America the Beautiful: Katharine Lee Bates on the Summit
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
In the summer of eighteen ninety-three, a thirty-three-year-old English professor from Wellesley College boarded a train in Massachusetts and headed west to teach at a summer session in Colorado Springs. Katharine Lee Bates had accepted the invitation because she wanted to see the country. She got more than she bargained for.
The journey included a stop in Chicago, where the World's Columbian Exposition was running its gleaming White City of modernist exhibition halls. Then the train moved west across Kansas, through wheat fields stretching to every horizon, the American grain belt in summer. Then the mountains appeared, and Colorado Springs, and the first week of teaching ended, and a group of professors decided to celebrate by going up.
They hired a prairie wagon and a mule team and made the ascent to the summit of Pikes Peak, fourteen thousand one hundred fifteen feet above sea level. At the top, Bates said later, something happened to her. The Great Plains spread eastward for hundreds of miles below her, the purple mountains ran in every direction, and the words of a poem began arriving in her mind.
She wrote them down that evening in her room at the Antlers Hotel on Cascade Avenue. The poem was called simply America when it was first published on July fourth, eighteen ninety-five, in a church periodical called The Congregationalist. It went through two substantial revisions, the last in nineteen thirteen, before it settled into the version that endures.
The melody it is now sung to, composed by Samuel Ward, was not paired with Bates's words until nineteen ten, and the combined title America the Beautiful followed. Bates was a remarkable figure in her own right, a scholar, poet, and lifelong partner of fellow academic Katharine Coman, in a relationship her biographers describe as a Boston marriage. What she saw from the summit of Pikes Peak that August afternoon became the most contested candidate for a national anthem the country never officially adopted.
