Colorado Springs
The Early Years
It is a city named not because it actually boasts any springs, but because an early 
promoter of the town thought the name had a nice ring to it. The site of the city was selected not for a wealth of amenities, but for a similarly artificial consideration - a great view and its proximity to railroad tracks.
Its founder, William Jackson Palmer, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker, yearned for a "Newport of the Rockies," and others for a "Little London." These visions were in a landscape previously marked by a less-than-genteel scramble for gold.
Later, the great hotelier, Spencer Penrose, furthered the importing of culture and refinement to the area, despite his own indifference to certain areas of the arts.
Seized by the notion that a swatch of prairie below Pikes Peak would make a nice whistle-stop for his railroad, General William Jackson Palmer, a Civil War veteran, bought the land, laid out the streets (wide enough to make a U-turn in his carriage), donated acres for various civic and educational uses, and then promoted his idea with fervor, in his own weekly newspaper, "Out West," which eventually became the daily Colorado Springs Gazette.
The "Newport in the Rockies" notion of a resort town was supplanted by the "Little London" phase in which Colorado Springs became a destination for English immigrants. That phase faded by 1890, but the establishment of culture left its mark.
The city's police department began in 1872 with the single appointment of S.C. Foote as constable. Though Foote left in less than a year, the department's growing list of officers became known as "bobbies" during the next decade, dressing like their English counterparts.
The city's first genuine cultural event was a concert on a snowy night in 1872: Palmer's wife, Queen, was the prima donna, singing a scene from an opera of Verdi and popular ballads of the day. To no one's surprise, she received thunderous applause. Despite Palmer's vision of a cultured city, other more crude entertainments furnished the first residents of the sparsely populated town.
From the night of the concert, however, the city was rarely without the finer arts. The Colorado Springs Opera House began in 1881, opening with a performance of "Camille," closing 25 years later after having been a venue of many of the day's leading lights, including Lon Chaney, born to one of two deaf parents who helped found the Colorado Springs School for the Deaf and Blind.
Not that all of the city's greatest figures shared Palmer's love of the arts: Penrose was said to have snored through an entire performance of Shakespeare's "Richard III," although his wife, Julie, helped found the Colorado Springs Art Society and their home on 30 E. Dale St. became the Fine Arts Center.
Early on, Palmer banned liquor in his city, causing a boom for nearby Colorado City (now the center of the city's West Side). Colorado City harbored the saloons, until it went dry in about 1914 and annexed to Colorado Springs.
Judge Baldwin became famous for ignoring Palmer's ban. He had come to be called a judge because at one point he had judged a sheep contest, and ended his life falling into a well at the present site of the Deaf and Blind School.
And there was the Chicagoan "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, who founded Zoo park near Cheyenne Canyon - a wildlife refuge that included a bourbon-drinking elephant and a roller coaster.
That, too, passed, as did the Broadmoor Casino, founded in 1891 by Count James Pourtales. It burned to the ground in 1897.
Palmer, through it all, seems to have been a man bent on bettering the city's people: He hated profanity of any kind, which caused him to change the name of a rock formation in Garden of the Gods. His name for it was "Seal and Bear," amended from the view suggested by his own publicist: "Seal Making Love to Nun." The publicist was fired.
It was the next publicist, Dr. William A. Bell, who strengthened the "Little London" concept introduced by Charles Kingsley, canon of London's Westminster Abbey. In 1874, Kingsley caught a bad cold in San Francisco and was ordered to Colorado Springs to recuperate. By all reports, Kingsley neither liked nor disliked the town in his short stay, but publicist Bell had no problem pitching the city as a place for a proper Englander to find refuge from drear weather and bad colds.
