by Alice Echols
So how far from the truth did these Colorado marriage announcements stray? Was my grandfather a hotshot lawyer and my grandmother an heiress?
When Walter Davis arrived in the Springs at age twenty-three he carried with him business cards that described him as a lawyer in Greensburg, Indiana. He carried something else as well—two letters of reference. The letter writers, both of them prominent judges, were generous in their praise of him. Yet it was as an “office man”—a stenographer and typist—and not as a lawyer that the judges recommended him. It turns out that Walter Davis had worked as a court reporter, and before that as a barber in his father’s well-appointed tonsorial parlor. It was his father’s tuberculosis that precipitated Davis’s move to Colorado Springs, where the clean, dry mountain air was thought to cure the disease.
Lula Gilham was raised in Greensburg as well, but in a hardscrabble part of town. The daughter of a stonecutter and a dressmaker, she was orphaned at age ten. Over a two-year period, tuberculosis wiped out her family. A drugstore clerk, likely the one who sold her bottles of cough syrup, became her guardian. After living with his family and nearly finishing high school, she got a job as a clerk in a department store before moving to Indianapolis, where she secured work repairing fur coats in a ladies’ tailoring shop. At age eighteen she should have come into a modest inheritance when her guardian gave her some part of the $1,000 insurance payout due her and any money from the sale of her parents’ run-down cabin.
I cannot prove that my grandfather composed these self-serving Colorado marriage announcements, which are among the few scraps in the family archive that chronicle my grandparents’ lives when they were young. I do have the handwritten version of a more restrained marriage announcement that appeared in the Greensburg press, and it was composed on stationery Walter had used in the last job he held in Indiana. How he managed to persuade the Colorado papers to run these stories when wedding announcements were typically two to three sentences long, I don’t know. However, we see in this bit of misrepresentation his determination to use the move west in order to reinvent himself. In this respect he was no different from many other transplants. That said, how many newcomers would go so far as to pass themselves off as members of the moneyed professional class?
Davis family, circa 1888, in a Greensburg, Indiana, photo studio. From left: Lizzie, Ray, Roy, Walter, and Allen. Even at this age, Walter seems tightly wound, perhaps because the staging made baby Roy the main attraction. (Author’s archive)
In this school picture, Lula Gilham is in the back row, second from the right. (Author’s archive)
There is no fathoming Walter Clyde Davis without understanding Colorado Springs. Likewise, it is impossible to make sense of Colorado Springs without situating its story within a larger narrative about the development of the American West, a region that in the aftermath of the Civil War figured prominently in the national imaginary. The West was a place where people like my grandparents came to reinvent themselves. And it was also the place where some believed the nation itself could be reimagined. These were years of promise and peril that pivoted around fundamental questions of freedom, equality, and national identity. Would the Union hold together? How expansively would citizenship be defined, and would it be extended to African Americans, immigrants, and women? What place would Native Americans have in this reconstructing nation? And by 1877, the year of the Great Railroad Strike, there was no avoiding another great divide—labor versus capital. Was it possible to reconcile the country’s republican ideals with the growing industrial working class, much of which labored and lived in deplorable conditions that rivaled those of Europe? Was American exceptionalism sustainable? For many, the West, with its grand, unspoiled vistas, held the promise of renewal and redemption.
Few people invested more hope in the West than the founder of Colorado Springs, William Jackson Palmer, an engineer, a railroad executive, and, by the end of the Civil War, the highest-ranking Quaker officer in either army—a brevetted brigadier general in the Union Army. Like other railroad men, General Palmer saw the development of a transcontinental railroad system as critical to a number of projects—postwar reconstruction, the conquest of native people, the opening of Asian trade, and the expansion of trade relations with northern Mexico. However, what most excited him about the railroad’s development was the role it would surely play in the discovery and exploitation of coal. As secretary-treasurer of the Kansas Pacific Railway, Palmer promised to bring what he called the “star of empire” westward into an area whose coalfields he would make among the most productive in the world.
Even when he was young, Walter Davis radiated attitude in studio portraits. (Author’s archive).
A young Lula Gilham. (Author’s archive)
Palmer was an evangelist for “mineral-intensive industrialization.” Powered by coal, the Mountain West would undergo, he argued, an industrial revolution that would rival that of England. Of course, Colorado was no stranger to mining. The Pikes Peak gold rush (“Pikes Peak or Bust!”) had already played itself out by the end of the Civil War. Ultimately, the gold mines had not produced as much wealth as they had consumed. The prevalence of hucksters had undermined the region’s standing in financial markets. If that wasn’t bad enough, locusts were destroying the crops. In 1869, one on-the-ground observer went so far as to warn that a “premature decrepitude” threatened the region. But at the same time that others were writing the area off, Palmer was envisioning it as an industrial powerhouse whose growth was virtually guaranteed by the apparent inexhaustibility of coal there. He also believed that the region’s rugged and remote terrain would inoculate it against economic competition, which he blamed for many of the country’s problems, particularly its labor woes. If industry were organized paternalistically, he argued, workers would feel as though they were a part of a family rather than at the mercy of some “soulless corporation.”
Palmer did more than daydream about the future of the region. He left the Kansas Pacific and formed a new railroad, the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG), which would run south of Denver. And he set about surveying and buying coal land. Palmer bought thousands of acres of such land in southern Colorado, enough to power the D&RG, and enough to eventually make his Colorado Coal and Iron Company the largest coal mine operator of the Mountain West. Indeed the acrid smell of burning coal was a familiar one to Coloradans in the period between the 1860s and 1910s.
At the same time that Palmer pursued the intensive exploitation of these coal lands, he also yearned to make the area “a home in nature,” one that would bring together the “best features of the Western wildness and European refinement.”1 In all his Colorado dreaming Palmer does not seem to have sensed any contradiction between his advocacy of intensive coal mining and the preservation of the nature he so loved. And yet Palmer knew, especially from having visited British coal mines and some of the industries they powered, that industrialization could damage both workers and the surrounding environment. In personal terms, Palmer would manage to have it both ways. The town he founded, Colorado Springs, would remain a bit of paradise on earth because wherever mining was happening, it was happening on the town’s outskirts, not inside it.2
Palmer decided he had found his home in nature in 1869 when he first came to Monument Park, at the base of Pikes Peak. Besotted with the place, located about seventy miles south of Denver, he rhapsodized to his fiancée that life in this place could not help but be “poetry.” He toyed with the idea of calling it “Bijou” to signify its preciousness. Palmer found its majestic mountain views transformative, and he thought others of his station might feel “elevated by them into a lofty place of thought and purpose.” And yet he wasn’t going to leave this to chance. A place so divine could not be allowed to become like other Western towns with their bawdy amusements—saloons, brothels, and gambling. When he established the Colorado Springs Company in 1871 to promote and sell land there, he stipulated that this was a place for those of “good character and strict temperance h
abits.” He hoped the rich would flock there, as they had to Eastern resorts, but ideals mattered to him.
And yet as Palmer and his associates moved ahead with planning their new community, they were not motivated by idealism alone. It may have been “Bijou,” but that doesn’t mean that Palmer and the rest of the men in his outfit would permit the truth to get in their way when it came to turning a profit. Unable to resist the temptations of hype, they called the new community Colorado Springs despite the fact that the closest spring was a good six miles away, in Manitou. The town’s founders outlawed gambling, but in naming the new development they were betting that the white settlers whom they were trying to lure there would not be too bothered by that sleight of hand.
The Colorado Springs Company moved quickly, buying ten thousand acres of land for a dollar an acre. By the summer of 1871 it had driven the town’s first stake at what would become the intersection of Pikes Peak and Cascade Avenues. Only three months later the D&RG was offering rail service between Colorado Springs and Denver. By the end of 1871, more than 150 structures (many of them portable houses shipped from Chicago) had been erected, and quite a few cottonwood trees had been planted. However, the first visitors were not always enchanted with what they found. It may have been called Colorado Springs, but Marshall Sprague, who wrote a loving history of the town, admits that the town site was “treeless, bleak, brown.”3 Two years later British journalist Isabella Lucy Bird traveled there and pronounced Colorado Springs “a queer, embryo-looking place” whose treelessness appalled her.4
Sales were sluggish at first, but a shrewd advertising campaign in the British press, selling the Springs as an ideal place for everything from cattle and sheep ranching to regaining one’s health, was so successful that the town came to be known as “Little London.”5 Wealthy men from the East who were suffering from “neurasthenia,” a nervous condition associated with exhaustion and linked to the demands of modern American commerce, also arrived. One of the era’s most widely read doctors prescribed that such men head west and engage in physical activity. He was the same doctor who devised the “rest cure” for women stricken with neurasthenia, the “cure” that Charlotte Perkins Gilman exposed in “The Yellow Wall-paper.”6 The opening of sanitariums and hospitals, and the growing reputation of Manitou’s mineral springs—said to cure any number of ailments—brought more and more health seekers to the area. The opening in 1883 of the Antlers Hotel, a luxury hotel with Turkish baths and central heating, further enhanced the Springs as a tourist destination.
Still, Colorado Springs remained a sleepy resort town until 1891, when prospector Robert Womack discovered rich gold-bearing quartz in a cow pasture known as Cripple Creek. Thirty years had passed since the conclusion of Colorado’s gold rush, which had started in 1858. Only twenty miles from Colorado Springs, as the crow flies, the mining district was six miles square. It was located in the crater of an extinct volcano that was filled with great quantities of lava and granite that contained dry quartz filled with pure gold. This was not the sort of “picture rock” that had caught the eye of earlier prospectors, but once the nature of the deposits was understood, gold production in Cripple Creek exploded, from $2 million worth in 1893 to sixty times that amount by 1902.7 Nowhere else in America produced more gold that year than Cripple Creek. During the era of Cripple Creek gold fever, bank deposits in Colorado Springs increased ninefold, and the town’s population tripled. More often than not, the mine owners moved away from the mining district and took up residence in Colorado Springs, often on Wood Avenue, which was soon dubbed “Millionaires’ Row.” At the turn of the century Colorado Springs boasted that it had the greatest number of millionaires per capita anywhere in the United States.
The Antlers hotel and downtown Colorado Springs, circa 1915. In the mid-sixties the Antlers was demolished and rebuilt. It is now a thirteen-story behemoth that from Pikes Peak Avenue obscures the stunning view of Pikes Peak. (Courtesy of the Andrew J. Harlan Photograph Collection, the Pikes Peak Library District, 402-45)
Already a town that leaned in the direction of the leisure class, Colorado Springs was remade by all the gold. As conceived by General Palmer, the Springs was meant to be an ennobling place that would function as a refined retreat from the crassly commercial. But with Cripple Creek, the town embraced the speculative.8 The Colorado Springs Mining Exchange became the financial hub of the town. By 1899 it was handling more than 230 million mining shares valued at over $34 million.9 Some of that mining money found its way into the town’s parks, roads, medical facilities, cultural institutions, and transportation system. Highlights included the elegant opera house, the Antlers Hotel, Colorado College, nearby Monument Valley Park, numerous shops and restaurants (including a vegetarian eatery), three sanitariums, and a state-of-the-art trolley car system that took passengers nearly everywhere, including the recently opened Zoo Park, an amusement park in Cheyenne Creek. As for the Cripple Creek District, its growth was off the charts, although there were plenty of businesses there that General Palmer would have regarded as disreputable. By 1900, its population stood at almost twenty thousand, with nearly sixteen thousand residents employed in the mines.
By the 1910s Colorado Springs was unrecognizable from the days when it was a “dreary stretch of sagebrush and yucca.”10 With its red-light district and industrial sector relegated to adjacent Colorado City, the Springs could be said to be in the West, but not completely of it. In many ways it was, as it advertised, a “Spotless Town,” just as General Palmer had envisioned.11 And of course its surroundings—Pikes Peak, the Garden of the Gods, Manitou Springs—would always make it special. A Western town that in some ways played against type, it prided itself on its sophistication. A “rare combination of climate and culture” was how one piece of boosterism put it in 1917.12 This was something grasped by many “cultured” foreigners, including the Englishman who named the Springs one of the only two civilized places between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (the other was Chicago) because it offered polo, good society, and, on occasion, even decent tea.13 Many residents and visitors would have agreed with a leading city planner who in 1905 claimed that the Springs belonged to a “very small, very highly favored class of city.”14
In 1897 Cripple Creek was a thriving mining town, a far cry from what it became in the mid-twentieth century. In 1952’s The Price of Salt Patricia Highsmith described it as a “tiny disorder of a town.” (Courtesy of the Cripple Creek Photograph Collection, the Pikes Peak Library District, 174-3476)
All the gold money that streamed into Colorado Springs did more than just prettify the place. Some historians have argued that gold helped shift ideas of success in America, following the California gold rush of 1848. “The old American dream, the dream inherited from ten generations of ancestors,” writes H.W. Brands, “was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmers: of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year.” In the wake of the gold rush, Brands argues, tempered expectations were supplanted by a “new dream . . . the dream of instant wealth.”15 Recent work on the great California gold rush complicates Brands’s view. However, I would argue that for the men who became mine owners during the Cripple Creek gold rush, the dream of striking it rich (or richer in the case of those who arrived on the scene already moneyed) was often a powerful lure.
All the millions made off the gold strikes skewed expectations as the town’s leaders and boosters came to expect that the Springs enjoyed a lock on success. Colorado Springs was too rich, and with too beautiful a surrounding area, to fail. Yes, there might be periodic downturns in Cripple Creek mining, but as long as there were gold strikes that resulted in mines like Winfield Scott Stratton’s seemingly inexhaustible Independence Mine, the money spigot would stay firmly in the on position.16
Gold rushes shifted consciousness in another way, too. “Mining set a mood” in the West, as Patricia Limerick has argued. Even after gold m
ining was played out, “the attitude of extractive industry” persisted.17 Frank Norris captured this predatory disposition in his novel The Octopus, which focused on the agricultural entrepreneurs of California. The San Joaquin Valley farmers at the center of his book “worked their ranches as, a quarter of a century before, they had worked their mines . . . To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze it dry, to exhaust it seemed their policy. When, at last, the land, worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then, they would all have made fortunes. They did not care. ‘After us the deluge.’”18
In Colorado Springs nature’s beauty and nature’s bounty were inextricably connected. The inseparability of the land’s beauty and its commercial potential was unintentionally captured by then vice president Theodore Roosevelt who, upon traveling on the old Short Line railroad from Colorado Springs to Cripple Creek, a route of stunning views, reached for a financial term to describe the experience. The trip was so beautiful, he remarked, it “bankrupts the English language!”19 Over the years the specialness of the land underwrote schemes large and small—resorts, hotels, spas, sanitariums, and eventually the military installation cum nuclear bunker known as NORAD, built deep into Cheyenne Mountain.20 One such scheme was the brainchild of a Chicago politician who in 1905 spent $75,000 building a “Coney Island resort” in Ivywild, a neighborhood just south of downtown. With dazzling lights, a roller coaster offering lightning-fast rides, and a small zoo featuring an elephant, a bear, and a “sacred cow” that was said to be from India, the amusement park attracted upward of five thousand people on weekends. Its closure a decade later exemplifies what sometimes happened to those big dreams. Both the zoo’s sacred cow and the bear were purchased, butchered, and sold to the public as meat. In the bear’s case, it was chained outside a popular downtown restaurant for several days as an attraction—a “wild bear,” the management claimed—before being slaughtered and fed to its customers.21
