Introduction to the Second Edition

In the 1980s, a restaurateur in Louisville, Colorado had an idea 
for a restaurant called the Black Diamond. The name was a tribute 
to Boulder County's largest coal mine, and the restaurant would 
have a coal mine aesthetic, including a mine tipple.

There was one problem. There were no mine tipples left in Boulder 
County. The owner had to have one imported from a former coal mine 
in New Mexico. 

I cite this story as an example of how quickly the coal-mining 
legacy of Colorado's Front Range was lost. The Northern Coal Field 
stretched from the Marshall Mesa near Eldorado Springs, out to Ft. 
Lupton on the plains. Over 120 coal mines operated in the area 
from the 1860s to the 1970s, and yet, by the 1980s, not one mine 
tipple was left standing. The imported tipple in Louisville can 
still be seen on Louisville's Main Street, where it's home to the 
Melting Pot fondue restaurant. 

Today, the only remaining structure from the region's mining days 
is the wooden frame of a water tower at the Eagle Mine in Erie. I 
used a photo of the water tower on the cover of this novel's first 
edition. 

Back in 2017, I had no plans to write a novel about the Coal 
Miner's Strike. I had first learned about the strike two years 
earlier, when producing a documentary for a museum in Lafayette, 
Colorado. At the time, the 90th anniversary of the strike was 
approaching. The public outrage that grew from what happened here 
in 1927 marked a change in American labor history. By 2017, 
however, I was worried that November 1927 would pass by unnoticed.

In the city of Leadville, perched in the Rockies at 10,000 feet, 
you will find the National Mining Museum and Hall of Fame. The men 
and women described in this book have no place at the Mining Hall 
of Fame. Wives who solicited blankets for donation, and men who 
risked death for the coal which powered our homes, are crowded out 
by Captains of Industry and Elder Statesmen.

This apathy from the many, and the deliberate erasure by the few, 
was a core motivation for this book. History has detailed the 
prospectors panning in rivers, and the tycoons who built their 
fortunes on the stampede for silver and gold. We know about the 
homesteaders, or to use a slightly contentious term, the Pioneers. 
We know about the Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Utes. What has been 
almost entirely ignored has been the role of the coal miner in 
shaping the American West. 

To paraphrase the Rabbi Hillel, "If not us, then who?"

It is distressing for me to think that Sean and Gerry, the two 
teenagers who play the Ebenezer Scrooge role in the story, would 
now be well into college. In the years since 2017, I have had the 
pleasure of sharing the story of these coal miners with people all 
across the country. I've met former coal miners, labor leaders, 
union workers and historians. In Fraser, I met a man who worked at 
Gilman, the company town abandoned in the 1980s, and now the most 
haunting ghost town of the Rockies. I've met men who organized and 
agitated at the Climax Mine, the massive complex at the summit of 
Fremont Pass. 

I've met the grandsons of labor organizer Louis Tikas. Tikas had 
been chased out of Lafayette once by Pinkerton thugs, and was 
later the lead organizer at Ludlow. I told the grandsons how much 
I admired Louis' work. I hope their translator conveyed this, 
since both men spoke only Greek. 

When the miners were being massacred at Ludlow in 1914, a passing 
train slowed down to give them cover. Every year at the Ludlow 
ceremony, the passing train blows its horn in solidarity. I have 
seen the BNSF go lumbering by the ceremony, and heard the union 
workers cheer.

I've organized a Labor Day memorial to honor those killed at the 
Columbine Mine. I've met the committed museum volunteers who work 
to keep our nation's history alive. I've walked through the ruined 
foundations of the Hastings Mine, where 121 men died in an 
explosion. I've stood on Main Street in Trinidad and seen the spot 
where state militia on horseback rode down a crowd of women 
protesters. 

I did what I set out to do: get people to remember. The fight for 
freedom is never fought once and for all. The spirits of the 
cemetery dare us to do better. The labor freedoms under attack 
today are rights that people died fighting for. I've tried to put 
names and faces to those people: Beranek, Ortega, Jacques, Davis, 
Spanudakshis, Bell, Eastenes, and little Dorothy. I thought it 
would make it easier to remember what they gave up for us to work 
in safer conditions. Let's not forget those who were beaten and 
jailed so we could speak our minds without fearing the pit boss' 
boot or the deputy's nightstick. I hope we can keep on 
remembering, because remembering might be our only hope. 

This second edition of *November in America* includes several 
updates to the original text. This includes factual updates where 
possible. I have corrected a rather galling error about directions 
on Lafayette's Simpson Street. Doctors are lucky; they get to bury 
their screw-ups. As a writer, I can only offer this new-and-
improved edition, and hope its older brother doesn't show up 
uninvited too often.

When I wrote *November in America*, I used the phrase "not-so-long-
ago" in a numerical sense. I was thinking about the 1920s as 
something that happened in the lifetimes of my great-grandparents. 
As Michael Stevens put it, we went from Custer's Last Stand to 
Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" within a single human 
lifetime. Now, as I watch a resurgence of white supremacy, anti-
immigrant hatred, government corruption, growing wealth 
inequality, the culling of free expression, and the destruction of 
worker's rights, the world of November 1927 feels not-so-long-ago 
at all.

Come right this way, readers. The spirits of the cemetery would 
have words with you...

Nicholas Bernhard
Lafayette, Colorado
November 18, 2025