Pueblo, Colorado

Pueblo sits where Fountain Creek runs into the Arkansas River, on the southern edge of Colorado's Front Range. The first permanent settlement here was El Pueblo, an adobe trading post built in 1842 to work the fur trade along the Santa Fe Trail. It was a genuine crossroads: Anglo, French, and African American trappers, Mexican settlers, and Plains, Iroquois, Delaware, and Cherokee people all met and traded at a spot that then marked the border between the United States and Mexico. The post was abandoned after an 1854 attack; the city that grew up around the site incorporated in 1870.

What turned Pueblo from a frontier town into a city was steel. In 1880 William Jackson Palmer's Colorado Coal and Iron Company built ironworks here to roll rails for his railroad, and after an 1892 merger it became Colorado Fuel and Iron, whose only steel mill was in Pueblo. By 1910 the company employed roughly 15,000 people, about a tenth of Colorado's entire workforce, and the mill drew immigrants from across Europe and Mexico into the neighborhoods around it. That heritage is why Pueblo still answers to the nickname Steel City, and a mill on the south side rolls steel to this day.