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Life
is Life:
A Mining Family in The West
by Eric Margolis
Division of Educational Leadership and Policy
Studies
Arizona State University
-- margolis@asu.edu[i]
Coal mining was
essential to the development of the American West. Mining was labor intensive
and spread over a wide area. Miners and their families lived in company towns
and small communities with names like Cokedale, Madrid, Rock Springs, and Helper. Mining
brought ethnic diversity to the rural West. In 1901 thirty-two nationalities
were living in the Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) company towns and 27
different languages were being spoken.[ii]
The CF&I was not unique: Finns, Greeks, Italians, and Slavs predominated
in Utah mines; Polish and Slavish miners composed a large part of the
population around Sheridan, Wyoming; Finns, Slovenes, Italians, Scots and
Asians worked along the Union Pacific line near Rock Springs. Blacks from the
Deep
South found their way West, and Mexican immigrants crossed the border to
work the mines. By 1921 there were more than 30,000 coal miners working in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Although these polyglot communities were built by coal companies to house
their workforce, they became more than infrastructure servicing the mines.
The western coal community developed a unique self-concept. Members of the
community learned to work together and act in concert. In hardship and common
action strong bonds were forged. To give human scale to the sweeping
historical processes that led to the creation, and ultimate dissolution, of
the western coal community, this article examines the experiences of a single
family. This is the saga of a working family, the Bazaneles,
who came from the Tyrol to work and live in the coal towns of southern Colorado. [iii]
They were among the tens of thousands of
immigrants who came west to work in the mines and mills that produced the raw
materials for industrialization. The experience of this family is offered as
a window into an important western community but the Bazaneles
are neither “typical” nor particularly unique. In considering
their story we learn something about the labors of men and women, about
immigrants, coal miners and the creation of community in the West, but perhaps
more importantly we learn something about ourselves -- about each
individual’s role as historical actor and as the victim of forces
outside their ability to control.
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Photo 1: Tabasco Looking East
Tipple, coal washery, and coke ovens on left.
Company housing on right. Courtesy CF&I corporation
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 Photo
2: Tabasco Looking East
Tipple, coal washery, and coke ovens on left.
Company housing on right. Courtesy CF&I corporation
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Thirteen miles north of Trinidad, Colorado, near Ludlow Junction,
two canyons arid open like the arms of a lazy K off the main line of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad.
North of Ludlow is canyon Del Agua where the
Hastings and Delagua mines of the Victor American
Fuel Company squatted. South of Ludlow is Berwind
canyon where in 1890 the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) began to
develop an integrated mining and coking complex. Two drifts were driven directly
into the coal seams where they had been exposed by the stream action which
carved the canyon. One mine was named Berwind,
after then president of the company, Edward J. Berwind.
Between 1890 and 1920, the mine produced nine million tons of coal. The other
mine was opened in 1901 and called Tabasco. Perhaps the hot name has
to do with the string of coke ovens that burned day and night, processing the
coal from both mines into fuel for the open hearths and Bessemer converters at the
West’s largest steel mill at Pueblo, Colorado. [iv]
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 Photo
3: Coke Ovens under construction at Tabasco Colorado, ca. 1901 Photo
courtesy CF&I corporation
.
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 Photo
4: “Eugenia Gianesini 1870-1941 Joe Gianesini 1870-1950's
Eugenia, Victor’s mother, Victor, Joe Gianesini
Victor’s stepfather” Tyrolia,
Austria ca 1906.
Photo courtesy Bazanele family
.
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 Photo
5: Tabasco, Colorado
looking west in the 1910's. Note the miners’ houses on the right. The
large building with smoke stacks is the washery
and tipple where raw coal was crushed, washed, graded and loaded into
railroad cars. The mines produced metallurgical quality coal that was
burned to coke in the string of coke ovens behind the railroad cars on the
right. The Coke was sent to CF&I’s Pueblo,
Colorado steel mill. Photo courtesy
Harvey Phelps, MD.
.
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As the large mining and coal processing complex developed, immigrants
from all over the world came to work in Berwind Canyon. Experienced Welsh and
English miners arrived with safety lamps in their wooden trunks; they also
brought the dream of labor unions. As early as 1882, Men named Buchanan and
Driscoll helped to organize Knights of Labor Assemblies in Southern Colorado. During Strikes in 1893
and 1903, company recruiters imported thousands of Southern and Eastern
European immigrants. Many Greeks, Italians, Poles, Germans, Austrians and
Slavs first came to work as strike breakers, later they joined the union.
Victor and his stepfather came three years after the bloody 1903 strike, but
whether they were hired as strikebreakers or not, it is clear that the Tyrolians were part of the companies' calculated policy
of replacing trouble making "Johnny Bulls" with cheaper immigrant
labor. [v] There was bitterness on both sides. As
Victor explained:
The bosses were all Irish and Scotch and They used to treat us bad
too, because we were foreigners and I"ll tell
you the treatment we got was terrific. Terrible. We were called Dago, garlic
snapper, all them kinds of words. But never the name, never the Bazanele, Victor Bazanele. We
were Dagos, Wops. No, not Wop, Wop came after, years after.
By 1912 Berwind and Tabasco, Hastings and Delagua,
were polyglot communities inhabited by people from all over the world. [vi] Tabasco was a typical company
town. Steam trains chuffed up the canyon, tipple screens roared, and at night
the light from coke ovens flickered a ruddy glow on the canyon walls. As the
ovens were fired sulfurous clouds belched from the trunnel
heads and when the wind shifted, miners' wives were quick to rescue their
laundry from the line. George McGovern described Berwind
this way:
In 1912 some 300 miners were digging coal for 55 cents a ton wrenched
out 362,939 tons for the CF&I and, after deductions for powder, smithing, house rent, and medical insurance, a
miner’s net wage for the year scarcely exceeded $600. The children of Berwind and nearby Tabasco attended an overcrowded
school -- sixty-five pupils in the intermediate class -- which was, however,
electrically lighted, steam-heated, and provided with drinking fountains of
pure mountain water. In other respects the sanitation was deplorable. ‘Refuse
from kitchen, sick chamber, laundry room, stable, is dumped promiscuously in
and near every camp... [vii]
Like so many other young boys, Victor quit school and started in the
mines as a trapper, opening the doors to let the mule trains through and
closing them afterward to keep the ventilation system from short circuiting.
After three months trapping, he told the boss in his new language, "Me
like driven," and soon after he graduated to mule driver, making the
big money, $2.95 for ten hours. The mines ground harsh edges on men, hardened
them, and taught an existential fatalism; "Life is life,"
Victor said.
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 Photo
6:
caption: Miners and young mule driver in a Southern Colorado Coal Mine. Oil
lamps on hats suggest that th photo was made
before 1900. Photo Courtesy Colorado
Historical Society
.
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When I met him, Victor was a strangely brooding man; perhaps it was
senility coming on. Some months after the interview, when I called the family
to do a follow-up, his son Aldo told me that Victor was in the nursing home.
I couldn’t talk to him because he was no longer living in the present
but passed his time in the old days with friends and enemies long since dead.
At the time of the interview I did not see senility, but Victor’s talk
had a quality of terrible immediateness, of reliving experiences rather than
reflecting on them. With words that were not so much a narrative as a running
account of events happening before his eyes, Victor transported us back in
time.
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 Photo
7: Victor Bazanele, his son Aldo and two of his
grandchildren during interview in 1976. I met an old man with glasses and a
throaty voice that rose in pitch when he got excited. The hard labor that
conditioned his life had left Victor with a muscular torso but he had
recently broken his hip in a fall. At eighty four, broken hip or no, he
could have arm wrestled any of us college boys and won hands down. He sat
upright, steadying himself with one hand on the couch, crutches leaned
against the wall. CREDIT Coal Project Photograph
.
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When still a boy, Victor was the last one to leave the mine one
evening. He had backed the coal car up close to the face and was loading
coal. He chunked up his final car of the day and was ready to go home. As
usual, he threw his tools on the car and climbed up expecting to be hauled to
the surface. "Gee," he yelled at the mule, "Haw."
The mule refused to move. The entry was narrow and Victor couldn't squeeze
past the loaded coal car. Trapped! Everyone had gone home. He cursed the mule,
called it devil, threatened and cajoled but nothin'
worked; the mule penned him up for hours in the dark mine. When he finally
got home it was very late at night. "Nobody was thinking I was
working extra," He said, "Nobody missed me either. Mamma neither.
My stepfather either. And I was late from five
o'clock on."
The lesson was not lost on the boy miner or the old man who remembered.
Victor's memory catalogued the inhumanity of life in the mines where life was
cheap:
People was worth nothing, a mule was worth everything. If you kill a
mule, look out. I missed a sprag one day. My lamp
went out and I missed a sprag. That mule went down
and he was kinda scratched between the ribs.... It
was just a little scratch but I lost a week off of work.
Like all the other old timers,
he kept a mental tally of those who died unshrivened
and unmourned:
I remember two Bulgarians. They were under three feet of sandstone.
Just the feet was hanging out. And they put three jacks, three ten ton jacks, under and we raised it about a few
feet and took them out. Just like a newspaper. Flat. Two fellas
they threw them in the coke ovens, they had a bunch of black smoke and that's
all. One after the other. That's where they buried them.
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 Photo
8: Accident victim wrapped in white canvas. Delagua, Colorado
Oct. 1901 Courtesy Denver
Public Library
.
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THE 1913-1914
COAL STRIKE
There had been major coal strikes in Colorado in 1882, 1893, and 1903
but the bloodiest strike took place in 1913. By the time the strike came
along Victor was a hard eyed miner of twenty one. Practical reality, more
than political ideology, led him to join the union. Mike Livoda,
a local union organizer, analyzed the miners’ feelings this way:
“It wasn't a situation that these men got love of union because it
was the case that the union was a necessity and it was the only source for
them to get some protection and some freedom." [viii]
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 Photo
9: Victor Bazanele in a studio portrait taken in Trinidad
at the Hausman drug store and studio. ND. Photo
courtesy Bazanele family
.
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On September 23, in the midst of an early mountain snowstorm, Victor
and thousands of other miners were evicted from company property. Armed
guards swaggered around jeering as miners loaded their families and meager
belongings on wagons and plodded down the canyons. The exodus streamed down
to Ludlow where the United Mineworkers of America (UMWA)
was setting-up a tent colony to house the strikers. In the tents a spirit of
camaraderie and community prevailed. The grinding struggle to survive was
lessened by the union strike fund which supported the strikers. Victor
remembered: “We were kind of happy you know, we were getting three
dollars a week for food and we were making it. Potatoes, sometimes a little
meat.” Some of the miners played instruments and in the evenings Ludlow rang with folk songs
Italian, Hispanos, American, and Greek. Still,
there was hardship. Several times Southern Colorado was paralyzed by
blizzards. Deep snows collapsed the tents, and when the sun came out the tent
colony became a sea of mud. There was a union organizer from each ethnic
group. Charlie Costa from Cedarhill was Victor's
friend and the leader of the Italians. Louis Tikas
was the leader of the Greeks, Mike Livoda helped
organize the Slavs, and John Lawson had overall charge of the strike.
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The strike developed
into a protracted struggle between the strikers who tried to shut the mines
down, and the coal operators who sought to keep the mines open with non union
labor. Even before the strike, the CF&I had contracted for mine guards
with the Baldwin Felts Detective agency they provided "detectives"
fresh from the hateful mine wars with the UMWA in West Virginia. [ix] At night huge searchlights
played on the roads and hillsides. Gun fire was common. The light on Tabasco hill was manned by "a
bunch of scabs," according to Victor, "They look all around,
and find out everybody that's walking kinda slow,
you know, try to murder somebody." The company towns of Berwind and Tabasco became armed fortresses.
Barbed wire secured the perimeter, company guards questioned anyone seeking
to enter the canyons. In order to get to the mines strikebreakers had to
change trains at the Ludlow station. The tent colony
functioned as a twenty-four hour a day picket line. "Scab,"
"Yellow belly," "Wop;" strikebreakers were
confronted by mobs of angry miners and screaming women and children. Armed
guards met the trains to escort workers: "Scab herders, scab
herders" jeered the pickets. There was little the strikers could do.
They were no match for the heavily armed Baldwin Felts detectives. On the
other hand, the output of the mines slowed to a trickle. As Victor explained:
“We used to load all the coal we could get....but the scabs didn't.
They just make a car or two. They didn't know how to dig coal. And that's
where the company lost money on that fight. Rockefeller lost money on that
fight.”
Violence and retaliation continued through the long cold winter of
1913-14. Company guards mounted a light machine gun in an automobile that
they had armored at the steel mill in Pueblo. Miners called it the
“death special” when it raced past the tent colony firing into
the tents. [x] At the Forbes Colony, eight miles south of Ludlow, a young boy was hit by
nine machine gun bullets fired from the armored car. [xi]
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 Photo
11: Armored car built in the CF&I steel works and used against strikers
in 1913-14 strike. Men in car employees of the Baldwin Felts Detective
Agency. SOURCE Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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 Photo
12: Miners waiting at the main bridge below Ludlow
shotgun point to turn back train Source : Denver Public Library, Western
History Collection
.
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 Photo
13: “National Guard in ore car at Ludlow”
Source: : Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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On October 27th, 1913, Victor took part in his
first battle. A squad of company guards commandeered a coal train in Trinidad, intending to take it up
the tracks to Ludlow and shoot up the tent
colony. Victor explained that one of the "Brotherhood of Trainmen"
called the strikers to warn them, and the miners grabbed their rifles and
rushed to the railroad bridge to defend their families. When he was a boy
Victor had gotten his first twenty two. Hunting rabbits to put meat on the
table taught him to make every bullet count. As he said: "I was a
damn good shot, impossible to beat just about." Some of the other
miners were trained soldiers, a few of the Greeks had even seen action in the
Balkan wars. The strikers waited patiently for the train to emerge around the
curve beneath the Ramey tipple. Victor clutched a small caliber rifle, a 25
35 with an octagon barrel. Victor remembered that the guards started shooting
as soon as they came into view while the miners held their fire till the
train was in range. Then they returned a ragged volley with their motley
collection of saddle guns and deer rifles. However, one of Victor's friends
had an Italian Army gun with armor piercing shells. The steel jacketed
bullets ripped right through the coal cars. The engine had its lamp blown out
and the guards became afraid for the boiler. The train stopped and
reluctantly chugged backwards towards Trinidad. A triumphant yell rose
from the throats of the defenders. They had won a battle but the long war was
only beginning. [xii]
The next day, Victor and more than 300 other armed miners climbed the
steep hillsides and arrayed themselves above the towns of Berwind
and Tabasco. On signal they attacked. Several guards and
deputies were killed. That same day the Governor of Colorado, Elias Ammons, called out the state militia to restore order.
The militia were under the command of General John Chase, a Denver physician who had seen
duty in Cripple Creek during the notorious hard rock miners'
strike of 1903. Most of the troops were simply young civilians from Denver, including a contingent
from the University in Boulder.[xiii]
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 Photo
14: “National Guard Ludlow” Most of the troops were young
civilians from Denver. When
they arrived in the strike zone, the strikers met them with a brass band.
Miners wanted to believe the officers when they said that they would disarm
both sides and impose peace on the strike zone. This photo appears in
numerous historical collections. Sometimes with union captions, The Van
Bittner collection at the University
of West Virginia has the
caption “Drunken thugs at Ludlow”.
Source : Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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When the militia first arrived in Southern Colorado they were welcomed by the
strikers who believed the officers when they said that they would disarm both
sides and impose peace on the strike zone. The miners met the troops with a
brass band and a militia encampment was set up just across the railroad
tracks from the Ludlow tent colony. One group of
company guards was actually disarmed, and the miners were told that the
guards would be given safe passage out of Colorado. In a show of goodwill,
strikers at Segundo and Sopris turned in their
guns. But rumors began spreading that the strikers' guns had turned up in the
hands of some of the guards. Further, the guards who were to have left the
state reappeared, armed once again. When General Chase ordered the strikers
at Ludlow to turn in their guns, only 37 were surrendered.[xiv]
The tents were searched repeatedly, and in one sweep Victor's rifle was found
hidden in a fold of canvas; the militia confiscated it.
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 Photo
16: General John Chase, of the Colorado National Guard, and Frank E. Gove
stand outdoors in Trinidad, Las Animas County,
Colorado. Source : Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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 Photo
17: K. J. Linderfelt, former mine guard and a
member of the Colorado National Guard Source : Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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From the miners'
perspective, a disturbing series of events occurred in early November. When
it became apparent that the troops would be in the field for months, many asked
to be relieved so they could return to jobs or school. General Chase allowed
the replacement of these "weekend warriors" with mine guards
previously employed by the coal companies.[xv]
Company B, under the command of Karl Linderfelt,
was composed mostly of company guards, some still receiving pay from the coal
operators. Karl Linderfelt, who had recently been
one of the most hated and feared mine guards, was in the reserves and was
activated and given a commission as a Lieutenant in the Colorado National
Guard. A career soldier, Linderfelt learned
"counterinsurgency" while serving with the U.S. army in the war against
the Moros in the Philippines. According to Barron Beshoar he had a "blind hatred for 'red necks and
Wops.'" In the words of Mike Livoda: "He
was a sonofabitch. A man that if you don't do and
believe as he does, he thinks you ought to be dead." Linderfelt and Company B were left guarding Ludlow.[xvi]
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 Photo
18: J.C. Osgood, President of Victor American Fuel on Right. Photo Colorado
Historical Society
.
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Of course, the company perspective on their hired hands was somewhat
different. J.C. Osgood of the Victor American Fuel Company had only good
things to say about them: “The
troops under the command of Adjutant Chase acted with energy and great
discretion in maintaining order, as is evidenced by the fact that although
frequently attacked and sorely tried at times, not a single striker was
killed or seriously injured. The state of Colorado had no fund from which to
pay the troops, or their expenses, but public spirited merchants and bankers
cashed warrants to a large extent for this purpose.” It became
difficult, however, for Governor Ammons to secure
funds to maintain the troops in the field, and in the early part of March he
began to withdraw them gradually.[xvii]
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 Photo
19: Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt (right) and other
members of the Colorado National Guard trotting down the dusty street at
Forbes, 8 miles south of Ludlow. The photo captured Linderfelt
as he imagined himself: "Jesus Christ on Horseback" (Beshoar, 1942:125). This was the force of former mine
guards who were inducted into the Colorado National Guard to confront the
immigrant miners and their families who dared to defy the power of the coal
operators. CREDIT: Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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 Photo
20: The miners armed themselves. Victor is in the center wearing a light
coat. Guerrilla warfare raged sporadically. Linderfelt
sent a telegram to Adjutant General John Chase of the Colorado National
Guard informing him that a state of rebellion existed in the Southern
Fields. CREDIT: Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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At some point, after the national guard was called out but before
Victor's rifle was confiscated, Victor found himself in a gun fight and
probably killed a militia man. In the interview Victor's son, Aldo, asked:
"Did you shoot a militia?" Victor became evasive, "No.
We couldn't. I had no bullets." There were strangers in the house
and, after all, this was murder we were talking about. He changed the topic
and the conversation ranged over different subjects. But Victor's son kept
returning to the shooting. Little by little, with some prodding from Aldo,
this story emerged:
Aldo: After you were over at the bridge on the corner over here remember?
In the ditch, and you had a gun then, right? You and Ancheety.
Did you shoot a militia man then?
Victor: Well, I thought I did, but I don't know for sure. How
could you tell? I see him throw his gun away and flop to the ground, but I
don't know. How in the hell I know he was dead or not?
Aldo: Was he shooting at the tent colony?
Victor: He was shooting, right. No he was shooting at me. Three or
four bullets right in the cedar below. And he caught that cedar every time,
but the bullets wouldn't go through. A small rifle I guess. Oh he was
shooting at me. And then I said where in the hell is he shooting from? And
only once I saw a light, kinda flashing light.
Aldo: What kind of gun you have?
Victor: Oh, I had a 25-35. That first gun.
Aldo: That's the one the militia got.
Victor: That's the one they got. Yeah it was in the fold of the
tent. Yeah.
Aldo: So you saw a flash?
Victor: Yeah, a flash. Like the barrel of a gun, and I watched it.
Then I saw him. There's the bugger. There he is. So I leveled up and hold it
about three feet high. 'Cause that gun wouldn't carry, you know. 25 35 or
something like that. It was a little bullet you know but it wouldn't carry.
It had an awful drop. I took about three foot high and I let him have it. And
his gun dropped over. I saw the same light again, the barrel you know, and
him fall but I didn't know if he was dead or not. Most likely wounded. But
I'm not sure he was dead.
Aldo: What did you do, take off?
Victor: Oh, I took off, in a hurry too. I didn't want no more
bullets to fly in there. Right in the bottom of the cedar tree come the
bullets. Not one of them got me.
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 Photo
21: This shot also has been variously identified as miners or militia in
the woods in Southern Colorado. CREDIT: Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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April 19, 1914 was the Greek Easter, and
the Greek residents of Ludlow held a celebration for
the strikers in the tent colony. Greeks had been one of the most recent
immigrant groups to arrive in the western mines. Large Greek communities
could be found in the coal camps of Northern New Mexico and Eastern Utah. The Greeks had little
experience with unions, coming from a pre industrial society; but they were a
proud people, quick to defend their honor.[xviii] The coal operators viewed the Greeks with
suspicion. J.C. Osgood of the Victor American Fuel Company claimed that: “A large number of the men in the Ludlow camp at this time were
Greeks, Bulgarians and Montenegrins, who had seen service in the Balkan war,
mostly young unmarried men without families. These men were armed with high
power rifles and were the leaders in all acts of violence."[xix]
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 Photo
22: Striking miners at Ludlow
playing baseball. CREDIT: Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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A ball game was held as part of the Easter festivities. During the
game a small group of militiamen rode by the ball diamond and Mike Livoda heard one soldier say: "Have your fun today,
we'll have ours (or our roast) tomorrow." This was interpreted later as
evidence that the attack the next day was premeditated.[xx]
Victor believed that: “They were coming to wipe us out! Coming, I'll
tell you what ... Years before in 1904 they took the people and put them on a
freight train and let them off in the desolate country of Texas. No water, no food, no
nothing....Nothing but rattlesnakes and tarantulas...and we were afraid of
that.
At Ludlow, Victor spent hours
digging cellars beneath the tents so women and children could escape random
bullets, but in his wildest dreams Victor couldn't imagine what was in store.
About ten o'clock in the morning on April
20, 1914 firing broke out at Ludlow. It was never established
who fired the first shot but the miners recall that the militia simply began
to rake the tents with machine gun fire. The fire was directed from Water
Tank Hill about 300 yards south of the tents. Machine gun fire quickly cut
the canvas tents to ribbons, terrifying the miners and their families.[xxi]
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 Photo
23: Members of the Colorado Militia posed with a light machine gun during
the 1913 strike. The men in civilian clothes may be Baldwin-Felts
Detectives or mine guards. The machine gun is one Water Tank hill in a
position similar to the one from which fire was directed at the Ludlow
tent colony. CREDIT: Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
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Flapping canvas
offered scant protection from the bullets swarming through the Ludlow tent colony. Women
screamed and children cried as they scrambled into the shallow pits the
miners had dug beneath the tents. Automatically Victor reached for his rifle,
and remembered with a jerk that the militia had confiscated it only days
before. Strikers with guns ran to dirt breastworks that they had constructed
and began firing back at the militia. Bullets from 30 30's were not accurate
at this range, but they kept the militia from charging. Victor helped others
escape from the doomed colony. Crouching low, they dashed to the safety of an
arroyo a hundred yards to the north. There, peering over the dirt bank,
Victor spent the day. Afraid to leave the safety of the ditch, the survivors
watched sick with horror while the Militia finished the job. In Victor's mind
the events of that day were never laid to rest. His words tumbled out in an
agitated rush:
You couldn't see one militia, you couldn't see the machine gun, it
was down in a hole... all rushing bullets.... bullets flying all over,
hitting pans and stoves, dishwater pans and boilers, tubs.
Firing continued sporadically all day. In the midst of the battle,
Victor said, a "fellow immigrant" climbed out of the arroyo
and crawled "belly down like a snake" to his tent to rescue
his concertina. He crawled back with the squeeze box on his back, took it out
and played. "Crazy son of a bitch," said Victor, "ain't you got enough?" "Oh no,
looky," he said "I'm going to play
schottische. And he did, the noise drove us crazy."
Late in the afternoon the miners ran out of ammunition and with a
blood curdling cry Company B charged the colony. Linderfelt
was in the lead. George Titsworth, whose father was
a camp guard at Segundo, raced up and down the rows with a flaming broom and
set the tents on fire. According to Osgood and others on the company side:
"In some manner, which can probably never correctly be explained, a fire
started in the tent colony. This fire spread rapidly and destroyed the
colony. It is possible that the rifle fire of the militia may have set fire
to a tent, or that it started from an explosion of ammunition, which was
found in large quantities in the private tent of John Lawson, strike
leader." Whatever the true story, the Ludlow colony was destroyed by
fire.[xxii]
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 Photo
24: 1) Ruins of John Lawson’s tent in which military claim were
several thousand rounds of ammunition which John Lawson deny’s
2) Ruins of tent under which was a cave from which were taken the bodies of
11 children and 2 women. One of the two women had a child born last week
and the other was pregnant. 3) The only tent not destroyed. 4) Concrete
bridge under which 150 strikers were driven and held in an arroyo beyond.
5) Trench along the C&S RR occupied by the military commanders, the
position on the hills occupied by the strikers. These men were under fire
at intervals all day yesterday. CREDIT: Colorado
Historical Society Denver Post photo
.
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Victor’s
memories are entirely different from the carefully weighed discussions of the
historians or journalists. As the old man talked, a door opened across sixty
eight years; between his sobs you could hear the crackle of gunfire and the
wails of women. I will never forget the pale afternoon or the name Bazanele, Victor Bazanele:
The man with the gallon of gas, coal oil, Titsworth.
Titsworth, that was his name, but we didn't see him
put the coal oil on exactly, because we couldn't exactly see from the ditch.
But we saw Tikas there. At first he was close to
the poll, telephone poll. He put his hand like this, he said 'stop. Women and
children.' Well, the first bullets...kind of nicked him, you know. He went
down a little bit. The second bullet, we could tell that he got a second
bullet. Even then he didn't fall exactly. He went down to his knees, that's
all. But the third got him. And even Mrs. Costa, she was pregnant six months,
she had bayonet wounds in her belly too. Mrs. Costa, because I remember, we
told her, I said I want to see Mrs. Costa for the last time. She said, 'you
can't.' (crying) 'Its impossible, she's all wounded, full of blood and stuff
you know.”
Josephine Bazanele
comforted her husband, "Now papa, don't get sentimental."
After a moment I asked, "Charlie Costa was killed too?"
”Yeah, he got a head wound here, in his brain. He was killed
too. All his kids died there and his woman and she was pregnant, that was
never mentioned, and the bayonet wound isn't mentioned either. that is true....
There were 11 kids, I know, 11 little… (Victor's voice began to
break again) I don't know. It gets to me you know. Whenever I look at it I
can see it. A cry of anguish broke from Victor's throat. His son, Aldo,
interrupted, "Okay papa, now take it easy. Take it easy."
Victor, sobbed "I can see it, I can't help it." Aldo soothed
his father "Take it easy, its past and gone now." Victor
said: "I know its past and gone, but I can't help it. Its still in my
guts now all the time, I never done nothing about it." Victor's cry
was an open wound. There was a hush in the room; the hair prickled on the
back of my neck and I didn't want to look at anyone. Victor's voice got
stronger: Now just a minute.
There's another thing here coming. The man that saved the tent colony was a
Scotsman. A trainmaster. He stopped the train right about, a long freight you
know, he said 'get the hell out of there.' He knew we were under fire. He
said, 'get the hell out of there.' That's why otherwise ohmygod
all would have been killed. And then they burned the tents. What did you do? Oh, we all went
down the creek, a bunch of people, I don't even know. When I reached Hoehne I couldn't see my feet from the cactus. And then
we went by the Black Hills.
|
 Photo
25: This photograph made by Lewis Dold shows one
of the cellars from which bodies were removed after the Ludlow
fire. CREDIT: Denver Public
Library, Western History Collection
.
|
|
 Photo
26: This photograph made by Lewis Dold shows
wreckage from the ruined tent colony includeing
cook stoves and bed springs. CREDIT: Denver
Public Library, Western History Collection
.
|
The next day it was discovered that 11 children and 2 women had
suffocated in a cellar beneath one of the tents. The miners regrouped in the Black Hills a few miles east of Ludlow. There the union
officials caught up with them. The women and children were brought into town
and the men formed into fighting bands. Mike Livoda
and the other organizers brought food, ammunition, and plans for revenge.
Victor went into town to "Camp Beshoar" where the strikers
put up a new tents city and the union passed out rifles. At this time he had
decided to kill General Chase, in revenge for the deaths at Ludlow:
Victor: I went to Trinidad again where they
furnished me with that rifle and about 60 bullets. Three boxes of bullets. I
was looking for that General. I said by god he's in town, I'm going to look
for him...kill the son of a bitch...I really had it in mind to kill him. Oh
no. I says ah (crying) I can't help it. I saw that hay wagon...Yeah, (crying)
whenever you look at a hay wagon full of eleven not Tikas,
not Rubino, none of them, all little ones. well
you'd get mad too. That's what I saw a hay wagon full of them little corpses.
Well, you get mad too. I was looking for him. They told me he was in town.
And they said he was not in the court house he was somewhere in the hotel.
And I passed close to him, but I wasn't the only one looking for him. There
was more than one, must of been two or three hundred of them.[xxiii]
|
 Photo
27: A group of armed miners at “Camp
Beshoar”
near Mount San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad. This is
where the United Mine Workers regrouped after the Ludlow
fire and before the Ten Days War. Victor is in the center of this group.
Credit : Denver Public Library,
Western History Collection
.
|
|
 Photo
28: The funeral of the Ludlow
victims in front of Holy Truinity Catholic Church
Trinidad April 1914. The coffins of the children are indeed arrayed on a
hay wagon as Victor said. CREDIT: UPI Photographer Lewis Dold
.
|
|
 Photo
29: Miners resting after the battle at Forbes mine. CREDIT: UPI
Photographer unknown
.
|
General Chase had his headquarters in the Columbian Hotel in Trinidad. He was heavily guarded
and it would have been suicide to try to assassinate him. Victor left town
and joined the other miners in the hills. The miners fought a pitched battle
at the Forbes mine, the camp was destroyed and several Japanese
strikebreakers were killed when the boarding house was torched. Mines and
tipples were dynamited. In their rage at companies that valued mules over men
the miners burned their nemeses in the barns. Many died on both sides in the
guerrilla warfare, which came to be known as the Ten Days War. The violence
didn't end until April 29 when federal troops dispatched by President Woodrow
Wilson arrived in the coal fields and disarmed both sides. Victor was not
reassured:
They said the Federals were going to come. They took my rifle again
and I went down the track and went to Hoehne. I
saved myself. Because we thought we were going to be imprisoned. The way the
law was you know. The law kill us. We didn't know the difference.... I stayed
down there for about 15 days and came right back and went up to Cedarhill. So scared, yeah. No militia. No nothing.
|
 Photo
30: Panorama of the Ludlow tent
colony rebuilt after the fire. Note burned area in center and rows of new
tents in the background. Strikers stayed at Ludlow
until 1915. Photo Courtesy of Joe “Moose” Martinez
.
|
In December 1914, low on funds, its leaders exhausted by expensive
legal battles, the United Mine Workers of America capitulated to the Colorado mine operators. Frank J.
Hays, Vice President of the union, summed up the strike: "Thus passed
into history one of the greatest conflicts ever waged by any body of workers
on this continent." George McGovern's analysis of the bloody strike was
more pessimistic: "Although unequaled in bitterness and strife, (the
strike) was in essence a manifestation of the social instability and labor
turmoil affecting all America. No major lasting reforms
led directly from the conflict.... Bitterness in Colorado's coal fields diminished,
but no permanent peace had been achieved."[xxiv]
However, of all the thousands of words that have been written on Ludlow, Victor Bazanele's conclusion rings forever in my mind: “You know everything that happened
like this is mostly cruelty, believe in cruelty. Yeah. Because its been done.
Lots of it before. Everything is done in cruelty.” Almost every
miner knew of the Ludlow strike, and it came to be
seen as an epiphany, a germinal event in the development of community
consciousness. Communal Identity was forged in life and death struggle with a
common enemy. The conflict encouraged miners to begin to set ethnic
identification, and animosity aside. The strike was the start of a decades
long process of assimilation and community building.
|
Photo 31: A panorama
of the camps at Berwind and Tabasco taken with a circuit camera from
the top of the canyon in 1923. Credit Mile High Photographs. Photo courtesy
Glen Aultman
|
THE
“GOOD OLD DAYS:” 1915 1927
After the strike
life went on in the dusty coal camps of Southern Colorado. Barbed wire and
searchlights came down, miners went back to work, children returned to their
classrooms, and company stores did a brisk business. Victor put it
philosophically: "You might as well dance with them, you can't do
nothing fighting them." Conditions slowly began to improve and the
miners remember the years from 1915 through the roaring twenties as the
"good old days." John D. Rockefeller, owner of the CF&I,
announced the formation of a new labor institution, which he called The
Colorado Industrial Plan. The Rockefeller Plan, as everyone called it, was
one of the first company unions. Grievance procedures were spelled out in
detail; miners could only be fired with cause. Much of the plan had to do
with the transformation of barren company towns into livable communities.
Under the Rockefeller Plan the company built new houses. And YMCA's were
built in the coal camps to provide recreational opportunities. Life in Berwind and Tabasco improved.
|
 Photo
32: Berwind Tabasco Band Photo courtesy CF&I
CORPORATION
|
|
 Photo
33: Berwind Baseball team courtesy CF&I
CORPORATION
|
|
 Photo
34: Cars parked in Berwind courtesy CF&I
CORPORATION
|
During World War I the price of coal soared and every able-bodied
miner was called to the pits. In the midst of the wartime boom, almost three
years to the day after Ludlow, another tragedy rocketed
the Southern Field into the headlines. Colorado's worst mine disaster
occurred on April 27, 1917 when the Hastings No. 2
mine exploded, killing 121 miners.[xxv]
Victor and the other miners raced over to the neighboring canyon, but there
was little anybody could do. Victor's eyes were again assaulted by bodies,
dozens of burned black corpses laying in the machine shop all in a file with
identification tags tied to each big toe. War fever was high and jingoist
residents of Trinidad blamed the explosion on Austrian saboteurs. Because he still
identified with his homeland, Victor remembered that with particular bitterness:At Trinidad was sixty men with rifles
and pistols, ready to come up and pick off all the widows and kids. And
they'd send them back to the old country. The little ones, kids, after their
man is dead laying on the ground outside the mine... and they was coming to
take the widows and take them foreigners out, back to the old country.
But there was a horrible shock in store for those who wanted to blame
the Hastings explosion on foreigners. According to the
official U.S. Bureau of Mines report, the explosion was caused by the Mine
Inspector. David Reese had apparently smuggled in matches and the magnetic
key to open the safety lamp. His body was found next to an open lamp. Twenty-two
matches lay
scattered around the charred corpse.[xxvi]
|
 Photo
35: View of the Hastings mine
after the 1917 explosion. Photo Otis Aultman
Credit : Denver Public Library,
Western History Collection
|
For Victor, the disaster confirmed what he believed about the bosses
that had made his life miserable:
The fire boss was drunk all the time. All Irish, they were all
Irish.... Oh hell, they were half drunk all the time. Drinking from one and
another, from a Dago here and a Dago there and a beer here and a drink there.
Mooching you know. They were drunk when they went in so what the hell are you
going to expect? At Hastings they found the fire
boss...he had a magnet to take out the little magnet piece, you know, that
unscrews the lamp...That was the explosion that blowed
up Hastings, because he had the lamp
unscrewed in two pieces. And he must have put the flint in and light it again
and boom. They say there was more than 100 people. There were 90 when I went
over.
Explosions and gun fire were the only noises to pierce the veil of
silence shrouding the coal fields. After the Hastings tragedy, Southern Colorado returned to obscurity.
During the war, and a brief period of post war prosperity, the mines worked
overtime. Changes wrought by the Rockefeller Plan benefited both the miners
and the local economy. Interurban streetcars connected the coal camps to Trinidad and the economy boomed.
With money in their overalls and no longer forced to shop at the company
store, the miners brought their business to local merchants. Many bought
cars. Movies and radio helped break the coal community's isolation.
|
 Photo
36: A load of new cars arriving at the railroad station in Trinidad,
Colorado. CREDIT: Glen Aultman
|
The war in Europe had slowed immigration to a trickle, but
ethnic miners had not relinquished their ties to the old country. "We
lost the war" said Victor. He meant Germany. Relatives back in Tyrolia were suffering, but in the coal camps 1921 was
the most prosperous year ever; almost 15,000 miners were working in Colorado. Victor saved his money,
and in that boom year he sent to the Tyrol for Josephine, his bride
to be.
|
 Photo
37: Josephine Bazanele had this portrait made as
a postcard and sent it from Tyrolia to Victor in Trinidad.
Photo courtesy Bazanele family
|
As Josephine put it, "He was my third cousin and first
love....And I have to marry him and I've been getting had ever since."
Her son tried to make light of it: "But you love it?" and
she replied "I didn't have no choice. I marry him, so I have to stick
to it." The future Mrs. Victor Bazanele
was detained at Ellis Island but Victor wrote to President Wilson: "I
sent Mr. President a telegram. I says, please let my sweetheart loose."
It must have worked. Josephine came on the Santa Fe Railroad. Listen as
Josephine’s strong voice adds a new dimension to the Bazanele saga:
I didn't know what I was coming to anyway, but I was prepared, I
think, for the hard life.
Aldo: What did you think when you first came to this country.
Green as you were?
Josephine: Flabbergasted. Ugly people I said, my goodness. They
don't know how to talk, they don't even.... There was dancing every Saturday.
There was just like tons of people in there. And I remember, there was a
woman she took the tits out and she nursed the baby right there in that
saloon.
The family laughed: "She was civilized. Highly civilized.".
|
 Photo
38: Victor, Joesphine and Aldo Bazanele during 1976 interview. CREDIT Coal Project
Photograph
|
During the interview with Victor, Josephine had stood in the doorway
listening. A raw-boned woman with steel gray hair and a no nonsense look
about her, she wore a homemade chintz house dress. Several times when Victor
broke down she quieted him matter of factly "Now
don't get sentimental papa." But she stayed out of the conversation,
this was Victor's hour, during the strike she was still in Tyrolia. And, I suspect she was sick of hearing about it.
At one point Victor tried to get her to tell the story of their wedding but
she warned him to leave her out of it. Later we all moved into the kitchen
for coffee and once on her turf, even though the tape recorder was still on
she joined the conversation. There is a family joke about what happened after
the wedding, it was probably not funny at the time but gained humor in the
retelling. Josephine had been here for about a week. Victor had set her up in
a furnished room in Trinidad and they got married.
Then he disappeared. He was going to work and then hanging around with his
bachelor buddies just like before. Eventually somebody went looking for him
to tell him his wife was looking for him. "My wife?!" said
Victor, "Oh Christ almighty. What the hell I'm married!?"
(laughter).
|
 Photo
39: Wedding photo of Victor and Josephine Bazanele.
Photo courtesy Bazanele family
|
There are thousands
of photographs of coal mines, strikes and disasters skewing our images of
history. It is important to notice that no photographers recorded the
day-to-day work life of a coal miner's wife. Luckily we have Josephine's
words which may be more graphic than any photograph:
Grandpa was, oh, a good working man, but he want to be just so. He
was raised in Germany, he was raised from the
baby up and he was thinking about the kids. They got to jump every time father
and mother says so. Now they're all different. Now the father and mother jump
when the kids say so.... Out of the mine they want to be served and get his
paper. My old man, he was very anxious to read all kinds of magazines, all
kinds of books. He'd stay up in the night two, three
o'clock. But he don't touch nothing in the house. He don't care about kids
if they were sick. They better be quiet in the night because he got to have
his sleep. Yes sir, when he came just have his supper ready, yes sir, pass the
salt. If he want to go honkey tonkey
someplace, just let him go.
|
 Photo
40: This undated shot at the Bear mine was made by a CF&I photographer.
We are looking up the canyon toward the number three mine where the Bazaneles lived in a house similar to those on the
left. Notice the school building on the right. Photo courtesy CF&I
|
After their
marriage, the Bazanele's lived for the next thirty
three years at the Bear mine, an independent coal company up above Berwind. In 1922 company records show V.D. Bazanele living in house number 26. The rent was $5.00 a
month an additional $1.50 was deducted for lights.[xxvii]
They got their water from a pump outside the house. Many miners kept
chickens, goats and cows. Produce from vegetable gardens was stored in root
cellars scratched into the stoney hillside. The
four room houses built of hollow tile were hot in the summer and cold in the
winter. Storms whistling through Berwind canyon
blew down the chimneys and filled the houses with coal smoke. At independent
mines there was no Rockefeller Plan, no union contract. The old system
prevailed. As Victor put it, Mr. Boss put his hat on the ground and all the
miners would ante up scrip money to ensure a good place to dig coal. And if
you said boo, down the canyon you go. In the thirties, one of Victor's
friends had his head cracked open with a revolver for talking union. The boss
then sent a two wheeled cart to his house, loaded up the furniture and the
stove, and sent the whole family down the canyon. Once, when Victor went for
his check, instead of handing it to him like a man the super threw his pay on
the ground:
Think of it. cried Victor, Think what happened to you and see if you
don't murder the son of a bitch. But you couldn't do nothing. you had to love
it. You had to take it. You couldn't fight no place else. No. You just had to
shut up and keep on working, because like me with these three kids, how could
I do it?
To add insult to injury, in the early twenties crosses were burned on
canyon walls above the mine camps. In Southern Colorado, Ku Klux Klan activity
was not so much racism against blacks as an expression of Anglo American
hatred of immigrants. The rigid class system of the mines and towns was
breaking down. Immigrants became citizens and occasionally
"foreigners" even moved up to become bosses in the mines. Prosperity,
union organizing, company plans and new fangled ideas threatened the old
pecking order. The good Anglo Burghers and poor white trash hid beneath masks
and bed sheets to spread terror and keep Dagos, garlic snappers, goddamn
Greeks, and Bohunks in their place. Victor had his
trusty Marlin, the one the union gave him to use in the ten days war, and
when the "Ku Ku Klan" burned a
cross above his house he let it be known that "If any son of a bitch
comes down here I'm going to kill him." The Klan may have been
stupid, but they weren't dumb; nobody came down.
|
 Photo
41: A couple years after the original interview, when Victor had been moved
to the nursing home, the coal project returned to talk with Mrs. Bazanele. She provided woman’s necessary
perspective on the miner's life. Josephine was camera shy, her son Aldo had
to take matters into his own hands to get this shot. Photo Coal Project
|
While Victor fought
to protect his family, assert his dignity as a man, and make a living in the mines;
Josephine struggled to raise four
children and do the housework. She remembered a different set of hardships:
Scrub by hand, go fetch the water a mile over, two three o'clock in the morning, didn't have enough to wash, bake
bread, things like that. Tend to the garden for sure, yes sir. If there's
anything to go and gather, we used to go. For those herbs you know, those
different kinds and boil it and make spinach out of it. Oh yeah. Go for
jackrabbit. Now you don't see jackrabbit. If you go all around this prairie
you don't see one. Well we used to go for jackrabbit, oh squirrel, yes sir.
We used to make salami out of jackrabbit meat, believe it or not....When we
have a bird we have a feast. All kinds of it, turtledove, Those black birds.
Those snow birds. All kind of birds. Oh yes. And we raised our 4 kids and
pretty fat at that. Send the kids to school. Listen to my old man cussing all
the time that I spend too much money.
Josephine had a fine hand at needlework. Fancy crochets, appliques, and embroidered floral designs enlivened the
dresses she made for her children and grandchildren. She knit wool stockings
for Victor to wear in the winter, but fancy cutwork table clothes were her
special delight. This I was told by her daughter in law. In Josephine's own
account her artistry sounded matter of fact:
Now a days they don't know how to patch. When they are full of holes
they just throw it and buy some more. But that time you got patch and some
more patch. Even the stocking you mend it and mend and mend. The pants, one
patch on top of the other. I used to make all the dresses for my two girls.
The only bought dress they had it was graduation dress. He broke down, my old
man, and bought them a nice dress for graduation.
The Bazanele's made a home out of the
company house at Bear Canyon. They paid rent to the
company but upkeep was their responsibility. Josephine's summer gardens were
always the most beautiful in camp. She prided herself on Dahlias as big as
dinner plates, and vibrant stands of gladiolus to brighten up the drab coal
camp. Something good was always cooking, fresh bread, jams and jellies in
late summer, and wonderful berry pies. But, this meant a lifetime of hard
work for Josephine. She scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees, and white
washed the walls:
I scrape everything down; and I calcimine the room; and wash the curtain;
and put everything away just like before; and wash everything nice and clean.
Sometimes he noticed. Sometimes he doesn't. I didn't get no credit
whatsoever, no matter what I did....And sometime if I was sick or something
and I couldn't make bread, I'd probably buy a loaf and put it in his lunch
bucket and he'd bring back the bread. He said, don't put any bought bread in
my lunch anymore. So that's that, sick or no sick, you're going to make
bread. That's right. There was the man now, see. I wear the pants, he always
said.
Aldo asked, "When dad used to come home, you used to have
what on the stove?"
Oh, I had the tub full of water, hot water. and he go down in the big
tub and I had to scrub him down, front and back and dry him out and help him
put his socks and his shoes on his feet, give him coffee. Sometimes with a
little chicory in it. (She chuckled) Have his supper ready when he got
through and eat. He go out in the front room that we have, sit down in the
couch, he have his paper and his pipe and that's all.... He made a radio, he
was always very ingenious, very very ingenious. You
can hear, oh, I don't know. The ballroom dance a long time ago in Chicago. It was that pushety pully music a long time
ago.
The song Dark as a Dungeon eloquently expressed the men's
attraction to the work: "Like a fiend for his dope, or a drunkard his
wine, a man will have lust for the lure of the mine." "It gets in
your blood," the old timers tell you. Making a living loading coal by
the ton was physically demanding, it hardened your body. But strength wasn't
enough. If you wanted to live, you learned practical knowledge quickly: seat
of the pants geology, engineering, and a working understanding of explosives.
You became a carpenter, a blacksmith, a mule skinner, and more. You utilized
fluid mechanics to ventilate the room, and surveying to drive a straight
tunnel. Miners lived and died by the shear and stress of rock mechanics.
Mining practices literally created the conditions under which they worked. If
a bad shot fractured the roof, you might have to eat your lunch under that
spot every day.
Miners worked as a team, from the partners who looked out for each other to
the entire brotherhood of miners. Coal miners created a union which at one
time was the most unified in America. Among the miners, there
was an endless conversation about coal mining. They joke that they talked
about sex in the mine and mining in the bedroom. Night and day the bars were
full of men drinking beer and talking about the mine. Even today the old
timers gather in the parks and on the courthouse steps to "mine
coal." Part of the miners' bond was danger, part challenge; there was an
existential fatalism in the face of death. The mix of sinew, hormones and
male bonding, like that experienced by combat teams in wartime, forged strong
attachments between men.
The lot for women
was different: isolated and oppressed. Lucy Parsons the wife of Albert
Parsons the Haymarket martyr, called working-class women "The slaves of
slaves." Josephine Bazanele described the
intimate burden: ”When everything go wrong in the mine he come out
and take it out on the women, you know, or the kids. My old man used to do it
a lot of times. I don't know for why; and so little by little I understood.
He says, something was wrong in the mine and got to let the steam go
someplace else." When
Josephine was asked if the women all got together, she replied: “No,
No, No, there was no gathering. No everyone they tend to their own business.
Everyone to their own house and by the time they are ready to lay down and go
to sleep they had no interest to do anything else.”
Josephine gave birth to two boys and two girls. When her first son was born
Victor was at work: "He just came and that's all. Nobody. I was alone.
And I just got through washing mind you, in the tub. When grandpa come from
the mine, why, his son was there." Later she learned to plan the births
better: I used to bake bread, a big batch of bread and wash all the
clothes, iron on the clothes, be ready, because for a couple of days I have
to stay put. (she chuckled as if realizing how strange this sounded in
the 1980"s) The mine mouth was up
on the hill, the Bazanele's house down along the
creek. and a boulder loosened by rain was shaken free by the endless rumble
of the mine cars. It came crashing down on the house where Josephine and
their new born son were:
It went
through this shack and all those sticks and the plaster and it come on top of
him on this little cradle. So I got scared for a while but then he don't say
too much. He got scared, but that's all. No hurt. No nothing. There was a
great big hole in the roof that the rock came down. So the men, the next day
they come, four or five men, and they took the rock out and chop them up and
fix the wall.
THE END OF
THE ERA
After the mid
twenties the coal economy began to collapse in a depression which would not
bottom out until 1933. The Bazanele’s stayed
on in Bear Canyon but the mine worked steadily only two or three months in
the winter, in the summer it went down to only one day a week. Josephine
saved a pay check stub from 1932 which showed that Victor made five dollars a
shift. Deductions included: $2.00 for lights, $1.50 for the doctor, and fifty
cents for the bathhouse. The bottom line was forty one dollars for eight days
work in two weeks. During those years of hunger Victor traded the rifle that
the union gave him after Ludlow to pay a milk bill.
Victor and his two sons scavenged the old Tabasco mine site for lead pipes
and copper wire to sell for scrap. The money went for flour and potatoes.
"My kids they was always hungry,” Josephine said matter of factly. “On the side they was swiping this and
swiping that if they could, ain't it?"
"Had to eat," said Aldo. "Yah, that's right," she agreed.
They used to buy big tins of crackers, sardines by the case. Kept them in the
cellar, Aldo laughed:
Mother used to go down and she'd count everyone of them everyday. So I
opened up a can, ate the sardines, put the lid back again, put it underneath
the piles. She didn't know the difference. Crackers. We'd take the crackers.
She used to mark the tin. So we used to get cardboard, and put them
underneath so they would stay up to the line.
Things got better in the late 1930's. After the National Labor Relations Act
was passed the miners voted in the United Mine Workers Union. War once again
propelled the fortunes of the coal community. In 1945, Victor's check showed
eighteen shifts and nine hours at time and a half. Overtime. And in May, a
warm month. He took home $125.00. However, the burst of prosperity was an
illusion. World War Two was the last gasp for the Southern fields. As the war
drew to a close, so did the reign of old king coal.
|
 Photo
42: “Bear Canyon Coal Company 6/29/46 Bear
Canyon #6 mine Vallorso, Las Animas Co. Colo.
Houses for miners in company housing project. Credit National Archives and
Record Service Photographer Russell Lee
|
|
 Photo
43: Portal of the Bear Canyon
# 6 mine. Photographer Glen Aultman. Ca. 1940's
Courtesy Glen Aultman
|
Diesel trains now
howled past the Ludlow depot. Fifty-three
railroad cars a day whistled north; hauling all the coal needed by the Pueblo steel mill. This demand
came to be met by a single mine, CF&I's modern
Allen mine which was opened in 1951. A few independents hung on, selling coal
by the truck load to those who couldn't afford to switch to gas. But, one by
one the railroad tracks up the canyons were abandoned; the old timers
retired, Victor in 1954. He was always good with his hands. After he retired
he made Josephine a present: a beautifully finished dollhouse, with a white
picket fence around it. Here, he said, it’s the home that I never could
buy for you.
|
 Photo
44: In a modern coal mine continuous miners like this claw the coal off the
wall and pass it on to a conveyor belt. This is one of the machines that
Aldo Bazanele serviced in the Allen Mine. The
walls are white because they have been sprayed with rock dust which is used
to keep concentrations of coal dust from reaching explosive potential.
CREDIT: CF&I Corporation
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 Photo
45: Silos of the Allen Mine where Aldo Bazinele
worked as a mechanic. Automatic loaders fill a 53 car train without
stopping. CREDIT: CF&I Corporation
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 Photo
46: Unit train of coal from the Allen mine on its way to the Pueblo Steel
Mill CREDIT: CF&I Corporation
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There was still one Bazanele mining coal in Southern Colorado. Aldo, gained his first
work experience earning a dollar a day in the CCC camps. During the war he
was offered a coal miner's deferment but chose to enlist instead. But after
VJ day he worked in small mines for a few years, and about the same time that
Victor retired, Aldo went to work at the Allen mine. After 20 years as a
union miner, Aldo rose to company work as an assistant master mechanic. He
serviced the mechanical miners and expensive long wall machines that had been
imported from Germany and England. The Allen mine was one
of the most modern mines in the country. However, in 1983 CF&I announced
that it was going out of business. The Allen, the last major mine in Las
Animas county, was sold to the Wyoming Fuel Company. Not feeling bound by
history; the new company intended to run a "union free operation."
They could not immediately get out of the union contract that they inherited
from CF&I, but they could begin to replace the old guard supers and
company men, who they felt were "soft" on the union, with tough
minded newcomers. And certainly in Aldo Bazanele's
case, there was a blood tie through Ludlow that transcended his
position as a company mechanic. Aldo chose early retirement.
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 Photo
47: UMWA picket line at the Wyoming Fuel Company 1986. CREDIT: Eric
Margolis
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Victor’s grandchildren are not coal miners and live far from Berwind canyon. In fact, Mark Bazanele
was responsible for making this paper possible. A student in a sociology
class at The University of Colorado, Mark heard about my interest in oral
histories of coal miners and suggested that I might find it interesting to
interview his grandfather because he had been at Ludlow. And indeed I did find
that interesting, but over the years I found something richer in the story.
Individually, and as a family, the Bazaneles
worked, acted, and made difficult individual choices based on the fields of
possibility that they perceived. Their decisions and labor, alongside the
decisions and labors of thousands of others in similar situations, are
usually obscured in great historic movements of the 20th century:
immigration, union organizing, assimilation, women’s movements, upward
mobility, and so on. In the oral history of the Bazaneles
I came to understand individuals not just as the product of historic forces,
but as makers of history.
ENDNOTES
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