Navajo, New Mexico

The opening of the Navajo coal mine by the American Fuel Company produced the camp of Navajo. Small frame houses were supplied to the residents by the company. A store and a hotel operated at the camp for a few years. About 1922, the Gallup American Coal Company sank the shaft at Gamerco, less than a mile west of Navajo, and the center of coal mining activity shifted there. The Navajo Mine closed, but many of the miners stilled lived in the camp while working at Gamerco. In the mid-1930s Navajo reported a population of six hundred. However, before long all of the buildings were moved, leaving nothing but mine dumps and foundations.

Gamerco, New Mexico

The Gallup American Coal Company began sinking shafts into coal deposits north of Gallup in 1920, and two years later the newly formed camp of Gamerco witnessed hoisting of the first coal. Even before mining was underway the town was platted, and the Gallup American Coal Company moved abandoned homes from Heaton, and Navajoe, both nearby coal camps ran by the company, to Gamerco, in addition to new ones that were being constructed. The company town was soon supplied with a company store, a meat market, a hotel, a clubhouse, a shower house for the miners, and an executive office building. Keeping their miners happy, the company also built several recreation facilities, including a golf course, swimming pool, tennis courts and a base ball park. The company also provided a resident physician and a nurse.

The company was diligent in its safety practices, no doubt in an effort to prevent a coal mining disaster such as the one that occurred in Dawson, New Mexico several years earlier which claimed 263 lives. Ninety percent of the underground employees had were certified in rescue and first aid, the men were supplied with electric lamps and only permissible low heat explosives were ever used.