The Lungers: Colorado Springs and the Tuberculosis Migration

By the eighteen eighties, Colorado Springs had a problem that was also its entire reason for existing. A large share of the population was sick. Not with something contagious they had caught in Colorado, but with tuberculosis they had arrived carrying, because the city's founders had spent a decade advertising the mountain air as a cure.

The pitch was not fraudulent, exactly. In the decades before antibiotics existed, before anyone understood that tuberculosis was bacterial, dry high-altitude air genuinely slowed the disease's progression. Physicians sent patients west as a last resort, and Colorado Springs, with its mile-high elevation and three hundred days of sunshine per year, became the destination.

Boosters billed it as a national health resort. Patients of every income level arrived. Wealthy ones checked into hotels with long porches designed for sun treatment.

Poorer ones lived in peculiar small huts invented by a local doctor named Charles Fox Gardiner, small canvas-and-wood shelters built for fresh air. Some of these patients came for a season and left cured or dead. Others never left.

They bought land, built houses, donated money, and became the city. The men and women who arrived as invalids and stayed to found businesses, fund institutions, and endow the schools included a significant portion of Colorado Springs' early philanthropic class. The tuberculosis economy shaped the city's character as much as Palmer's railroad did, perhaps more.

Effective drug treatment emerged after World War Two, and the sanatoriums closed in the years that followed. But the city those migrants built remained. Colorado Springs grew into a military and aerospace hub on the bones of what had once been, essentially, a national refuge for the very ill.