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Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 27, 1914
Denver, Colorado – Thousands Gather to Protest Slaughter of the Innocent at Ludlow
From The Denver Post of April 27, 1914:
[Photos above: Top: Crowd standing in the rain at the state house. Bottom left: Edward Doyle. Bottom right: Jesse Vetter.]
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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.
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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday April 18 1914
Denver, Colorado – Mother Jones Resting After Release from Cold Cellar Cell
From the Rocky Mountain News of April 17, 1914:
From The Indianapolis Star of April 18, 1914:
MINERS WOULD REOPEN CASE
TO PRESENT ‘MOTHER’ JONES
———-DENVER, Col, April 17-A movement was started here tonight by the policy committee of District No. 15 of the United Mine Workers of America, to reopen in Washington the congressional investigation of the Colorado coal miners’ strike by seeking to place before the committee the testimony of “Mother” Mary Jones, the aged strike leader who was released from military imprisonment at Walsenburg on Thursday.
“Mother” Jones who came to Denver immediately on her discharge, probably will leave tomorrow for Washington.
Telegrams were sent tonight to Representative M. D. Foster, chairman of the recent investigating House mines committee, and to Representative Keating of Colorado, urging a hearing for “Mother” Jones.
[Emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 16, 1914
Forbes and Ludlow, Colorado – Militia’s Reign of Terror Continues
From The Denver Post of March 12, 1914:
Views of the tent colony at Forbes, Colo., destroyed by order of General Chase last Tuesday [March 10th] in the Trinidad coal strike district. The lower photograph is a view of a tent and the strikers and their families before the soldiers took charge. The upper is a view of the colony dwellers and their destroyed homes, showing the strikers and their children eating the food found in their wrecked tents.
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The body of Neil Smith, strikebreaker, was found near the railroad tracks between Forbes and Suffield just before the March 10th raid on Forbes Tent Colony. Gen. Chase blamed the miners for Smith’s death stating that he was murdered by strikers with clubs and stones and “then the victim’s body was laid on the railroad tracks to be run over, as it was, by an approaching train.” For that reason, according to Chase, the nearby strikers’ colony was raided, ransacked and destroyed by the militia. Every man living in the colony was taken into military custody.
Joe M. Scatterthwaite, editor of the Trinidad Free Press, the union newspaper, reported that the trainmen (J. M. Riley, conductor; T. H. Mitchell, engineer, and J. M. Dean, brakeman) examined Smith’s body immediately after he was run over by the train. They found no signs of clubs or stones. The militiamen and company guards did not arrive at the scene until several hours later, and that is when the stones and clubs suddenly appeared. Sixteen strikers from the Forbes colony have been arrested and 48 women and children are now homeless. The militia has not allowed the union to rebuild the colony.
Scatterthwaite recently published the following editorial:
HOW LONG, OH GOD, HOW LONG?
Governor Ammons, sitting on his shoulder blades in cushioned chair, replies to complaints concerning the Forbes outrage, that he knew nothing of it-and that it will not happen again.
Of course it will not occur again-and it does not need an anemic, spineless, truckling executive to give that assurance. The thing has been done! The tents are down. The women are in tears, the children are in hysterics, the peaceful colony is scattered. It will not be done again at Forbes. O, No!
But will it be done at some other point? Will Ludlow be the next to suffer? Will the mailed fist fall on Starkville? Will these unrebuked outlaws next attack some other law-abiding band of citizens? These are questions for a kow-towing executive to answer. He does not know what the next order of the coal barons will be, but he knows that he will probably obey that command as he has sniffingly and cringingly obeyed every order that has come to him from the offices of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and Victor American Fuel Company-his masters. He does not know what his militia will do, for he is fully aware, in his puny heart, that the militia has got beyond his control.
He knows that these desperate men of the gun and bludgeon can no more be checked and held in leash than the imps of hell. He assures the people that there will be no further outrages at Forbes, but he is powerless to say that the heavy hand will not fall on some other community. And so he keeps silent, groveling out his excuses to righteous complaints.
[Emphasis added.]
March 13th, as if to provide proof for the points of Scatterthwaite’s editorial, Lieutenant Linderfelt and his men charged their horses onto the platform of the the crowded Ludlow train station. It was just at train time, and some of those waiting for the train were knocked down as others scattered in a panic to avoid being trampled. Witness say the cavalrymen rode straight at them from a rise beyond Ludlow, just as the westbound train pulled into the depot. No doubt, Lt. Linderfelt and his men were hoping to provoke the colonist into retaliating.
General Chase has issued an order that the 450 militiamen still in the field cannot be sent home. “A clash between the militia and the strikers is expected,” the General stated. The militia left in the field are of the worst sort. Linderfelt is a glaring example of the character of the militiamen who have been left in the strike zone. Many of them are company guards, now in the pay of both the military and the coal companies.
The investigating committee from the Colorado Federation of Labor (appointed by Governor Ammons), singled Linderfelt out as an officer unfit for duty. The Labor Committee specifically requested, last January after the Lieutenant’s previous rampage at the Ludlow depot, that Linderfelt be taken out of the strike zone stating that:
We did not expect to report to you until we had completed the taking of testimony at all camps, but in our judgment the following serious matter should be reported to you at once: Lieut. K. E. Linderfelt, of the cavalry stationed at Berwind, last night [Dec. 30th] at Ludlow brutally assaulted an inoffensive boy in the public railroad station, using the vilest language at the same time. He also assaulted and tried to provoke to violence Louie Tikas, head man of the Ludlow strikers’ colony, and arrested him unjustifiably. Today, in the presence of one of our number, he grossly abused a young man in no way connected with the strike, also makes threats against the strikers in the foulest language. He rages violently upon little or no provocation and is wholly an unfit man to bear arms and command men as he has no control over himself. We have reason to believe that it is his deliberate purpose to provoke the strikers to bloodshed. In the interest of peace and justice, we ask immediate action in his case.
[Emphasis added.]
Governor Ammons, Democrat of Colorado, elected to office with the aid of the Labor Vote, has continued to ignore this request. Lt. Linderfelt remains in the strike zone, camped out with his men at Berwind, near to the Ludlow Tent Colony.
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Hellraisers Journal – Friday January 30, 1914
Sterling, Colorado – Mrs. Lee Refuses to Help Free Mother Jones
From The Cincinnati Post of January 28, 1914:
(Will woman suffrage make good in Colorado?
That is the question all the United States is asking today. That question was put up to Mrs. Gertrude A. Lee, Chairman of the Democratic State committee in Colorado. The Governor and his militia Generals, who placed 82-year-old Mother Jones in solitary confinement in a military prison, are members of her party. The following is from the Denver correspondent of the Post, who went to Sterling to see Mrs. Lee.-Editor’s Note.)
STERLING, COLO., Jan. 28.-(Spl.)-Mrs. Gertrude A. Lee, head of the Democratic State central committee, doesn’t know officially that Mother Jones has been illegally imprisoned or that the Colorado state troops rode down and beat women and children paraders with swords in Trinidad.
So she won’t protest
“I want to do what is right for the party and the women,” said Mrs. Lee, who has been recuperating from a nervous attack on a farm near here.
“I don’t know that there is anything wrong in the coal strike fields. I want time.”
“Do you believe any citizen-man or woman-should be deprived of his constitutional right of personal liberty and free speech without due process of law?” she was asked.
Mrs. Lee evaded the question five times and finally said, “No.”
Mrs. Lee will not ask the State [Democratic Party] committee to do anything about the coal strike that will embarrass Governor Ammons.
[Emphasis added.
Note: Mrs. Gertrude A. Lee is married to Colonel George M. Lee who is next in authority to General Chase in the state militia now occupying southern Colorado and enforcing its military despotism upon the striking miners, their wives and their children.
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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday January 21, 1914
Mrs. Gertrude Lee of Colorado’s Democratic Party Could Help Free Mother Jones
From The Cincinnati Post of January 20, 1914
-Write or Wire Mrs. Lee, of Colorado’s Democratic Party, to Help Free Mother Jones:
