34 GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 
Below Pikeview the valley is cut in soft shale (the Pierre) and for 
that reason it is broad and shallow, and the mountiins rise majes- 
tically a short distance to the west. Colorado 
Colorado Springs. Springs is at the point where Monument Creek joins 
pei a 5 rs: 05. Fountain Creek, or Fontaine qui Bouille (bubbling 
Heh ver %5 nities fountain), as it was first named by the French 
explorers, and the railroad runs directly down the 
valley to that city. Colorado Springs is the most noted health resort 
in Colorado and, indeed, in the entire Rocky Mountain region. It 
was organized by Gen. William J. Palmer as a model city on July 
31, 1871, the same year that the first railroad—the Denver & Rio 
Grande, then a narrow-gage line—was built into the valley. It has 
far outgrown the ideas of its founder, however, and has become the 
great tourist center of the mountain region as well as an attractive 
residence city, a railroad point of considerable importance, and the 
site of Colorado College. 
The name Colorado | Springs is somewhat of a misnomer, for there 
are no large springs in the city, but it is closely connected by steam — 
railway and by trolley with Manitou, which has springs of different — 
kinds that have a world-wide reputation. Despite its clean, wide 
streets and its wealth of green lawns and shrubs and trees Colorado 
Springs offers little of special interest to the tourist, but it is a stop- 
ping place from which other and more interesting localities may be 
visited and a gateway to the attractive features of the mountains. 
It is built on the edge of the plains, which sweep away eastward 
farther than the eye can see. Few travelers who visit Colorado 
Springs think of the plains as worthy of their attention or as having 
any beauty that is at all comparable with the beauty of the moun- 
tains, but Helen Hunt Jackson, who is buried here in Evergreen 
Cemetery, saw beauty in all the latidacapes: and she likens the plains 
about Colorado Springs to the wide expanse of the sea, ever chang- 
ing, yet always the same. 
Between it [Colorado Springs] and the morning sun and between it and the 
far southern horizon stretch plains that have all the beauty of the sea added 
to the beauty of the plains. Like the sea they are ever changing in color, and 
seem illimitable in distance. But they are full of tender undulations and 
curves, which never vary except by light and shade. They are threaded here 
of cottonwood trees, dark green in summer, and in winter of a soft, clear cot 
more beautiful still They are broken here and there by sudden resesa of 
lands, sometimes abrupt, sharp-sided, and rocky, looking like huge 
lines of fortifications; sometimes soft, moundlike, and imperceptibly wanda 
like a second narrow tier of plain overlying the first. 
The continuation of the description of the country along the main © 
line of the railroad will be found on page 53 
