Pikes Peak inspired New England poet's ode to beautiful America

By Dick Foster

America the Beautiful (first verse)
By Katharine Lee Bates

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

The Wellesley College English professor had traveled throughout Europe, but it was her brief wagon trip to the top of Pikes Peak in 1893 that inspired one of America's most enduring anthems, America, the Beautiful.

Katharine Lee Bates described her ride to the top of the mountain and the view from its summit that July 22 as the ``most glorious scenery I ever beheld, and I had seen the Alps and the Pyrenees.''

For the 33-year-old Massachusetts native, the journey up Pikes Peak was the climactic moment in a summer of travels and experiences that touched her poet's soul.

Bates had been invited to teach a three-week summer session at Colorado College. She had traveled abroad but had never seen her own United States west of Philadelphia, so the summer trip was an opportunity she embraced.

A railroad journey across the heartland, through the sea of Kansas wheat on the Fourth of July, brought her to the rising Rockies on the Western horizon.

The vastness, energy and beauty that she witnessed left the writer in her groping for words, as Bates herself recalled.

``It was with this quickened and deepened sense of America that we went on, my New England eyes delighting in the wind-waved gold of the vast wheat fields,'' she wrote. ``But the sublimity of the Rockies smote my pencil with despair.''

Bates arrived in a Colorado Springs bustling with excitement. Seven years earlier, in 1886, a rancher named Bobby Womack had discovered gold in Cripple Creek, on the back side of Pikes Peak.

Colorado Springs, dubbed Little London by its founder, William Jackson Palmer, had been transformed from a genteel vacation resort for wealthy Easterners to a teeming trail head for fortune hunters.

Between her lectures on Chaucer and European poetry that summer, Bates was a dedicated tourist, visiting the scenic canyons west of town and the sandstone formations at Garden of the Gods.

Her own account tells of visits to ``canyons, lakes, glens, bluffs and cascades innumerable, all so marvelous that our stock of exclamations gave out.''

A wagon road had been built to the top of Pikes Peak in the early 1880s. Visitors boarded horse-drawn carriages at Cascade for the 19-mile ride to the summit. As the summer school closed in July, some of the visiting professors decided to top off their stay with the ride up Pikes Peak.

``My memory of that supreme day of our Colorado sojourn is fairly distinct even across the stretch of 35 crowded years,'' Bates wrote in 1928, a year before her death.

They stopped at the halfway house to swap horses for mules to pull the wagon to the summit.

At the top, Bates recalled, ``we stood at last on that Gate-of-Heaven summit, hallowed by the worship of perished races, and gazed in wordless rapture over the far expanse of mountain ranges and sealike sweep of plain. It was then and there that the opening lines of America the Beautiful sprang into being.''

She returned to her Antlers Hotel room in Colorado Springs that night and wrote the now cherished anthem.

Bates put the poem away when she returned to Wellesley, perhaps because of her disappointment in it. Her diary carried an entry on her summer's writing: ``Consider my verses. Disheartening.''

Two years later, she published the poem in a religious magazine. It drew immediate acclaim for its celebration of America's beauty and spirit. Requests came from around the country for copies and permission to use it.

Bates was not a musician, so there at first was no music for the work. At least 60 compositions were used over the years.

Popular taste leaned toward an 1882 composition called Materna that Samuel A. Ward, a New Jersey musician, had composed for a 17th-century poem of the same meter that began, ``O Mother Dear, Jerusalem, when shall I come to thee?''

The National Federation of Music Clubs thought this music too somber for Bates' majestic verses and in 1928 called for a national contest to write appropriate music for the verses.

The five-month contest drew nearly 1,000 entries, but the federation announced April 21, 1929, that it ``failed to produce a melody of sufficient merit to carry the famous poem of Katharine Lee Bates.''

Ward's music has been used ever since.

Colorado Springs itself has not exploited its connection to Bates or the song over the decades. Aside from a public school named after her and a small marker in the Colorado College chapel, there are no parks, statues or memorials.

``When I tell people we're where America, the Beautiful was written, they say, `You're kidding,' '' said Terry Sullivan, director of the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Mayor Mary Lou Makepeace said she doesn't know why the city hasn't done more to recognize Bates.

``Katharine Lee Bates is among the best-known women in our history, and it's about time that she had more recognition,'' she said

In 1993, civic leaders organized a centennial commemoration, and local businessman Costas Rombocos donated a monument with Bates' verses that was placed atop Pikes Peak.

Today, more than 500,000 visitors a year gaze from the summit over the same timeless expanse of mountains and plains that inspired Bates more than a century ago.

The daughter of a Congregationalist minister, Bates never married. From her childhood, her life seemed entwined with Wellesley College in her hometown, as a student and teacher.

She was an imaginative, adventurous girl who loved books and the outdoors. She once told a friend she thought men had the better jobs because they could work outside.

Bates wrote 22 books of poetry, literary history and English, but little of her work is now remembered, except those four verses from her only visit to Colorado.

``If I could write a poem people would remember after I'm dead,'' she once told childhood friend Emily Norcross, ``I would consider my life had been worth living.''

June 15, 1999

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