Page:Van Cise exhibits to the Commision on Industrial Relations regarding Colorado coal miner's strike.djvu/18

7328 Of the battle itself, little need be said. Started by the strikers, it was finished by the soldiers. But of the results volumes have and will l>e written. One significant fact bus been overlooked. If the troops started the battle, where, did the strikers so quickly get their arms and ammunition, when presumably they had turned all over to the soldiers on demand and search? Or did they hide them as they did from the United States troops? Why were these guns at hand?

The soldiers were in uniform, on duty, and representing the State. Whatever their past offenses, the strikers had a remedy in a legal manner. An attack upon the troops was an assault upon the Government.

Until darkness fell, and their ranks were augmented by reinforcements from Troop A, the conduct of the soldiers was most exemplary and praisworthy. But the approach of night gave cover to liberty, and riot reigned as the battle ceased. Three prisoners were captured, one assaulted by Lieut. Linderfelt, and all three shot under the infamous "ley fuga" of the Mexicans. The colony, already on fire in one corner, was burned to the ground.

The assault upon Tikas and the murder of the three prisoners can not be too severely condemned. As the men were outlaws they could have been shot in their tracks and never captured, but once taken they were entitled to be kept inviolate. These murders by this mine-guard group should he as severely punished as should the murders by the strikers, and both should receive the extreme penalty of the law. On the other hand, however, the heroic work of the other officers and men who participated in the Ludlow battle should not be overlooked and unstinted praise should be given them for their conduct in resisting an attack by superior numbers.

The next day dead bodies of women and children were found huddled in a small pit under one tent, and the papers published far and wide the lie that machine guns had mowed down women and children. This falsehood was deliberately spread by union leaders, whose own physicians had personally testified before a coroner's jury that there was no sign of a bullet wound on any but the Snyder boy. He was not in the pit, and was shot in the forehead while standing beside a tent, facing to the rear. The boy's father pulled the body back into the cellar, and when rescued from there by the troops carried the body to the depot.

The world has heard little of the horrible mutilation of the bodies of Pvts. Martin and Hockersmith by strikers, of the percussion-capped, soft-nosed, and poisoned bullets of the unionists. All that went out was that "gunmen militia had murdered defenseless women and children."

The fact that prisoners had been assaulted and killed was first given out by the board of officers appointed to investigate the Ludlow battle. If it had wished to shield anything, all it had to do was to keep quiet and nothing would ever have been known of these incidents.

But that strikers built rifle pits in front of and in the colony, that they dug cellars for their women and children to hide in, that they used both on the day of the battle, and deliberately forced the troops in self-protection to return the fire has not been told. That women and children were rescued from the colony by soldiers was not admitted by strikers, though these unfortunates were cared for, fed and sheltered, and sent to Trinidad, where they later lodged in the strikers' tent colony. Though all the inhabitants of the tent colony were accounted for on Thursday after the battle, and this fact was admitted by John McLennan, president of the State federation of labor while he was a prisoner at Ludlow, yet for weeks the leaders sought to inflame their follower's with statements anent women and children buried and concealed at Ludlow!

Then what happened? A machine gun was delivered to strikers at Aguilar by union leaders. Delagua was attacked, men killed and women shot upon. The water plant was destroyed, the Royal mine blotted out, 35 men, women, and children shut in, and the entrance dynamited. The Chandler mine in Fremont County damaged by strikers under a flag of truce. The Walsen mine at Walsenburg asailed, Mrs. Gregory shot in the arm, and troops sent to the defense. Maj. Lester, of the medical corps, was killed and Lieut. Scott and Pvt. Miller injured. (For their own purposes of concealment, and to encourage their own ranks, the strikers did not make public the fact that in this attack upon the troops their losses were very heavy.) The Heckla mine, in Boulder County, was next surrounded and thousands of shots poured into it. while the sheriff was imprisoned inside. Calls to arms were published in the Denver papers, signed by union leaders, asking union men for arms and ammunition and to drill to exterminate mine guards and militiamen. The camp at Forbes, near Ludlow,