The Colorado Coal Strike of 1913-1914 was one of the most violent strikes in American history. The strike culminated in the Ludlow Massacre on April 20, 1914 when the Colorado National Guard attacked the miners' tent colony killing 19 men, women and children. Included were 2 women and 11 small children who died while holding onto each other in a burning tent.
Following the attack, the miners armed themselves and engaged the National Guard in violent class warfare which took place along a 40 mile front in southern Colorado from Trinidad to Walsenburg.
Right smack in the middle of this struggle was the Miners' Angel, Mother Jones, the great labor organizer and agitator. She came to southern Colorado to help the striking miners and their families and assist in establishing the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in the coalfields.
Trying to stop her was General John Chase, the head of the Colorado National Guard. He issued a ban on Mother Jones, refusing her entrance to Trinidad, a town in the southern part of the state. In typical Mother Jones-style she ignored the ban.
On January 4, 1914 she entered Trinidad where she was arrested and sent to a Catholic hospital where she was placed under house arrest for 9 weeks. She was given no reading or writing material, was denied mail and allowed to see no one. When she was released she traveled to Denver where she made the decision to return to Trinidad.
Before she got there, troops boarded the train, arrested her and took her to a cell in the basement of the Huerfano County Courthouse in Walsenburg.
|
|
|
Huerfano County Courthouse and old Walsenburg Jail (1896) now a mining museum.
|
Mother Jones described this jail as an "underground dungeon." "It was a cold, horrible place," she said, "without heat, damp and dark. I slept in my clothes by day and at night I fought great sewer rats with a beer bottle."
"If I were out of this dungeon," thought I, "I would be fighting the human sewer rats anyway."
|
|
|
Original UMWA Journal caption reads "the above picture shows Mother Jones, 82 year old angel of the coal camps, confined in a damp, dirty, cold celler cell in the Walsenburg, Colo. jail. She was kidnapped, taken from a train while on her way to Trinidad, and placed in this cell to be held incommunicado as a military prisoner."
|
She was forced to stay there for 26 more days; again, no visitors, no reading or writing material. They were trying to break her. Afterwards she would write that she and the miners were fighting for union rights and civil liberties against the powerful "national burglars of Wall Street" and the "princes of plunder."
According to the Indianapolis Star of April 29, 1915 Mother Jones "carries her eighty years with a buoyant step, a steady hand and a strong voice. She wore a black silk dress trimmed with white and a black hat with a dash of purple on the crown, which added youth to her appearance."
Click here for the only film and audio recording of Mother Jones in existence. This is an edited version of a "talkie" filmed at the Burgess Farm in Adelphi, Maryland at Mother's 100th birthday party on May 1, 1930. (Thanks to Craig Simpson, UFCW Local 400.)
