A History of Coal Mining
In Las Animas County, Colorado

The Trinidad coal field is part of the larger Raton Basin coal region of New Mexico and Colorado. In Colorado it is contiguous with the Walsenburg coal field to the north in Huerfano County. The major distinction between the two fields is the difference in coking quality of the southern coals, a chemical property which roughly parallels the county boundary. The Trinidad coal field is located in the western half of Las Animas County bounded on the east by the beginning of the eastern high plains and on the west by the sharply upturned strata of the synclinal basin. Trinidad itself is near the eastern boundary of the field. U.S. Interstate Highway 25 parallels the eastern margin of the field.

Geologically, the field is a synclinal basin with its axis near the western margin. Along the eastern margin, the coal bearing strata dip gently to the  west.  The western margin is bounded by strata dipping steeply to the east along the mountain front. The coal occurs in the Vermejo Formation of the late Upper Cretaceous age and Raton Formation of Upper Cretaceous to Paleocene age. There are 14 mineable seams ranging in thickness from 4 ft. to over 8 ft. Most of this coal is high volatile bituminous A and all are coking coals. As far as burning this coal goes: it is some of the cleanest burning coal on Earth.

Until 1866 this enormous piece of Colorado real estate we call Las Animas County, now the largest county in the state, was part of a yet larger Huerfano County, one of the original 17 territorial counties formed in 1861. The actors and the events in the play of its history have been similarly large. But just as the glittery shimmer of gold has tended to blind the residents of the Centennial State to its broader past, so the drama of the 1913-14 coal strike and the resulting Ludlow Massacre have tended to distort the basic outline of mining in the Raton Basin, both in Las Animas and in Huerfano Counties. Ours is a history with a richer ethnic diversity than that of any other state, an effect not only from being on the northern fringe of Spanish and Mexican influence, but also because of the diversity of the groups who were attracted and recruited to the coal mines: Italians, Greeks, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Slavs, Serbs, Poles, Montenegrins ... all came to mine or to cut stone or to coke coal or to supply the many needed services centering around a coal mining camp.

Though the region lay along the Santa Fe Trail's' "Mountain Branch" over Raton Pass, the first permanent settlement at Trinidad was not established until 1862. This town of Trinidad lies just south of the river which was longwindedly dubbed by early Spanish explorers "el rio de las animas perdidas en purgatorio" (the river of souls lost in purgatory), a name the French gallicized to Purgatoire, and the Americans later anglicized to Picket Wire. Trinidad was the only large settlement, primarily because the land was too dry to farm, except in the narrow valley bottoms where cattle ranching took hold.

A typical coal tipple

Early Mining Days

The first mining of coal is said to have been from a seam near what later became the Starkville mine, a few miles south of Trinidad. In 1861, William Kroenig delivered wagonloads of coal to Fort Union, where its quality was highly praised. A less precise account has Lucien Maxwell, by then owner of the massive Beaubien-Miranda (Maxwell) Land Grant, freighting coal from the same area southward across Raton Pass to fire the forges at his blacksmith shop in Rayado, south of what's now Cimarron, New Mexico. For the most part, the county was left to its agricultural peace and pace for the next fifteen years. This was forever altered with the coming of the railroads. From the north, propelled by the dreams and schemes of General William J. Palmer, came the Denver and Rio Grande (D&RG). From the northeast came the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF). Companies controlled by these larger enterprises began to mine the abundant coal within this portion of the Raton Basin coalfield almost as soon as they arrived here.

Perhaps the most significant actor in the game was the Southern Colorado Town and Coal Company, organized and incorporated by three men who also held executive positions in the D&RG. Despite failure to secure federal assistance for a line from Denver to Santa Fe, a right of way was secured and rails pushed southward. Their first enterprise, once the rails had reached the north bank of the Purgatoire, was to establish the town and the mine at El Moro. By March 1876, a 16-ton-per-day production had begun at the mine. The excellent coking qualities of this coal prompted construction of a set of beehive coking ovens. The first shipment of coke was in February of 1878. It went by rail to Colorado Springs, and then by wagons drawn by 16 teams of oxen over the passes to the Harrison Reduction Works in Leadville. Production of coal from the expanded El Moro mine reached 1500 tons per day by late that year. The El Moro mine, known also as the Engle mine in honor of its first superintendent, George U. Engle, quickly cornered the market and for a decade remained the state's largest producer of both coal and coke.

The demand for lump coal was growing, both for the steam locomotives pulling their loads over an increasing tangle of western rails, and for the growing domestic populations. Coke was quickly supplanting charcoals as the primary fuel for the smelting industry, and was much preferred by Denver foundries and forges. The production of steel in Colorado had not yet been accomplished, though several capitalists, Palmer among them, had their eyes on both the iron deposits of the state and the coking coals in the Trinidad, Crested Butte, and Pitkin County fields.