The glamour of romance can never fade from Colorado, whose entire history is one of heroic deeds and splendid energy; but the primitive stage of the state is already left far behind with the nineteenth century. In its intellectual and scientific development the years of the twentieth century have almost exceeded its twenty-four years of life as a state in the nineteenth. The tide of immigration still continues, but from being the objective point of mining activities where fortune hunters rushed to find a royal road to riches, it is now a state of agriculture and of commerce. Social conditions are thus altered; and though some of these conditions are those of mining regions, as in the Cripple Creek district, they have altered from the typical Bret Harte mining-camp life to those of orderly progress,—to the life dominated by twentieth-century ideals of humanity; the life whose framework is seen in public-school systems, in religious observance, in the liberal reading of periodical and other literature, and in the maintenance of public libraries as a necessity in every community.
The dawn of literary and artistic development in Colorado is very evident,—a dawn that is already of such radiant promise as to forecast the day when this state shall contribute to our greatest national literature. A large number of individual writers could already be named whose work in books, magazine articles, and excellent journalism might well be held as typical of the best culture of the entire country. The first wild turmoil of a new and richly varied state has given way to a prosperous, progressive commonwealth. Material progress must still always precede the higher growth, yet the air is vital with ideas, and the vision of Colorado is always toward the stars. The beauty and majesty of the environment cannot but react upon the people. The growth of women's clubs has been one steady factor of progress, with most favorable effect on all the general life of intellectual and moral advancement. The public libraries in every centre establish and develop the reading habit. While a love for beauty is an element in human life, the influence of the transcendent majesty and incomparable sublimity of the Colorado scenery will continue to prove a source of inspiration to the mental and moral life of the people. The changing colors of the mountains are a constant delight. Colorado offers a perpetual feast of beauty. Her resources are infinite. Colorado combines all the exaltation of the untried with an abundance of the conveniences and luxuries of the older civilization; and of this Centennial State it is difficult to record facts and statistics that do not seem to suggest the tales of a thousand nights. With resources and with scenic loveliness which no language could exaggerate, it is still only to those who themselves know and appreciate the grandeur of this state that any interpretation of it will appear as rather within than as at all beyond the limits of the most statistical and demonstrable facts. The East has already outgrown the tradition that the entire trans-Mississippi region is a howling wilderness. Colorado is no longer as vague as is Calcutta to the average mind. Dr. Edward Everett Hale exclaimed that he desired his sons to know that there was something in the world besides Beacon Street, and this ambition has of late years become too prevalent to leave even the extreme East in any absolute and total ignorance of the wonderful West. Still it may be true that the flying visions from Pullman-car windows are marvellously extended and intensified by increasing familiarity with the almost incredibly swift progress of this region.
A typical illustration of the fallibility of human judgment is seen in the attitude taken in 1838 by the great Daniel Webster on the floor of the United States Senate against an appropriation for a post route west of the Missouri River.
"What do we want," said he, "of this vast worthless area,—this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, shifting sands, and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, or these endless mountain ranges, impregnable and covered to their base with eternal snow? What use have we for such a country? Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer Boston than it is to-day."
It is a far cry from this "vast worthless area," as Mr. Webster termed it in 1838, to the grand and richly promising state of to-day, with its splendid young cities where art and science unite with literature and ethics in the rapid development of social progress; with its mountain ranges climbed in palace cars; its electric transit and electric lighting; its vivid and forceful achievements, that even in each decade concentrate the progress of a century, as seen in the past.
It is not a mere vagary, but rather a practical and momentous fact, that Colorado is peculiarly the realm receptive to invisible potencies and mental impressions. Science is now confronted with the question as to whether thought and electricity may be identified as the same force under different degrees of manifestation. "There is an elemental essence—a strange living force—which surrounds us on every side, and which is singularly susceptible to the influence of human thought," says an English scientist, and he continues: "This essence responds with the most wonderful delicacy to the faintest action of our minds or desires; and this being so, it is interesting to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite thought or desire." All the significance of a thousand years may be concentrated in an instant's thought, as all the heat stored up in all the forests of the world is concentrated in a small quantity of radium. Emerson embodies this truth in the stanza:
"His instant thought a poet spoke,
And filled the age his fame;
An inch of ground the lightning strook
But lit the sky with flame."