nonetheless evicted from company houses. The United Mine Workers of America immediately built tent colonies for them. The largest, having two hundred tents and a population of nearly a thousand people, was located on the barren plains of Ludlow. When the strike in southern Colorado finally went into effect on September 23, over eleven thousand mine workers, 95 per cent of the total, left the pits. With company operations halted by this mass work stoppage, the "Big Three" corporations—Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, and the Victor American Fuel Company—imported the Baldwin-Felts industrial detectives of West Virginia. The Baldwin–Felts organization promptly took over the sheriffs' offices in Las Animas and Huerfano counties ... and staffed them with several hundred barrel-house bums and professional gunmen imported from the cities ... The miners meanwhile had armed themselves in self-defense and in a battle had temporarily succeeded in driving the Baldwins into the hills. Then came the Colorado National Guard, in command of Adjutant General John Chase. Assured by him and Governor Ammons that they would be let alone, the striking miners voluntarily surrendered their arms. On the last day of October 1913, with banners flying, the singing men, women and children marched behind their band down the road to meet the militia ... [3] Account of Frank Hayes speech after the Ludlow Massacre "Frank J. Hayes, International Vice President of the Union, the man who had charge of the Colorado situation, and colleague of Lawson, was then introduced. Mr. Hayes spoke in clear, ringing voice. His splendid diction and his magnetic personality at once won his hearers, and he held their closest attention. First paying tribute to Lawson as a splendid man, he declared that he came here as the representative of 500,000 organized coal miners to discuss the so-called "Lawson case." He told how he and Lawson and other leaders went to Colorado in 1913, how they sought a hearing with the mine owners but met with refusal, because the operators had determined to eliminate the union. Then he told of how the strike was called, and how the men had hoped to conduct it peacefully, as no strike could be won by violence. Then Mr. Hayes told how the mine owners imported 700 gun-men to break the strike, of how they started the trouble by shooting into the tent colonies established by the strikers who had been