The Smuggler-Union and the Labor Wars
Near Telluride, Colorado
High above town, in the basins the miners called Marshall and Savage, sat the Smuggler Union, one of the richest gold mines in the district. It was also the flashpoint for some of the bloodiest labor violence in Colorado history. On the first of May in nineteen oh one, about three hundred fifty miners walked off the job.
The fight was over a wage system tied to how wide the ore vein ran, which the Western Federation of Miners said cheated them. The superintendent, Arthur Collins, reopened the mine with replacement workers, many of them armed and sworn in as deputies. On the morning of the third of July, strikers ambushed the night shift as it came off the mountain.
In the gunfight that followed, three men were killed. A year later, in nineteen oh two, Collins himself was shot dead by an unknown assassin as he sat at a lighted window in his home. His killer was never found.
His successor, the ambitious Bulkeley Wells, would carry the conflict into the wider Colorado Labor Wars of nineteen oh three and nineteen oh four. These mountains held gold, and men died fighting over who would profit from it.
