A History of Coal Mining 3
In Las Animas County, Colorado

Advent of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company

Osgood and his cronies were able, in 1892, to effect the merger between Berwind's CC&I and their Colorado and Denver Fuel Companies, creating the new Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I). Osgood was elected president. No new mines were opened in this decade, principally because the 1893 silver crash slowed the growth of the steel industry, and all but stopped the silver industry. In the midst of all this, in 1896, CF&I managed to silence its last large rival in this southern field by leasing AT&SF's idle Starkville properties.

Labor troubles plagued CF&I in the wake of the silver crash. On top of payment irregularities, the miners complained about being paid solely in scrip. This was essentially credit in the company-owned Colorado Supply Company, an idea initiated by Osgood back in 1888.

But labor unrest dissipated with the return of financially stable times. In the late 1890's, the company was able to expand its steel production capabilities, a policy which again called for more coal and coke. The most logical place to increase production was the southern fields, as the mountain districts were further from Pueblo and separated by passes. These districts continued to slump in the face of continued depression in the smelting industry. From 1899 to 1903 CF&I opened five new mines in the Raton Basin field. Out of some 3.75 million tons CF&I produced in 1903, 52 % or roughly 1.9 million tons were extracted from Las Animas mines.

One of the new mines was Tobasco, a single slope driven into the canyon walls one mile north of the operating Berwind mine. It began shipping in April 1901, with most of the coal being coked on site in a line of 302 beehive ovens. Only recently has this magnificent set of ovens been bulldozed to rubble, recognizable now only by the colors and textures of the slag- coated bricks.

Perhaps the most significant acquisition in this period was that involving a portion of the old Maxwell Land Grant. Osgood had been eying this tract for more than a decade, and thought he had concluded the deal when the silver panic of 1893 caused his company to come up short on its first payment. The deal finally went through in 1901; the 265,000 acre Colorado portion of the Maxwell Land Grant was transferred from the hands of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company to those of CF&I. Osgood immediately began exploitation of the resources along the Purgatoire.

Later that year, the southern division of the Colorado and Wyoming railroad, a wholly owned subsidiary of CF&I, was established to push a rail line up the Purgatoire River from the AT&SF tracks near Trinidad. (Initially incorporated in 1899, the C&W's northern line connected the newly opened Sunrise, Wyoming iron deposits with good rail service to the Pueblo Blast Furnaces). In 1902, a mine was opened in Smith Canyon, serviced by a spur rail winding up out of the Purgatoire Valley toward the north. The mine, which was finally called Primero, consisted of a set of six shallowly dipping slopes. This was to be one of CF&I's largest producers. The mine and the town were certainly talked up in the company's magazine, Camp and Plant. The coal was shipped down to the valley where the town of Segundo was established around a set of coke ovens which would grow to 800 in number.

The tracks veered southwest at what is now the town of Weston, and followed the south fork of the Purgatoire to a deposit on the west side of the Raton Basin coalfield. The first mine there was originally called Torres, then Rincon, and finally Tercio, as CF&I numbered in Spanish its Purgatoire Valley operations. This mine was opened along six drifts, with a total capacity of 1000 tons per day. Most of this was coked in a set of 600 ovens nearby.

The Cuatro mine was also opened in 1902, this time along four drifts, but the coal's coking properties were such that production was not to the same scale as that at the Tercio Mine. These two mines, and the later Cornell mine, comprised what was known as the Tercio district, distinct from the rest of the coalfield by its position along the western outcrop. The strata containing the coal here have been warped into a slight anticline which has since eroded away in the middle. The Tercio mine followed the coal down along its dip to the south and east from the enclosed valley; the Cuatro mine followed it down on the opposite side. Both mines dipped quite steeply, at up to 30 and 45 degrees from the horizontal (as compared to dips on the eastern outcrops of 1 to 10 degrees), making the mining more difficult and lowering production rates. This is a major reason why the mines are concentrated along the eastern outcrops and in the Purgatoire valley, where the river has cut down to the almost horizontal seams in the middle of the basin.

It was with this vast number of coal mines and coke ovens that John Osgood's career as head of CF&I came to a close in 1903. The power struggle ended with John D. Rockefeller and his associates in control of the majority of the stock. John Osgood was left to scratch together another enterprise. He was already involved with the Victor Coal and Coke Company, owners of the Hastings and Grey Creek properties in Las Animas County. He soon consolidated this into the Victor Fuel Company, and then effected a merger with the New Mexico-based American Fuel Company to form the Victor-American Fuel Company. Soon after being ousted from the CF&I directorate, he and his new company opened up deposits further up in Del Agua Canyon, calling the new mine Delagua. This supplemented the supply of coal for the ovens at Hastings. To connect this system of mines, he incorporated the Colorado and Southern Railroad, which was to perform a task similar to that which the Colorado and Wyoming performed for CF&I.