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Colorado Springs appears to be the site of yet another conflict between traditional values and the vital modern forces of progress. The traditional value is the horseback statue of Gen. William Jackson Palmer at the busy downtown intersection of Platte and Nevada avenues.
But there are those who say the Palmer statute is a traffic hazard that stands in the way of efficient transportation, and it must be removed in the interest of safety.
I must confess that I like those quirky local anomalies
that identify a place. With the Palmer statue in the
middle of two major streets, Colorado Springs never needed
to erect 40-foot-high letters spelling out the city's name.
Contrast that to Denver, apparently so undistinctive that
it is necessary to keep telling people where they are, lest
they start asking strangers Are we in Omaha or
Albuquerque?
Colorado has always attracted visionaries and idealists, but Palmer was the rare one who actually implemented some of his vision for the region.
Palmer, a cavalry commander during the Civil War, arrived in Denver in 1870 as head of construction for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. That line, like most railroads of the time, had an east-west orientation to serve the prevailing national transportation ideology.
But the mountain barriers ran north-south, and Palmer,
like geographers since then, saw that Denver's
natural
hinterland was to the north and south,
rather than to the east and west.
That holds to this day. You have go farther north (Calgary, Alberta) or south (Guadalajara, Mexico) to find cities of comparable size than you do east (Kansas City) or west (San Francisco).
Palmer decided to tap the southern hinterland with a railroad from Denver to a connection with the Mexico Northwestern at El Paso, Texas on the Rio Grande. Thus the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, and a pre-NAFTA vision of continental trade with Mexico.
By building his railroad as a narrow-gauge line (only three feet between the rails, as opposed to the standard gauge of 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches), Palmer could reduce construction costs, and keep other railroads from intruding into his domain because of the expense of transferring cargo from one sized car to the other.
Less than a decade after the first spike was driven in 1870, much of Palmer's initial vision was derailed. He lost Raton Pass, the best route south, to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Profitable mining traffic to the west, especially Leadville, sent his railroad off in a new direction.
But he had other visions, too. Another of his ventures was Colorado Coal & Iron, which evolved into Colorado Fuel & Iron and a huge industrial complex at Pueblo. It rolled rails for his expanding railroad, and provided plenty of traffic as the D&RG hauled coal, coke, limestone and iron ore to the steel mills.
Palmer designed much of Colorado. He established Denver as its administrative center and Pueblo as its core of heavy industry. He set up Salida, Alamosa, Durango and Montrose as regional trade centers. Colorado Springs was his special project -- a genteel, cultivated resort.
Parts of Palmer's vision persisted long after he lost control of the railroad in 1883. Within living memory, trainloads of limestone rattled through Salida, bound for the steel mill in Pueblo where it would join coal and coke from Trinidad and iron ore from Guernsey, Wyoming.
Denver once had the people who signed the checks and
made the decisions. These days, in the words of former
Chamber President Richard C.D. Fleming, it's a regional
headquarters city,
with most of its major community
institutions, from hospitals and banks to television
stations and utility companies, under outside control.
Palmer's notion of an independent railroad, headquartered in Denver and devoted to Colorado interests, survived to some degree until 1996, when the Union Pacific swallowed the Denver & Rio Grande Western.
Colorado Springs evolved from a railroad resort to a place without passenger service today. It sits in a state where the governor cannot think of any way to move people between the two largest cities, except by expanding the highway.
Some observers have characterized modern Colorado Springs as the easternmost extension of Orange County, Calif. -- an economy based on defense spending, a haven for aspiring fundamentalist ayatollahs and a geography dominated by the automobile.
Traffic is pretty tough in the Springs -- I've heard that preachers there tell their flocks that unless they repent, they will spend eternity on Academy Boulevard.
There Gen. Palmer, even though he founded the place and organized a goodly chunk of Colorado, is a hazard and an obstruction. His statue impedes traffic and thus might provoke stalled drivers to ponder whether generic Colorado, a land of freeways and franchises, represents the best that might have been.
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