Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Southern Colorado walks out of the company towns and into the rain

1913 · Ludlow, Trinidad, and the southern coalfields

On Sept. 23, 1913, in a rainstorm, United Mine Workers of America miners struck Colorado Fuel & Iron and the other southern operators. Families were evicted from company housing the same day. The union put up tent colonies. The largest sat at Ludlow. Seven months later the National Guard burned it.

The convention in Trinidad had already voted. The walkout was the part that counted. Rockefeller-controlled CF&I ran the company towns in Las Animas and Huerfano counties the way a company runs a store it also happens to live in: houses, scrip, the doctor, the scale that weighed your coal, the guard at the canyon mouth.

The demands were not poetry. Recognize the UMWA. Raise the tonnage rate 10 percent. Enforce the eight-hour law Colorado had already written down. Let miners elect their own checkweighmen. Pay in cash. Shop and live somewhere other than the company counter. Enforce the rest of the mining code, including a 1913 ventilation bill that had no teeth.

Operators said no. So the miners left. Historians put the first-day walkout in the thousands; by the 24th something like 80 percent of the southern field was out. Count the families and the eviction lists climb toward 20,000 people. Tents were late. Some households slept under furniture until canvas arrived. Ludlow, a railroad stop north of Trinidad, grew into the big colony: about 200 tents and 1,200 people. Aguilar, Forbes, and the other camps filled the canyons.

Mother Jones had already worked the crowds. Louis Tikas, a Cretan union man, kept order at Ludlow. Baldwin-Felts detectives worked for the companies. Governor Elias Ammons sent the National Guard in late October.

On April 20, 1914, guardsmen and company men fired into the Ludlow colony and the camp burned. At least 19 people died that day, including 11 children and two women who suffocated in a cellar pit, and Tikas, shot under a flag of truce. The Ten Days' War that followed pushed the statewide death count into a range scholars still argue about: 69 on the low side, nearly 200 if you keep counting. President Wilson sent the Army. The strike bled out in December. The union did not win recognition. Rockefeller hired Mackenzie King and built a company-union plan instead.

The site is a National Historic Landmark now. The monument still stands in the grass off County Road 44. The rain on the first morning was only weather. Everything after it was policy.

Sources: Wikipedia — Colorado Coalfield War · Colorado Encyclopedia — Ludlow Massacre · History Colorado — Ludlow resource set · University of Denver Coalfield War atlas

Occupy Denver holds its first assembly and a trooper draws the property line

2011 · Lincoln Park and the Colorado Capitol

On Friday, Sept. 23, 2011, Occupy Denver held its first general assembly in Lincoln Park, across Broadway from the Capitol. A state trooper told the crowd they could not stay on state property. Half the meeting stayed on the grass. Half moved to the sidewalk. The tents came later.

Wall Street had already been occupied for a week. Denver showed up on a Friday with the national script and a local lawn. Lincoln Park sits between the Capitol steps and Civic Center, which is to say it sits on land the state believes it owns and the city believes it polices.

The first assembly was messy on purpose. Westword later called it possibly the messiest. A trooper arrived early and drew the line without much poetry: you may not camp on state property. One faction took that as a suggestion and stayed in the grass. The other took it as a map and moved to the sidewalk. Protest veteran Mel Van Nice still called the afternoon beautiful.

What followed was two months of tent arithmetic. The kitchen they named Thunderdome went up and came down and went up again. Lupe Fiasco dropped parkas. Governor John Hickenlooper said in October the occupation would not stay on state ground, and on Oct. 14 police cleared Lincoln Park before dawn and booked the first 24 people, mostly for being on state property without an invitation. Civic Center got its own nights of pepper spray and folded canvas.

The movement did not rewrite Colorado statute. It did plant a two-month argument on the one block of Broadway everyone in Denver already uses as a civic stage. Fifteen years later the lawn is mowed, the sidewalk is still a sidewalk, and the question the first assembly asked — who the block is for — has not actually left.

Sources: Westword — Occupy Denver timeline · The Denver Post — Occupy clashes · Wikipedia timeline of Colorado history

The date can hide the houses in sand, or put 31 degrees on the official sheet

1873 · Denver

Sept. 23 is a polite 76-degree average that does not mean it. In 1873 a sandstorm hid houses a few hundred yards from the weather observer. In 1977 the foothills gusted 50 to 80. In 2000 the first snow of the season started on this date and Denver bottomed out at 31.

The 1991–2020 average high is 75.9. The record high is 89, shared by 1947 and 1992. That is the brochure version of late September.

The observer version is older and meaner. On this date in 1873, north-to-northwest winds that the Signal Service called almost a gale pushed dust and sand through Denver all afternoon and evening. From the roof of the weather office, houses a few hundred yards away disappeared. The sky went with them. Sustained speeds hit 35 mph; no single hour officially cleared 28. Visibility was a rumor.

In 1977 the foothills took gusts of 50 to 80 mph and Stapleton logged a 53 mph northwest shot. Then 2000 arrived with the first snow of that season on the 23rd and 24th. Rain and drizzle at the new airport on the 23rd flipped to an estimated 2.1 inches of wet snow by the next morning, most of it already melting on the official stick. Boulder measured 6 inches. Castle Rock and Morrison took 4. Conifer got 10, Crow Hill 8, Chief Hosa 7. Downtown's official low on the 23rd was 31 degrees, the coldest this date has posted. The high that afternoon stopped at 41, one degree off the all-time lowest high, which still belongs to 1965 at 40.

The wettest official Sept. 23 is newer: 1.28 inches in 2025. Snow on the date itself remains a blank in the modern column. The foothills do not fill out the same form.

Wear the jacket you already pulled for the equinox. Leave the shovel where 1946 can see it. The sandstorm is the reminder that Denver's air has always been willing to erase the block.

Sources: NWS notes via ThorntonWeather · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 23 · The Denver Post — Sept. 24, 2000 storm