The poem wasn’t yet set to music, but by some accounts, as many as 75 song versions existed by 1900. Two years later, in 1895, a religious Boston weekly newspaper called The Congregationalist published the poem under the title “America.” Fittingly, it was published on July 4. The views were, and are, expansive-you can see Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Kansas from the mountain top on a clear day.īates later wrote in her diary that the view showed “the sea-like expanse of fertile country,” and that “all the wonder of America seemed displayed there.” Her experiences inspired her to write a poem called “Pikes Peak” before she left Colorado. Toward the end of her class, Bates took a wagon more than 14,000 feet up to the top of nearby Pikes Peak on the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
The exploration didn’t stop once she arrived in Colorado. Her cross-country travels took her through much of the heartland in the Midwest, as well as the World’s Columbian Exposition happening in Chicago that year. In 1893, Bates, a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, went to Colorado Springs to teach a summer class on Chaucer. The song promotes the idea of a bountiful country with spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountains majesty, and a fruited plain.īut do you know which scenic lands inspired author Katharine Lee Bates to write the immediately popular lyrics? Or, for that matter, what Bates meant by “ alabaster cities”? The origin of “America the Beautiful” “America the Beautiful” isn’t the United States’s national anthem (that honor goes to “The Star-Spangled Banner”), but it’s arguably just as well loved.
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