The storms of Colorado raged for ten long years,
The mines of old Montana were filled with blood and tears....

So wrote Utah Philipps of the struggles of western miners to secure labor rights and union representation in the Rocky Mountain regions in the early Twentieth Century. The Ludlow Strike of 1913-1914 was the last, and the bloodiest, of the "storms of Colorado." It was a region rich in coal, including high-value anthracite, but a few owners controlled the mines and forced miners into settlements where they lived in small company-owned houses and had to shop in company stores. And, even worse, the owners would not spend the money to keep the mines safe; the Colorado miners had higher rates of death and injury than any others in America at the time.

So it was that the United Mine Workers induced the miners into a many-month struggle for better pay and union representation. The strikers were immediately forced from their company housing and had to settle in tents in a Colorado autumn and winter. Little wonder, then, that there was anger and resentment -- especially as the owners hired private "detectives" (which, by this time, was basically a euphemism for private militia; detectives didn't solve crimes, they did the hatchet work of corporate bosses). A strike that began with a walkout descended into jeering and, eventually, a certain amount of shooting. And then, one day, at the Ludlow camp, the fighting escalated -- and much of the camp caught fire, and two women and their children died in the fire. The miners erupted in anger, and for ten days, it was open war, with dozens killed -- a war that did not end until Federal troops arrived. Near the end of 1914, the strike officially ended in total defeat for the miners.

The story inspired many books, plus Woody Guthrie's song "The Ludlow Massacre." Of the books I have read, this is by far the easiest to read -- straightforward, with not too many digressions or side material, and intended for students. It is probably slightly pro-worker, but it doesn't have the "If you aren't with the Union, you're the enemy" attitude of the Guthrie song or the books by labor authors. It has a handful of photos of important people and places, and the timeline at the end is much clearer than what I've seen in the other two books I've read on the subject.

The one real concern with the volume is the sources. It has endnotes (although probably not enough of them), but half of them or more are from one source, Leonard Guttridge and George McGovern's The Great Coalfield War. Yes, it's that George McGovern; the Guttridge book is adapted from his 1953 Ph.D. thesis. The thesis was, as I understand it, properly documented -- but Guttridge cut some of the facts and all of the citations, so one never really knows whether to trust the result. And, because Laughlin is so heavily dependent on that, it's ultimately McGovern's analysis of the facts, even if Rosemary Laughlin has put her own stamp on both the politics and the writing.

That's a caution more than anything else: it's important to keep in mind that this is a book taken almost entirely from secondary sources, and those not always of the best quality. It's not the last word. But it's a very good place to start in learning about the last great labor strike before the tide started to turn against total "Boss" control of workers: During and after the strike, the federal government started looking into just what had happened, and eventually the laws started to shift, mostly as a result of Ludlow. ( )