Main Office — 555 E Pikes Peak Ave, Suite 200 – Colorado Springs, CO 80903 – (719) 633-3850
North Office — 8580 Scarborough Dr, Suite 120 – Colorado Springs, CO 80920
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We have chosen to name our practice Iron Horse Pediatrics because of our location in the old Santa Fe Railroad station, which dates to 1917. We like the way this term evokes the early history of our region. We asked Mark L. Gardner, a local historian, to research the term Iron Horse, and provided us with these citations:
The earliest mention of the term appeared in the Charleston, Courier on December 29, 1830, when the locomotive “Best Friend” was referred to as an Iron Horse. The engine was remarkable for being able to pull 40 to 50 passengers at a speed of 16 to 21 miles per hour. In 1859, in the book Rocky Mountain Life, the early fur trader Rufus Sage predicted the joining of the rails that would occur at Promontory Point in Utah ten years later: “The lofty cliffs of the Rocky Mountains are soon to echo to the tread of advancing civilization, as symbolized in the Pacific railway, which will, in a few years, speed the Iron Horse and his living freight from Boston to Sat Francisco, forming a bond of social and commercial intercourse across the continent.”
The term Iron Horse reminds us of the way children see the world. Imagine a great metal horse galloping day and night across the West. Horses, like dinosaurs, trucks and trains, have long served as symbols of strength, speed and excitement for young children, as in the traditional rocking horse, in stories of unicorns, or on a Merry-Go-Round.
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IRON HORSE PEDIATRICS!
In The Vanishing Race: The Last Great Indian Council by Dr. Joseph K. Dixon (1913, p. 124), Chief Two Moons of the Cheyenne is quoted as saying, “The first time the Indian saw a locomotive, he called it the Iron Horse, and the railroad was called the Iron Road.”