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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday May 10, 1914
Don MacGregor Describes the Battle of the Hogback, Near Walsenburg
From the Chicago Day Book of May 5, 1914:
They fired carefully, deliberately. They didn’t fire to frighten but to kill.
But they didn’t shoot at those militiamen because the blood lust was in their veins. They shot because the memory of Ludlow was in their minds.
Soon after the battle started, Rockefeller’s murderers at the Walsen mine turned their machine guns on the city of Walsenburg. Two men were killed there, while women and children crouched in terror in the basements of their homes.
Such was the battle of Walsenburg, in which 300 strikers Wednesday [April 29th] defended their position on a hilltop against about 200 so-called militiamen.
They tell me that one militiamen and ten gunmen were killed. It’s too bad but they shouldn’t be militiamen and gunmen. They shouldn’t be working for greedy coal operators against men and women and children who are striking for bread.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t working against the women and children. The men can stand their attacks. But when they kill wives and mothers and babies, kill them for hire it’s different.
I never knew braver or better men than those miners. They’re rough; they’re ignorant, but they’re men. They love their families.
And I know that when they fought the militia at Walsenburg it was simply to protect their families.
It wasn’t for revenge. It was from fear of another massacre.
The strikers under me occupied a position on a hill “the Hogback.” One-half mile back of them was their camp of Toltec, and stretching twelve miles back of that were seven other strikers’ camps in which were fifteen hundred women and children. All that stood between John D. Rockefeller’s murderers and these fifteen hundred women and children was “The Hogback” and the strikers on it.
And every man was thinking of Ludlow. Four men who had lost wives and children in the massacre there were in our ranks. They’d told the story of Ludlow, over and over again. They’d told how the militiamen and the gunmen, brought to Colorado to kill for hire, had trained their machine guns on the camp. They’d heard how the tents were set on fire, how the children screamed and died in cruel flames!
And they were determined to die rather than let those militiamen reach the camp back of Walsenburg.
We didn’t do wrong. We didn’t resist officers of the law. We resisted men who have preyed on us for months, who have shot us down, who have burned our camps and who have killed our women and children. That’s the awful part.
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