From Scribbles to Spacious Skies

By Donna D. Feeney

	Katie L. Bates

When Katie L. Bates was nine years old, her mother gave her a small red notebook. Katie’s first entry was, “I am writing, scribbling rather, just for fun.” She went on, “The lines are to short for good rhymes. Storys take up two many pages.”

As Katie grew up, she continued to write in notebooks and diaries. Her spelling improved. She even became an English teacher. And she wrote lots of rhymes and stories.

One of those rhymes became an anthem that we sing today—more than one hundred years after she wrote it. The song is “America the Beautiful.”

Bates wrote the poem in a notebook during her first trip west in 1893, when she was thirty-three years old. She was headed for Colorado College in Colorado Springs to teach a summer class. At that time she was Miss Katharine L. Bates, a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Traveling by train, she stopped in Chicago to visit a friend. While there she spent time at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The Exposition was a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. No matter that the fair was a year late—it was spectacular. Many of the buildings were white, and the fair became known as “The White City.”

By the fourth of July, Bates was in western Kansas. She noted its “fertile prairies” in her diary. When she finally arrived in Colorado, she wrote that she had begun teaching “under the purple range of the Rockies.”

Summer session lasted only a few weeks. When it was over, the teachers wanted to celebrate. What better way than to go to the top of nearby Pikes Peak, the best-known mountain in the Rockies?

Katharine Bates wrote that her group was “not vigorous enough to achieve the climb on foot nor adventurous enough for burro riding.” So they made their way huddled in prairie wagons.

On the tailboards of the covered wagons were signs saying “Pikes Peak or Bust,” the same slogan gold prospectors had used years before. Horses took the group halfway up the mountain. Mules pulled the wagons the rest of the way.

“We were hoping for half an hour on the summit,” wrote Miss Bates. But when the teachers got to the top, two of them became faint from the thin air. The group was quickly “bundled into the wagons” for the “down-ward plunge.”

Katharine Bates said that there was hardly time on the peak for more than an “ecstatic gaze.” She added, however, “it was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.”

As she put the poem on paper, she also recalled the gleaming “White City” of the Exposition. She expanded on it as “thine alabaster cities.”

By the time Bates left Colorado Springs, the four stanzas of “America the Beautiful” were penciled in her notebook.

When she returned home, she was so busy at school that she laid the notebook aside. It wasn’t until two years later that she submitted the poem to a publication. It first appeared in The Congregationalist on July 4, 1895—a perfect date for a patriotic poem.

	Katharine Lee Bates, a graduate of Wellesley College, taught there and was head of the English literature department until a few years before she died in 1929.

But that version isn’t exactly the same as the one we sing today. It began:

O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!

Most people liked her poem, but some suggested changes. Miss Bates considered the ideas, which came from all over the United States. Over time, she rewrote parts of the poem. A new version was published in 1904. Later, changes were made to the third stanza, and “America the Beautiful” became the poem we know today.

Even as she was revising it, the poem was being sung to many different tunes. In 1926 a contest was sponsored by the past presidents of the National
Federation of Music Clubs to find an appropriate melody for “America the Beautiful.” Almost nine hundred compositions were submitted, but none of them was selected.

The National Federation of Music Clubs and the National Hymn Society wanted the poem to become the country’s national anthem. But it was “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which had been sung by the public and the armed forces for many years, that became the official national anthem five years later, in 1931.

Today, “America the Beautiful” is usually sung to the hymn “Materna,” written by Samuel A. Ward. Ward, who lived from 1847 to 1903, was a church organist, choirmaster, and music-store owner in Newark, New Jersey.

Throughout her life, Katharine Lee Bates never stopped filling notebooks with her “scribbling.” She wrote many poems as well as travel books, textbooks, and children’s books.

But it is the poem she wrote 401 years after Columbus first came to the New World that continues to remind Americans of the sweeping beauty and majesty of their country. It is no wonder that “America the Beautiful” has been called the unofficial national anthem of the United States.