Walsenburg: Coal Gateway to the Spanish Peaks

Walsenburg, Colorado was established in eighteen seventy-three and named for Fred Walsen, a merchant who opened a store here near the Cucharas River in what was then still a frontier outpost on the edge of Ute and Comanche territory. The town sits at the northern entrance to the Huerfano Valley, beneath the twin volcanic peaks the Spanish called Las Dos Hermanas, the Two Sisters, and which Anglos renamed the Spanish Peaks. Coal was discovered in Huerfano County in the eighteen seventies, and Walsenburg became the supply and administrative hub for a network of coal camps spread through the surrounding mountains, the same coal camps whose miners walked off the job in the great strike of nineteen thirteen that culminated in the Ludlow Massacre roughly twenty miles to the south. Walsenburg is the seat of Huerfano County, whose name means orphan in Spanish, reportedly for the isolated volcanic butte that stands alone on the valley floor.