The Cripple Creek Labor Wars

Seventeen miles west of Colorado Springs, behind a wall of mountains called the Rampart Range, lies a high basin where gold was discovered in eighteen ninety. The Cripple Creek district became one of the richest gold fields in North American history, and for a decade it made fortunes for the men who owned the mines and reasonable wages for the men who worked them. Then the owners decided to change the terms.

The eighteen ninety-four strike began when mine owners in the Cripple Creek district extended the workday from eight hours to ten hours without raising the daily wage of three dollars. Miners affiliated with the Western Federation of Miners refused. The owners hired private armed guards and attempted to break the strike by force.

What happened next was unusual in the history of American labor. Governor Davis Waite sent the state militia to Cripple Creek, but instead of suppressing the strikers, he negotiated a resolution that restored the eight-hour day and the three-dollar wage. The miners won.

It was one of the rare occasions in the Gilded Age when a governor's militia sided with labor. The second war, from nineteen oh three to nineteen oh four, had a different ending. Mine owners pressured a more accommodating governor, James Peabody, who dispatched nearly a thousand militiamen to occupy Teller County and establish what amounted to martial law.

Adjutant General Sherman Bell, a former Cripple Creek mine district sheriff's deputy, arrested union leaders without warrants, deposed elected officials who were sympathetic to the union, and shut down a newspaper whose editorial position he disliked. Captured miners were confined in outdoor enclosures called bullpens or marched to the Kansas border and abandoned. On June sixth, nineteen oh four, an explosion destroyed the platform at the Independence depot where non-union miners were boarding a shift-change train.

Thirteen men were killed. Responsibility for the explosion has never been conclusively established. Mine owners blamed the Western Federation of Miners.

Circumstantial evidence and later testimony pointed in other directions. In the aftermath, the Citizens' Alliance and mine owners used the explosion as justification to deport more than two hundred union men and blacklist any miner who refused to renounce his union membership. The Western Federation of Miners was crushed in Cripple Creek and never recovered there.