Ludlow Massacre

It was made at the Colorado Fuel and Iron plant in Pueblo, from the chassis of a large touring sedan, wrapped in steel. Agents drove it around the perimeters of the strikers' tent colonies. At night they swept the tents with searchlights and fired into them at random. Families dug pits under the tent floors to hide in. About twelve hundred striking miners and their families were living here in tents on wooden platforms, evicted from company housing after the strike began in the fall of 1913. On the morning of April the twentieth, 1914, militia set a machine gun on a ridge above the camp. The shooting lasted all day. At dusk a freight train stopped on the tracks in front of the gun placements, and under its cover many people ran east to the hills. By seven the camp was burning. Roughly twenty-one people died, mostly wives and children. The townsite is a ghost town now. The mine workers' union owns the ground and put up a granite monument.