Ludlow: The Coal Strike Massacre of Nineteen Fourteen

On April twentieth, nineteen fourteen, Colorado National Guard troops and company guards opened fire on a tent colony of striking coal miners and their families near the town of Ludlow. When the fires burned out, eleven children and two women, who had been sheltering in a pit dug beneath one of the tents, were found dead from smoke, suffocation, and burns. More than twenty people died in all.

The strikers had walked off Colorado Fuel and Iron mines in September nineteen thirteen demanding union recognition, an eight-hour day, and the right to be paid in real money instead of company scrip. The attack triggered ten days of open armed warfare across the coalfields. The United States Army intervened to end the fighting.

No guardsmen or company officials were ever prosecuted. The Ludlow Massacre became a landmark event in American labor history. The site is now a National Historic Landmark, maintained by the United Mine Workers of America.