Cripple Creek Miners Strike Achieves Rare Victory Through Governor Intervention

Gold miners in Cripple Creek, Colorado, launch a strike after mine owners announce they will either extend the workday from eight to ten hours for the same $3 daily wage or maintain eight-hour days while reducing wages to $2.50 per day. Western Federation of Miners president John Calderwood issues a notice on February 1, 1894, demanding mine owners reinstate the eight-hour day at the $3.00 wage. When owners do not respond, the nascent union strikes on February 7. The conflict escalates with firefights and dynamite attacks, including an explosion at a train platform where a deputized strike-breaking posse was about to disembark, sending the armed strikebreakers fleeing back on the train.

The Cripple Creek strike becomes notable as the only time in United States history when state militia is deployed in support of striking workers rather than against them. Governor Davis Hanson Waite, a Populist, initially refuses to send the Colorado National Guard to assist mine owners despite pressure to do so. When mine owners recruit 1,200 armed deputies under private control, violence intensifies with shootings, dynamite explosions, store break-ins, and gun thefts. Waite issues a May 27 proclamation ordering both the miners to disband their Bull Hill encampment and—in an unprecedented development—declaring the 1,200-person deputized force illegal and ordering it disbanded as well.

Waite sends state militia to restore order but crucially sits down with labor and management to negotiate an agreement favorable to miners: an eight-hour workday and $3 daily wage. The five-month strike ends in victory for the Western Federation of Miners, dramatically increasing the union’s popularity and power throughout the region. However, retaliation follows swiftly: on June 22, 1894, Adjutant General Tarsney of the Colorado State Militia is kidnapped by masked men, stripped to the waist, and tarred and feathered for being a “friend of the miners.” Outside southwest Colorado, Waite’s support for miners leads to backlash; hamstrung by a Republican-controlled legislature, Waite loses his 1894 re-election bid to Republican Albert McIntire. The 1894 Cripple Creek victory proves exceptional and temporary—the WFM is “forever tarred as a dangerous and violent organization” by employers, and subsequent Colorado labor conflicts including the 1903-1904 Cripple Creek strike and Ludlow Massacre (1914) demonstrate that state power overwhelmingly serves capital rather than labor throughout the Gilded Age and beyond.