martinimade

Isabella and Birdie on still on the “road” to Colorado Springs.

They left bright and early. The day started “gray and sour” but “brightened and warmed” as she rode. After 12 miles, she stopped at for bread, milk, and horse feed at a house where there were also 8 boarders, “each one looking nearer the grave than the other.” This is the usual route consumptives take to the sanitaria in the Springs. Some, as you’d imagine, perish along the way.

Isabella detours a little through Monument Park, just because she’d heard that it wasn’t to be missed. She rode through “strange gorges with wonderful upright rocks of all shapes and colors, and turning through a gate of rock, came upon what I knew must be Glen Eyrie, as wild and romantic a glen as imagination pictured.”

She rode through a “decayed-looking cluster of houses bearing the arrogant name of Colorado City,” then saw the “ambitious watering place of Colorado Springs” from the top of a ridge. Rather than charge on, she stopped to put a long skirt on, then rode sidewise, “though the settlement looked like a place where any deference to prejudices was necessary. A queer embryo-looking place it is, out on the bare plains, yet it is rising and like to rise…it has a fine view of the mountains, but the celebrated springs are in Manitou, three miles off, in really fine scenery.”

On Monday: more about consumption!*

* Don’t say I don’t know a good time.