Victor-American Fuel Company, also styled as the Victor Fuel Company, was a coal mining company, primarily focused on operations in the US states of Colorado and New Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. Prior to a 1909 reorganization, the business was known as the American Fuel Company.[1]
Company president John C. Osgood took lead of the company in 1903 after being forced out of another company he had founded, Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, by future part-owner John D. Rockefeller.[2] Behind the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the Victor-American Fuel Company was the second-largest coal company in the state–and the wealthiest owned by Coloradans–during the first decades of the 20th century.[3] During the 1913-1914 Colorado Coalfield War, strikebreakers and mine guards working for Victor-American that had been hired in response to the United Mine Workers of America-led labor uprising were targeted in attacks.[4]
Like other Colorado coal mining companies of the era, Victor-American operated company-owned mining towns that housed its workers across many sites. Victor-American acquired mining sites throughout Colorado, establishing towns to support operations. These mines include Bowen, Chandler, Delagua, Hastings, Pinnacle Mine in the Oak Creek fields, and Wadge Mine.[5] [3] [6] [7] [8] Some of these mines were home to significant Asian-American populations, which occasionally were utilized as strikebreakers against collectivizing White miners, especially at Chandler.[9]
By 1987, Victor-American had registered itself as a corporation in Maine.[10]
At the Bowen Mine near Trinidad, Colorado, an explosion of dust ignited by giant powder on 7 August 1902 killed 13 people.[11] [12]
On 8 November 1910, at Delagua, an explosion at the Victor-American coal mine killed 76 miners. A group of recovery parties were gathered from the nearby mining communities at Hastings, Berwind, and others.[7] Miners from Primero and Starkville, both CF&I towns that had suffered a major disaster earlier that year (the latter exactly a month earlier), rushed to send help.[13]
The Hastings Mine Disaster took place on 27 April 1917, killing 121 miners at the Victor-American mine.[14] The Hasting mine was not far from Ludlow, site of the Ludlow Massacre, the most violent point in the 1913-1914 Colorado Coalfield War that saw some Victor-American property damaged by armed striking miners.
At Delagua on 27 May 1927, six miners were killed in an explosion of the No. 3 shaft, the same that had collapsed in 1910.[15]
On 27 January 1942, 34 miners were killed at the Victor-American Wadge Mine on Mount Harris in Routt County.[16]