Ludlow and the Coalfield War

In September of nineteen thirteen, about ten thousand coal miners in southern Colorado went on strike against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, controlled by the Rockefeller family. They were demanding better pay, safer mines, and recognition of their union, the United Mine Workers of America. The company evicted the strikers from its company towns, so the miners and their families built tent colonies on the open plain.

The largest of these, at Ludlow, sheltered around twelve hundred people. On April twentieth, nineteen fourteen, the Colorado National Guard and company guards opened fire on the Ludlow colony and set the tents ablaze. The death toll reached about twenty-five people, including eleven children.

Two women and the children died when they suffocated in a pit they had dug beneath a tent to shelter from the bullets. The killings touched off ten days of open warfare across the coalfields, in which dozens more died, until President Woodrow Wilson sent federal troops to restore order. John D.

Rockefeller Junior, a part owner of the company who had recently testified before Congress about the strike, was widely blamed for the deaths and spent years afterward trying to repair his reputation. The Ludlow Massacre became a turning point in American labor history, drawing national outrage and helping build support for reforms including the eight hour workday. A granite monument erected by the union still stands at the site today, where members of the United Mine Workers gather each year to remember the dead.