You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Friday May 6, 1904
From The Indianapolis News: Mother Jones Will Not Be Reporting to John Mitchell
John Mitchell, President
United Mine Workers of America
Rumors have been circulating of a falling-out between John Mitchell, President of the United Mine Workers of America, and Mother Jones, his employee. Mother Jones most famously denounced the separate agreement worked out last fall for the striking miners of the northern coalfields of Colorado. This agreement meant that the mostly Italian miners of the southern fields would be left abandoned in their strike against the power of the coal operators. Mother Jones made a speech at the special convention pleading with the English-speaking miners of northern Colorado to stand with the their Italian brothers in the south. The entire convention stood up en-mass cheering, and voted down the settlement.
John Mitchell was, reportedly, most unhappy when he learned that his most famous organizer had defied his wishes and took strong measures to see that the settlement was soon accepted.
On Tuesday, we reported that Mitchell had sent a message requesting that Mother Jones report to him in Indianapolis as soon as she was able. She was, of course, under quarantine in Utah at that time. Today we can report that Mother Jones will not be reporting to Mitchell at anytime in the near future.
Tuesday evening this item appeared in The Indianapolis News:
"Mother" Jones Ill.
Word has been received by President John Mitchell, of the United Mine Workers, that "Mother" Jones is so ill that it will be necessary for her to go to the Pacific coast. The nervous, as well as the physical strain of her work as organizer in Colorado has told upon her severely. she will go at once to the Pacific Coast, But when sufficiently recovered will come to this city to report to President Mitchell.
SOURCE
The Indianapolis News
(Indianapolis, Indiana)
-of May 3, 1904
See also:
Hellraisers Journal
-of Nov 22, 1903
http://www.dailykos.com/...
-of Nov 29, 1903
http://www.dailykos.com/...
-of Dec 9, 1903
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Photo: John Mitchell
http://www.pbs.org/... (edit)
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Wednesday May 6, 1914
Trinidad, Colorado - "The So-Called 'Militiamen" are only...thugs wearing the uniform."
Gunthugs in Military Uniform in front of Ludlow Saloon
Linderfelt, Butcher of Ludlow, third from left
Today we continue to feature testimony from those who were witnesses to the slaughter of striking miners and their families at the Ludlow Massacre.
Yesterday's New York World carried this interview with Godfrey Irwin, an electrical engineer employed by the the Electrical Transportation and Railroad Company of Trinidad:
On the day of the Ludlow battle a chum and myself left the house of the Rev. J. O. Ferris, the Episcopal minister with whom I boarded in Trinidad, for a long tramp through the hills. We walked fourteen miles, intending to take the Colorado & Southern Railway back to Trinidad from Ludlow station.
We were going down a trail on the mountain side above the tent city at Ludlow when my chum pulled my sleeve and at the same instant we heard shooting. The militia were coming out of Hastings Canyon and firing as they came. We lay flat behind a rock and after a few minutes I raised my hat aloft on a stick. Instantly bullets came in our direction. One penetrated my hat. The militiamen must have been watching the hillside through glasses and thought my old hat betrayed the whereabouts of a sharpshooter of the miners.
Saw Tikas Murdered.
Then came the killing of Louis Tikas, the Greek leader of the strikers. We saw the militiamen parley outside the tent city, and, a few minutes later, Tikas came out to meet them. We watched them talking. Suddenly an officer raised his rifle, gripping the barrel, and felled Tikas with the butt.
Tikas fell face downward. As he lay there we saw the militiamen fall back. Then they aimed their rifles and deliberately fired them into the unconscious man’s body. It was the first murder I had ever seen, for it was a murder and nothing less. Then the miners ran about in the tent colony and women and children scuttled for safety in the pits which afterward trapped them.
We watched from our rock shelter while the militia dragged up their machine guns and poured a murderous fire into the arroyo from a height by Water Tank Hill above the Ludlow depot. Then came the firing of the tents.
I am positive that by no possible chance could they have been set ablaze accidentally. The militiamen were thick about the northwest corner of the colony where the fire started and we could see distinctly from our lofty observation place what looked like a blazing torch waved in the midst of militia a few seconds before the general conflagration swept through the place. What followed everybody knows.
Sickened by what we had seen, we took a freight back into Trinidad. The town buzzed with indignation. To explain in large part the sympathies of even the best people in the section with the miners, it must be said that there is good evidence that many of the so-called ‘militiamen’ are only gunmen and thugs wearing the uniform to give them a show of authority. They are the toughest lot I ever saw.
No one can legally enlist in the Colorado state militia till he has been a year in the state, and many of the ‘militiamen’ admitted to me they had been drafted in by a Denver detective agency. Lieutenant Linderfelt boasted that he was ‘going to lick the miners or wipe them off the earth.’ In Trinidad the miners never gave any trouble. It was not till the militia came into town that the trouble began.
Machine Gun Pointed at the Ludlow Tent Colony,
The Home of 1200 Men, Women and Children
Three days after the massacre, John Oleko filed this affidavit:
AFFIDAVIT
State of Colorado,
County of Las Animas ss
John Oleko, of lawful age, being first duly sworn, upon oath doth depose and say:
That his name is John Oleko; that he is a resident of the Ludlow tent colony; that he is of Slavish nationality; that he went to the store at Ludlow which is about 200 yards from the tent colony, on Monday morning, April 20 A. D. 1914, to buy some things from the store; that about 9 o'clock he came back to his tent, which is No. 120, and in a moment or two he heard a big shot over near the soldiers' camp; he came out of his tent and heard another big shot; pretty soon shooting from soldiers' camp and from all over that way started by men shooting toward the tent colony; affiant got scared and tried to get some Slavish women and children to leave the tents and hide in the arroyo or run away; that affiant had no gun and there were very few guns in the tents; that he did succeed in getting three women and several children down in the creek, but was all the time shot at by rifles and machine guns;that the soldiers and guards shoot thousands and thousands of shots trough the tents; that men who try to go get women out of tents get killed; that they holler for women to come down in the creek, but they were afraid, and affiant thinks that they would all have been killed had they tried to cross the open space from the tents to the arroyo; if the tents had not been burned, the women and children who had hid in the holes under the tents might have been all right, unless the explosive bullets hit near them; affiant could not do anything, so he ran away to a ranch and came to Trinidad, where he has been since.
(Signed) JOHN OLEKO.
Subscribed in my presence and swore to before me this 23rd day of April, A. D. 1914.
My commission expires on the 18th day of July, A. D. 1915.
(Seal) ANGUS E McGLASHAN,
Notary Public.
SOURCE
The Ludlow Massacre
-by Walter H. Fink
Williamson-Haffner, Denver, Colorado
1914
https://archive.org/...
https://archive.org/...
Photo:
Linderfelt an other Militia/Gunthugs in front of Ludlow Saloon
http://www.du.edu/...
Machine Gun Pointed at Ludlow Tent Colony
http://www.du.edu/...
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They'll Never Keep Us Down-Hazel Dickens
The power wheel is rolling, rolling right along
And the government helps keep it going, going strong
So working people get your help from your own kind
Cause your welfare ain't on the rich man’s mind
Your welfare ain't on the rich man’s mind
Your welfare ain't on the rich man’s mind
They want the power in their hands
Just to keep down the workers and
Your welfare aint' on the rich man’s mind
-Hazel Dickens
Lt K E Linderfelt
Butcher of Ludlow
This diary is dedicated to Governor Ammons, Democrat of Colorado, who allowed these gunthugs to wear the uniform of the Colorado National Guard, thereby conferring upon them the authority of the State of Colorado.
He allowed Linderfelt, the Butcher of Ludlow to remain in the field even after numerous pleas from the field to have Linderfelt removed. One of those pleas came in the middle of an
investigation by a committee which the Governor himself had appointed.
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