Friday, October 9, 2026

Mack Powell is shot off his horse watching a strikers' ball game near Ludlow

1913 · Ludlow tent colony, Las Animas County

On October 9, 1913, two weeks into the southern Colorado coal strike, mine guards opened fire near the Ludlow tent colony during a baseball game at its edge. Mack Powell, a former union miner working as a cowboy on a nearby ranch, was shot and killed while sitting on his horse.

The strike that became the Colorado Coalfield War started in late September 1913, when thousands of miners walked out of the coal camps of Las Animas and Huerfano counties and moved their families into tent colonies the United Mine Workers had set up on leased land. Ludlow, on the plains north of Trinidad, was the largest.

The companies answered with guards, many of them hired through detective agencies, and the canyons around the colonies filled with armed men. On the afternoon of October 9, guards from the Hastings camp fired toward the ball field at the edge of the Ludlow colony. Mack Powell, a onetime union miner who had taken work as a cowboy on a ranch nearby, was sitting on his horse watching when he was hit. His widow later testified that he died that day.

Accounts of the day also record the death of John Nimmo, a mine guard and Colorado National Guardsman from Denver, killed early in the shooting. Neither side came out of October 1913 with clean hands, and both sides kept count.

Powell was far from the last to die in the strike. The fighting went on through the winter, and on April 20, 1914, the Ludlow colony itself was attacked and burned, killing about two dozen people, many of them women and children. The Ludlow Massacre is the name people remember. Mack Powell's afternoon at the ball game is one of the smaller stories that led there.

Sources: We Never Forget: Mack Powell shot at the Ludlow ball game · Wikipedia: Colorado Coalfield War · Wikipedia: Ludlow Massacre

October 9, 2020: Denver hits 85 degrees in the year that would not cool off

2020 · Denver

The warmest October 9 in Denver's records came in 2020, when the thermometer reached 85°F. The average high for the date is closer to the mid-60s.

Denver's record high for October 9 is 85°F, set in 2020, according to the city's daily records. In a normal year the date tops out around the mid-60s, with cool nights and a real chance of a first freeze somewhere on the plains.

The fall of 2020 did not do normal. The smoke from that year's wildfires hung over the Front Range for weeks, and the heat lasted well into October before an Arctic front at the end of the month knocked the city into single digits. The 85-degree day sits on one side of that swing. The other side came two and a half weeks later.

If you remember mid-October 2020 as T-shirt weather under a hazy sky, the record book agrees with you.

Sources: Extreme Weather Watch: Denver October 9 records

October 9, 2009: 18 degrees, the coldest the date has been

2009 · Denver

Denver's record low for October 9 is 18°F, set in 2009. The same date has also hit 85°F, which makes for a 67-degree spread between its best and worst days.

The coldest October 9 in Denver's records came in 2009, when the low dropped to 18°F. October 2009 was a cold, snowy month along the Front Range.

Put it next to the 85°F record from 2020 and October 9 has a 67-degree range between its warmest and coldest readings. That is what early fall in Denver looks like: a date that can belong to summer or to winter depending on the year, and sometimes to both within the same week.

The practical advice has not changed in a hundred years. Keep the jacket in the car until November.

Sources: Extreme Weather Watch: Denver October 9 records