Editing Lafayette, Colorado (section)

===Labor===
The extended and sometimes violent coal miner's strike of 1910–1914, called "The Long Strike," put Lafayette at the forefront of unionized labor's struggle for fair wages. Union miners belonging to [[United Mine Workers]] of America were determined to get fair wages and safety improvements in a dangerous workplace, while coal mine operators wanted the mined coal to continue flowing.

In the Northern Field, the Long Strike started April 1, 1910. [[United Mine Workers]] of America miners wanted an increase of 3 cents per ton for machine mining, 4 cents for pick mining, a 5.55 percent increase for day wages and dead work, an 8-hour work day, selection of checkweighmen, union recognition and enforcement of state labor and mine safety laws.<ref name="LafHist" />

At a convention in Trinidad in September 1913, [[United Mine Workers]] delegates from across the state endorsed a statewide strike, which became the greatest labor upheaval in Colorado history. Coal miners statewide accused operators of favoring profits over the safety of workers, and their demands included coal operators’ recognition of the union, an increase in wages of 10 percent, an eight-hour workday for all classes of labor in or around the coal mines, payment for deadwork, the right to have union-paid weigh bosses, the right of the miners to trade wherever they pleased (instead of company stores), the right to choose their own boarding place and their own doctor, the enforcement of the Colorado mining laws and "total abolition of the notorious and criminal guard system."<ref name="LafHist" />

During the strike, Rocky Mountain Fuel Co., owners of the Simpson and Vulcan mines in Lafayette, the Acme mine in Louisville and the Industrial mine in Superior, recruited and paid the railroad fare for nonunion coal miners from W. Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Joplin, Missouri. Strikebreakers were labeled either "scabs" or "blacklegs."<ref name="LafHist" />

Those on strike, members of [[United Mine Workers]], were called "rednecks" because they wore red handkerchiefs around their necks. After asking Boulder County Sheriff M.P. Capp to deputize up to 75 company men to help guard the mines, which he refused, Northern Coal and Coke Co. hired West Virginia-based Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency guards to protect the company's assets. The Baldwin-Felts guards, known in southern coal states for protecting coal trains and payroll shipments, were hired to prevent trespassing on company property.

In September 1910 coal operators, including RM Fuel's E.E. Shumway, asked Denver District Court Judge [[Greeley W. Whitford]] to issue an injunction to restrain striking miners from gathering in groups, posting notices or interfering with nonunion operation of the mines. Whitford agreed to the injunction and appointed Baldwin-Felts detectives as enforcers.<ref name="LafHist" />

Elected in November 1912, Colorado Governor Elias M. Ammons sent the Colorado militia to Boulder County to quell the strike violence after a September 17, 1913, gun battle raged on the east side of Lafayette. Union sympathizers said that nonunion employees at the Simpson mine, "the Bulgarians," fired indiscriminately at union members returning from work at an adjacent union mine. The nonunion workers claim that union sympathizers started the fight by throwing rocks through one of the company buildings in the Simpson compound.<ref name="LafHist" />

All sides agreed that numerous volleys of gunshots, estimated at over 1,000 rounds, originated in both the stockade – shooting toward downtown Lafayette – and in downtown Lafayette shooting toward the stockade. One person inside the stockade was injured by a gunshot, and one horse was killed.<ref name="LafHist" />

After U.S. troops brought in to referee the strike encamped near the Lafayette cemetery on October 28, 1913, they proceeded to confiscate all guns in Lafayette, even searching homes room-by-room. The following week, children of union men refused to go to school with two boys whose fathers had scabbed the previous summer.<ref name="LafHist" />

The Long Strike was called off by the UMWA in late 1914. The large Colorado coal operators who'd refused all of the miners’ demands, Rocky Mountain Fuel Co. and Colorado Fuel and Iron, agreed only to rehire the miners that went on strike. The general consensus was that the UMWA's 1913–1914 statewide strike didn't accomplish much, and it was decades before the union regained its influence in Colorado.<ref name="LafHist" />

Edward Lawrence Doyle (1886–1954), Lafayette resident from 1908 to 1912 and UMWA Dist. 15 secretary-treasurer based in Denver from 1912 to 1917, is better known for his involvement in the fateful 1914 Ludlow Massacre, where he played a key role in communicating to national media the union's perspective of the killings. As part of that job, he corresponded regularly with labor activist Mother Jones and with author Upton Sinclair, who wrote "King Coal," an exposé on the dangerous conditions Colorado coal miners faced. Doyle was entrusted by Sinclair to proofread "King Coal" for accuracy prior to its release in 1917.<ref name="LafHist" />

In 1909, Doyle worked as a checkweighman at the Capitol mine east of Lafayette where he advocated for miners’ safety, including dogging the mine's owner to remove snow and ice that regularly blocked the mine's escape shaft after snow storms. Doyle worked his way into leadership of Lafayette Local 1388 during the first few years of the Long Strike, where he organized the group's civil disobedience efforts. Doyle aggressively rooted out turncoat union members hired by coal operators to spy on the organization. He also planted two of his own union men, hired from out-of-state, who posed as scabs in each local coal mine.<ref name="LafHist" />