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A Climate of Failure or One “Unrivaled, Perhaps, in the World”

Fear and Health in the West

While early observations of the Great Plains by Zebulon Montgomery Pike, Stephen Harriman Long, and Washington Irving painted the vast grasslands as an awesome barrier to white civilization, in time other travelers would begin to assess the far West more positively. These reports, in turn, began to transform American conceptions of the West as a wasteland and dumping ground for the nation’s unwanted peoples. The descriptions of a harsh, trackless wilderness soon gave way to glowing accounts of sunny, warm regions. American sailors, for example, involved in the hide trade with far distant California, remarked on the beauty and potential of the region. They marveled at the temperate climate with its mild winters and cool summers. There existed, however, a danger implicit in the sun and fair climate of California and the Southwest, for too much good weather could harm individuals as much as inhospitable climates and savagery.

Americans saw themselves as descendants of the hardy races of Northern Europe. Their work ethnic—considered a hallmark of alleged Anglo-Saxon superiority—emerged from an age-old, relentless battle with a harsh and unforgiving Mother Nature. In struggle lay the key for tempering Northern Europeans into the fittest, strongest people on the planet, but this domination could only be renewed by constant competition with nature, and the Southwest was simply too warm. A salubrious climate could be detrimental to racial vigor, and indeed, early Anglo-American visitors saw proof of the dangers of a pleasant climate in the allegedly lazy Indians and Hispanics of California and the Southwest. This belief justified American conquest, but would not the same fate befall the vigorous, expansionistic Americans?

Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, which recounted his experiences as a sailor engaged in the hide trade between the East and California from 1834 to 1836, ranks among the earliest works to argue that good climates could hurt white American racial vigor. He noted that California possessed tremendous natural resources, fertile soil, a temperate climate, vast plains for grazing, little disease, and numerous great ports. “In the hands of an enterprising people,” he declared, “what a country this might be . . . Yet how long would a people remain so, in such a country? The Americans . . . and Englishmen [who live in California] . . . are indeed more industrious and effective than the Spaniards; yet their children are brought up Spaniards, in every respect, and if the ‘California fever’ (laziness) spares the first generation, it always attacks the second.”¹

Dana consciously equated laziness with an endemic disease. What worried him and others was the prospect that inferiority might be contagious.

Despite the fact that he was merely a sailor, Dana’s Harvard education and manners enabled him to mix with the highest stratum of Mexican California. Among the many important Southern Californians he met was Don Juan Bandini, whom he described as a prime example of the kind of “decayed gentleman” he had often seen in California. Dana described Bandini as slim, delicate, and highly articulate, a nobleman characteristically “ambitious at heart, and impotent in act.”² Masculinity, for Dana and the legions of Americans who followed him, meant action, strength, and competitiveness, not decay and impotence—the latter the opposite of virility, a chief attribute of the vigorous man. The Southwest’s pleasant climate, Dana believed, created such infirmities. Only by struggling against a harsh, unrelenting nature could men avoid growing weak and effeminate. The mild climate of the Southwest seemed to make the ancient struggle between man and nature obsolete, and comfort invariably came at the expense of racial vigor.

Hispanic women, although widely praised for their beauty, also suffered from evident racial degeneration. If Anglo-Americans considered ideal women to be chaste, modest, and virtuous, then Mexican women represented the opposite. Dana summed up the views of many when he wrote, “The women have but little education, and a good deal of beauty, and their morality, of course, is none the best.” Marital indiscretions nonetheless occurred rarely since husbands and other male family members stood ready with “a few inches of cold steel [to] punish . . . an unwary man.”³ The beauty of California women still struck Dana when he returned to the Golden State in 1859. Upon getting reacquainted with Don Juan Bandini and his wife, Doña Refugio, Dana still found the lady quite stunning, perhaps because of “the preserving quality of the California climate.”⁴

Dana and other early adventurers in the West certainly had reason for concern given their understanding of race at the time, but the emerging racial science of polygenesis seemed to offer a panacea to racial fears. Polygenesis argued that the races of humanity had been created in different locations and been endowed with innate and immutable characteristics. Anglo-Americans, as white-skinned Europeans, unquestionably occupied the pinnacle of human development, and their whiteness could not be fundamentally altered (except perhaps through miscegenation or residence in the most extreme climates). Africans, created as supposedly docile and stupid creatures, seemed destined to serve as slaves, and American Indian peoples, with their alleged savagery and inability to adapt to change, appeared doomed to vanish before the superior race, as in the oft-used simile “like snow melting before the sun.” In addition to justifying slavery and expansion, polygenesis promised that whites could colonize any environment without fear of degenerating.

During his 1859 visit to California, Richard Henry Dana marveled at the essential differences in the races—a marked change for a man who had once warned about the dangers of California’s climate. After leaving San Francisco, he headed for China. While crossing the Pacific he met a Chinese family with a newborn. Dana wrote, “Travelling as I do gives one a strong notion as to the differences of races. The differences seem almost of the essence and ineradicable—not to speak of the original unity, but of the present state of things. Mixtures of races seem doomed to extinction. There is a Chinese infant on board, born in Cal., but its little eyes are as Chinese, from the moment they were opened as any ‘oldest inhabitant.’ ”⁵ Climate, as in the case of the Chinese infant, did not change the baby into something else, he noted with almost palpable relief.

Yet Dana did not endorse all aspects of polygenesis and remained a believer in the original unity of the human family. He did concur with polygeneticists that mixed races faced inevitable extinction. “I do not,” he continued, “believe the Kanakas [Hawaiians] can . . . increase and maintain themselves long as an equal race with the whites, or that a mixed race will multiply at all. These facts, and even that most striking one respecting the intermarriage of mulattoes, do not disprove the orig. unity, nor relieve the difficulties in the theory of orig[inal] diversity.”⁶

Polygenesis had provided a salve to those worried about whites sinking to the levels of the savage races, but it did not entirely relieve the fear that whites could degenerate to a degree at least from climates like that of the American West. Had this not, in fact, happened in Latin America? Even polygeneticists agreed that certain races should avoid climates foreign to them. The racial theorist and leading polygeneticist Josiah Nott wrote that whites were “destined eventually to conquer and hold every foot of the globe where climate does not interpose an impenetrable barrier.”⁷ But climate did pose barriers that could undermine white racial vigor. Scientists uniformly considered hot and humid climates dangerous to whites while convinced that peoples of African descent possessed unique adaptations to such climates. As the historian Conevery Bolton Valenčius noted, “Black immunity to [tropical diseases like malaria], real and perceived, was a powerful argument for white Americans about the rightness of black servitude.”⁸ Slaves belonged in the South, working in the heat of muggy cotton fields or rice paddies. This was not cruel, slaveholders argued. It was natural.

While polygenesis opened the door for possible Anglo-American settlement of the West, most experts agreed that already weak members of society could benefit from the West’s salubrious climates. The chronically ill, especially those suffering from pulmonary ailments like tuberculosis, could find hope in the region.⁹

The perception of the West as a healthy region developed slowly over the first half of the nineteenth century. Early explorers to the West made infrequent references to the region’s healthfulness, although they did not report many diseases either. Stephen Long, for example, noted that among the Omaha Indians, the “catalogue of diseases, and morbid affections, is infinitely less extensive than that of civilized men.” Common ailments like rheumatism, gout, jaundice, and phthisis (tuberculosis) did not occur among them, he claimed.¹⁰ Long did not feel optimistic about the prospects of western settlement, and he asserted that the temperature fluctuations in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains would not promote good health, though he believed the dry air would be better than that in the humid Mississippi Valley.¹¹ John C. Frémont conversely observed in 1842, “The climate [on the plains] has been found very favorable to the restoration of health, particularly in cases of consumption,” a fact he attributed not to the climate (as most observers did) but rather to the presence of sagebrush and other “aromatic plants.”¹²

Spurred by more favorable reports, like those of Frémont, the belief that the West offered a genial, healthy landscape had begun to take hold in the American consciousness by the 1840s. Josiah Gregg, an American trader, for example, marveled at the “salubrity of climate [in] . . . New Mexico. Nowhere—not even under the much boasted Sicilian skies[—]can a purer or a more wholesome atmosphere be found. Bilious diseases—the great scourge of the valley of the Mississippi—are here almost unknown.” Except for epidemics of typhoid and smallpox, “New Mexico has experienced very little disease of a febrile character; so that as great a degree of longevity is attained there, perhaps, as in any other portion of the habitable world.”¹³

Susan Shelby Magoffin, a young bride whose husband, like Gregg, participated in the trade between Missouri and Santa Fe, found the Great Plains not “very beneficial to my health so far,” an impression exacerbated by a miscarriage she suffered at Bent’s Fort.¹⁴ New Mexico, however, proved markedly better, and in her diary for September 10, 1846 she wrote, “The air is fine and healthy; indeed the only redeeming quality of this part of New Mexico is its perfectly pure atmosphere, not the damp unhealthy dews of the States.”¹⁵

California similarly developed a reputation for healthfulness. Mrs. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (better known by her nom de plume “Dame Shirley”) accompanied her physician husband to the California goldfields in 1851. Shirley’s husband selected the mining camp Rich Bar “as the terminus of his health-seeking journey, not only on account of the extreme purity of the atmosphere, but because there were more than a thousand people there already, and but one physician, and as his strength increased, he might find in that vicinity a favorable opening for the practice of his profession, which, as the health of his purse was almost as feeble as that of his body, was not a bad idea.”¹⁶ Upon leaving the mining camps fourteen months later, Shirley boasted to her sister of the physical and mental changes resulting from the experience. “I took kindly to this existence, which to you seems so sordid and mean,” she wrote. In California she “gained an unwonted strength in what seemed to you such unfavorable surroundings. You would hardly recognize the feeble and half-dying invalid . . . in the person of your now perfectly healthy sister.”¹⁷

Walter Colton, writing in the 1850s about his experiences a decade earlier, also boasted of California’s healthfulness. He claimed, “The fecundity of Californians is remarkable and must be attributed in no small degree to the effects of climate. It is no uncommon sight to find from fourteen to eighteen children at the same table, with their mother at the head.” One Monterey woman, he asserted, had twenty-two surviving children. Indeed, California’s climate seemed so salubrious that once transportation improved, Colton predicted, “The day is not distant when a trip to California will be regarded rather as a diversion than a serious undertaking. It will be quite worth the while to come out here merely to enjoy the climate for a few months. It is unrivaled, perhaps, in the world.”¹⁸

Following the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, people did flock to California for the climate. The state’s international reputation as a gigantic sanitarium encouraged often extravagant claims. Norman Bridge, a physician specializing in pulmonary ailments, noted that even California could not cure everyone. He wrote in Charles Fletcher Lummis’s promotional magazine Land of Sunshine, “There has been no exaggeration about the climate of Southern California. One who recovers from pulmonary tuberculosis is excusable for some enthusiasm about the climate; while he who fails to recover will hardly be loud in his praises.”¹⁹ California, Bridge continued, could make the weak strong, and cured invalids could live fulfilling and productive lives, but for advanced cases, he cautioned, it extended little hope.

The naturalist John Muir, writing in the late 1870s, held a largely pessimistic opinion of California’s reputation for healthfulness. Invalids “come here only to die, and surely it is better to die comfortably at home . . . It is indeed pitiful to see so many invalids, already on the verge of the grave, making a painful way to quack climates, hoping to change age to youth, and the darkening twilight of their day to morning. No such health-fountain has been found, and this climate, fine as it is, seems, like most others, to be adapted for well people only.”²⁰ Muir, however, found some places in the West healthy not only for the body but also for the soul. “The summer climate of the fir and pine woods of the Sierra Nevada would,” he wrote, “be found infinitely more reviving [than sanitariums]; but because these woods have not been advertised like patent medicines, few seem to think of the spicy, vivifying influences that pervade their fountain freshness and beauty.”²¹ Reflecting on the healing power of wild country, in a letter on Mount Shasta Muir wrote, “The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men. Therefore we are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to the mountains is going home. Yet how many are doomed to toil in town shadows while the white mountains beckon all along the horizon!”²² In the mountains the sick, the weak, the world-weary could all be healed, but California’s climate could only do so much.

California’s main competition in the growing business of health tourism came from the mountainous territory of Colorado. The English traveler Isabella Bird observed in 1873, “The climate of Colorado is considered the finest in North America, and consumptives, asthmatics, dyspeptics, and sufferers from nervous diseases, are here in hundreds and thousands, either trying the ‘camp cure’ for three or four months, or settling permanently.” So numerous were health seekers, she claimed, that “nine out of every ten [Colorado] settlers were cured invalids.”²³ Dr. Samuel Edwin Solly, a supposedly noted English physician and health seeker, gave a lower but still considerable estimate of the number of health seekers as roughly one-third of Colorado’s total population. The “one-lung army” totaled perhaps 30,000 in Denver by 1890—a fifth of the city’s population.²⁴ Rose Georgina Kingsley, an English friend of Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway (D&RGW) president William Jackson Palmer, provided a typical endorsement of Colorado’s “bracing and healthy” climate. In one case, she explained, a young man she knew “came out in the summer of 1871 apparently dying of consumption, obliged to be moved in an invalid carriage. In the spring of 1872 we wished him good sport as he started on foot for a week’s shooting and camping in the mountains!”²⁵ A few years later one observer declared, “The Centennial State, while it is no more a cure-all than the patent nostrums of the period, can indeed afford blessed relief, and life itself, to many a forlorn and despairing sufferer.”²⁶

The D&RGW extolled the virtues of the state in its advertising material. Colorado, it claimed, possessed superior health resorts to those of Switzerland and France, and the infirm could easily access them by way of rail lines from the East.²⁷ Manitou Springs, located near Colorado Springs and owned and heavily promoted by the D&RGW, became Colorado’s premier health resort. The railroad company charged Dr. Solly with explaining the superiority of Manitou Springs’s hot springs pools to those of other famous resorts around the world. Not surprisingly, he found those in Manitou the equal of even the most renowned resorts in Europe. The various springs, with their differing temperatures and chemical content, could treat virtually any ailment know to humanity, including congestion, inflammation, dyspepsia, and nervous and sexual disorders, to name a few.

The superiority of Colorado’s environment set it apart from Europe’s resorts. Its dry, inland location meant that humidity, which Doctor Solly warned endangered consumptives, would not be a problem, and Manitou’s sheltered location assured sunny and mild winter weather. Health seekers, the doctor advised, should plan on winter as the best time to stay at Manitou Springs, since the winter sun and desiccated air could have the greatest “effect . . . upon the human body.” He concluded, “There is probably no climate in the world where out-door life is so thoroughly enjoyable through every season of the year as that of Manitou.”²⁸ Consumptives might not be completely cured, but many would be able to live longer and healthier lives in Colorado. Solly, who had recovered his health in Colorado Springs, used his growing professional reputation to advertise the city to an eager invalid audience.²⁹

The healthy western lifestyle therefore compared quite favorably with the urban East. Tuberculosis, which Dr. Joseph W. Howe called the “scourge of humanity” in 1875, particularly thrived in crowded, unsanitary factories and urban environments.³⁰ Tenements filled with dozens of workers, weakened by long and tiring shifts in close quarters with infected people, made contracting TB likely. Samuel Hopkins Adams, in a 1905 McClure’s Magazine article, argued that tuberculosis could be effectively controlled with the creation of large sanitariums, better sanitation methods, and improvements in urban tenement houses. A lack of proper sanitariums meant that “we must either dump the vast majority of our consumptive poor into the contagious wards of our hospitals, send them to the pest-houses, or—this is the common and approved method—let them die in their dark tenements or their wretched dwellings.”³¹ Simply changing one’s environment could cure this scourge. “Fresh air, sunlight, and good food will save any case of tuberculosis that has not progressed too far—and nothing else will,” Adams explained. These conditions readily existed in cities, exclusive of the slums, and therefore, “the sufferer doesn’t need to go to Arizona or California. Climate, while it may be an aid in some cases, has much less influence on tuberculosis, except in the later stages, than is generally supposed.”³² Adams lamented the plight of the urban poor, forced to live in cramped, infected dwellings, and his article, like those of other Progressives, functioned to goad Americans into action.³³

The polluted city was the offspring of industrialization, and poor urban workers kept its factories humming. The laboring poor, though, did not always live isolated from their social betters and could therefore spread tuberculosis. The railroad provided a technological solution to the problems of urbanization that came with the Industrial Age.³⁴ Great distances, even for the ill, no longer served as obstacles, and people with money and leisure time could easily access places like Santa Fe or Los Angeles, towns that had once sounded distant and exotic. Western promoters never tired of extolling the virtues of their beneficent climate and the lucrative industry it spawned.

The healthy West continued to beckon, promising escape for those who could afford the price, but this was merely part of a growing dissatisfaction wealthier Americans felt toward the city. The September 17, 1891, issue of the Nation juxtaposed the alien city against the healing countryside. An article on the new immigration noted that an increasing number of unskilled or unemployed immigrants headed for the nation’s ports. Unfortunately, the magazine observed, “[as] the influence of the Teutonic races declines, that of the Latin and Slavic increases” from year to year. Even worse, these immigrants were predominately male, of the “lowest class,” and “not related to us [Anglo-Americans] in race or language.” Such immigrants might be appropriate, the author noted, for “an undeveloped frontier; but the statistics of the reported destination of immigrants show that the bulk of them intend to settle in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.”³⁵ The next article in the magazine noted the increasing numbers of middle- and upper-class people who escaped the cities for quiet country cottages where they could spend the summers. This phenomenon reflected “a growing national love of Nature and her quietudes.”³⁶ The juxtaposition of the two articles, while likely coincidental, reflected the tensions of the Gilded Age; and escaping the city, with its immigrants and diseases, became a common pursuit of those with leisure time and money. The West, therefore, seemed an ideal place: free of the smoke, pollution, and lowest class of immigrants and brimming with nature in all her myriad grandeur and quietudes.

Railroads and resort owners (often one and the same) promised rejuvenation to a select few. Railroad fares and the cost of living for months in a resort or sanitarium precluded all but the wealthy from coming. Those with money could get access to peaceful, healthy environments far from the pollution and problems of industrial urban cities. Across the Southwest, railroads erected impressive and exclusive sanitariums and hotels. The Southern Pacific Railroad created the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California, in 1880, the first of the West’s elaborate resorts. In 1882 the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe answered with the massive Montezuma Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the D&RGW built the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs in 1883 and developed exclusive resorts in Manitou Springs and Glenwood Springs.³⁷ Only wealthy whites could stay in resorts like Manitou Springs that were both racially and class exclusive.³⁸ Disease knew no distinctions of class or race, but treatment regimes certainly did.

Figure 2.1. Railroads eagerly courted invalids, promising them health and rejuvenation in fine resorts throughout the West. While people debated whether the West’s climate would be beneficial to Anglo-Americans generally, there was little debate about the vivifying effects of the West’s climate on tuberculosis patients and others with debilitating ailments. View of the “Colorado” Hotel and hot springs bathhouse built by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway in Glenwood Springs. Courtesy, Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Denver, CO.

Colorado, California, and New Mexico might all be blessed with an agreeable climate, but only a few places had the conditions suitable for constructing sanitariums, and Colorado Springs vied to be the best of them all. “An invalid needs not only good climate,” Lewis Morris Iddings opined in Scribner’s, “but the best of food and many comforts. Roughing it for sick people has been much over-estimated.”³⁹ Accompanying Idding’s article were drawings of fashionable Colorado Springs “invalids,” seemingly in the bloom of health, enjoying outdoor activities and attending evening balls. Iddings noted the civilized nature of the city and its residents: “The residents are Eastern people of considerable wealth . . . and their scheme of life is intended to take in such means of enjoyment as they have been accustomed to at home. It is Eastern life in a Western environment.” Filled with beautiful architecture (the handiwork of an eastern architect forced to relocate for his health), a fledgling university staffed with professors from fine eastern and European schools teaching cultivated but sickly youth (“and thus care is taken not to press them with too much study”), and the Cheyenne Mountain Country Club, Colorado Springs seemed anything but a frontier outpost.⁴⁰

While the rich could convalesce in style, many young men and women of lesser means also went west to build up their strength and find a place for themselves in the world. Julian Ralph of Denver declared that the Mile-High City’s “good taste, good society, and progressiveness” were a result not of its mineral wealth but rather of its invalid population: “It was not [mining and] oil that gave us college-bred men to form a Varsity Club of 120 members, or that insisted upon the decoration of the town with such hotels as ours. The influence of invalids is seen in all this. They are New Yorkers, Bostonians, Philadelphians, New Orleans men, Englishmen—the architects, doctors, lawyers, and every sort of professional men being among them.”⁴¹ Denver welcomed invalids, and it seemed all the better for it.

These glowing reports of “bracing air” and ocean breezes, of former invalids risen like Lazarus and strolling under the purple skies of a Pikes Peak sunset, did much to contradict early negative reports of the West that warned of the region’s isolation, savage population, and inappropriateness for white settlement. Many early visitors, like Richard Henry Dana, worried that the mild climate represented a greater threat to white racial vigor than did savagery. Polygenesis alleviated some of these fears, but even Josiah Nott hedged when it came to the question of white superiority and climate. Fears remained, however, that racial vigor could not thrive in warm climates. Many easterners, in fact, criticized California and the Southwest as too healthy. Climates that might suit invalids could nevertheless be harmful to the overall racial vigor of the white race. It fell to promoters and western mythmakers in the last third of the nineteenth century to once again defend their region from detractors and convince Anglo-Americans that the region offered all Americans—not just the sick—an opportunity to achieve a level of development unprecedented in human history.