Hotel Colorado: The White House of the Rockies

Glenwood Springs was a place people came to cure themselves. The Ute people had known about Yampah, the great hot springs at the confluence of the Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers, for centuries. They called the springs Big Medicine. Anglo settlers arrived in the early eighteen eighties, and within a few years a silver baron named Walter Devereux had bought the land, built the world's largest outdoor mineral hot springs pool, and decided that what the canyon needed was a hotel worthy of European ambitions.

Construction of Hotel Colorado began in eighteen ninety-one. The architect drew from the Villa de Medici in Rome. The building that opened in June of eighteen ninety-three cost eight hundred fifty thousand dollars to build and was described in newspapers of the time as the finest resort hotel between the Great Lakes and the Pacific. It had an indoor waterfall. It had gas lighting, electric bells, and a staff trained to the standards of the grand European resort tradition. The timing was nearly catastrophic: the national silver crash of eighteen ninety-three happened the same year it opened.

The hotel survived. Presidents helped. In the summer of nineteen oh five, Theodore Roosevelt checked in for three weeks while on a hunting expedition in the surrounding mountains, and the Hotel Colorado became the temporary White House for the duration of his stay. Roosevelt loved it and returned nearly every year afterward.

The teddy bear origin story attaches itself here. When Roosevelt returned empty-handed from one hunting trip, hotel maids reportedly sewed him a stuffed bear from scrap fabric. Whether that bear was actually the first teddy bear is disputed by the toymakers of Brooklyn, who have their own claim. The hotel leans into it anyway.

William Howard Taft stayed here. The Unsinkable Molly Brown stayed here. The building still stands on the same spot on Eighth Street, still taking guests, the stone facade unchanged since eighteen ninety-three.