Delagua: Water in the Canyon

The name Delagua comes from the Spanish for of the water, Canon Del Agua, the water canyon, which is where the Victor Fuel Company sank its first shaft in nineteen oh three. By nineteen twenty this was the largest coal mine in Colorado, employing around nine hundred workers and supporting a population of over a thousand. On November eighth, nineteen ten, an open-flame headlamp ignited a pocket of gas and coal dust deep in Mine Number Three.

Seventy-six men died. The explosion was heard three miles away in Hastings, and it came just weeks after fifty-seven men died in the Starkville mine explosion nearby, a brutal season for this valley. The camp survived and the mine kept running, finally closing in nineteen fifty-two.

Seventeen years later the last structures were abandoned. A second, smaller explosion in nineteen twenty-seven took six more lives. The canyon is quiet now.