Easterners traveled west as medical invalids seeking a prescribed camping cure in the mountains.

Evidence

At Denver, people who come from the East to try the “camp cure” now so fashionable, get their outfit of wagon, driver, horses, tent, bedding, and stove, and start for the mountains. Asthmatic people are there in such numbers as to warrant the holding of an “asthmatic convention” of patients cured and benefited. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 157

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the ‘camp cure’ as an early wellness-tourism industry — asthma, tents, and outfitters before the sanatorium era.
• CANDY: An actual asthmatic convention of cured patients is an irresistible elevator fact.