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 moimtiins rise majes- 

 tically a short distance to the west. Colorado 

 Colorado Springs. Springs is at the point where Monument Creek joins 

 Elevation 5,989 feet. Fountain Creek, or Fontaine qui Bouille (bubbling 

 Dcnve^ 75°miies. 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 jenr that the first railroad — the Denver & Eio 

 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 Avhich 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 landscapes, 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 tlie 

 far soutliern 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 

 and there by narrow creeks whose course is revealed by slender winding lines 

 of Cottonwood trees, dark green in summer, and in winter of a soft, clear gray, 

 more beautiful still. They are broken here and there by sudden rises of table- 

 lands, sometimes abrupt, sharp-sided, and rocky, looking like huge castles or 

 lines of fortifications ; sometimes soft, moundlike, and imperceptibly widening, 

 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. 



