The Miners
The legacy of mining in Trinidad can be found in the abandoned coal shafts that surround the town. And in the oxygen tank that keeps Joe Felthager alive.

Joe Felthager struggles to breathe, his lungs wrecked by 31 years of coal dust. Trinidad was once the center of a coal mining region. Today, the mines are closed, and a last generation of miners is dying out.

The ghost of king coal haunts the Eagles hall in Trinidad, where for years United Mine Workers of America Local 9856 met standing-room-only, shoulder to shoulder, in a cavernous hall on the second floor.

Here, calls were made for better wages, for safer conditions underground, for strikes. Much was at stake: For decades, thousands of men mined millions of tons of high-quality coal. It bled easily from veins in the surrounding volcanic hills, fueling Colorado's factories, running its railroads and heating its homes.

Union members still meet the second Sunday of each month. Only now, three years after the last mine in the region closed, there's plenty of room. And different issues on the agenda.

"I've ordered more Bibles," Mike Romero, the local's president, announces at one recent gathering. The Bibles go to the families of members when they die, a union tradition that's getting a workout these days.

Eleven men listen quietly as Romero's voice echoes through the huge hall. The only other sound is the periodic whisper of the oxygen tank that keeps Joe Felthager alive.

He is known as Twiggy. He was lanky and strong when he got out of the Navy in 1945 and went into the mines, liberating coal from the earth with a pick and shovel and hauling it into rail carts by hand.

At 75, Twiggy Felthager is lanky and weak, his lungs hardened by 31 years of working in dust so thick he sometimes couldn't see his hand in front of his face.

"At any time, something could happen to you in the mines," Felthager says. And it often did. His father was killed when a mine roof fell in on him. Years later, in 1959, a cave-in fractured Felthager's skull, leaving him partially deaf and paralyzing the left side of his face.

Another Trinidad trailblazer: Chin Lin Sou

"Got to chew everything on my right side," he says. He also has to sleep upright. "When I lie back, I just can't get any air."

His tank whispers again, and Felthager rubs a hand over his cheek, the one he can still feel. "What are you going to do? Your great-grandfather is a miner. Your grandfather's a miner. Your dad's a miner. It's in your blood."

The legacy of mining in Colorado is full of paradoxes: bonanzas and depressions, great cities and polluted land, good wages and high unemployment, families and orphans, hope and despair.

Gold put Colorado on the map, and silver, coal, molybdenum and other minerals moved it forward. But mining has become something of an abstract -- its history revered, its actual practice scorned.

The Mighty Miners still take the field at Trinidad High School. But the jobs are at Wal-Mart, or with the county, or at the prison that's under construction. The mines paid as much as $18 an hour. Today, a good job in Trinidad might pay half that.

Prosperity's death has been a slow one. By the 1920s, oil and natural gas began to replace coal as the nation's primary fuel. Later, the decline of Colorado steel-making reduced the need for coking coal. Las Animas County's population has dwindled to a third of what it was.

"This town has had a rough time of it," says Bob Butero, who grew up in Trinidad, worked in the mines and is now a UMWA official. "It hasn't been the same since the '70s. Those were good times. People had money. The biggest problem then was finding a place to park downtown to shop."

Forty-four minutes after Local 9856's Sunday meeting begins, it is over. Most of the time has been spent discussing health benefits for pensioners. In the hallway is a stack of booklets, the United Mine Workers of America constitution, far more copies than are needed.

"There is no truth more obvious than that without coal there could not have been such marvelous social and industrial progress as marks present day civilization," it begins. On Page 137 is the burial service that's read when the Bibles are handed out.

"The local used to have dances, fund-raisers and a yearly picnic," Romero says. "When everybody was working, it was easy to have a good turnout at the picnic. We haven't had one in a few years."

He drives down Picketwire Valley, past abandoned coke ovens and churches and weed-choked ballfields that were the centers of life in boomtowns gone bust.

Romero gets by running a liquor store. But he has spent more than half his 53 years underground, and he'd gladly go back. And not just for the money.

"It took a special kind of person to be a coal miner," he says. "It's very hard work. Very hazardous work. There was pride in being a miner.

"We once called this a mining community. Now, I don't know what you'd call it."

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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