By Deborah Frazier
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Throughout western Colorado, thousands of hot springs dribble from small seeps, whisper from hidden pools, mist over rivers and invite the weary, the worn and the infirm.

The springs prompted Colorado's first tourism boom. More than a century later, they still draw thousands.

While Americans' love for skiing, mountain biking, fishing, hiking, camping and simple sightseeing now draws tourists to the Rocky Mountains, many trips are still planned around approximately 30 commercial springs and dozens of pools and ponds tucked away on federal land.

In the first half of the 19th century, explorers, trappers and settlers learned the locations of the thermal wonders from the Utes, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other tribes who revered the steaming pools as sites of physical and spiritual regeneration.

For instance, explorer John Fremont, an adventurer with a soft spot for comfort, stopped at a half-dozen or more springs during his 1840s survey trips.

Three French fur trappers wandering around northwestern Colorado in the 1820s were less informed than the American Indians or Fremont. When they heard short bursts of noise, they concluded a steamboat was near.

Not so, but the naturally heated water they found was welcoming. And the Steamboat Springs name stuck, even after blasting for the railroad in 1908 silenced the chugging spring.

The dreamers and schemers who followed the pioneers had their own view of the springs as "hot water mines."

William Byers, founder and publisher of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, acquired Hot Sulphur Springs in 1864 with dreams of creating an international resort for intellectuals, entrepreneurs and industrialists.

In 1865, Col. Albert Pfeiffer, a scout for Kit Carson, homesteaded near the sulfur-laden thermal features at Pagosa Springs near Durango and became the local Indian agent. Pagosa, in Ute, translates roughly as "stinking."

When the Utes were herded onto reservations in 1881, Pfeiffer claimed they "gave" him the springs, and he developed the area's first resort.

When Steamboat's bursts still sounded in the 1870s, settler Jim Crawford stumbled across Heart Springs. He ran back to his cabin and gathered up his wife and children for the family's first long, hot bath in years.

The next year, he built a bathhouse on the spot and started charging admission, having decided that selling hot soaks paid better than farming.

The springs around the state became hot property throughout the 1870s with miners craving a tonic for sore muscles and cold joints.

In Poncha Springs near Salida, railroad workers and miners built a tent city around the hot pools in the 1860s and defended their claims to hot water with guns against the rightful Ute and Arapaho owners.

After the Jackson Hotel opened at the springs in 1878, the guest book bore the signatures of Billy the Kid in 1881, Susan B. Anthony in 1882, Rudyard Kipling in 1884 and Alexander Graham Bell in 1886.

About the same time, miners in Idaho Springs pushed the Utes and Arapaho out, leaving prospectors to rediscover the actual springs. George Jackson discovered the first gold in Clear Creek and the cluster of springs.

The series of developers who followed used tunnels abandoned by often frustrated gold miners to link the subterranean baths.

Isaac Cooper was perhaps the miner most enraptured with hot springs.

Although the Civil War had stolen his vitality and youth, he toiled in the Leadville mines in the 1870s. He heard tales of springs at the confluence of the Colorado and Crystal rivers.

Although it was deep winter, he made the 60-mile journey over the Continental Divide to Glenwood. He never left, founding the town of Glenwood Springs in 1879.

In those days, before antibiotics and any understanding of pathogens, spring water was credited with healing both the body and the mind. Every spring boasted miracles -- relief from arthritis to schizophrenia and infertility.

Colorado's first recreation boom, the spa era, peaked at the springs.

For instance, when the railroad brought the first transcontinental visitors to Glenwood in 1887, locals set 3,500 bonfires to welcome the town's first load of tourist dollars.

Diamond Jim Brady, Buffalo Bill Cody and Doc Holliday were among the first regulars at the poker table, followed by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft, who mixed their drinks with the mineral-ladden water.

In Steamboat, early tourists brought lemons to Soda Springs to make lemonade. Lithia Spring and others there contained lithium, used today to relieve depression. Troubled by bad lungs? Inhaling deeply at Cave Spring, an enclave of sulphur fumes, was credited with many cures.

Also at the century's start, America's love affair with all things radioactive was in bloom. And Colorado was a major source of radium.

In the spirit of the times, many Colorado hot springs either used radium in their names or claimed special restorative powers based on high levels of radioactivity.

In fact, there's not much radiation at any of the springs.

But until science firmly linked cancer and radiation in the 1970s, the pools in Idaho Springs were known as Radium Hot Springs.

And in the early 1900s, when Dr. Charles Davis of Chicago bought several sets of springs at Waunita near Gunnison, he crusaded against alcohol while advocating radium water.

Spiritualism, another turn-of-the-century trend, brought prescient New Age frolickers to Eldorado Springs near Boulder. There, a natural artesian spring had been a worship site for Indians for hundreds of years.

Although Eldorado's water is only 70 degrees, the spring attracted honeymooners Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower before World War II. In the 1940s, the Glenn Miller Orchestra headlined at the ballroom above the pool.

In many ways, World War II ended the spa resort era.

New highways, car vacations and itchy feet dispatched families farther and wider in search of alpine respites. Pools and motels replaced grand style hotels and bathhouses.

But the springs have a new wave of popularity. Hot Sulphur Springs, the Hooper Pool near Alamosa and Mineral Hot Springs near Salida have been revived. And another half dozen dormant hot springs have potential buyers.

Now, as then, the springs' siren call whispers.

And the aching bones of aging baby boomers, New Age believers in search of natural remedies and a new generation of muscle-sore snowboarders, mountain climbers and rafters are leaving fresh footprints on the paths that lead to hot springs.

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society (303) 866-2305.

Online: InsideDenver.com, keyword "2000."

On TV: Sunday at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: It just may be Denver's oldest logo, but you may not know what it means.

September 28, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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