Walsenburg was named for Fred Walsen, a German immigrant who settled there 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 there in the early 1860s. Their settlement, La Plaza de los Leones, stood along a busy north-south trail and became the region’s main trade center. In the late 19th century, immigrants from across Europe came to work in the coal mines, and the town eventually became home to people from 32 countries speaking 27 languages, while Hispanos remained central to its cultural past and present. Local legend also tied the nearby Spanish Peaks to a curse told to Coronado in 1598, warning that anyone who mined the mountains’ gold would be punished; according to the story, a priest named de la Cruz found a rich vein, used Indian slaves as miners, and vanished while returning to Mexico with 40 burros loaded with gold. Walsenburg was known as "The City Built on Coal" because it stood atop a coalfield 30 miles long, and its mines depended on the railroads, especially the line built in 1876 by the Denver and Rio Grande Western, which carried southern Colorado coal to market while the railroads themselves relied on coal to fuel their locomotives. Between 1875 and 1975, railroads shipped about half a billion tons of southern Colorado coal. Mining was hard and sometimes deadly work, and miners used numbered brass checks before and after each shift so that missing tags showed who remained underground after an accident.