COLORADO SPRINGS
In a certain city that I visited upon my travels, I met one night at
dinner, one of those tall, pink-cheeked, slim-legged young polo-playing
Englishmen, who proceeded to tell me in his positive, British way,
exactly what the United States amounted to. He said New York was
ripping. He said San Francisco was ripping. He said American girls were
ripping.
"But," said he, "there are just two really civilized places between your
Atlantic and Pacific coasts."
The idea entertained me. I asked which places he meant.
"Chicago," he said, "and Colorado Springs."
"But Colorado Springs is a little bit of a place, isn't it?" I asked
him.
"About thirty thousand."
"Why is it so especially civilized?"
"It just _is_, y'know," he answered. "There's polo there."
"But polo doesn't make civilization," I said.
"Oh, yes, it does," he insisted. "I mean to say wherever you find polo
you find good clubs and good society and--usually--good tea."
This, and further rumors of a like nature, plus some pleasant letters
of introduction, caused my companion and me to remove ourselves, one
afternoon, from Denver to the vaunted seat of civilization, some miles
to the south.
Colorado Springs is somewhat higher than Denver and seems to nestle
closer to the mountains. The moment you alight from the train and see
the park, facing the station and the pleasant facade of the Antlers
Hotel, beyond, you feel the peculiar charm of the little city. It is
well laid-out, with very wide streets, very good public buildings and
office buildings, and really remarkable homes.
The homes of Colorado Springs really explain the place. They are of
every variety of architecture, and are inhabited by a corresponding
variety of people. You will see half-timbered English houses, built by
Englishmen and Scots; Southern colonial houses built by people from the
South Atlantic States; New England colonial houses built by families who
have migrated from the regions of Boston and New York; one-story houses
built by people from Hawaii, and a large assortment of other houses
ranging from Queen Anne to Cape Cod cottages, and from Italian villas to
Spanish palaces. There is even the Grand Trianon at Broadmoor, and an
amazing Tudor castle at Glen Eyre.
The society is as cosmopolitan as the architecture. It has been drawn
with perfect impartiality from the well-to-do class in all parts of the
country and has been assembled in this charming garden town with, for
the most part, a common reason--to fight against tuberculosis. This
does not mean, of course, that the majority of people in Colorado
Springs are victims of tuberculosis, but only that, in many instances,
families have moved there because of the affliction of one member.
I say "affliction." Literally, I suppose the word is justified. But
perhaps the most striking thing about society in Colorado Springs is its
apparent freedom from affliction. One goes to the most delightful dinner
parties, there, in the most delightful houses, and meets the most
delightful people. Every one seems very gay. Every one looks well. Yet
one knows that there are certain persons present who are out there for
their health. The question is, which? It is impossible to tell.
In the case of one couple I met, I decided that the wife who was slender
and rather pale, had been the cause of migration from the East. But
before I left, the stocky, ruddy husband told me, in the most cheerful
manner that he had arrived there twenty years before with "six months to
live." That is the way it is out there. There is no feeling of
depression. There is no air of, "Shh! Don't speak of it!" Tuberculosis
is taken quite as a matter of course, and is spoken of, upon occasion,
with a lightness and freedom which is likely to surprise the visitor.
They even give it what one man designated as a "pet name," calling it
"T. B."
Club life in Colorado Springs is highly developed. The El Paso Club is
not merely a good club for such a small city, but would be a very good
club anywhere. One has only to penetrate as far as the cigar stand to
discover that--for a club may always be known by the cigars it keeps.
So, too, with the Cheyenne Mountain Country Club at Broadmoor, a suburb
of the Springs. It isn't one of those small-town country clubs, in
which, after ringing vainly for the waiter, you go out to the kitchen
and find him for yourself, in his shirtsleeves and minus a collar. Nor,
when he puts in his appearance, is he wearing a spotted alpaca coat that
doesn't fit. Without being in the least pretentious, it is a real
country club, run for men and women who know what a real club is.
When you sit at luncheon at the large round table in the men's cafe you
may find yourself between a famous polo-player from Meadowbrook, and a
bronzed young ranch-owner, who will tell you that cattle rustling still
goes on in his section of the country. The latter you will take for a
perfect product of the West, a "gentleman cowboy," from a novel. But
presently you will learn that he is a member of that almost equally
fictitious thing, an "old New York family," that he has been in the West
but a year or two, and that he was in "Tark's class" at Princeton. So on
around the table. One man has just arrived from Paris; another from
Honolulu, or the Philippines, or China or Japan. And when, as we were
sitting there, a man came in whom I had met in Rome ten years before, I
said to myself: This is not life. It is the beginning of a short story
by some disciple of Mrs. Wharton: A group of cosmopolitans seated
around a table in a club. Casual mention of Bombay, Buda-Pesth and
Singapore. Presently some man will flick his cigarette ash and say, "By
the way, De Courcey, what ever became of the queer little chap we used
to see at the officer's mess in Simla?" Whereupon De Courcey, late of
the Lancers, and second son of Lord Thusandso, will light a fresh Corona
and recount, according to the accepted formula, the story of The Queer
Little Chap.
I could even imagine the illustrations for the story. They would be by
Wenzell, and would show us there, in the club, like a group of sleek
Greek statues, clothed in full afternoon regalia of the most
unbelievable smoothness--looking, in short, not at all like ourselves,
or anybody else.
However, the story of The Queer Little Chap was not told. That is the
trouble with trying to live short stories. You can get them started,
sometimes, but they never work out. If the setting is all right, the
story somehow will not "break," whereas, on the other hand, when the
surroundings are absolutely wrong, when the wrong people are present,
when the conditions are utterly impossible, your short story will break
violently and without warning, and will very likely cover you with
spots. The trouble is that life, in its more fragmentary departments,
lacks what we call "form" and "composition." There is something
amateurish about it. Nine editors out of ten would reject a short story
written by the Hand of Fate, on this ground, and would probably advise
Fate to go and take a course in short-story-writing at some university.
No; Fate has not the short story gift. She writes novels--rather long
and rambling, most of them, like those of De Morgan or Romaine Rolland.
But even her novels are not popular. People say they are too long. They
can't be bothered reading novels which consume a whole lifetime.
Besides, Fate seldom supplies a happy ending, and that's what people
want, now-a-days. So, though Fate's novels are given away, they have no
vogue.
Having somehow digressed from clubs to authorship I may perhaps be
pardoned for wandering still further from my trail here to mention Andy
Adams.
A long time ago, ex-Governor Hunt expressed lack of faith in the future
of Colorado Springs because, at that time, there was not much water to
be found there, and further because the town had "too many writers of
original poetry." So far as I could judge, from a brief visit, things
have changed. There is plenty of water, and I did not meet a single
poet. However, I did meet an author, and he is a real one. Andy Adams'
card proclaims him author, but more than this, his books do, also.
Himself a former cowboy, he writes cowboy stories which prove that
cowboy stories need not be as false, and as maudlinly romantic as most
cowboy stories manage to be. You don't have to know the plains to know
that Mr. Adams' tales are true, any more than you have to know anatomy
to understand that a man can't stand without a backbone. Truth is the
backbone of Mr. Adams' writings, and the body of them has that rare kind
of beauty which may, perhaps, be likened to the body of some
cowboy--some perfect physical specimen from Mr. Adams' own pages.
I have not read all his books, and the only reason why I have not is
that I have not yet had time. But so far as I have read I have not found
one false note in them. I have not come upon a "lone horseman" riding
through the gulch at eventide. I have not encountered the daughter of an
eastern millionaire who has ridden out to see the sunset. Nor have I
stumbled on a romantic meeting or a theatrical rescue.
So far as I know, Mr. Adams' book "The Log of a Cowboy," is preeminently
the classic of the plains. One of its greatest qualities is that of
ceaseless movement. Three thousand head of cattle are driven through
those chapters, from the Mexican frontier to the Canada border, and
those cattle travel with a flow as irresistible as the unrelenting flow
of De Quincey's Tartar tribe.
The author is one of those absolutely basic things, a natural story
teller, and the fine simplicity of his writing springs not from
education ("All the schooling I ever had I picked up at a cross-roads
country school house"), not from an academic knowledge of "literature,"
but from primary qualities in his own nature, and the strong, ingenuous
outlook of his own two eyes.
Mr. Henry Russell Wray tells of a request from eastern publishers for a
brief sketch of Adams' life. He asked Adams to write about two hundred
words about himself, as though dealing with another being. The next day
he received this:
A native of Indiana; went to Texas during his youth; worked over
ten years on cattle ranches and on the trail, rising from common
hand on the latter to a foreman. Quit cattle fifteen years ago,
following business and mining occupations since. When contrasted
with the present generation is just beginning to realize that the
old days were romantic, though did not think so when sitting a
saddle sixteen to twenty-four hours a day in all kinds of weather.
His insight into cattle life was not obtained from the window of a
Pullman car, but close to the soil and from the hurricane deck of a
Texas horse. Even to-day is a better cowman than writer, for he can
yet rope and tie down a steer with any of the boys, though the loop
of his rope may settle on the wrong foot of the rhetoric
occasionally. He is of Irish and Scotch parentage. Forty-three
years of age, six feet in height and weighs 210 pounds.
Though I met Mr. Adams at Colorado Springs, I shall, for obvious
reasons, let my description of him rest at that.
* * * * *
When writing of clubs I should have mentioned the Cooking Club, which is
one of the most unique little clubs of the country. The fifteen members
of this club are the gourmets of Colorado Springs--not merely passive
gourmets who like to have good things set before them, but active ones
who know how to prepare good things as well as eat them. Every little
while, throughout the season, the Cooking Club gives dinners, to which
each member may invite a guest or two. Each takes his turn in acting as
host, his duties upon this occasion being to draw up the menu, supply
materials, appoint members to prepare certain courses, and, wearing the
full regalia of a chef, superintend the preparation of the meal, which
is cooked entirely by men belonging to the club. Wine is not served at
Cooking Club dinners, the official beverage being the club Rum Brew,
which has a considerable local reputation, and is everywhere pronounced
adequate. Not a few of the members learned to cook in the course of
prospecting tours in the mountains, and the Easterner who, with this
fact in mind, attends a Cooking Club dinner is led to revise,
immediately, certain preconceived ideas of the hard life of the
prospector. No man has a hard life who can cook himself such dishes.
Indeed, one is forced to the conclusion that Colorado is full of
undiscovered mines, which would have been uncovered long ago, were it
not that prospectors go up into the mountains for the primary purpose of
cooking themselves the most delightful meals, and that mining is--as
indeed it should be--a mere side issue. For myself, while I have no
taste for the hardy life of the mountaineer, I would gladly become a
prospector, even if it were guaranteed in advance that I should discover
nothing, providing that Eugene P. Shove would go along with me and make
the biscuits.
Aside from its clubs Colorado Springs has all the other things which go
to the making of a pleasant city. The Burns Theater is a model of what a
theater should be. The Antlers Hotel would do credit to the shores of
Lake Lucerne. Where the "antlers" part of it comes in, I am unable to
say, but as nothing else was lacking, from the kitchen, down stairs, to
Pike's Peak looming up in the back yard, I have no complaint to make.
I suppose that every one who has heard of Colorado Springs at all,
associates it with the famous Garden of the Gods.
Before I started on my travels I was aware of the fact that the two
great natural wonders of the East are Niagara Falls and the insular New
Yorker. I knew that the great, gorgeous, glittering galaxy of American
wonders was, however, in the West, but the location and character of
them was somewhat vague in my mind. I knew, of course, that Pike's Peak
was a large mountain. I knew that the giant redwoods were in California.
But for the rest, I had the Grand Canyon, the Royal Gorge, and the Garden
of the Gods associated in my mind together as rival attractions. I do
not know why this was so, excepting that I had been living on Manhattan
Island, where information is notoriously scarce.
Now, though I saw the Royal Gorge, though I rode through it in the cab
of a locomotive, with my hair standing on end, and though I found it "as
advertised," I have no idea of trying to describe it, more than to say
that it is a great cleft in the pink rocks through which run a river and
a railroad, and that how the latter managed to keep out of the former
was a constant source of wonder to me.
As for the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, it affects those who behold it
with a kind of literary asthma. They desire to describe it; some try,
passionately; but they only wheeze and look as though they might
explode. Since it is generally admitted that no one who has seen it can
describe it, the task would manifestly devolve upon some one who has not
seen it, and that requirement is filled by me. I have not seen it. I am
not impressed by it at all. I am able to speak of it with coherence and
restraint. But even that I shall not do.
With the Garden of the Gods it is different. The place irritated me. For
if ever any spot was outrageously overnamed, it is that one. As a little
park in the Catskills it might be all well enough, but as a natural
wonder in the Rocky Mountains, with Pike's Peak hanging overhead, it is
a pale pink joke. If I had my way I should take its wonder-name away
from it, for the name is too fine to waste, and a thousand spots in
Colorado are more worthy of it.
The entrance to the place, between two tall, rose-colored sandstone
rocks may, perhaps, be called imposing; the rest of it might better be
described as imposition. Guides will take you through, and they will do
their utmost, as guides always do, to make you imagine that you are
really seeing something. They will point out inane formations in the
sandstone rock, and will attempt to make you see that these are
"pictures." They will show you the Kissing Camels, the Bear and Seal,
the Buffalo, the Bride and Groom, the Preacher, the Scotsman, Punch and
Judy, the Washerwoman, and other rock forms, sculptured by Nature into
shapes more or less suggesting the various objects mentioned. But what
if they do? To look at such accidentals is a pastime about as
intelligent as looking for pictures in the moon, or in the patterns of
the paper on your wall. As nearly as Nature can be altogether silly she
has been silly here, and I think that only silly people will succeed in
finding fascination in the place--the more so since Colorado Springs is
a prohibition town.
The story of prohibition there is curious. In 1870, N. C. Meeker,
Agricultural Editor of the New York "Tribune," under Horace Greeley,
started a colony in Colorado, bringing a number of settlers from the
East, and naming the place Greeley. With a view to eliminating the
roughness characteristic of frontier towns in those days, Mr. Meeker
made Greeley a prohibition colony.
When, a year after, General William J. Palmer and his associates started
to build the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad from Denver to Colorado
Springs, a land company was formed, subsidiary to the railway project,
and desert property was purchased on the present site of the Springs.
The town was then laid out and the land retailed to individuals of "good
moral character and strict, temperate habits."
In each deed given by the land company there was incorporated an
anti-liquor clause, whereby, in the event of intoxicating liquors being
"manufactured, sold or otherwise disposed of in any place of public
resort on the premises," the deed should become void and the property
revert to the company. Shortly after the formation of the colony the
validity of this clause was tested. The suit was finally carried to the
United States Supreme Court, where the rights of the company, under the
prohibition clause, were upheld.
General Palmer, later, in discussing the history of Colorado Springs,
explained that the prohibitory clause was not inserted in the deeds for
moral reasons, but that "the aim was intensely practical--to create a
habitable and successful town."
The General and his associates had had ample experience of new western
railroad towns, and wished to eliminate the disagreeable features of
such towns from Colorado Springs. Even then, though the prohibition
movement had not been fairly launched in this country these practical
men recognize the fact that Meeker had recognized; namely that with
saloons, dance halls and gambling places, gunfighting and lynchings went
hand in hand.
It is recorded that the restriction seemed to work against the town at
first, but, on the other hand, such growth as came was substantial, and
Colorado Springs attracted a better class of settlers than the wide open
towns nearby. The wisdom of this arrangement is amply proven, to-day,
by a comparison of Colorado Springs with the neighboring town of
Colorado City, which has not had prohibition.
Even before Colorado Springs existed, General Palmer had fallen in love
with the place and determined that he would some day have a home at the
foot of the mountains in that neighborhood. In the early seventies he
purchased a superb canyon a few miles west of the city, and the Tudor
Castle which he built there, and which he named Glen Eyrie, because of
the eagles' nests on the walls of his canyon, remains to-day one of the
most remarkable houses on this continent.
Every detail of the house as it stands, and every item in the history of
its construction expresses the force and originality which were such
strong attributes of its late proprietor.
The General was an engineer. In the Civil War he was colonel of the 15th
Pennsylvania Cavalry, and was breveted a general. After the war he went
into the West and became a railroad builder. Evidently he was one of
those men, typical of his time, who seem to have had a craving to
condense into one lifetime the experiences and achievements of several.
He was, so to speak, his own ancestor and his own descendant; there
were, in effect, three generations of him: soldier, railroad builder,
and landed baron. In his castle at Glen Eyrie one senses very strongly
this baronial quality. Clearly the General could not be content with a
mere modern house. He wanted a castle, and above all, an old castle.
And, as Colorado is peculiarly free of old castles, he had to build one
for himself. That is what he did, and the superb initiative of the man
is again reflected in the means he used. The house must be of old
lichen-covered stone, but, being already past middle age, the General
could not wait on Nature. Therefore he caused the whole region to be
scoured for flat, weathered stones which could be cut for his purpose.
These he transported to his glen, where they were carefully cut and set
in place, so that the moment the new wall was up it was an old wall.
Finding the flat stones was easy, however, compared with finding those
presenting a natural right angle, for the corners of the house.
Nevertheless, all were ultimately discovered and laid, and the desired
result was attained. After the house was done the General thought the
roof lacked just the proper note of color, so he caused it to be torn
off, and replaced with tiles from an old church in England.
Perhaps the most splendid thing about the place is an enormous hall,
paneled in oak, with a gallery and a beamed barrel ceiling, but there
are other features which make the house unusual. On the roof is a great
Krupp bell, which can be heard for miles, and which was used to call the
General's guests home for meals. There is a power plant, a swimming
pool, a complicated device for recording meteorological conditions in
the mountains. And of course there are fireplaces in which great logs
were burned; yet there are no chimneys on the house. The General did
not want chimneys issuing smoke into his canyon, so he simply did not
have them. Instead, he constructed a tunnel which runs up the
mountainside behind the house and takes care of the smoke, emitting it
at an unseen point, far above.
Meanwhile the General played Santa Claus to Colorado Springs, giving her
parks and boulevards. One day, while riding on his place, he was thrown
from his horse and a vertebra was fractured, with the result that he was
permanently prostrated. After that he lay for some time like a wounded
eagle in his eyrie, his mind as active as ever. He was still living in
1907, when the time for the annual reunion of his old regiment came
around. Unable to go East, he invited the remaining veterans to come to
him by special train, as his guests. So they came--the remnants of that
old cavalry regiment, and passed in review, for the last time, before
their Colonel, lying helpless with a broken neck.
[Illustration: On the road to Cripple Creek--We were always turning,
always turning upward]
In its mountain setting, with the pink sandstone cliffs rising abruptly
behind it, this castle of the General's is one of the most dramatic
homes I have ever seen. There is a superb austerity about it, which
makes it very different from the large homes of Broadmoor, at the other
side of Colorado Springs. As I have already mentioned, one of these is a
replica of the Grand Trianon; others are Elizabethan and Tudor, and many
of them are very fine, but the house of houses at Colorado Springs is
"El Pomar," the residence of the late Ashton H. Potter. I do not know a
house in the United States which fits its setting better than this
one, or which is a more perfect thing from every point of view. It is a
one-story building of Spanish architecture--a style which, to my mind,
fits better than any other, the sort of landscape in which plains and
mountains meet. Houses as elaborate as the Grand Trianon, always seem to
me to lend themselves best to a rather formal, park-like country which
is flat, or nearly so; while Elizabethan and adapted Tudor houses of the
kind one sees at Broadmoor, seem to cry out for English lawns, and great
lush-growing trees to soften the hard lines of roof and gable. Such
houses may be set in rolling country with good effect, but in the face
of the vast mountain range which dominates this neighborhood, the most
elaborate architecture is so completely dwarfed as to seem almost
ridiculous. Architecture cannot compete with the Rocky Mountains; the
best thing it can do is to submit to them: to blend itself into the
picture as unostentatiously as possible. And that is what "El Pomar"
does.