America the Beautiful

In 1893 Katharine Lee Bates, a 33-year-old English professor at Wellesley College, took the train to Colorado Springs to teach at Colorado College. Sights on the journey found their way into her poem: the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the "White City" whose gleaming buildings promised a future; the wheat fields of Kansas, through which her train passed on 16 July; and the view of the Great Plains from the top of Pikes Peak.