The Song Katharine Lee Bates Wrote for Someone Else

In the summer of eighteen ninety-three, Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, rode a mule to the top of Pikes Peak. There was no paved road, no cog railway. The ascent took hours. She was not a young woman accustomed to physical hardship, and the climb was by her own account difficult.

She had crossed the Great Plains by train before reaching Colorado Springs. The high summer wheat fields, the vast open sky, the amber light over an endless flat horizon: that is what stayed with her. At the summit, fourteen thousand feet above sea level, she sat down and wrote notes in a small book. She wrote about the spacious skies and the amber waves of grain. She was writing about Kansas, not Colorado. The mountain gave her the height to see what she had already seen.

The poem she assembled from those notes, set to a tune already circulating as a hymn, became what many Americans sing in place of the national anthem. Its opening images are of the Great Plains.

What is equally documented, and equally suppressed in the standard telling, is the life Bates shared with her Wellesley colleague Katharine Coman. They lived together for twenty-five years in what the era called a Boston marriage, a term for partnerships between women that required no further explanation at the time. Bates called Coman the chief joy of her life. Coman died in nineteen fifteen. Seven years later, Bates published a book of poems titled Yellow Clover, a Book of Remembrance. The scholarship on those poems is not ambiguous about what the relationship was.

The song that stands as an alternative national anthem was written by a woman who loved another woman, on a mountain she reached by mule, about plains she had crossed by train.