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[1]

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.[2] 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. [3] 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.

Photo 1: Tabasco Looking East Tipple, coal washery, and coke ovens on left. Company housing on right. Courtesy CF&I corporation

Photo 2: Tabasco Looking East Tipple, coal washery, and coke ovens on left. Company housing on right. Courtesy CF&I corporation

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. [4]

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
.

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. [5] 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. [6] 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... [7]

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.

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
.

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.

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.

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." [8]

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.

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. [9] 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. [10] At the Forbes Colony, eight miles south of Ludlow, a young boy was hit by nine machine gun bullets fired from the armored car. [11]

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
.

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. [12]

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.[13]

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.[14] The tents were searched repeatedly, and in one sweep Victor's rifle was found hidden in a fold of canvas; the militia confiscated it. 

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
.

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.[15] 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.[16]

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.[17]

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.

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.[18] 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."[19]

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.[20] 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.[21]

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.[22]

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
.

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.