Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or courier
Things writ in vaster character;
And on his mind at dawn of day
Soft shadows of the evening lay."
In his diary, kept during the march from St. Louis, Major Pike thus pictured his first impressions of Colorado:
"The scene was one of the most sublime and beautiful inland prospects ever presented to man; the great lofty mountains, covered with eternal snow, seemed to surround the luxuriant vale, crowned with perennial flowers, like a terrestrial paradise."
The memory of this hero cannot but invest Colorado Springs with a certain consecration of heroism that becomes, indeed, part of the "omens and signs" that fill the air.
In the early autumn of 1906 Colorado Springs and Manitou celebrated the centenary of the discovery of Pike's Peak with appropriate ceremonies. One of the interesting features was the rendering of an "Ode" by a chorus of one thousand voices, of which the words were written by Charles J. Pike of New York, the well-known sculptor, a great-nephew of General Pike, and for which the music was composed by Rubin Goldmark.
