Popular Culture
Colorado Springs has featured in science fiction beyond the writings of Robert Heinlein. War Games, the popular film from the early nineteen eighties, featured NORAD headquarters in the man-made stone vault inside Cheyenne Mountain, especially the enormous steel blast doors at the entrance. The television series Stargate SG-1, though filmed in the Vancouver, British Columbia area, tells the stories, set in the present day, of a special force based out of the same facility inside Cheyenne Mountain, and many of the characters are, in the series, said to have homes in Colorado Springs.
History
The recent television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman claimed Colorado Springs as its setting, but the city’s early days could scarcely have been more different than the highly fictionalized account in the series. Never a rough frontier town nor even, truly, a mining town, Colorado Springs was, from its founding, a planned community. It was platted and established by General William Jackson Palmer (1836-1909) in 1871, relatively early in his railroad career. He was an incongruous character. A Delaware-born Quaker who abhorred violence and strong drink, he enlisted as a colonel on the Union side in the Civil War when his abolitionist politics outweighed his distaste for warfare. He served as an intelligence officer in the 15th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry. He was captured and spent part of the war as a Confederate prisoner of war. Released in a prisoner exchange, he served throughout the conflict with distinction and was ultimately rewarded with a Congressional Medal of Honor and retired from military service at the rank of Brevet Brigadier General. Early in 1870, he founded the Denver and Rio Grande railroad, with a relatively short line from Denver to Pikes Peak. In the fall of that year, during his honeymoon to the British Isles, he saw a narrow gauge railroad in operation for the first time. In 1871, he introduced narrow gauge rail transit to the American West. This innovation allowed cost effective rail access to the mining communities high in the Colorado mountains and established Colorado Springs as a railroad destination. Among the early visitors were sightseers enchanted with the landscape and tuberculosis patients who were advised by their doctors to seek “the prairie cure” of pure food, sunshine and clean air. The city quickly became a preferred place of residence and leisure travel destination for those lucky few who made millions in mining speculations. This paved the way for the establishment of the now world-famous Broadmoor resort and the Antlers Hotel. Late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, Colorado Springs was a western playground for the wealthy elite. Nicknamed “Newport in the Rockies”, it became a polo-mad gathering place for minor European nobility, presidential families, and captains of Eastern industry, as well as those who struck it rich on gold and silver anywhere from the Bay Area to Virginia City, Nevada, to Colorado’s own mining towns of Cripple Creek, Victor, and Leadville.
The Broadmoor Hotel was originally located beyond the city limits, though it was eventually annexed along with surrounding neighborhoods in the early 1980s. There was good reason for it to begin outside of the city, as the Broadmoor was an Edwardian era casino before it was a hotel, and part of General Palmer’s plans for the city banned gambling establishments and saloons in Colorado Springs. Anyone who wanted to purchase alcohol had to look either to the outlying hotel or to the older and more unruly mining supply town of Colorado City (now the charming historic district know as Old Colorado City) to the west or to the nearby Manitou Springs. The sale and production of alcohol in Colorado Springs was not permitted until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Whether a jibe or a tribute to the city’s dry days and abstemious founder, the Phantom Canyon microbrewery opposite today’s Antlers Hotel features a light beer produced on-site called Queen’s Blonde Ale, named for Palmer’s wife Mary Lincoln “Queen” Mellen Palmer who, as twenty-one year old newlywed, founded the first school in Colorado Springs. Queen Palmer Elementary School also bears her name.