The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 Killed 11 Children and Almost Nobody Has Ever Heard of It

 In 1913 coal miners in southern Colorado went on strike.

They were demanding basic things. Union recognition. An eight hour work day. The right to be paid in real money instead of company scrip that could only be spent at the company store. The right to live somewhere other than company owned housing where they could be evicted for any reason at any time.

The coal companies that owned the mines also owned the towns the miners lived in. They owned the stores, the schools, and the houses. Workers who went on strike were immediately evicted from their homes.

So the miners set up tent colonies on public land. They brought their families. Thousands of people, men, women, and children, living in tents in the Colorado winter while they fought for the right to be treated like human beings.

What Happened at Ludlow

On April 20, 1914, Colorado National Guard troops and guards hired by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company surrounded the Ludlow tent colony.

A battle broke out. The guards and soldiers fired into the tents. They attacked the colony with machine guns. Then they set fire to the tents.

Families who had been hiding in pits dug beneath the tent floors tried to shelter there as the tents burned above them. When the fires were out and the smoke cleared workers found the bodies.

Eleven children and two women had suffocated or burned to death in one of those pits. They were hiding under the floor of a tent, trying to escape machine gun fire, and the fire caught them.

In total between nineteen and twenty five people died at Ludlow that day depending on which accounting you use. It was one of the worst single episodes of labor violence in American history.

What Happened After

The miners did not surrender. They armed themselves and fought back. What followed was ten days of open warfare in southern Colorado that killed dozens more people on both sides before President Woodrow Wilson sent in federal troops to end the fighting.

The coal companies faced no meaningful legal consequences. The National Guard officers who ordered the attack on the tent colony were never prosecuted.

John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose family owned Colorado Fuel and Iron, testified before Congress that he supported the right of workers to organize but denied any personal responsibility for what happened. His company eventually made some reforms but the union recognition the miners had been striking for was not granted.

Why It Is Not Taught

The Ludlow Massacre is not in most history textbooks. The reasons are the same reasons most labor history is not taught. The people who control what goes into textbooks have generally had more in common with the company owners than with the miners.

But the Ludlow Massacre is part of the story of how American workers won the rights that most of us take for granted today. The eight hour work day. The weekend. Safety regulations in the workplace. Child labor protections.

Those things did not come from the goodwill of employers. They came from people who went on strike and sometimes died fighting for them.

Those people deserve to be in the history books. The eleven children who died in that pit at Ludlow deserve to be in the history books.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.