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The Tourists’ Gem, Describing The Manitou Grand Caverns, The Largest and Most Wonderful Subteraneum in the Rocky Mountains, And Other Attractions for Tourists.
[Manitou Springs, Colorado, ca. 1885.] 24mo (5.125” x 3.75”), illustrated yellow wrappers. 17 pp., b&w illus., ads on back wrapper. CONDITION: Very good, light wear and spotting to wrappers, a few pp. trimmed close at top margin, very minimal effect to text. A scarce illustrated guide to Colorado’s famed Manitou Caverns, recently opened as a tourist attraction and, after a swarm of sightseers stripped neighboring caves of their stalactites, fitted out with protective “screens” so that future visitors might see the caverns “as left by the hand of God.” The guide begins with the drive from Manitou Soda Springs to the Ute Pass, and then devotes some ten pages to the caverns themselves. These pages, written by “Mrs. V. M. S., for George W. Snider” (probably Snider’s first wife, Vera), describe the wonders of the entrance (including a collective “monument to General Grant’s memory,” formed by each visitor “depositing a stone”), the various formations in Stalactite Hall, the Narrows, the Rotunda, the Jumbo Tunnel (“imagine a row of alabaster crystals extending along the wall for twenty feet”), the main room (dubbed “the Opera House”), with its “frost-work flowers of calcite, glistening with a silvery light” and myriad curious formations—and more. Brief accounts follow of the resort town of Manitou and the branch of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad by which it could be reached. George Washington Snider (1851–1921), a stone-cutter from Ohio, explored and connected several of the Manitou Grand Caverns caves in the early 1880s while in partnership with Charles Rhinehart, with whom he ran tours of the Cave of the Winds. Following a split with Rhinehart, Snider began running tours of the Manitou Grand Caverns in 1885. By 1896, overwhelmed with debt, he had turned operations over to his brother and left Manitou. OCLC records three holdings, at Colorado College, Pikes Peak Library District, and Yale.
Item #9984
Price: $275.00
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