Nick Pappas is an award-winning journalist who dedicated more than forty years of his life to newspapers, most recently as an editor at the Albuquerque Journal. On April 13 he will discuss and sign copies of his book, Crosses of Iron, at the Martha Liebert Library in Bernalillo, NM.
In October 1913, 261 miners and two rescuers died when a massive explosion ripped through a mine operated by Phelps, Dodge & Company in Dawson, New Mexico. Ten years later, a second blast claimed the lives of another 120 miners. Today, Dawson is a deserted ghost town. All that remains is a sea of white iron crosses memorializing the nearly four hundred miners killed in the two explosions—a death toll unmatched by mine disasters in any other town in America.
Now, to mark the centennial of the second disaster, veteran journalist Nick Pappas tells the tragic story of what was once New Mexico’s largest and most modern company town and of how the strong, determined residents of the community coped with two heartbreaking catastrophes.