Trinidad, CO, still on the way to New Mexico ;)

It was a long day... We started it in Pueblo (click here to see - The most boring city in Colorado... Really?), continued along the Highway of Legends (click here to see - Highway of Legends - La Veta and Stonewall...) and an hour before sunset we were not only still on the road, but made one more stop. This time in Trinidad... Yeap, almost all day and we haven't even left Colorado yet!

 

City of Trinidad. Sleepy town at the intersection of CO highway 12 and I-25. Another town that travelers usually just pass through. Only 12 miles before the highway crosses the state border. Does this city have a history? Your bet, it does. Maybe it is not as colorful and bright, but it's still interesting and can surprise you.

The history goes back a long time, but I would like to start with 1821 because it was a very important date in the history of this region. Mexico had won their independence from Spain in 1821. Before that time, no trade was allowed with the United States. Record of a Kentuckian who arrived in Santa Fe with trade goods in 1805 shows he was immediately jailed as was a Frenchman who arrived in 1804 with items to trade. But with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail as an international route in 1821, trade between Mexico and the US was legalized by treaty. A Missouri Frenchman, William Becknell, was the first to make the trip to Santa Fe with trade goods and returned to Missouri with tales of great opportunities for wealth. That was 1822. Many others followed  William's route crossing Raton Pass to bring their trades to the Mexican city of Santa Fe...

In 1824, a Chihuahua merchant, Jose Escudero, led a group of Santa Fe businessmen on a trip up the Santa Fe Trail  to various parts of the Mississippi Valley in an effort to encourage trade with Nuevo Mexico and Chihuahua. In this group were members of the prominent families of Baca and Romero. It was Felipe Baca who was one of the entrepreneurs to open the city of Trinidad for business in 1842.

When Trinidad was founded in 1842 by Mexican traders anxious to take advantage of the trade opportunities offered by the Santa Fe Trail, the area was still a part of Mexico. A river called “El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio” (the river of lost souls in Purgatory) or the Purgatoire River, drained this grassland area. A grove of cottonwood trees along the river made a welcome resting-place for travelers along the trail. The difficult trek over Raton Pass was ahead of them.

Only four years from this time, the US army marched through Trinidad while still a part of Mexico. 

Fifteen years after becoming a part of US territory, Hispanic and American pioneers settled near Raton Pass. Many of the Hispanic pioneers from Northern New Mexico brought sheep. By 1861 the settlers had built irrigation ditches and were starting to raise wheat, corn, and sheep for sale in Pueblo. The town quickly became the main population center in the Purgatoire Valley and served as a vital connection to northern New Mexico and Santa Fe. At the same time, merchants began arriving from the back East and the next year, 1862, coal was discovered. A call went out to Europe for a trained labor force of miners. Those who responded came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, Hispanic, Greek, Italian, Polish, Irish, Lebanese, Slavic, and Northern European.

Three years later, the trail was improved by Richens Lacy “Uncle Dick” Wootton, a former mountain man. He and his partner, George C. McBride, made an agreement with Lucien Maxwell to build a toll road over Raton Pass. They blasted rock, removed road debris and built bridges for months, finally crossing the 27 mile ordeal with a passable road. Then they built a toll booth and charged $1.50 per wagon, 25 cents per horseman and 5 cents per animal from everyone wishing to pass, except Native Americans who traveled free.

As easy as the toll road made it, Raton Pass was still not a place for the inexperienced. The banks of the road were littered with broken parts of wagons that didn't make it. And sometimes it took up to seven days to complete the crossing (about 21 miles long). 

At the same time, the first mail delivery firm office was set up in Trinidad. It was the Barlow, Sanderson, and Company. The following year, Marrice Wise opened a store on Main Street. He was one of the German born Jewish settlers who relocated to Trinidad from the East. Another general store was opened by John Thatcher of Pueblo. By 1869, there were 1,200 residents of Trinidad and it was becoming a commercial and agricultural center. Log and adobe buildings lined Main and Commercial Streets.

Gold was discovered in the Spanish Peaks area in the early 1870's. It wasn't a big rush and it petered out quickly but by 1876 there were between 50 and 60 mine shafts operating on the twin peaks. At least one was owned and operated by one of Abraham Lincoln's sons.

Trinidad was officially incorporated in 1876, just a few months before Colorado became a state. It was already evolving from a small adobe village into a Victorian jewel. That year about 15,000 tons of freight passed over Uncle Dick's toll road.

On any given day, up to 500 head of wagon train oxen would be staked out around town, grazing and resting for the journey over Raton Pass. 10,000 sheep (and their shepherds) would spend the day crossing the Purgatoire River in the middle of town. The red light district (on W. Main St., where the Safeway is now) did a booming business with all the cowboys and freightmen passing through.

In 1876, Trinidad was incorporated and two years later, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway was built over Raton Pass. When the railway reached Santa Fe in 1880, the Weekly New Mexican printed, “And the Old Santa Fe Trail passes into oblivion.”

Westward advancing rail lines in the 1860's and 1870's brought nearly all Trail traffic to the Mountain Branch. Adobe buildings and a few log structures lined Main and Commercial Streets in Trinidad. Town suffered a few raids from the Utes and the chronic lawlessness of a frontier town, but quickly matured into a major center of commerce and agriculture for southern Colorado.

By the 1880s Las Animas and Huerfano Counties were the top two coal-producing counties in Colorado, with the richest coal lying in an easily accessible strip between Trinidad and Walsenburg. Trinidad’s population doubled that decade, from about 2,200 in 1880 to roughly 5,500 in 1890, and several grand brick buildings served as evidence of the city’s growing wealth. In 1879 the Grand Union Hotel (later called the Columbian) went up at the corner of Main and Commercial Streets. A few years later the Jaffa brothers, Jewish merchants, built a 700-seat opera house across Main Street from the hotel. Holy Trinity Catholic Church was completed in 1885, a new city hall in 1888.

With the passing of the Santa Fe Trail, mining and cattle companies became chief industries for the area.. By 1908, Morley Camp south of Trinidad was the most active mine in southern Colorado. 

Facing low wages and dangerous working conditions, many miners joined the United Mine Workers and organized several major strikes in the 1890s and early 1900s. In April 1914 tensions between miners and owners reached their climax in the Ludlow Massacre, the deadliest labor conflict in US history, when National Guard troops attacked a tent colony of miners about fifteen miles north of Trinidad.

The Ludlow Massacre did not cause the decline of coal mining in the area around Trinidad, but it serves as a convenient turning point in the region’s history. Over the next few decades, industrial changes and economic depression resulted in greatly reduced demand for coal. Mines in the area began to close in the 1920s. Even when the national economy recovered during and after World War II, mines around Trinidad continued to close because of high extraction costs and increasing competition from other fuels. As a result, Trinidad’s growth ground to a halt. Its population peaked in 1940 at more than 13,000, then started a slow decline for the next fifty years.

Trinidad was dubbed the "Sex Change Capital of the World", because a local doctor had an international reputation for performing sex reassignment surgery. In the 1960s, Dr. Stanley Biber, a veteran surgeon returning from Korea, decided to move to Trinidad because he had heard that the town needed a surgeon. In 1969, a local social worker asked him if he would perform the surgery for her, which he learned by consulting diagrams and a New York surgeon. Biber attained a reputation as a good surgeon at a time when very few doctors were performing sex-change operations. At his peak, Biber was performing roughly four sex-change operations a day, and the term "taking a trip to Trinidad" became a euphemism for some seeking the procedures he offered. Biber performed about 4000 operations during 30 years of his career. Biber's surgical practice was taken over in 2003 by Marci Bowers. Dr. Bowers has since moved the practice to San Mateo, California. Another page of the city's history was turned...

In 2017 the town is experiencing a new boom, the city is thriving due to the marijuana industry. CNN asks the question "Did pot money save a small town from 'abyss of nothingness'?". Apparently the answer is a resounding "yes" with the town experiencing a new found $4.4 million in tax revenue from $44 million in annual sales of the recreational drug, representing about 5.13% of the state's total sales. In 2018 High Times called the town "Weed Town, USA" noting the 23 licensed retail marijuana dispensaries servicing less than 10k people works out to one dispensary per 352 people.

Is that all? Definitely not... There are a few more interesting facts about Trinidad.

Most of Trinidad’s streets are straight, but not Main Street, which was built in the 1860s along the gently curving wagon ruts of the old Santa Fe Trail. At the corner of Main and Animas streets, you’ll notice a curious sight. There are normal storefronts at street level, but there’s another set of storefronts one story below, down a seldom used flight of stairs. It’s a remnant of what once was an entire underground block of Main Street that connected to tunnels traversing wide stretches of the city.

Ask three people in Trinidad the purpose of these subterranean thoroughfares and you’ll get three different answers. Some say they were built during Prohibition, when Trinidad had an undercurrent of Mafia activity, and bootleggers – even Al Capone, according to rumors – used the tunnels to transport illicit booze. Others say Main Street simply was raised up one story to avoid damage from the flooding Purgatoire River.

So... another undeservedly forgotten place with a lot of history in the past. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to explore everything in the city. So we just spent about an hour before sunset walking down Main Street and looking around. And we hit I-25 again, finally crossed the New Mexico border and made it to Las Vegas, where we spent the night at the Airbnb known as "Night in Museum".

Yeah... it took a whole day to drive these 400 miles. But we think it was a good day to explore some places we've never stopped and seen before....

Pictures were taken on October 20, 2018.