Despite a quarantine order and frustrated at sitting at home on the computer for countless hours a day, I recently ventured out for a walk to see how things are these days in the small town in which I live, in the age of a virus that has crippled our economy and shuttered our states. As always, my thoughts are constantly in motion as I seek out new things that inspire me.
As is true for all American tourist towns these days, Manitou Springs is not how it should be.
The sidewalks are more populated with warnings than people. The arcade is dark and quiet. The gift shops, candy stores and restaurants are closed and dark. The bars, which seem to never close, are dark and lifeless. The Incline, one of the largest draws this time of year, is closed. City Hall, the Library, the hotels, the museums, the art galleries, all closed with signs saying "Stay Safe" and "Closed Until Further Notice." Window signs say "Sorry" and "Closed" - "Since the world has gone totally nuts," reads the one at Totally Nuts and Co., the sweet-smelling shop housed in old tuberculosis huts along the main drag on Manitou Avenue.
The running creek breaks the unusual silence, along with the chatter of vagrants here and there. One of them finds himself up Ruxton Avenue, sitting on the bench near Iron Spring. This is one of eight wells celebrating Manitou's legendary mineral waters.
These days, when the Coronavirus reminds us that life really can be stranger than fiction, one might reconsider old legends. Maybe it is true what early people said about these "healing waters" of Manitou, a name derived from what native tribes knew to be a "great spirit."
"Man, it's gotta be true," says this bearded fellow, who bears a Bible, a pack of cigarettes (or, this being Manitou, maybe something a little more powerful), a bottle of beer and two water bottles, which he has filled with this iron-rich tonic.
"Tastes like a mouthful of rusty train tracks," he says. Which is true. Without a doubt, it is the worst and least appealing of the springs; the others pour forth a flavor like soda, true to their storied reputations.
As for this man's belief in the special powers of Iron Springs...
Local historians who maintain the springs say it helps, but it is not a cure by any means.
Mother Nature's alchemy helps. Springing up from a deep-seated aquifer that meets ancient rock and gas, the mixture of iron, alkaline, calcium, potassium and more helps in a way similar to a typical sports drink.
But, there is no reason to think Manitou's water is the remedy for that which is ailing us now. No, this pandemic's masses are not about to seek these springs, as they did during the tuberculosis scare.
Decades before then, white explorers found the cool, bubbling streams to be as remarkable as suggested by the natives, who held them sacred.
In the early 1840s, John Frémont wrote in his journal of finding the springs after an arduous, stormy day searching with his crew.
In 1848, George Ruxton, by his own description, "was half dead with thirst" when he came upon the water: "I dipped the cup into the midst of the bubbles, and raised it hissing and sparkling to my lips," he wrote. "Such a draught! ,,,almost blowing up the roof of my mouth with its effervescence."
Credited as the first white woman to climb Pikes Peak in 1858, Julia Archibald wrote of sweet relief alongside her party, "We drank deeply from these Saratogas of the wilderness..." (Saratoga being a reference to the famous springs in upstate New York).
Later, as plague crept like a shadow, the waters took on new fame.
During the tuberculosis outbreak, there was no better place to be than Manitou, the growing West and border nation came to believe. This was largely due to an 1874 pamphlet by Doctor Edwin Solly. Sanitariums sprouted in Colorado Springs. The sick remarked on the fresh air and sunshine, as celebrated in an exhibit at Pioneers Museum in downtown Colorado Springs.
But, how much did Manitou's springs have to do with that?
Solly discredited native people, "believing as they did that the Good Spirit breathed into the water the breath of life." Though it was true, he wrote, that the waters were rather miraculous - capable of easing stomach pain and clearing congestion, of helping poor livers and kidney. Perhaps even alcoholism could be cured, he hinted. All of which "not even the wildest exaggerators up to then had dreamed that the spring possessed," Sprague wrote.
Town founders General William Jackson Palmer and Doctor William Abraham Bell were likely thrilled by Solly's pamphlet. It helped sell their vision of Manitou as a European-style retreat for America's upper class from the East. But, a financial panic in 1873 hit just as things were getting started, so more regular folks began arriving, changing their vision of what Manitou Springs could become forever.
Those visitors would be bound for Iron Spring, heading up the steep path of Ruxton Avenue, which would come to be accessed by a trolley established by Winfield Scott Stratton. They would embark at the grand hotel nearby. Virtually demolished by a fire a few years before the trolley stopped running, the remnants of what was is now the home of Iron Springs Chateau, a dinner theater, itself shuttered by the virus.
One well is named for Stratton, drilled amid the Great Depression. Now, Stratton Spring spouts beside Loop, a Mexican restaurant now shuttered and dark in the midst of the current epidemic. Named after the trolley that used to loop around nearby.
Another is Wheeler Spring, named for Jerome Wheeler, a local benefactor who started bottling the water at a now shuttered plant farther down Manitou Avenue toward the edge of town where the creek flows down from Rainbow Falls, near my home. The plant closed as World War II raged around the globe. Another company started by Wheeler lasted: Macy's, among department stores whose fates seem uncertain these days.
Things change. But the springs still flow.
And they seem as popular as ever.
And grateful this day is the man who parks his truck along Ruxton to fill up 10-gallon jugs at Twin Spring, "the best of the waters," he says.
Farther up Ruxton at Iron Spring sits a man who says he is tired from traveling. He is content here, for now, with his Bible, cigarettes, beer and bottle of water, however funky tasting.
He might just stick around, "ride it out," he says. "If there was ever an apocalypse, you can still get your minerals. It's a good place to be."
And I proudly call that place home.
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