The Day Hastings Went Dark

You are a mile or two from the site of Colorado's worst coal mine disaster, a place called Hastings, a company town that no longer exists, swallowed by the southern Colorado foothills as thoroughly as the men it once consumed.

On the morning of April twenty-seventh, nineteen seventeen, one hundred twenty-two men descended into the Hastings Number Two mine. They were coal miners working a seam deep in the earth for the Victor-American Fuel Company, the same corporation that three years earlier had been the principal operator on the other side of the labor wars at Ludlow, a massacre that had left eleven children and two women dead in a burning tent camp less than two miles from where you are right now. The men who went down the shaft that April morning had attended Ludlow's third anniversary commemoration just five days before. They understood the ground they stood on, in every sense.

The miners were immigrants, almost entirely. Thirty-five Greeks. Thirty-three Austrians. Fourteen Italians. Thirteen Mexicans. Poles, Welsh, Serbians, Americans. They had come from two continents and a dozen countries to dig coal out of the Raton Basin for wages that ranged from hard to merely adequate. Their names filled company ledgers; many barely spoke the same language as the man swinging a pick beside them.

Somewhere between nine and nine-thirty in the morning, deep inside the mountain, something ignited. The coroner's jury later concluded that the culprit was David Reese, the company's own mine safety inspector, a careful thirty-four-year-old who had directed rescue operations at this same mine after a smaller explosion in nineteen twelve. Reese had opened his sealed oil-burning safety lamp underground, perhaps to relight it. Investigators found twenty-two matches on his body. The spark met methane. In an instant, the explosion tore through the tunnels.

Frank Millatto, an Italian miner who had entered around nine o'clock, smelled smoke two thousand feet in and turned back. He was the only man who walked out. Rescue teams from neighboring mines, Delagua, Berwind, pushed in as far as twelve hundred feet before the smoke drove them back. One hundred and twenty-one men never came up. Recovery was agonizing: only nineteen bodies had been retrieved by May first. Some men were identified only by the brass disks they wore around their necks.

The arithmetic of grief was staggering. Sixty-four widows. One hundred forty-nine children without fathers. The state awarded compensation under the new Colorado Workmen's Compensation Act, twenty-five hundred dollars per widow if her husband was a citizen; eight hundred dollars if he was not. The distinction tells you something about who these men were and how the law measured their lives.

The Hastings mine sealed its portal with concrete in nineteen twenty-three. By nineteen thirty-nine, the town was a ghost. Today a granite monument stands on County Road forty-four, sixteen miles northwest of Trinidad. The coke ovens are concrete ruins in the scrub. One hundred and twenty-one names.