![]() ![]() To feed and clothe her four young children, her widowed mother had to be thrifty and find ways to share and barter. ![]() Living in Falmouth on the Cape, Bates' minister father died when she was just a month old. Though she grew up rich in heritage, her grandfather having been a college president, the household where she spent her childhood was a poor one. The song and poem reflect a belief in community and social justice, values that came out of Bates' hardscrabble upbringing on Massachusetts' Cape Cod. Ray Charles performs "America The Beautiful" on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972. "It kind of radiates this purple glow, and it is beautiful." "In the late afternoon, as the sun is shining and the shadows are coming over the mountains, the mountain looks purple," Witherow explained during our visit. And even on a bitterly cold and windy day, puffy clouds floated by, the sun hit the red rocks and the alpine evergreens were dusted with snow. To the north, the Rocky Mountains stretch into the distance. Looking east, you can see almost all the way to Kansas. On top of the windswept peak, though, it's easy to see why Bates made the arduous journey. A park ranger warned me and my guide Leah Davis Witherow, historian and curator of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, to use the lowest gear on our way back down. A brand-new railway up the 14,000-plus-foot mountain was broken, so Bates had to make it up the rocky path by horse-drawn wagon, and then by mule.Įven today, traveling by SUV, the road is intimidating: There are narrow switchbacks and astonishingly few guardrails. ![]() She'd been teaching a summer session on Chaucer, and recovering from a suicidal depression earlier that spring. In July of 1893, a witty feminist poet and Wellesley professor named Katharine Lee Bates scaled Pikes Peak, just outside Colorado Springs, Colo. ![]()
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