Colorado Coalfield War (sep 23, 1913 – dec 22, 1914)
Description:
The Colorado Coalfield War was a major labor uprising in the southern and central Colorado Front Range between September 1913 and April 1914. Striking began in late summer 1913, organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) after years of poor working conditions. The strike was marred by targeted and indiscriminate attacks from both strikers and individuals hired by CF&I to defend its property. Conflict was focused in the southern coal-mining counties of Las Animas and Huerfano, where the Colorado and Southern railroad passed through Trinidad and Walsenburg. It followed the 1912 Northern Colorado Coalfield Strikes. While the entirety of the strike-related violence is also commonly called the "Colorado Coal War" and the "Colorado Civil War," some historians use these terms only to refer to the final ten days of intense fighting at the end of April.
Tensions climaxed at the Ludlow Colony, a tent city occupied by about 1,200 striking coal miners and their families, in a massacre on 20 April 1914 when the Colorado National Guard attacked. In retaliation, armed miners attacked dozens of mines and other targets over the next ten days, killing strikebreakers, destroying property, and engaging in several skirmishes with the National Guard along a 225-mile (362 km) front from Trinidad to Louisville, north of Denver. Violence largely ended following the arrival of federal soldiers in late April 1914, but the strike did not end until December 1914. No concessions were made to the strikers. An estimated 69 to 199 people died during the strike, though far fewer are officially recorded being killed by the fighting by both the local government and contemporary news reports. It has been described as the "bloodiest labor dispute in American history.
