Mining Life was Tough

According to Las Animas County Ghost Towns and Mining Camps, by F. Dean Sneed, mining camp towns were built and maintained by the coal companies. Houses and general stores were provided for the miners families. Churches, schools, barbershops, hotels, and saloons thrived. However, many mines paid their laborers with scrip which could only be used at eh camp stores, leading to the saying, “I owed my soul to the company store”. My cousins who had lived in Colorado said that their parents felt like indentured servants.

Working conditions for coal miners were generally unsafe. Many attempts to unionize workers led to bloody conflicts. The infamous Ludlow Massacre in 1914 took place not far from Aguilar and Hastings, where the LaRosa and Cuca families lived at various times during this period of time. They most certainly had to be involved somehow, either as strikers or sympathizers, in this significant event of the United States labor movement.

Over 90% of the 12,000 miners in Las Animas County went on strike in 1913 for improved safety conditions and union recognition. Mine owners expelled miners from their camp homes. The United Mine Workers of America set up a dozen tent cities for these strikers on land the union had leased, where they lived for 14 months while the union tried to negotiate a contract. I never heard specifically that the LaRosas or Cucas lived in the tent cities, but they did tell of the violence and bloodshed that occurred.

A monument stands in memory of 121 men who lost their lives in the Hastings mine explosion of 1917. Ignazio Messina, also from San Biagio Platani and a friend of Grandpa Raffaele LaRosa, lost his life in that disaster. A family story has it that Grandpa Raffaele didn’t go to work that day at the Hastings Mine because he had an infection in his eye. How provident.

Hastings had been a bustling town with three general stores, a Catholic church, an opera house, bakery, two barbers, hotel/boarding house, numerous saloons and a public school. Raffaele’s brother Ignazio LaRosa set up a music department in Hastings for the mining company to promote dancing for sociability in the camp town.

Valdez, a mining camp town for the Frederick Mine, had at its peak in 1921, two general stores, a saloon, two schools, a hotel/boarding house, a restaurant, a YMCA, and a movie theatre.

Most of the mining towns were bulldozed when mining lost it’s importance in the mid 1920s because the coal companies didn’t want to pay taxes on the houses. Some houses were actually sold for $2 per room and moved to Trinidad. Just a few footers of ruined buildings remain in most of the coalfields that are now overrun by cattle and rattlesnakes.

The town of Aguilar established in 1894:it was not a mining camp. Before becoming a hangout for miners and bootleggers, Aguilar was a quiet village of sheep and goat herders. It continued to live on even after most of the miners left the area.