On November 21, 1927, members of a Colorado militia fired into a crowd of hundreds of striking miners in the Weld County town of Serene, killing six and wounding twenty. The Columbine Massacre showed that little had changed in Colorado in terms of relations between workers and companies, as well as between labor and the state, in the thirteen years since the Ludlow Massacre, the deadliest labor conflict in state history.
Coal Mining in Colorado
Mining in Colorado is often associated with precious metals such as gold and silver, but by the late nineteenth century, coal had become the state’s most important commodity. It underwrote the entire industrial economy, from gold mining and smelting to construction and railroads. Coal also heated hundreds of homes in cities such as Denver. Unlike coal operations in the eastern United States, coal mining in Colorado was dominated by only a handful of large companies, with the two most prominent being Colorado Fuel & Iron and the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company.
