For a relatively small town, Trinidad has an amazing amount of history - and not small town stuff, either. The brick-paved streets of Trinidad have time and again echoed with the cries and taunts and marching feet of violence, the roar of guns and the galloping horses of pursuit, the screams of women, and the warning shouts of men. And more than once the eyes of the nation have turned with surprise and fascination on this small city.
History jostled and jolted its way here on the creaky wheels of overladen freight wagons pulled by groaning oxen. The Mountain Route of the famous Santa Fe Trail had several routes across the prairies but they all converged at the site of Trinidad and two of the major ones joined at what is now the center of town, the intersection of Main and Commercial Streets. So, though the first settlers came in the early 1860s to farm and ranch, the town that soon developed was a trading town and a rest and repair stop because of the Trail. After the railroad came – from the north in 1876 , from the east in 1878 – Trinidad was a major distribution point for much of New Mexico, Arizona and West Texas.
Probably, these shipping facilities led to Trinidad’s being headquarters for three of the most famous and largest of the open-range cattle empires in the 1880s and ‘90s. It was during that era when cowboys with their monthly $30 to spend raced horses up and down the streets, firing into the air in true Hollywood style. The dance hall girls glittered and flounced while the faro tables gleamed under the lights, and in the corner, poker games grew tense. Doc Holliday gambled here and in 1882, Bat Masterson, fresh from cleaning up Dodge City, was appointed city marshal. He must not have been tough enough for Trinidad, though, for when he ran for re-election, local voters turned him down. Much of the town you see today was built during those decades by sheep and cattle ranching money.
Then, around 1900, the complexion of the town changed. As homesteaders and their barbed wire brought an end to the open ranges and the cattle empires faded (though ranching and farming remain important to Trinidad today), the coal mining industry that had been slowly developing for 30 years suddenly roared into robust life. Eastern money discovered the rich veins of high-grade coking coal that lay under the slopes of the mountain above Trinidad and throughout the hills and canyons to the west. The Rockefellers, the Goulds, the Carnegies and others poured their money into southern Colorado. In a few years, teeming company-built towns, locally known as coal camps, clustered near coal mines north, west and south of Trinidad. At its peak, during the 1910s, over 12,000 miners burrowed under the pinon-studded hills. And Trinidad – proud, bustling, and ambitious – reaped the wealth.
Thousands of miners were brought from southern and eastern Europe and the babble of tongues on the streets of the city was bewildering. Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Austrians, Poles, Lebanese, Germans, Welsh, Irish and a few Scandinavians and Asians added their flavor to the melding of Hispanics and Anglos who had been here from the beginning. Coking coal was basic to almost all heavy industry in those days and this led to Trinidad’s becoming one of the great battlefields – quite literally – during the struggle between organizing labor and entrenched management, a struggle that went on all over the nation in the early 1900s. The high tide of historic drama came here during the 1913-14 labor strike when the United Mine Workers of America attempted to unionize the Trinidad-area mines. The strike culminated in the infamous battle at Ludlow, north of town, when the strikers’ tent colony burned, and women and children died. The nation gasped with horror and Congress belatedly scrambled to find out what was going on. Unfortunately, all the fighting, destruction, and death were for naught. Not until 1935 was the UMWA recognized by the mine operators.
Meanwhile, coal was fading in importance. By the 1950s most of the mines were closed. Miners drifted into Trinidad, found no work, and mostly moved away. For decades, Trinidad lived and worked among the tarnished splendor built by former wealth.
Today, however, Trinidadians have learned to cherish and refurbish that splendor while new people, new ideas, and new money fleeing the metropolitan areas are adding vibrancy to the city. A developing art colony – music and the performing arts as well as painting and crafts – is burgeoning. Stay a while. Enjoy.
This audio tour is divided into three self-guided walks through the Corazon de Trinidad (Heart of Trinidad) National Historic District. Each can take from 45 minutes to half a day, depending on how much you poke around, stop to admire, or pause to inquire of the (mostly) friendly natives. Along the way, we will give you dates and facts about the major historic structures, describe some of the life that went on in them, tell of the ebb and flow of history along the streets, and mabye gossip about a few of the people who walked that way before you.
All of the walks begin at the intersection of Main and Commercial Streets, the historic center of town. If you are not currently standing at that intersection, perhaps make your way there, and when you’re ready, we’ll get started.
Where you now stand saw history pass by, beginning years before there was a city of Trinidad. Beginning in 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain and opened Santa Fe and much of what is now the US Southwest and northern Mexico to the famous aggressive Missouri traders, strings of pack horses and freight wagons churned up dust as they traveled the Trail to Santa Fe. The Mountain Branch of that famous trail came right past here.
It was not a single, neat little trail. There were many detours and diversions, but two main pathways joined here. One of them, which had crossed the Purgatoire River several miles east of town, came along what is now East Main Street, staying high above the tall grasses and mosquitoes down in the river’s lowlands. The other, which had paused to rest (and swat mosquitoes) in the shade of riverside cottonwoods, climbed out of the river bottoms and plodded up what is now Commercial Street. From the junction at this spot, the trail headed out West Main Street to turn up the street appropriately named Santa Fe Trail and on up a tortuous way along Raton Creek, with it crossed and re-crossed 43 times before reaching the pass, according to Susan Magoffin, who traveled it in 1846 and must have had a very methodical mind. The journey over the Pass often took a week and cost several smashed wagon wheels, broken axles, or, occasionally, an entire wagon that broke loose and crashed into a ravine. Which was why most of the early wagon trains avoided Raton Pass by taking the Cimarron Route across the Oklahoma Panhandle and eastern New Mexico plains. Though that was more dangerous due to attacks by Indian tribes attempting to stop the invasion by the white man on the lands they called home as well as the lack of reliable watering holes, they did it anyway.
So during the first few years of the Trail, most of the traffic past this spot was horses, mules, and burro staggering under a top-heavy load of trade goods for and from Santa Fe. By the 1830s however, quite a few wagons rolled past here to be hauled by brute force up and over the pass. And in 1846, when still no one was living anywhere near here, Colonel Stephen Kearny led his Army of the West past this point (no doubt hot and dusty for it was August) on his way to a bloodless conquest of Santa Fe during the US Mexican War. That war started when the US annexed Texas, whose independence Mexico had never recognized, and it ended with much of the Southwest and West Coast becoming US territory, including the place where you now stand. This land had always been part of New Spain and, after 1821, Mexico. An 1819 treaty between Spain and the US had set the Arkansas River 80 miles north of here as the International Boundary in this area between the US and what became Mexico.
By 1862, when the Civil War (or the War Between the States, depending on where you are from) was heating up, there was a settlement of sorts here, a scattering of low, flat-roofed adobe buildings, when the Colorado Volunteers quick-marched past the gaping stares of everyone in town on their way to Glorieta Pass in New Mexico and a victory over Confederate forces that saved the rich gold mines of northern Colorado for the Union, helping to turn the tide of the war.
