Hastings Mine Explosion

This quiet ground north of Trinidad holds Colorado's deadliest mining disaster. On April twenty-seventh of nineteen seventeen, an explosion tore through the Victor American Fuel Company coal mine at Hastings, killing one hundred twenty-one men. Investigators blamed a windy shot, a charge improperly placed or overloaded, that hurled its force into the mine air and ignited coal dust and gas underground.

There is a heavier sorrow here. Just one week earlier, many of these same miners and their families had gathered to mark the third anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre, the killing of striking miners and their children only a short distance away. Two tragedies of the southern Colorado coalfields, bound together in the same few miles.

A small monument west of the Ludlow site remembers the men who never came back up out of Hastings.