The Railway That General Palmer Built to Sell Lots

Before there was a road to the summit of Pikes Peak, before there was a cog railway, there was Katharine Lee Bates on a mule. By the early eighteen nineties that was no longer necessary.

General William Jackson Palmer founded Colorado Springs in eighteen seventy-one. He was not primarily a civic idealist; he was a railroad developer who had built the Kansas Pacific line and understood exactly what a scenic mountain backdrop could do for real estate prices. Colorado Springs was a product, and Pikes Peak was its marquee feature.

The Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway opened in eighteen ninety-one. The primary purpose was not scenic appreciation. It was to make the summit accessible enough to become a tourist magnet, and a tourist magnet compelling enough to sell Colorado Springs lots to people who had read about Pikes Peak in eastern newspapers and wanted to live within sight of it. The cog railway was real-estate infrastructure disguised as transportation.

Spencer Penrose, who later built the Broadmoor Hotel south of Colorado Springs, added the automobile road, the Pikes Peak Highway, in nineteen fifteen. The same commercial logic applied: make the summit reachable, make it famous, sell the area around it.

The mountain does not care about any of this. It was there before General Palmer. It was there before the gold rush that made Colorado a territory. The Ute people had names for it. Katharine Lee Bates reached the top the slow way, wrote the poem that became the closest thing America has to an alternative national anthem, and left. The real estate developers followed her.