Page:Van Cise exhibits to the Commision on Industrial Relations regarding Colorado coal miner's strike.djvu/5

Rh The mine guards are usually employed through a detective agency, and the armed guards it furnishes antedates the present trouble and is born of a long series of conflicts in other fields and in other States. During the weeks before the coming of the soldiers last fall, these armed mine guards and the strikers fought many a battle, from all of which it has come to pass that the deadliest hatred exists between the strikers of the tent colonies and the mine guards of the coal camp.

The third class of men in this vicinity consists of the uniformed and armed National Guardsmen, who have been on duty during the campaign. With an exception to be noted presently, this class has no feeling either of hatred or of fear toward the colonists, whose nearest neighbors they were. Throughout the campaign a friendly relationship was maintained between the two groups of tents. Ball games were played between them and athletics were indulged in in common.

We find the attitude of most of the soldiers toward the colonists to have been throughout the campaign one of friendly indifference. We find, however, from the examination of the colonists themselves that this neutral frendliness of the soldiers was not returned, but that a large portion of the strikers harbored a suppressed hostility toward the militia, the intenser for its being suppressed.

The exception referred to is the company of mounted infantry occupying the substation at Cedar Hill in Berwind Canyon. Designated as Company B, it was commanded for the greater part of the campaign by Lieut. E. K. Linderfelt. This officer is an experienced soldier and an inexperienced sociologist. He is the veteran of five wars; but wholly tactless in his treatment of both mine guards and strikers. From the beginning of the campaign, this militia organization and the strikers in the colony were in frequent petty conflicts with one another. They grew to dislike each other and to worry, harass, and annoy one another. Both sides fed the flame of increasing enmity. They provoked each other on every possible occasion. The strikers spread the wires across the roads in the dark to trap the soldiers' horses and thus to maim both man and beast. The soldiers indulged reprisals.

In this way dislike grew into hatred and provocation into threats. From threats by each against the others' lives, the strikers have come to fear and hate this Company B, and Company B has come to partake of the fear of the workmen and the hatred of the mine guards toward the colonists.

Upon the withdrawal of the troops from the field, it was felt necessary to leave one unit at Ludlow between the largest colony of strikers on one side and the richest mines and most populous camps on the other. Company B was selected for that service because, albeit hated by the strikers, it was feared and respected by them. Lieut. Linderfelt, whose life was in peril from the deadly hatred of this large foreign population, was relieved of the command, and sent away upon recruiting service.

Thus it will be seen that the participants in the dreadful battle of April 20, were distributed around a triangle, the strikers in the colony at the cross-roads, the workmen of Troop A and the mine guards at Hastings, in Delagua Canyon, and Company B at Cedar Hill, in the Berwind Canyon.

It should here be explained that after the coming of the soldiers last October, and until their departure a few days before the Battle of Ludlow, there was practically no mine guards in this vicinity, but upon withdrawing the protection of the National Guard from the mines and communities of the strike zone, the mine guards returned to the employment of the mine owners.

We believe that such as incident as the Battle of Ludlow was inevitable under the conditions that we found. Our belief is based upon an analysis of the forces of human passion we discovered to have been at work. These forces we find to have been as follows:

The tent colony population is almost wholly foreign and without conception of our government. A large percentage are unassimilable aliens, to whom liberty means license, and among whom has lately been spread by those to whom they must look for guidance, a dangerous doctrine of property.

Rabid agitators had assured these people that when the soldiers left they were at liberty to take for their own, and by force of arms, the coal mines of their former employers. They have been sitting in their tents for weeks awaiting