Dawson 1913

Cañada de los Álamos, New Mexico

1913

When, exactly, had this become a village of women, youngsters, and the elderly? Piedad Abeyta stopped near a patch of late-blooming juve, arrested in her work by the thought. She was out on the mesa above town when it hit her, gathering contrayerba, matarique, and mastranzo for her practice. The fiesta of San Lucas was in a few days and that meant harvest season was over. Corn, squash, berries, chiles and apples were all in; the men were all away. Some were cutting lumber for railroad ties, many were mining coal, a few were already tending beets, but not one wife in Cañada de los Álamos had her husband with him.

No, she thought, that wasn’t quite true. Seferina Trujillo, Cleotilde Vigil and Choni Maestas all had their husbands with them… just not here. All those women had left the village in order to be with their men. Seferina was with Benigno at the Phelps, Dodge coal mine in Dawson. The others were at the Rockefeller coal mines in Colorado, along with her Epifanio. Oh, and of course there were the viejos who no longer worked. They were sitting in the sun together, talking about old times, resolaniando. But none of the young men were here. None of the working men were here. None of them would be back before Christmas.  When had all this happened? When Piedad was a girl, all the working-age men were here, farming, herding, and weaving. Well, all except her wandering brother José. Now all the village men had become itinerant workers like Joey.

She sat down for a moment to consider the village in the valley from this vantage point. No sooner had she stopped moving than she heard the sound of iron-shod hoofs on the rocky trail below and little Silbestre Jaramillo rode into view on his family’s roan mare. This had to be about his mother’s cousin, Raquel. It was still early – Piedad hadn’t expected her to go into labor before November – but it was Raquel’s first baby. Maybe she was just nervous. In any case, Piedad would have to drop what she was doing here and check in on the young mother-to-be. She gathered her things.

Silbestre was not here about a birth, though. “There was a telephone call,” he said as soon as he got close enough to speak. That could not be good. The nearest telephone was at the railroad station in La Vega. Calls meant trouble. “They need you in Dawson,” added Silbestre. Dawson? Something with Seferina? she wondered. But she put away her anxiety. It would take time to travel. Dawson had to be a hundred miles away and worrying would not make the trip faster. Piedad climbed up behind the twelve-year old and rode down to the village.

The grown-ups in town were no more informative. Old Bonifacio Vigil was sitting out in front of his little tendejón with his cronies, Don Apolonio, Don Faustín and Don Porfirio. As soon as Piedad got off Silbestre’s yegua and thanked him with a small coin, the grocer was up and gesturing toward the north. “Dawson!” he said. “There is trouble in Dawson!” 

“What kind of trouble?” asked the partera. “A pregnancy?”

“Trouble!” repeated Don Bonifacio. “Elías Martínez said that Gilberto Naranjo got a telephone call!”

This information was all useless. She wanted to know who called, not who received the call. She wanted to know who was the patient they were calling about, whether it was a birth or a medical emergency. She really wanted to know why they were calling her so far away, to Dawson. There were plenty of other parteras and curanderas between here and there. Hadn’t Genara Lucero moved to Dawson? “What was the message?” she asked the men.

Don Bonifacio looked at her in disbelief. “Trouble!” he shouted, as if she were hard of hearing. “In Dawson!”

Why had she thought this resolanero could answer her questions? There would be more information at the train station. Piedad nodded and thanked Don Bonifacio, then went to her house. She packed both her healing bag and her midwife bag into the valise where she always kept a change of clothes for overnight calls and she folded in an additional change of undergarments. Dawson was far; she might be away an extra day. Then she went next door to tell her mother-in-law that she would be out of town. Doña Luz promised to take care of the children for as long as necessary. In the old days this would have been the responsibility of Pia’s comai, but in this new world? Choni was up in Colorado with the men. Choni’s children were with her mother.

Piedad saddled her golondrino and tied on her valise. The only child she could find quickly was eight-year-old Anita García, so she hoisted her up in front of the saddle and asked Doña Luz to inform Consolación. Anita’s mother would never object to Piedad asking her daughter to bring the horse back home from the train station in La Vega, but she did have to be told and Piedad was running out of time if she wanted to make the 2:30 train. 

Finally, sitting on the Denver and Rio Grande narrow-gauge for the two-hour ride to Santa Fe, there was time to think about what she had learned from the telegraph operator: a mine accident in Dawson. They were calling for help from all over, so there was no particular reason to think that her neighbor Benigno Trujillo was hurt. The wait at the station in Santa Fe and the northbound ride on the AT&SF passed without incident. But there were a lot of anxious people waiting for the transfer to the El Paso and Southwestern at the depot in French. The closer she got to Dawson, the more her dread returned. 

The town of Dawson, up the canyon from French, was dominated by two huge smokestacks and a towering steel-framed mine entrance, bigger than even the cathedral in Santa Fe. Every man in town was working to excavate the collapsed mine entry. More miners had come from as far as eastern Kansas to help with the rescue efforts. Piedad went to a large tent where an Anglo man in a suit asked, “Are you a miner’s wife?”

“Nurse,” she answered, knowing that the gabachos only understood their own medical credentials.

“Over there,” he said, pointing to an area of empty cots. “We are still waiting for the first patients to be brought in.”

Waiting. There was nothing to do but wait. Where were the victims?

As the assembled doctors prepared their equipment, Piedad spoke to the other curanderas and nurses who had been summoned to deal with this disaster. Over 250 men had descended into the Phelps, Dodge #2 pit the previous morning to dig coal for the big coking ovens. In mid-afternoon, the people of this boomtown heard what sounded like a very loud rifle shot, followed by a deafening roar. Then they saw flames leaping into the sky as high as the surrounding hills. Crews from other shifts and other shafts ran in as far as they could to attempt a rescue, but they were forced to retreat when some of them dropped dead from lack of air. The ventilators would have to be restored before they could return.

So far, only 15 men had made it out. As the day turned into night and the electricians set up emergency lighting Piedad began to wonder if there would be any more. One by one, the crews were bringing out bodies – some charred by flames, some broken by rock fall, some asphyxiated and looking asleep – but there was nobody to care for in this hospital tent. And she was wondering, too, where were the women? There was very little English spoken here for what she had imagined in a corporation town like Dawson, and not much Spanish, either. She didn’t recognize the languages. And the mourners, those crying over the corpses, seemed to be almost all men.

Piedad wasn’t sure what time it was when she dropped off to sleep sitting in that makeshift hospital, but as dawn awakened her, surrounded by dozing nurses and doctors, her fear returned: what if there were no living souls to rescue? She went outside to find that the electricians had returned the big fans to service, pulling air through the underground tunnels. The miners, working in oversized relays, had cleared the debris from the mine entry. Rescue crews were reentering the works. She saw men who had worked through the night to reopen the mine collapsed on the ground in exhaustion. So. There was work for her anyway.

Retrieving her healing bag from the hospital tent, Piedad took a bucket of water and a ladle and began walking from one man to the next. Some were fast asleep. She touched their throats for a pulse and their foreheads for a fever and moved on. Some had visible injuries from the haste and darkness in which they had worked. She applied the appropriate balms and dressings of romerillo del llano and añil del muerto. Some showed symptoms of susto: they gazed into a distance that was visible only to them; they sat crying. She gave them water into which she stirred yerbanis and yerbabuena. All of them would need more treatment later, but this was a beginning and – if she was honest with herself – it felt better to be doing something than nothing.

Like all the others, the sleeping man she approached now was coated in coal dust. His face, his hands, his clothing, and his boots looked like a statue carved from rock, or perhaps a formation from deep under the earth. Nevertheless, she stopped before him and she looked at him, her brow furrowed until something – her staring? – woke him up. His eyes, and his astonishment at seeing her there, confirmed her unconscious intuition: it was Epifanio. It was her husband. It was the father of her children. Why, though, was he here? Wasn’t he supposed to be up in Colorado?

Epifanio leaped from the ground and embraced her as if the two of them were alone, as if all the dozens of other people present had vanished from his view. “Oh, how I miss you, mi amor!” he said with passion. Three weeks ago when he came home for the fiesta of San Gabriel he hadn’t been this affectionate. And that time it had been almost six months since his last visit. She welcomed the tenderness, but questioned it, too. What had he seen underground last night to trigger all this emotion?

He still wasn’t letting her go, either. “I miss you so much!” he repeated. He was sobbing now. “Don’t leave me, cariño! Don’t leave me!” Leave him? He was the one who kept running off to find cash work outside the village. She was the one at home taking care of their children and of his parents. What was he talking about?

“All gone!” he was crying now. “They’re all gone!”

Piedad was afraid she knew exactly what he meant. Nevertheless, she asked, “Who? Who is all gone?”

“They’re all gone!” Epifanio said again. “All those men! Dead! They killed them!”

“Killed?” asked Piedad, pushing him away. “Who? Who killed who?” She thought this was an accident. Why was he talking about killing?

He looked around wildly, as if to see who was listening to them. She looked around, too, although she didn’t know why. Nobody was paying any attention to them at all. But now Epifanio began speaking in hushed tones, “The company,” he whispered. “They don’t care if we live or die. Lose a Greek; replace him with an Italian.”

This made no sense to her at all. Greeks? Italians? What was he talking about? Had he lost his mind? And what was he doing here? “Amor,” she whispered back, trying to calm him, “everything will be okay.”

“Okay?” he asked sharply, and drew back from her as if she were a stranger. She might look like one now, too, she thought, covered as she was with the coal dust that he had transferred to her face and clothes during their embrace. But it wasn’t her appearance that shocked him. “How is any of this okay?” he asked, waving his hand around. His gesture took in the entire horror that surrounded them, the burnt-out mine buildings, the row of corpses, the weeping survivors. He was right. None of this would – or even could – be okay.

“Amor,” she asked, changing the subject, “how are you here?”

This question calmed him considerably. Good. “We heard about the blast in Colorado,” he answered. “We came right away.”

This answer raised new questions for Piedad, but their conversation ended right there because a shout went up from the mine entrance. The men she had been tending to earlier now all jumped up, joined by others who had been waiting all around them. People were coming out of the mine. Would she be needed now in the hospital tent?

She would not. There were only more corpses. “George Gelasakis!” shouted a man as he set down a new body in the line of bodies that had started the night before. Hearing that name, several men fell to their knees, crossing themselves and saying something that sounded like, “Agios athanatos, eleison imas.”

Then another name: “Umberto Giordani!” More kneeling, more crossing. She heard some say, “Riposare in pace.”

“Antonio Bediali!”

“Luigi Marinucci!”

“Duilio Zamboni!”

“Mike Cachulakis!”

And on and on. There were a few Negros. She couldn’t say for sure whether the people who ran to those bodies were relatives or friends. There were many New Mexicans, most of whom seemed to have wives and children weeping over their bodies. Jesus Reyes. Patrocinio Chavez. Felipe García. But the vast majority of the names she heard were unfamiliar. And the mourners for those apparently foreign names were overwhelmingly other young men.

“Gus Katis!”

“Giuseppe Nava!”

“Dominic Bruglioni!”

It was as if the roll call would never stop. Each name was accompanied by another broken body. She thought she could not bear anymore. But she had forgotten that there were men from Cañada de los Álamos working here at this mine.

“Benny Trujillo!” Benny Trujillo? Her neighbor Benigno Trujillo? She choked back a scream and stepped up to get a better look, taking Epifanio by the hand. It was true. Benny’s mother Teófila sat in the dirt, silent, with her son’s head cradled in her lap as if he were her sleeping infant. Her shawl was drawn up over her head and tears streamed down her cheeks. Benny’s wife Seferina stood behind Teófila, both arms reaching upward (to God? to Benny’s departing spirit?) howling wordlessly in protest against this insult. At Benny’s feet stood his friends, Sixto and Amarante. They had recovered his body from the mine. They looked beaten.

Piedad didn’t know what to say. She had something in her bag for labor pain and for menstrual cramps. She had something for diarrhea and something for snakebite. She had nothing for this, this… what was this? She gave Sixto her water bucket and a rag. He began cleaning the coal and rock dust from his friend’s body. 

Epifanio whispered hoarsely, “We will make them pay. We will make these malditos pay.”

There were already at least a hundred men’s bodies lined up on the ground now. More were coming out every minute. Smoke still hung in the air. Wasn’t this a terrible accident? What malditos? Who was going to pay?

Epifanio was now shuddering with grief and rage. Piedad took him in her arms to try to comfort him, but he could not stop shaking. She saw him looking up and down the unimaginably long line of broken men and their mourners. But she could only see the small tableau of Teófila holding her dead son Benigno while his wife wailed and his friend Sixto cleaned his body.