Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

13. Scenery, Health, and Tourism

223 13 From the day in early February 1807, when Zebulon Pike first saw the San Luis Valley, to the present, Colorado has been something special for the tourist. It has made a determined effort to attract vacationers and, with a barrage of publicity, has made the word Rockies mean Colorado to much of the nation. Easy to get to, comfortable to see, and filled with famous sights, the state has fully exploited the American propensity for travel. Today, many of the tourists who visit the state think of themselves as explorers. The same routes Coloradans have long traveled without hazard are adventures with unknown dangers around each curve. Each pass surmounted is a triumph to be photographed, each postcard like an official report on the expedition’s findings. Vacationers try gold panning and pronounce Colorado a humbug or an El Dorado, according to their luck. Many return home with souvenirs—a cowboy hat, a lump of ore—and become instant boosters of the wonders of the Great West. Gold seekers in 1859 scarcely thought about a future tourist trade. In the mid-1860s, however, journalists began to explore the territory, inspecting the scenery with a view to its potential for exploitation. Indeed, the boosters explicitly considered “the climate, mineral waters and scenic attractions of Colorado . . . as resources in themselves.” Like the fertile ground, flowing streams, and mines of silver and gold, they argued, In short, this view combined the sublime and beautiful; the great and lofty mountains covered with eternal snows, seemed to surround the luxuriant vale, crowned with perennial flowers, like a terrestrial paradise, shut out from the view of man.1 —Zebulon MontgoMery Pike, February 5, 1807 Scenery, Health, and tourism DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c13 chapter thirteen 224 the air and mountains were assets that would “bring people and money into this section.”2 Among the most venturesome tourists, William Byers regularly entrusted the Rocky Mountain News to his assistants while he went to the mountains. In August 1868 he accompanied John Wesley Powell in the first recorded ascent of Longs Peak; a few years later he joined the Ferdinand Hayden party on the summit of Mount Lincoln. Byers used his knowledge of the central Rockies to lead prominent visitors, such as travel writer Bayard Taylor, through a circuit that included Berthoud Pass, Middle Park, Hot Sulphur Springs, the valley of the Blue River, South Park, and the canyons of the South Platte. A year later, in 1868, he joined a group that included Vice President Schuyler Colfax and Massachusetts newspaperman Samuel Bowles as they rambled through Middle Park and South Park. Byers’s tour guiding facilitated the writing of two influential books: Taylor’s Colorado: A Summer Trip (1867) and Bowles’s The Switzerland of America (1869). Both writers agreed that the territory offered vast potential for tourism . Americans would soon flock to the nation’s interior “for rest and recreation, for new and exhilarating scenes, for pure and bracing airs, for pleasure and for health.” The two authors told a public accustomed to the scenery of Europe that Colorado was indeed the Switzerland of America. Pikes Peak was “something like” the Jungfrau, and other sights were like the Alps of Savoy. Local booster Ovando Hollister echoed that evaluation: “The Rocky Mountains offer the most delightful Summer resort of the New if not the Old World . . . The annexation of the Rocky Mountains to the Union by railroads will open a new world to science, a new field of adventure to money and muscle, and new and pleasant places of Summer resort to people of leisure.”3 Publicists such as Hollister and Byers capitalized on Americans’ love of summer vacations. Since the early 1850s, outdoor recreation had become increasingly fashionable among the mercantile and professional families of the East. Newport, Rhode Island, and Saratoga, New York, led everyone’s list of places where a proper family of leisure could comfortably spend July and August in a gala round of social events. Next were dozens of other resorts in the cool mountains or on the shore, each with imposing hotels and less expensive boardinghouses. To families unable to afford a mansion-sized “cottage” in Newport and unwilling to rub elbows at Saratoga with the middle-class crowds who filled the hotels, Colorado seemed the logical answer to the question “where to next?” scenery, health, and tourism 225 By the 1870s the transcontinental railroads made getting...