"The Tents Lit With Matches" | Ludlow, Colorado, 1914

On April twentieth, nineteen fourteen, Colorado's soldiers burned a town of tents. Their own report says the oil was poured on by hand.

That sentence is on page twenty-one, signed by three officers of the Colorado National Guard. A federal report a year later said the rest. This is what each one admitted, and what happened to the one man who was convicted.

One thing first. Every photograph here is black and white. The color was put on by a computer this year — a good guess, not a record.

Ludlow was a railroad siding on the plain below the coal canyons of Las Animas County, north of Trinidad. In September of nineteen thirteen the miners of southern Colorado walked out of the company camps.

The companies owned the camps, so the strikers had to leave them. The union pitched tents on leased ground at the canyon mouths. Ludlow was the largest colony.

The militia's report lists them: Greeks, Montenegrins, Bulgars, Serbians, Italians, Mexicans, Croatians. Only a few families, it says, were Americans. The federal report says twelve hundred people were there in April.

Another. The tents had board floors, and under many of the floors the families dug a pit — a cellar, for the cold and for the bullets.

Mother Jones, outside a tent at the colony with the organizer Mike Livoda. Ludlow sat in open country, and everything that happened there was in plain view of the railroad and the road.

Up the canyon was Berwind, a camp of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company — the Rockefeller company, the largest operator in the state.

The view west from a low rise the soldiers called Water Tank Hill, into Berwind canyon. Hold that hill in mind.

In October the governor sent in the National Guard. By January it was breaking up marches in Trinidad. This one, on Main Street in Trinidad, was marching to free Mother Jones, whom the militia was holding.

The Guard's commander in the field was General John Chase. A congressional subcommittee came to Colorado that winter and asked him to explain the militia's conduct.

He refused, unless he could be promised that the miners' lawyers would not question him. The committee said no, and wrote that down.

Its conclusion, in the report to the House: "It seemed the militia was on the side of the operators in this controversy, and the evidence seems conclusively to prove such to have been the case."

The report's sentence for it: by April twentieth the Colorado National Guard "no longer offered even a pretense of fairness or impartiality," and its units in the field "had degenerated into a force of professional gunmen and adventurers."

The officer it says dominated that force was Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt, on horseback near Ludlow.

On the other side, Louis Teekas, who led the Greek strikers at Ludlow. The federal report calls him "a man of high intelligence" who did his utmost that morning to prevent the attack.

Teekas, in the white shirt, with John Lawson, the union's district leader, and miners at the colony. Remember Lawson too. He is the man who was convicted.

Monday, April twentieth. The day after Greek Easter. The militia had about thirty-five men at Ludlow, with reinforcements up the canyon. They had machine guns. The colony had been searched for weapons for weeks.

The federal report: "the first offensive movement was the occupation of a hill near the tent colony by militiamen in full view of the strikers, the planting of a machine gun there, and the exploding of two dynamite bombs."

The Guard position on Water Tank Hill. The photograph is dated April twentieth.

The machine gun.

Guardsmen firing from the prone position. Who fired first is disputed in every account, including the federal one. What followed is not.

The fight ran all day. Strikers with rifles took positions in an arroyo and on the railroad cut. Hundreds of women and children ran for the hills, or a ranch house, or the pits under the tents.

At dusk the tents caught fire. The federal report says the militiamen fired them "with a torch."

What was left the next morning.

Iron bedsteads, stoves, and the stakes where the tents had been.

Every tent. The militia board later found that "all of the tents were burned on Monday night," and that the burning and the looting were finished before morning.

This is the pit. Under one tent, two women and eleven children had taken shelter. The tent burned over them.

The federal report, page one twenty-seven: "Eleven children and two women of the colony who had taken refuge in a hole under one of the tents were burned to death or suffocated after the tents had been fired."

The soldiers' own board measured the hole. Eight feet by six, by four and a half. It found the air in it could not have kept thirteen people alive for many hours. It argued they were dead before the fire.

Guardsmen inside the ruined colony. The Denver library dates the photograph April twentieth.

And Teekas. This photograph shows him being taken by the militia. He was a prisoner when he died.

The federal report: Teekas "was first seriously or mortally wounded by a blow on the head from the stock of a Springfield rifle in the hands of Lieutenant K. E. Linderfelt," and "then shot three times in the back by militiamen and mine guards."

The Trinidad paper the next evening. "Twenty-five dead, three wounded." The toll, it said, of an all-day battle at Ludlow.

Its death list. Louis Teekas, leader of the Ludlow tent colony. Frank Snyder, twelve-year-old son of William Snyder. A private of Company A. Then, under "reported dead": Mrs. Chavez and two children. Mrs. Costa and two children. Mrs. Pedronini and two children.

"Louie the Greek killed in flight when fire burns tents." That was the militia's version, and the paper ran it.

It also ran this: "Four women and ten children perished from suffocation by smoke when the fire swept through the Ludlow tent colony last night."

And on the same page, an editorial. "The battle in the Ludlow hills yesterday and its attendant loss of life may be laid at the door of a lying union press."

Denver read it differently. The Express, April twenty-second: "Militia fired tents soaked with oil, coroner is told."

And the day before: "Fiends shoot women and children after applying torch to tent homes."

The miners armed. For ten days they attacked the mine camps up and down the canyons. The Southwestern tipple.

The Empire mine tipple, after the battle there.

Strikers under arms, wearing bandoliers.

Miners under arms at the colony. The federal report puts the whole war's dead at more than fifty, including the twenty-one at Ludlow.

The federal report's judgment on the State: its military arm "had acted, not as an agent of the commonwealth, but as an agent of one of the parties in interest — as an agent, that is, of the coal operators."

At the end of the month the United States Army came in, and the militia went home. Federal cavalry arriving at Ludlow.

The coffins, at the Catholic church in Trinidad.

The funeral of Louis Teekas.

In Denver, a thousand women marched on the Capitol. The Express: "Punish the guilty for Ludlow massacre, cry women, one thousand strong, many with babies in arms, who storm Capitol and order Ammons to ask for U.S. troops."

Governor Ammons asked. Within the week the headline was: "U.S. troops end ten days' war in coal fields."

Now the two reports. The first was written by the Guard about itself. On April twenty-fifth, General Chase appointed three of his own officers as a board — a major who was the district's judge advocate and two captains of the First Infantry.

Their order was to inquire into the causes of the battle, "with special reference to the death of women and children, the killing of Martin, Teekas, Filer and others, the burning of the tent colony and the claim that the tents were looted."

They examined the officers and soldiers under oath. The strikers, they wrote, declined to appear, because the inquiry was not public.

Their report is fifty pages, printed in Denver. It blames the Greeks. It says the battle was planned by the strikers for their Easter and fell a day late by accident.

It calls the rescue of women from the burning tents by Linderfelt and Captain Carson "truly heroic."

And then, on page twenty, it says this. By the time the tents burned, the men in the colony — uniformed guardsmen, Troop A in civilian clothes, and mine guards — "had passed out of their officers' control, had ceased to be an army and had become a mob."

Page twenty-one. "We find that the tents were not all of them destroyed by accidental fire. Men and soldiers swarmed into the colony and deliberately assisted the conflagration by spreading the fire from tent to tent."

"So deliberate was this burning and looting that we find that cans of oil found in the tents were poured upon them and the tents lit with matches."

Clothes, bedding, jewelry, bicycles, tools, taken from the tents and carried away. This is the militia writing about the militia.

Its recommendations: a court-martial for the killing of Teekas and the burning of the colony, and a permanent state constabulary.

The court-martial met. Linderfelt was found guilty of striking Teekas with his rifle stock. A doctor at the inquest said that blow could itself have killed him.

The federal report, page one thirty-seven: "The courtmartial assessed as punishment a trifling demotion in rank."

That report was written for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations by George West, and published in nineteen fifteen. Chapter four is the militia. Chapter five is called "The Ultimate Responsibility."

On the militia, it reaches for the Declaration of Independence — the charge against the King, "for protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should do on the inhabitants of these states."

On responsibility, it names John D. Rockefeller Junior, in New York. Before Ludlow, it says, his letters of encouragement to the company's officers in Denver were enough.

After Ludlow he hired a publicity man, Ivy Lee of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and paid him from his own pocket to send bulletins to the nation under the operators' name.

No militiaman was convicted of a killing at Ludlow. One man was convicted of one — a striker.

John Lawson, the union leader in the photograph with Teekas. The Colorado Supreme Court's own summary: charged with the murder of John Nimmo — a mine guard, the federal report says, killed in a fight in October. On May third, nineteen fifteen, "a jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree, and fixed the punishment at imprisonment for life."

The court reversed it in April of nineteen seventeen. The new Attorney General had confessed error — the trial judge should not have sat. "The judgment is reversed."

So the record stands like this. A state report that admits the oil and the matches. A federal report that names the Guard and the man in New York. One demotion. One life sentence, thrown out.

The federal troops were withdrawn in December of nineteen fourteen. The tents did not go back to Ludlow.

And the shoes. Someone photographed them in nineteen fourteen and wrote on the negative: shoes of strikers' children, from Ludlow, Colorado.