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Hellraisers Journal – Friday April 24, 1914
Trinidad, Colorado – Mother of Slain Child Tells of Horror of Ludlow Massacre
From the Chicago Day Book of April 24, 1914:
the gunmen, and then the fire the savage murderers mercilessly started.
The shooting started, she says, when Louis Tikas, Greek leader at the tent colony, protested because the uniformed gunmen trained three machine’ guns on the tent colony.
[Mrs. Snyder said:]
Louis told them not to point their guns at the women and children.
Sunday they tried to break up a ball game our men were playing and some of the men got mad and chased them away. That is why they set up the guns and it was then that Louis objected.
Then they cursed him and fired at him. They must have fired 50 shots at him and he fell down dead. That was early Monday.
Our men all went mad then and got what guns they had and started after the gunmen. Our men were on one side of the tents and the gunmen on the other.
All of us women and children ran down into the cellars which were dug a long time ago when the gunmen first came down here and threatened us with rifles and machine guns.
All day long we lay down there without anything to eat or drink.
I had six children, the oldest eleven, and they all cried.
All through the camp we could hear women shrieking and calling to God and the Virgin to come and save their children. The firing continued and the bullets whistled over us hour after hour, and after a while I heard a woman cursing terribly. Later I heard that she had had her hand shot off at the wrist when she reached up from her cellar and tried to get a pail of water to give her children a drink.
My children begged me for water, and finally little William [Frankie] he was my oldest boy said he was going to get them a drink. So he climbed up out of the cellar and he never came back.
I know now that a bullet tore his head all away. I should have gone for the water myself, but I had to stay with the babies.
Just when it was beginning to get dark the gunmen dashed in among the tents and set fire to some of them. Our tents were all close together and the fire spread fast. All the time they kept shooting into the tents, although they knew our men, with their guns, were all away up in the hills.
I took my children and ran to a deep arroyo (gully) where there were about 50 other women and babies.
Lots of the others, though, were afraid to come out of their cellars and they suffocated under the burning floors side walls, which had been built up of boards.
I don’t see how any men could kill little children like my William and them other poor little things who were shot or burned.
The man who led the uniformed gunmen at the start of the battle was E. K. Lenderfelt [Karl E. Linderfelt], a lieutenant in the Colorado National Guard. A. C. Felts, head of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, told the congressional investigation committee that Lenderfelt operated a machine gun for the coal mine owners during the earlier part of the strike.
Lenderfelt, according-to witnesses before an investigating committee sent to Southern Colorado, had boasted that he would “get” Louis Tikas, the Ludlow strikers’ leader, and that he would wipe out the colony there some day.
This committee twice asked Governor Amnions to remove Lenderfelt and Amnions twice disregarded the requests.
Upon Elias Ammons, governor of Colorado, rests the blame for this awful slaughter.
Ammons is out of,, the state now. John Chase, his adjutant general, is rushing more ammunition and reinforcements to the gunmen in order that they continue the massacre.
Colorado people are very anxious for me to write into my story that no decent Colorado boys are now in the militia on strike duty. The so-called militia in the strike country are all thugs and bums from the cities, many of them gunmen with penitentiary records.
For the benefit of those who may not understand the “tent-colony” situation, it should be stated that, when this strike started, the miners, expecting eviction from company houses, bought tents and set them up on ground they leased themselves.
Their purpose was to be on their own property, where they could not legally be molested or evicted..
They found that the poor and oppressed have no legal rights as against the oppressors. From the start the tent colonies have been the object of depredations by soldiers and gunmen.
Time and again the tent colonies have been shot up in the night. Raids have been made and tent ropes cut. Wells have been fouled, and this in a country where water is as precious as gold.
Ludlow is the largest tent colony. It numbered about 400 tents which, since last September, have furnished homes to as high as 1,500 men, women and children. The colony was located on a broad bit of mesa stretching away from a railroad track.
Louis Tikas, one of the victims of this week’s massacre, acted as mayor of the little community, and to him was given credit for maintaining order, peace and sanitation in the camp which spoke 21 different languages.
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TAKE BURNED BODIES FROM
THE GROUND-29 DEADTrinidad, Col., April 24. Twenty-nine are now dead as a result of the war between the militia and the striking miners in the Colorado coal fields and their bodies lie in the morgue. Nineteen will be buried today in one big funeral.
The strikers released the prisoners in the Empire mine yesterday, but J. W. Sipple, president of the company, with twenty of his men, refused to surrender.
“We told them we’d protect them if they’d come out and give -up their guns,” declared Strike Leader Snyder, who led the party that bore the offer of release to the prisoners. “Sipple said he’d talk it over with his men.”
The work of taking the charred bodies of the wives and children of the miners out of the ruins of the tents fired, it is declared, by the militia, was ghastly.
Eleven women and two children [2 women and 11 children] were taken from the death cellar at Ludlow, where they were held trapped by the guns of the militiamen in Monday’s fight.
The cellar is ten feet deep and at the bottom less than six feet square. In this hole lay the bodies, heaped together. The mothers, Mrs. Chas. Costa and Mrs. S. Chavez [Patria Valdez], had evidently tried to shelter with their bodies their helpless little ones. But the bodies, one of them 11 days old, struggled when the suffocating smoke crept down. Their little hands, scarred by the flames, showed how they had reached out, trying to pull themselves from the flames.
Desultory fighting continued yesterday at Ludlow, but the main body of the strikers is believed to be at Rugby and Primrose.
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REPORTS SAY GOV. AMMONS
MAY FACE IMPEACHMENTDenver, Col., April 24.-It is planned to impeach Gov. Amnions at the special session of the Colorado legislature, according to authoritative reports because of his attitude in the coal mines strike in Southern Colorado. Gov. Ammons, who is returning here from Washington, said he would see that sufficient troops were sent to the strike zone to restore order.
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[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Mother Jones Babes of Ludlow, Speech at Trinidad CO UMW District 15 Special Convention, Steel Speeches p154 (176 of 360)
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/176/mode/2up
The Day Book
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Apr 24, 1914
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1914-04-24/ed-1/seq-1/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1914-04-24/ed-1/seq-2/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1914-04-24/ed-1/seq-3/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1914-04-24/ed-1/seq-4/
See also:
Ludlow Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday April 23, 1914
Trinidad, Colorado – City Officials Demand State Troops; Union to Issue Call to Arms
Tag: Ludlow Massacre
https://weneverforget.org/tag/ludlow-massacre/
Tag: Colorado Coalfield War of 1914
https://weneverforget.org/tag/colorado-coalfield-war-of-1914/
Tag: Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914
https://weneverforget.org/tag/colorado-coalfield-strike-of-1913-1914/
Las Animas County, Colorado
Mr. William Snyder describes how the gunthug-infested militia set fire to his tent while his family was still inside, how they mocked him and threatened him as he held his dead son in his arms, how Linderfelt raged at his wife as she begged for the life of her husband: “Please don’t shoot him; they have killed one of my children already,” when Linderfelt says, “It is a damned pity that all of you damned red-necked bitches were not killed.” Mr. William Snyder describes how his family was terrorized by the Colorado National Guard which was under the command of Governor Ammons, Democrat of Colorado.
SOURCE
Congressional edition, Volume 6937
United States. Congress
U.S. G.P.O., 1916
“Final Report and Testimony
Presented to Congress by the
Commission on Industrial Relations
Created by the Act of
August 23, 1912″
(search: william snyder lawful age)-page 7377
https://books.google.com/books?id=DIFRAAAAYAAJ
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The Ludlow Massacre · Fourwinds
Lyrics by Woody Guthrie