colorado fuel & iron

Nestled along Reilly Creek about eight miles west of Trinidad in Las Animas County , the Cokedale Historic District represents an excellent example of an early twentieth-century coal camp in the Raton Basin coalfield. In 1906 the American Smelting and Refining Company started construction in the...

In 1959 union members at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) in Pueblo participated in a nationwide strike for better job security. The strike led to a nationwide shortage of American-made steel, while the suspension of mining operations and steel production at CF&I caused Pueblo to...

The Ludlow Massacre began on the morning of April 20, 1914, when a battle broke out between the Colorado National Guard and striking coal miners at their tent colony outside of Ludlow in Las Animas County . Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but the incident is remembered as a massacre because...

Pueblo County covers 2,398 square miles in southeast Colorado, from the southern Front Range and Wet Mountains in the west to the Arkansas River valley and Great Plains in the east. It is bordered by El Paso County to the north, Crowley and Otero Counties to the east, Las Animas and Huerfano...

Between 1896 and 1918, the Vulcan Mine in Garfield County exploded three times, killing a total of eighty-five workers. The successive blasts prompted action from labor unions and politicians to make coal mines safer. At the site of the Vulcan Mine today, there remains an active underground coal...