accounts of the event. Background Areas of the Rocky Mountains have veins of coal close to the surface, providing significant and relatively accessible reserves. In 1867 these coal deposits caught the attention of William Jackson Palmer, then leading a survey team planning the route of the Kansas Pacific Railway. The rapid expansion of rail transport in the United States made coal a highly valued commodity, and it was rapidly commercialized. At its peak in 1910, the coal mining industry of Colorado employed 15,864 people, 10% of jobs in the state. Colorado's coal industry was dominated by a handful of operators. Colorado Fuel and Iron was the largest coal operator in the west and one of the nation's most powerful corporations, at one point employing 7,050 people and controlling of coal land. John D. Rockefeller purchased a controlling stake in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company in 1902, and nine years later he turned over his controlling interest in the company to his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who managed the company from his offices at 26 Broadway in New York. Mining was dangerous and difficult work. Colliers in Colorado were constantly threatened by explosions, suffocation, and collapsing mine walls. In 1912 the death rate in Colorado's mines was 7.055 per 1,000 employees, compared to a national rate of 3.15. In 1914 the United States House Committee on Mines and Mining reported: Colorado has good mining laws and such that ought to afford protection to the miners as to safety in the mine if they were enforced, yet in this State the percentage of fatalities is larger than any other, showing there is undoubtedly something wrong in reference to the management of its coal mines. Miners were generally paid according to tonnage of coal produced, while so-called "dead work", such as shoring up unstable roofs, was often unpaid. The tonnage system drove many poor and ambitious colliers to gamble with their lives by neglecting precautions and taking on risk, with consequences that were often fatal.Between 1884 and 1912 mining accidents claimed the lives of more than 1,700 in Colorado. In 1913 alone 110 men died in mine-related accidents. Colliers had little opportunity to air their grievances. Many resided in company towns, in which all land, real estate, and amenities were owned by the mine operator, and which were expressly designed to inculcate loyalty and squelch dissent. Welfare capitalists believed that anger