The City Built on Coal

Look southwest from anywhere in Walsenburg and two mountains fill the sky, one taller and one shorter, their summits bare and blunt above the piñon foothills. The Comanche called them Wahatoya, meaning Double Mountain. They are the Spanish Peaks, and they have been a navigation marker for every traveler on this section of the plains for centuries. Wagon trains on the Santa Fe Trail could spot them from a hundred miles out on the grasslands, the first hint of the Rockies rising from the flat earth.

The town beneath them has a longer story than it first appears. In eighteen fifty-nine, settlers coming north out of New Mexico built a Hispano plaza here in the old tradition, homes and livestock quarters arranged around a central courtyard, the whole compound walled against the open frontier. They called it La Plaza de los Leones, after a founding family named León. The street those settlers laid along the old Indian trail is still Walsenburg's Main Street.

The renaming came about fourteen years later. A Prussian immigrant named Fred Walsen had arrived in the valley in eighteen seventy. He opened a store, took an interest in what lay beneath the ground, and in eighteen seventy-six sank the first coal mine in Huerfano County just west of town. When the community incorporated in eighteen seventy-three, it took his name, or close to it. The original spelling carried an extra letter at the end. Over the years the final letter was quietly dropped and Walsen's name settled into the map as it stands today.

Coal remade everything. The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad reached Walsenburg in the middle of the eighteen seventies and the mines multiplied across the county. Dozens of coal camps scattered through the Huerfano hills, company towns where miners lived in company housing, spent company scrip at company stores, and answered to company rules. By the early nineteen hundreds, Huerfano County was shipping coal in enormous quantities, and the city called itself the city built on coal with some accuracy.

The weight of that system broke open in nineteen thirteen. Miners across the southern coalfields walked out of the pits in September of that year, striking against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Walsenburg sat near the center of the conflict. In October, deputies escorting wagons down Seventh Street fired into a crowd and killed three men. The following spring, after the Ludlow Massacre about twenty-two miles south, fighting spread back into Huerfano County. National Guard troops and mine guards struggled with strikers for control of the ridgeline above town across two days in late April of nineteen fourteen.

The strike was broken. The coal kept moving for another generation. Then oil and natural gas undercut the market, safety costs rose, and one by one the mines closed. The population that had peaked around fifty-eight hundred at mid-century fell to roughly three thousand by the time of the most recent census.

Today Walsenburg is the Huerfano County seat, quiet and intact along its old Main Street, with the double profile of the Spanish Peaks still visible from most corners of town, the same skyline the Comanche named, the same horizon the wagon trains steered by, the same mountains Fred Walsen saw when he decided to stay.