THE LUDLOW MASSACRE. By Leigh Hirst In 1874 Tom Shenton went to work in a Staffordshire coal mine. He was 11 years old. In 1896 he left England with his wife and three children and traveled to Sheridan, Wyoming where he found work in a coal mine. Two years later he took his family in a horse drawn wagon 700 miles south to Trinidad, Colorado to look for work in the Colorado coalfields. In 1999, the author, Tom Shenton's great-grandson, retraced his journey and visited the site of the Ludlow massacre, near Trinidad. This account of the massacre is a recreation of the events of that day in 1914, as seen through the eyes of Louis Tikas, a key figure. His persona is a creation of the author's imagination based upon available factual information. Sources include The Colorado Bar Association, KUED 7 University of Utah, Howard Zinn's "Declarations of Independence" and Walter Fink's "The Ludlow Massacre". As we push up the last steep grade, I shift into a lower gear and our rig, a GMC Yukon hauling a 19 foot trailer, rises smoothly into Raton Pass, wheels humming on the four-lane blacktop on the Interstate. We are at 7,800 feet, headed north. On our right, Fisher Peak looms above us, crowned with a massive, flat-topped, grey-rock mesa. A dense variegated green mantle - Douglas fir, spruce and ponderosa pine - drapes from its shoulders. In the late spring sunlight, framed by the azure sky, it is a striking sentinel on the Colorado-New Mexico border. This was once part of the Santa Fe Trail. The hard part. The trappers and traders came on horseback, riding up until the trail became so narrow and steep that they had to dismount and lead the animals along the edges of the canyons as they crossed from Spanish Mexico into Colorado. Now as we, my wife Gillian and I, approach the summit we can see below us traces of the old road that was built to make the trail passable to wagons - a side-cut into a rock face or a clear ribbon of dry grass disappearing into a wooded slope. "Uncle" Dick Wooton's road. In 1865, Wooton, mountain man and rancher, built a steep, rough road through the Pass. Teams of mules and oxen hauled groaning freight wagons up and down the wheel-rutted switchbacks. The mountain air echoed with screeching axles and the whip-snapping and cursing of the wagonmasters. Uncle Dick charged a toll of $1.50 per wagon and 50 cents per passenger. Indians traveled free. In 1880 the railroad came, and then the freight moved through the Pass to the puffing of the steam engine and the clackety-clack rhythm of the railcar wheels. We begin our descent onto the high, rolling grasslands of Las Animas County. Groves of cedars and pinon pines rise up to line the highway. Looking to the west we see on the horizon the white sawtooth of the Sangre Del Cristo range. Beckoning below is Trinidad, huddled along the banks of the Purgatoire river. Gilly and I have been on the road for several weeks. We picked up the trailer in Vancouver, B.C. and worked our way south. In Washington we tasted the good wines of the Columbia River valley and in Idaho we swam in the Snake River. In Salt Lake City we visited the Mormon Tabernacle and listened to the choir. Then further south in Utah, we camped and hiked in Zion Canyon, dazzled by the ochres, golds and russets of the canyon walls. In Arizona we watched birds, poked around Sedona's tourist traps and visited Jerome, an old copper mining camp. Driving east into New Mexico, heavy sidewinds nearly blew the trailer off the highway until we turned toward Santa Fe where we relaxed and absorbed the colonial Spanish ambience. In Taos, we visited D.H.Lawrence's shrine on a bush ranch 10 miles north of the town. Now, as we head north along Interstate 25, the trip has an added dimension and our purpose, at least mine, will become more focused. Trinidad is in the center of what was once the Colorado coalfields - the flashpoint in the Colorado Coalfield War - where my great-grandfather, Tom Shenton, brought his wife, Sara, and three young children in a covered wagon in 1898. As I survey the miles of glistening blacktop highway that stretches before us, I imagine him in that wagon, with his family and all their possessions, looking out beyond his horses' ears, looking at a strange place, looking for work. Time is an elusive concept. One hundred years can seem like an eternity - incomprehensible to a child - but to me, now old, it seems more like a mere blip. I knew Tom. I was 15 when he died. He was here in this place in a horse-drawn wagon. There were no automobiles. As I sit in my air-conditioned, high powered, self-propelled vehicle, I try to picture myself in that wagon sitting beside the man I once knew. And time dissolves. I feel as if he and I are one - bound together by our flesh, yet separated by an eternity of technological and social progress. The irony is not lost on me. Then, he had nothing. Now I have so much. And so much has happened in the interim. Descending from Raton Pass we roll quickly into a shallow canyon on the outskirts of Trinidad. To our left, separated by a railway track and loosely veiled by the now greening cottonwoods, sits a ramshackle row of forlorn wooden and adobe buildings, some abandoned, all clinging to another era. I feel a tingle at the base of my neck. "I bet that's Starkville," I say to Gilly. She nods. After years of looking for, and sometimes at, these places, I've developed a sense of recognition for an abandoned mining camp, even if it is only a remnant, an overgrown stone foundation, a slag heap, or a memorial to dead miners. But Starkville still bears some resemblance to a community. It is where they lived - Tom, Sara and their children, Arthur, Annie and Lizzie, my grandmother. We cross the tracks and nudge along the dirt road that serves as a main street. A church, a schoolhouse and a tavern (identified by a faded Coors sign above the entrance) lie listless, bleaching and crumbling in the hot dusty air. Windows boarded up, they stare with blind eyes. Two houses are inhabited. One has a new roof. The train must have stopped here. The standard, white diagonal cross-membered sign leans, paint-flaking. It reads Sta kv lle. This place was home to my ancestors for eight years, a century ago. It is one of the few vestiges still visible of what once was a thriving and turbulent part of the American West - the Colorado coalfields. There were several such communities, camps, around Trinidad at that time, including Ludlow. Back across the Purgatoire river in Trinidad we find, in contrast to Starkville, a quiet buzz of activity and a pleasant ambience. The main street, Commercial Street, is lined with restored Victorian style brick buildings, some with arched Romanesque entrances, others with decorative cornices and corbels. Vehicles clog the streets, pedestrians stroll the sidewalks, shops and restaurants are busy. It is a Saturday. I think of another Commercial Street. This could be Nanaimo, without the waterfront and before it developed urban sprawl. Still a small town, probably smaller than it was 100 years ago and tucked away in the far southeast corner of the state, Trinidad hides in a bit of a time warp. The economy is agricultural-based. We find no visible reference to its coal-mining history. The waitress at the Main Street Bakery and Café has a dark-complexion and flashing, black eyes. She could be Mexican but she has a Bronx accent. "Where're you from?" she asks when she sees my Visa card. I tell her. "And you? You don't sound like you're from around here." She smiles, "New York." "Don't you find this place a little quiet?" "That's what I like about it. I was headed home from a vacation in Santa Fe. Stopped here. Still here. That was four years ago. It's peaceful." She smiles again and I wonder if she sees the irony in that. "It wasn't always peaceful," I say. "How far is Ludlow?" "About 18 miles north. On I-25." She gives me a quizzical look. "You'll see the monument. They've been doing a dig there. The University." More irony. It's been less than a century and Ludlow is now an archaeological site. After lunch we drive up above the town to the State Park, leave the trailer at the campsite, and come back to poke around Trinidad. A large Victorian mansion houses the museum. Once the home of a wealthy rancher, it was built back in the time when the Rockefellers controlled Trinidad and the surrounding coalfields. We spend a couple of hours there, immersed in the exhibits of Trinidad's turbulent, colourful history - its place in the mythology of the American West. That evening, as the setting sun flashes on the basalt ramparts of Fisher's Peak, we grill steaks on the campfire and drink red wine. A cool breeze drifts the smoke away to leave a nose-tingling piney scent in the air. The wine tastes rich and warm. We watch the lights in the town below start to blink. Tomorrow we will go to Ludlow. To the south, beyond Raton Pass, stars sparkle in an indigo sky. The Canadian River has its headwaters in the Pass and from there it flows eastward to Texas and beyond - a reminder of the French Canadian traders and trappers who probed this far south, into what was Spanish Mexico, in the late 1700's. The Spanish fought the Comanches all along the other river, the one that flows through Trinidad, the one they called the River of Lost Souls in Purgatory. The Canadians, nomadic like the Indians, lived with them, married their women. They called the river the Purgatoire. The pronunciation was lost on the cowboys who came later, so it became known as the Picketwire. Before the railroad, the Santa Fe Trail was the principal trade route from the heart of the continent into the South West. From Trinidad, its Colorado terminus, it went up over the Raton Pass and down into Santa Fe. Kit Carson, the legendary frontiersman, used both outposts as a base of operations. Later, during the Mexican war, the Americans mounted their assault on Santa Fe from Trinidad -which fell without a shot fired. Trinidad's turbulent history commenced with the arrival of the Santa Fe Railway (the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe) in 1878, which accelerated the flow of settlers, gold prospectors and ranchers into the area. Managed by Murdo MacKenzie, a transplanted Scot, the Prairie Land and Cattle Co., with 16 million acres, became the largest ranch in the United States. The town attracted colourful characters. Wyatt Earp drove a stage coach from Trinidad north to Pueblo in the 1890's and the Sheriff, Bat Masterson, was often visited by Doc Holliday, his erstwhile gunslinging partner from Tombstone, Arizona. But it was coal, its availability and the railroads' and steel mills' voracious appetite for it, that inscribed Trinidad with its own chapter in the violent history of the United States. And it was coal, the working of it, that caused Tom Shenton to put his family and everything they owned in a horse-drawn wagon. He drove that wagon 700 miles south from Sheridan, Wyoming, living off the land, to Trinidad. The journey took 31 days. He found, in the camps around Trinidad, what had been so familiar to him in his birthplace - tall chimneys belching black smoke from pitworks framed by spindle-wheeled headstocks, around which huddled rude, soot-grimed company houses. This was in 1898. He stayed for eight years and he perceived the advent of the Colorado coalfield wars, which reached a climax with the Ludlow massacre in 1914. By this time, Tom was in Nanaimo B.C., in jail for his part in the labour war that gripped that community for two years. * * * At Ludlow we stroll in a landscape embraced by undulating, juniper-studded, grassland that rises gradually into the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It is a sunny Sunday morning. We feel invigorated by the fresh, clean air and animated in response to the cheeky magpie on the wrought iron fence that surrounds the monument. And my mood is distorted. The bucolic ambience of this place is playing tricks. Of the 18 names on the monument, 11 are children. This is only a partial list - of those that were found. Some estimates of the total are as high as 53. In 1903, John D. Rockefeller bought the Pueblo based Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the largest coal, iron ore and steel producing operation in the western US. Trinidad, in Las Animas County was the center of the coal operations. Steadfastly anti-union, the Company had virtual control of the social, economic and political life of the County. Miners lived in cheap housing owned by the Company, were paid in scrip (a form of currency redeemable only at the company store), and doctors, priests, school teachers, and law enforcement officers were all company employees (1). The company towns (the "camps") were enclosed, gated communities. The miners were virtually prisoners of the Company. Underground, working conditions were terrible. The miners were under constant threat from cave-ins and explosions. Accidental death was common. The Company broke attempts by the miners to strike by hiring unsuspecting immigrants from southern Europe and Mexico as strikebreakers. In 1913, the United Mine Workers made seven demands, which included recognition of the Union, better pay, and shorter hours (to 8 hours a day). The Company rejected these outright. In August, George Lippiatt, a union organizer, was murdered in Trinidad by a detective hired by the company. A month later the miners walked out and were evicted from their homes. They moved into tent camps, such as Ludlow, which had been erected outside of Trinidad. The following January the legendary Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) attended a mass rally of miners in Trinidad where she urged worker solidarity in defiance of the Rockefellers. Confrontations and violent incidents on the picket line became daily events. The Company hired the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency to protect the strikebreakers and to harass the strikers. The Baldwin Felts, living up to their brutal reputation for strikebreaking, shined searchlights into the camps at night and used an improvised armoured car, mounted with a machine gun, to patrol the perimeters, often firing randomly into the tents. The miner's dubbed it the "Death Special". They made dugouts under the tent floors to protect themselves and their families. As the unrest intensified, the Rockefellers prevailed upon the Governor of Colorado to send in the State National Guard. The miners' welcomed the troops, thinking they would provide protection from the Baldwin-Felts goons. They were mistaken. The Guard, instead, became an agent of the Company, escorting strikebreakers into the mines. The striking miners reacted by killing a strikebreaker and four mine guards. George Belcher, the Baldwin-Felts detective who murdered George Lippiatt, was killed by a sniper as he stood, lighting a cigar, on a Trinidad Street corner. Seven months later, following a harsh winter in the tent camps, a violent eruption appeared inevitable. It happened on April 20, 1914 at Ludlow. * * * Early on that Monday morning, Louis Tikas awoke to the sound of moving men and equipment. He heard the snap and clatter of a bandolier inserted into the breech of a machine gun on Water Tower Hill. Looking up, he saw two companies of Colorado State National Guard militiamen digging in above the tent city. Most of the people in the tents were still asleep. The day before, Sunday, they had celebrated Greek Orthodox Easter. Miners and their families from other camps: Italians, Mexicans, Slavs, even English from Starkville, 20 miles down the road, had come to share a lamb roast. Normally a Monday morning would be an active time, but this was not a normal Monday. As the morning wore on, the silence became ominous. Tikas stirred the smoldering embers in the brazier in front of his tent, added some fresh coal, and put a kettle on the grill. He looked to the high ground on the left side where the soldiers were positioned beyond the railway track, then back to where the land fell away. Where women were drawing water from the creek. He looked for an escape route. Louis Tikas felt the weight of the 1200 people he had lived with for seven months - through a hard winter. Many of the men were at the breaking point and the activity of the soldiers on the perimeter had them on edge. He had worked in the mines up north. Originally hired by the Company as a strike breaker - an ignorant Greek immigrant who found out quickly what it meant to be a scab. He turned, became an organizer for the United Mine Workers, and the union sent him down to Trinidad when the strike broke out. Now he was responsible for the people at Ludlow but he felt powerless. The camp was their only refuge. A month earlier the National Guard had demolished the tent colony up at Forbes. Tikas knew Ludlow was next. And he knew the men here would fight back. He felt desperate as he thought about the women and children. There were maybe 40 rifles in the camp, and not a lot of ammunition. That against 200 militiamen and six machine guns. Tikas thought about the Englishman. He had met him in a run down hotel in Denver where he, Tikas, worked as the night clerk. He was a coal miner passing through from Trinidad, on his way to Canada. His wife and children were still in Trinidad. He would send for them. That was eight years ago. Louis Tikas, fresh from Greece and slow with English, was curious about Canada and he drank beer with the Englishman that night in the saloon next door. He remembered his name - Tom. A slight, wiry man. In the saloon's yellow light his bare forearms rested on the table. They were stark white. His skin stretched tight over hard muscle and Tikas noticed the tiny flecks, like black ink, that filled the pores of his skin. It made him think of the speckled white eggs of the doves back home in Crete. The man's face was severe with a rigid chin. Louis remembered that stubborn jaw. The man was going to the West Coast of Canada where it rained a lot. That didn't appeal to Tikas. Tom saw the trouble coming. He told Tikas about the strike in 1902. How the miners were evicted from the company houses and how it was hard enough to strike but that much harder when you had no place to live. He told him about the rough working conditions, the danger and the low pay. Tom had worked coal mines in Montana and Wyoming, before Colorado. He said it was the same everywhere, even in Canada, except for one thing - a miner could own his home up there. That's why he was going. In spite of the labour troubles, work had been steady enough that he had saved the money. All coal companies were hard, he said, but the Rockefellers were the worst. Conditions were bad down there and there would be another strike, and there would be violence. Louis Tikas poured his coffee and looked up at the soldiers along ridge, their stiff-brimmed Stetsons silhouetted in the morning sun. He wondered if the Englishman knew how right he'd been. He thought about the speckled dove's eggs cradled in his mother's boney, brown hands, and his throat swelled with a longing for home. Charlie Costa came over from the camp gate, a rifle crooked in his right arm. "There's a couple of goons over there, want to talk to you." "About what?" "Seems they're looking for someone." Lieutenant Karl Linterfelt was waiting for Tikas at the gate. "You are harbouring a fugitive. Bring him here or we'll come in looking for him."" "I know no fugitive," said Tikas, "who?" The officer told him. "I know no such name." Tikas knew it was a ruse. Once inside the camp, the militia would take over. That had happened at Forbes. Behind him, Tikas heard the click/clunk of the lever of a Winchester 30:30. The officer stiffened and then everyone in that small, tense group turned to the direction of an explosion near the headquarters tent of the commanding officer of the National Guard. Soldiers scattered to their positions. Louis Tikas ran back into the maze of tents. As the machine guns opened fire, terrified women and children scrambled into dugouts under tent floors. A few of the men slipped through the soldiers' lines to the hills above where they tried to draw the fire from the National Guard. Others returned fire from trenches inside the camp. Some of the residents at the far side of the camp managed to escape across the creek but the barrage of bullets made a mass evacuation impossible. The machine guns' fusillades raked the tents to shreds. Tikas slipped into a trench and a miner tossed him a rifle. Numb to the furious staccato from the machine guns he heard only the whispering of the bullets and the plap, plap plap, as they tore into the sagging canvas of the tents. Tikas heard moans from the wounded. He wondered how many others were dead. A freight train steamed along the track that separated the militia from the camp. It stopped. The engineer leaned out and gestured with both arms. He shouted, "get everyone out. I won't move until you do." The train provided cover to allow many of the women and children to escape - before the militia threatened to shoot the engineer. The siege continued into the afternoon until Charlie Costa called to Tikas, "We're down to the last rounds of ammunition." Tikas crawled through the camp, looking for survivors. He found Alcarita Pedegrone and Mary Petrucci who said there were still women and children in the dugouts. In hope of protecting those who remained, he tried to signal to Major Hamrock, the commander of the National Guard. His arms raised, he walked to the gate where soldiers seized him and escorted him to Linterfelt. Tikas saw Major Hamrock emerge from his tent near the water tower. He saw him look in his direction and nod. Linterfelt raised his rifle and brought the butt down on the back of Louis Tikas' head - crushing it. As he fell a soldier pumped three rounds into him. Then he shot Charlie Costa. The militia entered the demolished tent city, combing through the debris, and at about 7:00 that evening they began pouring kerosene on the shredded tents. The camp was soon an inferno. Louis Tikas had managed to get most of the residents out of the Ludlow tent colony. When the union men entered the smouldering ruins the next morning they were able to find 18 bodies, including 13 women and children who had been incinerated in a dugout under a tent. There were an estimated 35 people unaccounted for - their bodies never recovered. Within hours, striking miners from every camp in the area went on a rampage, killing Company officials, militiamen and strike breakers. They blew up and burned Company property. Anarchy ruled southeastern Colorado for 10 days until US President Wilson sent the army in to restore order. Over 100 people died in the Colorado coalfield war. The miner's lost. But their sacrifices created a legacy that is now enshrined in labour legislation. * * * Louis Tikas is the first of 18 names inscribed on the monument. Of the others, 11 are children. Over twenty feet high, it rests stolid on a series of stepped plinths that also support two graceful, life-size statues. One is a coal miner, the other is a woman with a child in her arms. Nothing else remains here. The flat grassland gives way to undulating hills that glow in the sunlight. The monument towers like a beacon over a barren piece of ground, cordoned off, where a university is conducting an archaeological dig to probe and disturb the ghosts of the Ludlow massacre. The artifacts have been here a scant 75 years. This dig has to be the youngest in history. I wonder if they'll learn anything. We drive back into those uncharted hills on a rutted, dirt road, fording a couple of creeks until Gilly spots some ruins on a slope. An old stone foundation and some rubble. In the foreground stands a small granite monument. It reads, "In memory of the 121 men who lost their lives in the Hastings Mine Explosion, April 27, 1917." It is a reminder that the underground coal mines in Colorado, worked for barely 70 years (from the 1870's until the 1940's), killed over 1700 people, more than all the Indian wars, range wars and gunfights combined in the history of the State. In Colorado, the coalfields were the real wild west. All Rights Reserved.