Review: Profiting from the Peak: Landscape and Liberty in Colorado Springs, by John Harner

Abstract

John Harner’s detailed study of the growth of Colorado Springs connects two stories that are often told separately. The first is the familiar history of William Jackson Palmer’s railroad, tourism, tuberculosis refugees, and Cripple Creek gold that shaped the city’s first seventy years. The second is the development since 1940 of a post-industrial economy based on defense, sports, and conservative Protestantism. The first has been the province of historians, the second more often that of journalists and social commentators. Harner is a geographer who finds essential continuities in both the continuing role of economic boosterism and the ways in which the location itself, epitomized by Pikes Peak, shaped the evolution of the city.The Peak figures in obvious ways as the basis for growing a tourist economy in which everyone with enough money enjoyed mountain views and excursions, but also as the vital source of water in the formative years and the source of gold from its western flank. The aspirational image of a towering mountain helped Colorado Springs win the new Air Force Academy over finalists Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and Alton, Illinois (!). One wonders if the veiled reference in a 1954 Chamber of Commerce brochure was intended—“An ideal location for the United States Air Force Academy, where study reaches its peak due to fine climate and surroundings” (Figure 7.2). Meanwhile, Harmer also traces the economic attraction of clear, dry air from recreational and medical tourism to military training installations to sports headquarters and Olympic training facilities.The other theme is equally interesting. Nineteenth-century urban boosters and twenty-first century economic development professionals are seldom tied up in the same bundle, but Harner’s narrative highlights the similarities between efforts to promote Colorado Springs as a center for curing physical bodies in the sanatorium era and as a center for saving souls through the work of organizations such as Focus on the Family. He argues that the path toward the politically conservative city of recent decades was firmly set by 1900 when a commitment to elite tourism blended with fierce anti-labor ideology after the Cripple Creek strike. Subsequent developments then reinforced each other: full commitment to the military in the 1940s and 1950s, courting of profit-oriented sports bureaucracies, the conservative Christianity that has flourished at the Air Force Academy, the growing importance of military retirees, and the recruitment of evangelical Christian organizations.Harner brings together topics that I have known piecemeal and as components of separate stories and shows me some new connections. The book is richly illustrated with dozens of clearly legible and informative maps, many created or visually annotated by the author, and more dozens of illustrations. Many of the latter are color reproductions taken from tourism brochures in the collection of the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum, which hosts a related online exhibit. Colorado Springs profited from Pikes Peak and this reviewer has profited from Profiting from the Peak.