Health Trails

Following a trail to the West for good health seems a rather different motivation than the search for riches, religious freedom, adventure, or finding a new home, yet thousands of ill people came to the Rocky Mountains for just that reason. Denver resident P. T. Barnum observed, “People come here to die and they can’t do it.”(1)

In 1873, Isabella Bird, an English woman who climbed Long’s Peak, said, “Colorado is the most remarkable sanatorium in the world…the climate is considered the finest in North America … consumptives, asthmatics, dyspeptics, and sufferers of nervous diseases are here in the hundreds of thousands.” 2

One of the most famous seekers after a cure for his recurring tuberculosis was F.O. Stanley. When he came to Colorado in 1903, Stanley, at age fifty-four, had a grim outlook on life. His family doctor in Maine ordered him to seek a new climate or he would soon die. Stanley had invented the first steam car in 1897, and he arrived famously in Estes Park in a Stanley Steamer auto, after negotiating the wagon road up the St. Vrain Canyon. Here is F.O. dressed up as a cowboy, having both regained his health and constructed the beautiful Stanley Hotel.

The Boulder-Colorado Sanitarium was established in Boulder in 1894. According to its brochure, it was thirty miles from Denver “at the foot of the Rockies” and open all year. Initially begun as a tubercular sanitarium, it soon became popular among people not afflicted with TB, but desiring the healthy lifestyle led by the Seventh-Day Adventists. As the advertisement for the Boulder-Colorado Sanitarium stated : REST CURE: Many People are victims of tired, worn-out nerves, and are I need of special attention. The Rest cure given under proper supervision is very effective. The Boulder-Colorado Sanitarium is especially adapted and equipped to serve this class of patients.

The Sanitarium had its own dairy farm, food factory, and bakery. By the 1920s the Sanitarium emphasized that it was “non-tubercular” and that it did not accept patients “suffering from any other malady which might make their presence undesirable to others.” The Sanitarium idea was to educate as well as to cure, with weekly lectures by physicians, diet training to dyspeptic, obese, diabetic, or anemic patients Probably as many came people came West in search of health as wealth, and, by the 1920s, as much as perhaps 60% of Colorado’s population had migrated to the state either directly, or indirectly, for treatment of tuberculosis. In terms of Colorado’s economy the trail to health was as lucrative as the routes to the silver and gold mines.

One of the largest and most influential of the tuberculosis hospitals was the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society (JCRS), founded in Denver in 1904. JCRS was begun by a group of immigrant Eastern European Jewish men, many of whom were themselves victims of TB. For decades patients flocked to Denver from all over the country and were admitted free of charge. Although non-sectarian, in the early years the sanatorium catered primarily to Jewish patients in a distinctively Jewish environment. Breathing the fresh, clean air of Colorado was prescribed as part of the cure for lung diseases. Here patients facing the sun and breeze at precisely the same angle on the “heliotherapy” at the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society campus. The 1905 Annual Report of the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society explains the philosophy behind the treatment of those “broken in health, racked with pain, shattered by fever, a living corpse … must receive our care and attention … the only true … charity.”

The Ira M. Beck Memorial Archive holds the fascinating records of hundreds of patients. Sufferers found their way to Denver from all over the United States. A random selection of just a few names reveals the impact of this disease. Lula-Olga Mannheimer, thirty-one-year old mother of five from Pennsylvania, was admitted on January 18, 1911, and died two weeks later. In contrast, Rumanian-born Isaac Manes, a father of four and a carpenter from Birmingham, Alabama, was admitted in February 1907 and discharged, presumably healthy, in November 1907.

In 1954 the institution changed its mission to cancer research and became the American Medical Center. Today it is known as the AMC Cancer Research Center.

1. Antheam, Robert (1976) The Coloradans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 93.

2. Bird, Isabella. (1999) A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 41.