Manitou Springs Overview: The Town Built on Sacred Water
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
You are standing at the foot of Pikes Peak, in one of the most peculiar and layered little towns in Colorado. Manitou Springs sits in a narrow canyon where several natural mineral springs bubble up from the ground, naturally carbonated, fizzing on their own without anyone adding a thing. For thousands of years, that fizzing water drew people here.
The Ute, the Cheyenne, and the Arapaho all considered these springs sacred, the very breath of the Great Spirit they called Manitou. This was neutral ground, a place where nations that might otherwise be at war could drink from the same waters in peace. The name itself comes from that spirit.
When two railroad men, General William Jackson Palmer and Doctor William Bell, planned this town in eighteen seventy-two, they first meant to call it La Font. A business associate named William Blackmore suggested Manitou instead, borrowing the word, so the story goes, from Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha. Palmer and Bell were not building an ordinary town.
They were building a health resort, a spa in the Rocky Mountains, and they advertised the dry air, the sunshine, and above all the mineral waters as a cure for the sick. Invalids came in large numbers, many of them seeking relief from tuberculosis, chasing the cure in the thin mountain air. Grand hotels rose along the main street.
A cog railway was bored straight up the side of Pikes Peak. A castle went up on the hillside. Cliff dwellings were reassembled stone by stone.
Over the decades the town added a penny arcade, a coffin race, and a reputation for the strange and the artistic that it has never lost. Today you can still walk down Manitou Avenue and drink from the mineral fountains, the same effervescent water that made this a destination before Colorado was even a state. Every spring here has a name and a flavor.
Every building has a story. And nearly all of them trace back to that first improbable idea, that water bubbling out of the rock could build a whole town.
