Fifty for 150: Katharine Lee Bates writes ‘America the Beautiful’ following 1893 visit to Pikes Peak

Poet Katharine Lee Bates spent the summer of 1893 teaching English at the Colorado Summer School at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, on a leave of absence from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. By that time, she was already a published poet and author of works including the novel “Rose and Thorn” and contributions in newspapers such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly and the Boston Evening Transcript. 

Bates, then 33 years old, wrote the start of the poem that would become “America the Beautiful” while on a trip to the summit of Pikes Peak, one of Colorado’s many peaks that soar above 14,000 feet. Indigenous people referred to the mountain as Tava-kaavi or “Sun Mountain.”

Later, Bates remembered of that ascent that the group had to abandon their wagon near the top and finish the route with mules. Nowadays, travelers can drive, hike or ride the cog railway to the top of the mountain and rest at the visitor’s center.

“I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse,” Bates wrote.

Bates published the poem two years later in the nationally-circulated magazine The Congregationalist and revised it at least twice in the early 20th Century. Eventually, the poem was set to the tune of the 1882 song “Materna,” written by Samuel Augustus Ward.

For over 100 years, people have sung the iconic song, which includes the first stanza: