The Coal That Built Trinidad

Eight miles west of Trinidad, just off the Highway of Legends, a long curved row of stone arches lines the hillside like a Roman aqueduct left unfinished. These are the coke ovens of Cokedale. Three hundred and fifty of them once burned day and night, turning bituminous coal into coke, the hard nearly pure carbon the smelters of the West could not live without.

They are the best-preserved coke works in Colorado, and they tell a story that stretches from the Raton Basin mountains to the floor of a reservoir three miles downstream. It starts with the coal seams threading through these canyons in the eighteen eighties. John C.

Osgood built Colorado Fuel and Iron to pull the coal out; John D. Rockefeller eventually took control. CF&I planted company towns up every gulch: Berwind, Delagua, Starkville, Segundo, Sopris.

The American Smelting and Refining Company added Cokedale in nineteen oh six, and within a year fifteen hundred people lived here. They came from Italy and Greece, from Croatia and Hungary, from Mexico and Japan. By nineteen twelve the Las Animas mines employed men who spoke twenty-four languages among them.

Anglo-Americans were barely thirteen percent of the workforce. Life in the company towns was life inside a closed fist. Wages came partly in scrip, redeemable only at the company store at prices the company set.

Marshals patrolled the rows of company houses. Colorado had outlawed scrip in eighteen ninety-nine; the law was ignored. Between eighteen eighty-four and nineteen twelve more than seventeen hundred men died in Colorado coal mines at twice the national average, and coroners' juries sided with the operators in ninety-four of ninety-five cases.

That rage is why, in September of nineteen thirteen, eleven thousand miners walked off the job across this coalfield. The tent city they raised at Ludlow, roughly eighteen miles to the northwest, was where the Colorado National Guard opened fire the following April. Cokedale was different.

ASARCO built a more deliberate camp, with concrete-block houses, a school, a hotel, a trolley to Trinidad. Few Cokedale miners joined the walkout. The ovens burned on until nineteen forty-seven.

Three miles downstream, the town of Sopris had a harder end. CF&I's oldest camp in the county, it sat where four generations of Italian families had built a neighborhood called Little Italy, making wine in cellar rooms under adobe houses and burying their dead on a hillside above the Purgatoire. When the last mine closed in nineteen forty, three hundred people remained.

Then in nineteen sixty-seven the Army Corps condemned the town for a dam. By New Year's Eve of nineteen seventy, Sopris was empty. By nineteen seventy-five, one hundred feet of water covered the church, the houses, and the graves that could not all be moved in time.

The ovens of Cokedale still stand. The town of Sopris lies under the water below you. Together they frame what this place was: the engine of the industrial West, run by men who spoke two dozen languages and owned nothing but what they could carry in a lunch pail.