Imagine this.
A great prairie stretches for miles with little relief—an arroyo here, a grassy hill there, the windmill of a nearby ranch. Sage grows in wiry clumps, and cholla and prickly pear spike upward. To the west, locomotives weave through a maze of steel, trailed by miles of freight cars that spill dingy black coal. In the rail yard, everything is metal and mechanical, built to store, load, dump, or move coal. Sweeping up beyond the bridges and rails are the twin canyons of Berwind and Delagua, their wind-carved mesas and rocky, cedar-covered slopes casting late-day shadows. To the northwest, you might glimpse the rugged snowy caps of the Spanish Peaks, but to the north, there is only prairie. Flat, unbroken, its soil brick hard. To the east, the low, scrubby Black Hills, so called because they bristle with cedar and piñon, barely dent the straight, blank line of the horizon. To the south, past more rails and steel bridges, and past the water tower of the town of Ludlow itself, the great mesa near Forbes sweeps forward, blocking any view of Fisher’s Peak, in Trinidad, twenty miles beyond. Overhead is sky so radiantly clear that it hurts your eyes to look into it.
This is where the UMWA built its largest tent city.
From MY HEART LIES HERE: A Novel of the Ludlow Massacre
Lost Ranch Books 