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17 chapter two The Lure of Landscape: Tourism in Colorado and the Mountain West In the making of a tourist, motivation, transportation, and destination must combine. One must have a reason to leave home, a means of passage , and a place to go. In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans from across the nation traveled to the American West, particularly the Mountain West, to see for themselves the magnificent wilderness caught on canvas and in photographs or to seek its heralded and well-documented health benefits. Transportation was initially provided by railroads and later and more significantly via automobile. For many, the place to visit was Colorado: the “Switzerland of America” and the first spectacularly mountainous state reached when traveling from the east. Motivation: On the Hunt for Health, Scenery, and Recreation For the American traveler in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , three aims were particularly motivating: an urgent need to seek a cure for a life-threatening illness; a desire to experience firsthand Western wilderness areas with scenery, scale, and variety unmatched by anything in the Eastern United States; and an unrestrained enthusiasm for outdoor recreation. Tourism was aided along its path to institutionaliza- 18 high country summers tion by the advent of annual vacations and the emerging concept of the weekend, as well as the gritty reality that tourists left home in the summer not only to go to other places but to escape from the city as well. Indeed, in accounting for the flight from the city in the summer, the absence of air conditioning and inadequate sanitation must be given their due, for here were technological and infrastructural shortcomings of no small consequence. Cities were miserable in the summer, and the intense heat was dangerous because “foul miasmas—and later harmful germs—were known to flourish in hot weather amid the deficient sanitary conditions that characterized most urban areas” and subjected their inhabitants to escalating dangers of disease, epidemics, and higher death rates.1 Even when cities began to improve sanitation and waste management systems, residential air conditioning was not widespread until after World War II, and the heat remained relentless. Thus, those who could leave generally did so, fleeing what was poetically called the “heated term.” As the Fort Collins Weekly Courier reported on July 8, 1908, “Colorado has many charming summer resorts where one can spend the heated term with ease, comfort and satisfaction and enjoy the beauties and grandeurs that Nature has so lavishly placed at his hand.” For those with respiratory health problems, the American West in general and Colorado in particular were seen as life-saving destinations. Prior to its identification as an infectious bacterial disease in the 1880s, tuberculosis (as well as bronchitis, lung cancer, and other symptomatic respiratory diseases) was mischaracterized as “consumption,” an expression for any chronic wasting condition with pulmonary symptoms.2 In the absence of clear diagnoses, ignorance of microbial contagion, and a dearth of curative treatments, Colorado’s pure, dry mountain air was highly regarded in the medical community as an antidote to any and all respiratory symptoms. Many doctors prescribed lengthy visits to the state for those in need of a “mountain cure.” The number of health seekers who visited or moved to Colorado is undocumented, but during the first decade of the twentieth century an estimated 25 percent of the deaths in Denver were attributed to tuberculosis, a statistic that speaks to the substantial number of both tubercular visitors and inhabitants.3 By the early decades of the twentieth century, ailing tuberculosis patients had become less welcome or were confined to sanitariums due to an enhanced understanding (and fear) of the contagious nature of the disease. Conversely, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries , the number of middle-class tourists on the hunt for America’s scenic landscapes was on the rise. They initially found their way to eastern locales such as the Hudson River Valley, the Adirondacks and Alleghenies, and, most important, Niagara Falls.4 These natural wonders were a source of pride for a nation that had long harbored a strong sense of in- The Lure of Landscape 19 feriority to Europe’s cultural riches. Initially problematic, however, was the fact that beyond the crashing majesty of Niagara Falls, the pastoral landscapes of the East Coast, mid-Atlantic, and Deep South were strikingly similar to those of Europe. Worse, these locations were bereft of the requisite ruins, castles, and architectural follies that comprised customary...

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