THOMAS G. ANDREWS
“MORE MEN AND MACHINERY FOR C.F. & I. MINES”: The Trinidad Chronicle-News headline seemed to herald welcome news to readers in Colorado’s Las Animas County, heart of the most productive coal-mining region west of the Mississippi River. Surging demand for coal, the Chronicle-News explained in late January 1910, “made it necessary” to increase production. Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I), the Rockefeller-controlled behemoth that dominated the western fuel trade, was consequently scrambling to hire workers “from every employment agency in the state.” CF&I managers had especially high ambitions for the company’s Primero mines, which plunged beneath the Rocky Mountain foothills a dozen miles north of the New Mexico border. The coal giant announced that Primero, which already boasted “the largest producing capacity of any [coal mines] in Colorado,” would be expected to produce “all that it can give up.”1
Just a week later, another Chronicle-News headline carried altogether darker tidings: Primero had exploded for the second time in three years, “claim[ing] an awful toll of death.” Seventy-seven men and adolescent boys were toiling underground on January 31 when a “ball of flame” ripped through the mine around 4:30 P.M. Newspaper reporters invoked natural phenomena to describe the blast. “The explosion,” one wrote, “came ruthlessly and like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.” “Like a volcano,” another claimed, “fire and debris and smoke and dead men’s bodies spouted out the entrance to the workings.” As the explosion snuffed out dozens of lives, it propelled materials generally safely confined beneath the earth—“debris” and parts of “dead men’s bodies”—out of Primero’s depths and onto the surface above. In the process, this eruption of profound and unsettling potency upset the ostensibly clear and stable boundaries that ordinarily segregated the terrestrial from the subterranean, the natural from the artificial, and the Promethean from the infernal.2 The Primero disaster thus offered a revealing case study in the complicated and sometimes violent interconnections between environmental, social, and political dynamics that had long prevailed in and around the world’s coal mine workscapes.3
Although the explosion killed 76 men, it turned turn out to be but the first of three blasts to strike Las Animas County miners that year, claiming a grand total of more than 200 lives. The Starkville mine exploded in October, killing 56, followed a month later by the deaths of 79 more at Delagua.4 Never before in the annals of world mining history—and never since—would three mines lying in such close proximity unleash so much death and destruction in such short succession.5
A highly contingent conjuncture of interactions between people and nonhuman nature caused all three blasts. When sparks or flames loosed the vast potential energy latent in extraordinarily volatile mine atmospheres, they catalyzed two additional material processes: first, the toxification of mine atmospheres as the sudden ignition of coal dust, methane, and other substances saturated mine workscapes with a deadly stew of carbon monoxide and other combustion by-products known to Colorado miners as afterdamp; and second, the rapid decomposition of the men and mules killed, whether by the initial blast, the inhalation of afterdamp, or other causes. Together, combustion, toxification, and decomposition not only drove the course of rescue and recovery efforts but also mobilized popular discontent, legislative reform, and labor militancy.
Environmental histories of mining have rightly emphasized the intensive, far-reaching, and often long-lasting ecological consequences of human efforts to unearth, transport, process, and consume mineral resources. Most retrospective assessments of mining’s environmental consequences, however, adopt a bird’s-eye view of terrestrial landscapes while ignoring subterranean mine workscapes. This essay, by contrast, maintains a tight spatial and temporal frame on the tunnels and chambers of the Primero, Starkville, and Delagua mines, showing how disasters animated by sudden and extraordinarily volatile reactions between labor and nature reenergized long-festering conflicts among mine workers, mining companies, and the broader public. The resulting struggles over who should bear the mounting costs that coal-powered industrialism inflicted upon workers’ bodies and Colorado’s democratic institutions laid the groundwork, in turn, for the great coalfield war of 1913–14, the deadliest strike in U.S. history.6
Wherever coal was mined and consumed, vast and capricious energies threatened to erupt. Between the Civil War and the early twentieth century, coal-powered industrialization transformed the United States into what legal historian John Fabian Witt rightly calls “the accidental republic.” As railroad derailments, streetcar collisions, boiler explosions, smelter accidents, and other coal-fired calamities filled newspaper columns and cemetery rows, Americans suffered “an accident crisis like none the world had ever seen.”7
The burdens of this crisis, as Colorado’s coal miners knew only too well, fell disproportionately on working-class Americans. In the five years preceding the Colorado mine tragedies of 1910, American coal miners perished at three times the rate of their U.K. counterparts, leading one British expert to scoff that the United States “enjoy[ed] the unenviable reputation of being the most backward of the civilized nations” in terms of coal-mine safety.8 Colorado’s coalfields figured among the most “backward” and dangerous in the nation, with a fatality rate roughly double the national average for the period from 1884 to 1912.9 Between 1884 and 1907, a total of ten large blasts killed 239 Colorado colliers.10 Contemporaries often likened the appalling toll of underground labor to industrial tribute, with the bodies of dead miners serving as sacrifices to King Coal. The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) expressed a similar idea even more sharply. “Human flesh in the garb of labor,” a story in the union magazine lamented after the Delagua disaster, “is the cheapest commodity in the world.”11 Dead workers, as the WFM and Colorado’s coal miners recognized, constituted a kind of industrial by-product.
The capricious nature of Colorado’s collieries resulted, in part, from the particularities of Colorado’s geology and climate. Methane and other highly explosive substances permeated many of the state’s fuel deposits. To make matters worse, Colorado’s coal seams typically contained little water. The famously arid Rocky Mountain atmosphere further exacerbated the risk of igniting the region’s chemically dry coal; it also made it more difficult and costly for mine operators to mitigate dust hazards by sprinkling underground workings. Natural conditions alone, however, fail to explain the string of disasters that afflicted Las Animas County in 1910. Mine operators aggravated the dangers mine workers faced not only by skimping on sprinkling but also by hiring inexperienced workers who only dimly understood the hazards of coal mining; by co-opting local political, judicial, and law enforcement systems; and by adroitly lobbying lawmakers to stymy stricter safety regulations.12
Just moments after Primero exploded, relatives of those caught underground and off-duty mine workers rushed frantically toward the mine opening. Upon reaching the tunnel, though, they discovered that “smoke and flame poured forth” from the pit “as if it were the crater of a volcano.” An hour passed before “the air became clear,” at which time “volunteer rescuers dashed into the air shaft next to the main tunnel. [. . .] Quickly half-crazed wives followed,” only to find “portions of human bodies in the debris.” A macabre newspaper account published the next day described how the desperate women rushed forward “in an endeavor to ascertain” if these body parts “belonged to their missing loved ones.”13
CF&I managers and law enforcement officers worried that the sight of such carnage might provoke disorder or even violence outside the mine. To keep the peace, two National Guard officers, sheriffs from Las Animas County and neighboring Huerfano County, and several deputies hastened to Primero by train.14 Meanwhile, superintendents and bosses from other CF&I properties joined forty-five of southern Colorado’s most experienced coal miners just outside the wrecked mine.15 “As gently as possible,” the Denver Post explained, “the women and children were pressed back, ropes were stretched and a large space thus cleared to permit the men to work without interruption.” Rescue crews donned breathing helmets supplied by CF&I’s rescue car and plunged into Primero’s shattered entries.16
These so-called helmet crews pushed through immense piles of debris, extinguished “a smoldering fire” in one of the mine’s entries, and placed fans to bring fresh air underground. As they worked, they found the listless body of Leonardo Virgen, “a young Mexican, who came here recently from the sister republic,” buried beneath “a heap of a dozen dead men and half as many dead mules.”17 When rescuers trained their flashlights on Virgen’s face, his “eyes suddenly opened.” The Mexican “sat up” and, in “an uncanny performance for one” seemingly entombed by a pile of corpses “blinked his eyes and quavered: ‘Please, boss, can I go home now?’”18 The rescuers “set to work to get Virgen” out of the mine workings; “in a few moments he was landed safely outside the chamber of the dead”—the sole survivor of the Primero blast.19
An incomplete tally of those killed in the “indescribabl[y] damage[d] mine” reflected the tremendous diversity of southern Colorado’s coal mine workforce, including 34 Austrians, 9 Koreans, 6 Anglos, 6 Croatians, 5 African Americans, 4 Hungarians, 4 “Mexicans” (including Virgen’s partner), 3 Italians, a Welshmen, and a German.20 The Post expounded upon the explosion’s human cost: “Cold in death forty-three men lie in sheds and warehouses near the main tunnel of the Primero coal mine, victims of their calling.”21
CF&I placed these makeshift morgues “under guard, and no one [wa]s allowed in there except the physicians. As fast as the bodies were taken from the mine they were covered with blankets.”22 A day after the tragedy, Burney Sipe, deputy county coroner and proprietor of the Trinidad Undertaking Company, found that his firm “d[id] not have enough coffins to take care of the bodies,” obliging him to order “eighty-five coffins to be sent down by express from Denver.”23 For its part, Trinidad’s Catholic cemetery was forced to hire ten men willing to work around the clock, “digging graves for the unfortunate victims.”24
By smashing many of the mine’s passageways and demolishing its ventilation system, the blast had blocked escape routes while filling the mine with afterdamp.25 Dauntless rescue crews nonetheless threw themselves into harm’s way in hopes of saving any men who might have survived the explosion and taken refuge in pockets of good air. Three days after the mine blew up, however, most observers acknowledged that the heroic struggle to save the living had segued into a grim and dangerous campaign to recover the dead, as well as to account for the disaster and repair the mine workings so that extraction could resume.26
Viewed coldly and from a distance, the ensuing recovery efforts traced a curious but revealing arc. Exhuming corpses buried by the Primero explosion proved both dangerous and expensive. Workmen labored tirelessly to remove the rapidly decaying bodies of their comrades to the surface above, while state and company mine safety experts inspected each corpse for clues regarding the explosion’s cause and course. After these examinations, undertakers placed the bodies in coffins, which were then hauled by horse-drawn wagons and coal-burning trains to family homes and houses of worship. Once the living had a chance to grieve over their loved ones’ remains, grave diggers reburied the dead, thus completing a circuit that carried the lifeless bodies of the explosion’s victims out of the profane earth of Primero’s workings and into sacred cemetery ground.
Dead bodies traveled from pit to grave not simply because deep-seated traditions among Colorado’s extraordinarily diverse mine workforce demanded proper burial, but also because the dead continued to make claims on the living for as long as their earthly remains lingered underground. Disasters temporarily transformed Primero’s tunnels and chambers from CF&I’s private property into quasi-public sites of mourning—“tombs,” as newspaper accounts frequently characterized them. To resume production at Primero, CF&I had to relocate the bodies of the explosion’s victims to more appropriate final resting places while also containing the risks that the mutilated and rotting corpses of the company’s former employees posed to CF&I’s precarious reputation among southern Colorado’s miners and the West’s coal-consuming public alike.
Indeed, the corporation went to great lengths to conceal Primero’s horrors from public view. Two days after the explosion, the Post claimed that “the rescuers are only bringing to the surface bodies that while badly mutilated and burned, have no members missing.” From that point onward, CF&I apparently elected to keep most of the corpses its crews found within the mine, removing these brutalized bodies long after nightfall to prevent the anguished crowds congregating just outside the mine-mouth from laying eyes on them. One account, for instance, related reports “from volunteers who had penetrated far into the workings that the entries and tunnels are strewn in places with limbs and trunks of the dead,” with “some of the miners [. . .] blown into such small particles that it will be impossible to place them together, and thus ascertain whether these portions represent one or more bodies.”27 In identifying the dead, Deputy Coroner Sipe and his colleagues often had nothing more to rely upon than the numbered brass tabs known as checks, which miners used to claim credit for the cars of coal they loaded.28 Some bodies, though, lacked even these commonplace markers; the Post reported that six bodies “remain[ed] unidentified and will probably be buried that way, as they are torn and mangled beyond recognition.”29
The rapid decay of these “torn and mangled” bodies mandated swift burial for Primero’s victims. “Funerals,” the Post reported, “will continue as fast as the corpses can be shipped out.”30 The Post noted on February 2 that a return of cold weather “was welcomed as the bodies in the morgue, where the steam had been left on, had begun to putrify [sic] and the odor was almost unendurable.”31 Sixteen bodies recovered from the mine and sent to Trinidad on the evening of February 3 were decomposing so swiftly that they had to be interred the very next day.32
The outpouring of grief prompted by the hasty burial that followed temporarily blunted the outrage that many coalfield residents felt toward CF&I. One paper declared a mass funeral of disaster victims held on February 4 to be “the saddest [. . .] cortege the city of Trinidad has ever witnessed.”33 The eulogy delivered by Primero’s priest struck a Post reporter as “the most powerful sermon I have ever heard.” The journalist consoled himself that the disaster had at least yielded one glimmer of good: “Wonderful,” he exclaimed, “the manner in which this commanding sorrow has made the whole country of Primero kin.”34
And yet the solidarity extolled by reporter and priest alike was already wearing thin. The taint of death and disaster that loomed over Primero drove more than a few of its residents to flee. “Many of the miners,” the Post reported two days after the explosion, “are rapidly deserting the camp as rats desert a sinking ship.” The newspaper caricatured those most inclined to abandon the camp as “superstitious foreigners [who] are afraid to go back to work when the mine is repaired again, and so fast as they can gather up their effects they are pouring out.”35
Another journalist’s excursion into the mine itself hinted at the challenges that recovery workers faced as they struggled to reclaim the dead. “Yesterday I invaded this dark and hampered underground territory,” a Post reporter related, “and for the first time realized in some measure the awfulness and extent of the explosion. There is only one description possible.” Primero looked “as if hell itself had been purged with a tartar emetic and had spit out its spiteful vengeance into every nook and corner of this midnight microcosm.”36 The mass deathscape described in this passage constituted the mine workscape’s doppelganger.
A few days earlier, the Denver Republican had morbidly explained that the bodies still remaining underground “are so torn and dismembered that the rescue work will consist mainly of picking up pieces of bodies. Rescuers, one after another,” this account claimed, “have refused to go into the mine a second time, declaring that they could not bear to walk over the remains of human bodies.”37 The recovery effort slowed considerably because of the unwillingness of recovery workers to walk on the dead; their fear that “not another recognizable body” would be found; and the dawning realization that most or all of the corpses still underground lay “buried beneath tons of dirt, rock and timbers,” strewn amid “fallen debris varying in depth from two to ten feet.”38 Although recovery crews had removed fifty bodies from the mine in the first few days after the explosion, the remaining dead took several more weeks to locate and extract.39 Eight days after the blast, crews found seven additional bodies, most “in such a terrible condition from decomposition” that coal company officials were trying “to keep them out of sight until chemicals can be used upon them so that they will be in some sort of presentable shape for burial.”40
Colorado’s state coal mine inspector, who had been “almost constantly” at work since the rescue began, was joined on February 3 by the deputy state labor commissioner and George S. Rice, the U.S. Geological Survey’s leading expert on coal dust’s explosive potential. Together, these officials scoured the mine “for some sign, some suggestion, even the faintest clew [sic], which might enable them to eventually reach a conclusion” regarding the explosion’s cause.41 The state mine inspector needed several more weeks to complete his investigation. In the meantime, though, he confessed before a coroner’s jury that he “could find nothing in all the hours he has spent in exploring [the mine’s] cavernous recesses, since the morning following the explosion, which would in any way cast reflections upon the management.”42 The jury, presumably swayed by this expert testimony, absolved CF&I “from all blame.”43
The Primero explosion produced bereaved widows as well as dead miners. One woman reportedly went “temporarily insane” after the explosion claimed her husband, son, and brother, while another widow “slipped quietly into the chapel of the undertaking parlors” during one of the mass funerals held for workmen “literally blown to atoms” and released “a moan like that of a wounded animal.” No less important, the tragedy also propelled the federal government and CF&I to devote additional resources to mine safety.44 Although the House of Representatives had already approved legislation to establish the U.S. Bureau of Mines prior to the blast, the Primero tragedy may have contributed to Senate approval of the measure.45 CF&I, meanwhile, brought in a representative from Draeger, a leading manufacturer of self-contained breathing helmets, to instruct southern Colorado miners in rescue techniques and helmet use. This move undoubtedly reflected a sincere concern for work safety among some company officials. But it also suggested that the CF&I hierarchy saw mine explosions as an unavoidable part of the company’s business.46 Helmets, after all, served to mitigate the loss of life only after an explosion had already occurred.
Because CF&I had money to make and the people of the West needed coal to burn, the company resumed production as quickly as possible. Nine days after the blast hurtled through the Primero workings, the Republican reported that “work [wa]s going on as usual in the western slope of the mine, and the disaster is fast being forgotten in the maelstrom of the day’s activities.”47 Nearly three months later, rescue crews finally removed the last corpse from the pit.48
Eight months after tragedy struck Primero, the Starkville mine, another major CF&I producer lying two dozen miles to the east, exploded “without warning” on the evening of Saturday, October 8. Fifty-six members of the night shift were laboring underground at around 10 P.M. when the mine atmosphere ignited with such force that it “shook the earth” in Trinidad, five miles away, thrusting “huge rocks and boulders [. . .] hundreds of feet” into the air outside one of Starkville’s openings.49 What one reporter aptly called “the resistless force of the explosion” destroyed the mine entrance “as [if] it were made of fragile eggshell instead of being carved from the granite side of one of the eternal hills.”50 With the mine “wrecked” and its ventilation system decimated, the forty or so men who had survived the initial detonation were entombed “like rats in a trap”—“struggling,” as a Denver Post writer imagined, “with maniac energy to win their way to freedom, or lie dead in ghastly confusion amid the tons of debris hurled upon them from the volcano-like outburst.”51
Within minutes, “heartrending scenes” began to unfold outside the mine-mouth. “Women, clasping babies to their breasts, rushed frantically to the spot beseeching, demanding some news of their husbands.” The Miner’s Magazine described the sight of “the families of the murdered men gathered around the mine” as “the most pathetic that have ever been painted in the columns of a daily journal.”52 CF&I officials implored the wives of Starkville’s night-shift workers to return home, but “not a woman would consent to leave.”53 As at Primero, the company dispatched “a special force of deputy sheriffs” to establish “strict guard” and “prevent disorder of any character.”54 First, though, deputies had to save Frank Greet, the father of a motorman caught in the blast, from his own desperation. Greet “hastened to the mine [. . .] and heedless of the danger, started to enter the slope to search for his son.” A guard stopped Greet and “explained that he could not possibly come out alive if he entered the house of death.” As the deputy held Greet fast, the stricken man cried: “Let me go. [. . .] I know where my son is, and I will bring him out.”55
Crowds of people descended upon the small camp from near and far “as fast as steam could carry them.”56 In the first few days after the blast, “thousands of passengers from Trinidad and surrounding camps” stepped off of “railroads and interurban lines.”57 Many onlookers “attracted by idle curiosity” made haste to Starkville. So, too, did at least a hundred experienced mining men from the newly formed U.S. Bureau of Mines, CF&I’s other properties, and mines owned by other operators. Rescuers organized themselves into crews, then “pushed their way forward” “with [the] feverish intensity of madmen,” risking their own lives to save their comrades while “surmounting difficulties,” as one reporter phrased it, “which would have made the heart of less strong men quall [sic].”58 Each sally into the mine, however, brought more bad news about the blast’s extent and severity. “Only the most persistent optimist,” the Post noted, “can contemplate the awful devastation wrought by Saturday night’s catastrophe and expect to see a single one of those ill-fated miners emerge from his prison alive.”59
Crews surfaced from the disaster site and told reporters about the “unequal battle” they were waging against poisonous afterdamp.60 “Even the helmet men, with their modern protective apparatus, including reservoirs of oxygen to supply the lungs with pure air for breathing,” one account glumly related, “could do little, and once were themselves overcome when their oxygen became exhausted.” Reporters tended to portray oxygen helmets as technological wonders that bestowed superhuman powers on any man who donned one. In this case, though, journalists noted that the stricken helmet men themselves would have perished if not for the intervention of miners whose bodies possessed the unusual “ability to withstand impure air without artificial assistance.”61 This precarious rescue reinforced the mounting fear among knowledgeable observers that every member of the Starkville night shift must already have perished in the pit. “Way down in our hearts, boys,” one crew leader confessed to reporters two days after the blast, “we know our poor comrades are dead.”62 Even the anxious crowds waiting outside the mine-mouth lost faith: “As the hours dragged slowly on hope began to die and tears strengthened into conviction that none of the entombed men would be found alive.”63
Indeed, every man toiling underground at the time of the explosion had already breathed his last breath. Rescue crews “worked savagely throughout the day” on October 11, eventually discovering a group of corpses two miles from the surface.64 Crews exhumed the bodies “from the debris” and placed them along the main entry. They then waited until nightfall to bring the corpses out in a “funeral car” bearing a “pitiful heap of bodies,” two of them “badly burned” and the rest “blackened but not mutilated.”65 In the face of mounting controversy, CF&I Fuel Department manager H.H. Weitzel justified the company’s policy of removing burned or mutilated corpses at night on both moral and practical grounds. Weitzel declared to a reporter that he “shr[a]nk from the awful scenes that would occur” if “the hundreds of agonized women and children who are already worn almost to the breaking point by the terrific strain they have endured since they first heard of the great catastrophe” had to look upon the bodies of the dead “while the light of day remains to reveal in all its ghastliness the story of what those miners must have passed through.”66
The discovery of a second group of explosion victims whose “blackened [. . .] bodies” were “roasted beyond all resemblance to human beings” further solidified Weitzel’s resolve to continue his “successful plan of protecting relatives of the cruelly tortured miners from the anguish of having to look upon the mutilated remains of their loved ones.”67 As usual, public officials in southern Colorado adhered to CF&I policy. “So horrible is the appearance of the victims,” the Republican reported, “that Coroner Guilfoil will not allow even the relatives of the dead to gaze upon the features of their loved ones.”68 As the Republican noted, the shocking condition of the initial two groups of bodies recovered underground spurred the efforts of H.H. Weitzel and John R. Guilfoil to hide them from the gaze of an excitable public. The Post painted a phantasmagoric portrait of one group of victims found deep within Starkville: “Not a single one [. . .] was identified by the lineaments of the face, for the flesh of neck and cheeks was swollen prodigiously, in most cases to such an extent that the head seemed elephantine in size. [. . .] Through the swollen lips protruded tongues distended to thrice the natural size, clenched between the teeth in that eternal grip that always marks death by violence and accompanied by terrible pain.”69
Bodies marred by violent and painful death presented obvious threats to public health and order. Yet coal company officials felt even greater concern about a group of corpses discovered on October 13 that were not at all “burned or mutilated.” These remains, which were found “in a recumbent posture with the hands held over the face,” offered clear evidence that some miners had survived the initial blast only to perish “from the insidious, fatal gas known as ‘after damp.’”70 The state labor commissioner later reconstructed these workers’ final moments. About a dozen survivors, he believed, had rendezvoused in the minutes following the blast. Whether motivated by hunger, resignation, or that common human tendency to hold fast to routine even in the face of catastrophe, the miners sat down, opened their dinner pails, and began to eat. Rescuers later found their bodies arrayed in a circle beside their empty pails, suggesting that they had joined together to consume a last supper just before carbon monoxide snuffed out their lives.71
The assertion that afterdamp intoxication had caused a majority of the deaths at Starkville sharpened and focused the anger that the explosion had already kindled among many mining folk.72 “I shall always feel,” one rescuer declared, “that my comrades, whom I saw yesterday dead without a mark, would be alive and well this minute if they had not been penned in like dumb brutes in a mine that was poorly equipped with means of escape as well as poorly ventilated.”73 Suspicion spread that CF&I’s insistence on exhuming the explosion’s victims under cover of night stemmed not so much from the company’s consideration for the relatives of the dead as from scheming by Weitzel and his underlings to prevent it from “becom[ing] known that some of the men in the mine at the time of the explosion were not killed outright by the force of the shock,” “but died later, possibly while trying to effect their escape.”74 The devil of CF&I’s misdeeds lay in the details of the disaster scene. Consider an account in the Denver Republican of a dead miner found “lying face downward in the dust” with “his hand tightly clutched in the neckband of a companion’s shirt. Death,” the article’s author concluded, “had overtaken both while one was making an heroic effort to drag his companion to safety.”75 The coal corporation’s negligence, a growing chorus of detractors argued, had pushed brave men arm in arm toward their doom.
Starkville’s corpses, like Primero’s, were removed from the earth so they could be reinterred in more fitting burial places. Recovery workers carried the remains of explosion victims to a temporary morgue outside the mine, equipped with “washing tubs, burlap for wrapping the bodies, and rude benches.”76 Soon thereafter, the bodies traveled to the “the side entrance of a local undertaking establishment” in Trinidad where “a carload of coffins” had been shipped in from Denver.77 At least a few corpses were freighted back to their homelands by rail, retracing the migration routes along which the disaster’s victims had ventured to the southern Colorado coalfields in the months and years preceding the disaster.78 Most of the dead, though, were interred at Trinidad cemeteries.
The burials proceeded day after day without incident before a funeral procession for five Poles slowed to cross some railroad tracks and found the lifeless body of electrician Fred Foster “cut in twain by a coke car [. . .] in full view of those in the carriages.”79 Foster, one of the “heroes” who had risked his life during the rescue, was reportedly “fatigued to the verge of exhaustion from 22 hours’ incessant toil in an effort to reach the bodies of the entombed victims” and had “dropped asleep on a railroad track” while walking home. Moments after the cortege found Foster’s corpse, the news came from the mine that three more bodies, all in a “shocking state” of decomposition, had been found underground. “In any place not already sated with horrors,” a Post writer acerbically noted, “such a thrilling conjunction of tragedies would have created tremendous excitement. Yet here, where death has become a familiar sight, no one uttered a sound.”80 A little more than a week after the explosion, CF&I crews brought out the last of Starkville’s dead, with “many of the victims’ bodies” showing signs that these men had run “a considerable distance to escape the deadly fumes [. . .] and were either overtaken by the afterdamp or ran into it while attempting to make their escape.”81
Company officials no doubt felt relieved that the recovery effort was drawing to a close. “Many” workmen were reportedly “at the point of refusing to work because of the small wage paid them for the heroic effort put forward in recovering the dead bodies.” As for CF&I managers, they were intent on “clearing the mine of debris and preparing it for operation.”82
By that point, the coal corporation was facing much closer scrutiny than it had after the Primero disaster. Detractors assailed CF&I’s poor record of sprinkling its mines. “The charge of neglect,” the Denver Post claimed, “is being freely made by men who worked in the mine and knew the conditions that existed” leading up to the explosion.83 The Post related interviews with anonymous authorities who claimed the company had decided a few years earlier not to sink a new tunnel at Starkville.84 “It is now established,” the Denver paper’s editor scolded, “that the Starkville disaster could have been averted had the CF&I expended $10,000 for an air and escape shaft.”85 Some observers even faulted the company’s conduct of the rescue operations. The Post blasted the company’s “aimless, poorly directed attempts to enter the mine,” marveling that CF&I, “with two thousand volunteers to draw from, should spend nearly thirty-six hours without accomplishing more than placing a fan in a few hundred feet inside the opening of the mine.”86 The Post drove home its portrayal of corporate negligence by reporting that every time Starkville’s electric mine locomotive emerged from the workings, “carrying messages and performing other duties for mine officials,” the machine short-circuited the supply of power to the single huge fan responsible for ventilating the entire wrecked mine, forcing rescue workers to “scamper in all directions” in order to alert crews still working within the mine to beat a hasty retreat to the comparatively pure air outside the mine opening.87
Company managers bitterly denied any and all criticisms. Time and again, they argued that CF&I had always placed safety first. Mine explosions, CF&I manager Weitzel told the Post, saddled the firm’s balance sheet with a “dead loss”: “All our bookkeeping entries from now on for months will be set down in red ink.”88 “Do you think for a moment,” Weitzel implored, that “those poor fellows knew what struck them? Do you think that if there had been forty inclined air shafts”—each of which would have provided alternate escape routes—“they could have made use of them?”89 “The very fact that the explosion occurred,” CF&I counsel Fred Herrington reasoned with breathless cynicism, “proves that the air in our mine was fresh. Fire, you know, feeds on oxygen. I want you to quote me on this.”90
At least some folks in the coal camps interpreted the Starkville explosion in a manner consistent with the original meaning of disaster as “a mishap due to a baleful stellar aspect.”91 Rumors circulated in the days following the blast that an “aged Mexican woman” had supposedly issued a chilling warning weeks before the disaster. “Blood,” she had predicted, “will run in Starkville inside of six months.’” The woman based this prophecy on the actions of Haley’s comet, which she claimed had “rested” during its transit across the night sky earlier that year “for a considerable space of time over [. . .] the mine entrance,” thus signifying “a direct warning from heaven that a disaster of some sort was going to occur.”92
Those with longer experience underground, by contrast, generally traced the causes of the Starkville tragedy to earthly forces instead of celestial divination. “The dust theory for the explosion,” the Post claimed two days after the disaster, “is clung to by many who have thought over all possible causes for the catastrophe, and experts say that the presence of this dangerous explosive must be accepted as fact because all other theories have no foundation of fact to be based upon.”93 Even some company officials, the Post continued, “declare that in their opinion the deadly explosion was caused by fine coal dust being ignited by spontaneous combustion or else by a spark carelessly dropped by some one [fiddling] with an open lamp.”94
On October 13, less than five days after the explosion, state mine inspector John Jones suddenly left Starkville for Denver, leading “clear-thinking miners familiar with the conditions in the mine” to conclude that he had “solved the problem in his own mind of the cause of the explosion.”95 That same day, someone in Trinidad allegedly placed “a stick of dynamite, cap and fuse” beneath a private railroad car used by CF&I officials “as headquarters” for “rescue work at the ill-fated Starkville mine,” prompting the company to dispatch the head of its in-house detective force to the southern coalfields.96 Before a coroner’s inquest could meet or arrive at any verdict regarding the cause of the Starkville disaster, though, a third mine exploded.
In the early afternoon of Election Day, “generally observed as a sort of holiday by mine workers,” more than 150 men were working underground at Victor-American Coal and Coke Company’s Delagua No. 3 Mine when a fire broke out.97 At 1:57 P.M., flames from a burning door detonated coal dust thrust into the air by a mine locomotive as it sped toward the surface to summon reinforcements and retrieve firefighting equipment.98 The resulting explosion “crushed and burned” the mine superintendent and several men who had joined him to investigate the fire.99 As the blast reached the mine-mouth, it sent flames into the air outside while launching timbers and rocks into another group of workmen, killing three and injuring five. “It seemed like the lid had blown right off the bottomless pit,” one miner recalled, “and all the fires of hell had broken into that mine.”100
With “all those in immediate authority” struck dead by the explosion, confusion reigned.101 It took half an hour to restart the mine’s fan, giving carbon monoxide and other deadly combustion by-products a jump on the five hundred to six hundred rescuers who rushed to the mine in the hours after the blast, “firm in the belief that many of the men [were] alive” and could be rescued if only crews could reach them in time. By early evening, two teams of specially trained helmet men arrived on mine rescue cars outfitted earlier in 1910, one by CF&I and the other by the U.S. Bureau of Mines.102
After donning their special breathing devices, helmet men plunged underground, searching for survivors while attempting to repair the mine’s ventilation systems. Around 7:00 P.M., CF&I rescuers found four men who had used canvas barriers to safeguard a pocket of breathable air against afterdamp. Willis Evans, a young Colorado School of Mines graduate who “ha[d] made a special study of mine rescue work,” gave his helmet “to one of these men who was partly overcome.”103 Amidst the danger and darkness, no one noticed when Evans fell behind. “Overlooked in the confusion,” he succumbed to carbon monoxide. Later found “in practically a state of coma,” Evans died the next morning.104 Eighty-eight other men, though, would survive the disaster, thanks to the tireless work of Evans and other rescuers, the “great rapidity” with which workmen restored the flow of clean air into the mine, and the “very mild” effects of the explosion on more distant sections of Delagua’s immense underground workings.105
Moments after a rescue party surfaced with what turned out to be the last group of survivors, a second crew emerged. Hearts throughout Delagua sank as the request went out for carpenters to make the stretchers needed to carry thirty-five freshly discovered corpses out of the mine. Together with Willis Evans and several men killed at the mine-mouth, Delagua’s death toll reached seventy-nine, breaking the record recently set at Primero. Afterdamp intoxication caused thirty-six of these deaths.106 The rest of the dead were killed by the irrepressible heat and force of the explosion itself. Mine electrician Till Woodward, for instance, “was so riddled by the flying missiles and seared by the fierce heat of the exploding gas as to be scarcely recognizable.”107 The clothing of William J. Evans (no relation, it seems, to the unfortunate young rescuer Willis Evans), meanwhile, “was torn and rent as if a shower of bullets had passed through them,” his face “burned [. . .] beyond identification save by those who had known him many years,” and his neck “broken and twisted so that his head was pushed upward and back, giving him an uncanny appearance.”108 The bodies found closest to the source of the explosion, though, presented the most gruesome sight of all. One eyewitness described this “tangled mass” “of charred and disfigured bodies [. . .] with limbs torn and mangled” as forming a scene “tragical beyond all power of pen to describe.”109
The unsettling speed with which decomposition afflicted such battered and burned corpses soon undermined the cooperative spirit that had prevailed between Victor-American and its employees since the mine went up. On the second day after the blast, the Trinidad Chronicle-News, which remained closely associated with southern Colorado’s largest coal operators, claimed that harmony endured at Delagua. “Every employe [sic],” the newspaper approvingly noted, “displayed his loyalty to the company.”110 Two days later, though, even the Chronicle-News had to admit that in the wake of Las Animas County’s third major mine disaster in less than ten months, “terror” was spreading “among the mine workers throughout the entire southern field.”111
As the miners’ resentment toward Victor-American roiled, the care previously shown for removing the dead and burying their earthly remains in consecrated ground faltered. Several days after the blast, the company encountered “the greatest difficulty” in convincing “foreign” mine workers to return to the same tunnels and chambers where some of them had nearly perished just days earlier. Having failed to persuade immigrant employees to venture into underground spaces filled with debris, deadly afterdamp, and rotting corpses, Victor-American compelled African American mine workers to undertake this ghastly work. After confronting the horrific sights and smells permeating the pit, however, these black recovery workers immediately walked off the job. On November 11, “a strike of the laborers pressed into service to take the bodies out of the mine” broke out. African Americans notified the company that “they would no longer work for $2.95 a day” in dangerous places where “the stench from dead mules and from the bodies themselves was overpowering.”112 Victor-American tried to abate the noxious odors underground by injecting the bodies of dead mules with “large quantities of formaldehyde [. . .] to arrest decomposition until they can be moved.” At the same time, the company steadfastly refused to meet a demand from black recovery workers for a pay increase.113 After Mexican mine workers proved similarly “averse to working until after the bodies are buried,” Victor-American found that it could muster only “a small force of intrepid men” to “participate in the work” of reclaiming the corpses of Delagua’s dead.114
For many days after the mine exploded, the masses assembled outside the pit beheld “rickety wagons driv[ing] up with terrible frequency and regularity” to a temporary morgue in Delagua’s mine machine shop, where they “discharge[d] their ghastly burdens.”115 The Post explicitly contrasted Coroner Guilfoil’s emotional reaction to the sight of Delagua’s dead with the inscrutable reserve allegedly maintained by the friends and family of the fallen workmen. The coroner, though no stranger to death, “furtively wiped away many a drop of moisture from his eyes as he gazed on the pitiful array of wrecked human beings that passed in review before him with such nerve racking monotony.”116 By contrast, “the crowd of watchers across the way,” among whom Americans of color and immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Mexico almost certainly figured prominently, were “penned in a rope corral like a flock of sheep,” reacting to “the tragic panorama with the same dull lackluster stare that real sheep might have given it.”117 In the eyes of the Anglo-American reporter who penned these lines, the crowd’s failure to express grief, sadness, anger, or, indeed, any sentiment at all marked them as brutish, uncivilized, and un-American.118
The prejudices revealed and exacerbated by the Delagua explosion also influenced the hard line Victor-American adopted toward the bodies of the many Mexican nationals killed in the explosion. Though CF&I had deliberately brought out mangled or mutilated corpses from Starkville after nightfall, that company had nonetheless refrained from interfering with funerals or burials. Victor-American, by contrast, took pains to ensure that the more than two dozen “Mexicans” who perished in the bowels of Delagua would be laid to rest “silent and unattended, without funeral note or the peal of bells.” The furtiveness of these burials, conducted “under cover of darkness [. . .] with only a cloud of dust as an escort” and “a few brief words hurriedly spoken by the priest in charge” for a eulogy, contrasted strikingly with the public mourning that followed the Primero explosion. Back in February, Trinidad’s stores had closed early, flags throughout the town had fluttered at half-mast, and “great crowds” with “tear-dampened eye lids” had attended funerals, requiem masses, and even a show at the Dreamland Theater in which a local shutterbug displayed footage of rescue and recovery efforts in the wrecked mine.119 Nine months later at Delagua, by contrast, Victor-American “compelled” the friends and family of the Mexican miners who perished in the blast “to bid [the dead] the last farewell at the camp, without even looking upon their faces,” and denied the bereaved the opportunity “to be present even at what brief services were held.”120 Burying the men in secret, the company reasoned, was wiser than interring them in public, lest the discontent stirred up by 1910’s third major coal mine explosion set off an open revolt.121
The company endeavored to reduce its liability in other ways, too. Following the Primero and Starkville disasters, CF&I had quickly sought to broker settlements “with any person having any claim whatever” against the corporation. Company officials reasoned that “the kindly way in which” their firm dealt with its employees “in case of accident [would] enable us to retain their goodwill.” Swift financial recompense would also prevent “shyster lawyers” from talking next of kin into filing suit against the company—a worrisome proposition since Colorado law allowed judgments to reach as high as $5,000 for each person killed.122 Victor-American sought to limit its potential legal liability of nearly $400,000 by pursuing a similar strategy, as documented by a detailed ledger that recorded the settlements company officials negotiated with the explosion victims’ legal representatives.123 Payouts to next of kin averaged about $750, somewhat more than most southern Colorado mine workers typically earned in a year.124
More revealing than this average, however, were the patterns of variation in the settlements Victor-American paid. Settlements ranged from a low of $200, the sum paid to the surviving relatives of several of the Mexicans buried so unceremoniously by Victor-American lackeys, to a high of $2,000, received by survivors of mine superintendent William Lewis. Although no written accounts of the settlement negotiations remain, the disparities in indemnity payments clearly reflected the sometimes surprising interplay between ideas of race, nationality, occupation, and masculinity, as well as the varying skill and persistence with which diplomats from several nations conducted negotiations on behalf of the citizens they represented. Indemnities for workers categorized as “Americans” started at $1,000 and reached as high as $2,000. Not surprisingly, the mine superintendent and other mine officials were valued more highly than rank-and-file workers. The widow of José “Placita” Valdez received $1,000 for her loss, substantially more than any other survivor of a worker described on the ledger as “Mexican,” suggesting that Valdez was an Hispano and an American citizen. Survivors of Jerry Davis, L. Smith, and James Sampson—all categorized as “Americans” yet further described in the ledger’s “Remarks” section as “half breed Mexican,” “Colored,” and “Colored,” respectively—were also paid $1,000, an all-too-rare instance of common nationality trumping racial distinctions in early-twentieth-century America.125
“American” |
$1,192 |
“Austrian” |
$1,075 |
“Italian” |
$1,058 |
“Montenegrin” |
$500 |
“Japanese” |
$367 |
“Mexican” |
$304 |
Indemnity payments for immigrant workers, by contrast, varied more widely. Race and diplomacy together explain why. Survivors of workers hailing from Italy and from the Austro-Hungarian Empire received an average payment exceeding $1,000. Victor-American paid substantially smaller settlements, by contrast, to the next of kin of men listed on the ledger as “Montenegrin,” “Mexican,” and “Japanese.” Both Italians and Austrians had been fixtures of Colorado coal mine payrolls since the 1890s; more importantly, Italian and Austrian consular officials vigorously defended the interests of their national subjects in the wake of all three of Colorado’s 1910 mine explosions.126 Mexican and Montenegrin diplomats also parlayed with Victor-American, but with less success. The ability of Mexican representatives to drive a hard bargain with the coal company may have been compromised by the recent outbreak of revolution in that country.127 The small and vulnerable kingdom of Montenegro probably wielded even less heft in talks with coal company lawyers, while indemnity negotiations on behalf of the Japanese dead were conducted not by consular officials, but by a Japanese labor contractor who presumably had strong incentives to placate the coal company functionaries with whom he probably hoped to continue doing business.128 Racial discrimination probably also contributed to the comparatively meager settlements for Mexican and Japanese workers killed in the disaster. The Chronicle-News assailed the Mexicans who testified at the Delagua inquest, for instance, as “illiterate miners from the jungles of Old Mexico [who] could not grasp even through an interpreter the meaning of the questions put to them,” while vitriolic anti-Asian sentiment throughout Colorado almost certainly made it easier for Victor-American to skimp on the settlements it paid out to the relatives of Delagua’s Japanese victims.129
Family wage ideologies further inflected indemnity payments, pegging settlement amounts for workers with many dependents above those with few or none. According to patriarchal assumptions shared alike by company managers and the coalfields’ diverse mining populations, the value of each man killed by the Delagua explosion usually varied according to the number of mouths his labor supposedly fed.130 Those listed on the ledger as Italians illustrate the resulting disparities most clearly, with Victor-American paying just $500 to the next of kin of single miners, but $1,100 for those who were married with one child and $1,400 for miners who were married with four children. The male breadwinner ideal also accounts for the relatively small disparities in settlements for Japanese and Mexican victims. The coal company paid just $200 to $210 to protect itself from wrongful death suits involving unmarried Mexican nationals, and $300 in instances involving unmarried Japanese men. The ledger recorded disbursements of $350 to the next of kin of married Mexican miners, whether they had no children or several, and $500 in the case of S. Asaida, a Japanese miner who was married with one child.131
These variations in settlement payments testified to a hard truth: the residents of southern Colorado’s coal-mining communities were simultaneously drawn together by shared travails of work and disaster, and divided against one another by the complicated entanglements of skill, nationality, international politics, and gendered ideals.
In late November, several weeks after tragedy descended on Delagua, Coroner Guilfoil finally held an inquest over Starkville’s dead. The ensuing proceedings brought long-simmering struggles over knowledge and power in the southern Colorado coalfields to the boiling point. Before the inquest, CF&I had convened a special meeting in which expert miners and long-time company officials struggled to account for the Starkville tragedy. A newspaper account of the resulting discussions led with a surprising declaration: “Thirty of more grizzled veterans of the coal fields [. . .] who until lately contended that dust would not explode” publicly declared their conviction that October’s disaster was caused by a coal dust explosion.132 CF&I consul Fred Herrington put his own spin on the concurrence of these “grizzled veterans”: “The explosion we believe has established a hitherto unrecorded fact in mining science, that under certain conditions dust may explode without the contributing agencies of gas or fire.”133
Far from an “unrecorded fact,” however, the volatility of coal dust had long been recognized. Although some mining experts continued to maintain that coal dust could go off only when detonated by another explosive substance, such as methane, a growing number argued that coal dust could ignite in its own right.134 By the turn of the century, British mine safety researchers had “elevated” coal dust “to the rank of principal agent” in coal mine explosions.135 Blue-ribbon investigations on both sides of the Atlantic had gone on to blame coal dust for several infamous mine disasters, including the 1906 Courrières explosion, which killed 1,099 workers in northern France, and the 1907 Monongah explosion, the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history, which killed at least 362 in West Virginia.136 In a widely reprinted report published just two months after the Starkville inquest, George Rice of the U.S. Geological Survey proclaimed: “It is now exceptional to find a mining man who does not accept the evidence of the explosibility of coal dust. The question of the day no longer is ‘Will coal dust explode?’ but ‘What is the best method of preventing coal-dust explosions?’”137
Jurors at the Starkville inquest had no opportunity to consult Rice’s forthcoming report, but they did hear more than enough evidence to refute Herrington’s brazen claim that the Starkville disaster had revealed a new truth. “All of the witnesses” called by Coroner Guilfoil on the inquest’s second day “declared themselves convinced that a dust explosion [could] occur without the contributing agencies of gas and fire.” Among those who spoke were CF&I’s own mine inspector, who labeled “coal dust a menace to a mine with or without the presence of gas,” and Colorado’s newly appointed coal mine inspector, James Dalrymple, who declared that “for twenty years [he . . .] had believed coal dust explosive.”138
The glaring discrepancy between such testimony and Herrington’s spin called into question the coal companies’ long-standing control over what passed for official knowledge in and around Las Animas County’s coal mine workscapes. For years, CF&I, Victor-American, and their counterparts had lorded over the southern coalfields like absolutist monarchs. “Even in Russia,” one union miner complained, there was “more liberty than in Southern Colorado.”139 King Coal’s henchmen had grown accustomed to deciding what counted as “fact.” But the 1910 mine disasters demonstrated the power of nonhuman factors to expose some of the inconvenient truths that the companies had long succeeded in suppressing.140 And so the Starkville coroner’s jury delivered a stunning rebuke, finding CF&I “guilty of gross negligence.” Had the mine “been properly sprinkled,” the jury continued, the disaster “would not, and could not have occurred.”141
Although another inquest held a few weeks later exonerated Victor-American for the Delagua disaster, most coalfield residents had already begun to join forces with progressives and radicals elsewhere in Colorado and the United States to mount an overlapping pair of challenges to hazardous mine workscapes and coal company tyranny: mine safety reform and unionization. Most coal companies willingly embraced at least some new safety measures following the 1910 disasters. Victor-American, for instance, collaborated with Rice and the new Bureau of Mines to become “the first American producer to introduce rock dusting,” a dust-mitigation technique that worked better than sprinkling in Colorado’s arid climate. CF&I, meanwhile, pumped additional resources into equipping and training rescue crews.142
The coal companies’ efforts to address the perils that mine workers faced, however, failed to thwart calls for stricter state regulation. A Denver Post editorial used the Delagua disaster’s coincidence with Election Day to push for stronger mine safety laws. Incoming lawmakers, Post editors declared, “were selected to put statutes on the books that would protect the people of the state—all the people—the people who use the result of the miner’s toil, the man who owns the mine, the endangered digger in that mine. Let those newly elected legislators act!” After three explosions in less than a year, the Post could confidently assert that “the state wants protective statutes—not philosophizing.”143 Even the Republican jumped on the bandwagon: “Coal production is necessary,” an editorial in its columns acknowledged, “but that the waste of human lives that attends it in this country is not necessary is demonstrated by the fact that proportionately from three to four times as many lives are sacrificed every year in American coal mines than in those of Europe.”144 Governor John Shafroth responded to the resulting outcry by appointing a special commission to investigate the 1910 disasters and draft new mine safety legislation.145
By early 1911, though, southern Colorado’s mine disasters were already becoming old news. Mine operators capitalized on public apathy to block even the relatively modest reforms proposed by the governor’s commission. CF&I and its counterparts then moved to draft a milder safety bill through negotiations with state mine inspector John Dalrymple and John Lawson, district organizer for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the main coal miners’ union in the United States.
Mine workers in the southern coalfields later accused the companies of refusing to obey even this watered-down law, which Colorado legislators enacted in 1913. The UMWA, as Lawson’s involvement in drawing up Colorado’s new mine safety regulations indicated, actively supported legislative reform as part of its larger campaign to improve working conditions in the Colorado coalfields. When southern Colorado’s mine workers launched a massive strike in southern Colorado in September 1913, their strike demands thus encompassed not simply the recognition of the UMWA as collective bargaining agent for Colorado coal mine workers, but also the enforcement of the new safety law enacted in response to the deaths of 211 men at Primero, Starkville, and Delagua three years earlier.
The 1910 mine explosions helped the union to leverage long-standing unrest into a dramatic resurgence of organization and mobilization. Las Animas County miners had been fighting to unionize for decades. For the people of the coalfields, the Underground West combined peril and promise—the ever-present possibility of death with the promise of a better life. Since the coal industry’s inception, the mines themselves served as the vital crucibles in which workers from around the world had come together to forge a powerful oppositional culture. Death underground reinforced the everyday experience of subterranean labor and solidified a workforce fragmented by race, nationality, ethnicity, skill level, and many other factors into a cohesive and potentially militant movement.146
As UMWA organizers sought to build support for their cause—a campaign hindered by the coal companies’ near-total victory in the southern coalfields’ last major strike, which culminated in 1904—they sometimes leveraged the dust explosions of 1910 into scathing critiques of King Coal’s reign and forceful calls for union recognition as the key to rectifying Colorado’s abysmal mine-safety record. The toil and terror that had long suffused Colorado’s coal mines thus animated solidarity and social mobilization, as well.147 For striking miners and their allies, memories of Primero, Starkville, and Delagua epitomized the failure of mine operators to fulfill their legal and moral obligations to the workers on whose labor the profitability of these enterprises hinged. The trio of mine disasters triggered by a concatenation of material and social processes thus set the stage for the tumultuous Colorado coalfield war of 1913–14, a highly publicized, unusually violent labor struggle that exposed the dirty secrets of Colorado’s southern coalfields to probing, nationwide scrutiny.
Back in 1910, Robert Uhlich, a tireless UMWA stalwart, had prophetically warned: “There may be bloodshed on[e] day in Southern Colorado.” Because of “accidents” large and small, the miners were “aroused against this System which exist[s] here.” Uhlich assured the state labor commissioner that he still believed that “we”—he and his fellow union leaders—“could prevent a class war but on[e] Day, we will lose control over the miners, and when this [sic] unorganized go on Strike, it will be a terrible lession [sic].”148
As Uhlich sensed, the 1910 disasters would go on to shape not only why miners went on strike but also how they would wage war against mine operators and Colorado National Guardsmen. This trio of dust explosions—along with the seemingly incessant falls of rock and coal that injured and killed dozens of miners a year, the beatings company guards meted out to union organizers, a regional culture of violence that made Las Animas County’s homicide rate one of the highest in the nation, and the profligate miscarriages of justice that prevailed under coal company dominance—exemplified the shocking cheapness of human life in the southern coalfields. Is it any wonder, then, that after the Ludlow massacre claimed the lives of seventeen strikers in April 1914, battalions of armed mine workers showed their opponents no quarter? In ten days of fierce guerrilla fighting, strikers would kill more than thirty guards, strikebreakers, and militiamen. Rebellious workers also dynamited the entrances to several mines, temporarily closing off the subterranean workscapes in which their relatives, countrymen, and comrades had labored amid unnecessarily severe hazards—suffering and all too frequently losing their lives in the years leading up to the great coalfield war.149
The author would like to acknowledge the editors of this volume for valuable and constructive criticism, as well as David Fouser and Alessandra La Rocca Link for research assistance. Preliminary versions were presented as the Livingston Lecture at the University of Denver, at the Huntington Library’s “Under the West” Conference, and at the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration’s Denver offices.
1. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Jan. 24, 1910; R.L. Herrick, “The Primero Disaster,” Mines and Minerals 30 (March 1910): 463.
2. Denver Post, Feb. 1, 1910.
3. On workscape, see Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 4.
4. I consider these the most reliable statistics, though many sources claim that 75 men perished in Primero, instead of 76.
5. Helpful works on coal mine disasters include Paul Anderson, “‘There Is Something Wrong Down Here’: The Smith Mine Disaster, Bearcreek, Montana, 1943,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 38 (1988): 2–13; David Jay Bercuson, “Tragedy at Bellevue: Anatomy of a Mine Disaster,” Labour/Le Travail 3 (1978): 221–31; Anthony Fleege, “The 1947 Centralia Mine Disaster,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 102 (2009): 163–76; J. Davit McAteer, Monongah: The Tragic Story of the Worst Industrial Accident in U.S. History (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007); Robert G. Neville, “The Courrières Mine Disaster, 1906,” Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978): 33–52; Donald Reid, “The Role of Mine Safety in the Development of Working-Class Consciousness and Organization: The Case of the Aubin Coal Basin, 1867–1914,” French Historical Studies 12 (1981): 98–119; Steve Stout, “Tragedy in November: The Cherry Mine Disaster,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 72 (1979): 57–69; Anthony F.C. Wallace, St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town’s Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), ch. 5; and Liping Zhu, “Claiming the Bloodiest Shaft: The 1913 Tragedy of the Stag Cañon Mine, Dawson, New Mexico,” Journal of the West 35 (1996): 58–64.
6. George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1972); Andrews, Killing for Coal.
7. John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2. Witt’s analysis focuses on one era of U.S. history, and it seems likely that he is overstating the uniqueness of the American case; possible competitors for the title of world’s most accident-strewn phase include the coal and iron boom in Song Dynasty China and the Soviet Five-Year Plans of the 1920s and ’30s.
8. Quoted in Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870–1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 63. Statistics for 1906–10 from Mark Aldrich, “‘The Needless Peril of the Coal Mine’: The Bureau of Mines and the Campaign against Coal Mine Explosions, 1910–1940,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 488.
9. Colorado’s coal mine fatality rate of 6.81 deaths per thousand over the 1884 to 1912 period was exceeded by Utah’s, highest among all major coal-mining states. James Whiteside, Regulating Danger: The Struggle for Mine Safety in the Rocky Mountain Coal Industry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 74–75. Over the longer run, “the coal mining fatality rate, as measured per employee, ranged between two and three times as high in the United States as in Great Britain between 1880 and 1930.” Witt, Accidental Republic, 26.
10. Denver Post, Feb. 1, 1910; see also Andrews, Killing for Coal, especially ch. 4.
11. Miner’s Magazine 11 (Nov. 17, 1910): 3.
12. These themes are explored more fully in Whiteside, Regulating Danger, and Andrews, Killing for Coal.
13. In time, “the rescuers discovered that the portions of humanity were once five human beings,” so “cruelly mutilated” that “not one [. . .] could be identified.” Denver Post, Feb. 1, 1910.
14. The Post described the sheriffs and their deputies as “armed [and] ready to preserve order.” Ibid. Sixteen doctors from CF&I’s Pueblo hospital, Colorado’s state mine inspector, two mining engineers from the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Denver-based Italian and Austrian consuls also ventured by rail to the disaster site.
15. For details on the mine officials involved and the “forty-five sturdy miners from Cokedale, Starkville and Sopris” who constituted the first wave of rescuers, see ibid.
16. Ibid. (quoted) and Denver Post, Feb. 2, 1910. The Denver Republican also mentioned ropes and deputy sheriffs; Feb. 2, 1910.
17. Denver Post, Feb. 1, 1910. Virgen was found not far from ten corpses. Ibid. Reflecting broader confusion over the racial categorization of Mexican Americans and Mexicans, one paper referred to Virgen as “colored.” Denver Republican, Feb. 3, 1910.
18. One report spelled his name Domacio Vergan. Denver Post, Feb. 1, 1910.
19. Ibid.
20. Virgen told much the same story to the coroner’s jury. Trinidad-Chronicle News, Feb. 3, 1910. See also Herrick, “Primero Disaster,” 464. Throughout this chapter, the placement of “Mexican” in quotation marks indicates that I am drawing this attribution from primary sources, which often used “Mexican” to refer to U.S. citizens of Mexican or Hispanic descent.
21. Denver Post, Feb. 1, 1910.
22. Denver Republican, Feb. 1, 1910.
23. Denver Post, Feb. 1, 1910.
24. Ibid.
25. Even in its initial reports, for instance, the Denver Republican (Feb. 1, 1910) claimed, “There is little hope that any of the men in the mine are alive.”
26. Denver Post, Feb. 2, 1910.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.; see also Denver Republican, Feb. 1, 1910.
29. Denver Post, Feb. 4, 1910. That some of the men killed had only recently arrived in Primero and were not well known in Las Animas County made them even harder to identify. A final problem Coroner Guilfoil encountered resulted from the common Anglo-American perception of Asians as an undifferentiated mass (for Colorado context in this regard, see William Wei, Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016]). “There are eight Japanese corpses,” one newspaper claimed of men who were almost certainly ethnic Koreans, “which seem impossible of identification.” Denver Republican, Feb. 2, 1910. A list of the dead published by the Denver Post reflected this broader confusion: six dead mine workers are listed as “Japanese,” despite bearing common Korean names (Kim, Cho, and Chun, in addition to Clioy), while four others (two named Lee, plus Chim and Yar) were identified (correctly, one presumes) as Koreans. Denver Post, Feb. 2, 1910. Apparently, Guilfoil soon succeeded in identifying at least some of these men, as a few days later, another paper placed the number of unidentified corpses at just four. Denver Republican, Feb. 4, 1910.
30. Denver Post, Feb. 2, 1910.
31. Ibid.
32. Denver Post, Feb. 4, 1910.
33. Denver Post, Feb. 2, 1910 (quoted); see also Denver Republican, Feb. 3 and 4, 1910. It’s not clear how many funerals there were; the Republican claimed on February 4 that “twelve funerals were held today,” but this wording still admits of the possibility that just one funeral was held for twelve mine workers.
34. Denver Post, Feb. 2, 1910.
35. Ibid. By February 3, Primero seemed “indeed a deserted village,” but appearances could deceive. “Most of the relatives and friends” of the several dozen dead found during the early days of the recovery had “gone to Trinidad to attend the funerals,” closing up their houses and drawing their blinds behind them. Denver Post, Feb. 3, 1910.
36. Denver Post, Feb. 4, 1910.
37. Denver Republican, Feb. 2, 1910. Surprisingly, perhaps, not a single account of the rescue effort mentions the health dangers that decomposing corpses might have presented. This apparent lack of concern with hygiene and sanitation seems especially puzzling when compared to contemporaneous events in the American West and well beyond; e.g., Neville, “Courrières Mine Disaster,” 37; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
38. Denver Republican, Feb. 2, 1910.
39. Denver Republican, Feb. 3, 1910; Denver Post, Feb. 3, 1910. The two full trainloads of rock that workmen had already removed from the mine, it seems, represented but a drop in the proverbial bucket. Denver Republican, Feb. 4, 1910. “An occasional corpse may be taken out,” the Post (Feb. 4, 1910) declared, “but most of the missing men may be buried under the falls of thousands upon thousands of tons of rock, slate and coal.”
40. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Feb. 7 and 8, 1910; Denver Republican, Feb. 9, 1910.
41. Denver Post, Feb. 3, 1910 (first quote), and Feb. 4, 1910 (second). See also Denver Post, Feb. 2, 1910, and Denver Republican, Feb. 4, 1910. For more on Rice’s prominent role in dust explosion research, see Aldrich, “‘Needless Peril of the Coal Mine,’” 490–503.
42. Denver Post, Feb. 3 and 4, 1910. Curiously, the Republican had reported (Feb. 3, 1910) that the jury’s proceedings would last for weeks, but Guilfoil called testimony to a halt after just two days.
43. Denver Post, Feb. 4, 1910.
44. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Feb. 2, 1910 (both quotes). See also Trinidad Chronicle-News, Feb. 3, 7, and 8, 1910. Longtime Primero miner Samuel P. Lyon reportedly went insane in the weeks after the Primero disaster. Having lost many friends in the explosion, Lyon became “violent and is said to have gone about threatening to blow up everything in sight ‘like it did at Primero.’” Trinidad Chronicle-News, Feb. 17, 1910.
45. “A Bureau of Mines,” editorial, Denver Republican, Feb. 3, 1910; Denver Post, Feb. 7, 1910. Colorado had established the office of state inspector of coal mines following the Jokerville coal mine explosion of 1882.
46. Denver Post, Feb. 19, 1910.
47. Denver Republican, Feb. 9, 1910.
48. Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910; Trinidad Advertiser, Oct. 10, 1910.
49. Trinidad Advertiser, Oct. 10, 1910; Denver Post, Oct. 9 and 10, 1910.
50. Denver Post, Oct. 9, 1910.
51. Trinidad Advertiser, Oct. 10, 1910; Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910. The Denver Post echoed this language on Oct. 9, 1910.
52. “Another Explosion,” Miner’s Magazine 11 (Oct. 20, 1910): 6.
53. Denver Post, Oct. 9 and 10, 1910.
54. Ibid.
55. Denver Republican, Oct. 10, 1910.
56. Denver Post, Oct. 9, 1910. Elsewhere in the same day’s edition of the Post, a story identified their main correspondent at Starkville as A.R. Brown, city editor of the Trinidad Chronicle-News.
57. Denver Republican, Oct. 10, 1910.
58. Trinidad Advertiser, Oct. 10 and 13, 1910; Denver Post, Oct. 9, 1910. The Trinidad Advertiser (Oct. 10, 1910) noted that the USBM’s helmets had “never before [been] used.” See also Denver Republican, Oct. 10, 1910.
59. Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910. Curiously, state mine inspector Jones held out hope. “Without any stretch of the imagination,” he told reporters, “these men could be alive and perfectly safe.” Ibid.
60. Denver Republican, Oct. 10, 1910.
61. Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910. Compare this version of fallible technologies and exceptionally tolerant human bodies with a more typical celebration of expertise and apparatus in the Denver Republican, Oct. 10, 1910. For recent research on variations in how CO affects different individuals and groups, see J.A. Raub, M. Mathieu-Nolf, N.B. Hampson, and S.R. Thom, “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning: A Public Health Perspective,” Toxicology 145 (April 2000): 1–14.
62. Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910. “The grim fact that the men buried in Starkville mine are all dead,” the Post conceded elsewhere in the same edition, “may as well be faced now as later.”
63. Denver Republican, Oct. 10, 1910.
64. Denver Republican, Oct. 10 and 11, 1910.
65. Quotes from Denver Post, Oct. 10 and 11, 1910.
66. Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910. Weitzel’s experience overseeing the company’s response to the Starkville disaster was already haunting him. “When I become exhausted and drop down on the ground for a moment’s rest,” Weitzel complained, “my mind at once begins to conjure up harrowing pictures of the events that passed in that awful place Saturday night, and it seems as if I shall go raving crazy. It is a fearful experience, and I pray that I may never be called upon to go through another like it.” Ibid.
67. Denver Post, Oct. 12, 1910.
68. Denver Republican, Oct. 12, 1910.
69. Denver Post, Oct. 12, 1910. The account continued by describing these corpses as “seared by fire in a worse manner even than the victims of the Primero horror, still fresh in the minds of all citizens of Colorado.”
70. Denver Post, Oct. 13, 1910.
71. Twelfth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Colorado, 1909–1910 (Denver: Smith-Brooks, 1911), 35. Intriguing in this regard is Jerome M. Chertkoff and Russell H. Kushigian, Don’t Panic: The Psychology of Emergency Egress and Ingress (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).
72. Trinidad Advertiser, Oct. 16, 1910.
73. Denver Post, Oct. 13, 1910.
74. Denver Republican, Oct. 14, 1910; Denver Post, Oct. 13, 1910.
75. Denver Republican, Oct. 16, 1910.
76. Denver Republican, Oct. 12, 1910.
77. Ibid.
78. Relatives of Frank London, an African American mine worker, received his body in Walsenburg; another miner was shipped south to Raton, New Mexico; and the corpse of a third traveled by train to Oakland, California. Denver Republican, Oct. 13, 1910; Denver Post, Oct. 12, 1910.
79. Denver Republican, Oct. 13, 1910; Denver Post, Oct. 13, 1910.
80. Denver Post, Oct. 13, 1910.
81. Denver Republican, Oct. 16, 1910.
82. Trinidad Advertiser, Oct. 13, 1910 (first two quotes); Denver Republican, Oct. 17, 1910 (last quote). “Men were frequently overcome by the awful stench of the bodies in carrying them out,” another source reported, “and were further weakened by the intense heat which existed in the lower workings.” Twelfth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 37.
83. Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910.
84. Ibid.
85. Denver Post, Oct. 11, 1910.
86. Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910. The next day, the Post praised the company’s progress while reinforcing the sense that the early rescue effort had been deeply flawed: “That yesterday’s rescue parties got 5,000 feet further into the mine than any group had been able to reach before was a striking demonstration of the truth of the statement made in this paper yesterday that the company’s forces were practically without organization or capable direction on Sunday.”
87. Denver Post, Oct. 11, 1910. As was common, portions of this story appeared in almost the exact same form in other papers; e.g., Denver Republican, Oct. 11, 1910.
88. Denver Post, Oct. 11, 1910.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Oxford English Dictionary Online (2008), s.v. “disaster” (quoting Whitney, Life Lang. vi. (1875), 99).
92. Trinidad Advertiser, Oct. 11, 1910.
93. Denver Post, Oct. 10, 1910.
94. Ibid.
95. Denver Republican, Oct. 14, 1910.
96. Denver Post, Oct. 14, 1910; Denver Republican, Oct. 15, 1910.
97. Denver Post, Nov. 9, 1910 (quoted). One investigator placed the labor force at “135 miners and 22 company hands.” At the time of the explosion, three other men were also in and around the mine—“a visitor at the drift mouth” and “two who went inside out of curiosity.” George F. Duck, “The Delagua, Colo. Explosion,” Mines and Minerals 31 (Jan. 1911): 378.
98. Duck, “The Delagua, Colo. Explosion,” 376.
99. Ibid., 374–78.
100. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Nov. 12, 1910. As Duck explained, “While there were undoubtedly a series of explosions, the time interval between them was but a minute fraction of a second, so that to observers the action appeared instantaneous.” Duck, “The Delagua, Colo. Explosion,” 379.
101. Duck, “The Delagua, Colo. Explosion,” 380.
102. Denver Republican, Nov. 9, 1910.
103. Denver Post, Nov. 9, 1910.
104. Duck, “Delagua, Colo. Explosion,” 380.
105. Ibid. (“great rapidity”); John D. Jones to Shafroth, Nov. 9 and 10, Folder 5, Box 26732, Governor John Shafroth Papers, Colorado State Archives, Denver (other quotes).
106. The Republican (Nov. 11, 1910), currying favor with Colorado’s conservative business interests, blamed these victims for their own demise. “Not one man in the crowd,” the paper scoffed, “kn[ew] how to brattice, or shut the miners off from after damp, with nearby canvas.”
107. Denver Post, Nov. 11, 1910.
108. Ibid.
109. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Nov. 11, 1910.
110. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Nov. 10, 1910.
111. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Nov. 12, 1910.
112. Denver Post, Nov. 12, 1910.
113. Denver Republican, Nov. 12, 1910.
114. Ibid. (first quote); Pueblo Chieftain, Nov. 12–14, 1910 (other quotes).
115. Denver Post, Nov. 10, 1910.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid.
118. As with what James J. Farrell called “the spatial segregation of the living and the dead,” portrayals of the coalfield working classes as unfeeling “paralleled other types of spatial differentiation in American middle-class life.” Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 110. Significantly, southern Colorado’s Hispanos, the descendants of New Mexican agriculturists who had first colonized Las Animas County a half century before, presented a revealing exception. “The only outward show of emotion in the town of Delagua,” a Republican reporter claimed, occurred during a Hispano miner’s funeral; a woman widowed by the tragedy allegedly “did not weep, but her eyes wandered over the throng of bystanders with a peculiar look, as if her sorrow was too deep for tears.” Denver Republican, Nov. 12, 1910.
119. Trinidad Monitor, Oct. 14, 1910.
120. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Feb. 2 and 3 and Nov. 11, 1910. A deputy inspector from the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics had criticized CF&I for “permit[ting] a photographer to enter the temporary morgue for the purpose of taking a photograph of the bodies in order to put the same on the moving picture circuit,” while barring family members of the dead from seeing the earthly remains of their loved ones. Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 28.
121. In fact, it was the haste with which the Mexicans were buried that inspired the Serbian representative to implore Guilfoil to delay the burial of Serbs and Montenegrins. Denver Republican, Nov. 13, 1910.
122. Bowers to Murphy, Nov. 8, 1910, Folder 84, Box 27, Lamont Montgomery Bowers Papers, Special Collections, University of Binghamton, Binghamton, NY; on indemnity claims, Denver Post, Feb. 8, 1910.
123. Although the next of kin of some dead would also have received payouts from mutual benefit societies and insurance companies, most had little reason to hope for additional remuneration for their loss. Colorado had failed to enact workers’ compensation laws despite repeated campaigns by unions and progressives. Local and state courts, meanwhile, generally decided civil suits in favor of the companies. Whiteside, Regulating Danger, 85–90.
124. The ledger is in Folder 34, Box 1, Victor American Fuel Co. Papers, History Colorado, Denver. Unless otherwise cited, all information in the paragraphs that follow is drawn from the ledger. The ledger contains seventy-six entries; it thus includes all of the men killed underground, but none of those killed outside the mine. It is unclear whether the next of kin for these victims received settlements or not.
125. Some of the men listed on the ledger as “American” were probably not U.S. citizens, yet their next of kin received a minimum of $1,000.
126. See, for instance, Denver Post, Oct. 11 and Nov. 13, 1910; Denver Republican, Nov. 13, 1910. After the Primero blast, the Austrian and Italian consuls secured indemnities from CF&I amounting to “$1,200 for each widow,” with “fathers, mothers and children of the victims receiv[ing] $600 to $700 each.” Denver Post, Oct. 12, 1910.
127. Montenegro was evidently chomping at the bit to exercise its sovereignty; it had become a kingdom only in late August 1910, but already its officials were busily attempting to safeguard the rights of its citizens abroad.
The variations in the payments made according to race, ethnicity, and nationality at Delagua stand in contrast to the payouts made by a Phelps-Dodge subsidiary following the 1913 Stag Cañon explosion in Dawson, New Mexico. Liping Zhu claims that “in the end, each widow received a base of $1,200 and $100 for each child”; the company also “offered transportation to any part of the world” for the survivors of explosion victims. The difference between the indemnities paid at Delagua and Stag Cañon is all the more interesting since the latter mine was owned by a subsidiary of the Phelps-Dodge copper concern, which invariably employed racialized wage differentials at its copper mines and smelters in Arizona and New Mexico. Zhu, “Claiming the Bloodiest Shaft,” 63. For more on Phelps-Dodge and race, see Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
128. All four entries for the Japanese read as follows under “Remarks”: “Paid H.S. Okumura c/o W J Murray; Paid Shibata, PO Box 150 Delagua, Colo.” It would stand to reason that “Shibata” was in charge of the “little colony” of Japanese in Delagua; he may or may not have forwarded the payment to family members of the deceased back in the homeland. On labor contractors in the American West during this era, see Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
129. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Dec. 13, 1910.
130. “This model of the family,” Witt explains of family wage thinking, “played an influential role in the development of the American law of accidents.” Witt, Accidental Republic, 20. See also Maurine Weiner Greenwald, “Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: The Seattle Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920,” Journal of American History 76 (1989): 118–49; Ron Rothbart, “‘Homes Are What Any Strike Is About’: Immigrant Labor and the Family Wage,” Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 267–84; Linda Gordon, “Social Insurance and Public Assistance: The Influence of Gender on Welfare Thought in the United States,” American Historical Review 97 (1992): 19–54; and Lawrence Glickman, “Inventing the ‘American Standard of Living’: Gender, Race, and Working-Class Identity, 1880–1925,” Labor History 34 (1993): 221–35.
131. On Christmas Day, weeks after a coroner’s jury had exonerated Victor-American of all blame, company couriers delivered settlement checks to the families whose “husbands and fathers ha[d] been laid away in the cold ground.” The Chronicle-News reassured local readers that “none of the widows and orphans which this disaster made will become charges of the community,” portraying the indemnity payments as generous enough that “many of the families will thus be enabled to return to the old country from which they came years ago looking toward America as the great land of promise.” Trinidad Chronicle-News, Dec. 26, 1910.
132. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Nov. 21, 1910.
133. The Trinidad Chronicle-News (Nov. 23, 1910) seconded Herrington, calling the explosion “historical in the annals of mining industry.”
134. On dissenting nineteenth-century views, which held that coal dust was an explosion hazard in its own right, see Jacqueline Karnell Korn, “‘Dark as a Dungeon’: Environment and Coal Miners’ Health and Safety in Nineteenth-Century America,” Environmental Review 7 (1983): 261.
135. Neville, “Courrières Mine Disaster,” 47.
136. Ibid., 45–48; Aldrich, “‘The Needless Peril of the Coal Mine,’” 489–90.
137. George S. Rice, The Explosibility of Coal Dust, United States Geological Survey Bulletin 425 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911); a shorter version of Rice’s work also appeared in “Explosibility of Coal Dust,” Mines and Minerals 31 (Jan. 1911): 369. Excerpts from the report appeared in several trade publications, particularly those focusing on mining in general and coal mining in particular. See also “How Uncle Sam Protects His Coal Miners,” Current Literature 52 (May 1912): 536; and Aldrich, Safety First, 41. On the ongoing reluctance of many U.S. mine experts, especially practical miners, to accept the so-called “coal-dust theory,” see Aldrich, “‘Needless Peril of the Coal Mine,’” 497–501.
138. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Nov. 25, 26, and 30, 1910.
139. Robert Uhlich to Edwin V. Brake, July 17, 1910, Folder 4, Box 26732, John F. Shafroth Papers, Colorado State Archives, Denver.
140. The company’s power was widely recognized—and widely condemned. See, for instance, Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 26.
141. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Dec. 1, 1910. Many observers insisted that the Primero explosion, too, had resulted from dust. Although John D. Jones, Dalrymple’s predecessor as state mine inspector, could not locate the source or proximate cause of the blast, his remarkably thorough investigations alleged that “had it not been for the presence of the dust in the mine, [. . .] the explosion would have been merely local and would have been confined, possibly, to the room where it started.” The coroner’s jury in that inquest nonetheless attributed the disaster to “causes unknown”—a predictable conclusion, perhaps, since five out of the six jurors were employed by Colorado Fuel & Iron. Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27, 32; Trinidad Chronicle-News, March 1, 1910. On state mine inspector Dalrymple’s efforts to hold CF&I to account for excessive dust accumulation at Starkville, see ibid., Nov. 30, 1910.
142. As usual, corporations preferred to undertake their own reforms. CF&I called a conference of leading mining men in Las Animas County following the Delagua explosion and resolved to construct “a thorough system of piping” to facilitate the sprinkling down of coal dust, as well as steam jets to moisten the arid western air drawn into the mines by massive fans. CF&I also began to give cash prizes for safety. Trinidad Chronicle-News, Nov. 15, 16, and 21, 1910; Aldrich, “‘Needless Peril of the Coal Mine,’” 503.
143. Editorial, Denver Post, Nov. 9, 1910.
144. Editorial, Denver Republican, Nov. 10, 1910.
145. One authority attributed the governor’s change of heart to the death of the mine’s superintendent alongside his men. Denver Post, Nov. 12, 1910.
146. This, at least, is the interpretation I advance in Killing for Coal.
147. Even as the Delagua rescue was unfolding, Slavic miners anxiously awaited delivery of “an immense marble shaft which is to stand in the Catholic cemetery as a permanent memorial to the Slavish miners who were victims of the Primero explosion.” Paid for by Slavic mutual aid societies, the monument was made of blue Vermont marble and carried “the names of each one of the victims [. . .] as well as the names of the societies, the date and place of death and the emblems of the various societies”—a practice one newspaper declared “an old country custom.” Trinidad Chronicle-News, Nov. 12 and Dec. 10, 1910.
148. Uhlich to Brake, July 17, 1910.
149. Andrews, Killing for Coal, introduction, ch. 7, and epilogue; Scott Martelle, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).