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. 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.