Ludlow Massacre

In the fall of nineteen thirteen, coal miners in southern Colorado walked off the job at mines owned by Colorado Fuel and Iron, a company controlled by John D. Rockefeller Junior. The strikers, organized by the United Mine Workers of America, were demanding union recognition, an eight-hour workday, enforcement of existing safety laws, and the right to live and shop outside company towns. Most of the miners were immigrants from Greece, Italy, and the Balkans who had come to Colorado for work they hoped would be more rewarding than it turned out to be.

Evicted from company housing, they set up a tent colony at Ludlow, on land leased by the union, southeast of Trinidad in Las Animas County. Through the winter and into the spring, tension between the strikers and the Colorado National Guard escalated. Company guards harassed the camp through the cold months.

On April twentieth, nineteen fourteen, the day after Easter, National Guard troops and armed company guards opened fire on the Ludlow colony. The attack lasted most of the day. When the tents were burned, survivors found a pit beneath one of them where eleven children and two women had taken shelter. They had suffocated in the smoke. At least twenty people died in the attack.

The massacre set off ten days of armed conflict across the coalfields, which became known as the Colorado Coalfield War. President Woodrow Wilson sent federal troops to end it.

Ludlow became a landmark event in the history of American labor organizing. A monument maintained by the United Mine Workers stands on the site, which was designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand nine.