My sister Carolyn, (who lives in Montana) and I traveled out to Colorado for my sister Carmela's birthday last week. It was a big one, (birthday that is), that's right, she turned 40- -um- -again! Along with all the big birthday festivities, (there actually were none, well okay, just one, and that was strictly limited to dinner out at her favorite restaurant) we did a bit of touring.

We wandered into Old Town Pueblo where the beautiful historic train depot resides and got a history lesson on immigration. Not that we really needed one, mind you. Our dad spent some quality time at Ellis Island when he returned to the United States from Italy in his twenties.

Both of our parents had relatives who came here as immigrants and faced the requisite amount of discrimination. I remember my mother telling me more than once that when she was a little girl there were many children who wouldn't play with her because she was Irish and Catholic.

The immigrants who came through the depot in Pueblo, Colorado were on their way to work in coal mines, steel mills and other life-sucking, low-paying jobs that eventually unionized but at a high cost. The Ludlow Massacre is an example of how deadly being an immigrant who wanted to better himself could be.

Ludlow Massacre photo
Rocky Mountain PBS via YouTube
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The miners in Ludlow, Colorado had the crazy notion that perhaps, just perhaps, they should have safer working conditions, something to live in besides tents, access to medical care and education for their children. They decided to unionize and that is when the chief owner of the mine John D. Rockefeller, Jr. called in the Colorado National Guard and others to change their minds.

Ludlow Massacre Monument
Photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LudlowMassacre
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Although death tolls vary, the majority of the fatalities were men, women and almost a dozen children, of mostly Italian, Greek, Hispanic and Slavic descent. The women and children died horrifically of asphyxiation from having the tent they were under set on fire. The National Guardsmen drove an armored vehicle into the "tent colony" which the miners referred to as the "Death Special" because it had a machine gun mounted to it.

What was left of the "tent colony" of 1200 people when they were done? Not much.

Ruins of Ludlow, Colorado mining tent colony
"Ruins of Ludlow restored" by George Grantham Bain/Bain News Service via Wikimedia Commons -
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The Ludlow Massacre let to a chain reaction of violence which is now referred to as the Colorado Coalfield War and cost at least 75 lives, most of whom were immigrants doing jobs no one else wanted. Interesting, huh?

 

 

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