On April 20, 1914, unionist forces engaged in a day-long gun battle with the militia in the coalfields of Colorado. The site was a tent colony in Ludlow occupied by strikers who had been evicted from their company homes. Late in the afternoon, a fire of unknown origin swept the tent colony. When the smoke cleared, eighteen strikers were found dead, including two women and eleven children in a pit dug beneath a tent as shelter from the bullets. The incident, which rapidly became known as the Ludlow Massacre, was the piv-rnotal event in what became the Ten Days' War, as unionists fought back with a ferocity that resulted in more than thirty deaths and the intervention of the U.S. Army.
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