Valdez is a coal-mining ghost town in Las Animas County about 11 miles southwest of Trinidad. The term “ghost town” doesn’t mean that only ghosts live there. Valdez currently exists as a “Census-Designated Place” with a population of 49 in 2019. The Valdez post office operated from April of 1910 to September of 1961.
“Zeb,” the author of this postcard dated April 11, 1915, is writing to Mr. R. Guye, Esq., in Gulch, Pitkin County, Colorado. He writes, “Had pay day yesterday. What do you think of this bunch of mutts. McClain insisted on getting in the picture. Will play Primero this afternoon. We sure are going to win. The Baby and Wife are getting along just fine. Zeb.”
The life blood of Valdez was the nearby Frederick Mine, which opened in 1907 as the Valdez Mine. It was the second largest coal mine operated by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I). (At the turn of the 20th century, the CF&I’s Minnequa Works in Pueblo was the primary steel producer west of the Mississippi.) By the time the Frederick Mine closed in 1960, its total production equalled nearly 30 million tons. The store in the picture is the Frederick Mine Company Store, also known during its life as the Colorado Supply Company, a subsidiary of CF&I.
Zeb’s reference to Primero is to a nearby coal town. Primero and its sister coal communities of Segundo, Tercio (a misspelling of tercero), Quatro and Quinto, all west of Trinidad, carried Spanish ordinal names corresponding to the order in which they were established by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I). The towns, also referred to as camps, were located on an immense area of land purchased in 1901 by CF&I totaling approximately 258,000 acres. It comprised what was basically the southern Colorado portion of the Maxwell Land Grant.
The Maxwell Land Grant contained 1,714,765 acres and stretched from present-day Springer, New Mexico, north to Trinidad, Colorado, and west to the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. It was granted in 1841 by Manuel Armijo, governor of the Mexican provisional government in Santa Fe, in response to a petition by two Mexican citizens, Carlos Beaubien and Senor Guadalupe Miranda, for a “joint colonization grant to raise ‘sugar beets, cotton, and stock of all kinds.’” At the time, Miranda was secretary of the provincial government under Armijo. The grant came to be known as the Maxwell Land Grant some time after Lucien B. Maxwell, husband of Carlos Beaubien’s daughter Luz, was hired by Beaubien to look after his interests. The grant was incorporated into U.S. Territory as a result of the Mexican American war, which ended in 1848.
Given that Zeb wrote this postcard on April 11th, when he refers to “playing Primero,” there’s a good chance he’s referring to a baseball game. By stark coincidence, in a matter of a few days at most, a man shot two men in Primero, as reported by the Sulphur Springs Middle Park Times on April 16th. The paper reported that the fight was “over a ball game.”
REFERENCES:
- “Colorado Post Offices – 1859 to 1989,” by Bauer, Ozment and Willard, published in 1990 by the Colorado Railroad Museum.
- “COLORADO SUPPLY COMPANY STORE NUMBER 31, TERCIO, COLORADO: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE,” an M.S. Thesis in architecture by Tammy G. Cooper, Texas Tech University, May of 2002.
- Ebay Item Description, “VALDEZ, COLORADO RPPC. COLORADO SUPPLY, CF&I STANDARD GAS STATION, NEAR SEGUNDO,” by Chuck Harbert, WorthPoint (at https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/valdez-colorado-rppc-colorado-supply-1919865211 )
- “Frederick Coal Mine,” by Christopher J. Schreck, Mines of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation at https://scalar.usc.edu/works/mines-of-the-colorado-fuel-and-iron-company/frederick-coal-mine
- “Guadalupe Miranda,” by Fred Roder, April 11, 2009, LIDAR Magazine.
- “Las Animas Ghost Towns, Las Animas County Colorado,” Roads of the Past at http://roadsofthepast.com/las_animas_ghost_towns
- “Two Shot in Fight, One Dying,” (Sulphur Springs) Middle Park Times dated April 16, 1915, at www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org
- “Valdez, CO Profile: Facts & Data,” CO Home Town Locator at https://colorado.hometownlocator.com/co/las-animas/valdez.cfm
- “Death at Valdez,” Chronicle-News dated March 8, 1913, www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org
- Wikipedia at:
