LA JUNTA, Colo. — Three historical sites clustered on the bone-dry plains of southeastern Colorado have drawn new attention to hard truths around century-old massacres and a wartime prison, an opportunity local leaders are seizing to expand tourism that explores the lessons of the past.
At one site, the Colorado National Guard and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company attacked striking immigrant coal miners and their families who’d just endured the state’s snowiest winter in tent camps. They’d risked their lives in defiance of company owners, including John D. Rockefeller, who paid insufficient wages and forced workers to live in company housing and buy food in company stores. More than 20 people died, including 11 children, in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre.
At another location, U.S. troops slaughtered more than 230 native people, mostly women, children and tribal elders, some of them clutching U.S. flags they’d been promised would protect them. The killers removed body parts and paraded them from the prairie to Denver. Colorado Gov. John Evans supported the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. He’d issued a proclamation saying state citizens could kill native people and take their land.
