EXCERPT | The Colorado Book

Inside U.S.A.

John Gunther

COLORADO, THE MOST SPECTACULAR of the mountain states, lives on many things: scenery, beet sugar, gold, molybdenum, livestock, tourists, and tuberculosis. As to this last, I heard an ungentle and tasteless Coloradan complain, “Some fiend in human form discovered that rest, not altitude, was the best cure for T.B., and so the tuberculosis cases don’t come to Colorado so much anymore, and the economy of suffered terribly as a result, so I suppose you could say that T.B. is killing us, not the patients.”

Very little in the world can compare to the scenery of Colorado. The vistas here stretch the eyes, enlighten the heart, and make the spirit humble. Colorado has more than 1,500 peaks—literally—more than 10,000 feet high, and of the 65 in the United States higher than 14,000 feet, it has not less than 51. This is indeed the top of the nation. Colorado has the highest automobile road in the country, the highest automobile races, the highest ski courses, the highest astro­nomical laboratory, the highest railway tunnel, the highest lake, the highest yacht anchorage, and the highest suspension bridge. It has two national parks and six national monuments, 14 million acres of national forest, and more than 7,000 miles of fishing streams. And no matter where you turn, up and down or left and right, the overwhelming variety and magnitude of the views makes you blink. But—the state has had to learn these past years that scenery alone, no matter how stupefyingly dramatic, does not pay the bills. Scenery alone is not enough...

Historically, Colorado is of mixed origin; in whole or in part it has variously belonged to Spain, France, Mexico, and Texas. There is still a strong Spanish underlay in the southern tier of counties; all these bear Spanish names. Its modern annals begin with the discovery of gold in 1858, nine years after the California Gold Rush, and the mines at Leadville and Cripple Creek became a mud-and-canvas Meccas. It is an interesting revelation of the national character—James Truslow Adams makes a point of this—that California and the far West, though farther away, should have been settled before the states of the Rockies and Great Plains. It is as if a crazy impetuosity carried the first frontiersmen as far as they could possibly go geographically; they swooped straight across the continent without pause (of course, this generalization is too broad); then, later, a second wave, less volatile, descended on the states between.

Coloradans are proud of being Coloradans, and the state has a large propor­tion of citizens born within its borders.

This section was adapted from the essay "Inside U.S.A" by John Gunther from The Colorado Book Second Edition.

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