Colorado Springs

Spanish missionaries traveling north from Santa Fe in the 1600s noticed that the river draining the plateau ran brick-red after heavy rains. They called it El Río Colorado, the Ruddy River, for the iron-rich sediment that colored it. The name passed to the entire basin, then to the territory carved from Kansas Territory in 1861, then to the state admitted in 1876. Colorado became the Centennial State, admitted one hundred years after American independence, but its name was older than the republic by two centuries.

William Jackson Palmer founded Colorado Springs in 1871 as a planned resort city at the foot of Pikes Peak. He had surveyed the area for the Kansas Pacific Railway and recognized the potential for a genteel mountain town catering to wealthy Eastern tourists. The Springs in the name refers to Manitou Springs, a cluster of naturally carbonated soda springs two miles west that Ute people had long considered sacred. Palmer platted the town, planted trees, and banned saloons in the original townsite.

Colorado derives from Spanish colorado, the past participle of colorar, to color or dye, from Latin colorare, from color. In Spanish the word means reddish or ruddy, applied to the river as a plain visual description. The state name therefore means colored red, making Colorado one of the few American states named for a visual quality of water rather than a tribe, a person, or a landform. Springs is straightforward English, from Old English spring, a source of water welling from the ground.

The pairing of Colorado and Springs layers two separate acts of naming. One was a geological observation made by colonial missionaries watching floodwater. The other was a marketing decision by a railway promoter who wanted to suggest refinement and health. Together they produced a place-name that sounds almost poetic, though neither part intended poetry. Pikes Peak, visible from the city on clear days, was named for Zebulon Pike, who tried and failed to climb it in 1806.