The day ended with the deaths of more than twenty people, including miners, their wives and children, and one member of the Guard.
Tomorrow, Governor John Hickenlooper will issue an executive order to create the Ludlow Centennial Commemoration Commission.
The commission comprises reps of both the Colorado National Guard and the United Mine Workers of America, as well as historians and scholars, including driving force Jonathan Hugo Rees of Colorado State University-Pueblo, state historian William Convery and Dean Saitta of the University of Denver, who's co-director of the Colorado Coal Field War Archaeological Project, which has excavated sites connected with the strike of 1913-14, among them the Ludlow Tent Colony (a National Historical Landmark). Saitta also serves on the DU committee that's been charged with studying founder John Evans and his ties to the Sand Creek Massacre.
DU will also celebrate its 150th anniversary next year; John Evans, then the territorial governor, founded what was originally known as the Colorado Seminary with Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist minister who subsequently led 700 troops on a raid of a peaceful camp on the banks of Sand Creek on November 29, 1964. Over 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women, children and elderly men, were killed.
How the Sand Creek Massacre should be remembered is still a matter of heated debate.
Meanwhile, members of the Ludlow commission will be pulling together a series of lectures, exhibits and other activities to commemorate that tragedy. Here's the executive order establishing the commission:
From the "Calhoun: Wake-Up Call archive: "A century and a half later, the wounds of Sand Creek are still fresh."
