Poet Katharine Lee Bates spent the summer of 1893 teaching English at the Colorado Summer School at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, on a leave of absence from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. By that time, she was already a published poet and author of works including the novel “Rose and Thorn” and contributions in newspapers such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly and the Boston Evening Transcript.
This story is part of Colorado at 150. Each Fifty for 150 story focuses on an event that helped define Colorado over 150 years of statehood. Newsline is publishing one Fifty for 150 story every weekday in reverse chronological order until the sesquicentennial, Aug. 1, when the final of 50 stories, about the declaration of statehood, will appear.
Bates, then 33 years old, wrote the start of the poem that would become “America the Beautiful” while on a trip to the summit of Pikes Peak, one of Colorado’s many peaks that soar above 14,000 feet. Indigenous people referred to the mountain as Tava-kaavi or “Sun Mountain.”…