AMERICAN MINERS ON STRIKE

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 May 1914, Page 8

AMERICAN MINERS ON STRIKE

BATTLE WITH THE MILITARY. MANY KILLED. SAN FRANCISCO, April 27. For three days last week there wasac[•v.] warfare between the coalmine strjk- : o Ludlow district, Colorado, and the r ;,;i;tary. The deaths were K»ajer in ~„,be r than the Amencan losses in the .afcingof Vera Cvuz Irom Mexico. At Vast twenty-five lives are known to I. u been lost, and -some statement, place the number as high as fifty. Ihe officials o the United Mine Workers, ill a telegram to Samuel Gompcrs, president of the American Federation of Labour at Washington, used the following imploring angiraffe: "Will you, for God's sake and in thamme of humanity, call upon all ol vour citizenship to demand ol the President of the United States and both Houses of Congress that they leave Mexico alone and come into Colorado to relieve these miners, their wives and children, who are being slaughtered by the (lo'-cns bv numerous mine guards." More than four hundred armed strikers tared the state militia in the battle. Each side holds the other blameworthy for the outbreak of violence. Major Hamrock, in chr.-ge of the militia, declares that the

fighting was precipitated by a crowd of Greek strikers under one Louis Tikas, who opened lire upon a detachment of his men r.'nile they were drilling near the military camp. Earlier in the clay .Major Hamroek had ordered Tikas to release a striker who it was asserted, was desirous of returning lo work. 'Tikas is one of those killed 111 the fighting. According to the strikers' side of the controversy, Tikas went to meet Tiajor Hamroek, at the hitter's request, and never returned. The fighting then- began. The most, lamentable feature of the bloody outbreak was the loss of women's and children's life that it involved. Of and children's life that it involved. Of the actual combalasts, seven were killed by bullet wounds. The strikers' camp w r as a kind of tent city, most of them having been living with their families under canvas for some months past. Thi3 camp was within the zone of the battle, and in order to protect the women and children holes were dug in the ground under the tents. However, the tents caught fire, and at least 15 women and children were cither binned or smothered to death. Labour leaders charge that the military deliberately fired upon the tent camp, but this is emphatically denied by the military authorities, who say they do not know how the fire started. The Ludlow camp is a charred mass to-day, and additional horrors are still being revealed, [n holes dug under the tents for protection against the rifles and machine guns mothers and their children are found suffocated and cremated. One little girl was found dead with a doll in her arms. A touching incident is related of Louis Snyder, Hie 12-year-old son of a striker. His baby sister, unnoticed, had scrambled nv.t of the trench in which the family had taken refuge during the fighting, and was toddling along tho~li.no of fire. The boy ran after the baby, overtook her, and had just succeeded in pushing her back into the trench when he was hit by a rifle shot and killed. Major Hamroek believes the number of dead to be 33. This is undoubtedly the most serious strike war .since the fighting hi lh.! sains State ten years ago, surpassing in loss of life and bitterness of feelin i/ the conflict or the Michigan coppermfneirs v.ith the military authorities. The Governor or Colorado, who was in Washington attending to national business when the armed hostilities began, at once returned. A special session of the State L-'gislalure to deal with the crisis has been summoned.