Martelle’s “Blood Passion” Uncovers the 1914 Ludlow Mining Massacre

By Jenny Shank, 8-23-07

Los Angeles Times journalist Scott Martelle gave a presentation last night at the Boulder Book Store about his new book, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.  (Martelle will speak tonight at the Tattered Cover in LoDo as a part of the Rocky Mountain Land Series at 7:30).  Martelle explained that he had been interested in labor history since he read John Dos Passos‘ USA Trilogy many years ago, and that he became further interested in the subject of labor when he spent over a year on the picket line during the Detroit newspaper strike that began in 1995. 

Martelle writes, “A few years back I was reading a now-forgotten American history book and stumbled across a footnote reference to 100 men, women and children killed in a months-long war between striking coal miners and the Colorado National Guard.  My first thought: Why didn’t I know about that?  I knew about the April 1914 Ludlow Massacre, when two mothers and eleven children died after marauding Guardsmen torched a striker’s tent colony.  But the broader war came as a revelation.”

Martelle said that he pitched an idea for a story on the Ludlow massacre to his editors at the L.A. Times, but they weren’t interested, so he started working on it for a larger magazine piece, and quickly uncovered enough material to produce a book.  He said that he wrote Blood Passion from the perspective of a journalist, rather than a historian, because there were so many facts that had been distorted or omitted during the contemporary reporting of the story that he wanted to sort out truth from embellishment. Martelle began checking death records in rural Colorado counties, and said, “I was able to verify that 75 people were killed.”

While he laid out the chronology of the battle and the primary characters involved, Martelle showed pictures that he’d obtained from the Denver Public Library’s Western History Collection.  The photos brought the story he was telling to life, with their depiction of the crude housing and tents in which some of the miners and their families endured Colorado winters.  “Some housing wasn’t too bad,” Martelle allowed, but as in many mining communities, the Ludlow miners who worked for Colorado Fuel & Iron had to live in and pay rent for company houses, shop in the company store, worship at the company church, and drink at the company saloon.

The company was owned by the Rockefellers, and to demonstrate the callousness of the mine operators, Martelle read from a letter written by Lamont Montgomery Bowers ("the Rockefellers’ man in Colorado") in which he suggested a ten percent cut in wages.  The mine operators in southern Colorado hired guards and Baldwin-Felts detectives, who drove around a steel-sided truck with a mounted machine gun known as “The Death Special” to intimidate the miners into docility.  But as Martelle explained, many of the miners were Greek and Italian immigrants who had fought in Balkan wars, tough, hardy men who were not easily intimidated.  Before the actual war began, Matrelle said, there “was a lot of tit for tat violence.”

Miners dug pits beneath their tent homes so that their wives and children could take cover during the rounds of shooting that periodically broke out.  The most notorious incident of the massacre occurred when the National Guard torched the town, and a group of women and children were trapped in a pit below a burning tent.  The conflict eventually ended when President Wilson decided the governor of Colorado had lost control of the situation and brought in the U.S. Army.  But the carnage was already severe--the most haunting pictures that Martelle shared were of the massive funerals in Trinidad, including one with a horse-drawn hearse carting several caskets of children.

Martelle’s Blood Passion is unfortunately timely now, with six miners still trapped beneath the earth in Utah’s Crandall Canyon coal mine.  Mining has always been a dangerous profession, and Martelle’s account details a time when being a miner was just as dangerous above ground as below it.