Marcelina Pedregone, her thin skirt partly ablaze in the early morning light, recalled running hard—sprinting northward toward a fence, then crawling into a smoky arroyo where she could lay flat in the rocky dirt, trying to become invisible from the bullets nipping around her legs and feet like a mad dog. She saw some women dodging flames to desperately help their children reach a well and then scramble inside after them, while others sought safety in a pump house, its walls being chewed by gunfire. Amid their shrieks and wails, Marcelina allowed a brief hesitation to worry about her own children she had left behind, Cloriva and Rodgerio, just four months and six years old. They had been staying with the Valdez and Costa children near Tent No. 58, one of about 150 makeshift homes for Colorado’s southern coalfield miners and their families when someone shrieked, “Dynamite! Dynamite!”

The next day, as survivors straggled into Trinidad, Marcelina asked with parched lips if anyone had news of her children. Not until a “dead” wagon arrived, loaded with fourteen bodies, did she find Cloriva and Rodgerio, smothered, burned, and swollen, along with others who asphyxiated in the Costa death pit.

Over a thousand miles away and almost two years after Ludlow, an obscure young woman—a single mother—simultaneously struggled to support her child and improve her lot. That certain ladies had not empathized with Ludlow’s mothers and children personally offended her sense of feminine integrity. Her name was Jane Street, and she resolved to change the status quo. Jane Street would orchestrate a domestic mutiny against Denver’s Capitol Hill women, that is, against the powerful and elite. The housemaid rebellion would soon make national and local news. It would simultaneously herald club support for women’s suffrage, improved morality, and education of the underprivileged, even as it patronized the efforts of a neglected working class. Jane would face sexist attempts at suppression, including sabotage and betrayal, arrests and abandonment. For this, she deserves more than a small piece of working women’s history. Jane Street never claimed to be a victim, but her tragic life story makes one wonder why she did not.