This weekend marks the 200th anniversary of the start of Zebulon Montgomery Pike’s historic expedition to the Southwest, an epic trek being commemorated in Colorado by parades, concerts, museum exhibits and a reunion of Pike family descendants.
The festivities also are focusing new attention on Pikes Peak.
Its current status as “America’s mountain,” one of many monickers applied over the years, puts it in the same iconic realm as national landmarks such as the Grand Canyon, El Capitan and Niagara Falls.
Yet the peak’s popularity is a bit hard to explain. It is neither the tallest in the country, nor the hardest to climb, nor even the most majestic in Colorado.
It is, however, one imposing sight, especially to the legions of tourists who have headed west toward it on U.S. 24, and to their forbears who came in wagons proclaiming “Pikes Peak or Bust.”
It is also, for many, a symbolic destination, a kind of spiritual stage where ordinary life can be left behind and dreams played out.
“One reason Pike cemented the mountain in the popular imagination is because he didn’t make it to the top, thereby unwittingly setting up a challenge for all Americans,” says Leah Witherow, an archivist at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, which has mounted an exhibit on the links between the man and the mountain as part of a series of bicentennial programs.
But Pikes Peak didn’t just burst onto the nation’s cultural landscape as a natural outgrowth of Pike’s journey. It was pushed, Witherow says.
After gold prospectors and painters of the mid-19th century began depicting the mountain as a sight to behold, the railroads made it possible for anyone – not merely the well-heeled – to travel to Colorado to see it.
Then came local boosters, who plugged the peak’s “distinctive character and noble outline” as if they were describing a movie star.
Perhaps the most creative marketing ploy, Witherow says, was the Army’s decision to locate a signal corps weather station atop the peak in the 1870s, to record the kind of meteorological information that average Americans were just beginning to find fascinating.
By the 1880s and ’90s, tourists like “America the Beautiful” author Katharine Lee Bates were riding halfway up Pikes Peak on wagons and the rest of the way on mules or burros – a trip that the founder of Simmons Beautyrest mattresses found so uncomfortable he launched a company to build the Manitou & Pikes Peak Cog Railway.
By early in the 20th century, tourism was being pitched as a patriotic act, as embodied by the slogan “See America First.” And before World War I was over, people could do just that on the Pikes Peak auto road, the engineering marvel of its time.
The annual July 4 Hill Climb put Pikes Peak on the front page of 650 newspapers in its first running in 1916.
After that came the AdAmAn Club’s New Year’s fireworks displays starting in 1922, the Pikes Peak Marathon in 1966.
Souvenirs and other products too helped spread the word. “Pikes Peak has been used to sell everything from Reebok tennis shoes to Matchbox cars to mineral water to my favorite – nail polish,” says Witherow.
“Whether you hike it, run it, drive it, paint it or use it to forecast the day’s weather, as I do, Pikes Peak means something to you,” she says. “It resonates with you,” in part because “it represents our mythic ideals of the West.”
MEET “PIKE”
Historian Clive Siegle, executive director of the Zebulon Pike National Bicentennial Commission, will appear in period garb as Pike himself in two free programs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday and Tuesday at the Garden of the Gods Visitor Center in Colorado Springs. For details call 719-634-6666 or go online to gardenofgods.com.
