Author set new young adult novel in Las Animas County

Matthew Franks has turned Las Animas County into the setting for a new young adult novel, Las Animas High, giving Trinidad and the surrounding landscape a role that reaches beyond courthouse headlines and wildfire maps. Writing under the pen name Gibson Monk, Franks drew on a visit to southern Colorado and said the region’s scenery and culture stayed with him enough to shape the story itself.

That choice lands in a county that already carries a strong sense of place. Las Animas County is Colorado’s largest county by area, stretching across 4,775 square miles, yet the 2020 Census counted just 14,555 residents. Its name comes from the Purgatoire River’s original Spanish name, El Río de las Ánimas Perdidas en el Purgatorio, or River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory. The county seat, Trinidad, was established in 1861 along the Santa Fe Trail and later flourished from the late 1870s through the 1910s as the capital of southern Colorado’s coal-producing region.

For local readers, the question is whether a novel set here will recognize the county as people know it. Trinidad’s El Corazon de Trinidad National Historic District includes many blocks of adobe and brick buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a streetscape that still reflects the town’s layered history. The setting also carries the weight of the coalfield era, including the Ludlow Tent Colony Site about 15 miles north of Trinidad, where the Ludlow Massacre on April 20, 1914, killed two women and eleven children. The United Mine Workers of America built the Ludlow Monument in 1918 to honor the victims.

The county’s literary appeal is reinforced by places that already draw visitors for history and art. Bent’s Fort, built in 1833, was, for much of its 16-year operation, the only major permanent white settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements. The reconstructed Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site opened in 1976 after archeological and documentary reconstruction. In Trinidad, the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art holds more than 350 works by Arthur Roy Mitchell, along with Spanish folk art and Native American artwork.

Colorado tourism materials also place Trinidad in the Corazón de Trinidad Creative District and along the scenic Highway of Legends, linking the town to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and a corridor already known for its views and history. Las Animas High now adds another way for the county to travel outward, through fiction shaped by a place that has long left a mark on the people who pass through it.