"The houses are built of wood, stone, and brick, put together in all styles, varieties, and combinations of architecture, there are hardly two houses alike in the city, and with combinations of colours as various. Everywhere are well kept gardens and beautiful lawns, for the people like pleasant and large yards as well as wide streets and walks. Each householder takes pride in keeping up his place, even the plainest, and it is a rare thing to find a shabby house and yard. More than half of the dwellings are cottages, but there are many large and handsome houses, notably in the north part of the city, which has been built up rapidly within the last two years. There are several elegant stone residences costing from twenty to forty thousands dollars.
"The public buildings are remarkably fine for so young and small a city. The new hotel, The Antlers, the El Paso Club building, the High School building and Colorado College are built of a fine, beautifully pink-tinted stone taken from the Manitou quarries. The City Hall and business blocks are substantial structures, and the Opera House a fine brick building, is a gem inside, perfect in its arrangements, and fitted and furnished with exquisite taste."
The above description is accurate enough, but it is not right to our ideas to speak of Colorado Springs as a "city." It is only a decent-sized, picturesque town. But the Americans name even five or six houses cities, e.g. the City of Lancaster, in the Antelope Valley, which consisted of an hotel, a rail station, and two or three shops! The Antlers Hotel, alluded to, seemed to me, while I was there, to be a very perfect one.
Doctor Solly, on his part, thus describes this charming town and health resort.
"Colorado Springs is situated upon a plateau 6023 feet above sea-level, latitude 39°, longitude 105°. It is about five miles from the foothills in which the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains terminates and from which the great plains stretch 800 miles east to the Missouri river, south to the Gulf of Mexico, and north to the Black Hills.
"Colorado Springs cannot strictly be called a mountain health-resort, for it is actually situated upon the first plateau of the great plains, but is surrounded on three sides by a semi-circle of hills. Immediately to the west is the great mountain of Pike's Peak, 8000 feet above it and to the summit on an air-line ten miles distant from this the shoulders spread, to the south-west, terminating abruptly in a much smaller but very picturesque mountain named Chiann, while to the north they merge into a spur called the Divide, which melts away eastward into the rolling prairie, first throwing off, some four miles to the east, another spur, this breaking into the irregular shapes of bluffs curves towards the south, extending the shelter that the mountains on the west afford sufficiently to break the force of wind from the north-east, and leaving the plateau open to the plains in its southern and south-easterly aspects.
"The barriers from the wind and weather that this semi-circle just described affords, being an average distance of four miles from the edge of the plateau upon which the town is spread, do not detract from its openness or free exposure to the sun. The Peak lying to the west robs it of the direct effect of the last beams in setting but gives a longer twilight than is usual on this continent. The value of this semi-circle as a protection from storms is especially in the attraction it affords to the clouds that form upon the Peak, drawing the storms along its ridges to the north-east on one side or the south-west on the other, and thus frequently leaving the plateau free from the rain or snow that forms upon the mountains."
Again he thus remarks on the soil, the drainage, and the water-supply, all of them so important in a sanitary point of view.
"There is a top soil of about two feet, below which sand and gravel are found to an average depth of sixty feet, when a clay bed is struck which follows the slope of the surface and the fall of the water-shed to the south. The soil, therefore, is naturally absolutely dry beyond what little moisture the top soil can hold to feed the grass, and with as perfect drainage as could be devised.