The Archaeology of Class War: The Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914

Archaeology of Class War the Archaeology of Class War the the Colorado Coalfield Strike edited by of 1913–1914 ...

Author: Randall H. McGuire | Karin Larkin (eds.)

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Archaeology of Class War the


the

Colorado Coalfield Strike

edited by

of

1913–1914

Karin Larkin and Randall H. McGuire

University Press of Color ado

© 2009 by the University Press of Colorado Published by the University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The archaeology of class war : the Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913–1914 / edited by Karin Larkin and Randall H. McGuire. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87081-955-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Coal Strike, Colo., 1913–1914. 2. Coal Strike, Colo., 1913–1914—Sources. 3. Ludlow (Colo.)—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Coal miners—Colorado—Ludlow—History—20th century. 5. Working class—Colorado—Ludlow— History—20th century. 6. Social conflict—Colorado—Ludlow—History—20th century. 7. Ludlow (Colo.)—Antiquities. 8. Excavations (Archaeology)—Colorado—Ludlow. 9. Material culture—Colorado—Ludlow—History—20th century. 10. Ludlow (Colo.)—Social life and customs—20th century. I. Larkin, Karin. II. McGuire, Randall H. HD5325.M61521913 A73 2009 331.892'8223340978809041—dc22 2009028791 Design by Daniel Pratt 18

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Contents

vii

List of Figures

xi

List of Tables

xiii

Preface and Acknowledgments

Chapter one —Randall H. McGuire and Karin Larkin

1

Unearthing Class War 29

Chapter two —Randall H. McGuire

A Terrible Unrest: Class War in Colorado 69

Chapter three —Karin Larkin

Archaeology and the Colorado Coalfield War 123

Chapter four —Margaret Wood

Building the Corporate Family: Constructing Homes, Families, and the Nation 161

Chapter five —Sarah J. Chicone From Shacks to Shanties: Working-Class Poverty and the 1913–1914 Southern Colorado Coalfield Strike

Contents

187

Chapter six —Michael Jacobson

Landscapes of Hope and Fear: A Study of Space in the Ludlow Strikers’ Colony 219

Chapter seven —Amie Gray Material Culture of the Marginalized

251

Chapter eight —Claire H. Horn

“Thou Shalt Not Dose Thyself ”: Proprietary Medicine Use at the Ludlow Tent Colony 285

Chapter nine —Summer Moore Working Parents and the Material Culture of Victorianism: Children’s Toys at the Ludlow Tent Colony

311

Chapter ten —Mark Walker Archaeology and Workers’ Memory

331

Chapter eleven —Bonnie J. Clark and Eleanor Conlin Casella Teaching Class Conflict: A Trans-Atlantic Comparison Using the Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project in Undergraduate Curricula

351

Chapter twelve —Philip Duke and Dean Saitta

Why We Dig: Archaeology, Ludlow, and the Public 363

vi

Index

Figures

2

1.1 Monument to the Ludlow dead, before the vandalism

3

1.2 Monument to the Ludlow dead, after the vandalism

6

1.3 Map of the southern Colorado coalfields, 1913

23

1.4 Restored monument to the Ludlow dead

31

2.1 Aftermath of Primero Mine explosion, January 31, 1910

37

2.2 Morley, Colorado, 1907–1915, a company town

41

2.3 Miner-built housing in southern Colorado, 1900–1920

43

2.4 Miner’s family, southern Colorado, 1913–1914

48

2.5 Map of strike zone, 1913–1914

51

2.6 Women’s march, Trinidad, Colorado, 1914

53

2.7 Oberosler family and friends in front of tent at Forbes Tent Colony, 1914

54

2.8 Machine gun at Water Tank Hill, 1914

vii

Figures

56

2.9 Ludlow Tent Colony after the massacre, 1914

57

2.10 Death Pit at Ludlow, 1914

58

2.11 Dead company men at Forbes Mine, 1914

61

2.12 UMWA is here to stay, Somerton, Colorado, 2009

78

3.1 Dog-leash density map

80

3.2 Site map showing all features tested and excavated at Ludlow, 1998–2002

82

3.3– Series of maps for Berwind, Colorado, including Stock and 3.7 School canyons and Tollerburg

89

3.8 Bird’s-eye view of Ludlow Colony used in photo overlay project

98

3.9 Map of Locus 1, Ludlow

100

3.10 Plan view of Features 99 and 100 in Locus 13, Ludlow

101

3.11 Feature 70, west profile, Ludlow

102

3.12 Feature 73 in Locus 11 stratigraphic, Ludlow

104

3.13 Feature 74 in Locus 12 stratigraphic, Ludlow

108

3.14 Locus 13 glass counts by function

108

3.15 Locus 11 food group frequencies

109

3.16 Locus 11 glass by function

124

4.1 John D. Rockefeller talking with women, 1918

132

4.2 Italian mining family, southern Colorado, 1890–1910

133

4.3 Vernacular housing, Rugby, 1890–1910

134

4.4 Company housing, Rugby, 1902

137

4.5 Map showing footprint of vernacular structures and duplex structures, 1911

139

4.6 Plan of four-room square house, 1904

140

4.7 Row of four-room square homes in Berwind, Colorado, 1915

141

4.8 Bar chart showing household composition at Berwind, 1910 and 1920

142

4.9 Four-room square home with fence and yard, 1920s

viii

Figures

145

4.10 YMCA featuring similarities to domestic architecture, 1920s

147

4.11 Berwind baseball team near the clubhouse, 1922

153

4.12 Home canning–related items

164

5.1 View of abandoned residential buildings, Berwind, Colorado, 2006

166

5.2 Early cabin at Berwind, published in Camp and Plant with the caption “the sort men build for themselves,” 1904

169

5.3 Cement block housing exhibiting the popular four-room plan, Berwind, Colorado

173

5.4 Open sewage system at the former CF&I company town of Sopris, Colorado

175

5.5 Berwind house #249 first-prize winner, 1924

177

5.6 Interior (a) and exterior (b) views of a boardinghouse at the CF&I company town of Rouse, circa 1915

179

5.7 The only tent not destroyed in the Ludlow Tent Colony

181

5.8 Looking east down a residential street in the Ludlow Tent Colony, circa 1913–1914

194

6.1 Striking family standing in front of tent

195

6.2 Map of Ludlow Colony with approximate location of streets

198

6.3 Baseball game near Ludlow Colony

199

6.4 Celluloid film frame from Ludlow strikers’ colony midden

209

6.5 Death Pit after the Ludlow Massacre with evidence of construction methods

211

6.6 East-west cross-section, Feature 74

212

6.7 National Guard cross-section of Death Pit

231

7.1 Percentage of persons with two native-born parents, residents of Berwind, Tabasco, and Tollerburg, 1910

236

7.2 Production ranges of back stamps

240

7.3 Relative frequency of tableware vessel forms

243

7.4 Hand-painted Japanese porcelain

259

8.1 “Hints on Health,” August 8, 1920, Industrial Bulletin

ix

Figures

260

8.2 Mary Skrifvars, CF&I visiting nurse, 1917

273

8.3 Number of illnesses and injuries treated at CF&I steelworks and mining camps

286

9.1 Members of striking miner’s family in front of a tent at the Ludlow Tent Colony, 1913 or 1914

287

9.2 Group of strike participants, including three women, five younger children, and two infants, 1913 or 1914

288

9.3 A man and two small children play at the Ludlow Tent Colony, 1913 or 1914

289

9.4 Three boys stand in front of an effigy and snow tower during a demonstration at the Ludlow Tent Colony, 1914

290

9.5 Boys march down a street in Trinidad, Colorado, 1913 or 1914

303

9.6 Doll’s head recovered at the Ludlow Tent Colony from Feature 73, a burned tent cellar

304

9.7 Ceramic toy dishes recovered during excavations at the Ludlow Tent Colony and the nearby Berwind coal camp

320

10.1 Calls for commemoration of Ludlow began within two months of the massacre

338

11.1 Former textile industry workshop, West Yorkshire, March 2006

340

11.2 Striking University of California worker, Berkeley, September 2002

342

11.3 Melted canning jars amid other domestic items in tent cellar at Ludlow (Feature 73), August 2001

343

11.4 Diorama, Barnsley main seam

˘

Tables

106

3.1 Locus 13 group counts and relative frequencies, Ludlow 1998–2002

107


110


110

3.4 Locus 12 glass counts and relative frequencies, Ludlow 1998–2002

110

3.5 Locus 12 architectural remains counts and relative frequencies, Ludlow 1998–2002

111


111

3.7 All loci comparisons by frequency

150

4.1 Vessel counts and percentages of artifacts excavated from midden in neighborhood built as part of the Industrial Representation Plan (IRP)

xi

Ta b l e s

151

4.2 Counts and percentages of food-related vessels excavated from neighborhoods that dated before and after implementation of the IRP

152

4.3 Food-related vessels by material type from neighborhoods occupied before and after implementation of the IRP

237

7.1 Feature 73 teaware and tableware ceramic back stamps

265

8.1 Amounts of identifiable glass vessel types at Ludlow

266

8.2 Proprietary medicines by locus at Ludlow

268

8.3 Medicine bottles recovered from Berwind, by area

270

8.4 Varieties of medicinal compounds at Ludlow and Berwind

272

8.5 One week’s occurrences of illness and injury in CF&I camps, as reported in Camp and Plant 1903

xii


Anybody who read about the Ludlow Massacre, anybody who heard about it was bound to be affected by it. (Zinn 2004)

On the morning of April 20, 1914, Colorado National Guard troops opened fire on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado. Armed miners returned the militia’s fire while their families hid in cellars under their tents or scurried across the plains for safety. The Guard continued firing machine guns and rifles into the colony until late afternoon and then overran the camp, looting tents and setting them aflame. When the smoke cleared, all that remained of the colony were burned wooden frames, charred iron bedsteads, and great iron stoves standing starkly on the plains. Sunrise the next day found eighteen of the camp’s inhabitants dead, including two women and ten children who suffocated in a pit below a burning tent, and a twelveyear-old boy shot through the head. The Ludlow Massacre is the most violent and best-known event of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield Strike, but its significance goes far beyond this struggle. The death of innocents shocked the American public, and popular opinion soon turned against violent confrontations with strikers. After Ludlow, labor

xiii


relations in the United States started to move away from class conflict to corporate and government policies of negotiation, co-option, and regulated strikes. The press used the massacre to demonize John D. Rockefeller Jr. In response, he initiated the first important U.S. company union at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and he launched the first large-scale corporate public relations campaign in U.S. history. Mary “Mother” Jones, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, and other important personages in labor history participated in the strike. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) holds the massacre site as hallowed ground, maintains a monument there, and each June holds services to sanctify the ultimate sacrifice of union men, women, and children. Such shrines to the struggles of labor in this country are sorely needed because memories of class struggle have essentially been lost from popular consciousness. Strikes and labor struggle rarely leave evidence in the earth for archaeologists to dig up. The massacre at Ludlow and the subsequent burning of the colony, however, left a record of the strike in the ground. Dean Saitta of the University of Denver, Phillip Duke of Fort Lewis College (Durango, Colorado), and Randall McGuire of Binghamton University began the Colorado Coalfield War ArchaeÂ� ology Project in 1996 to unearth the story of class struggle in U.S. history. Graduate students from the University of Denver, Fort Lewis College, Binghamton University, Syracuse University, and the University of Colorado joined them to form the Ludlow Collective and investigate the Colorado Coalfield War. The collective has worked in cooperation with UMWA. The Colorado Historical Society funded the research with grants from the State Historical Fund, and the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities helped fund the educational programs. The Colorado Coalfield War is a well-documented event. The archival record of the strike includes thousands of pages, and hundreds of photographs exist of people and events that were part of it. The historians who have analyzed these records talk principally about the strike leaders and UMWA’s organizational work. They emphasize the common experience of workers in the mines and how it built the solidarity necessary for the strike. They contrast this to the home as the hearth of ethnicity that divided the miners. In these histories, the strike is a tale of striking male miners. Union workers, however, told a different story. They said that husbands and wives made the decision to strike at the kitchen table before workers ratified that decision in the union hall. They emphasized the hardship of a strike on mothers, sons, and daughters and the fact that solidarity had to spring from within the family or a strike would fail. Our research demonstrates that early–twentieth-century Colorado mining families shared a day-to-day experience of life that unified them and that the adversity of this experience forced families to strike. Archaeology provides a way to study the day-to-day experience of mining families in early–twentieth-century Colorado. The excavations of the Ludlow

xiv


Tent Colony offer a unique and unparalleled opportunity to address these issues. We need complete deposits of household remains to understand the mundane life of these households. The catastrophic abandonment of the tent colony and the subsequent burning of the tents created a “Pompeii”-like archaeological site. Families in their panic to escape the violence and fire left behind objects they would normally have treasured and taken with them. The strikers’ use of cellars for storage and protection ultimately became the record of their families’ lives and customs. In other words, the same conditions that created the devastating destruction in the end preserved the archaeological record that helped us understand the strikers’ day-to-day lives in new and important ways. Excavations in the pre- and post-strike contexts of the Berwind coal camp allowed us to compare this mundane experience before and after the strike. The chapters in this volume summarize much of the work of the Ludlow Collective for a scholarly audience. They weave material culture, landscapes, documents, oral histories, and photographs into narratives that reveal information about both the strike and life in early–twentieth-century Colorado coalfields that goes beyond standard documentary histories. They show how immigrant miners and their families negotiated pressure to become Americans. They discuss how working families used and transformed landscapes as part of their struggle. They illustrate how working-class women in the company towns were able to raise families on miners’ wages that were insufficient to feed two people and how the domestic sphere became a locus of class struggle. They answer questions such as what was the ideology and nature of poverty in the coalfields and what were the lives of children like. These insights will be of interest to historical archaeologists, as well as to western and labor historians. The turn of the twenty-first century has seen an increased emphasis on making archaeology relevant to the public. Most attempts to do this take the works of archaeologists and try to simplify them or water them down so a general public will understand what archaeologists are doing. The implicit assumption here is that all people have the same interest in the past and that the problem is simply one of communication. The Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project has tried to build a program that speaks to multiple audiences in languages they can understand, in formats that are accessible to them, and about aspects of the past that interest them. Archaeologists have traditionally spoken to two audiences: the scientific community of archaeologists and the general public. In addition to these traditional audiences the project has reached out to a nontraditional audience: unionized workers in southern Colorado and across the United States. It is unusual to hear a talk on archaeology in a union hall, but when project members speak of these events so important to union workers and about what they want to know about this history, it happens. Our efforts help make archaeology matter in the modern world.

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The research and fieldwork that form the foundation of this edited volume were the work of many hands. Most important were the members of the Ludlow Collective: Dan Broockmann, Donna Bryant, Sarah J. Chicone, Bonnie J. Clark, Philip Duke, Amie Gray, Claire Horn, Michael Jacobson, Kristian Jones, Jason Lapham, Karin Larkin, Randall McGuire, Summer Moore, Paul Reckner, Beth Rudden, Dean Saitta, Mark Walker, and Margaret Wood. In addition to the collective, April Beisaw and Andrea Zlotucha Kozub of Binghamton University conducted the faunal analyses at the site, Stacy Tchorzynski of Binghamton University wrote her MA thesis on the battle at Ludlow, and Erin Saar of the University of Denver did the ammunition analysis. We conducted fieldwork at Ludlow with the permission of District 22 of the United Mine Workers of America, Local 9856 of the UMWA, and the Women’s Auxiliary of L.U. 9856. The work at Berwind was done with the permission of Southern Colorado Realty. We received funding for the project from a number of sources. We used a faculty development grant from the State University of New York at Binghamton to plan the project in the summer of 1996. The Colorado Historical Society’s State Historic Fund was the principal source of funding, providing grants to the project every year from 1997 to 2004. We greatly appreciated Thomas Carr’s help with these grants. The University of Denver’s Faculty Research Fund also provided support for our work. The Walter Rosenberry Fund and the Humanities Institute of the Division of Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences at the University of Denver provided funding for site interpretation and public education programs. The Colorado Endowment for the Humanities (CEH) funded two Summer Teacher Institutes on labor history based on the project. We especially thank CEH director Maggie Coval, her staff, and the participants in these institutes for their support of our work. A number of community institutions, including the Colorado Digitization Project, the Trinidad History Museum, and the Bessemer Historical Society, aided our work with in-kind contributions and their archival resources. Paula Manini and Susan Collins of the Colorado Historical Society were particularly helpful in this regard. Trinidad State Junior College provided housing at reduced rates and other forms of assistance. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research funded Margaret Wood’s dissertation research on the project. We conducted our fieldwork as an archaeological field school at the University of Denver. We would like to thank the crews of 1998 through 2002. The volunteers and students in the University of Denver Summer Field School in Archaeology for 1998 were Kristen Arbuckle, Dan Broockmann, Bob Hedges, Justin Henderson, Maureen Hoof, Christie Kester, Sonya Loven, Debi Marsh, Micah McClung, Sarah Postellon, Karen Ramsey, Bryan Rozman, Meghan Steed, Matt Torhan, Howard Tsai, and Kara Weaver. The field crew and students (and

xvi


labor) in the 1999 season were Marco Aiello, Pachi Balaguer, Caroline Braker, Daniel Broockmann, Samantha Cline, Esteban Gomez, Sean Grealy, Angela GuzÂ�zino, Courtney Higgins, Laura Hortz, Patrick Morgan, Quim Oltra, Tracy Shaffer, and Alicia Valentino. The field crew for the 2000 field season included Caroline Braker, Shawn Farley, Erin Fitzgerald, Mari Heuser, Natalie Joy, Chanel Nakanishi, Kenneth Spencer, and Rebecca Wilford. The 2001 field crew consisted of Charlotte Berkshire, April Bernard, Jonathan Clark, Tanya DzhanfeÂ� zova, Stacia Falat, Catherine Foy, Signe Gabrielson, Abby Gaul, Joanne Hedley, Kathryn Levey, Amador Mijares, Alex Miller, Summer Moore, Andrew Ralles, Jessica Tollner, Angela Tonozzi, Katie Wardell, Dan Windwood, and Janna Wood. Field crew members in 2002 were Harold Barnhart, Gene Bosche, Megan Cuccia, Farah Firtha, Staci Gates, Margaret Kelly, Michael Knoll, Megan Meredith, David Victor, and Sarah Wagner. In addition, we thank Larry Conyers and Craig Stoner for Ground Penetrating Radar work and Mona Charles for magnetometer work at the Ludlow site. The most important and rewarding aspects of our research came from our collaboration with the United Mine Workers of America and the working people of southern Colorado. The UMWA Women’s Auxiliary Local 9856 maintains the Ludlow Monument and hosts the annual memorial. We single out Yolanda Romero and Carol Blatnick-Barros for the assistance they have given our research. Michael Romero, past president of UMWA Local 9856, also aided us in many ways. Bob Butero of the UMWA’s Denver office offered friendship and support. We had much interaction with, support, and inspiration from the descendant community of coal miners and other working families in southern Colorado. Many people shared their families’ histories and memories of the coal camps. They welcomed us in solidarity with labor’s struggle. They taught us things about strikes, work, and unions that one cannot learn from books or from digging in the ground. It was in this collaboration that we found the true reason for and rewards of our research. All royalties from the sale of this volume will go to the Southern Colorado Coal Miners Memorial and Scholarship Fund. Work Cited Zinn, Howard 2004 Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. First Run Features, New York.

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Randall H. M c Guire and Kar in Larkin

1

Unearthing Class War

At Ludlow, a granite coal miner gazes resolutely across the windswept plains of Colorado. Beside him, a woman in classical drapery clutches her baby with one hand and rests her head on her other hand in grief (Figure 1.1). Once they gazed up into mountain valleys teeming with activity. Great coal tipples loomed over miners’ homes shrouded in the acid smoke of coke ovens. In recent times they have stared up at crumbling foundations, sealed mine shafts, and red mounds of bricks that were once coke ovens. For eighty-five years the couple stood sentinel in their grief over the site of the Ludlow Massacre—until the night of May 3, 2003, when someone decapitated both the miner and his wife with a sledgehammer (Figure 1.2). The desecration of the Ludlow Monument invoked universal outrage in union circles. The monument stood on sacred ground for organized labor. For working families, the symbolic violence of the beheadings summoned forth the real violence of the massacre of women and children at Ludlow. Striking coal miners had erected a tent colony on this spot in 1913 to shelter their families. On the morning of April 20, 1914, troops with the Colorado National Guard assaulted the colony, strafing it with two machine guns. As the day ended, the armed strikers defending the colony ran out of ammunition and fled. The

1.1. Monument to the Ludlow dead, before the vandalism. Photograph by Randall McGuire.


1.2. Monument to the Ludlow dead, after the vandalism. Photograph by Randall McGuire.

guardsmen entered the colony, looting it and setting the tents aflame. When the smoke cleared the next day twenty people lay dead, including two women and ten children smothered in a pit below a burning tent, and a twelve-year-old boy with a gunshot wound to his head. Enraged by the deaths, the miners rose up in violent rebellion—burning company towns, dynamiting mines, and killing company employees. Finally, President Woodrow Wilson sent federal troops to restore order and put a stop to the most violent ten days of class warfare in U.S. labor history. In 2003 the statues stared out on a moribund coalfield, yet they stood as a living memorial. Every June since 1918, hundreds of working people and a handful of curious bystanders have gathered on the plains of southern Colorado to commemorate the Ludlow Massacre. At the memorial service, on June 29, 2003, Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), spoke to over 400 people. He described the Ludlow dead as “American Heroes” and “Freedom Fighters” who had won with blood the basic workplace rights so many Americans take for granted today. He announced: “This is our Vietnam Veterans Memorial, our Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, our Lincoln Memorial. There is no question whatsoever that .Â€.Â€. this monument will be restored” (Saitta

R a n d a l l H . M c G u i r e a n d K a r i n L a rk i n

2004:85). Dean Saitta, a professor at the University of Denver and an archaeologist, also spoke at the memorial service that day (Saitta 2004). He represented the Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project, which had conducted historical archaeology at the site of the Ludlow Massacre since 1996. He spoke in solidarity with the struggle of working families to sustain the rights for which men, women, and children had died at Ludlow. Saitta pointed out that we do not know if the attack on the Ludlow Monument was the random act of vandals or a calculated assault on the union. But even if the vandalism was not anti-union, it might as well have been because labor is under attack in the United States. The struggle of Ludlow continues today. The Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project

The Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project is part of that struggle. The University of Denver, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and Fort Lewis College sponsored the project, which has included faculty and students from these institutions as well as students from Syracuse University, La Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the University of Manchester, and the University of Colorado. The project has worked closely with the United Mine Workers of America, specifically with District 22 and Local 9856 in Trinidad, Colorado. We are working to recover the memory of Ludlow and to exhume what remains of the class war of 1913–1914 in the coalfields of southern Colorado. To do this, we are building an archaeology of American working families that speaks to a variety of audiences about working-class history and experience. These audiences include the academy, the general public, schoolteachers, students, and, most important, working families. This volume brings together the work of various members of the Ludlow Collective to engage the academic community in our work. In the volume, we discuss how the project has reached our other audiences. The project incorporates theoretical, scholarly, and political goals. On a theoÂ�retical level we wish to build a praxis of archaeology that entails knowledge, critique, and action. As scholars, we wish to assess the importance of families’ lived experience in the formation and maintenance of the class consciousness that made the strike possible. Our project is a form of memory, and memory is political. The theoretical goal of the research is to build a radical praxis of archaeology, an emancipatory archaeology that confronts and challenges inequality and exploitation in the world (see Duke and Saitta 1998; Saitta 2007). Archaeological praxis necessarily involves three parts: knowing the world, critiquing the world, and taking action in the world (McGuire 2008). Knowing the world involves the traditional activities of archaeology: reconstructing the past and seeking explana-


tions for cultural change. Critiquing the world includes critical self-examination of both the role of archaeology in the world and the inequalities in power that exist in the world. Knowledge and critique are pointless, however, unless they lead to action. At Ludlow we have crafted archaeology as political action. As scholars, we integrated archaeological evidence with archival evidence to evaluate propositions about the ways mundane experience shaped the strike. We have demonstrated that similarities in the day-to-day lives of miners’ families crosscut ethnic and cultural differences within the community of miners and that these similarities helped form a common class consciousness necessary for group action. Strikes do not just involve male miners; women and children were major participants in the 1913–1914 strike as well. We have shown how their participation sprang from their lived experience and how the struggle changed that experience (Reckner 2009). We obtained the data to test these propositions through excavations of domestic deposits in the company town of Berwind dating from the period immediately before the strike, from deposits at Ludlow that date during the strike, and from deposits in Berwind from the decade after the strike. Our results have implications for understanding this important event in U.S. history, the process of labor struggles in the United States, and current theoretical debates in archaeology over the forces of cultural change. This project is a form of memory. Our excavations at Ludlow draw attention to what happened there. Local people came out to tell us the story of their grandmother or great-uncle who lived in the camp. The excavations also attracted the attention of the media: newspapers, television, and radio. The vandalism of the monument in 2003 shows that memory and memorialization are a locus of struggle. We remember Ludlow to educate the general U.S. public about labor history. Here our message is the same as that of Cecil Roberts. Capital did not magnanimously grant Americans the workplace rights so many take for granted today. Working people won these rights with blood at Ludlow and in other struggles. Without shared consciousness and solidarity, these rights will be lost. We do not have to recover this memory for unionized working families in southern Colorado because they meet each June to remember Ludlow. Here we lend our expertise and the craft of archaeology to assist them in maintaining this memory in the face of those who would forget or destroy it. Ludlow and the Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913–1914

In Chapter 2 Randall McGuire presents a detailed history of the Colorado strike and the class war it engendered. We draw a brief summary of that history here. In 1913, Colorado was the eighth largest coal-producing state in the United States. Most of this production centered on the bituminous coalfield around Trinidad,

1.3. Map of the southern Colorado coalfields, 1913. Drafted by Ann Hull.


Colorado (Figure 1.3). The largest company mining coal in this region was the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I). CF&I employed approximately 14,000 workers, 70 percent of whom were foreign-born. Conditions in the mines, and of miners’ lives, were appalling. In 1912 the accident rate for Colorado mines was double the national average. Miners lived in crude, isolated mountain camps owned by the company. The company controlled the workers through the company store and by using mine guards as its private police force. In 1912 the company fired 1,200 miners on suspicion of union activities (Andrews 2008). Conditions came to a head in 1913 when the UMWA launched a massive organizing campaign to unionize the coal miners. At the same time the company brought in the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency to violently suppress the organizing efforts. The strike began on September 23, 1913, with 90–95 percent of the miners leaving the shafts and the company forcing all strikers from the company camps. The strikers streamed into about a dozen UMWA tent camps, of which Ludlow was the largest. On two occasions, one at Ludlow and the other at Forbes, company guards fired into the camps; on October 28, 1913, the governor of Colorado called out the National Guard. The Guard employed company police and increasingly became more antagonistic to the strikers. On April 20, 1914, the Guard attacked the Ludlow camp. After the attack the strikers took up arms, drove the Guard into Trinidad, and seized control of most of the mining district. Finally, after ten days of war, President Woodrow Wilson sent federal troops into the region to restore order. The strike continued until December 1914 when the UMWA, short on funds, canceled it. The Ludlow Massacre was a seminal event in U.S. labor history. Armed violence and the deaths of strikers and company agents were common within turnof-the-century labor strife, especially in the coal industry (Andrews 2008:272; Le Blanc 1999; Long 1991), but the killing of women and children was not. The deaths of Ludlow’s innocents at the hands of Colorado National Guard troops shocked the nation (Gitelman 1988). This shock fueled the Progressive Movement of the period and helped set in motion labor reforms that would be realized in the New Deal of the 1930s. Through these reforms, working people won the rights many take for granted today, such as the eight-hour day, the right to unionize, and safe workplaces (Davis 2000; Lichtenstein 2002). After Ludlow, management policies began to turn away from direct confrontation with strikers to strategies of co-option of workers’ demands. This spurred John D. Rockefeller Jr. to start the country’s first important company union and the first large-scale corporate public relations campaign. The strike involved many important ProÂ� gressive reformers and personages in labor history, including Mary “Mother” Jones, Upton Sinclair, and John Reed. It created others such as Louis Tikas. The


memory of Ludlow still invigorates the union movement. For the UMWA the Ludlow site is sacred ground and a shrine to the sacrifice of working families in this country. Archives and Historiography of the Southern Colorado Coalfields

The archival record of the Colorado Coalfield War is thick and deep. The record includes thousands of pages of testimony, hundreds of letters, reams of newspaper stories, and hundreds of photographs. Historians have mined this material for over fifty years. They have produced numerous books and articles relating to life in the southern Colorado coal camps, the strike, the massacre, and the importance of these events to U.S. labor history. The 1913–1914 strike and the massacre were the subjects of two federal investigations. Before the massacre, in January 1914, the U.S. House of Representatives charged the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate conditions in the southern Colorado coalfields. The committee spent four weeks in southern Colorado, examined several hundred witnesses, and generated over 2,000 pages of testimony (Foster, Evans, and Sutherland 1915). After the massacre, in January 1915, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations conducted hearings on the strike and the massacre (Adams 1966; West 1915). This investigation also examined hundreds of witnesses and produced thousands of pages of testimony. In both investigations the witnesses included company officials, local officials, union officials, members of the National Guard, and miners. The testimonies cover a wide range of topics, including the events surrounding the strike and the massacre, company policies, mine safety, and conditions of life in the coal camps. In addition to published reports (Foster, Evans, and Sutherland 1915; West 1915), documents from these investigations are available at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Major archival collections pertaining to the strike and the massacre exist in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New York. The Denver Public Library’s Western History Department holds extensive collections related to these events, including the papers of union leaders Edward Doyle and John Lawson, the papers of National Guard officer Philip Van Cise, and the proceedings of the Colorado National Guard court-martial that followed the massacre. The Colorado HisÂ� toriÂ�Â�cal Society also has extensive collections related to the strike. In 2003 the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company turned its papers, including those relating to the period of the strike, over to the Bessemer Museum in Pueblo, Colorado. In 1994 the United Mine Workers of America transferred its archives from Virginia to the Historical Collections and Labor Archives at Pennsylvania State University in State College. At some point when the archives were in storage in Virginia,


boxes related to the 1913–1914 Colorado strike and the Ludlow Massacre disappeared. Some materials pertaining to the strike can be found in correspondence files for District 15 and the union’s executive committee. John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s archives are held at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. The papers of his chief representative in southern Colorado, Lamont Bowers, are housed in the special collections of the Binghamton University Library, Binghamton, New York. In the first decade of the twentieth century, photography became a widely used, easy process with the advent of roll film, snapshot photography, and lightweight cameras. Professional photographers, union leaders, private individuals, and National Guard officers all took pictures of the strike and the massacre. Sociologist Eric Margolis (1988, 1994) has done extensive research on the photographs from the period and has identified over 500 images from the strike. Hundreds more surviving photographs were taken of the coal camps before and after the strike. Margolis (1988, 1994) has shown that the photographs were made, saved, and captioned for different reasons and to advance different agendas. In 1890, Oliver E. Aultman opened a photographic studio in Trinidad, Colorado. Aultman frequently worked for the coal companies, especially CF&I. His photographs for company publications and publicity portrayed the industry, order, and modernity of company mines, buildings, and housing. He took no photographs of the strike. Almeron Newman specialized in landscape photographs. He had a special camera that would take panoramic photographs. He used this camera to take panoramas of coal camps and, in 1914, a panorama of the second UMWA tent colony at Ludlow. Photographer Lewis R. Dold extensively documented the strike, the massacre, and the ten-day war. Dold used a camera format that allowed him to contact-print postcards from his negatives. He sold the postcards to the miners and printed myriad copies of each shot. His photographs thus reflect the images the strikers wanted. His are the best-known photographs of the strike, and he shot most of the images that define the strike in the historical imagination. Stuart Mace, a photographer for The Denver Times, specialized in photographs of the National Guard striking martial poses. Union organizer Edward Doyle apparently had a camera and took pictures of the strikers. These photographs ended up in various collections, often editorialized with captions. Thus cowboy artist, local museum curator, and member of the rural bourgeoisie Arthur Mitchell collected photographs of the coal camps. On the back of a photograph of a teenage girl in front of a wood and canvas shack, he wrote, “The Flower of Trinidad’s White Trash” (Margolis 1994:10). The UMWA collected strike photographs, principally Dold’s postcards. On them members scribbled captions such as “At last the devil has his own—a dead thug” (Margolis 1994:15). The CF&I’s photographic collection stresses modernity and industrial discipline.


Eight books and at least two dissertations tell the story of the strike, the massacre, and the ten-day war. Barron Beshoar grew up in Trinidad. His father, Dr. Benjamin Beshoar, provided the strikers with medical care, and the young Barron had accompanied his father to the tent colonies. As an adult, Barron Beshoar (1957) published a biography of strike leader John Lawson that primarily focused on the 1913–1914 strike. This anecdote-rich account became a union staple and has been reprinted many times. George McGovern (1953) wrote his doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University on the Colorado strike. When he ran for president in 1972, Leonard Guttridge reworked the dissertation into the book The Great Coalfield War (McGovern and Guttridge 1972). Only one participant in the strike wrote a book-length account of it. Mary Thomas was born to coal miners in Wales and came to the United States following her errant coal miner husband. After he left her, she ended up at the Ludlow Tent Colony, a single mother with two children. She became a notable person in the camp, in part for her fine singing voice. She later took her married name, O’Neal. In 1971 she published her biography, which focused primarily on the strike (O’Neal 1971). Also in the 1970s, Zeese Papnikolas embarked on a biography of Louis Tikas, a Greek miner and the elected leader of the Ludlow Colony. Papnikolas (1982) wrote a poignant personal account of Tikas’s life and role in the 1913– 1914 strike. David Wolff (2003) focused his comparative study on two western coalfield massacres: the 1885 massacre of twenty-eight Chinese miners at Rock Springs, Wyoming, and the Ludlow Massacre. Thomas Andrews’s (2003) dissertation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison focused on the historical developments that led to the massacre and the war. More recently, Scott Martelle (2007) wrote a journalistic account of the strike and the massacre. Marilynn Johnson (2008) compared the Colorado strike to the Johnson County Cattle War. Finally, Thomas Andrews (2008) has written a sweeping account that begins with a geological history of coal. The 1913–1914 strike and massacre have also provided fuel for historians looking at other issues. The strike figures prominently in biographical studies of John D. Rockefeller Jr. (Chernow 1999). Howard Gitelman (1988) has written about how the strike transformed labor relations within both the Rockefeller empire and the United States in general. Pricilla Long (1985) studied the role of women in the strike, and Ludlow appears prominently in her history of the coal industry (Long 1991). The Colorado strike figures in many historical analyses of mining issues such as miners’ economic welfare (Fishback 1992), strike violence (Fishback 1995), and mine safety (Whiteside 1990). Finally, Lee Scamehorn’s (1992) corporate history of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company could not avoid the Ludlow Massacre, although he seemed to want to stay away from discussing it. By the 1970s, most of the coal miners who had participated in the Colorado strike were elderly or dead. Two researchers rushed to collect the survivors’ sto-

10


ries. In the late 1970s, Eric Margolis undertook an oral history project about coal mining in the West that focused heavily on the Ludlow Massacre. He interviewed dozens of miners and collected over 200 hours of videotaped interviews. These interviews are archived in the Western Historical Collections, University of Colorado Library. His project also produced “Out of the Depths—The Miners’ Story,” a sixtyâ•‚minute segment of the PBS series A Walk through the 20th Century with Bill Moyers, which was broadcast on September 5, 1984. As part of his biography of Louis Tikas, Zeese Papnikolas collected oral histories from seventeen participants in the strike. They are archived at the American West Center of the University of Utah, Provo. What Can Archaeology Tell Us about the Colorado Coalfield War?

Strikes and the labor struggle rarely lend themselves to archaeological analysis because they tend to leave little in terms of material remains. The Ludlow Massacre site, however, offered a unique opportunity to use archaeology in the study of the labor struggle. In many ways it is the perfect archaeological site: a short-term occupation destroyed by fire and only slightly disturbed afterward. The major historical works on the strike focus on the events, strike leaders, and UMWA’s organizational work in the strike. They agree that the families who went out on strike did so because the conditions of their day-to-day lives had become intolerable and their future bleak. The oral histories focus on the lived experience of working families in early–twentieth-century Colorado. They confirm the grueling nature of daily life in the coal camps. Yet none of these studies provides more than an anecdotal understanding of what conditions were before, during, and after the strike. The documentary record of primary texts, photographs, and oral histories on the Colorado Coalfield War is incredibly robust, but it leaves a major issue unexamined. Working families created the class consciousness and solidarity necessary for the strike from their shared experience of everyday life. These experiences shaped the lives of miners and their families, but the documents focus on large-scale, high-profile political responses to the conflict that obscure these mundane aspects of life. Historians have tended to emphasize the male miner and commonalities of the work experience as the source of the social consciousness that united ethnically and racially diverse miners. The histories usually imply, and sometimes assert, that the miners shared a common lived experience at work but returned to ethnically different home lives. In this way they accept a very traditional hypothesis of labor action that emphasizes the agency of men and downplays the role of women. This hypothesis tends to equate class and class struggle with active men in the workplace and ethnicity and tradition with passive women in the home.

11


We, and many others, are skeptical of this traditional view (Beaudry and MroÂ�zowski 1988; Cameron 1993; Long 1985, 1991; McGaw 1989; Mrozowski, Ziesing, and Beaudry 1996; Shackel 1994, 1996). We agree that ethnic identities crosscut class in southern Colorado and that they hindered the formation of class consciousness, but we question the equations class = workplace = male and ethnicity = home = female. Alternatively, we would propose that class and ethnicity crosscut both workplace and home, male and female. We thus expect to find that working-class men in the mines and working-class women in the homes shared a common day-to-day lived experience that resulted from their class position and that ethnic differences divided them in both contexts (Reckner 2009). We can demonstrate from existing analyses that ethnic divisions existed in the workplace. In southern Colorado the miners worked as independent contractors and formed their own work gangs that were routinely ethnically based (Beshoar 1957; Long 1991; McGovern and Guttridge 1972; Papanikolas 1982; Reckner 2009). Historical and industrial archaeologists have also demonstrated in many other cases that nineteenth- and early–twentieth-century workplaces were ethnically structured (Bassett 1994; Hardesty 1988; Wegars 1991). In the traditional hypothesis the commonality of the work experience overcomes these ethnic divisions in the workplace and an ethnically based home life to create a class consciousness. The idea that a commonality of lived experience in the home also aided in the formation of a common class consciousness is more difficult to demonstrate from existing analyses. The histories agree that the day-to-day lives of miners’ families were hard, but they provide little more than anecdotal evidence about the reality of these conditions. Historian Priscilla Long (1985), in an analysis that supports our alternative hypothesis, has demonstrated that women in the Colorado coalfields shared a common experience of sexual exploitation, but she lacks detailed data on the realities of day-to-day lived experience in the home. Our alternative hypothesis stresses the importance of the home in the creation of class consciousness. We seek to prove that the day-to-day material conditions of home life crosscut ethnic divisions before, during, and after the strike. If this is the case, we will argue that women and children were active agents, with male miners, in formulating a social consciousness to unify for the strike. Alternatively, if our analyses show that each ethnic group’s home life had distinctive day-to-day material conditions, then we will accept the traditional notion that families followed the lead of male miners who acquired a common class identity in the shafts. Historical archaeology offers a very productive arena for archaeologists to examine the relationship among social consciousness, lived experience, and material conditions in affecting cultural change (Orser 1996; Shackel 1996). In

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historical periods the archaeologist can integrate documents and material culture to capture both the consciousness and material conditions that formed lived experience (Barile and Brandon 2004; Beaudry 1988, 2007; De Cunzo and Herman 1996; Delle, Mrozowski, and Paynter 2003; Leone 1995; Leone and Potter 1988, 1999; Little 1992). In the documents, people speak to us about their consciousness, interests, and struggles, but not all people do so with the same force or presence. Also, they rarely speak in detail about their day-to-day lives. People, however, create the archaeological record from the accumulation of the small actions that make up their lived experience. Thus the archaeological record consists primarily of the remains of people’s mundane lives, and all people leave traces in this material record. Historical archaeologists bring to the table a craft that reveals the material conditions of everyday lives in the coal camps and tent colonies of southern Colorado. The historical accounts say that life was hard, and many anecdotes illustrate the adversity of day-to-day experience. Mining families unknowingly left a detailed record of this experience in the ground. Archaeologists can recapture it in the burned remains of their tents, in the layout of camps, in the contents of the latrines, and by shifting through the garbage they left behind. Exactly what did people eat, how was it prepared, what few possessions did they have, and what did women and children do in the home to make up for the inadequacy of a male miner’s salary? In many photos striking families stand in front of their tents. We use archaeology to pull back the flaps and look inside the tents. By examining everyday life before the strike, we know better why people went out on strike. A look at this experience in the UMWA tent camps gives us a glimpse of what life was like during the strike, and a look at the objects used daily after the strike reveals how that experience changed as a result of reforms that followed the strike. We have conducted excavations at the massacre site and in the mining town of Berwind, from which many of the Ludlow strikers came. A tent offers little shelter on Colorado’s windswept plains. At Ludlow the miners excavated cellars and threw up earthen ridges around their tents. When we excavate within the ridges and cellars we find the remains of their daily lives. We uncover pieces of the stoves on which the families cooked their meals and the tin cans, jars, and bottles that contained their food. In each tent we find fragments of the iron beds in which multiple family members must have slept. Mixed in among it all we find religious medals and the badges of fraternal clubs, the emblems of the social organizations that helped the families survive. Occasionally we unearth the fragment of a treasured object: a porcelain teacup, a musical instrument, or a toy that would have brought some small comfort to a hard life. The cellars tell the story of the attack. Fire-damaged family possessions sit on the floors: a rusted bedstead, metal basins, a row of canning jars melted in place, and a

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porcelain doll’s head deformed by the heat of the fire. To reach them we dig through a level of burned wood, charred canvas, and rusted grommets from the burned tents. On top of all this is a layer of charcoal, coal clinker, rusted metal, and charred possessions the miners used to fill in the holes after the massacre. At Berwind we have identified two clusters of homes, one dating to before the strike and the other after. Here we have excavated in trash dumps, latrines, and yards. What Has Archaeology Told Us about the Colorado Coalfield War?

The work reported in this volume and in others (e.g., Saitta 2004, 2007) presents the results of archaeological investigations at Ludlow and Berwind. Our research has fleshed out the working-class experience in western coal camps and striker tent colonies. The Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project’s key findings thus far include: • Distribution of surface and subsurface remains at Ludlow suggests a wellordered and well-maintained colony that sought to project an image of solidarity and civility. Our excavations of tent cellars confirm that the striking families used them for a variety of purposes in addition to protection from hostile forces and the elements, including storage and possibly habitation. The planning and organization evident in cellar design and construction indicate that the striking miners had anticipated and prepared for a long struggle. We found no evidence to substantiate the existence of ethnically distinct precincts within the Ludlow Tent Colony, although this could change with broader excavation (Reckner 2009). • As we expected, our excavations of trash pits, privies, and the midden revealed a reliance on canned foods. We found more evidence for alcohol consumption at Ludlow than we observed at the coal camp of Berwind. The greater consumption at Ludlow likely relates to the use of drink to break the boredom of a long strike. Faunal analysis suggests that strikers ate cows, sheep or goats, chickens, pigs, and spadefoot toads. Two-thirds of the beef cuts were shanks from the fore- and hindquarters, which are particularly cost-effective cuts. The butchering marks on most faunal material from the site indicate the use of saws to process meat. All butchering marks suggest that an inexperienced person did the processing. This would make sense if meat was purchased by, or donated to, the strikers in bulk sections. • Tableware and teaware remains from tent cellars suggest that miners acknowledged genteel Victorian, middle-class American values that prescribed elaborate matched table settings and formal teawares. However, differences in the stratigraphic context of decorated and plainware ceramics within cellars suggest that the latter saw greater use in everyday practice

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Unearthing Class War and that working-class families may have privileged coffee drinking over taking tea. This implies that miners incorporated only selected elements of the existing American middle-class value system, ones that best fit with a working-class consciousness. Working families did not totally reject Americanizing influences; rather, they negotiated a careful balance between American and Old World identities that would serve the cause of collective action. • The archaeological work at Berwind contributes to a small but growing database of archaeological investigations of company towns in the United States. Working at Berwind, Margaret Wood (Chapter 4) has produced substantive insights into women’s economic strategizing and changes before and after the strike. Her analyses open a window onto women’s shared realities and anxieties that became instrumental in creating interfamily ties of mutual support and assistance. These alliances would have paralleled those formed among men in the mine shafts. • Our excavations have given us a few insights into the battlefield logistics and tactics employed by the strikers on April 20 and during the subsequent ten-day war, insights that have escaped historians (Andrews 2008:271). Archaeological excavations at Ludlow confirm that strikers were armed with a variety of weapons, including Winchester rifles and shotguns. However, we found no clear direct archaeological evidence for stockpiles of ammunition as suggested by the documentary record. Sixty-four percent of the ammunition we recovered by excavation came from a single cellar. This may verify that strikers did indeed have caches of ammunition and arms in the tent colony, but the evidence is localized and comparatively thin. • The same ambiguity surrounds evidence for the alleged existence of rifle pits within the colony, as repeatedly emphasized in testimony from Colorado militiamen before the Commission on Industrial Relations and in the militia’s own reports on the Ludlow Massacre. However, thus far we have not clearly identified any features like those described by militia leaders. The artifact content of the best candidate for such a pit includes food remains, building materials such as nails, and clothing parts. Less than 1 percent of this feature’s contents relates to firearms, suggesting a function as something other than a rifle pit. The location of another possible rifle pit feature corresponds to those plotted on a map of the colony made by the National Guard after the massacre. However, this second feature has only three cartridges associated with it, and its depositional history suggests a trash pit. In summary, there is no concrete evidence for the existence of rifle pits at the Ludlow Tent Colony. The absence of such evidence dovetails with post-strike testimonies given by people other than militiamen. No other individual in the archival record describes or even suggests the existence of rifle pits at Ludlow. It thus appears that the Colorado militia perceived the Ludlow Colony as more dangerous than it actually was. Or militia leaders may have purposely exaggerated the threat, and these

15


exaggerations have been uncritically incorporated into official histories of the strike.

These and other investigations by project personnel are helping to clarify the day-to-day lived experience of miners in the shafts and families in the homes. The work makes contributions that supplement, extend, and correct the documentary record. But ours is still work in progress. We have much to do to substantiate the various kinds of material support the besieged Ludlow strikers received from outside sources, as well as their novel, “homegrown” support strategies. Descendants and Descendant Communities and the Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project

Many historical archaeologists have argued that scholars have an obligation to work with the descendant communities of the sites we study (Blakey and LaRoche 1997; Shackel 2004; Singleton and Orser 2003; Spector 1993; Wilkie and Bartoy 2000). Many of these researchers confuse the descendants of historical communities with a descendant community. In the case of Ludlow we have tried to serve both descendants and the descendant community, but we recognize that in this case only the descendant community is a community of struggle. The project has entered into a collaboration with the UMWA and unionized workers in southern Colorado to advance this struggle. This collaboration entails all of us working together with integrated goals, interests, and practices. The archaeologists and the UMWA have contributed different resources, skills, knowledge, authority, and interests to the collaborative effort. We have combined these distinctive qualities in the shared goals of remembering Ludlow and educating the public about the struggle of working families. Many descendants of the striking miners come to the memorial each year. They are principally professional Anglos. Few are miners or members of the working class. They, their parents, or both participated in the great social mobility of the 1950s and 1960s, and today they are teachers, lawyers, businesspeople, managers, and administrators. They are scattered across the United States. They share an identity as descendants of the massacre, but they do not form a community, either in the sense that they live near each other or in being members of any type of interacting group, organization, or club. The descendants desire a familial and personal memorialization of the strike and massacre. They attend the memorial to establish a connection to this familial heritage and to see to it that their family’s role in these events is properly honored. We have aided descendants in various ways, such as marking the graves of ancestors and correcting errors on the labeling of historical photographs.

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The unionized working people of southern Colorado make up the descendant community of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield Strike. A few are biological descendants of people who participated in the strike, but the vast majority have no ancestral connection to the events of 1913–1914. Some are ethnic whites (Italians and Eastern Europeans), but the vast majority are Chicano. They maintain the monument, organize the memorial, and make the struggle of 1913–1914 part of their active union struggle. Effective collaboration usually starts with the definition of an objective or a problem so that all involved can have a say in that definition. We spent nearly two years planning the project and establishing a working relationship with the UMWA before beginning excavations. We made contact with the UMWA at all levels, from the national executive committee to the local in Trinidad. The first thing union leaders wished to establish was that we were sympathetic to the goals of the union movement. As they explained more than once, we were asking to work on sacred ground. Once we had established that we shared common political goals, the union met our interests with bemused curiosity. After all, what we were proposing was not Indiana Jones. Several individuals in Local 9856 and its Women’s Auxiliary became key in setting up the project. Yolanda and Michael Romero have long been union activists and major people involved in the memorial service each year. Women’s Auxiliary member Carol Blatnick-Barros had studied archaeology in college and worked on excavations. She became an invaluable facilitator in our discussions with the union. With this relationship established, the Colorado Coalfield War ArchaeÂ�ology Project focused on the sites of the Ludlow Tent Colony and Massacre and the ColoÂ�rado Fuel and Iron Company camp of Berwind. These sites provided the two contexts needed to assess our goals of identifying working, living, and social conditions leading up to, during, and following the strike. We focused on understanding and mapping both sites using a variety of techniques. This helped us examine the ways they could inform us about the daily living conditions of the miners and their families. We also tested specific features such as tent pad locations, cellars, privies, and middens that provided material culture remains to help us address our specific research agenda, as discussed in Chapter 3. Based on our excavation, artifact analysis, and interpretations, we were able to produce a variety of products geared to both academic and general interest audiences as well as educational programs. These are discussed further in Chapters 11 and 12. Archaeology as Memory The chronicle of class warfare in Colorado clashes with most accepted narratives of class relations in the United States, particularly the West (McGuire and

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Reckner 2002). The hidden history of Ludlow represents a watershed event in American history that our project seeks to uncover for a broad range of constituencies. Many visitors to the memorial site are unaware of what happened there. They are often uncomfortable with the implications of the story. Pointof-interest signs on the interstate that identify the exit to the Ludlow Massacre Memorial draw a small but steady stream of summer tourists to the site. Most of these individuals arrive expecting to find a monument to an Indian massacre. Others see the story of Ludlow as a reminder of an unfortunate past the nation has transcended. Various people in southern Colorado have told us that the union needs to let go of the memory of Ludlow. These people believe everyone in the United States has become middle-class and that class conflict should therefore be forgotten as a bad memory. This line of thought has the ideological power to undermine and make irrelevant the real problems working-class people face in the United States today. The story of the 1913–1914 Coalfield War and the Ludlow Massacre is a history that has been hidden, lost, or at best selectively remembered outside union circles. Within the union movement, Ludlow is a shrine and a powerful symbol invoked to raise class consciousness and mobilize union members. In this context, our excavations become a form of memory, recalling for visitors what happened at Ludlow, the sacrifices of the strikers, and the fact that the rights of working people were won through a terrible struggle. The story of Ludlow has great popular appeal. The violence of the events and the deaths of women and children make the history a compelling story. It is also not a tale of a distant or exotic past. Within the union movement, memory leads to action as working people see their contemporary struggles as a continuation of the struggle at Ludlow. Our research focus on everyday life humanizes the strikers because it talks about them in terms of relationships and activities modern audiences also experience—for example, relations between husbands and wives or parents and children and activities such as preparing food for a family or doing the laundry. The parallel between the modern realities of these experiences and the miners’ lives gives modern audiences a comparison through which to understand the harshness of the strikers’ experience. In the United States, archaeological excavations are considered newsworthy. Our first two seasons of excavation resulted in articles in every major newspaper in Colorado. Eric Zorn, a columnist with The Chicago Tribune, covered our excavations in his Labor Day column in 1997. He titled the column “Workers Rights Were Won with Blood.” Our excavations give the events of 1913–1914 a modern reality; they live again and become news again. We have also focused on developing interpretive programs at the massacre site. The United Mine Workers of America has made Ludlow and the massacre

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a symbol of its ongoing struggle. But the tourists who regularly visit the site need more explicit background information on the 1913–1914 strike to understand Ludlow’s significance in the present. Every summer from 1997 through 2002, hundreds of people visited our excavations and, through site tours provided by our staff and students, learned the story of what happened there. At the Ludlow memorial service in June 1999, we unveiled an interpretive kiosk that includes three panels: one on the history of the strike and the massacre, a second on our archaeological research, and a third on the relationship of Ludlow to current labor struggles. We also mounted traveling exhibitions that we put up at the memorial service and sent to union halls around the country. During the summer of 2006, we installed a more detailed interpretive trail at the site. An important component of our education program has been the preparation of school programs and educational packets for Colorado’s public schools. We prepared a curriculum for middle school students on the history of labor in Colorado, with the 1913–1914 strike as its central focus. We also assembled a teaching trunk and made it available to schools in the Denver metropolitan area. During the summers of 1999 and 2000 we held training institutes for teachers sponsored by the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, in which we educated teachers on labor history and on how to develop classroom materials to use in teaching Colorado labor history. A key part of our project was the creation of a University of Denver field school that did the actual excavation. In the field school we trained students in archaeological methods and techniques and also taught them about U.S. labor history. Most of the students who attended the field school came from solidly middle-class backgrounds but had very little direct connection to workingclass experiences and institutions. They had acquired their knowledge of labor unions from mainstream educational and media organizations. While some had been exposed to American labor history and the idea of class structures in U.S. society, the majority had few experiences that had led them to become aware of class in general and, more specifically, of their own class position. The nature of the Ludlow Massacre site brings the reality of class and class conflict in American history into sharp relief for students. The awareness of class in the past, however, in no way precludes the denial of class in one’s own present. Interactions between students and the local labor community challenged this latter notion. The annual UMWA memorial service at the Ludlow Monument confronted students with the phenomena of labor unionism and working-class solidarity in a powerful way. Every summer, staff and students of the Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project attended these gatherings along with between 300 and 1,000 union people from all over the United States and from many different industries. At these and other events, students

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presented their work on the archaeology of Ludlow and discussed its meaning with working people. Archaeology as Political Action When we conceived the project in the mid-1990s, an active, unionized coal mine was still operating west of Trinidad. When we entered the field in 1997, we were disappointed to hear that the mine had closed just before Christmas 1996. We feared this closing would transform the project from an active engagement with a union community to a postindustrial memory project, but it did not work out that way. Ludlow remains a sacred place for the UMWA, and the District 22 office in Price, Utah, took over responsibility for the monument. The memorial service remains a national event for the union, with representatives from the national executive council attending each service. Since the project began, both county workers in Las Animas County and hospital workers at the Trinidad hospital have unionized. Both groups of workers choose the union of their fathers and uncles, the United Mine Workers of America. Both groups also identify with the 1913–1914 strike. Finally, striking steelworkers from Pueblo, Colorado, made the Ludlow Massacre a powerful symbol of their struggle. Working people in southern Colorado still struggle for dignity and basic rights. From 1998 until 2004, when the strike ended, several hundred participants in the Ludlow memorial services were striking steelworkers from Locals 2102 and 3267 in Pueblo, Colorado. They struck CF&I to stop forced overtime. They wanted to regain one of the basic rights for which the Ludlow strikers had died: the eight-hour day. They embraced the Ludlow Massacre as a powerful symbol in their struggle. Such is the power of Ludlow that the parent company (Oregon Steel) changed the name of its Pueblo subsidiary from CF&I to Rocky Mountain Steel to distance itself from the events of 1914. This move also prompted the donation of the CF&I archives to the Bessemer Museum in Pueblo. Following difficult debates in contract negotiations, a former president of Oregon Steel stated that the workers were “still mad about Ludlow” (Saitta, Walker, and Reckner 2006:200). At one point the strikers set up a tent camp in an empty lot across the street from the headquarters of Oregon Steel. The company was determined to break the union and to deprive the steelworkers of another of the basic rights the Ludlow strikers had struggled for: the right to collective bargaining. In June 1999 we twice addressed the Pueblo steelworkers, and afterward several individuals insisted that we accept small monetary donations to further our research (McGuire 2004). It was important to them that we accept this unsolicited support, and they dismissed our counterargument that the money should go to the locals’ strike relief fund. In the spring of 2004, the steelworkers won the strike.

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Chapters and Themes The chapters in this volume speak to a scholarly audience about our academic goals and how we have articulated those goals through a political praxis. They apply the craft of archaeology to knowing, critiquing, and taking action in the world. These chapters are unified by the praxis of the project and by five themes that stem from the project’s goals: • The struggle for labor rights and dignity—things that were won with blood • The idea of class consciousness as a basis for a strike and the home as a locus for forming such consciousness • The idea that class, gender, and ethnicity crosscut and do not necessarily work in opposition to each other • The idea of memory and remembering as a form of political action and struggle • Most important, the idea of building an archaeology for multiple audiences, including a nontraditional (working-class) audience.

Margaret Wood, in Chapter 4, provides a thought-provoking and insightful discussion of how the reforms CF&I presented after the strike were designed to promote certain ideals of class consciousness and conformity. She examines how the locus of the home was used to reinforce company ideals related to class, family, and “American” identity. The use of a built environment to underline and reinforce unity, cooperation, and identity was reflected in the coal camps of Berwind and was intentionally utilized. The adoption of practices, such as home canning, that co-opt and alter the original intentions of the built environment gives archaeologists insight into the changeable nature of the structure. In Chapter 5, Sarah Chicone discusses notions of poverty and class consciousness. She examines constructions and conceptions of home and how they are both limited by and form our ideas of poverty and class. She attempts to challenge the notions of poverty that modern society places on our understanding of the living conditions of miners in both the Berwind coal camp and the Ludlow Tent Colony and forces us to address the “complex reality of social position and class wealth that emerged from the coalfields of southern Colorado.” Michael Jacobson, in Chapter 6, also examines the use of physical space and the built environment to challenge or reinforce ideas of social norms, ethnic identity, and class. Jacobson explores the use of space as a material expression of mediation and strategy. He discusses the fact that space was contested and manipulated by both sides to achieve their individual goals. These goals unfortunately ended in violent conflict that was again arbitrated through space and

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the built environment. Jacobson discusses the use of space in the fight for basic rights and dignity, as well as the use of the landscape to reinforce company, class, and ethnic ideals and consciousness. In Chapter 7, Amie Gray discusses the ideal of Americanization and the reality of ethnic, class, and social identities as reflected in the material culture of the time. She examines the ceramic assemblage of one family’s home to outline the fact that gender, ethnicity, and class often crosscut and do not necessarily work in opposition to each other, despite flagrant attempts to create uniform class and social identities during this period in American history. The discrepancies between middle- and upper-class ideals put forward during this period often did not translate into lower-class practices. This discrepancy in class practice is discussed in Chapter 8, in which Claire Horn compares the ideals proposed by “modern medicine” and the middle- to upper-class social structure with the reality of mining life and ailments. In Chapter 9, Summer Moore examines the use of play as an important tool for socialization, identity construction, and maintenance in the formative younger years of life. She uses the children’s toys uncovered from the Ludlow Tent Colony to explore how they fit into American, Victorian, and ethnic identities. Such toys often play an important role in the creation and maintenance of social and ethnic identities. A central metaphor of politically conscious archaeologies is that we are recovering silenced histories or giving voice to those without power. In Chapter 10, Mark Walker argues that in the case of Ludlow, when we look deeper we find that the history we seek to recover is not that silent or awaiting archaeologists to recover it but is instead jealously guarded. “Official histories” silence the Ludlow Massacre, as is the case with many similar episodes of class struggle in the United States. Nonetheless, it remains an event that has great importance in the construction of working-class identity and struggles up to the present. The chapter discusses the history of Ludlow as memory, an understanding of the past that, to a certain extent, creates and is created in the practices of everyday life. Ludlow is a living memory, and as such the debates over the control of this memory are fractious and ongoing. Chapters 11 and 12 examine the idea of building archaeology for multiple audiences, including the nontraditional (working class) and students. In Chapter 11, Bonnie J. Clark and Eleanor Conlin Casella examine how the archaeological work of the Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project can be an important and powerful tool for teaching students about class, social issues, and conflict management. In Chapter 12, Philip Duke and Dean Saitta outline the various audiences to which this work appeals as well as the myriad methods the project employed to reach these disparate audiences. This research has wide and important implications for many interested parties.

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1.4. Restored monument to the Ludlow dead. Photograph by Randall McGuire.

Today, the granite miner still gazes resolutely across the windswept plains of Colorado (Figure 1.4). After the vandalism, UMWA Local 9856 in Trinidad, Colorado, put out a call for funds to restore the monument. Tens of thousands

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of dollars poured in from union locals and individuals. On June 5, 2005, UMWA’s executive board, along with officials of other unions, politicians, scholars, visitors, and over 1,000 rank-and-file union members, gathered to rededicate the memorial. The miner and his wife still stand sentinel in their grief over the clearest case of class war in U.S. history. The site of the Ludlow Massacre remains a living memorial and a reminder that workers’ rights were won with blood. Works Cited Adams, Graham 1966 The Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–1915: The Activities and Findings of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations. Columbia University Press, New York. Andrews, Thomas G. 2003 The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization, 1870–1915. PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison. 2008 Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Barile, Kerri, and Jamie C. Brandon 2004 Household Chores and Household Choices: Theorizing the Domestic Sphere in Historical Archaeology. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Bassett, Everett 1994 “We Took Care of Each Other Like Families Were Meant To”: Gender, Social Organization, and Wage Labor among the Apache at Roosevelt. In Those of Little Note: Gender, Race, and Class in Historical Archaeology, ed. Elizabeth Scott, 55–79. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Beaudry, Mary 2007 Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Beaudry, Mary (editor) 1988 Documentary Archaeology in the New World. Cambridge University Press, Cam-Â� bridge. Beaudry, Mary C., and Stephen Mrozowski 1988 The Archaeology of Work and Home Life in Lowell, Massachusetts: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Boott Cotton Mills Corporation. Industrial Archaeology 19:1–22. Beshoar, Barron B. 1957 Out of the Depths: The Story of John R. Lawson, a Labor Leader. Golden Bell Press, Denver. Blakey, Michael, and Cheryl LaRoche 1997 Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground. Historical Archaeology 31(3):84–106.

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Unearthing Class War Cameron, Ardis 1993 Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts 1860–1912. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Chernow, Ron 1999 Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Vintage Books, New York. Davis, Mike 2000 Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class. W. W. Norton, New York. De Cunzo, Lu Ann, and Bernard L. Herman (editors) 1996 Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Culture. Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE. Delle, James A., Stephen A. Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter (editors) 2000 Lines That Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Duke, Philip, and Dean J. Saitta 1998 An Emancipatory Archaeology for the Working Class. Assemblage 4. www.sh ef.ac.uk/assem/4. Fishback, Price V. 1992 Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890– 1930. Oxford University Press, New York. 1995 An Alternative View of Violence in Labor Disputes in the Early 1900s: The Bituminous Coal Industry 1890–1930. Labor History 36(3):426–456. Foster, M. D., John M. Evans, and Howard Sutherland 1915 Report on the Colorado Strike Investigation Made under House Resolution 387. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. Gitelman, Howard 1988 Legacy of the Ludlow Massacre: A Chapter in American Industrial Relations. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Hardesty, Donald L. 1988 The Archaeology of Mines and Mining: The View from the Silver State. Society for Historical Archaeology, Pleasant Hill, CA. Johnson, Marilynn 2008 Violence in the West: The Johnson County Range War and Ludlow Massacre: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford and St. Martin’s, New York. Le Blanc, Paul 1999 A Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century. Humanity Books, New York. Leone, Mark 1995 A Historical Archaeology of Capitalism. American Anthropologist 97(2):251– 268.

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Leone, Mark P., and Parker B. Potter Jr. 1988 Introduction: Issues in Historical Archaeology. In The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, ed. Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter Jr., 1–26. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. 1999 Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Kluwer Academic, New York. Litchtenstein, Nelson 2002 State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Little, Barbara (editor) 1992 Text-Aided Archaeology. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL. Long, Priscilla 1985 The Women of the C.F.I. Strike, 1913–1914. In Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman, 64–85. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. 1991 Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. Paragon House, New York. Margolis, Eric 1988 Mining Photographs: Unearthing the Meaning of Historical Photos. Radical History 40:32–48. 1994 Images in Struggle: Photographs of Colorado Coal Camps. Visual Sociology 9(1):4–26. 2000 “Life Is Life”: One Family’s Struggle in the Southern Colorado Coal Fields. Colorado Heritage (Summer):30–47. Martelle, Scott 2007 Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. Rutgers University Press, Rutgers, NJ. McGaw, J. A. 1989 No Passive Victims, No Separate Spheres: A Feminist Perspective on Technology’s History. In In Context: History and the History of Technology, ed. S. H. Cutcliffe and R. Post, 172–191. Lehigh University Press, Bethlehem, PA. McGovern, George 1953 The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–1914. PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, Evansville, IL. McGovern, George S., and Leonard F. Guttridge 1972 The Great Coalfield War. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. McGuire, Randall H. 2004 Colorado Coalfield Massacre. Archaeology 57(6) (November–DeÂ�cemÂ�ber):62–70. 2008 Archaeology as Political Action. University of California Press, Berkeley. McGuire, Randall H., and Paul Reckner 2002 The Unromantic West: Labor, Capital, and Struggle. Historical Archaeology 36(3): 44–58.

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Unearthing Class War Mrozowski, Stephen, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry 1996 Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. O’Neal, Mary Thomas 1971 Those Damn Foreigners. Minerva Books, Hollywood. Orser, Charles 1996 A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. Plenum, New York. Papanikolas, Zeese 1982 Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Reckner, Paul 2009 Social Difference, Community Building, and Material/Social Practice: Solidarity and Diversity at the Ludlow Tent Colony, 1913–1914. PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton. Saitta, Dean 2004 Desecration at Ludlow. New Labor Forum 13:84–87. 2005 Labor and Class in the American West. In North American Archaeology, ed. S. Loren and T. Pauketat, 359–385. Blackwell, London. 2007 The Archaeology of Collective Action. University of Florida Press, Gainesville. Saitta, Dean J., Mark Walker, and Paul Reckner 2006 Battlefields of Class Conflict: Ludlow Then and Now. Journal of Conflict Archaeology 1:197–213. Scamehorn, H. Lee 1992 Mill and Mine: The CF&I in the Twentieth Century. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Shackel, Paul 1994 A Material Culture of Armory Workers. In Domestic Responses to NineteenthCentury Industrialization: An Archaeology of Park Building 48, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, ed. Paul Shackel, 10.1–10.7. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Capital Region, Regional Archaeology Program, Washington, DC. 1996 Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era. Plenum, New York. Singleton, Theresa, and Charles E. Orser Jr. 2003 Descendant Communities: Linking People in the Present to the Past. In Ethical Issues in Archaeology, ed. L. J. Zimmerman, K. D. Vitelli, and J. HollowellZimmer, 143–152. AltaMira, Walnut Creek, CA. Spector, Janet D. 1993 What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. Minnesota Historical Society Press, Minneapolis.

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Wegars, Priscilla 1991 Who’s Been Workin’ on the Railroad: An Examination of the Construction, Distribution, and Ethnic Origins of Domed Rock Ovens on Railroad-Related Sites. Historical Archaeology 25:37–65. West, George P. 1915 Report on the Colorado Strike. U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Washington, DC. Whiteside, James 1990 Regulating Danger. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Wilkie, Laurie A., and Kevin M. Bartoy 2000 A Critical Archaeology Revisited. Current Anthropology 41(5):747–778. Wolff, David A. 2003 Industrializing the Rockies: Growth, Competition, and Turmoil in the Coalfields of Colorado and Wyoming. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

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2

A Terrible Unrest

Class War in Colorado

I suppose I’ll live a long time, but I don’t see how I can ever be happy again. .Â€.Â€. I can’t have my babies back. But perhaps when everybody knows about them, something will be done to make the world a better place for all babies. —Mary Petrucci (The New York Times 1915:7)

On April 21, 1914, class warfare raged on the plains of southern Colorado. Near the Ludlow railroad depot, troops of the Colorado National Guard hunkered down in a burned-out union tent colony, besieged by armed strikers. The morning before, they had attacked the colony with machine gun and rifle fire and, after a daylong battle, driven the strikers out. The bodies of two women and ten children lay at the bottom of a dark, smoky pit in the colony. Passengers on a passing train were horrified to see the corpses of union leaders Louis Tikas and James Fyler sprawled by the tracks. Hundreds of enraged miners were ranging through the nearby mountains razing company towns. They set fire to buildings, dynamited mine shafts, fatally shot company employees, slaughtered the mine mules, and at Forbes they burned down a house with four Japanese strikebreakers inside. Finally, on April 29, federal troops intervened and brought an end to the war.

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Strike-related violence, especially in coal strikes, was not unusual at the beginning of the twentieth century (Andrews 2008:272). But the killing of women and children at Ludlow outraged the American public. The ten-day war that followed the Ludlow Massacre also realized long-standing fears of class warfare in the United States. The death of innocents helped turn popular opinion against violent confrontations with strikers, while at the same time corporate reformers started to call for a new relationship between capital and labor. Gradually, capitalists began to replace the ideology of social Darwinism with a new ideology of an industrial partnership between capital and labor, albeit a relationship in which capital remained the senior partner. The massacre marks a pivotal point in U.S. history when labor relations began to move from class warfare to corporate and government policies of negotiation, co-option, and regulated strikes. Capitalism, Progressives, the Union, and Coal in the Early Twentieth Century

At the dawn of the twentieth century, industrialism and capitalism were firmly established in the United States. The nation had exceeded Great Britain in manufacturing output to become the greatest industrial nation in the world. Laissezfaire ruled the country, but a powerful Progressive Movement challenged it. Immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe flocked to America by the hundreds of thousands. They dramatically changed the country’s ethnic and cultural makeup, but they encountered a formidable xenophobic reaction to their presence. They became the capitalists’ reserve army of the unemployed for the burgeoning factories, mills, and mines. Within the labor movement, reform-minded craft unions like the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) battled with revolutionary unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for the immigrants’ minds, hearts, hands, and dues (Davis 2000; Lichenstein 2002). Coal powered the nation (Andrews 2008; Long 1991). Coal ran the trains; heated factories, schools, and homes; turned electric generators; and drove machinery. Baked into coke and mixed with iron ore and limestone, coal made steel. Coal drove the great machines of industry, but miners still dug coal by hand (Whiteside 1990:32–54). Deep underground they set dynamite charges to blast the black rock from the earth. They then used picks and shovels to load the coal into mine cars pulled by mules and, later, electric engines. The companies paid miners by the ton for coal they loaded each day. In 1913, Colorado companies did not pay miners to perform “dead work,” which included all the activities necessary to get to the coal seams, including timbering mine tunnels, removing waste rock, laying track, and removing rockfalls. Not being paid for dead work meant miners earned more money if they shorted the activities that made their workplace safer (Whiteside 1990:53). Many

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2.1. Aftermath of Primero Mine explosion, January 31, 1910. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, x-63177, Denver, CO.

dangers lurked in the mines. Sparks ignited coal dust and methane gas, and the explosions could kill hundreds of miners in a single accident. In 1910 three southern Colorado coalmines exploded, killing a total of 210 miners (Figure 2.1) (Whiteside 1990:73). Most men died or were injured in less dramatic ways (Martelle 2007:19). The kick of a mule, rock falling from the roof, a plunge down a mine shaft, a mistimed dynamite charge, runaway mine cars, and dozens of other mundane accidents maimed and killed many more miners than the widely publicized disasters. Between 1900 and 1930, 71,160 coal miners died in U.S. mines (MSHA 2006). In the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, a miner faced a one-in-eleven chance of dying during his career in the mines (Dublin and Licht 2005:49). During the same period, nonfatal injuries outnumbered fatal ones by a factor of fifty to one. Few men left the mines without disabilities. The Progressive Era

At the start of the twentieth century, Progressive reformers sought to transform the United States (Chambers 2000). They wanted to make the economy more efficient, the government more democratic, the workplace safer, and

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society more just. They sought to close the immense gap industrialization had opened up between the haves and the have-nots. Although they had success, many of their reforms would not be fully realized until the New Deal of the 1930s. The reformers confronted the great monopolies that dominated the turnof-the-century U.S. economy. Prominent among these was Standard Oil. In 1900, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the U.S. oil industry and had made John D. Rockefeller Sr. the richest man in America (Chernow 1999). One of the Progressives’ first victories was passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890. This law legislated the breakup of the monopolies, and in 1911 a U.S. Supreme Court decision ordered the dismantling of Standard Oil. By this time, John D. Rockefeller Jr. had taken his father’s place as head of the family’s more diversified business empire. Muckraking journalism defined the era. Progressive journalists, writers, and photographers used their crafts to expose the graft, corruption, exploitation, waste, and scandal of the times. Photography became a major tool of social commentary, beginning with Jacob Riis’s (1890) book How the Other Half Lives. Among the most famous writers was Upton Sinclair. His novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. The Jungle told the story of a Lithuanian immigrant family working in the Chicago stockyards. The novel revealed how they were cheated, exploited, impoverished, and discriminated against. Immigration

The Progressive era witnessed the greatest period of mass immigration in U.S. history. Between 1880 and 1920, 23.5 million people entered the United States (Daniels 2002:124). Italians accounted for the largest group of these immigrants (4.1 million), with Poland, Greece, Hungary, and Russia providing the bulk of the remainder (Daniels 2002:188). Chinese had been immigrating to the West Coast since the 1840s, but laws passed in the 1880s ended Chinese immigration to the United States. The laws did not bar other Asian immigration, though, and by the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese were arriving on the West Coast in the tens of thousands. The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 led to a massive flow of Mexican people who joined long-established Mexican American communities in the western United States. Many in America blamed the immense poverty, disease, and crime in early– twentieth-century U.S. cities on the immigrants. They argued that these “new immigrants” were less educated, less intelligent, less skilled, and more seditious than the “old immigrants.” Reformers sought to “Americanize” the immigrants by replacing their culture, civic values, language, and customs with an American

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culture. Other Americans embraced a virulent xenophobic nativism (Behdad 2005). They claimed that the new immigrants were not only culturally inferior but also racially inferior to Anglo-Americans. This movement culminated in the 1920s with laws that limited immigration. Outside the South a revived Klu Klux Klan focused its hatred on immigrants. In Colorado, the Klan burned crosses outside coal camps with their immigrant miners (Margolis 2000:44). Early–twentieth-century capitalists consumed immigrant labor just as their factories consumed coal. Most of these immigrants had been peasants in their homelands. Nearly all came with the intention of returning to their homelands with sufficient funds to establish a farm (Daniels 2002:213–214). They arrived ill prepared for industrial labor and mainly worked in unskilled positions in industry and mining. One of the main characteristics of the unskilled, industrial workforce was extremely high turnover, averaging 100 percent a year (Nelson 1995:85–86; Slichter 1919). Capitalists could always count on more immigrants to replenish the reserve army of the unemployed. As technological and organizational changes allowed the deskilling of production, owners could break strikes of skilled workers with immigrant scabs (Braverman 1998). This constant flow of immigrants and the high turnover rates among unskilled workers hindered union organizing efforts (Nelson 1995). Labor’s Struggle

Workers did not bend to their industrial yoke willingly but resisted in violent strike after violent strike (Davis 2000; Le Blanc 1999). U.S. law did not protect workers’ right to form labor unions, engage in collective bargaining, or strike until the 1930s. In 1877, during a nationwide railroad strike, Pittsburgh workers besieged troops of the Pennsylvania militia in a railroad roundhouse. During the same strike, in Chicago state militia and police fired on strikers, killing scores of people in the “Battle of the Viaduct.” Fifteen years later in the nearby community of Homestead, Pennsylvania, striking steelworkers seized the mill and engaged in pitched gun battles with Pinkerton agents employed by the steel company. Strikes and labor actions were particularly bloody in the nation’s coalfields (Andrews 2008; Fishback 1995). When Colorado reformer Josephine Roche took control of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company in 1928, she invited the United Mine Workers to unionize the company. As an act of goodwill, she disposed of the thousands of dollars’ worth of machine guns, barbwire, and ammunition the company had stored to deal with labor disturbances (Time 1931). In the first three decades of the twentieth century, unions called not only for improved working conditions but also for the establishment of a socialist economy (Davis 2000; Le Blanc 1999). In 1886, reform-minded craft unions

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banded together to form the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL primarily represented skilled workers and sought reforms to improve working conditions, safety, and compensation. The AFL pushed for legislation to close off immigration. Following the model of the AFL, two miners’ unions united in 1890 to form the UMWA, which actively sought to organize immigrants and African Americans. It quickly gained membership in the East, South, and Midwest but initially had little success in the West, where a more radical unionism was born. In 1893, miners organized the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in Butte, Montana. The new union adopted the motto “[l]abor produces all wealth; wealth belongs to the producer thereof ” (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:39). The WFM launched a series of violent strikes in Colorado’s hard-rock mines that culminated in the 1903 Cripple Creek Strike ( Jameson 1998). The Colorado militia under the command of Denver ophthalmologist John Chase violently put down the Cripple Creek Strike. By 1903 the WFM and the UMWA competed to organize Colorado coal miners. In 1905 the WFM played a key role in forming the IWW, and the radical IWW would continue to compete with the UMWA for the loyalty of Colorado coal miners until the New Deal of the 1930s. The specter of class warfare hung over the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Anarchists and socialists sought to ignite such warfare in a revolution to overthrow capitalism. Progressives sought to blunt and remove this threat by reforming capitalism. Capitalists sought to maintain their profits and privilege in the face of both the specter and the reformers. In August 1912 the U.S. Congress authorized the formation of a U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations (Adams 1966; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:314–315). President Woodrow Wilson appointed the Progressive senator from Missouri, Francis Patrick Walsh, to head this commission. Congress charged the commission to identify the origins of industrial discord in the United States and to prescribe remedies for that conflict. The outbreak of class warfare in Colorado would soon consume its time and attention. Coal and Colorado

Hard-rock mining for gold, silver, and lead industrialized Colorado. The extraction of these minerals required tools, machines, and, most important, railroads. Coal powered the steam engines in the mines, the railroad engines, and the steel mills that produced the rails. Seams of bituminous coal run through the east slope of the Rocky Mountains. Northwest of Denver, near the university town of Boulder, coal occurs in strata deep under the plains. In the south, seams of coal lace the mountains facing the plains. The southern coalfield began at the New Mexico border in Las Animas County, with its county seat at Trinidad,

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and extended north into Huerfano County, with its county seat at Walsenburg. Coal mining had begun in the southern field by the 1870s. In 1892 two existing companies merged to form the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) (Scamehorn 1992). In Pueblo, Colorado, CF&I operated the only steel mill between the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast. It also established coalmines and coke ovens in the southern coalfield to feed that mill. By 1913, Colorado was the eighth largest coal-producing state in the nation. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company

The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), under the direction of John Osgood, grew rapidly to become the most powerful coal and steel operation in the West (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:8; Scamehorn 1992; Wolff 2003:121). Osgood took a paternalistic attitude toward his workers. In the mountains of western Colorado, he created a model company town at Redstone, where CF&I ran a coke plant. In 1901 the company set up a Sociological Department to look after the welfare of the workforce and shape the workers to fit the company’s mold of good employees. Many of the Sociological Department’s ideas and policies were progressive in nature, but it was an arm of the company whose purpose was to increase profits (Andrews 2003:428–429). That same year, CF&I published the first issue of a weekly company magazine titled Camp and Plant. The magazine was glossy, professionally produced, and an unabashed propaganda organ for CF&I. It conveyed the company line to the workers and provided them with a safe alternative to the muckraking press. CF&I became one of the most powerful economic and political forces in Colorado. The Engineering and Mining Journal estimated that by 1906, 10 percent of Colorado’s population depended on CF&I for their livelihood (Whiteside 1990:8–9). In 1903, Osgood and his cronies lost control of CF&I. With Standard Oil under legal assault as a result of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, John D. Rockefeller looked to diversify his holdings, and his gaze fell on Colorado. Rockefeller moved to consolidate the company by installing his own people in positions of power. He appointed Jesse Welborn president of the company, but the company faltered and faced bankruptcy. In 1907, he sent Lamont Montgomery Bowers to oversee CF&I as chair of the Board of Directors. Bowers shared Rockefeller’s upstate New York roots and Baptist faith (Pepper 1979). He was a capitalist of the old school with no interest in Progressive ideas or meddling. Rockefeller gave Bowers simple instructions: cut costs and increase output. Rockefeller did not supervise his managers’ affairs as long as the bottom line remained healthy. The new regime at CF&I slowly dismantled Osgood’s paternalism. First they suspended publication of Camp and Plant, then they abolished the Sociological Department. Osgood did not leave the Colorado coal industry, however. He took

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control of the Victor-American Fuel Company and built it into the foremost of CF&I’s competitors in southern Colorado. The new regime at CF&I immediately faced a crisis. The United Mine Workers called a convention in Pueblo, Colorado, in September 1903 to organize Colorado coal miners for a statewide strike. Representatives of the Western Federation of Miners also attended, and they called for the coal miners to follow the example of the hard-rock miners in Cripple Creek and strike (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:42–47). On November 9, miners in both the northern and southern fields walked out on strike. Operators in the north quickly made concessions and accepted the UMWA as the representative of their miners, and within a month the strike there had ended. In the south, things did not go so well. The operators led by CF&I refused to recognize or negotiate with the UMWA (Wolff 2003:218). In Cripple Creek, General John Chase broke the hardrock strike by deporting strikers and imprisoning hundreds of them in outdoor bullpens without trials. The militia commander in the southern coalfields did the same. More important, the coal operators began bringing Italians, Poles, and other immigrants into the southern field as strikebreakers (Whiteside 1990:48). On June 2, 1904, the UMWA terminated strike benefits, and the strike in the south failed. The strike gave the UMWA a foothold in northern Colorado and transformed the culture of the southern coalfield. In the late nineteenth century, coal operators had attracted Irish and Welsh miners to Colorado by promising higher wages than they were paid in Pennsylvania and the Midwest (Whiteside 1990:47– 48). These were experienced miners, often with union backgrounds. During the 1903 strike, many of these miners left for other coalfields, and the militia deported some of them. Others left, disillusioned by the failure of the strike. Many of those who sought to get their jobs back at the end of the strike found that Italians, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, African Americans, and Japanese had taken their places (Beshoar 1957:1; Whiteside 1990:47–48; Wolff 2003:192–193). CF&I managers would claim that the immigrants appeared as a result of the favorable conditions the company created in southern Colorado. Federal law prohibited U.S. companies from recruiting workers in foreign countries. Years later, however, Upton Sinclair would claim that he had seen color posters advertising jobs with CF&I in southern European railroad stations (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:51). By 1910, the ethnic makeup of the southern field had been transformed. Seventy percent of the workforce was non–English speakers (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:52). UMWA (1912) organizers in 1912 listed twenty-four nationalities in the southern field. Thirty percent of these were English, 30 percent Italians, 24 percent Eastern Europeans, 7 percent Mexicans, 4 percent Greeks, and 1.6 percent Japanese. In 1913, 15,000 to 20,000 people lived in CF&I-owned coal camps in southern Colorado (West 1915:34).

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A Terrible Unrest

2.2. Morley, Colorado, 1907–1915, a company town. Courtesy, Colorado Historical Society, Trinidad Collection, Scan #20004309, Denver, CO.

Life in the Southern Colorado Coalfields

The conditions of miners’ lives in southern Colorado were abysmal. Every week someone was crippled or killed under falling rock or the wheels of a runaway ore car (Andrews 2008; Martelle 2007). Every few years a mine would explode and dozens of men would die. The operators often ignored state laws regulating safety, working conditions, and the fair compensation of miners. The miners and their families lived in crude shacks in isolated company towns (Figure 2.2). The company controlled the housing, the store, the medical facilities, the town saloon, and all recreational facilities. Company guards acted as police and determined who could come and go in the communities. The company also dominated the local political structure and instructed its employees on how to vote. As was typical in coalmines of the time, workers in southern Colorado could be divided among professionals, company men, and miners (Andrews 2008; Whiteside 1990:39). A handful of professionals, including a mine superintendent, teachers, and doctors, worked in each community. Company men were paid by the hour. Shot firers entered the mines between shifts and set off charges to loosen the coal. Pit bosses assigned miners to rooms (work areas in the mines)

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and supervised the work. Most company men, however, were “outside men.” Workers in the coke ovens pulled hot coke out of the ovens and into waiting ore cars. Blacksmiths shoed the mules, and mechanics maintained the apparatus of the mines. The vast majority of workers were miners, however. The companies regarded coal miners as independent contractors, and the miners formed their own work gangs, usually made up of family members or friends from the same ethnic background (Beshoar 1957; Long 1991; McGovern and Guttridge 1972; Papanikolas 1982; Reckner 2009). The shift pit boss could assign a work gang to an easily worked room where the men could straightforwardly load a large amount of coal. Or he could send them to low, water-filled rooms that required a lot of dead work to load a little coal. The foreman expected the miners to buy him beer and sometimes to offer him outright bribes. Each miner had numerous brass checks with his number on them. When he entered the mine, he hung his check on a board to indicate he was underground, and when he went home he hung it on a different board. If he was killed in the mine, the brass check identified the miner’s body. In the mine, the miner attached a check to each car he loaded, and mules or an electric engine dragged the car to the tipple for unloading. In the tipple, a weigh boss weighed the car and credited the miner with his tonnage. The weigh boss could deduct for slate or other stone in the car or simply cheat the miner by robbing Peter to pay Paul (Henraty 1912). The scales were often dishonest, and miners at the UMWA (1913) District 15 convention in 1913 complained repeatedly that the companies shorted them on their tonnage. The miners wanted to elect their own check weighman to verify the scales and tonnage of their coal. Coal miners earned very little money. In 1913, miners reported that the companies paid them 40 to 60 cents for each ton of coal they loaded (UMWA 1913). This translated into a daily wage of no more than $3.50 (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:22). Mexican miners were paid even less (UMWA 1913:5). From this amount, the company deducted for blacksmithing, blasting powder, oil or carbide for lamps, lamp globes, doctors’ fees, and rent and utilities for company housing. Company men were paid about the same as the miners, with the average daily wage between $3.00 and $4.00 in 1914 (Whiteside 1990:51). Demand for coal was seasonal, and so was work in the mines. In the early twentieth century, miners worked 130 to 195 days a year, and their gross annual wages totaled $300 to $500 (Whiteside 1990:51, 117). The average Colorado coal mining household consisted of 5.1 persons, and the average cost of minimal support for a family that size was $410.76 (Wood 2002:75). Life on a coal miner’s wages was clearly marginal. The Colorado mines were notoriously unsafe, among the most dangerous in the nation—second only to Utah. In the period 1884–1912, 42,898 coal miners perished in mine accidents in the United States. Of that number, 1,708 died in

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A Terrible Unrest

Colorado mines. Miners died in Colorado coalmines at a rate that was over twice the national average (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:66; Whiteside 1990:74–75). Colorado law required that a company pay compensation for the death of a miner if the company was at fault. The companies, however, especially CF&I, politically dominated Las Animas and Huerfano counties through ballot stuffing, suppression of free speech, and graft (West 1915:16). Almost without exception, handpicked coroners’ juries absolved the coal companies of responsibility for miners’ deaths. For example, in the years 1904–1914, juries picked by Sheriff Jeff Farr of Huerfano County found the coal operators to blame in only one case out of ninety-five (Whiteside 1990:22). The companies did follow an informal practice of paying survivors of the dead according to “the facts and circumstances of each case” (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:34). In 1913, 110 men died in Colorado coalmines, leaving 51 widows and 108 orphans. The companies, on average, paid the survivors $305.40 for each death (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:34). Miners complained that the operators valued their lives less than they did the mules. Joe Morzox worked at the Tabasco Mine. He recounted that the pit boss required miners to haul their own rails to the face and that many of the men did not know how to drive the mules to do the hauling. He remembered, “One man was kicked by a mule and lived only five hours after. The mine boss asked me about the accident and then said he was glad it was not the mule that was killed” (UMWA 1913:4–5). Miners replaced themselves; the companies had to purchase mules. The mines in southern Colorado were located up in canyons that emptied from the mountains down onto the plains. Most of the mines were far too distant for workers to live in established towns such as Trinidad and Walsenburg. The companies owned all the land in the canyons and founded coal camps on that land (Beshoar 1957; Long 1985; Martelle 2007; McGovern and Guttridge 1972). These were gray, gritty, self-contained communities. Coal tipples and other industrial buildings dominated the landscape. Scattered among the industrial buildings were homes, schools, jails, saloons, churches, bathhouses, and hospitals. Sewage ran in open trenches through many of the towns, leading to frequent outbreaks of typhoid (Andrews 2003:429). The company owned and controlled all aspects of life in the camps. The mine superintendent was also the mayor, the school board, the election board, and sometimes the judge. The company dictated what would be taught in the schools, what would be sold in the store, which religions could be practiced, and which movies would be shown. The companies fenced and closed most of the camps (Andrews 2003:430; Wolff 2003:220). Employees and visitors passed through locked gates patrolled by gun-toting mine guards to enter the camps. The guards protected company property, enforced company rules, and bullied workers. They would beat individuals

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suspected of union sympathies and send them “down the canyon.” The worst of the guards would accost and molest miners’ wives when their husbands were working in the pits (Long 1985:67; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:110). During our fieldwork, former miners and children of miners who had lived in the camps in the 1920s and 1930s told us stories to illustrate the mine guards’ arbitrary power. In one frequently told story, when guards stopped a miner at the company gate, they saw a pair of new mining boots in the backseat of his car. They asked the miner where he got the boots, and he said it was at a store in Trinidad. When they asked him why he had not purchased the boots at the company store, the miner replied that the company store did not have his size. The guards took the boots and told the miner “now they do.” The company store was the most infamous institution in the coal camps (Andrews 2003:436). The largest companies, such as CF&I, had mercantile divisions that ran the stores in the company camps. The companies expected a profit from these stores, and in 1913, CF&I’s Colorado Supply Company yielded the Rockefellers a 20 percent profit (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:22). In half of CF&I’s camps, the company store was the only store. The isolation of the camps made these stores both a necessity and a means to further exploit workers for the benefit of the company’s bottom line (Bowers 1911). In testimony before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915, both Welborn and Bowers denied that CF&I required its employees to shop at Colorado Supply Company stores. Bowers (1915) wrote President Woodrow Wilson and asserted, “No pressure whatever was brought to bear in order to induce them [the miners] to trade at our stores.” However, in a 1911 letter to the manager of the Pueblo steel mill, Bowers wrote of employees who did not shop at the Colorado Supply Company stores: “But in any event their disloyalty is self evident, and a disloyal person when discovered will have no employment in our company.” The stores would advance miners credit against their next check. Given the marginality of the miners’ pay, most miners found themselves owing their soul to the company store. Operators attempted to guarantee profits in their stores through the use of scrip, company-issued currency that could only be used in the company store. Some companies paid a portion or all of the miners’ wages in scrip, while others, including CF&I, advanced credit to their miners in coupons good only at the company store. Two types of housing existed in the coal camps (McGovern and Guttridge 1974:24–25). When the companies first established the camps, the miners built their own housing (Andrews 2003:437). They threw together shacks using packing crates, scrap boxes, corrugated metal sheeting, and flattened tin cans (Figure 2.3). In some cases, miners constructed dwellings from the mud and rock they found in the canyons. They often built their homes in side canyons away from the prying eyes of the managers and guards. The miners bought and sold these

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2.3. Miner-built housing in southern Colorado, 1900–1920. Photograph by Otis Aultman. Courtesy, Colorado Historical Society, Aultman Collection, Scan #20010799, Denver, CO.

vernacular dwellings among themselves, but they built them on company land. The owners of the shacks paid a lease fee to the company for use of the land. The company could evict the miners and destroy their houses. Emma Zanetell (n.d.) recounted to Eric Margolis and Barron Beshoar that CF&I dynamited the house her father built in the CF&I town of Sopris in retaliation for his union activities. Over time, the companies replaced these vernacular homes with company-built dwellings. The operators placed the houses in neat rows interspaced with the industrial structures of the mines. The houses were uniformly simple, unadorned, and small. The CF&I built cottages of concrete block for $700 apiece. They rented them to their employees for $2 per room per month and turned a 6 to 8 percent profit on the deal (McGovern and Guttridge 1974:24–25; Wood 2002:70). In 1913 some company houses had electric lights, but almost all lacked running water. A group of houses would share a common outdoor water tap. The CF&I maintained two coal camps up Berwind Canyon. In 1888, one of the companies that would later merge to form CF&I discovered a six-foot seam of coal outcropping in the canyon and established a mine and a camp (Wood 2002:65). By the turn of the twentieth century, over 600 people lived in Berwind,

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and the mines were among the most productive in Colorado. By 1913 the town boasted both a Colorado Supply Company store and an independent general store owned by an Italian immigrant, John Aiello (Long 1985:66; Wood 2002:72). The town also contained a school, meat market, jail, and saloon. Down the canyon but adjacent to Berwind was the CF&I town of Tabasco. In 1901 the company sank a mine shaft into the canyon at Tabasco and built 302 coke ovens. The smoke and ash from these coke ovens wafted daily over the communities of Berwind and Tabasco, combining with the oily soot that emanated from the coalmines to color everything a greasy gray. A woman’s life in the coal camps was grueling (Figure 2.4) (Wood 2002). Given the isolation of the camps, women had few employment opportunities. A handful of women in each camp worked as maids or servants for the professional households. Each day women had to haul water, wash clothing, care for children, and prepare meals. They did all these things by hand. It was hard, backbreaking work. The number of men in the camps exceeded the number of women, so many men lived as bachelors. The single men lived in company boardinghouses or in dwellings with other bachelors, or they boarded with families. Women made money by attending to the domestic needs of the bachelors in the camps. Women took in boarders, took in laundry, and prepared meals for men who lived in all-male households. The money women could make from these activities came close to matching the wages of a male miner. But even with the contributions of both spouses, the life of a mining family remained wretched and harsh. The Strike

In 1913, conditions in the mines of southern Colorado were ripe for a strike and for violence. The brutality of mundane life had produced festering dissatisfaction among mining families that grew on a daily basis. Divisions of class, ethnicity, and race had solidified in ways that both unified and alienated people. More important, these divisions bred fear and dehumanized the participants in the struggle. The operators brought in gunmen and machine guns to maintain their control. The miners had valid grievances, and the UMWA moved to organize workers to confront those grievances. Everyone knew the strike would be violent because violent behavior was normal in a coal strike (Fishback 1995). No one anticipated, however, that innocents would die and that class war would spring from the smoking Death Pit at Ludlow. Hundreds of photographs are one of the most compelling legacies of the strike. Lou Dold, a Trinidad, Colorado, photographer, made his living taking and selling picture postcards (Margolis 1994:15). Dold traveled through the strike zone taking photos of miners, company guards, and the Colorado militia. Back

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2.4. Miner’s family, southern Colorado, 1913–1914. Courtesy, Colorado Historical Society, Trinidad Collection, Scan #x-60427, Denver, CO.

Randall H. McGuire

in his studio he printed the photos on card stock and sold the postcards to those he had photographed. Stuart Mace, a staff photographer with The Denver Times, favored shots of the militia in soldierly poses. Various other photographers also documented the events. Divisions

The social context of coal mining in early–twentieth-century Colorado enÂ�tailed complex interrelationships of class, gender, ethnicity, race, and age. The bourgeoisie, or owners of the mines, were uniformly white and Anglo and lived in Denver or other urban areas outside the state. White, Anglo middle-class managers, administrators, and professionals represented the bourgeoisie in the coal camps. This industrial society of the mines was embedded in a rural society ethnically differentiated between Anglos and Chicanos, with a rural working class of cowboys and field hands, smallholder herders, and farmers and a rural bourgeoisie of large ranchers and merchants. Each of these social groups had different interests in the conflict that would come. The most obvious distinction was the one between working-class miners and members of the bourgeoisie and middle class who owned and ran the mines. This is the classic capitalist contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The members of the working class, however, did not all experience dayto-day life in southern Colorado mining communities the same way. The lives of men and women were quite different, and power relations and exploitation existed within working-class households (Long 1985). Each ethnic group also formed its own community, residentially and through churches, associations, and fraternal organizations (Reckner 2009). Racial discrimination existed, with Euro-American workers discriminating against African American and Chicano workers and the handful of Japanese in the camps largely excluded from union activities. The UMWA has a long history of organizing miners across racial and ethnic lines. As current UMWA president Cecil Roberts stated in an address at the 2000 Ludlow memorial service, “When the top comes down it does not care if you are Black or White.” However, in 1913, UMWA officials, leaders, and organizers were largely Irish and Welsh and culturally distinct from the immigrant, Chicano, and African American rank and file. Racial and ethnic distinctions divided the industrial working class but unified Anglos across class lines against the miners. The Anglos of the local rural society regarded the miners as inferior foreigners. They shared these racist and xenophobic prejudices with the Anglo rural bourgeoisie, the industrial bourgeoisie, and the middle class. In a 1909 letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr., Lamont Bowers (1909) used this xenophobia to justify reducing wages at the Pueblo steel mill: “I always regret cutting the wages of laborers who have families to support

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and are trying to pay for homes and educate their children but considering these foreigners who do not intend to make America their home, and who live like rats in order to save money, I do not feel that we ought to maintain high wages in order to increase their income and shorten their stay in this country.” The xenophobic, rural, Anglo bourgeoisie largely sided with management against the strikers. Individuals from the rural, Anglo working class filled the ranks of the mine guards. A small, primarily ethnic-based, petty bourgeoisie of shop owners and tradespeople identified with the miners who were their customers. As tensions grew, the companies brought in more gunmen (McGovern and Guttridge 1974:85–88). Not confident that their own mine guards were a sufficient deterrent to industrial violence, they called on experts. The Baldwin Felts Detective Agency of West Virginia specialized in breaking coal strikes. The CF&I, the Victor-American Fuel Company, and the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company engaged the agency to disrupt organizing and break any potential strike (McGovern and Guttridge 1974:87–88). The Baldwin Felts Agency deployed up to seventy-five agents in southern Colorado. They hired men locally and brought in others from outside the region. Sheriff Farr of Huerfano County deputized them. The agency also brought in at least eight machine guns (McGovern and Guttridge 1974:117–118), one of which they took to the steel mill in Pueblo. There CF&I had mounted steel plating on the sides of a touring sedan to create a homemade armored car. The Baldwin Felts machine gun and a spotlight finished off the “Death Special” (Martelle 2007:96–98). Solidarity

The UMWA leaders had not forgotten their defeat in 1903, and the coalmines of southern Colorado remained a ripe field for organizing. But, as had happened in 1903, the labor struggle began in the northern coalfield (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:74–91). In 1908, UMWA organizers under the leadership of John Lawson won a contract for the UMWA with the major producers in the northern field. The CF&I encouraged the northern operators to abandon the contract, which they did when it expired in 1910. The miners walked out, and the UMWA had a strike that would drag on for five years. Support from CF&I and the VictorAmerican Fuel Company reinforced the northern operators’ resistance to the strike. In the early months of 1913, the UMWA sent organizers to the southern fields to organize a strike and put pressure on the southern operators. Lawson took charge of the strike efforts in Las Animas County, and Adolph Germer, later a founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, directed operations in Huerfano County. The union also brought in its most powerful weapon: an eighty-plus-year-old widow known as Mother Jones. Dold photographed her striding through the streets of Trinidad at the head of a demonstration.

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The deplorable condition of miners in the southern part of the state made a mockery of Colorado’s laws (Whiteside 1990:57–109). Turn-of-the-century Colorado was a progressive state. In 1893, it became only the second U.S. state to grant women the right to vote. Colorado legislatures in 1899 outlawed scrip and any coercion by companies to control the places their miners shopped (West 1915:68). The first state mining law, passed in 1883, regulated safety and set up a system of state inspections of mines (Whiteside 1990:58–59). State law had allowed miners to elect check weighmen since 1897 (West 1915:64). The state of Colorado passed legislation mandating an eight-hour day in 1905 (West 1915:21– 22). In March 1913 the state legislature passed a comprehensive reform of state mining law that reaffirmed existing provisions and strengthened safety regulations and mine inspections (Whiteside 1990:106–108). Perhaps if the southern Colorado operators had obeyed these laws, the UMWA would not have found such fertile ground for a strike. As the UMWA organizers fanned out in the southern fields, they met with resistance from the operators. CF&I guards jumped organizer Michael Livoda near the Ravenwood Mine and beat him brutally (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:81). Deadly violence began at 8 P.M. on August 15, 1913, when Baldwin Felts agents gunned down UMWA organizer Gerald Lippiatt on the streets of Trinidad (Martelle 2007:14; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:90). The state labor commissioner, who was present in Trinidad that day, wired the governor, warning of “a terrible unrest” (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:91). The UMWA had no machine guns, but the union bought Winchester, Marlin, and Savage repeating rifles to arm strikers (Margolis 2000:44; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:118– 119). During the ten-day war, Dold photographed the rebellious miners with red bandanas tied around their necks and their union rifles in their hands. The Special Convention of District 15 of the United Mine Workers, held in Trinidad, Colorado, convened on August 16, 1913 (UMWA 1913; Martelle 2007:71–75). The memory of Lippiatt’s murder was strong in the minds of the 300 delegates. They had taken great risks themselves sneaking out of the coal camps under the noses of company guards and sheriffs’ deputies. Mother Jones addressed the convention. She charged the miners: “I want you to pledge yourselves in this convention to stand as one solid army against the foes of human labor” (UMWA 1913:20). This they did, voting to strike and drawing up seven demands (UMWA 1913:21–23): 1. Recognition of the UMWA as the miners’ representative 2. A 10 percent increase in the tonnage rate for miners and raises in the day wage scale 3. An eight-hour day for all classes of labor in and around the coalmines and at the coke ovens

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A Terrible Unrest 4. Pay for all dead work 5. The election of check weighmen in all mines, without interference by company officials 6. The right to trade in any store and the right to choose their own boarding place and doctor 7. The enforcement of the Colorado mining laws and the abolition of the notorious and criminal guard system

With the exception of the call for union recognition and the raise in wages, Colorado mining laws already stipulated these points. The companies led by CF&I acceded to all the demands except recognition of the union. On September 23, 1913, between 8,000 and 10,000 miners, comprising 40 to 100 percent of the miners at various camps, walked out of the pits (West 1915:31). Life in the Strike Zone

The UMWA had prepared for the strike and the needs of the strikers. The union correctly anticipated that the companies would evict strikers from company dwellings and vernacular houses built on company land. The union set up a dummy real estate office in Denver and leased land for twelve tent colonies at the base of the canyons (Beshoar 1957:57–58). Over 1,000 tents had been sent from West Virginia, but they had not arrived in southern Colorado by September 25. On that date, a cold drizzle of sleet, rain, and wet snow soaked the striking families as they wound their way down the canyons carrying everything they owned. The strikers made do with what tents there were and set up their new union communities (Figure 2.5). The union organized each camp democratically, with elected officials resÂ� ponsible for representing the camps, maintaining order, and mediating internal conflicts. The UMWA paid strike pay to all miners who remained in the strike zone: three dollars a day for each man, one dollar per woman, and fifty cents per child. The miners erected tents on wooden frames and organized them in neat rows. The union provided each tent with a cast-iron stove and iron bedsteads. Many miners added on to their tents with wooden doors and windows. Some also dug cellars under their tents that provided a warm refuge from the plain’s winter wind, extra storage and living space, and protection from rifle fire. Each camp had a large community tent that served as a meeting hall, cafeteria, school, and recreation center during the strike. At least some of the camps had telephone and electric lines run into them. The union set up the tent colonies at the base of the canyons in part to intercept strikebreakers brought in by the companies. At word of the arrival of strikebreakers, the women of the camp would go to the railroad siding with bats

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2.5. Map of strike zone, 1913–1914. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.

A Terrible Unrest

and confront them (Long 1985:73). Women went because there was less chance that the company guards would perpetrate violence against them. They would beg, cajole, and threaten the strikebreakers to quit the companies and join the union. The UMWA set up the largest of these tent colonies along the train tracks a mile north of the railroad depot of Ludlow (Beshoar 1942; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:105). On September 23, mining families from Berwind, Tabasco, and the Victor-American mining camp of Hastings trekked into Ludlow. The Ludlow Tent Colony served as the headquarters of the strike in Las Animas County. A second colony called White City, set up on the edge of Walsenburg, was the headquarters in Huerfano County. The strikers laid out a baseball diamond and built stands for it on the other side of the section road from the Ludlow Colony. They also erected an outdoor gymnasium along the south edge of the colony. The Ludlow Colony elected a Greek miner, Louis Tikas, as its leader and a young Welsh woman, Mary Thomas, as official “greeter-singer” (Long 1985:72). Another woman, named Pearl Jolly, also became a leader in the camp. To make extra money she sold Dold’s postcards from her tent (Papanikolas 1982:214). The strikers seemed to overcome the divisions of more than twenty ethnic and racial identities and cooperated in the domestic life of the camp and the strike (Reckner 2009). The companies harassed the strikers in numerous ways. At Ludlow, the Victor-American Fuel Company and CF&I erected giant spotlights on the edge of their properties. These spotlights would sweep the tents all through the night. Company guards routinely harassed strikers and their families when they ventured out of the camps. Company officials and guards publicly proclaimed the strikers to be “dirty foreigners.” Bowers wrote Rockefeller warning of “bloodthirsty Greeks who have just returned from the Turkish wars” among the strikers (quoted in West 1915:146). Company guards randomly fired their weapons over the tents or into the camps. When the Death Special arrived on the scene in October, Baldwin Felts agents drove by the tent camps in the night, firing their machine gun. The union reacted to these molestations by ringing the camps with armed guards. The companies set up their machine guns at the entrances to the canyons to guard their mines. The situation was tense and the strike zone filled with armed men. Violence was inevitable. Violence

The first violent death after the strike call occurred on the second day of the walkout. A group of strikers ambushed and killed a particularly brutal mine guard who had a reputation for molesting miners’ wives (Long 1985:67). Reprisals soon followed (Martelle 2007:81–91). Guards fired into tent camps and on picketers.

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Miners dynamited buildings in company camps. A pitched battle erupted at Ludlow between Baldwin Felts agents and strikers (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:115). A few days later, a cowboy was killed by a stray bullet during a shootout between mine guards and strikers near Tabasco. On October 17, the Death Special appeared outside the Forbes Tent Colony south of Ludlow. Shooting broke out and the Death Special’s machine gun raked the camp, killing a miner and wounding and crippling an eighteen-year-old boy. In Walsenburg on October 24, sheriffs’ deputies fired on a crowd of strikers, killing three. The next day, armed men from the Ludlow tent camp, fearing an attack, drove mine guards led by Karl Linderfelt up Berwind Canyon (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:126–134). The battle raged for eight days. The strikers besieged mine guards in Tabasco and Berwind. Albert Felts sent an armored train with Baldwin Felts agents to machine-gun the Ludlow Colony and relieve the siege. The strikers intercepted the train in a running battle, forcing it up Berwind Canyon. Welborn confronted the governor of Colorado and demanded that he call out the National Guard to protect company property and lives in southern Colorado. On October 28, the governor issued the order for the state militia to take control of the strike zone. The Colorado National Guard arrived in Trinidad on November 1 with over 900 men and with artillery (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:137–139). General Chase, the Denver ophthalmologist who had broken the 1903 Cripple Creek Strike, was in command. Chase relieved the besieged company men up Berwind Canyon and issued CF&I company guard Linderfelt a commission as a lieutenant in the militia. He deployed Company K, which consisted primarily of University of Colorado students, to Ludlow. The Ludlow strikers greeted Company K with American flags, a band playing marches, and the hope that the militia would disarm both sides and bring order to the strike (Martelle 2007:126). Relations between Company K and the Ludlow Colony remained civil through the winter, in part because of the goodwill of company commander Philip Van Cise. Dold photographed militia soldiers with an artillery piece, pistols, and a mule. One soldier is seen striking a marshal-like posture while two others smile at the camera and a fourth waves. Mace had better luck posing guardsmen with military bearing. In one of his photographs, a line of soldiers looks appropriately stern and marshal-like on the roof of a train. As the days passed, Chase increasingly demonstrated that he was on the side of the operators. Soldiers entered Ludlow and other camps to search for and seize weapons, and they disarmed mine guards. But many of these same guards soon appeared in National Guard uniforms carrying military weapons (West 1915:110–111). Scattered violence and killings continued on both sides, but no more pitched battles broke out. Lamont Bowers, in response to a letter from President Woodrow Wilson, called Mother Jones “this vile woman” (quoted in McGovern and Guttridge 1972:

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2.6. Women’s march, Trinidad, Colorado, 1914. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, x-60493, Denver, CO.

135). Soon thereafter, General Chase declared martial law in southern Colorado, something only the governor had the authority to do. One of Chase’s first acts under martial law was to bar Mother Jones from the strike zone. On January 4, 1914, General Chase deported her from the strike zone. When she returned to Trinidad a week later, Chase had her arrested and interned in the county hospital. Hundreds of women with their children streamed into Trinidad for a march to protest Mother Jones’s arrest (Figure 2.6) (Long 1985:75–76). General Chase confronted them with cavalry on the town’s main street, and he fell off his horse, much to the amusement of the women and children. Climbing back on his steed, he ordered his troops to charge the women. The cavalry drove the women and children through the streets (Martelle 2007:152–155). No one was killed, but this attack on their spouses and children enraged the miners. It took all of the union leaders’ efforts to prevent an attack on General Chase’s headquarters at the Columbia Hotel (Beshoar 1957). Ten weeks later General Chase once again deported Mother Jones to Denver. She returned again, but this time Sheriff Farr intercepted her in Walsenburg and held her in the Huerfano County jail. In her autobiography, Mother Jones wrote that she used a broken bottle to drive rats out of her cell ( Jones 1925).

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The strike in Colorado attracted national attention. Members of the U.S. Congress were concerned about industrial strife and its potential to lead to class war. The House Subcommittee on Mines and Mining held hearings on the strike in Denver and at the West Theater in Trinidad (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:177–193). The committee questioned dozens of people, including company officials, union leaders, and Albert Felts of the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency. One of the points revealed in the testimony was that Linderfelt was enrolling Baldwin Felts agents in his militia company. The congressional committee had barely left Colorado when the National Guard attacked the Forbes Tent Colony (Beshoar 1957:154–156; Martelle 2007: 197–202). A railroad crew had found a strikebreaker dead on the tracks nearby. They said he was drunk and had been hit by a train. The militia claimed strikers in the Forbes Tent Colony had beaten him to death. The soldiers tore down the tents and arrested sixteen strikers. They left tent number 30 standing because inside that tent Emma Oberosler Zanetell was recovering from the birth of stillborn twins (Zanetell n.d.). Dold arrived soon after the tents were down and took pictures. In one photo Emma Zanetell’s sisters and brothers are standing in front of tent 30 (Figure 2.7). One’s eyes are drawn to her niece, a little girl named Irene Micheli, wearing a white dress, in the center of the composition. By early spring 1914, the state of Colorado had drained its treasury maintaining the National Guard in the strike zone. The costs of the intervention were driving the state into bankruptcy (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:186–193). At the end of February, the governor removed all but 200 National Guard soldiers from southern Colorado (McGovern and Gutteridge 1972:186). He would continue to remove soldiers until mid-April, at which time he announced that the situation had been turned over to local authorities. Two National Guard companies remained. Company B under the command of Lieutenant Linderfelt was stationed at Ludlow. Although dressed in National Guard uniforms and carrying military-issue rifles, this company was made up primarily of mine guards. Troop A was formed that month when Linderfelt swore in 130 mine guards at the Trinidad armory (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:204–205). National Guard officers took command, but CF&I and the Victor-American Fuel Company clothed, armed, and paid Troop A. The Colorado National Guard in southern Colorado was now little more than a gang of coal company gun thugs (West 1915:124–126). The Massacre and Class War

On the morning of April 20, 1914, families at the Ludlow Tent Colony awoke slowly. The previous day had been the Greek Easter. The Greek miners had put on a party for the event with food, music, and a baseball game. Dold had

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2.7. Oberosler family and friends in front of tent at Forbes Tent Colony, 1914. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, x-60448, Denver, CO.

climbed up on a railroad water tower and taken a panoramic picture of the camp a few days before. The skiffs of snow in that picture were gone, but the morning was still crisp and cold. Only a dozen or so guardsmen were in their camp across from the Ludlow depot, but they had a machine gun set up on a hill below a water tank, about a mile south of the colony. This gun, with uniformed soldiers and mine guards striking martial poses, can be seen in a Stuart Mace photograph (Figure 2.8). Lieutenant Linderfelt had awakened his troops early to drill on the machine gun. While the morning was still new, the stage was set for the tragic events that would soon transpire (Beshoar 1957:166–194; Martelle 2007:160–176; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:210–232; West 1915:126–132). National Guard commander Major Patrick Hamrock called the colony at around 9 A.M. and asked Tikas to meet him at the militia camp. Tikas refused but agreed to get together with him at the Ludlow station. Strikers, fearing for Tikas’s safety, drew guns out of hiding and gathered in a railroad cut from which they could cover the depot with rifle fire. No one knows who fired the first shot, but moments later Lieutenant Linderfelt exploded two dynamite bombs as a signal to militia and mine guards to come to his aid. With these explosions the strikers began firing on the machine gun nest in earnest. Mine guards brought down the Baldwin Felts machine gun that had been protecting Hastings and set

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2.8. Machine gun at Water Tank Hill, 1914. Photograph by Stuart Mace. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, x-60543, Denver, CO.

it up beside the militia’s weapon. By day’s end, almost 200 soldiers and guards were firing into the camp. Mary Thomas (O’Neal 1971) said that by dusk the canvas tents were so shot up that they looked like lace. Neither side was willing to engage in close combat. They fired back and forth at relatively long distances, often up to a mile, so their bullets had little effect. Two of the armed strikers (Charles Costa and Franj Rubino) and one soldier (Alfred Martin) from Company B died in the combat. On the main highway two miles away, a stray bullet killed hitchhiker Primo Larese (Martelle 2007:222–223). Pandemonium reigned in the camp. Dogs barked, babies cried, and people ran to and fro seeking shelter. Families who had dug cellars under their tents ducked into them. Some women and children clamored down into a walk-in well that supplied the railroad water tank, huddling in the cold water. Louis Tikas and Pearl Jolly ran through the camp trying to get people to safety. With every lull in the machine gun fire, they directed people down the arroyo north of the camp to Frank Bayes’s ranch and safety. Armed strikers took up position at a steel bridge over the arroyo to cover this retreat. Some of the most intense fighting of the day occurred here. The Snyder family huddled in the pit under their tent. Around noon, twelve-year-old Frank Snyder went up into the tent and was

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fatally shot. His father, crazy with grief, began running from tent to tent telling people not to flee because the militia was killing children. As the day wore on, the attackers gained strength and the strikers ran low on ammunition. At dusk, the first tent burst into flames. The attackers had the upper hand, and they started to move into the camp. A southbound freight train passed between the bulk of the attackers and the colony, stopping the militia advance. With this interruption in gunfire, most of the rest of the women and children in the camp fled. At about the same time, the armed strikers ran out of ammunition, and Tikas ordered them to the Black Hills east of the colony. Soldiers and mine guards rushed into the camp, spreading the fire from tent to tent. They soon heard the screams of women and children in the cellars under the burning tents. Some of the militia officers began ripping up tent floors and pulling women and children from the pits, but many of the attackers began an orgy of looting, taking anything of value they could find. Louis Tikas heard screams in the camp and ran back to make sure everyone had gotten out. Company B soldiers seized him, the union paymaster James Fyler, and an armed striker named John Bartolotti. The soldiers brought the prisoners to Linderfelt and summarily executed them (Martelle 2007:175–176; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:251). Their bodies lay sprawled by the railroad tracks for three days. Mary Petrucci had spent the day huddled in the cellar beneath tent 1 in the southwest corner of the camp. At dusk, when the tent ignited, she grabbed her baby and two young children and fled from the shelter. Outside the tent, a guardsman confronted her and threatened to kill her. She fled to the cellar under Alcarita Pedregon’s tent. Pedregon, Fedelina Costa, Patricia Valdez, and their seven children had cowered in this pit all day, and there was little room for four more people. Mary and her children crouched on the steps of the cellar while the tent above them burned, sucking the oxygen from their refuge. Mary eventually passed out. The next morning when she awoke, the baby in her arms and her other two children were dead. Of the fourteen women and children in that pit, only Mary and Patricia Valdez survived. The two women stumbled dazed and confused to the Ludlow depot, where the postmistress put them on a train to Trinidad. The bodies of their children and friends lay in the smoking pit for three more days. Finally, agents of the American Red Cross received permission from the National Guard to recover the bodies at Ludlow. A representative of the UMWA and Lou Dold accompanied the Red Cross. On that day, Dold made some of his most compelling images, with masses of burned tents, stoves, and bedsteads spread over a stark plain (Figure 2.9). The National Guard was also taking pictures. In one, a soldier stands in the Death Pit with his white hand sticking up out of the darkness (Figure 2.10) (Margolis 1988). The UMWA and the Colorado Federation of Labor put out a call to arms to all working people in Colorado (Beshoar 1957:183–184). It began: “Organize

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2.9. Ludlow Tent Colony after the massacre, 1914. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, x-60483, Denver, CO.

the men in your community in companies of volunteers to protect the workers of Colorado against the murder and cremation of men, women and children by armed assassins in the employ of coal corporations, serving under the guise of state militiamen. Gather together for defensive purposes all arms and ammunition legally available.” Armed miners mustered in Trinidad and took to the hills to attack and destroy mines and company towns. Meanwhile, other armed workers pinned down the National Guard at Ludlow and in Walsenburg. At Walsenburg the battle stretched over several days, and a National Guard officer and two strikers died (Martelle 2007:223–224). In Denver, National Guard units ignored the call to muster, and railroad crews refused to operate trains carrying troops south. Finally, the governor had no choice but to appeal to Washington for federal troops to end the class war. John Lawson, who had resisted calls to radical action before April 20, now aggressively pursued the war. Two days after the massacre, strikers had laid waste to at least six mines and company towns (Martelle 2007:177–197; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:240–249). Guerrilla forces would continue to emerge from the mountains and attack company towns for seven more days, burning and killing (Martelle 2007:222–224). At the Empire Mine, managers, strikebreakers, women, and children huddled in a mine shaft pinned down by rifle fire from strikers. Strikers’ bullets killed the mine supervisor and a company employee, and com-

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2.10. Death Pit at Ludlow, 1914. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, x-60482, Denver, CO.

pany guards killed two of the attacking strikers. Strikers wearing red bandanas around their necks rushed the Victor-American Mine at Delagua, killing five mine guards. At four other mines, four company men and one striker died in the fighting. The most intensive attack occurred at Forbes, Rocky Mountain Fuel’s coal camp. Three hundred miners dodged machine gun bullets to attack the camp. They set fire to the barn, and thirty-seven mules died. They threw coal oil on the tipple, scales, boardinghouse, and post office and set them aflame. During the fight, sixty women and children cowered in the mine for safety. Four Japanese miners perished in a burning shack, and seven other company men fell to strikers’ bullets. One of the company men tried to escape on a mine car but was fatally shot, and his body fell on the tracks. That afternoon the first contingent of federal troops reached southern Colorado, and the war ended. Stuart Mace was in Forbes right after the fighting (Figure 2.11). He photographed the burned buildings, the smoldering tipple, and four bodies. Aftermath and the Rockefeller Plan

The massacre at Ludlow invigorated the strike. At the beginning of April, the UMWA had expended the strike fund, and the strike was nearly done. Outrage

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2.11. Dead company men at Forbes Mine, 1914. Photograph by Stuart Mace. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, x-61219, Denver, CO.

over the massacre at Ludlow swelled union coffers and continued the strike. Upton Sinclair arranged a cross-country tour of Ludlow survivors, including Pearl Jolly, Mary Thomas, and Mary Petrucci (Beshoar 1957:232–234; McGovern and Guttridge 1972:276–278). The women told the Ludlow story on podiums all across the United States, bringing audiences to tears with their story (The New York Times 1915). President Wilson welcomed them to the White House, but John D. Rockefeller Jr. refused to see them. After the tour, Sinclair (1917) wrote his book King Coal to try to do to the coal industry what The Jungle had done to meatpacking. In May, the UMWA set up a new strikers’ colony at Ludlow. But fund-raising after the massacre only briefly extended the strike. By December 1914 the UMWA was bankrupt, and on December 10 it ended the strike. Many of the strikers had trouble getting work because the companies blacklisted them. A few families hung on in the tent colonies until early 1915. The U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations had not done significant work during its first year, but in 1914 it turned its attention to Colorado and Ludlow. The chair, Francis Walsh, saw the Ludlow events as an opportunity to expose and humiliate the Rockefeller family, and he set out to do just that. The commission held hearings in December 1914 and January 1915 and produced thousands of pages of testimony (West 1915). The individuals who testified included

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the Rockefellers senior and junior, company officials, National Guard officers, Colorado state officials, strikers, and strikers’ wives. Walsh was largely successful in his attempts to discredit Rockefeller. Both the commission’s hearing and the widespread publicity about the massacre moved public opinion against Rockefeller. In response to his growing infamy, Rockefeller started the country’s first corporate public relations office and mobilized it in an effort to regain his good name (Gitelman 1988; Marchand 2001:16–17). After the strike ended, Colorado authorities arrested 408 miners, with 332 indicted for murder, including strike leader John Lawson. The trials dragged on until 1920. Most of the miners never came to trial, and all the trials were eventually suppressed at the request of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who wanted to end publicity about the strike. The Colorado National Guard moved quickly after the massacre to court-martial and exonerate 10 officers and 12 enlisted men who had participated in the massacre. The court-martial did find Lieutenant Linderfelt guilty of assaulting Louis Tikas but acquitted him of any criminal charge (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:286–287). None of the mine guards or mine officials was brought to trial. In the end, no one was convicted or punished for any of the crimes of the Colorado Coalfield War. In the fall of 1914, Rockefeller employed Canadian socialist Mackenzie King to conduct a study of industrial relations within CF&I (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:293–311). The events in Colorado had challenged Rockefeller’s perception of industrial relations and his own company’s role in the strike. He deplored the killings of the women and children in the Death Pit, although he always denied any responsibility for them (Gitelman 1988:23). His subsequent public scourging before the Industrial Relations Commission strengthened his resolve for reform. The consequence of this change of mind was the Rockefeller Plan (also referred to as the Industrial Representation Plan or IRP) (Gitelman 1988). In September 1915 he initiated the plan with a tour of CF&I’s eighteen coal camps in southern Colorado. His motorcade stopped first at Berwind and Tabasco. Rockefeller danced with miners’ wives, ate with miners in boardinghouses, and, with Mackenzie King, donned stiff new overalls to go down into the mines. He promised a new regime of partnership and cooperation between CF&I and the workers. The Rockefeller Plan sought to forestall labor unrest and unionization by establishing a company union and improving living conditions in the coal camps. The plan set up a system of joint management-labor committees to discuss health, sanitation, mine safety, recreation, and education. The scheme included elected worker representatives to present labor’s concerns to management and provided for the election of check weighmen in each mine. The plan also initiated a wave of construction in the coal camps, including Berwind. Rockefeller invited the YMCA into each camp and built buildings to house the organization.

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Managers eliminated the remaining vernacular housing in the camps and tore down and replaced many existing company houses. Within a few years, the domestic architecture of most of the camps had been completely transformed. At Berwind, the company built the new YMCA at the south end of the camp so it could also serve Tabasco. It also replaced most of the domestic structures in the camp and built a row of show homes at the camp’s entrance. The Rockefeller Plan did not buy the industrial peace Rockefeller had hoped for, however (Beshoar 1957:362–364). World War I brought an increased demand for coal, higher wages in the mines, and nationalization of the U.S. railroad system. After the war, John Lewis consolidated power as the leader of the UMWA, and the union called for the nationalization of the coal industry. With the loosening of wartime controls and a fall in demand, coal companies, including those in southern Colorado, cut wages. In 1919, CF&I workers responded to a UMWA call for a national strike, and CF&I lured them back with higher wages. In 1921 the company took back the wage increase, and the miners of southern Colorado once again walked out of the mines. This time the state forbade evictions from company houses and the construction of tent camps. In 1927 the IWW called for a national strike, and miners in the northern and southern coalfields joined it. In the south, the IWW set up a few tents at Ludlow and held large meetings there. In the north, at Columbine, Colorado, Rocky Mountain Fuel Company guards opened fire on strikers with a machine gun, killing five and wounding twentyfive. The UMWA opposed the strike and even advised the companies on how to combat it. A year later the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company became the first company in southern Colorado to recognize the UMWA as the representative of its workers. Josephine Roche took control of the company after her father died, and she hired John Lawson as her vice president. Roche then invited the UMWA to organize the company’s workers. In many ways, the New Deal of the 1930s finally realized the goals of the Progressive Movement (Chambers 2000; Davis 2000; Litchtenstein 2002). The 1935 Wagner Act effectively outlawed company unions. The act also granted workers the right to unionize and set up a system of regulations and guidelines for union organizing and strikes. This act ushered in the modern practices of federal mediation in labor disputes. In southern Colorado, the miners embraced the UMWA. From the 1930s until the last coalmines closed in 1996, the southern coalfield was a unionized field. UMWA Local 9856 in Trinidad remains active today, even though none of its members currently work in the mines. Since that time the UMWA has organized other workers in southern Colorado, including employees of Las Animas County and health care workers at Mt. San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad (Figure 2.12). The coal industry began a long decline in the 1920s (Long 1991). Other fuels, principally natural gas and petroleum, began to challenge coal’s dominance in the

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2.12. UMWA is here to stay, Somerton, Colorado 2009. Photograph by Randall McGuire.

energy market. In the West, demand for the steel rails produced at the Pueblo steel works and the coke to make them declined (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:342). Increasing mechanization of both coal mining and surface strip mining decreased the number of mines and miners. By 1950, pick-and-shovel loading of coal was an oddity in Colorado mines. The number of coal miners in Colorado peaked at 13,117 in 1923, declined to 3,238 by 1953 (Allen 1966:69), and dropped to 2,116 in 2004 (CMA 2005). During the 1920s, CF&I closed thirteen of its mines, leaving only two open in 1930. World War II revived some mines and towns, but by 1950 CF&I was the only coal producer left in southern Colorado. In the 1970s, CF&I operated only the Allen and Maxwell mines west of Trinidad. The company closed Berwind in 1928 and hired a contractor to bulldoze the standing buildings. Widespread ownership of automobiles and improvements in road networks eliminated the isolation of the mines and the need for company towns. The last remaining company town in southern Colorado shut down in 1947. In 1982, CF&I quenched the fires in the last blast furnace at the steel mill in Pueblo. Today, it operates only electric furnaces to melt scrap steel. The plant still produces rails and wire, but with the cessation of steel production from ore the demand for coke ended. The Allen and Maxwell mines produced coal for electric power plants until CF&I closed both mines in 1996. Today, both the northern and southern coalfields of Colorado are silent. Coal production continues on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains and

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in Wyoming. Every day long trains of coal cars rumble by Ludlow, carrying Wyoming coal to power plants in New Mexico. Remembering Ludlow In May 1918, Rockefeller and King returned to southern Colorado to take the measure of their reforms (Gitelman 1988:239–244). Once in Colorado they were surprised to learn that the UMWA had purchased the forty acres where the Ludlow camp had stood and paid $6,500 for a monument to be erected on it (UMWA 1917). Rockefeller, King, and their wives arrived at Ludlow the afternoon of May 30 as the union began the dedication ceremony for the monument. Rockefeller and both wives waited in the car while King asked union officials if Rockefeller could attend and speak at the ceremony. The union officials thanked King for Rockefeller’s good intentions, but they feared someone might do him harm. They demurred on an invitation to speak to Rockefeller in his car. King returned to the car, and the chauffer whisked the party away. Since 1918, the United Mine Workers of America has maintained the massacre site as a shrine, and descendants of the strikers and union members make regular pilgrimages to the place. UMWA locals take new members to the memorial to swear them in. The monument also served as a focal point for rallies during subsequent labor actions and strikes. On the third Sunday of June each year since 1918, hundreds of working people have gathered on the windswept plains of southern Colorado to commemorate the Ludlow Massacre. Each year members of UMWA’s executive committee have addressed the memorial service. The service is a ritual act to build and reinforce solidarity among working people. Memory helps build the shared consciousness that unites working people in a community for struggle. As discussed previously, between 1997 and 2004, several hundred striking steelworkers from United Steelworkers Locals 2102 and 3267 in Pueblo, ColoÂ� rado, joined the Ludlow memorial service. They walked out on strike against CF&I to stop forced overtime and regain one of the basic rights for which the Ludlow strikers had died: the eight-hour day. The Ludlow Massacre became a powerful symbol in their struggle. The parent company (Oregon Steel) sought to distance itself from the killings of 1914 by altering the name of its Pueblo subsidiary from CF&I to Rocky Mountain Steel. The company wanted to break the union and therefore deprive the steelworkers of another of the basic rights people died for at Ludlow: the right to collective bargaining. In the spring of 2004, the steelworkers won their strike. The monument to the men, women, and children who died at Ludlow still stands on the Colorado plains. However, not everyone in Colorado supports labor’s struggle or wants the memory of Ludlow preserved. The vandalism of

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the monument on May 8, 2003 (discussed in Chapter 1), stunned, shocked, and saddened the union community. Donations from union locals and private individuals poured into the UMWA Local 9856 in Trinidad until the $77,000 necessary to repair the memorial was raised. In November 2003, the statues were removed to California for restoration. That same month Irene Dotson (née Micheli), the girl in the white dress in Dold’s Forbes photograph and one of the last known survivors of the strike, died at age ninety-one. On June 5, 2005, the UMWA and its supporters rededicated the monument with the restored statues. Working people in southern Colorado still struggle for dignity and basic rights. Many of the rights the Ludlow strikers fought and died for, such as the eight-hour day, are threatened in the United States today. Animosity toward union families and their struggles also continues in southern Colorado. Remembering Ludlow remains an active part of working families’ struggle for respect, fair treatment, and a living wage. The events of the Colorado Coalfield War dwell not only in the documents, photographs, and artifacts of the strike but also in the hearts and minds of working people. The photographs of the Colorado Coalfield Strike continue to haunt us today: a silver-haired Mother Jones in a black dress on the streets of Trinidad; uniformed militiamen striking macho poses beside a 75 mm gun; a little girl in a white dress standing with her family in front of their tent; burned-out tents, stoves, and iron bedsteads littering a large field; a man’s body sprawled in an unnatural position on train tracks surrounded by the burned ruins of buildings. The objects the strikers left in the ground also haunt us. The fires that consumed the tent colony transfigured a porcelain doll’s head. The rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns still echoes in a coffeepot riddled with bullet holes. Works Cited Adams, Graham 1966 The Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–1915: The Activities and Findings of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations. Columbia University Press, New York. Allen, James B. 1966 The Company Town in the American West. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Andrews, Thomas G. 2003 The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization, 1870–1915. PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison. 2008 Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Behdad, Ali 2005 A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

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Beshoar, Barron B. 1957 Out of the Depths: The Story of John R. Lawson, a Labor Leader. Golden Bell Press, Denver. Bowers, Lamont 1909 Letter to Mr. J. D. Rockefeller Jr. Binghamton University Library, Special Collections, LM Bowers Collection, Box 28, FF99, Binghamton, NY. 1911 Letter to Mr. J. B. McKennan, Manager, Minnequa Works, Pueblo, Colorado. Binghamton University Library, Special Collections, LM Bowers Collection, Box 28, FF98, Binghamton, NY. 1915 Letter to President Woodrow Wilson, November 6, 1915. Binghamton University Library, Special Collections, LM Bowers Collection, Binghamton, NY. Braverman, Harry 1998 Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Monthly Review Press, New York. Chambers, John Whiteclay 2000 The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. Chernow, Ron 1999 Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Vintage Books, New York. CMA 2005

Colorado Mining Facts. Colorado Mining Association, http://www.colorado mining.org/COMiningFacts.html#link2. Accessed April 27, 2006.

Daniels, Rodger 2002 Coming to America. Perennial, New York. Davis, Mike 2000 Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class. W. W. Norton, New York. Dublin, Thomas, and Walter Licht 2005 The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Fishback, Price V. 1995 An Alternative View of Violence in Labor Disputes in the Early 1900s: The Bituminous Coal Industry 1890–1930. Labor History 36(3):426–456. Gitelman, Howard 1988 Legacy of the Ludlow Massacre: A Chapter in American Industrial Relations. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Henraty, Pete 1912 Letter to John P. White. Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Pennsylvania State University, United Mine Workers, District 15 Correspondence, State College.

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A Terrible Unrest Jameson, Elizabeth 1998 All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek. University of Illinois Press, Champaign. Jones, Mary Harris 1925 The Autobiography of Mother Jones. Charles H. Kerr, Chicago. Le Blanc, Paul 1999 A Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century. Humanity Books, New York. Litchtenstein, Nelson 2002 State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Long, Priscilla 1985 The Women of the C.F.I. Strike, 1913–1914. In Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman, 64–85. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. 1991 Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. Paragon House, New York. Marchand, Roland 2001 Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. University of California Press, Berkeley. Margolis, Eric 1994 Images in Struggle: Photographs of Colorado Coal Camps. Visual Sociology 9(1):4–26. 2000 “Life Is Life”: One Family’s Struggle in the Southern Colorado Coal Fields. Colorado Heritage (Summer):30–47. Martelle, Scott 2007 Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. Rutgers University Press, Rutgers, NY. McGovern, George S., and Leonard F. Guttridge 1972 The Great Coalfield War. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. MSHA 2006

Coal Fatalities for 1900 through 2005. U.S. Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, http://www.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.htm. Accessed April 10, 2006.

Nelson, Daniel 1995 Managers and Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920, 2nd ed. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. The New York Times 1915 Two Women Depict the Battle of Ludlow. The New York Times, February 15, 1915, 1, 7. O’Neal, Mary Thomas 1971 Those Damn Foreigners. Minerva Books, Hollywood.

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Papanikolas, Zeese 1982 Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Pepper, Jerry 1979 Lamont Montgomery Bowers: A Register of His Papers with a Biography. State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton. Reckner, Paul 2009 Social Difference, Community-Building, and Material Social Practice: Solidarity and Diversity at the Ludlow Tent Colony, 1913–14. PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton. Riis, Jacob A. 1890 How the Other Half Lives. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. Scamehorn, H. Lee 1992 Mill and Mine: The CF&I in the Twentieth Century. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Sinclair, Upton 1906 The Jungle. Doubleday and Page, New York. 1917 King Coal. Macmillan, New York. Slichter, S. H. 1919 The Turnover of Factory Labor. B. C. Forbes, New York. Time 1931 UMWA 1912

1913 1917

Rocky Mountain Gesture. Time, September 7. Nationalities Employed in Mines of Colorado during the Year 1912, and Percentage. United Mine Workers of America, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Pennsylvania State University, United Mine Workers, District 15 CorÂ� respondence, State College. Proceedings Special Convention of District 15 United Mine Workers of America Held in Trinidad, Colorado, September 16, 1913. Manuscript on file, Doyle Papers, Western History Collection, Denver Public Library. Contract between the United Mine Workers of America and the Springfield Granite and Marble Company. United Mine Workers of America, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Pennsylvania State University, United Mine Workers, District 15 Correspondence, State College.

West, George P. 1915 Report on the Colorado Strike. U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Washington, DC. Whiteside, James 1990 Regulating Danger. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Wolff, Duane A. 2003 Industrializing the Rockies: Growth, Competition, and Turmoil in the Coalfields of Colorado and Wyoming. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

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A Terrible Unrest Wood, Margaret 2002 “Fighting for Our Homes”: An Archaeology of Women’s Domestic Labor and Social Change in a Working-Class, Coal Mining Community, 1900–1930. PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Zanetell, Emma N.d. Interview with Eric Margolis and Barron Beshoar, transcript on file at the University of Colorado Library, Boulder.

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3

Archaeology and the Colorado Coalfield War

The Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project (CCWAP) strove to complement the written history of the 1913–1914 labor strike in southern Colorado. While the written history provides a thorough description of the events and their larger implications, it does not paint a complete picture of how the events affected the daily lives of the men, women, and children who experienced them. Further, it cannot show the living conditions that led up to the strike or illustrate the strike’s effect on the material conditions of the workers and their families. Such is the nature of history. The archaeology of the CCWAP provides the only means for examining firsthand the daily conditions of life in the coal camps and the strike colony before, during, and after the strike. The project had two main goals: first, to raise public awareness of the coalfield strike and the coal war, Colorado’s rich labor history, and the national and international significance of that history; and second, to gain a better understanding of how the southern coalfield strike was rooted in the coal camps’ material conditions and how the conditions of daily life changed as a result of the strike. To address these goals, project investigators conducted three phases of research: archival studies, field explorations and excavations, and analysis and interpretation, resulting in a variety of outputs. This chapter reviews the research goals,

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methodology, and archaeological fieldwork of the Colorado Coalfield War ArÂ�chaeÂ�ology Project that the authors use in the remainder of the volume. It focuses on six main methodological categories: archival research, determining viability and site identification, site mapping, site testing and feature identification, feature testing and excavation, and oral interviews. Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project Research Questions and Design

Research conducted at the sites of the Ludlow Tent Colony 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield Strike and war and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) coal camp at Berwind sought to understand three main questions. First, how were the events of the strike rooted in everyday life, as evident in the coal company camps? Second, how did conditions in the coal camps change as a result of the strike? And third, what were conditions in the Ludlow Tent Colony really like during the strike? To address these questions, project archaeologists had to explore variations among three historical contexts: coal camp deposits predating, and contemporaneous with, the strike; Ludlow Tent Colony deposits; and coal camp deposits dating to the decade after the strike. The research entailed two main comparisons: variation between pre-strike coal camp and Ludlow Tent Colony material culture and variation between prestrike and post-strike coal camp material culture. The Ludlow strikers’ tent colony (5LA1829) and the coal company town of Berwind (5LA2175) provided the contexts needed to address the research questions and objectives of the project. Variation between the pre-strike coal camps and the Ludlow Tent Colony helped us determine how the causes of the strike were rooted in the daily life of the coal camps. Variation between the pre-strike and post-strike coal camp contexts at Berwind demonstrated how, if at all, the strike changed material conditions in the coal camps and the nature of everyday camp life. Analysis of differences between these contexts also involved considering the variation within contexts. For example, the project aimed to explore whether significant differences existed among ethnic, age, and gender groups in their conditions of everyday life in the coal camps and at the Ludlow Tent Colony. In both the Ludlow Tent Colony and the Berwind coal camp, we considered two scales of analysis: that of the community as a whole (i.e., at the Ludlow Tent Colony as a whole and in a coal camp, the town, and possibly the neighborhood as a whole) and that of the individual household (the tent platform or house lot). For example, at Ludlow the privies were communal and probably filled with trash from the colony, whereas at Berwind each house lot had an individual privy containing trash from the individual household. Middens, on the other hand, reflect material from the wider community. The Ludlow mid-

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den contained material from the entire colony, whereas the middens at Berwind contained material from the immediate neighborhood. Therefore, our analysis had two main, interrelated axes: the household and the supra-household material conditions. The Household

In looking at the household, project archaeologists sought to identify two main factors: the occupants’ ethnicity, religion, or both; and household composition—whether the household was composed of single men or a family. Making these initial identifications permitted researchers to further address issues of ethnicity and gender, discussed in subsequent chapters. In the coal camps we tried to identify ethnicity or ethnic neighborhoods through a combination of documentary research (especially census records), oral histories, and certain classes of artifacts and architectural features, such as hornos (stone bread ovens) (e.g., Wegars 1991). At Ludlow, project archaeologists had to rely primarily on archaeological data to identify ethnicity and religion. Artifacts indicative of ethnicity include religious medallions and certain styles of tobacco pipes. Some embossed bottles may also suggest ethnicity. The identification of ethnicity at Ludlow proved extremely difficult. Beyond ethnicity, a great deal of intrahousehold variation was the result of household composition—whether the house or tent was occupied by single miners, a group of bachelors, or families. At Ludlow it was possible to distinguish between the different kinds of occupation on the basis of the actual size of the tent or tent platform. Very large tents may indicate a barracks of single men. Conversely, very small ones may indicate a single occupant. The artifacts associated with the individual tent platforms also helped inform us about household composition. The presence of toys and baby bottles indicated children. Clothingrelated and personal artifacts, such as certain styles of buttons, shoe parts, jewelry, combs, and similar items, indicated the occupants’ gender. Archaeologists working on twentieth-century logging camps have suggested that artifacts such as decorated ceramics, pressed glass, and fragile glassware may indicate the presence of women (Brashler 1991:64; Franzen 1992:92). This assumption is not unreasonable insofar as these sorts of artifacts suggest the presence of families in an otherwise male environment. Determining whether single men or a family occupied a house was more complicated in the coal camps such as Berwind than at Ludlow. Single men would have stayed in company-run boardinghouses or as boarders with families or widowed women. Some men had their own house or shared a house with other men. We attempted to determine household composition in the coal camps through a combination of historical and archaeological evidence. The

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size of the foundation and the nature of the artifact assemblage, together with census records, maps, and company records, helped illuminate the nature of the household. However, the nature of living conditions at the coal camps made confident identifications much more difficult. Supra-Household Material Conditions

The study of supra-household material conditions by project archaeologists focused on four main areas: the spatial organization of the community, shelter, diet, and consumption. Spatial organization was considered at a community level of analysis. Three main aspects of spatial organization fit the project goals and interests: ethnic/religious segregation, health and sanitation, and defense. Project archaeologists attempted to identify neighborhoods based on groupings of households with similar ethnic or religious affiliations and also on the spatial layout of the community. The presence or absence of such neighborhoods and the material differences between them had the potential to provide information on ethnic segregation, boundary maintenance, and the ways ethnic differences were negotiated during the strike. A second, related issue in looking at spatial organization was health and sanitation. Variation in features such as privies, drains, trash pits, middens, and streets could potentially provide information on the investments mining companies made in the coal camps and whether certain ethnic groups were privileged over others. At Ludlow, the relative standardization of such features may suggest the degree of centralized organization of tent colony affairs. Project archaeologists relied on artifacts and ecofacts to tell us about health. For example, privy soils can yield evidence of particular parasites. Medicine bottles were also a valuable source of information on health, especially when they were embossed. A third issue in looking at spatial organization, one exclusive to Ludlow, was defense. The strikers may have excavated features such as rifle pits (McGovern and Guttridge 1972:217). Such pits could suggest that the strikers were expecting an attack and had an organized plan of defense. We were not able to identify any rifle pits in our excavations. Tent cellars, however, did provide information related to defense. Some historical accounts indicate that the pits were excavated in the month leading up to the attack for purposes of defense. One informant who visited the colony when he was about seven stated that the cellars were created for warmth in winter (Tapai, pers. comm., 1998). Pits could also have been excavated beneath the tents to conceal items such as ammunition and arms from National Guard searches. We know from historical accounts that cellars were used as protection during gunfire. The cellars likely had multiple uses. Archaeological investigation was able to shed light on the functions of these pits,

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the degree to which their plan was standardized, and whether they constituted a series of individual responses to different problems. The main artifacts that provided information about defense, and about the battle itself, were gun parts, cartridges, and bullets. Cartridges and gun parts disclosed the sorts of weapons possessed by strikers. Bullets, with evidence of having been fired, were probably from National Guard guns, making possible a comparison of the relative armaments of the two sides. The two sides’ military capabilities, in particular weapon types and minimum numbers, were evaluated according to established research in battlefield analysis (Scott et al. 1989). In the analysis of shelter in the coal camps and at Ludlow, researchers considered the construction of the houses and tents, as well as “amenities” such as furnishings, plumbing, and lighting. Project archaeologists looked at the size of the structure, that is, the amount of floor space as reflected in the size of the tent platform or the foundation. This gave us some idea of how many people could have lived there. Through the analysis of architectural features such as postholes and stake holes, nail alignments, and the materials used in constructing foundations and cellars, we were able to ascertain construction differences among different areas of the towns, the degree of standardization in construction, and whether construction improved after the strike. Artifacts such as nails, grommets, and window glass also provided relevant clues in this regard. For example, nail pennyweight is an indicator of, minimally, the intended function of the nail (Fontana and Greenleaf 1962; Sutton and Arkush 1996:164). Furnishings (broadly defined) were also considered part of housing. Artifacts such as stove and lamp parts, washtubs, plumbing and gas hardware, and electrical artifacts provided information about how the structure was heated or lit, how cooking was done, and how water was obtained for domestic labor. These items can inform us about the nature of certain aspects of domestic labor in coal camps and the tent colony and differences in living conditions among different areas of the community. The project considered aspects of diet in the coal camps and the tent colony. Project archaeologists analyzed data from cellars, privies, trash pits, and middens to determine diet practices and differences. At Ludlow, these features provided information at a community-wide level of analysis. In the coal camps, the level of analysis depended on the particular circumstances. For example, in the coal camps, trash pits and privies were often associated with individual house lots, although there were community dumps. However, historical sources also indicate that in some coal camp neighborhoods before the strike, privies may have served as many as ten households. Features at Ludlow likely to provide information on individual tent households were the artifact assemblages associated with the tent platforms, the tent drainage ditches (which likely accumulated trash from the immediate area), and possibly certain stratigraphic contexts of

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the tent cellars (assuming deposition of de facto refuse from the catastrophic abandonment and burning of the colony). To compare differences in diet at the Ludlow Tent Colony, we analyzed faunal remains, plant remains such as seeds (from privy and pit deposits), and artifacts such as bottles, cans, and certain ceramic and tin-ware artifacts from cellars and middens. We had hoped species identification of faunal and floral remains could tell us whether and how the miners were supplementing their diet through hunting and trapping wild animals and gathering plant foods. However, these analyses were incomplete and less informative than we had originally hoped. The formal aspects of bottles and tin cans (e.g., glass color, size, shape, form, closure type, means of opening) provided general information about the original contents. Labeled or embossed cans and bottles obviously provide much more specific information about contents. As bottling was still a fairly local industry in the early twentieth century, bottles have the greatest potential for informing us about local trade networks. Differences in diet, or the lack thereof, among households and between the colony and the coal camps provided information on ethnicity, domestic labor, the dominance of the company store in the camps, and the degree of union support of the tent colony. Certain ceramic and tin-ware artifacts (e.g., coffee- and teawares) are also indicative of diet. These artifacts, along with jars, bottles, and faunal remains, can provide information on how food was stored, cooked, and consumed. For example, butchery marks on bone and the presence of canning jars, condiment bottles, and different kinds of kitchen vessels can all provide data on how food was prepared and cooked. The social role of food and drink service and associated ceramics has been the subject of a considerable literature in historical archaeology. These ceramics are generally seen as part of the household’s presentation of itself to the broader community (Beaudry and Mrozowski 2001; Cantwell and Wall 2001; Claney 1996; Fitts 1999; Goodwin 1999; Overland 2004; Wall 1991, 1999; Yamin 2001), as part of competitive social display or emulation of upper classes (Fitts 1999; Martin 1994), the building of community networks (Burley 1989), demonstration of adherence to a certain cultural worldview (Deetz 1977; Fitts 1999; Leone and Potter 1988; Wall 1999), or the representation of certain political or social beliefs (Shackel 1996). In examining consumption, project archaeologists were fortunate in having access to documents, including catalogs and company store records, that provided prices for many of the artifacts. This permitted us to compare the relative financial worth of different assemblages, in turn allowing insight into amounts of disposable income controlled by different households and how the households chose to allocate their income. In summary, the project sought to examine variation among three different historical communities: coal camps predating, and contemporaneous with, the

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strike; the Ludlow Tent Colony; and coal camps that date to the decade after the strike. Within each of these communities, the project looks at the interaction among households, in particular ethnic/religious affiliation and household composition; and supra-household material conditions, concentrating on spatial organization, shelter, diet, and consumption. By comparing the pre-strike and post-strike coal camp contexts, it is possible to see how conditions changed through time. By comparing the pre-strike contexts with the Ludlow Tent Colony, it is possible to see why these conditions changed. Archaeological Findings The research design and questions outlined here guided archaeological fieldwork for six field seasons. Each season addressed specific questions. In 1997, project archaeologists excavated a trench at Ludlow and confirmed the presence of intact subsurface deposits. During the 1998 season, emphasis was on defining the precise nature of the known features and on identifying and testing additional features in different areas of the colony. In 1999 the project continued investigation of features identified at Ludlow in 1998, conducted testing to identify additional features, and identified features using a photo overlay technique. A field chief and crew also conducted testing in two areas of Berwind that had the potential to yield deposits significant to the research design. Additional testing at Berwind was also conducted during the 2000 field season. In both the 2000 and 2001 seasons, project leaders concentrated on intensive excavations in two cellars and identifying tent pads located during the 1999 field season at Ludlow. The 2002 field season focused heavily on site layout and public interpretation. In all years we tested the midden area near the arroyo at Ludlow that is in danger of eroding away. Over the five years in which the project excavated at the sites of Ludlow and Berwind, certain goals and methods were employed consistently every year: archival research, feature identification, feature testing, midden testing, Berwind testing, mapping, and oral histories. Each will be discussed below. Phase One: Archival Research

Archival investigations aided in the development of research questions and identifying which data classes would best address the project’s questions. Project archaeologists conducted research using archival sources, such as census records (Wood 2002), newspapers, company publications, government hearings, and oral histories. Secondary accounts also proved a great asset. These accounts discussed written histories of the Colorado Coalfield War of 1913–1914 (Beshoar

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1957; Foner 1980; Gitelman 1988; Long 1991; McGovern and Guttridge 1972), daily life in the southern Colorado coalfields (Allen 1966; Clyne 1999; Deutsch 1987), and general mining history (Laslett 1996). The research into archival and documentary sources addressed two main goals. First, the sources provided historical background on the region. They shed light on extreme events, such as labor strikes, but also on daily life and cultural practices. Second, they provided information that led to a better understanding of the archaeological record. For example, the sources supplied clues to the positioning and layout of structures in both Berwind and the Ludlow Tent Colony. Primary and secondary documents also offered a context for anticipating the presence of certain classes and specific types of material culture and described how individuals might have used the materials. More specific research was geared at finding specific references to events and people and how they related to the archaeological record. For example, primary and secondary sources revealed that Mary Petrucci was an important figure in the events on the day of the massacre (Long 1985; USCIR 1916:8196). References specifically detailed the position of her tent in the Ludlow Tent Colony. Project archaeologists attempted to use this information to identify the position of her tent through survey to develop an understanding of the layout of the colony. Project archaeologists had immeasurable help identifying and analyzing the historical record. Students and scholars working on their own specific research problems added a basic understanding of coal camp life and the strike. These researchers focused on interesting topics the project would have had insufficient time to address, such as gender (Wood 2002), memory (Walker 2003), landscape archaeology ( Jacobson, this volume), foodways (Gray, this volume), and medicine (Horn, this volume). Each of these studies required a look into archival and documentary sources in its own unique way. For example, Jacobson (2006) concentrated on government hearings such as those of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations (USCIR 1916) to identify specific references to the use of space in the hearings. These references included remarks on features such as tent construction methods, feature locations, and layout of the camps. The inclusion of each individual study in the overall knowledge of the CCWAP has added a more nuanced depth to the understanding of events. Phase Two: Determining Viability and Identification of Appropriate Sites Ludlow

In 1997 a Colorado Historical Society–State Historic Fund (CHS-SHF) minigrant and a Denver University Faculty Research Fund grant supported six weeks of preliminary survey and test excavations at Ludlow. Our aim was to investigate

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the integrity of the site and to evaluate whether it was viable for archaeological excavations using two main strategies: a dog-leash survey and the excavation of a test trench at the Ludlow site. This test trench exposed burned wood and ash stains that indicated the remains of a tent platform. Dog Leashes. In 1997 we conducted counts of surface cultural material at the Ludlow Tent Colony using one-meter-radius “dog leashes” at ten-meter intervals. A “dog leash” is the circular area within which the artifact count is taken. In 1997 these data permitted us to identify the extent of the actual colony and the trash midden at the arroyo. A more detailed analysis of the data conducted in 1998 provided information on the internal structure of the colony. Project analysts input artifact counts originating from the dog leashes into Surfer to determine artifact concentrations for the Ludlow Tent Colony. The Surfer map was imported into the AutoCAD site map to aid in the determination of test excavation locations under the assumption that high artifact concentrations were related to feature location (Figure 3.1). Mechanical Stripping. In 1998 we also removed the rootmat and disturbed soil from a 210-meter-long by 2-meter-wide strip using a skid loader. After the skid loader had removed the disturbed soil, we shovel-scraped the trench to identify features and artifact concentrations. This trench (Locus 5) confirmed that the tent locations were not going to be represented by massive concentrations of charcoal and burned wood, as we had initially hoped. One likely burned plank floor was identified, but otherwise potential tent locations were indicated by discolored soil and artifact clusters. Berwind

To examine comparative material for Ludlow, we focused on the coal camp of Berwind, located approximately three miles southwest of the Ludlow Tent Colony in a narrow canyon of the same name. This site is located on private land that was recently subdivided, and some owners were beginning to build houses on parts of the old coal camp. Project archaeologists were able to gain permission to map and do limited excavations on the land while it was still owned by the developer. CF&I owned the coal camp of Berwind, which was established in 1890 and occupied until 1928 when the mine was closed down. Then the town was largely depopulated. Project archaeologists mapped the surface remains of the camp, including Berwind, Tollerburg (the town that merges with Berwind to the south), and two canyons that shoot off of Berwind Canyon—Stock and School canyons—and created a site map showing features associated with the different loci identified. We also conducted test excavations in different loci during

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3.1. Dog-leash density map. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.


the 1999 field season to determine whether we could identify pre-strike and poststrike contexts to help address the research goals. We were able to locate two loci that dated to these time periods. The remains of houses and privies are clearly visible at Berwind. Based on these preliminary tests, we determined that enough material did indeed remain—even at the tent colony of Ludlow, which was only occupied for a little over a year. Phase Three: Site Mapping

In any archaeological project, one of the first goals is to create a comprehensive site map to help the archaeologists understand the site as a whole before exploring specific areas in greater detail. Provenience control was established at each site using a hierarchy of designations. This section discusses the types of detailed site maps project archaeologists created for both Ludlow and Berwind, as well as the provenience control used at both sites. Ludlow

Archaeologists established a site grid to map the Ludlow Tent Colony site. A datum was placed at the south-center section of the site and given the grid designation of 500N/500E/100 meters above datum. From this datum we placed a grid based on 30-meter squares across the lot owned by the United Mine Workers of America. We recorded positional data into an AutoCAD map using the software AutoCAD LT. This allowed the basic recording of features as well as excavation data in an analytical format. Dr. Randall McGuire initiated the mapping of the Ludlow Tent Colony site, recording features and excavation units, while Dan Broockmann began the AutoCAD file and continued it through the 1999 field season. Michael Jacobson continued the mapping from 2000 through the finalization of the project. AutoCAD allowed project archaeologists to separate themes—such as each field season’s excavations, different survey blocks, and non-Ludlow features—into discernible features (see Figure 3.2). Elevation Map. During the 2002 field season, an extreme drought retarded the growth of vegetation normally found at the site. The long wild grasses that generally obscure the ground surface did not grow that year, leaving only small square patches of short green grass in apparently depressed areas. These patches generally fell along diagonal lines that corresponded with the orientation of the tent colony. We hypothesized that these areas were the depressed and disturbed deposits of tent cellars, and we applied an alternate survey technique to this hypothesis. Using the Sokkia total station, field crew measured points on the site

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3.2. Site map showing all features tested and excavated at Ludlow, 1998–2002. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.

location systematically at increments of every two meters in a block across the site. The elevation measurements were then analyzed using the software program Surfer 8 to map the elevation changes of the site. The resulting map shows a general decrease in elevation from the high point of the site in the southwest area moving north and east. This change is the result of a natural decrease in

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elevation from the foothills west of the site to the plains east of the site. There was no discernible change in elevation from cultural behavior. There was one crater-like area of abrupt change in elevation; we have described it in project notes and mapping. This feature was either a watering hole for cattle or a reconstructed tent cellar created for a documentary on the Ludlow Massacre. This mapping project gave no definitive identification of tent cellars based on elevation changes. Post-occupational disturbances and depositions may have limited the alterations to elevation in the landscapes. Berwind

Our first objective at Berwind was to survey and map the entire town in order to link areas of the town to different historical periods. Specifically, we wanted to identify areas of the town that dated to before the strike (1890–1914) and areas that dated to after the strike (1915–1931). This is important because many of the questions we addressed dealt with the changes that occurred in coal mining communities as a result of the strike and the Ludlow Massacre. As discussed earlier, we identified specific neighborhoods within the coal camp. The geographic extent of the town required mapping crews to demarcate two separate datums at either end of the neighborhoods. The large distance between the two individual datums necessitated separate grids. Areas were mapped using an EDM recording both vertical and horizontal positioning of points. Areas mapped included natural features such as streams and elevation changes; modern infrastructural features such as roads, terraces, and bridges; and cultural features such as foundations, fence posts, ovens, and privies. Additionally, archaeological test units were mapped (see Figures 3.3–3.7). Provenience Control

Provenience control at both sites consisted of five levels of designation: site, locus, unit, feature, and stratum/level. • Site: Site names and numbers were written on every document and bag. • Locus: The project archaeologists designated loci within each site. At Berwind, these consisted of neighborhoods. At Ludlow, they were arbitrary archaeological work areas. At Berwind, loci were designated with capital letters A–Z, and, as necessary, subdivisions within a locus were designated with numbers; for example, A.1, A.2, and so on. At Ludlow, loci were differentiated through numbers; for example, 1, 2, and so on. • Unit: The basic unit of provenience control was the one-meter square at both sites.

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3.3. Series of maps for Berwind, including Stock and School canyons and Tollerburg. Map 1 of 5. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.





Archaeology and the Colorado Coalfield War • Feature: Features were designated with a feature number. The numbers ran continuously within each site and from the previous year. We numbered features within features as subfeatures, getting a decimal designation; for example, the larger feature might be 10, while the smaller features within it would be 10.1, 10.2, and so on. • Stratum and level: Within the one-meter squares, natural and cultural strata were designated with a stratum letter. If arbitrary levels were excavated within strata, they were designated with a level number. The surface was designated by an “S” and rootmat by “R.” Below that, they were alphabetical, A–Z.

Phase Four: Site Testing and Feature Identification

The identification of households and their associated features was a central concern for project archaeologists at both Ludlow and Berwind because of our research interests, discussed earlier. As most of the structures at Ludlow were tents, we did not expect substantial architectural footprints, especially since the site has been subjected to cattle trampling for the past eighty years. However, despite the ephemeral nature of the site and the subsequent disturbance, project archaeologists were able to identify partial tent outlines and cellars. We were particularly interested in identifying features to give us an idea of the overall extent and layout of the colony, both as a guide for testing efforts and to provide information on the organization of the colony itself. Over the years, the project leaders used, or intended to use, a number of combined methods to identify the layout of the colony and features within the colony: photographic overlay, remote sensing, hand augering, and test excavations. Photographic Overlay

In 1998, 1999, and 2002 we attempted to overlay negatives of historical photographs of the tent colony onto the current landscape (Deetz 1993; Prince 1988). Our original plan was to identify tent locations. The basic premise of overlaying historical photographs on the current landscape is that one should be able to line up landscape features in a photograph with those in the modern landscape, thus determining the modern location of historical cultural features. This requires a camera with a removable viewfinder so negatives of the historical photographs can be cut to fit the viewfinder. After reassembling the camera with the negative in place, one sees the historical photograph overlaid on the landscape within the view of the camera. Theoretically, it is then possible to look through the viewfinder, line up historical landscape elements with contemporary ones that have remained unchanged, and locate those historical features that have disappeared. Beyond the technical requirements, this technique also requires surviving

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landscape elements to line up with, and knowing the exact location of, the original photographer’s position. Small errors in lining up the image can result in gross errors in the final result. For this technique to work, it is also important that the lens be as close as possible to the original lens. Generally this information is not available, but the archaeologists, in consultation with the curator at the Aultman Studio in Trinidad, were able to identify the probable type of camera and lens used by Lou Dold, who took many of the photographs of Ludlow, including the original aerial shots in 1914. It is unfortunate that many of the colony photos were taken from the west, which means that eastern Colorado forms the backdrop, a landscape not noted for its relief. The useful features in the photos were the Black Hills to the east, the section road to the south of the colony, and the extant buildings of Bayes Ranch to the northeast. The 2002 photos from the ground faced a variety of directions. The photos facing west, north, and south were the most successful, as those directions offered the most relief in the landscape and the most readily identifiable features. Our attempts to use Dold’s photographs were unsuccessful in 1998 because of a number of technical issues, including the fact that the camera lens used that year was incompatible with the one Dold used to take the original photographs. In 1999 the problems were resolved, and a team under the direction of Randall McGuire and Dan Broockmann was able to correlate the historical photographs with an acceptable amount of modern terrain. Through consultation with the curator of the Aultman Museum, we were able to identify the original camera and lens Dold used and a comparable modern lens. 1999 Photo Overlay. In 1999, project archaeologists used a panoramic triptych of the colony taken shortly before the massacre. A slight time interval between the photos is evident in discrepancies in the presence of certain people where two photos overlap. This time interval is not significant, though, as there is little discernible change in the snow on the ground. The photos were taken from an elevated point west of the colony. Of the three parts of the triptych, the southernmost photo was the most promising for lining up the camera, as it showed both the road and the Black Hills. The location and elevation are consistent with a water tower located on the railroad tracks north of the section road. For designation purposes only, the tents were numbered on the photo (Figure 3.8 shows the photograph used). These numbers do not correlate with the original tent numbers of the colony. The camera used was a standard 35 mm Nikon SLR with a removable viewfinder and a 50 mm lens. Negatives of the three photographs of the colony were printed up separately and trimmed to fit the viewfinder. The negatives were

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3.8. Bird’s-eye view of Ludlow Colony used in photo overlay project. Photograph by Lewis Dold. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, z-193, Denver, CO.

placed in the viewfinder backward to compensate for the reversal of the camera lenses. Once the technical problems of making negatives and fitting them to the camera had been solved, the main problem was setting up the camera in the correct location. For the 1999 season, the fact that the photo was not taken from the ground but from a point that is now empty air compounded the problem, adding a third dimension to the other two. After establishing the approximate location of the tower from the colony panorama and another photo of the tower itself, the project rented a scissor lift with drive controls to get the necessary height. The north-south placement of the camera was easier to judge than the east-west placement or the height. Therefore, the location of the tents on the north-south axis is probably more accurate than the one on the east-west axis. Comparison of the photo with the mapped results suggests that the mapping of the colony using the photo overlay may be compressed on the east-west axis. The placement of the westernmost (closest) tent locations is more accurate than those farther away simply because slight errors, even shifts in the position of one’s eye at the viewfinder, became so much greater with distance. Error also results from parallax, the optical phenomenon that makes railroad tracks seem to converge when viewed over a long distance. There is still the possibility of error in the closest tent locations, but it is a matter of a few meters. The trees in the memorial area also blocked our view of some portions of the site. The team

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was able, with varying degrees of confidence, to map about 40 percent (52 of 132) of the tents identifiable in the photos. Project team members then attempted to ground truth our results through hand-auger regimes and area test excavations. Unless there was a tent cellar identified through augering, identifying tent locations was difficult because they require large-scale area excavations. Until it is possible to test some of the tent locations through such excavation, one means of at least increasing the confidence in the method was to overlay the CAD map generated by the photo overlay with the contour map of artifact distributions generated from the 1997 fieldwork. There does appear to be a correspondence between linear artifact concentrations and the tentatively identified tent rows. Tents 32–34, 41, 42, and 46 lie along an artifact concentration, as do 117, 118, and 120 and 37, 38, and 47. Tents 51, 53, and 54 are associated with a particularly dense and unusual artifact concentration, possibly a communal dining area (CCWAP 2000). It may be that the Locus 1 tent excavated in 1998 lies outside the boundaries of the original colony. However, Tents 37, 38, 47, 51, 53, and 54 are at the fringes of the colony, and their exact placement must be viewed with caution. Archaeologists augered some of the identified tent locations, but this did not reveal conclusive evidence. If there was no cellar or the augering missed the cellar, then test excavations would be most likely to determine whether a tent was in fact present or not. 2002 Photographic Overlay Project. In the 2002 field season, project leaders and crew chiefs decided to attempt the photographic overlay from the ground level within the tent colony. The overall methods were the same. Using multiple images taken within the colony and outside the colony at a lower angle, project members believed we could get increasingly accurate locations of tents and cellars. The team then shot the flags in with the EDM and, once the field season was over, entered them into AutoCAD LT to combine them with electronic site maps. Project leaders used eight photographs of the colony taken at different times, both before and after the massacre. We also assumed the photographs were taken at different locations within the camp based on the background landscape. Field researchers chose the photographs based on the marked natural landscape in the backgrounds, such as ridgelines. Photographs used will be named by their Denver Public Library (DPL) call numbers. We chose nine photographs to test in the field: Colorado Historical Society (CHS) Western History Collection photograph call numbers x-60558, x-60354, x-60483, x-60454, x-60472, x-63219, x-60359, x-60468, and x-60339. The matching of the landscapes from the photographs to those in the present worked with little complication. However, two photographs (x-60468 and x-60339), with the Black Hills as the landscape background, were not success-

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fully matched to the present-day landscape. The background was not distinct enough to convincingly match the photograph with the landscape from a single vantage point. The photographs we placed with confidence were located in the monument area. They are x-60354, x-60483, x-60454, x-60472, and x-63219. Our confidence was based on nearly complete to complete alignment of the background of the photograph with that in the present landscape. These were based on ridgelines that were closer to the site and that therefore were more distinct and could be located with more certainty than the ridgelines of the Black Hills. Photograph x-60354 we located at N511/E482 facing west. The photo depicted Front Street with a building. The photograph appears to be reversed in the print. This was evident when we examined and compared the tent layout and ridgeline. When the slide was flipped over, it matched up with the ridgeline. The farthest west tent would have been Tent no. 1, Mary Petrucci’s tent, and its position fits with the testimonies. Photograph x-60483 was taken at N512/E434 facing east. The photograph depicted stove ruins and the camp after it was burned. The scene appears to be west-southwest of the monument. The far ridges of the Black Hills are lined up, but the close features are subject to parallax. Test units and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) should help to ground truth. The Red Cross photo was blocked by the monument and pavilion, and it is questionable how the tent lineup is working. Photograph x-60454 was located at N508/E435 facing east. The photograph depicts the gymnastic set that was set up in the southwest portion of the camp. It is still in the area of photos x-60483 and x-63219. The photo lines up closely with the other features, although there is little ridgeline in the background with which to match it up. Photograph x-60472 was taken at N505/E435 facing east again. The photo depicts the gymnastic set again from a slightly different angle. This time it matched up well with both ridgelines. Features flagged from the images discussed previously and four people in the background are of the same scale as the people from the other picture. From this photograph we were able to estimate where the gymnastic set was located on the site, southwest of the monument and south-southwest of the Death Pit. Photograph x-63219 was taken from N504/E431 facing east. This photograph depicts men and women of the Red Cross standing in the ruins of the colony just after the massacre. Remains include bed frames, pots, pans, washtubs, ovens, barrels, tent frames, and mattress frames. While we could line up the photograph, it was difficult to locate the cellars from the photograph. We could not ascertain the coordinates for photograph x-60359 facing eastnortheast. The photograph turned out to be backward like x-60354. After switching sides, the negative matched everywhere, no matter the position. We flagged

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tent fronts near Locus 13; however, we are not confident about these locations, so we did not record them. Photograph x-60468 facing north also proved impossible to place with certainty. The photograph depicts a well with children standing beside it. The ridge matched up from the photo. However, parallax was an issue in that the people did not match up to buildings, and if the wooden structure was the same for the colony, it was too far north. For this reason we chose not to use this photograph. The final photograph, x-60339 facing east, was also difficult to place. The photograph depicts Main Street with tents. This photo has the same problem as the other Main Street photo. The Black Hills were too indistinct to match up. All in all, five of the nine photographs provided additional information on the camp layout using the photographic overlay project. We were disappointed that the photographs of Main Street did not work out. The Black Hills proved too far away to provide an accurate point of reference. However, the photographs depicting Front Street and the area near the monument provided important location information for the project. Remote Sensing

Historical documentation indicates that a number of the tents had cellars or pits beneath them. The miners used many of these pits as trash pits during the cleanup after the fire and massacre. Throughout the occupation of the tent colony, strikers used the pits for storage, protection, and additional living space. Given these facts, the pits contain a large quantity of various artifacts ranging from bed frames to buttons. During the 1998 and 2002 field seasons, we attempted to identify these deep features using remote sensing techniques, GPR (1998 and 2002), and Cesium (1998) and Proton magnetometers (2000 and 2001). In 1998, Dr. Larry Conyers of the University of Denver surveyed a 50-metersquare block of the tent colony using the GPR and magnetometer. While both remote sensing methods picked up variations in the soil, Conyers reported that they did not appear to be significant. There may be too much clay in the soils in this area for these techniques to be useful, although it is also possible that there were simply no deep features in the sampled area. In addition to Conyers’s aid with the GPR surveys, we enlisted the use of magnetometer surveys. Dr. Peiling Yao of the Colorado School of Mines conducted a magnetometer survey of the Ludlow Tent Colony in conjunction with this project in 1998. The survey was used to identify burned areas or concentrations of metallic items we assumed would be associated with historical features.

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During the 2002 field season, both GPR and magnetometer tests were attempted again. Students of Conyers surveyed two areas of the Ludlow MasÂ� sacre site using a technique to track hits from the GPR in real time in which possible metal and subsurface anomalies were recorded and examined for patterning. In this process, one person ran the GPR antennae along transects in the blocks while another individual observed the readings and called out possible hits. Other members of the team marked these possible hits with flags that were then mapped. Field supervisors analyzed the maps for concentrations of hits and determined possible features under the assumption that high concentration of GPR hits may coincide with features. This process allowed for realtime identification of possible features without the wait for lab analysis of GPR data. We first investigated the memorial area (Figure 3.2) to identify the locations of tents and cellars. We were primarily interested in identifying the location of a tent that belonged to Mary Petrucci, one of the two survivors of the Death Pit and well represented in the archival history of the Colorado Coalfield War. Through statements in the archival evidence, she locates her tent in the southwest corner of the site, identified as Tent “#1” in the union’s tent numbering system for the colony. Locating her tent would aid understanding of the layout of the colony, as well as link a tent and specific material culture to an individual listed in the history of the conflict. We also tested in this area to test the photo overlays from the 1999 and 2002 seasons. By overlapping different survey techniques, the process of feature identification was refined. After GPR investigation and the identification of possible features, auger testing was used to ground truth the existence of features. Unfortunately, we were never able to confidently identify the exact location of Petrucci’s tent. The second area, measuring eighty-five by thirty meters east-west, was located in the field portion of the site. Again, the goal was to detect features such as tent outlines, tent cellars, and streets or pathways within the colony. Here, field supervisors judgmentally chose to center research in this location to cover the far eastern areas covered in the 1999 photo overlay. Also, with intensive surface excavation conducted in the western area of the site at Locus 13 for two consecutive seasons (2000 and 2001), there had been limited research in the south end of the site. Our field crew and Dr. Conyers’s students conducted GPR analysis tracking hits in real time. We tested the apparent hits in this area using auger testing and surface unit excavation to ground truth the identification of features. Also during the 2002 field season, we applied magnetometer survey to the site for feature identification. Mona Charles of Fort Lewis College conducted the survey using a gradient magnetometer. We centered our survey area on two blocks outside the monument area. The first was an overlap of the 2002 GPR

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survey already discussed. The second area was a 20-meter-wide north-south transect to the north of the first block. We overlapped the magnetometer, GPR, and photo overlay techniques in this section to provide a variety of lines of evidence to help understand the positioning of tents in a very difficult section of the site for locating features. Since magnetometers read variations in magnetic fields often caused by intense heat or metal, we assumed that the effects of the massacre through the fire and the cleanup following the massacre would create features readily identified through magnetometer testing. In addition, by overlapping GPR and magnetometer techniques with the photographic overlay technique, we hoped to correct the photo overlay errors in parallax and gain a more accurate idea of the location of features. The variation in the size and placement of the magnetometer survey block with our site grid is a result of Mona Charles’s specific methods. She ran transects within 20-meter by 20-meter blocks, while our site grid is based on 30-m grid squares. Therefore, the blocks for the magnetometer were plotted using measuring tapes. The difference in size led to a slight deviation in coverage between the GPR and magnetometer surveys, although the majority of the area covered overlapped. We positioned the second block to cover areas not previously surveyed. The overlapping of the photo overlay, GPR, and magnetometer was the primary goal of the 2002 surveys, but as the memorial area of the site is surrounded by metal fencing and is sided by a railroad track running along the west side, we were concerned about contamination of the magnetometer readings in that area. Therefore, we repositioned the survey block judgmentally in a section that had not been covered through previous surveys or excavations. The block’s transect covered a north-south area at the north end of the first colony. We defined features discovered in this area as identifying the normal tent outlines and cellars but also the boundaries between the first and second tent colonies. It would help to determine if there were any features such as privies in the area on the fringe of the colony and with which colony Feature 1 (first tent identified) was associated. For both blocks, any possible features identified through magnetometer were tested using a hand auger. Remote sensing provided a clearer picture of the layout of the site and the location of possible features than originally thought possible because of the ephemeral nature of the Ludlow Tent Colony site. The ephemeral features are not readily visible using pedestrian survey or test pits. Additionally, because of the shallowness of the site, test pits could potentially damage indistinct features such as tent outlines. Remote sensing provided noninvasive investigations and permitted an initial understanding of the layout of the colony that led to future testing and excavation.

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Hand-Auger Regime

As noted, we tested the possible features identified by the photographic overlay and remote sensing using a hand auger with a six-inch bucket. Each year field crews conducted an auger regime. Each auger test pit was cored to a depth of approximately two meters of sterile soil. The dirt from each bucket was screened through a ¼-inch screen and replaced after the auger hole was completed. Each hole was mapped and recorded if cultural material was present. Project archaeologists determined success by the presence and identification of cultural material, such as artifacts, ash, coal inclusions, or rust. During the 2001 and 2002 field seasons, each hole was mapped and recorded regardless of success. Additionally, field notes recorded any depositional patterns detectable that might suggest possible feature identification. The positioning of auger tests followed both judgmental and systemic sampling strategies. The areas surveyed through photo overlays and remote sensing initially defined the blocks subject to remote sensing. Within these blocks, we employed a systematic sampling strategy, placing tests at increments of approximately two meters. During the 2001 season, influenced by the photo overlay and testimonial sources from the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, project archaeologists attempted to identify the location of Mary Petrucci’s tent. She had provided an account to the commission with a basic description of her tent and its possible location. We presumed that the location of her tent was in an area now fenced in by the memorial. Archaeologists based this location on her testimony that she was close to Tent #58, or what came to be known as the Death Pit. The project matched the Death Pit, which is now marked and memorialized at the Ludlow Memorial, with the photographic overlay during the 1999 season. By linking the testimonial evidence and the photographic overlay, archaeologists made a basic assumption about the position of Mary Petrucci’s tent. In an attempt to identify the location of Petrucci’s tent, project archaeologists placed a total of thirty-three auger holes in the area. Each pair of auger probes was 2 meters apart along several vertical lines. Each vertical line was initially offset from the previous line by 1.4 meters. However, as testing proceeded, the crew made further probes that filled in gaps. The systemic placement of these tests allowed project archaeologists to identify possible feature boundaries before more intensive test excavation was conducted. Unfortunately, we identified little material culture from the original Ludlow Tent Colony in this area. We believe the lack of culture remains within the monument area is a consequence of the construction of the area into a memorial to the massacre. The ground was heavily graded and then graveled, erasing the shallow deposits. Project archaeologists also annually employed a program of judgmental hand-auger testing based on surface indications such as artifact scatters and veg-

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etation changes. This process of judgmental survey was intensified during the 2002 field season because of the aforementioned drought in the region. Project archaeologists tested the rectangular-shaped grassy areas with one to three auger holes placed in random sections of those areas to confirm or reject the identification of a cellar. If the areas appeared to contain cultural deposits, they were further tested using 1-meter by 1-meter test excavations. Five additional cellars were identified during the 2002 field season using the vegetation and were tested through auger holes and test excavations. Phase Five: Feature Testing and Excavation At both Ludlow and Berwind we focused our attention on features that would help address the research questions. Of the twenty-three different loci identified at Ludlow, several produced features significant to understanding the site and the research questions, including two cellars, one possible privy, and several tent outlines. These were excavated either completely or nearly completely. As noted earlier, two areas at Berwind also appeared to date to the appropriate time periods for answering the research questions; one area dated to the occupation prior to the strike, and one postdated the strike. Privies and midden areas were excavated in each of these areas. Ludlow

Test units consisted of one-meter-square units excavated vertically according to stratum. Test units were placed adjoining one another to identify broad patterns linked to features and to allow for the basic identification of tent outlines. Tent cellars required an alternate excavation technique than tent outlines because of their vertical size and boundaries. The surface boundaries identified through test units provided guidelines for the boundaries of tent cellars but did not reflect actual boundaries for the entire depth of the feature. Cellar features were bisected and excavated in halves to keep track of artifact and subfeature locations as well as to provide a stratigraphic profile for the feature. After crews had excavated and mapped the first half of a feature, they removed the second half. In both halves, stratigraphic layers determined the vertical contextual boundaries of recorded excavation. Each stratum was excavated and recorded separately. Feature 74, a large tent cellar, was bisected in both north-south and east-west directions to help in the recording of depositional and artifactual contexts. Within the cellar features, project archaeologists recorded subfeatures and artifacts by quadrant. The eastern quadrants were excavated in the 2000 season, with the western quadrants excavated in the 2001 field season. We profiled the feature’s stratigraphy after excavating the appropriate bisection.

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Tent Pad Locations—Locus 1 and Locus 13. Two different areas along the west edge of the colony produced tent pad outlines with no associated cellars (Locus 1 and Locus 13; Figure 3.2). These excavations were conducted during different years and were identified using different techniques. Locus 1 was identified in the test trench excavated during the 1998 field season, while Features 99 and 100 of Locus 13 were identified by soil stains and artifact concentrations on the surface. Locus 1. In Locus 1 we excavated a total of 109 square meters to reveal and define a complete tent platform (Figure 3.9) and parts of three adjacent tents to the southeast and northwest and possibly to the north. This locus was instrumental in discerning the orientation of the tent colony on the property, understanding the construction and layout of individual tents, and visualizing the relationship between tents. Data from the surface collections made during the 1997 field season (Figure 3.1) suggested pronounced northeast-to-southwest alignments. The excavation at Locus 1 confirmed this alignment and demonstrated that the tent colony was oriented diagonal to the railroad and section road. In other words, the front of the colony faced toward that intersection. The tent platform identified in Locus 1 was defined by two coal- and clinker-filled ditches to the northeast and southwest, a shallow silt-filled ditch to the southwest, and a linear dark charcoal-flecked stain to the northeast. The ditch was about twelve centimeters deep, straight-sided, and deliberately constructed. Photographs of the tent colony show shallow ditches around some of the tents and reveal that many of the tents had small berms around the edges. These berms presumably helped weigh down the tents, blocked the wind, and provided insulation. We also sampled another shallow (approximately six centimeters deep) ditch with an irregular shape. This feature may represent a shallower silted-in drainage ditch or possibly a drip line from water coming off the side of the tent. In the latter case, however, we would expect to find a drip line to the northeast as well, which was not the case. An additional feature associated with the tent pad construction was a linear concentration of charcoal flecks along with some coal. This may represent a wooden feature, such as a sill or planking that burned in situ. These four features defined a tent with a maximum size of about fourteen feet by sixteen feet, assuming that the shallow irregular-shaped ditch and linear construction lay outside the tent. The project also identified fifteen features inside the tent platform that gave some idea as to the tent’s construction. These features consisted of three posthole/post-mold features, seven small stake holes, four larger stake holes, and an ash-filled feature, probably the remains of a hearth (Figure 3.9). Most of these features had coal and clinker in the fill, suggesting that the posts had

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3.9. Map of Locus 1, Ludlow. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.


been removed rather than decaying in place. It is likely that the tent had been repaired and upgraded during its occupation. For example, most, if not all, of the tents had wood floors installed at some point. In addition, project archaeologists found rows of nails that corresponded to the joists of the tent platform. One interesting set of features was the ash pit and the circle of stake holes that adjoin it to the west. This circle was approximately one meter in diameter. This complex may be the remains of a temporary shelter or windbreak and campfire from the days before the tents were set up at Ludlow or a structure related to cooking within the tent. Additional features to the north, northeast, and southwest suggest the presence of three other structures, one in each of those directions. The feature to the north was a coal- and clinker-filled ditch, while the features to the northeast and southwest were linear stains of dark brown silt loam. There also appear to have been two intersecting rows of stake holes in the southwestern part of the excavation block, one running east-west and the other running roughly northeast-southwest. Locus 13—Features 99 and 100. Features 99 and 100 also represent tent pad outlines excavated by the project during the 2000 field season (see Figure 3.10). Feature 99 is about one meter east of Feature 100. Feature 99 consists of a thin line of concentrated coal, clinker, and ash about twenty centimeters wide. Feature 100 is about forty centimeters wide, with heavy amounts of coal, clinker, and ash. These two features are on the same alignment as the orientation of the tent colony, 40–45 degrees off north. Both features are shallow, only about five to seven centimeters below modern ground surface. The units inside the tent outline produced more artifacts than those outside the outline; however, few artifacts were found overall. Of note were two artifacts. One clothing clip, or tie clip, found was engraved with either a personal name or a manufacturer, “Leonard.” We also located a medallion with the symbol of the Knights of Pythias fraternal organization. Other artifacts primarily included nails (with a few alignments noted) as well as very small pieces of ceramics, glass, and metal. It is unclear exactly how Features 99 and 100 were related. However, we believe they are from the same tent as opposed to two neighboring tents because of their proximity. The features are parallel and about one meter apart. Feature 99, not as wide as Feature 100, is less convincing as a tent outline. However, it is possible that the two features represent two neighboring tents. It is more likely that the coal and clinker concentration defined as Feature 99 is a trench or drip line associated with Feature 100. After completing the areal excavations of Features 99 and 100, we excavated six auger probes to determine whether there may have been a cellar associated with them. The probes did not produce subsurface artifacts, indicating there was probably no cellar in this location.

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3.10. Plan view of Features 99 and 100 in Locus 13, Ludlow. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.

Privy Sampling. Our best example of a possible privy excavated at the Ludlow Tent Colony was Feature 70, located along the southern edge of the site. Project archaeologists identified Feature 70, located in Locus 6, as a shallow depression evident on the surface and confirmed it as a feature through an auger test. The cultural deposits in the auger probe were over 1.54 meters deep. Initially, we placed two 1-meter units over the auger test to identify the feature. This feature was excavated over two field seasons, 1998 and 1999. Feature 70, irregular in shape, measured approximately 2.5 metersÂ€by 3.5 meters (Figure 3.11). Archaeologists reached the bottom of the feature at a depth of 2.5 meters below the surface. Feature 70 appears to have been a privy, with the very bottom strata (a thin layer containing small artifacts) being privy deposit. The sheer number of bottle caps in this deposit suggests it was also a place for private drinking (unless the caps were deposited into the privy in a single dumping episode). Overlying the privy stratum was a layered series of refuse deposits. These were capped by a relatively sterile layer that represents either a period of abandonment or at least cessation of dumping or an effort to seal the privy, probably to control the smell.

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3.11. Feature 70, west profile, Ludlow. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.

Dumping resumed with the deposition of a relatively thick layer of refuse. The remaining strata resulted from the natural silting of the privy depression. Cellar Sampling. Two cellars were completely excavated by the project, labeled Feature 73 in Locus 11 and Feature 74 in Locus 12. The cellars had dissimilar construction styles and depositional histories, as discussed later. Each cellar tells a different story of the use and abuse of the Ludlow Tent Colony. Feature 73 represents a single family’s possessions and use, while Feature 74 represents the cleanup effort of the strikers and the Red Cross after the massacre and fire in the tent colony. Feature 73, Locus 11. Locus 11 contains one deep buried cellar, Feature 73. Feature 73 was obviously a tent cellar, given the household artifacts and the feature’s size and shape. The cellar measured 3.5 meters by 1.5 meters and 1 meter deep. Reddening as a result of the extreme heat of the fire clearly delineated the rectangular walls of this feature. Both the artifacts found in the tent and the depositional sequence of the cellar suggest that this feature can be linked to the

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3.12. Feature 73 in Locus 11 stratigraphic profile, Ludlow. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.

individual family living there. This feature thus provides a snapshot view of the life of a single family in the tent colony (Figure 3.12). The cellar had a complex depositional sequence evident in the profile of the wall. This profile revealed three distinct cultural strata. Near the bottom of the excavation were artifacts that appeared to have been originally stored in the cellar. They included canning jars, plates, a trunk, and other items that would not have been used on a daily basis in the tent. Overlying this layer in only a few areas of the feature was the wooden plank floor that collapsed during the fire, preserving the cellar contents below. In other areas, personal items from the overlying

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tent appear to have collapsed into the cellar when the fire weakened the tent’s floor supports. As a result of this collapse, the tent filled the cellar, causing the cellar to collapse into itself. The early and fast deposition in the cellar allowed the walls to be protected from weather and slumping effects, explaining the clear oxidation on the feature’s walls. The collapsed feature appears to have filled the cellar and allowed no major filling by surface refuse during the cleanup after the massacre. The context of the artifacts was not overly mixed and jumbled, and the massacre’s fire is evident through the large amount of burned wood and melted glass. Despite the destruction, personal items were preserved through the fire and post-occupational disturbances. Items related to children—such as toys— and to women—such as clothing and fine china—were uncovered in this cellar context, but there was not an abundance of material. Although this cellar cannot be documented to a specific person or people, it does provide an anonymous material perspective of those who lived in the tent and associated cellar. Feature 74, Locus 12. This feature is also interpreted as a cellar. However, differences between the two cellars (Features 73 and 74) are obvious and require different interpretations. Differences in the stratigraphic sequences, artifact frequencies, and artifact types suggest that this cellar does not reflect a single household but instead illustrates the post-massacre cleanup efforts of the strikers and the Red Cross. This feature also has a complex depositional sequence (Figure 3.13). The three upper strata are shallower and have a bowl shape that levels off into Stratum A. This suggests an eolian deposit of sediments and possible filling by post-strike occupation or from the second group of colony inhabitants. Post-strike activities, such as ranching, and occupation from the second colony on the site likely affected the site formation for these three higher strata. The lower strata also exhibit differences in deposition from those observed for Feature 73. The strata are more uniform and much thicker. The feature’s overall size, shape, and depth signify a larger structure than Feature 73 and could reflect a larger tent structure over the top or subsequent widening to accommodate post-massacre cleanup. The oil drop cloth we found placed on the floor was original to the structure when it was first used as a cellar, suggesting that the cellar was not deepened to accommodate trash during the cleanup. Heavy oxidation at the base of the walls of the feature, about twenty to fifty centimeters from the floor and slumping low in the feature, further supports our hypothesis. The cellar remained open for a period and was subject to weather-induced wall slumping as well as to cultural deposits from trash disposal. Artifact frequencies in this feature suggest a jumbled mix of material. The lower strata are mostly filled with metal associated with architecture. Very little

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3.13. Feature 74 in Locus 12 stratigraphic profile, Ludlow. Courtesy, Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project.

material related to domestic or food usage is present. The frequency of artifacts changes higher in the feature, but food usage is still less abundant than in Feature 73. The low proportion of domestic to architectural goods in Feature 74 suggests a possible single dumping episode of architectural material after the camp had burned and during the subsequent cleanup. Post-massacre, the majority of the colony’s remains would likely have been that of architecture on the surface. The cellars would have acted as readily accessible pits for dumping by the massacre survivors and the Red Cross. The cross-colony refuse associated with Feature 74’s destruction gives evidence of secondary context for the material associated with that feature. The varied materials, composed mostly of cooking (coffeepots, a possible stove, and

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pans) and bedroom (headboard) items, suggest a domestic context, except that the materials are not complete. The headboard has no associated bed frame and was not primarily deposited from the surface tent. On the other hand, we found a multitude of items that should have been unique in a domestic context. For example, we found three coffeepots and three alarm clocks in the lower layers of the pit, as well as many more cooking items than the average striking family would need. Interpretation of the feature did not alter the basic premise that Feature 74 had acted as a cellar during the strike. After the massacre, the cellar’s size made it a ready trash pit. The vast depth of the cellar was not fully filled by the collapse of the overlying tent, as occurred with Feature 73. Instead, strikers filled the remaining open space with surface refuse from the first colony. We were unable to link the material culture in Feature 74 to an individual family or person. However, this feature allowed us to understand community material culture as a whole as well as the post-massacre cleanup efforts. Midden Sampling. Locus 7, located along the south bank of Delagua Arroyo to the north of the colony, acted as the colony’s trash dump. This arroyo has threatened the context of the midden deposits. Much of the midden has been eroded away as a result of cutting of the arroyo bank. The surviving portion of the midden, approximately 30 meters north-south and 100 meters east-west, has been the subject of intensive testing to recover as much material as possible before it is lost. Initial testing in 1997 positioned individual test units in disparate sections of the surviving area to allow for an overall sample of different parts of the midden. Succeeding field seasons have used adjoining units and trenches to uncover larger sections of the midden. The positioning of these test units and trenches was determined through judgmental sampling based on surface remains. Sampling worked on the assumption that the midden acted as a general trash dump for the entire colony. As such, there may have been horizontal and vertical stratigraphy based on occurrences of deposition. The ephemeral occupation limits the archaeologists’ ability to discern the differences in occurrences of depositions. Archaeologists examined the midden to gain information on consumption habits on a community-wide scale. Units were placed primarily according to surface scatters that suggested depositional activity and variability in artifact and material types. We also heavily tested areas under threat from erosion as a result of the arroyo to acquire information we feared would be lost in the near future. To gain an overall view of the stratigraphy in the middens, we did not map or profile units individually, but we did record profiles of trenches to recognize patterns in midden deposition.

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Table 3.1. Locus 13 group counts and relative frequencies, Ludlow 1998–2002 Group

Count

Relative Frequency (%)

Architecture Food Clothing Other Personal Unrecognizable Total

1,046 5,291 107 21 28 44 6,537

16 82 1 0 0 1 100

Artifacts Recovered at Ludlow

The Ludlow Tent Colony produced a multitude of artifacts from a variety of contexts that helped project archaeologists address the research questions. The four main contexts we focused on were Locus 7, the midden, to gain a community-wide perspective; Feature 73, the cellar, for a household perspective involving personal possessions; Feature 74, to examine the post-massacre cleanup trash disposal pit; and Locus 13, the tent outlines, again for a household perspective but also to examine construction and artifact distribution. For purposes of analysis and discussion, these contexts were categorized into broad groups that reflect function and, secondarily, disposal. The groups were broken down into several categories: food, architectural, personal, clothing, other, and unrecognizable. Trends within these categories within loci are examined next (Conkey 1989; Fontana 1965; Kovel and Kovel 1986; Leone and Potter 1988; Ludlow Collective 2001; Toulouse 1971). Locus 13. Locus 13 contained Features 77 and 78, a partial tent pad outline. Overall patterns presented in Table 3.1 show a high relative frequency of foodstuffs (82%), with architecture (relative frequency 16%) a distant second. The zero percent shown in the other and personal categories really reflects

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