The Road Forked at Monument. Colorado’s Tarred Adjutant General Took the Palmer Lake Branch.

Congress made Labor Day a national holiday on June 28, 1894. Days earlier, on the night of Friday, June 22, masked men had taken Colorado’s adjutant general out of a Colorado Springs hotel at gunpoint and tarred him for having stood between striking miners and a sheriff’s private army. He walked twelve miles north through the night. A rancher came out with a carriage and drove him the rest of the way, and where the road divided they took the Palmer Lake branch rather than the Monument one, because deputies lived around Monument and there might have been a fight.

Labor Day arrives in the Tri-Lakes as a closed town hall, a closed library and a council meeting moved to Tuesday. Monument stages no event of its own; the markets and the music were Saturday and Sunday. The holiday’s origin is usually told as a parade in New York and a signature in Washington. Colorado’s version is closer to home and considerably less decorous, and one week of it happened on the road between Colorado Springs and Palmer Lake. The account below comes chiefly from three Rocky Mountain News reports of June 1894, read in full in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.

Colorado put it in statute before Congress did

The holiday reached Colorado law seven years before it reached federal law. Oregon passed the first state Labor Day act on Feb. 21, 1887, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Three weeks later the Colorado General Assembly passed its own. House Bill 131 runs to a single section and was approved on March 15, 1887.

Colorado was one of four states to follow Oregon that year, alongside Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, and the Denver Public Library reckons it the second. From 1887 to 1894, 23 states in all enacted a Labor Day holiday, according to the historian of the U.S. House. The House took up the Senate’s bill, S. 730, on June 26, 1894 and passed it without objection. President Grover Cleveland signed it two days later, on June 28.

The army the sheriff raised

Earlier that year, Cripple Creek had been through a strike that ran from February into June. The gold camp sat inside El Paso County in 1894; Teller County was not carved out of it until 1899. The sheriff was an El Paso County officer, the county seat was Colorado Springs, and many of the district’s leading mine owners lived there.

In January 1894 the owners of the district’s eight-hour mines moved their shifts to ten hours while holding daily pay at $3. Schedules varied across the camp: some mines already worked nine or ten hours, and several accepted the eight-hour demand and kept running. The Western Federation of Miners, formed the year before, struck the mines that held out on Feb. 7. Sheriff M.F. Bowers asked for troops in March and Governor Davis H. Waite sent them. Adjutant General Thomas J. Tarsney went with the column and reported back that no warrant had ever issued in the county over the labor trouble, that no deputy had been resisted, and that the sheriff had never attempted to go up to Bull Hill where the disorder was said to be. The troops were withdrawn on March 20.

Bowers then deputized a private force, armed and paid for with money the owners advanced to the county. Colorado Newsline puts it at about 1,200 men; the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum puts it at 1,300 and records that the Gazette ran a call to arms as opinion pieces stoked fear in the city that the miners would march on it.

On May 24, 125 deputies, most of them former police officers and firemen, left Denver under a former chief of police. As their train came into view the next morning, a party of miners packed dynamite into the boiler inside the shaft house of the Strong mine and blew the building apart. Around midnight the miners attacked the deputies’ camp down the track. The deputy William Rabedeau was shot in the chest and killed; a miner, George Crowley, was accidentally shot from behind by one of his own side and was found dead in the morning. The sequence is set out in Benjamin McKie Rastall’s 1908 history of the district.

Waite told the Rocky Mountain News on May 28 that the militia would not act as guards to the owners’ property. “Isn’t it about time for the mine owners to explain why they are gathering armed forces in El Paso County?” he asked. On June 4, in Denver, the mine owners J.J. Hagerman and David H. Moffat signed articles of agreement with Waite providing that “eight hours actual work shall constitute ‘a day’” at three dollars, the men taking twenty minutes for lunch on their own time. The district’s owners had no association, so the two could sign only for themselves; they urged the rest to accede, and the rest did. On June 8, when the deputies advanced on a strikers’ camp anyway, the state troops put themselves between the two forces and ordered the deputies back. The News called it “as close a call as any war time ever knew.” Colorado Newsline describes it as one of the few occasions in American labor history when a state’s troops were called out on the strikers’ side.

Five months in El Paso County, 1894

Date	Event
Jan. 1894	Owners of the district’s eight-hour mines move to ten-hour shifts at the same $3 daily wage.
Feb. 7	Western Federation of Miners strikes for the eight-hour day.
March 18–20	Waite sends the militia at Sheriff Bowers’s request, then withdraws it on Tarsney’s report.
Spring	Bowers deputizes roughly 1,200 men, subsidized by the mine owners.
May 24–25	125 deputies leave Denver; miners dynamite the Strong mine’s shaft house as they arrive; William Rabedeau and George Crowley are killed in fighting around midnight.
June 4	Hagerman and Moffat sign articles of agreement for themselves: eight hours’ actual work for $3 a day. Other owners follow.
June 8	State troops interpose between the deputies and the strikers and order the deputies back.
June 22–23	Tarsney is taken from the Alamo Hotel in Colorado Springs, tarred and feathered, and reaches Palmer Lake the next day.
June 28	Cleveland signs the act making the first Monday in September a federal holiday. The House had passed it on June 26.

Midnight at the Alamo

The fullest surviving account of what followed is Tarsney’s own, given to a News reporter at his Denver home on the evening of June 23. What follows is his account, and the hotel clerk’s, as the paper printed them.

Tarsney was in Colorado Springs on Friday, June 22, staying at the Alamo Hotel on Tejon Street. Shortly after midnight a bellboy told him he was wanted on telephone number 53. He went down without dressing fully, because he knew the number: it was the public telephone at Altman, on Bull Hill, and he had answered it many times. There was nobody on the line. Six masked men came through the doors, struck him on the head with a revolver and carried him out to a hack waiting around the corner on Cucharas Street. A seventh held the night clerk at gunpoint by the entrance and ordered a patrolman across the street to halt three times before the officer understood and went away blowing his whistle.

The party grew on the road to somewhere between fifteen and forty men before it halted five or six miles out of town. A barbed wire fence was leveled, pickets were thrown out behind, and the group went half a mile off the road to a sandy streambed under a bright moon. There the masked men convened what the News called a court, charging Tarsney with responsibility for deaths in El Paso County and with being present when the Strong mine was blown up. He was given ten minutes to answer.

“I have often addressed juries but never such a jury as the one before me last night,” he told the paper. He said he had been many miles away, addressing 5,000 coal miners, when the Strong mine went up. The circle withdrew, conferred and returned a sentence of 100 lashes on the bare back. Tarsney said he would not survive it and asked to be shot instead. They conferred again, and a man went down the ravine and came back with a bucket of tar and a bag of feathers. He was stripped, tarred, told to dress, and warned never to be seen in Colorado Springs or Cripple Creek again. He was missing his hat and $28. Part of the Alamo still stands at 128 S. Tejon Street, on the National Register since 1977.

The road north, and the fork

One of the men walked him back to the road and pointed north. By daylight he had covered twelve miles on foot, hiding behind rocks once when he heard horses. Three buildings came into view, one of them a schoolhouse. He knocked until a woman came to the window and drew back with a frightened cry; he said afterward that he was the most hideous object ever seen in Colorado. The only man on the place was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, who fetched a neighboring rancher.

The rancher was Andy Mallory, and he was himself a deputy under Sheriff Bowers. He drove up with a rig, handed Tarsney a gun and took him north. Asked later whether he had been afraid to put himself in a deputy’s hands, Tarsney said he was not.

Then came the decision that puts this story on the Divide. “At the forks of the road a halt was made,” the News reported, “as one road led to Monument and the other to Palmer Lake. The ranchman explained that there might be a fight if they should go to the former place.” The reason was plain enough: quite a number of Bowers’s deputies lived in the neighborhood. Mallory said he was willing to try Monument if the general wanted it. They went the other way, thirteen miles on.

Tarsney pulled an old white slouch cowboy hat down over his face and reached the Palmer Lake depot without being recognized. The railroad had reached the place in 1871, when it was still called Summit Lake, with passenger service the following January. The lake made it an ideal spot for steam locomotives to take on water, as the Palmer Lake Historical Society records. The ornate little station on the west side of the lake had been built as a model depot for an 1882 exposition in Denver and moved down the following year, with an eating house beside it.

The agent gave them the use of the freight room. Mallory went at the general’s face with hot water and kerosene; nothing had been cleaned off until then, the paper reported, because the deputy had thought it unwise to stop for long in what it called the enemy’s country. The tar covered Tarsney’s entire body and his boots were full of it. Mrs. G. G. Russell of the eating house helped remove it and furnished clean clothes. He ate something and waited for his family to come down from Denver, and while he waited he lost his composure and wept. Mallory rode with him on the train. At home it took physicians three hours to finish the job.

Nobody was ever convicted. Tarsney told the News he held a Colorado Springs paper, the Daily Mining Journal, largely responsible, and said the city’s residents had entered no protest against what it had been printing about him.

What the eight-hour day was worth

The eight-hour day was part of the June 1894 settlement, and in 1899 the legislature extended it by statute to underground mines, smelters and reduction works. The Colorado Supreme Court struck that act down the same year. Voters wrote an eight-hour mandate into the state constitution in 1902; the legislature deadlocked over the enabling bill in 1903 and did not pass a replacement statute until 1905. Teller County, meanwhile, was cut out of El Paso County in 1899, a separation the Pioneers Museum attributes in part to how badly Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek had fallen out.

The district’s second strike, in 1903, did not begin over wages at the mines. It grew out of a dispute at a Colorado City mill over whether men who had struck there were to be given back their old jobs or merely re-employed as vacancies arose, and when that stayed unresolved the federation called about 3,500 Cripple Creek miners out on Aug. 8, 1903, from some fifty mines, to starve the mill of ore. Rastall, who is hard on the union throughout, records that most of the district’s miners had no grievance of their own and did not want to strike.

Governor James Peabody sent the National Guard and later proclaimed Teller County in a state of insurrection and rebellion, after which his officers ran the county under military rule: strikers held in stockades, the staff of the Victor Daily Record arrested over an editorial against the owners, as the Colorado Virtual Library recounts, the militia defying a judge’s release order before giving the prisoners up and, after the explosion at the Independence depot on June 6, 1904, deportations and a district reopened non-union under an employer card system. The Pioneers Museum’s summary is blunt: Colorado Springs mine owners broke the union and left Cripple Creek under their control. One coda is widely repeated in the wrong form, including by History Colorado’s own encyclopedia, which says the deported men were paid $60,000 among them. The 1909 act appropriated $55,520 to pay the Western Federation of Miners for the “appropriation and destruction of, and damage done, in 1904, to the stocks of merchandise and general supplies” it owned in Teller County. It was money for the union’s wrecked stores, not for the men put on trains.

Much of that ore left the mountains to be treated at Colorado City, the industrial town at the foot of the hogbacks where the Colorado Midland kept its yards and, as the Pioneers Museum records, where the immigrant labor lived. Four gold-refining mills stood there, the Standard among them — the mill the 1903 strike was called to starve. Colorado City voted itself into Colorado Springs in 1917. It is Old Colorado City now, and people shop there on holiday weekends.

Monument Town Hall and Palmer Lake’s offices are closed today, the libraries with them, and Monument’s council meeting has moved to Tuesday. The statute that closes those offices was approved in Denver on March 15, 1887, and in Washington on June 28, 1894 — in the same week that Colorado’s adjutant general came up this Divide covered in tar, and took the Palmer Lake road because the other one went to Monument.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Labor Day Weekend in the Tri-Lakes, what is actually open and running here this weekend · Colorado at 150: The State That Arrived Late and Picked a President, the state’s founding decade and Monument’s place in it · Historical Society Hosts Palmer Divide History Day in Palmer Lake, why the Denver & Rio Grande stopped at Palmer Lake at all · A History of the Monument Police Department, on policing here running through the El Paso County Sheriff until the late 1970s.

Primary documents: H.B. 131, Colorado Session Laws 1887, the state’s Labor Day act · “Talk With Gen. Tarsney,” Rocky Mountain News, June 24, 1894 · “Removing the Tar,” Rocky Mountain News, June 24, 1894, filed from Palmer Lake · “The Midnight Capture,” Rocky Mountain News weekly, June 28, 1894.

The holiday: Historian of the U.S. House, “The First Labor Day” · U.S. Department of Labor, History of Labor Day · Denver Public Library, “Colorado: The Second State to Adopt Labor Day”.

The strikes: Benjamin McKie Rastall, The Labor History of the Cripple Creek District (1908): the deputy army and the Strong mine · Rastall: the Colorado College conference and the June 4 articles of agreement · Rastall: the call of the 1903 strike · Colorado Session Laws 1909, ch. 135, the appropriation to the Western Federation of Miners · Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, “Cripple Creek Labor Strikes” · Colorado Newsline, “Fifty for 150,” July 23, 2026 · Colorado Encyclopedia, Western Federation of Miners · Colorado Virtual Library, “The Victor Labor War of 1903–04”.

Places: Palmer Lake Historical Society, the train depots · History Colorado, Alamo Hotel · Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, annexation of Colorado City.

Methodology

The 1894 narrative here is taken from three Rocky Mountain News articles read in full in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection rather than from secondary summaries. Quotations are reproduced from the collection’s optical character recognition of the printed page, which introduces errors; quoted passages were checked against the surrounding text for sense, and garbled words were omitted rather than reconstructed. They were not compared against the scanned page images. Details attributed to Tarsney are his own account, given to a reporter at his Denver home on the evening of June 23, 1894, and are not independently corroborated.

The three News items are reports in one newspaper rather than three independent accounts, and the June 28 weekly piece reprises the June 24 daily reporting. The strike history around the Tarsney episode is drawn from Rastall’s 1908 study and from the Colorado session laws rather than from encyclopedia summaries, two of which were found to be wrong on the cause of the 1903 strike and on the 1909 appropriation.

Two figures in the record disagree. The dispatch filed from Palmer Lake places his arrival there “a few minutes before 10 a.m.”; the Denver account of the same day says noon. Both are left as the papers had them. The size of Sheriff Bowers’s deputized force is given as 1,200 by Colorado Newsline and 1,300 by the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, and both figures appear above.