The company towns, writes historian Philip Foner, were “feudal domains with the company acting as lord and master. The ‘law’ consisted of company rules. Curfews were imposed, company guards — brutal thugs armed with machine guns and rifles loaded with soft-point bullets — would not admit any ‘suspicious stranger’ into the camp.” CF&I was the most restrictive of all, and its employees often lived 20 to a shack, in houses owned by the company itself.

…In September, after the company refused demands for an eight-hour workday and the elimination of company guards, the workers went on strike. The labor organizer Mother Jones gave a rousing speech in support of the strike, for which she was imprisoned for 20 days.

…When she was released, she saw that the miners had been evicted from their shacks for attempting to strike. They were now living in tent colonies outside the towns of boarded-up shanties they had once called home. Not only that, but the company guards were arresting the newly homeless miners for vagrancy and forcing them to work for no pay as punishment. The miners were regularly beaten by the guards.

…In response to the terrorism of the agents, the miners and their families dug pits in the earth under their tents, in which they hid at night to avoid being sprayed by bullets. They endured this violence, living in their tents with their pits, all through the winter and spring. The few occasions they fired back at agents were used as justification for calling in the Colorado National Guard.

…President Woodrow Wilson, having been informed that the situation in Colorado was out of control and the Colorado Guardsmen were defeated, dispatched federal troops to the region.

…More than 400 miners were arrested and charged on nearly as many counts of murder, but only one was convicted, and the verdict was eventually overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court. It turned out that the State of Colorado, while waging war with guerrilla fighters within its own borders, had never declared martial law.

The richest American family hired terrorists to shoot machine guns at sleeping women and children

sigh…