COLORADO SPRINGS AND TUNNEL NO. 6, CRIPPLE CREEK SHORT LINE

Ellis Meredith has often pictured in song the charm and romance of Colorado with the vividness and power that characterize her poems which are essentially those of insight and imagination; but in the opinion of many of her admirers she has hardly laid at the shrine of the muses any more felicitous votive offering than this little impromptu.

A summer in Colorado Springs is one that is set in the heart of fascinating attractions. Nor is the Pike's Peak region a summer land alone, for the autumn is even more beautiful, and the winters are all crystal and sunshine and full of exquisite exhilaration and delight in mountain regions that take on new forms of interest. Colorado Springs is not merely—nor even mostly—an excursion city for pleasure-seekers; it is a city of permanent homes, whose residential advantages attract and create its phenomenal growth.

To open one's eyes on the purple line of the Rocky Mountains, with Pike's Peak towering into the sky, in a luminous crystal air that makes even existence a delight, is an alluring experience. To look over the beautiful city of Colorado Springs, with its broad streets and boulevards, and lines of trees on either side; its electric lights, electric cars, well-built brick blocks, churches, schools, and free public library; its interesting and enterprising journalism; to come in contact with the intelligence and refinement of the people,—is to realize that this is no provincial Western town, but instead, a gay and fashionable city, with the aspect of a summer watering place. Manitou, which lies six miles away at the very base of Pike's Peak, and Colorado Springs are connected by electric cars running along the mountain line, and there is a great social interchange. It is simply a whirl of social life in the late summer, and the rapidity with which the guest is expected to flit from one garden party, and tea, and reception to another, within a given time, reminds him of a London season. In the morning every fashionable woman drives to Prospect Lake, and from her bathing in its blue waters to the informal "hop" at night, she is on a perpetual round of gayety if she so desire.

The wide range and freedom of life in Colorado Springs is equally enjoyable. The artist, the thinker, the writer, finds an ideal environment in which to pursue his work. This beautiful residence city, founded by General Palmer in 1871, has now a population of some thirty thousand, and although lying at the foot of Pike's Peak, it is yet on an elevation of six thousand feet above the level of the sea. Adjoining Colorado Springs is Colorado City, a manufacturing town of five thousand inhabitants, and Manitou, the little town at the immediate base of Pike's Peak, with some two thousand residents, to which, in the summer, is added an equal number of visitors, who bestow themselves in the attractive hotels and boarding-houses or who occupy cottages or camps in the foothills. Colorado Springs was founded in a wise and beneficent spirit. Every deed in the town contains a clause prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors, and by the terms of the contract any violation of this agreement renders the deed null and void and the property reverts to the city. Education is made compulsory, and on this basis of temperance, education, and morality the town is founded. It is laid out with generous ideas and with unfailing allegiance to municipal ideals of taste. The avenues are one hundred and forty feet wide and the streets are all one hundred feet wide. Lying midway between Denver and Pueblo, the two largest cities of the state, Colorado Springs is within two hours of the former and one hour of the latter.

Colorado College, a co-educational institution, is largely endowed, and it has from eight to nine hundred students. Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, D.D., of Boston, the president of the Unitarian Association, was invited to deliver the Commencement Address at this college in 1905, and on this occasion Dr. Eliot said:

"Nothing can surpass the academic dignity of a commencement at a Western State University. The perfection of the discipline would make our elegant, but often distressed, 'master of ceremonies' at Harvard green with envy. At our Eastern Colleges there are still individual idiosyncrasies and perverse prejudices and traditions of simpler days to be considered. There are some old-fashioned members of the faculty who just won't wear the academic gown or the appropriately colored hood, and there are always some reckless seniors who will wear tan shoes or a straw hat. Not so in Kansas and Colorado, in Iowa and Nebraska. There every professor and every senior wears his uniform as if he were used to it; each one knows his place and his part and performs it impressively. The academic procession, headed by the regents in their gowns and followed by the members of the various faculties with their characteristic hoods and stripes, and by the senior classes of the college and the various professional schools, is perfect in its orderly procedure, and the commencement exercises themselves are carried through with a solemnity which is sometimes awesome. I caught myself almost wishing that some senior would forget to take off his Oxford cap at the proper time or trip on his gown as he came up the steps of the platform to get his sheepskin, but no such accident marred the impressiveness of the occasion."

Dr. Eliot playfully touches a fact in the social as well as in the academic life of the West in these remarks. The informalities so frequently experienced in recognized social life in the Eastern cities are seldom encountered in the corresponding circles of life in the West, all observance of times and seasons, as calling hours, ceremonial invitations, and driving being quite strictly relegated to their true place in the annals of etiquette. In his Commencement address before Colorado College in 1905 Dr. Eliot said, regarding the several educational schools of Colorado:

"Thus in Colorado the State University is at Boulder, the Agricultural College at Fort Collins, the Normal School at Greeley, the School of Mines at Golden, and so on. The result is not only an injudicious diffusion of energy, but real waste and sometimes deplorable rivalry. Doubtless it is now too late to rectify this mistake. Provincial jealousies and a sense of local ownership are too strong to permit of desirable concentration, and these states are probably permanently burdened with the necessity of sustaining half a dozen institutions which must often duplicate equipment and courses of instruction."

Leading authorities in the Centennial State do not wholly agree with this view. The distribution of an educational centre in one city and part of the state and another in a different part, contributes to the building up of different cities and to a certain concentration on the part of the students on the special subjects pursued. President Slocum of Colorado College, President Baker of the State University, President Snyder of the State Normal College in Greeley, with other college presidents and their colleagues and faculties, are devoting their lives to the interests of higher education in its broadest and most complete sense; and with their own splendid equipments in learning, their patience and ability in research, their zeal for teaching, and their intense interest in the problems of university life in a new state, they are making a record of the most impressive quality. They are the great pathfinders of the educational future.

Colorado has the advantage of a larger percentage of American population than any other of the Western inland states, there being only twenty per cent of foreign admixture in the entire six hundred and fifty thousand people,—a fact that is especially to be considered in educational progress.

The high school building in Colorado Springs; the court house, costing a half-million dollars; the new city library of Colorado stone; the thirty-five miles of electric railway; a water system costing over a million of dollars; the admirable telephone system,—these and the fine architectural art would render it a desirable residence city even aside from the group of scenic wonders which has made it famous all over the world.

General William J. Palmer, the founder of Colorado Springs, is one of the great benefactors of the state of Colorado. "General Palmer has always been a builder for the future," says a local authority. "His remarkable foresight was best exemplified in the construction of the Rio Grande railroad,—the road which made Colorado famous. Colorado Springs is another monument to his prophetic vision. With an ample fortune he has retired from business life, but is busier than ever with his many philanthropies, all of which have an eye to the future.

"At great expense he has abolished Bear Creek toll-gate, and has constructed a wonderful carriage road through this beautiful cañon, and will give it to the people as a permanent blessing."

This Bear Creek Cañon lies north of Cheyenne Cañon—about five miles from Colorado Springs. The road winds back and forth in a zigzag elevation, with new vistas of enchantment at every turn,—towering mountains, the Garden of the Gods,—that strange, weird spectacle, St. Peter's Dome, Phantom Falls, Silver Cascade, Helen Hunt Falls, and other points of romantic beauty.

Colorado Springs has a great park system at a cost already of three hundred thousand dollars, and with the buildings and other features projected the cost will be hardly less than half a million. There are to be floral gardens, an Italian sunken basin with a fountain rising in streams, after the fashion of the fountains of Versailles,—and an art gallery is soon to be added to this lovely and enterprising city. Already the city has Palmer Park,—comprising eight hundred acres, donated by the generous and beneficent General Palmer,—a park that contains Austin's Bluffs, from which a magnificent view is obtained.

It is to General Palmer that all the charming extension of terraced drives and walks in North Cheyenne Cañon is due,—the road often terraced on the side of the mountain; and here and there little refreshment stands, where a sandwich, a glass of lemonade, a cup of tea may be had, are found in these wild altitudes. In Palmer Park one portion has been appropriately named Statuary Park, from the multitude of strange forms and figures that Nature has chiselled in the sandstone. Gray's Peak, like a dim shadow on the far horizon to the north, and the faint, beautiful outline of the Spanish Peaks to the south, are seen from this park, while the massive portals of the "Garden of the Gods" in their burning red are near, and at one side the rose pink rocks of Blair Athol.

General Palmer's residence in Glen Eyrie is one of the poetic places of the world. The romantic environment of mountain cañons, towers, and domes of the fantastic sandstone shapes, and overhanging rocks that loom up thousands of feet on a mountain side, impart a wild charm that no words can picture. The architectural effects have been kept in artistic correspondence with the romantic scenery.

Monument Valley Park is the latest of General Palmer's munificent gifts to Colorado Springs. It was a tract of low waste land some two miles in length and covering an area of two hundred or more acres, but its transformation into the present beautiful park is the realization of an Aladdin's dream. An artistic stone drinking-fountain; a wide vista of trees relieved by a low Italian basin with fountains; Monument Creek, made to be sixty feet wide between its banks; the creation of artificial lakes; and there are included in the scheme conservatories, rustic pavilions, and botanical gardens. This park is one of the most extensive improvements in decorative effect, that is known in any city.

Monument Park is distinctive from Monument Valley Park, the former lying some ten miles from the city, and it is picturesque beyond words.

The "Garden of the Gods" has achieved world-wide fame. The "Gateway," the "Cathedral Spires," "Balanced Rock," and other singular formations fascinate the visitor and draw him back again and again. A local writer thus describes the majestic "Gateway":

"Two immense slabs of red sandstone, soft and beautiful in their coloring, tower over three hundred feet high on either side and seem to challenge the right of the stranger to enter the sacred portals. Napoleon, at the Pyramids, sought to impress his soldiers with the thought that from that eminence four thousand years looked down upon them. But from here geological ages of untold length look down upon the beholder. In close proximity may be found limestone, gypsum, white sandstone, and red sandstone, each representing a different geological era, and each, in all probability, representing millions of years in its formation."

The "Garden of the Gods" represents one of those inexplicable epochs of Nature's creations as does, only in a more marvellous degree, the Grand Cañon and the Petrified Forest. A scientist says of these grotesque shapes that "their strangely garish colors, red and yellow and white, in enormous masses, lofty buttresses, towers and pinnacles, besides formations of lesser size, in fantastic shapes, that readily lend themselves to the imagination, are sedimentary strata, which once lay horizontally upon the mountain's breast, but that some gigantic convulsion of nature threw them into their present perpendicular attitude, with their roots, as it were, extending hundreds of feet underground. The erosion of water, when this was all the Gulf of Mexico, accounts for the shaping.

"The gateway to the Garden is really the grandest feature, rising perpendicularly on either side twice the height of Niagara, and framing in rich terra cotta a most entrancing picture of the blue and tawny peak, apparently only a little way on the other side."

GATEWAY OF THE GARDEN OF THE GODS, COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO

CATHEDRAL SPIRES, GARDEN OF THE GODS, COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO

Any writer on Colorado Springs is embarrassed by the fact that the great founder and benefactor of the city has requested that his name is not to be recorded in connection with his great and constant gifts to the municipality; and while it is far from the desire of any one to disregard the expressed wish of a man whose modesty is as great as is his munificent generosity, it is yet impossible to tell the story of Colorado Springs without perpetual references to her distinguished citizen, her great and noble benefactor and founder. It is not too much to say that there is probably not, in the history of the United States, all instance parallel to the story of General Palmer and Colorado Springs. Yet beyond this bare mention, in which one even thus records that which General Palmer has wished to have had left without reference, one is under bonds not to go. The Recording Angel may not be so plastic to the expressed preferences of the wise founder and the munificent benefactor of the charming city; and the vast and generous gifts, the noble character of the citizen whose life and example is the most priceless legacy that he could bequeath to Colorado Springs, however priceless are his long series of gifts,—these are inevitably inscribed in that eternal record not made with hands, on whose pages must ever remain, in shining letters, the honored name of General William J. Palmer, whose energy and whose lofty spirit have invested this beautiful centre of the picturesque region of Pike's Peak with the spell of an enchanted city lying fair in a Land of Enchantment.