Mary Thomas O'Neal

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Mary O'Neal (Thomas), 1914

Mary Hannah Williams Thomas O'Neal (1887 – after 1974) was a Welsh-born American labor activist who wrote the only eyewitness memoir of the Ludlow Massacre, part of the Colorado Coalfield War.

Early life

Mary Hannah Williams was born at

Nantymoel, in the Ogmore Valley, South Wales, to parents James Williams and Mary A. Williams. Her father was a coal miner. She was married at age 17 to Tom Thomas, an American-born miner.[1] She was the mother of two daughters when she moved to Colorado with her children in 1913, looking for her estranged miner husband.[2]

In the American West

At Ludlow, Colorado, Mary Thomas was soon involved with ongoing United Mine Workers of America efforts to organize the miners, including she singing to the strikers.[3][4] She was arrested in riots in February 1914, and spent eleven days in jail.[5] Thomas later said she had led the camp's women and children to safety at a nearby ranch when the militia attacked their tent city in April 1914, and arranged for them to be housed and fed. She lost all her own possessions in the attack, valued at $1,500 in press accounts.[6] Arrested and detained, she used Welsh in her jailhouse conversations with Tom Thomas, knowing that the listening guards were unlikely to comprehend them. She also led fellow prisoners in singing union anthems.[1]

After her release from jail, the union sent her and her young daughters to

United States Commission on Industrial Relations in New York City.[10]

Mary Thomas lived in Utah and Nevada after the events at Ludlow and her visit to Washington D. C. She worked as a waitress and later ran a restaurant and dance hall. She married again, to Don O'Neal, in Nevada.[1]

Later years

Knickerbocker Hotel as an old woman, and experienced memory loss before she died, probably in the 1970s.[2]

Barbara Yule wrote a one-woman play about Mary Thomas, For Tomorrow We May Die, which was performed by Tanya Perkins in Colorado in 2015.[14]

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 9780807887905
  2. ^ a b Sherna Berger Gluck, "Mary Thomas O'Neal, audio interview" (oral history interview conducted in 1974), Scholarship @ the Beach: The CSULB Digital Repository.
  3. ISBN 9780813544199
  4. ISBN 9781136247699
  5. Newspapers.comOpen access icon
  6. ^ "Colorado's Militia Exposed" Coast Seamen's Journal 27(June 3, 1914): 8.
  7. ^ "Judge Lindsey and Women and their Babies Who Are Enroute to Washington to tell President Wilson about Colorado War". Evansville Press. Newspapers.com. 20 May 1914.
  8. ^ "Ludlow's Story is Too Horrible to Put in Print". Daily Capital Journal. 19 May 1914. p. 1.
  9. ^ "Women Tell of Terrors of Colorado Strike War" The Day Book (May 27, 1914): 5.
  10. ^ Congressional Serial Set, Report on the U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations (May 29, 1914) (U. S. Government Printing Office 1916):
  11. ^ "Widman Speaks on Organizing at Ludlow" United Mine Workers Journal (June 1, 1965): 11.
  12. ISBN 9781478623045
  13. ^ Mary T. O'Neal, Those Damn Foreigners (Minerva Press 1971).
  14. ^ "Apishapa Valley Historical Society - Calendar". Aguilar History. 2015. Archived from the original on 2015-12-18. Retrieved 2021-10-12.
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