O'er the Cripple Creek Short Line."
COLORADO SPRINGS AND TUNNEL NO. 6, CRIPPLE CREEK SHORT LINE
Ellis Meredith has often pictured in song the charm and romance of Colorado with the vividness and power that characterize her poems which are essentially those of insight and imagination; but in the opinion of many of her admirers she has hardly laid at the shrine of the muses any more felicitous votive offering than this little impromptu.
A summer in Colorado Springs is one that is set in the heart of fascinating attractions. Nor is the Pike's Peak region a summer land alone, for the autumn is even more beautiful, and the winters are all crystal and sunshine and full of exquisite exhilaration and delight in mountain regions that take on new forms of interest. Colorado Springs is not merely—nor even mostly—an excursion city for pleasure-seekers; it is a city of permanent homes, whose residential advantages attract and create its phenomenal growth.
To open one's eyes on the purple line of the Rocky Mountains, with Pike's Peak towering into the sky, in a luminous crystal air that makes even existence a delight, is an alluring experience. To look over the beautiful city of Colorado Springs, with its broad streets and boulevards, and lines of trees on either side; its electric lights, electric cars, well-built brick blocks, churches, schools, and free public library; its interesting and enterprising journalism; to come in contact with the intelligence and refinement of the people,—is to realize that this is no provincial Western town, but instead, a gay and fashionable city, with the aspect of a summer watering place. Manitou, which lies six miles away at the very base of Pike's Peak, and Colorado Springs are connected by electric cars running along the mountain line, and there is a great social interchange. It is simply a whirl of social life in the late summer, and the rapidity with which the guest is expected to flit from one garden party, and tea, and reception to another, within a given time, reminds him of a London season. In the morning every fashionable woman drives to Prospect Lake, and from her bathing in its blue waters to the informal "hop" at night, she is on a perpetual round of gayety if she so desire.
The wide range and freedom of life in Colorado Springs is equally enjoyable. The artist, the thinker, the writer, finds an ideal environment in which to pursue his work. This beautiful residence city, founded by General Palmer in 1871, has now a population of some thirty thousand, and although lying at the foot of Pike's Peak, it is yet on an elevation of six thousand feet above the level of the sea. Adjoining Colorado Springs is Colorado City, a manufacturing town of five thousand inhabitants, and Manitou, the little town at the immediate base of Pike's Peak, with some two thousand residents, to which, in the summer, is added an equal number of visitors, who bestow themselves in the attractive hotels and boarding-houses or who occupy cottages or camps in the foothills. Colorado Springs was founded in a wise and beneficent spirit. Every deed in the town contains a clause prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors, and by the terms of the contract any violation of this agreement renders the deed null and void and the property reverts to the city. Education is made compulsory, and on this basis of temperance, education, and morality the town is founded. It is laid out with generous ideas and with unfailing allegiance to municipal ideals of taste. The avenues are one hundred and forty feet wide and the streets are all one hundred feet wide. Lying midway between Denver and Pueblo, the two largest cities of the state, Colorado Springs is within two hours of the former and one hour of the latter.
Colorado College, a co-educational institution, is largely endowed, and it has from eight to nine hundred students. Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, D.D., of Boston, the president of the Unitarian Association, was invited to deliver the Commencement Address at this college in 1905, and on this occasion Dr. Eliot said:
"Nothing can surpass the academic dignity of a commencement at a Western State University. The perfection of the discipline would make our elegant, but often distressed, 'master of ceremonies' at Harvard green with envy. At our Eastern Colleges there are still individual idiosyncrasies and perverse prejudices and traditions of simpler days to be considered. There are some old-fashioned members of the faculty who just won't wear the academic gown or the appropriately colored hood, and there are always some reckless seniors who will wear tan shoes or a straw hat. Not so in Kansas and Colorado, in Iowa and Nebraska. There every professor and every senior wears his uniform as if he were used to it; each one knows his place and his part and performs it impressively. The academic procession, headed by the regents in their gowns and followed by the members of the various faculties with their characteristic hoods and stripes, and by the senior classes of the college and the various professional schools, is perfect in its orderly procedure, and the commencement exercises themselves are carried through with a solemnity which is sometimes awesome. I caught myself almost wishing that some senior would forget to take off his Oxford cap at the proper time or trip on his gown as he came up the steps of the platform to get his sheepskin, but no such accident marred the impressiveness of the occasion."
Dr. Eliot playfully touches a fact in the social as well as in the academic life of the West in these remarks. The informalities so frequently experienced in recognized social life in the Eastern cities are seldom encountered in the corresponding circles of life in the West, all observance of times and seasons, as calling hours, ceremonial invitations, and driving being quite strictly relegated to their true place in the annals of etiquette. In his Commencement address before Colorado College in 1905 Dr. Eliot said, regarding the several educational schools of Colorado: