COLORADO SPRINGS, CO- This is what happen when apolitical wits want to dribble their sardonic apathy on a subject of historic import. Or as they see it, unimport. The 100-year anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre passed in April, with considerable media attention and unfortunately the requisit controversy that comes of celebrants numbering equal parts decendents of the perps and not the miners. You'd think KRCC might have heard the dissonance in April, the attempt of National Guard to rewrite the history in accordance to today's culture of military-worship and the ensuing protestations, but no. Tonight a locally produced radio show called "Wish We Were Here" aired a one-hour episode about "Ludlow" on public radio franchise KRCC. Noel Black, Jake Burnell and Andrea Chalfin put the program together and relied on the same revisionists which dogged the official commemorations.
Tag: Ludlow
Ludlow 100 year anniversary feted by social class that committed massacre
DENVER, COLO.- I might be sensationalizing a technicality, but in effect it's what happened: the remembering of Ludlow has been commandeered by the class who perpetrated it. The preliminary series of events commemorating the 100 year anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre (April 20, 1914) concluded tonight at Denver's History Colorado Museum with a panel discussion featuring only establishment voices. "Is Ludlow relevant?" was the question posed to five participants among them three professors, a soldier, and a union rep. That's like asking "is global warming real?" The question is loaded with the suggestion that the opposite is equally plausible. I would have preferred to hear HOW is Ludlow relevant. Though the union rep skillfully skirted the issue, no one pushed back at another flawed presumption, that the coal strike was an armed conflict. Yes the massacre provoked the ten day "Coal Field War" during which striking miners retaliated against the mine company employees, but the death toll was still but a fraction of the number of miners killed in the mine accidents which precipitated the Ludlow strike. It took an audience member to address that omission. Alas nobody mentioned the aftermath that found many miners under arrest, others scattered, and no mine owner, operator, guard, strikebreaker, Baldwin-Felts thug, or National Guard save one, was punished for the atrocity. Yes many immigrant miners were veterans of Bulkan wars, but some Colorado soldiers were veterans of the US campaign in the Philippines, where villages were dispatched with flame and machinegun fire. Not mentioned. Instead a Colorado National Guard representative was let to say that burning the tents at Ludlow was not a tactical error -and since the "non-combatant" deaths were unintended, Ludlow was not technically a massacre.
Pueblo museum excises Mine Workers Union from Ludlow Massacre exhibit!
PUEBLO, COLORADO- 2014 marks one hundred years since the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. A variety of commemorations are planned before the formal anniversary on April 20. I attended one such event on Wednesday, a lecture by a CSU professor to footnote the "Children of Ludlow" exhibit at El Pueblo History Museum. I'm always excitied when attention is paid to Ludlow, a subject regularly left out of American schoolbooks, but I was disappointed to find key elements of labor history excised from the museum's narrative. Literally. The United Mine Workers of America, the organization central to the strike, which supplied the tent city, and which even today maintains the memorial site, was mentioned only once, IN FINE PRINT! The Ludlow miners voted to strike because the mining companies refused to recognize the UMWA. Unmentioned. The horrors of the atrocity were not tempered, in their explicitness perhaps we think them enough, but there was also the apologist suggestion that some culpability belonged to the miners. I questioned one curator who admitted they were at pains to keep the story "balanced" and that the squeakiest wheel thus far has been the National Guard. Apparently the Guard is offended that its role will be misconstrued. What balance do they want, I wondered. Had they lost children in the "battlezone" too? Children are at the heart of commemorating Ludlow and at the heart of this preversion of the massacre's memory. Were they recklessly endangered by their parents and union organizers? Were they dragged into a battlezone? The museum seems to suggest as much, highlighting the beligerence of the miners, mischaracterizing the soldiers, and leaving the union actions largely unexplained. First I'd like to declare how I tire of the objective irrelevance which results when academics seek the approval of government technocrats. I am also disturbed by educators who pretend blindness to subtle inferences which shape a political takeaway. To them, "remembering" Ludlow seems sufficient in itself. I can hardly see the point to remembering Ludlow unless we have discerned its lessons. Until we are remembering the LESSONS OF LUDLOW, our educators' self-proclaimed raison d'etre will be self-fulfilling: "history will repeat itself." This Pueblo exhibit suggests no lesson other than the exploitation of tragedy, and leaves me fearful about the Ludlow commemorations to follow. The anti-union, pro-military climate which prevails these hundred years since the massacre will make for a travesty of a remembrance unless someone with a worker's perspective speaks up. NOT BROUGHT TO YOU BY... Let's start with this exhibit, which alas has already escaped critique since September. Its full title, as evidenced in the photo above: "Black Hills Energy presents: Children of Ludlow, Life in a Battlezone, 1913-1914." I'll bet curators thought it a measure of truth and reconciliation that the Ludlow presentation was sponsored by a local extraction industry business. Black Hills Energy trades not in coal but natural gas. In fact they're among the frackers tearing up Southeastern Colorado. I think the irony more likely suggests how the UMWA's starring role was
“independent counsel” Feinberg says all okay by 2012″
The Gulf of Mexico will have largely recovered from the BP oil spill by the end of 2012, the administrator of the $20bn (£12bn) pay-outs fund has said. Attorney Kenneth Feinberg said that compensation to those who lost revenue from the disaster would be based on this prediction. Meanwhile, a judge has ruled that Mr Feinberg make clear to claimants that he is not independent from BP. The Deepwater Horizon spill was the biggest in US history. The fund was set up by BP in August to compensate those affected by the spill, and has so far paid out about $3.3bn to 168,000 people. And how many more billions in Company Thugs to keep photographers, journalists, the U.S. Navy, and any attorneys for the plaintiffs (every sumbitchin' citizen of America and the world) from accessing evidence of their culpability in this mass Eco-Slaughter. Including using United States Publicly Funded Resources such as the courts and police to help enforce their Private "property". Property meaning even any data about the nature of their crime. O, yassuh Mr Company paid Judge, we-uns knows we gonna get good treatment from the company doctor and a decent settlement from the company lawyers... Oh, and they Created Jobs too... They created 11 job openings at Deepwater Horizon in a matter of seconds, "fired" the original workers... with real fire.
“Capital” Punishment, forced compliance with Money-Worship.
If, as a Corporate Lawyer and somewhat friend suggests, Capital were the be-all and end-all for progress, economically, politically, technologically, and even spiritually, why then is Participation Made Mandatory? The Capitalist PIGS go after not only nations who opt for a more socialist economy, but communes within the Capitalist CONTROLLED countries. Communal economies such as Anarcho-Syndicalism are brutally repressed, Unions are Brutally Repressed, by taxpayer funded State Manifestations of Power, like the Ludlow Massacre. The PIGS who murdered the 4 students at Kent State had loaded submachine guns, (M16A1) simply because earlier that day they were “negotiating” with a Teamster strike. At gunpoint. Since the guns weren’t pointed at the Corporate Faction in any of this, it’s patently obvious who exactly the Ohio National Guard were representing. Their Rich-Bitch Owners. If, as the Capitalists assert, it’s their own initiative, their own industry and entrepreneurship which gained them their riches, and anybody who takes government handouts is a Welfare State Junkie... Why then don’t they “just say no” to the Welfare State subsidizing THEIR INDUSTRIES far above and beyond what pittances are accorded the Public at Large. Instead huge amounts of Public Money is spent to ensure that the Public never rises in power. The People are kept down, especially the Working Class, by Police and Military and Court so-called “authority”, Union activity and other organized and coordinated collective action groups which benefit the individual workers above the Corporate Masters, criminalized and punished, yet so-called “revolutionaries” organized by the Corporations to protect the status-quo of Corporate Hegemony, both at home and abroad, like the so-called Tea Party so-called “patriots" not merely protected by the police and military but actually encouraged? If the Capitalists had such hegemony, not only the right but the Duty to bring every nation and every person on earth under their dominion, if it were really patently obvious, as they insist it is, why would they spend more than half the Government Budgets of the United States, the states themselves and local “authorities” to FORCE compliance at gunpoint? Why would it be necessary to send soldiers to other countries, to force those countries to obey the Capitalist Ideal, and why would it be necessary to lie and call such forced compliance “freedom”?
Bloody Ludlow, revisited?
Perhaps the Bonus March "Hooverville" WW 1 Veterans Camp that got shot up in Washington DC... The City Council and the C.S. Gestapo Department are proposing declaring War on The Homeless, over the Hooverville camps along Fountain and Monument creeks. Maybe the Piggoes just didn't get the message from the Stand Down event two short months ago. They're declaring a war on people who know How To Fight.
Mother Jones and the children of Ludlow
APRIL 20 MARKS THE 95TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LUDLOW MASSACRE. From her 1925 autobiography, Mother Jones wrote about the UMWA strike in Ludlow Colorado, over the harsh winter of 1914. From Chapter 21: No one listened. No one cared. The tickers in the offices of 26 Broadway sounded louder than the sobs of women and children. Men in the steam heated luxury of Broadway offices could not feel the stinging cold of Colorado hill-sides where families lived in tents. Then came Ludlow and the nation heard. Little children roasted alive make a front page story. Dying by inches of starvation and exposure does not. On the 19th of April, 1914, machine guns, used on the strikers in the Paint Creek strike, were placed in position above the tent colony of Ludlow. Major Pat Hamrock and Lieutenant K. E. Linderfelt were in charge of the militia, the majority of whom were, company gun-men sworn in as soldiers. Early in the morning soldiers approached the colony with a demand from headquarters that Louis Tikas, leader of the Greeks, surrender two Italians. Tikas demanded a warrant for their arrest. They had none. Tikas refused to surrender them. The soldiers returned to quarters. A signal bomb was fired. Then another. Immediately the machine guns began spraying the flimsy tent colony, the only home the wretched families of the miners had, riddling it with bullets. Like iron rain, bullets' upon men, women and children. The women and children fled to the hills. Others tarried. The men defended their home with their guns. All day long the firing continued. Men fell dead, their faces to the ground. Women dropped. The little Snyder boy was shot through the head, trying to save his kitten. A child carrying water to his dying mother was killed. By five o'clock in the afternoon, the miners had no more food, nor water, nor ammunition. They had to retreat with their wives and little ones into the hills. Louis Tikas was riddled with shots while he tried to lead women and children to safety. They perished with him. Night came. A raw wind blew down the canyons where men, women and children shivered and wept. Then a blaze lighted the sky. The soldiers, drunk with blood and with the liquor they had looted from the saloon, set fire to the tents of Ludlow with oil-soaked torches. The tents, all the poor furnishings, the clothes and bedding of the miners' families burned. Coils of barbed wire were stuffed into the well, the miners' only water supply. After it was over, the wretched people crept back to bury their dead. In a dugout under a burned tent, the charred bodies of eleven little children and two women were found-unrecognizable. Everything lay in ruins. The wires of bed springs writhed on the ground as if they, too, had tried to flee the horror. Oil and fire and guns had robbed men and women and children of their homes and slaughtered tiny babies and defenseless women. Done by order of Lieutenant Linderfelt, a savage,
Mother Jones: You Don’t Need a Vote
After the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the later capitulation of the UMWA union, Mother Jones, by now 85 years old, toured the US to spread the word about what happened. She wrote in her autobiography, about a meeting in Kansas City: "I told the great audience that packed the hall that when their coal glowed red in their fires, it was the blood of the workers, of men who went down into black holes to dig it, of women who suffered and endured, of little children who had but a brief childhood. 'You are being warmed and made comfortable with human blood' I said. ... 'The miners lost,' I told them, because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.'" From The Autobiography of Mother Jones, Chapter 22: YOU DON'T NEED A VOTE TO RAISE HELL. Five hundred women got up a dinner and asked me to speak. Most of the women were crazy about women suffrage. They thought that Kingdom-come would follow the enfranchisement of women. "You must stand for free speech in the streets," I told them. "How can we," piped a woman, "when we haven't a vote?" "I have never had a vote," said I, "and I have raised hell all over this country! You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!" Some one meowed, "You're an anti!" "I am not an anti to anything which will bring freedom to my class," said I. "But I am going to be honest with you sincere women who are working for votes for women. The women of Colorado have had the vote for two generations and the working men and women are in slavery. The state is in slavery, vassal to the Colorado Iron and Fuel Company and its subsidiary interests. A man who was present at a meeting of mine owners told me that when the trouble started in the mines, one operator proposed that women be disfranchised because here and there some woman had raised her voice in behalf of the miners. Another operator jumped to his feet and shouted, 'For God's sake! What are you talking about! If it had not been for the women's vote the miners would have beaten us long ago!'" Some of the women gasped with horror. One or two left the room. I told the women I did not believe in women’s rights nor in men's rights but in human rights. "No matter what your fight," I said, "don't be ladylike! God Almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies. I have just fought through sixteen months of bitter warfare in Colorado. I have been up against armed mercenaries but this old woman, without a vote, and with nothing but a hatpin has scared them. "Organized labor should organize its women along industrial lines. Politics is only the servant of industry. The plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity."
What became of Ludlow DEATH SPECIAL
One of the weapons deployed against the striking miners of Ludlow, was an early armored car nicknamed the "Death Special." Its steel plated sides emboldened mine guards to run their mounted machine gun through the union camps. What became of the intimidating machine? Does it sit in a prairie museum, or was its metal armor recycled? Recycled, definitely. The Death Special was improvised by the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency who were the hired strike-breakers, and built at CF&I's own steel works to use against its striking employees. At Ludlow the steel-plated vehicle was driven alongside and through the tent colony, its searchlight used to harass the sleeping strikers. Its guns took shots at the tents which left haphazard victims killed or maimed. World Wars One and Two produced many armored vehicle designs, but the Baldwin-Felts model was unique for being a civilian model. You can recognize its lines in the modern urban assault vehicles which metropolitan police departments have determined to arm themselves, in the war against what, meth-lab pill-boxes? No, these armored police cars are deployed against public protest, in the name of riot-control. By their paint jobs, neither camouflage nor emergency neon, they are obviously intended to intimidate. If the Baldwin-Felts and Pinkertons are going to reinvent themselves as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, why not also their weapons of choice? This one was used to mark the line over which the A.NS.W.E.R. marchers were not to cross, when they marched against the Pentagon and its weapons suppliers in Washington DC. This vehicle was bought by the Aurora Police Department, out of the $50 million allocated to Denver for security for the 2008 DNC. Notice on its intimidating black sides, it says "Emergency Rescue." Here it is aimed at you. St. Paul at the RNC. Denver.
At the site of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre
LUDLOW MEMORIAL, COLORADO- Day three of the Colorado College Ludlow Symposium featured a bus ride to the site of the 1914 massacre.
Springs Utilities and “Right to Work” law
Which is really the "right to fire you if you get injured on the job or if you seek fair compensation for your labor or if you form (or join an existing) an organization which represents the workers to ensure the Equal Protection Under the Law and right to petition the Government for redress of grievances" law. Since both Springs Utilities and the Corporate Welfare Council are married to the Coal corporations, and they both apparently sponsored the "White" wash of the Ludlow Massacre"incident" I felt it politic to post this again. When I was in the hospital after my ankle fusion surgery two years ago there was this young dude in the next bed, who had been in an accident while working for Springs Utilities. He had been working "under the crane" which is a strict no-no in Union work, because the hooks and or the cable and or the chains attached to the crane have a distressing tendency to snap and to send the load which they were bearing straight down. Which is what happened in this case, the crane dropped a 2 1/2 ton steel fitting onto his foot. His mom was visiting him, and a gentleman I think was his brother His doctor came in, one of the surgeons from Front Range Orthopædics. Who is considered to be one of the Premier surgeons in the country. He had spent the past three days trying to save the kid's foot. But the foot had to be amputated, and he was breaking the news to him and his family that they wouldn't be able to save it. After he left, his brother and his mom were telling him he needed to hire an attorney, he told them "No, (one of his friends from work) was talking about it with me and he said to just trust the company, they'll take care of me". I almost bit my tongue in two keeping from interjecting on that score. Then the Corporate Whore company representative came in, she was telling him what the settlement was the company was offering, his mom said 'should we hire an attorney to review it?" and the Corporate Whore told her "no need, we'll take care of him TRUST US Then proceeded to tell the kid that they were going to assign a doctor to him, one "approved by the Corporation" his mom interjected with the fact that he had one of the best surgeons in America already as his doctor and the Corporate Whore said "yes, we know, he's an excellent doctor but He Doesn't Keep Up With The Paperwork" Which is bullsh ee It of such a high order it deserves a third syllable. The doctors at Front Range don't do the paperwork, they have a very competent staff who do that. Efficient enough that all the major insurers including CHAMPVA, TriCare, Medicare, Medicaid, Just a start on the Government insurers, accept their billing and procedures without question. She was slick-dicking this kid who was in severe pain, on a morphine drip, and cowing him into obedience to The
Ludlow Massacre or unhappy incident?
COLORADO COLLEGE- CC is holding a symposium on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. Actually, it's only called the Ludlow Symposium. True to Colorado Springs form, several among the audience want to call it an "incidence," instead of a "massacre." One of the participants, author Scott Martelle, is willing to oblige, explaining that if the militia hadn't known that women and children were taking shelter beneath the tents which they were putting to the torch, then the soldiers were guilty only of criminally negligent homicide. (*Note 4/12/09: this article has been revised in light of helpful comments offered by symposium participants. Also: Differences of opinion aside, I am remiss if I do not praise the scholars who were very generous with their time and encyclopedic memories to enrich this symposium. 1. CC's own Professor David Mason authored an evocative narrative of lives caught up in the 1914 events, written in verse, entitled Ludlow. 2. Journalist Scott Thomas researched the most recent definitive account to date, the 2007 Blood Passion: the Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. 3. Thomas Andrews, Associate Professor at CU Denver, enlarged the context in 2008 with his award winning Killing For Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. 4. Zeese Papanikolas represented his authorative Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, written in 1984.) Does it matter what it's called, or with what certainty? The symposium is filled with public school system educators looking for an angle with which to approach Ludlow with their kids. One of them expresses her doubt about teaching about Mother Jones, having just heard from the panelists a probably too-nuanced assessment of the labor hero's tactics. The political climate of our age can't find any purchase with moral nuance. I'm stuck thinking that in recording social history, scholars cannot avoid writing the victor's narrative. In particular as regards the history of labor, because neither academics nor even middle class hobbyists in the symposium's audience can look at the events from the perspective of the working class. Even the scholar's objectivity is middle class. The opinion was expressed by the panel that the Ludlow aftermath was one of the few occasions when the story was spun to the benefit of labor interests. But this does not account for why authors and educators find themselves having to resurrect the tale of Ludlow these many years later. When it occurred, Americans may have swallowed the hyperbole, but since that time they've internalized its internment, effaced by a corporate culture so as to have disappeared from even our school textbooks. I think this may have been something of the question posed by symposium organizer Jaime Stevensen to the panel, when she asked how the authors insulated themselves from the fictions woven into their own perspectives of history. She didn't get any takers. The very concept that history adds up to only so much trivial pursuit, is inherently a view from the ivory tower. Do the Ludlow scholars not recognize that common people today face the same foes
Things to do in April
APRIL 2009 3- Antonio Skarmeta: Swing and Literature, Gaylord Hall, CC, 7pm 5- Andrew Skurka: Walking the Great Western Loop, CC, 4pm 7- Rajeev Taranath, Concert sarod/tabla, Packard Hall, CC, 7:30pm 14- Anniversary of BURNING OF BAGHDAD LIBRARY 15- LUDLOW SYMPOSIUM, Max Kade Theater, CC, 7pm 17- International Day of Farmers Struggle 20- 20th Annual Holocaust Commemoration, Gates Common Room, CC, 7pm
As if things weren’t bad enough…
From Democracy Now... Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds. Unless I'm mistaken, that would be the Third "Brave Rifles" from Ft Carson. The unit involved in the Murder of Crazy Horse and the Murders at Ludlow in 1914, kind of a rich history of killing Americans. The whole idea of the Big Pigs forcing the army to be their muscle for them is sickening enough, but if the soldiers go along with it willingly, they'll be dragging America into the depth of Totalitarian Dictatorship. Any of you reading this, think about that. Your Master is about to unleash you against Americans and American Freedom. You'll be ordered to kill AMERICANS and you'll be ordered to do it contrary to the Constitution you swore to uphold and defend against ALL enemies, and, Soldiers, that doesn't make an Exclusion for the Bush Regime. Your Commander in Chief made the same oath, when he went into the Air Force National Guard, when he was sworn in as Governor of Texas, and twice now as President of the United States. His actions and his words show clearly that he doesn't give a Damn about freedom, American lives, or the Constitution, and that his word is the empty promise of a confirmed Liar, Thief and Murderer. Your choice now is either to do your Sworn Duty and resist the Unlawful Occupation of America, or be willing servants of a Godless Dictator. He mouths the name of God with the same contempt that he mouths the name of Freedom or of the Constitution. Gentlemen and Ladies, I give you in his own words, concerning the Constitution... "Stop waving that in my face. IT'S JUST A GOD-DAMNED PIECE OF PAPER" He has shown with ordering You to Unlawfully Occupy the nation of Iraq that he cares even less for YOUR lives. If he says otherwise, remember how he described the Constitution, and how he defiles the name of God Himself. Remember that when his fathers Appointed So-Called "Justices" installed him in the office of President, that he said "It would be easier if this were a dictatorship... as long as I get to be the dictator" The Cowards with whom he surrounds himself laughed like it was a joke, he said later that it WAS
Creating Terror in America
We have an government active in creating a climate of terror inside its own borders. There is nothing really new about that, and today's Gazette had an entire section of the paper dedicated to the Ludlow Massacre which occured decades ago, leaving a permanent stain on the state of Colorado that it may never completely erase. The massacre was a Colorado national guard assault on immigrants in the middle of Colorado's freezing winter, in an area located close to Trinidad in the Colorado town of Ludlow, where numbers of immigrant miners and their families including children were murdered down in cold blood and their tent city razed entirely to the ground. The assailants shouted racist anti-immigrant vitriol against the people they were murdering, much similar to the present day mindset pushed by the Right Wing twit Imus. Imus certainly would have done much the same if he had lived back then, other than that he is in reality nothing more than an embittered and nasty old fart, given overloads of air time for no good reason that anyone can ascertain. But his airtime led to a hostile and racist environment, where the government of the United States itself can both abuse and use immigrants in America today. Yes, Bush's Klan is now engaging in what can only be described as a terrorist campaign against the immmigrants living amongst us. See 'Secret Immigration Raids in the D.C. Subway'. I am ashamed to be an American. Little has changed from our past history. We are a country with a nasty and violent past, as well as a country with a nasty and violent present. And just what happens to the children that fall victims to these witchhunts? Here is a link to a youtube video following an article about these children. US Born Kids Face Deportations as Well These children are living around us here in Colorado, too, as well as in Massachusetts and California. Act to help save them from governmental terrorism.
Some Colorado labor history
Labor day. It commemorates the likes of Samuel Gompers, Big Bob Haywood and Mother Jones and their efforts to unite working class peoples. They met great resistance from gullible populations of consumers and business owners who weren't going to give anything unless they were forced. Child labor laws, five day work weeks, eight hour days, overtime pay, work breaks, retirement, benefits, sick days, vacation days, we owe all these to the might of collective bargaining. Today's labor organizers are seen more as standing in the way of productivity. We think of union workers as lazy and greedy, corrupt and undeserving. How is it the labor unions have fallen so low in our sentiments? Probably because businesses have public relations budgets which advance the corporate view, and labor unions, well, do not. Was this always so? Actually, yes. The Gold Miner's Strike, 1894 Colorado Springs citizens themselves figured prominently in an early and notorious labor conflict: the Cripple Creek Miner's Strike of 1894. Miners united by the Western Federation of Miners were fighting for the three dollar, eight hour day. This was a high wage at the time, but the gold mining business was a veritable bonanza and mine owners were building huge homes on Wood Avenue, "Millionaire's row." Up on the mountain the miners seized and shut down the mines. From their exclusive hang out, the El Paso Club, the mine owners complained about the evils of socialism and the populist leanings of the governor. When underhanded attempts to dislodge the strikers failed, the mine owners, with the assistance of the Gazette, convinced the population of Colorado Springs to rise up in arms against the miners, lest the miners descend from the mountain and attack them. Twelve hundred men were deputized and led on a march to defeat the seven hundred miners. Luckily the 1,200-strong Colorado Springs volunteer posse was outwitted and the miners achieved their demands. The struggle was long and bitter and makes an amusing story now. We can be happy that the miners prevailed but let us not today be mistaken about which side most of Colorado Springs was on. Breaking the union, 1904 By 1904, miners had lost the eight hour day. The Mine Owner's Association issued work permits only to miners who would renounce their union memberships. As the owners shipped in scab labor to substitute for the union holdouts, the conflict grew bloody. The state militia was called in to close the Victor Record, a newspaper sympathetic to the W. F. M. The union was silenced. On June 6, 1904, a lunatic fighting on the side of the miners, but for motives of his own, blew up a train platform, killing 21 nonunion workers. Though it was not then established who had done it, the W. F. M. was immediately blamed and routed. 225 union miners, a number of whom had families in Cripple Creek, were boarded unto trains and deported from Teller County. One group was sent to the Kansas border, marched across, and abandoned. The other was dropped off in a desolate part