Walsenburg

Walsenburg. Scenic Highway of Legends. , Walsenburg is named for Fred Walsen, a German immigrant who settled here in 1870 and leased the land for the first major coal mine. But the community was actually founded by Don Miguel Antonio Leon, a rancher who led several dozen Mexican American colonists here in the early 1860s. Their settlement, La Plaza de los Leones, sat along a busy north-south trail and became the main regional trade center. , Eventually Walsenburg would be home to people from 32 countries, speaking 27 languages, as immigrants from all over Europe came here to work in the coal mines in the late 19th century. But Hispanos hold a special place in the city's cultural past , and its present. , The Mountains’ Curse , During Coronado's 1598 explorations of Colorado, the Indians told him a curse hung over the Spanish Peaks: anyone who dared to mine the mountains' gold would be punished by the gods. , One of Coronado's men, a priest named de la Cruz, supposedly defied the curse. He tapped a rich gold vein on the Spanish Peaks, using Indian slaves as miners. De la Cruz started back to Mexico with a caravan of 40 burros, all of them burdened with gold. But along the way the gods must have taken their vengeance: the evil priest disappeared without a trace, never to be heard from again. , Locals called Walsenburg "The City Built on Coal," and it really was: the town stood atop a coalfield 30 miles long. But the mines couldn't prosper without railroads. The tracks in front of you, built in 1876 by the Denver and Rio Grande Western, carried southern Colorado's coal from the mines to the markets. The railroads, in turn, relied on the coal mines to fuel their locomotives. , Railroads shipped about half a billion tons of Southern Colorado coal between 1875 and 1975. , Coal mining was difficult, sometimes deadly work. Miners pulled numbered brass checks from a rack before each shift and replaced them at quitting time. When an accident happened, the missing tags indicated which miners remained underground. The sculpture to your left, called "Number's Up," remembers those tags and the unlucky men they belonged to. , All That Glitters… , Francisco Coronado marched through this part of Colorado in 1598 in search of a mythical golden city. He was the first in a long line of fortune seekers lured here by rumors of unimaginable wealth , lost mines, hidden lodes, maybe even Montezuma's gold. Every rumor proved false, but another one always emerged. , Ironically, as they chased after gold that didn't exist, all those treasure hunters passed right over the region’s real source of wealth , coal. , To find out more about the history of this area, visit the Walsenburg Mining Museum, less than 1 block from here at 112 W. Fifth Street, or call 719-738-1992.