Before antibiotics, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the United States, and there was no cure. What doctors could offer was rest, rich food, and air: high, dry, sunny air, which they believed gave the lungs their best chance. By the 1870s Colorado was being sold on exactly that, and Colorado Springs, founded in 1871 by the railroad promoter William Jackson Palmer at the foot of Pikes Peak, sold itself hardest of all.
The health-seekers
The town's boosters published pamphlets, an English physician named Edwin Solly wrote up the climate as a cure, and the sick came. Historians estimate that in the 1880s and 1890s about a third of the people living in Colorado Springs had come there because of tuberculosis, their own or a family member's, and by 1900 some 20,000 health-seekers a year were moving to the Southwest. The town adopted the slogan the City of Sunshine. Locals called the newcomers lungers, and not all of them were glad to have them.
Most lived wherever they could afford, in boarding houses, rented rooms, tents and small cabins with open sides. For decades tuberculosis accounted for roughly a third of all deaths in the city.
The sanatoriums
The institutions followed. A woman widowed by the disease opened the Glockner sanatorium in 1890, charging a dollar a day. The International Typographical Union built the Union Printers Home in 1892 for ailing members of the printing trades. In 1909 the fraternal insurer Modern Woodmen of America opened a sanatorium that treated its members free, at times more than two hundred of them, many living in small octagonal tent-cottages built to let air flow through while they slept. Fifteen or more such places operated in and around the city.
At the other end of the scale was Cragmor, opened in 1905 on the bluffs northeast of town for the rich. Its patients threw parties and published their own magazine, named Ninety-Eight-Six for the body temperature they all hoped to keep. In 1924 the National Tuberculosis Association called it the most desirable sanatorium in the world. In its last years, under a federal contract, it took in Diné patients sent from the Navajo Nation, far from their families.
What remains
Drugs that could cure tuberculosis arrived in the 1940s, and the sanatoriums emptied. Their buildings found other uses. Glockner became Penrose Hospital. Cragmor closed in 1962 and its main building became the core of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. The Woodmen sanatorium became Mount Saint Francis, and Woodmen Road is named for it; one of its tent-cottages survives there, and another beside Penrose Hospital. Up the canyon in Manitou Springs, the Montcalme sanatorium is now Miramont Castle, a museum.
The sick did more than fill beds. Those who recovered, and many who did not, stayed, invested and built, and helped make Colorado Springs the state's second city while the mining towns emptied. Up in Estes Park, the Stanley Hotel was built by one of them.