James Hamilton Peabody (August 21, 1852 – November 23, 1917) was the 13th and 15th Governor of Colorado, and is noted by some for his public service in Cañon City and by others for his brutality in crushing the miners' strike in Cripple Creek in 1903–04.

On March 19, 1878, he married his employer's daughter, Frances Lillian Clelland, and the couple eventually had four children together (James, Clellan, Cora May, and Jessie Anne).

While the Federation worked to expel all non-union miners from the county, mine owners refused to negotiate over the Federation's complaints, and the struggle degenerated into violence by both parties; while the mine owners tried desperately to import non-union miners from elsewhere in the state, the union used its clout to barricade roads and rail lines into Cripple Creek.

On June 6, 1904, after nine months of the strike, someone destroyed the Independence Railway Station near Victor, Colorado, with dynamite, killing 13 non-union miners.

County Sheriff Henry Robertson became a target of the Cripple Creek Mine Owners' Association and their ally, the Citizens' Alliance, and was forced to resign under threat of hanging.

[3] The mine owners used force to take over the press of the Victor Record, which had been a largely pro-union periodical, and captured strikers, who were then confined in the infamous "bullpens" or taken under guard to the Kansas border and abandoned.

The Colorado National Guard made several dozen unwarranted arrests of miners and their supporters and held many people without formal charges, some for several days.

A union member named Harry Orchard later wrote in a confession to Pinkerton agent James McParland that he had committed the attack at the Independence Station.

But when Peabody, a banker, was elected governor of Colorado, Cripple Creek mine owners felt they had an ally and they could provoke the miners with impunity.

In response to the strike, Peabody sent in The Colorado National Guard which broke into miner's homes, harassed their wives and children, and forcefully deported union men out of Cripple Creek.

When judicial authorities objected to this illegal treatment Peabody tried to suspend the writ of habeas corpus that was being used to protect illegally-arrested miners.