{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Selling the Springs: William Jackson Palmer and the Business of Paradise","description":"Colorado Springs has long sold a seductive story: a Quaker Civil War general falls in love with Pikes Peak, builds a railroad, and creates a beautiful, healthy city where churches replace saloons and the Rocky Mountain air restores the soul. But the real story of Colorado\u2019s second city is stranger\u2014and tells a more interesting story about how becoming a state depended as much on marketing as on gold rushes or coal booms. In this episode of Lost Highways, we peel back the myth of William Jackson Palmer and the founding of Colorado Springs. Palmer was an abolitionist, Civil War general, railroad visionary, land developer, idealist, and relentless capitalist. His dream depended on a clever\u2014and sometimes ethically murky\u2014combination of railroads, real estate, violence, foreign investors, aggressive marketing, and the creation of a city so his railroad would have somewhere to go. Join the Lost Highways team to uncover the deeper legacy of a place that, in some ways, may still be living inside the marketing scheme that created it. ","author_name":"Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains","author_url":"https:\/\/www.historycolorado.org\/lost-highways","html":"