Las Animas

A journey across the former coalfields of Las Animas County in Southeastern Colorado. In the early 1900s the region witnessed one of the bloodiest labor uprisings in U.S. history known as the Coalfield War. The conflict culminated in the Ludlow Massacre where 21 strikers and their families were murdered by the National Guard and CF&I pinkertons. After the decline of mining in the area, most former extraction sites were gradually converted into wilderness areas or flooded. It is believed that the coal fires from that era still burn somewhere deep below the landscape.