Page:Van Cise exhibits to the Commision on Industrial Relations regarding Colorado coal miner's strike.djvu/6

7316 the departure of the soldiers and the day when they could seize what they have been told is theirs. When the troops were withdrawn elsewhere, and this one unit left at Ludlow, many of the strikers believed that the men whom they saw in uniform were no longer members of the National Guard, but hired gunmen or mine guards who retained their uniform for want of other clothing. They saw the hated mine guards return. They were told by their leaders, as they have been always, that the mine guards intended to attack their colony. The greed, fears, and most brutal hatred of the violent elements were thus aroused, and they began to prepare for battle. They laid in a store of arms, two or three at a time; they bought quantities of ammunition; they built military earthworks in concealed places; they dug pits beneath their tents in which they designed to put their women and children as a place of safety. They got all things ready. The Greeks in particular who had deeply resented the searching of the colony and the taking of their arms by the soldiers, swore that their arms should never be taken from them again.

In this movement, as in all others, the Greeks were the leaders. Not all of the colonists by any means were taken in on the general plan. Those who were found timorous or unwilling were told nothing of what was going on. We found that there were many in the colony who now bear a deep resentment against the Greeks, who had no wives or children to protect, for precipitating the battle without giving their fellows opportunity to prepare for it.

While those warlike preparations were going forward, though they were concealed from some in the colony, yet they were shared by others who knew better and who in the last analysis must take their share of the responsibility for the awful results that ensued. We learn that there was found in the tent of John R. Lawsen large stores of ammunition in thousand-round boxes awaiting distribution. By all these means the fighting part of the colony had worked themselves into a frenzy. The colony was electrified; a spark only was needed to set off an explosion. The spark fell unwittingly on Monday, the 20th of April.

As is usual with such inevitable conflicts, the battle was unexpectedly precipitated and by a trifling incident. Two facts in this connection stand out very clearly. One is that the conflict was contemplated, prepared against, deliberately planned and intended by some of the strikers, and was feared and expected by the soldiers and inhabitants of the mining villages. The other fact, equally clear, is that neither side expected it to fail at the time nor in the manner that it did.

That the colonists were, and intended to be, the aggressors there can be no doubt in the world. It was evidently with some difficulty that the Greek portion of the colony had been restrained from giving battle now that the main body of State troops was withdrawn.

We find from examination of the colonists themselves, that talk of such an attack upon the soldiers, to be followed by a seizure of the mines, expulsion of the nonunion workmen, and vengeance upon the mine guards had been rife in the colony for many days. According to the Greek Church, Easter fell on Sunday, the 19th, and we have, it from Greeks and others in the colony that the Greeks, at least, had planned such an attack as part of the festivities of that day.

In the celebration on Sunday, however, the Greeks got pretty drunk, and the matter was postponed until Tuesday. We find that these plans of the Greeks were not known generally throughout the colony, and many there were who were wholly ignorant that the colony gossip of an attack had taken any such definite form. There were two Greeks in the colony who had a brother at work in the near-by Ramey mine near the entrance of Berwind Canyon.

On Sunday, after the plan to deliver the attack on Tuesday had been perfected, these Greeks visited their nonunion brother, told him of the plan, and begged him to leave before Tuesday's work of destruction commenced.

This workman communicated the information thus received to his employers at the mine on Sunday evening, who had intended to warn Maj. Hamrock on Tuesday morning. Before that information was discussed the battle was precipitated on Monday.

It is very certain that the soldiers were not expecting any attack or molestation at the time on the day of the battle. It is true that such an attack was always feared by soldiers and civilians alike. All believed that sooner or later it would come. For weeks before the withdrawal of the troops it had been a settled belief that some day, when the military force should be weakened, the strikers would undertake to wipe out the soldiers and civilian