Denver, Colorado

As the civil war raged on with no end in sight and millions of Americans succumbed both to warfare and famine, the socialist leaning Colorado rumbled. In the last election, Colorado had voted SPA, in a sea of Federalist neighbors. A massive protest both against the government and the war as a whole was led by local SPA leaders. Some forty thousand men women and children from Denver and her suburbs marched down Colfax to the Capitol building. The five thousand strong military garrison in Denver, alongside the Denver Police and Sheriff’s departments panicked as the protest got more and more rowdy at the steps of the capitol. Many of the protestors, miners from the coal fields and Rockies that had even ridden into Denver for the specific purpose of this march were armed and carried the memories of earlier labor uprisings.

It’s not known who shot first, but a riot ensued on Larimer street from an offshoot of the protest. The fighting spread through much of Denver north of the capitol building, while the brunt of the protest dispersed. Six hundred thousand protesters were killed, and fifty army and police were killed in what could be described as more of urban warfare than a riot. The question of who instigated the Battle of Larimer Street remained in the air, but what would not be questioned is who instigated what came next.

Panic spread among the military’s ranks, with the fear that they wouldn’t be able to hold Denver in the face of a full-scale uprising. The order was given to find and eliminate the agitators who had caused the Larimer Street Battle. However, with the difficulty to identify who was an active fighter and who was a civilian, union membership was perceived as rebellion and nearly the entirety of Denver’s industrial working population was killed. It is estimated that 75% of the state’s UMW members were killed in Denver that day. Immigrant neighborhoods of Globeville and Highlands were blamed for the uprising and hundreds were killed by reactionary militias that accompanied the federals in the conquest of the city. Denver was securely in government hands… at the cost of 5,000 lives.