History fails to tarnish Palmer's image
A century after Gen. William Jackson Palmer was buried, there still isn't much dirt on him.
Not that people haven't been digging.
As a genteel town founder, farsighted and generous benefactor and humble war hero , Palmer has reached almost mythic status in the Pikes Peak region.
But great men always seem to have some mess behind the myth. Evidence shows Martin Luther King likely cheated on his wife. Abraham Lincoln was clinically depressed and, some historians argue, gay. George Washington probably never chopped down that cherry tree.
So it stands to reason that Palmer, for all his accomplishments, did some things he would have rather seen swept under the rug.
Local experts say no.
"Listen, I'm a skeptical historian, I am trained to believe no one can be perfect," said Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum director Matt Mayberry. "We keep looking for the dirt. And we haven't found it."
In addition to building well-planned towns that emphasized healthy family living, and laying out railroads to develop the West, Palmer enjoyed reading classic literature, riding horses and walking with his dogs. He was a fierce egalitarian, his contemporaries said, who treated even the least in society with the greatest respect, and was known for giving quietly to charity.
None of his colleagues had a dark word to say about him, even in private letters.
"I was very skeptical of the Palmer hero worship when I first moved here. The rosy view just seemed to good to be true," said Katherine Sturdevant, a history professor at Pikes Peak Community College. But after living in the city for over 20 years and studying Palmer at length, she has joined the worship, which she says "stems from a deep respect and affection for a man of great integrity."
The closest thing in Palmer's life to a scandal, Sturdevant said, is the pervasive story, spread primarily by Marshall Sprague's popular 1961 history, "Newport in the Rockies" that Palmer and his wife, Queen, didn't get along.
"But I think Sprague based a lot of that on oral tradition - in other words gossip."
True, Queen lived only a few years in Colorado Springs before moving back East, and then to England, but Sturdevant pointed out that Queen was ordered east by her doctor after a heart attack and Palmer wrote loving letters and regularly made the long journey to visit once or twice a year.
Palmer was by no means perfect. He had paternalistic views toward women and minorities. He preferred Protestants to Catholics.
And despite penning laws that forbade alcohol in Colorado Springs, he was known to enjoy a glass of wine with friends.
"He had a lot of grape arbors around his home in Glen Eyrie and I'm sure it wasn't so he could have grapes on his table," Sturdevant said with a slight chuckle. "I suppose we can get him with that - but that's not very much."
