Scott Martelle
journalist/author

A few years back I was reading a now-forgotten American history book and stumbled across a footnote reference to 100 men, women and children killed in a months-long war between striking coal miners and the Colorado National Guard. My first thought: Why didn’t I know about that? I knew about the April 1914 Ludlow Massacre, when two mothers and 11 children died after marauding Guardsmen torched a strikers' tent colony. But the broader war came as a revelation. And it was telling that such a protracted showdown between capital and labor had been reduced to a literal footnote. History is written by the victors, and labor has not been victorious very often.

Curiosity drove me deeper into the history, with loose plans to write a magazine article on the Colorado Coal Field War Project, an archeological exploration of the Ludlow colony and the nearby Berwind mining camp. Led by Dean Saitta of the University of Denver, Philip Duke of Fort Lewis College in Durango, and Randall McGuire of the State University of New York at Binghamton, the 1999-2000 project was the first to treat the site as a place of archeological inquiry, trying to determine what life was like for the miners both before and during the strike. But it quickly became apparent to me that there was more material here than I could shoe-horn into a magazine piece. Blood Passion is the result.

Although Blood Passion explores the violent trajectory of a labor strike, it is not a work of labor history. Rather, it is a journalist's look back at a story of oppression and rebellion, of ordinary people revolting under a corrupt local political system, and of immigrants who discovered that if they wanted a piece of the American Dream they had better be ready to fight for it. A union helped them in that battle, and is an integral part of that history, but this book is about the combatants and the battles themselves.

From this country's earliest days, we have wrestled with the conflicting concepts of respecting our government and rebelling against it. Blood Passion is an attempt to knock some of the dust off this long-forgotten yet hugely emblematic moment in American history.

-- Scott Martelle

Ludlow, Colorado

Hot summer winds whisk across the Colorado prairie with a distracting persistence, kicking up small dust devils and swirls of debris that whisper eastward over Interstate 25 and on into the vast flatness of the Great Plains. A freeway sign at Exit 27 says this spot is the town of Ludlow, but there’s no town here, just a chain-link fence with an unlocked gate surrounding a white-walled meeting hall, a gazebo with picnic tables, and a monument that looks like an oversized Victorian grave marker. A half-dozen isolated ranchettes, some with metal-bar horse corrals, dot the sweeping countryside, giving the place a forgotten feel, like a Grange Hall amid farms gone fallow. A rusty railroad runs north and south like a seam stitching the prairie to the Sangre de Cristo—Blood of Christ—Mountains. In one direction lies Colorado Springs and, farther north, Denver; the opposite direction takes you to Trinidad and on across the old Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico. On the west side of the tracks a washboard road curls into a canyon leading to the ghost towns of Hastings and Delagua. A little to the south another dirt road trails into another canyon to more ghost towns—Berwind and Tabasco, reduced now to tan clusters of crumbling stones along a gurgling creek, the only sound save for the occasional chirp of a bird or the rustle of dry leaves and grasses. Coal once was king here, but emptiness now reigns, and it doesn’t take much of a romantic flight to hear the footfalls of the dead.

Less than a century ago this quiet and mostly empty stretch of southern Colorado was the scene of great strife, and great agony. More than seventy-five people died, most of them shot to death in the first eight months of a coal strike that lasted fifteen months and that the miners lost. The United States had endured violent labor battles before, and there have been many since. None, though, reached the level of pitched warfare that erupted here in Colorado’s southern coalfields, where East Coast money and power collided with immigrant poverty and need. The nadir came on a sunny Monday morning in April 1914, when a detachment from the Colorado National Guard engaged in a ten-hour gun battle with union men at Ludlow, where a tent colony housing some eleven hundred strikers and their families had been erected. Seven men and a boy were killed in the shooting, at least three of the men—all striking coal miners, one a leader—apparently executed in cold blood by Colorado National Guardsmen who had taken them captive. As the sun set, the militia moved into the camp itself and an inferno lit up the darkening sky, reducing most of the makeshift village to ashes. It wasn’t until the next morning that the bodies of two mothers and eleven children were discovered where they had taken shelter in a dirt bunker beneath one of the tents. The raging fire had sucked the oxygen from the air below, suffocating the families as they hid from the gun battle.

The deaths of the women and children quickly became known as the Ludlow Massacre, and the backlash was vicious and bloody. Over the next ten days striking miners and their supporters poured out their rage in attacks across the coalfields in “an armed and open rebellion against the authority of the state as represented by the militia. This rebellion constituted perhaps one of the nearest approaches to civil war and revolution ever known in this country in connection with an industrial conflict.” And it was a guerrilla war that stretched along more than two hundred miles of the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies. Union men—mostly Greek and Italian immigrants—swept in from the hillsides and burned mine works to the ground before disappearing. Guards and strikebreakers were killed. At one point several dozen mine officials, guards, scabs, and their families were holed up in a mine shaft, the entry partially sealed by dynamite blasts, with rampaging miners ready to kill if they came out. It took the U.S. Army to bring the bloodshed to an end.