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Hellraisers Journal – Friday September 18, 1914
Las Animas County, Colorado – Gunthug Walter Belk Active in Arrests of Union Men
From the Appeal to Reason of September 12, 1914:
Ludlow Is Disfranchised
Ludlow, the strikers’ tent colony of nearly a thousand souls, is to be barred from the ballot box.
Ludlow’s citizens must go to Hastings two miles away to register, and Hastings is surrounded by company land, guarded by the armed thugs of the Baldwin-Felts Detective agency, armed while the union men are gunless.
No union man is permitted on company land and so the ballot box is in the grip of the coal operators.
A committee of citizens went to Colonel Lockett’s office in the city hall of Trinidad, Tuesday morning, to ask for protection at the polls and the colonel refused to see them. In his place stood Captain Rockwell with this message from the colonel:
“If the operators desire they can prohibit voters from going to the polls when the polls are on company land-the military will furnish no protection to any person on election day.”
The voice was that of Captain Rockwell, but the command was that of Colonel Lockett, Lockett of the United States army under whose protecting arm scabs have been flooding to the struck mines and digging coal for Rockefeller.
[Emphasis added.]
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