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Hellraisers Journal – Monday May 11, 1914
MacGregor Describes the Terror Wrought in Colorado by Rockefeller’s Murderers
From The Day Book of May 6, 1914:
And I saw little children, with wide and reddened eyes, run from my approach because I was a stranger and the Ludlow massacre of the innocents had taught them fear of all strangers.
I stopped my machine to talk to one little girl of seven. She ran from me, stumbled, fell, and lay clinging to the earth, her small body shaking with sobs.
“Are you scared of me?” I asked.
Her sobs became more violent.
“I’m your friend,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you. Why are you afraid of me?”
She turned a terror-stricken face to me for a moment.
“I don’t know you,” she said. “And you came in an automobile. And-“
She buried her wet face in the earth and fell to sobbing again.
At the Jackson tent colony, twelve miles from where the fighting took place, a woman came to me and fell on her knees. She was soon to be a mother.
“Can’t you get me away from here?” she cried. “I don’t want my baby born here within reach of the machine guns. There was a woman going to have a baby at Ludlow, and-and they burned them both.”
She was silent for a moment; then waved her hand toward her husband, who stood at her tent door, leaning on a rifle, his face as grim as death itself.
“Besides,” she said proudly, “I want my man to be down at the front fighting the gunmen with the rest, and he can’t leave me alone here. Get me away.”
Mothers pleading that their babies might be born out of reach of Rockefeller’s guns! That they might be removed from danger so their men could go to the front-against Rockefeller!
Was it not enough to make men’s hearts red with rage? Was it not enough to rouse the murder lust within them?
I tell you there were times there when I felt like hanging every Rockefeller murderer who fell into our hands, without ceremony and without compunction. I think my hands would have been clean.
And yet those miners, who have been called every murderous name the mine owners or their hired press agents could think of, captured four mines outside Walsenburg and gave every gunman at them safe conduct out of the district when they raised the white flag!
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