A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Isabella Bird and Stephanie Nikolopoulos

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Like the glorious afterglow so often described in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), Isabella Bird's impassioned travelogue continues to delight us as it recounts escapades of blizzards, grizzly bears, and a desperado known as "Mountain Jim." A symbiotic weave of adventure and sentiment, the book recounts the story of an English woman's solo journey from California to Colorado. Whether you're interested in nature, the history of the Rocky Mountain region, travel writing, Christianity, or women's studies, Bird's simple yet provocative letters will entertain your imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411468573

Book preview

ESTES PARK.

001

A LADY'S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS

ISABELLA BIRD

INTRODUCTION BY STEPHANIE NIKOLOPOULOS

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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New York, NY 10011

ISBN: 978-1-4114-6857-3

To my Sister,

to whom

these letters were originally written,

they are now

affectionately dedicated.

Note to the Second Edition

For the benefit of other lady travellers, I wish to explain that my Hawaiian riding dress is the American Lady’s Mountain Dress, a half-fitting jacket, a skirt reaching to the ankles, and full Turkish trousers gathered into frills falling over the boots,—a thoroughly serviceable and feminine costume for mountaineering and other rough travelling, as in the Alps or any other part of the world.

I. L. B.

November 27, 1879.

Note to the Third Edition

In consequence of the unobserved omission of a date to my letters having been pointed out to me, I take this opportunity of stating that I travelled in Colorado in the autumn and early winter of 1873, on my way to England from the Sandwich Islands. The letters are a faithful picture of the country and state of society as it then was; but friends who have returned from the West within the last six months tell me that things are rapidly changing, that the frame house is replacing the log cabin, and that the footprints of elk and bighorn may be sought for in vain on the dewy slopes of Estes Park.

I. L. B.

January 16, 1880.

INTRODUCTION

LIKE the glorious afterglow so often described in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, Isabella Bird’s impassioned travelogue continues to delight us long after its initial publication in 1879. This series of letters written to her younger sister in Victorian Scotland relishes with detail the pristine landscape of the wild West with its strictly North American beauty. A symbiotic weave of adventure and sentiment, the book recounts the story of a woman’s solo journey from California to Colorado. Today, Lake Tahoe and Estes Park are luxurious tourist destinations, but in the late nineteenth century Bird said it was no region for tourists and women. The English clergyman’s daughter rigorously travels for days on end without seeing a single person, triumphs over blizzards, encounters snakes and grizzly bears, becomes enraptured by a desperado known as Mountain Jim, and leaves behind an eminent legacy. It’s no wonder, the Spectator said, There never was anybody who had adventures as well as Miss Bird. Whether you’re interested in nature, the history of the Rocky Mountain region, travel writing, Christianity, women’s studies, or familial relations, Bird’s simple yet provocative letters will entertain your imagination.

The motivation for Isabella Lucy Bird’s life of travel can be found in her roots. Born in Yorkshire, England, on October 15, 1831, Bird could have been described as a rambunctious little girl if it were not for the illness that often confined her to bed. She began traveling in her early twenties when a doctor recommended it as a remedy to her back pain. The letters she sent home to her younger sister, Henrietta, became the source for A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains and other travel writings. Born to Edward Bird, an Anglican pastor of the Church of England, and Dora Lawson, herself a preacher’s daughter, Isabella wrote with a spiritual appreciation for the lands she visited, from Australia to China. Bird lived a life of continual travel and as a result was the first woman to be elected to the Royal Geographical Society. She settled down only for a short time when at fifty years old she married her longtime friend Dr. John Bishop. Bird died in Edinburgh, Scotland, on October 7, 1904, with the final observation that she was going home.

Bird never let her physical ailments slow her down. As a child she played just as rough as her cousins when they gathered at her Grandfather Bird’s Taplow House in the summers. Her mind-over-matter attitude was apparently inherited from her father, Edward Bird, whom biographer Pat Barr describes as, an impulsive, passionate, uncompromising man, his rather frail physique stretched to breaking-point by the demands of his highly-strung temperament. In spite of suffering from back pain at an early age, Isabella and her father would go horseback riding around his parish. This tendency to persevere in physical exercise continued when doctors instructed her to travel to better her health. Bird had a tumor in her spine removed when she was eighteen years old, but her back pain continued. Ironically, Bird’s health improved when she traveled, even though travel was neither as convenient nor comfortable as it is today.

Critics, therefore, have conjectured that Bird’s sickness may have been psychosomatic. Bird traveled much of the time in demanding conditions. In A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, she describes long days on horseback and treacherous winter conditions, but never complained of health problems. However, research indicates that whenever she returned home Bird would fall ill. The Edinburgh Medical Journal described her as, The invalid at home, and the Samson abroad. Bird herself confessed she felt sluggish when at home but that When I am traveling I don’t feel it, but that is why I can never stay anywhere. It is possible that, as a woman, Bird simply felt stifled in the oppressive cultural environment of the United Kingdom. Without the opportunity to keep physically busy and experience new adventures, her mind may have focused on the sometimes-negative circumstance of being a woman in Victorian society. While feminism outside of Europe may not have necessarily been more advanced, Bird gained autonomy when she traveled on her own, away from her family and the expectations of those around her. It was to a certain degree necessary for women to be bold initiators in America because the country was younger. Colorado itself was progressive: Having entered the Union in 1876, by 1893 it was the second state to give women the right to vote.

Bird may not have been an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, but her actions clearly indicate her belief that women were capable of taking care of themselves. Traveling on her own to remote parts of the world, where ecological and political conditions were potentially dangerous, Bird exhibited everything from independence and courage to adaptability and street smarts. In East Asia, for example, she escaped a xenophobic Chinese mob that tried to stone her. Although women travelers in the Victorian era had to contend with harsher gender inequality than modern women, little has changed in that women today still face a number of the same issues when they travel independently. Recent books such as Thalia Zepatos’ Journey of One’s Own: Uncommon Advice for the Independent Woman Traveler (1996) and Marybeth Bond’s Gutsy Women: More Travel Tips and Wisdom for the Road (2001) demonstrate what are most frequently considered gender-specific concerns of traveling: sexual harassment, women’s health, safety, as well as how to avoid being ripped off. In A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains even a man considered to be of dodgy character himself warns Bird to get a revolver, which indicates that women travelers were not any safer in the nineteenth century than they are in the twenty-first century.

Being an independent traveler was not the only thing that set Bird apart from most women. Bird did not view her femininity in terms of the ability to please a man and produce offspring. While some may argue that her self-reliance stems from the luxury of coming from a family with enough money to support her so that she did not have to marry, as many women of her time period did, it is important to remember that there were, and still are, social stigmas surrounding women who do not start a family. In A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains we encounter Mr. Nugent, better known as Rocky Mountain Jim, who Bird says, is one of the famous scouts of the Plains, and is the original of some daring portraits in fiction concerning Indian frontier warfare. Although most critical research suggests mutual admiration between the two, Bird does not obsessively pine over Mountain Jim in the travelogue and instead leaves Colorado without looking back. After returning from one of her trips, and perhaps falling ill again, Bird met Dr. John Bishop in Edinburgh. The two became good friends, but Bird, claiming that there was no room for a third in her relationship with her sister, rejected the doctor’s advances. It was only after he had proposed three times and her sister had passed away that Bird married Bishop on March 8, 1881. By the time they married, she was fifty years old and well past childbearing years. When Bishop died five years later, Bird, naturally, returned to her travels.

Still, Bird was a product of her time. After the Times reported that she wore men’s clothes, she wrote a note to the second edition of A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains that defended her Hawaiian riding dress, which she claimed not to iron but to bleach, as being a thoroughly serviceable and feminine costume for mountaineering and other rough travelling in any part of the world. More telling, Bird wrote passionately about her experience cooking for the men she lived with during a blizzard. Presumably, the men were capable of hunting and cooking when they were on their own in the woods; but with Bird’s arrival the weight of the cooking responsibility fell on her. With detail she described her frustration of cooking for the men with the little resources provided, and she sounds particularly annoyed by the youngest, who although offered no service to the group ravenously ate all their food and tried to coax Bird into making more. At one point, Bird went to the extreme of saying, I felt like a servant.

Whether she was climbing mountains or baking cakes, Bird wrote ardently about her experiences in America. She frequently sent home detailed letters describing her adventures, and it was because her friends wanted to know more about her intrepid lifestyle that Bird began publishing these letters. The most frequent recipient of these letters appears to have been her younger sister, Henrietta, whom she referred affectionately to as Hennie. According to Bird, Hennie was the inspiration of all my literary work, my best public, my home and fireside, my most intimate and congenial friend. Despite the sisters’ close bond, they lived apart from each other even when Bird was not traveling. The Bird family had moved to Edinburgh after Edward died, and when their mother died Hennie moved to an island off of Scotland. The letters Bird sent home to her sister were originally published in Leisure Hour in 1878 before becoming the basis for A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. When the book came out it was met with positive reviews. The San Francisco Chronicle called the book, a great piece of reporting, while the Chicago Tribune said, The book is a jewel case of keen perception, social analysis, and masterful description for this era. In fact, despite writing many subsequent books about her travels to more exotic locales than the United States, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains has remained Bird’s most popular work.

Fellow Victorian traveler Mary Kingsley has often overshadowed Bird’s literary stardom, though. While Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa certainly is a valuable opponent for the crown of Victorian travelogues, it was not written until 1897, almost two decades after Bird had paved the path for women travelers with A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. Perhaps a more worthy rival would be Bird’s predecessor Harriet Martineau, a prominent writer of the 1830s. Like Bird, Martineau started out as a religious writer and overcame a physical disability—deafness—to travel to America. However, Martineau never achieved Bird’s level of esteem in the States because of her harsh criticism of the American way of life. Another important figure in the history of women’s travel writing is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was assailed by popular literary icons Alexander Pope and Horace Walpole in the mid-1700s but who today is recognized as one of the preeminent women of her day. While travel writing has been popular since the days of Herodotus’ Histories (5th century BC) and presumably gained in stature as travel became more accessible, it was by no means the norm for women to travel independently of their families. Bird, therefore was a pioneer, having begun traveling on her own in her early twenties and subsequently traveling under rigorous and dangerous circumstances to remote regions throughout the world.

Although Bird would go on to write almost ten books that were based on her letter writing, the first book she wrote, The Englishwoman in America, was initiated by her father. Edward was curious about the religious temper in North America and encouraged his daughter to travel to Canada and the United States to give a first-hand sociological account. Edward and Isabella had originally planned to collaborate on the project, but Edward passed away leaving Isabella to write the book on her own. Fortunately, Isabella had good family ties and with the help of the wealthy publisher John Murray III she published the book in 1856. It was met with praise and sold well both in Europe and America. Always charitable, Bird reportedly used the proceeds to buy boats for poor fishermen.

In fact, Bird’s Christian upbringing played heavily into her lifework. Her father had a very strict interpretation of the Bible, which apparently did not sit well with the Church of England. After her father lost his position at Tattenhall, Bird, at around eleven years old, became a Sunday School teacher at her father’s new parish in Birmingham, England. The family had to move again when Bird was in her teens because of Edward’s conflicts with this parish. While Bird herself did not envision herself as a preacher, like her father, or a missionary, like some of her relatives, she did believe strongly in performing works of charity. In one letter to her sister she wrote, If my back gets well enough I seriously think that a servant’s place would be the best thing. Indeed Bird did live according to the Bible’s instructions to serve others, reportedly setting up hospitals in Asia. She furthermore used her literary talents to write religious tracks.

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, while not overtly religious, criticizes the idolatry of money over God in the West and indicates the spirituality with which Bird viewed her surroundings. In one beautiful passage, she hikes to the canyons in search of solitude and ponders the words of The Imitation of Christ. She says, To be alone in the Park from the afternoon till the last glory of the afterglow has faded, with no books but a Bible and Prayer-book, is truly delightful. No worthier temple for a ‘Te Deum’ or ‘Gloria in Excelsis’ could be found than this ‘temple not made with hands.’ She uses an almost Psalm-like phraseology to describe the mountains, and one cannot help but recall Psalm 50:11, I know every Bird in the mountains, (capitalization mine) when thinking of Isabella Bird. Similar to Native-American writing, Bird’s work is imbued with an appreciation for the beauty of God’s creation.

Her love for the outdoors of course connects her not only to the land but furthermore to her horse. By the time she reached adulthood, Bird was renown for her equestrian skills. Even before A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains was published in book form her reputation was growing: "They asked me if I were the English lady written of in the Denver News, and for once I was glad that my fame had preceded me, as it seemed to secure me against being quietly ‘put out of the way.’ This is not to say, however, that her travels on horseback were not without incident. After she is bucked off a half-broken bronco mare, Bird describes her flesh as being crushed into jelly, but goes on to say she does not want anyone making a fuss" over her.

By the third printing of the book in 1880, however, the Manifest Destiny so prevalent in America had visibly changed the landscape of the West that Bird had visited just seven years earlier. She writes in the note to the third edition that with the establishment of permanent housing where there was once natural woods the footprints of elk and bighorn may be searched for in vain on the dewy grass of Estes Park. The desecration of America’s landscape and animals—the near-extinction of the buffalo is a popular example of the extreme influence settlers had on the West—had a profound impact on environmental laws and the setting aside of national lands in the early twentieth century. In less than a hundred years from the publication of A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, the landscape of literature would vastly change from that of the great outdoors to that of a postmodern city. The sorrowfulness of modern technology’s destruction of nature is eloquently described by Beat-poet Allen Ginsberg, who like Bird spent time writing in San Francisco and Denver, when in his 1955 poem Sunflower Sutra he asks a sunflower that is dying against a smoggy sunset, when did you forget you were a flower? Bird’s work therefore acts as an important reminder of the untamed West of America’s youth.

Back in the 1800s when she was writing to her sister, Bird probably never imagined the popularity she still has with the masses today. A women’s clothing line for The Territory Ahead Stores (TTA) have even been inspired by Bird, and Bruce Willard, president and founder of TTA catalog company, refers to her as Mark Twain’s alter ego. (Twain wrote a travelogue about the West called Roughing It in 1872.) Furthermore, she has a strong presence on the Internet, with websites devoted to her work and personality. Her writings have been converted even into eBook platforms, making it easy for travelers to read her work en-route. As part of their Book Groups on the Road trip to Colorado, BookWomen Center for Feminist Reading initiated discussions about A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. Importantly, women aren’t just admiring Bird from afar—they’re blazing their own paths. The women’s travel-writing industry has grown increasingly, with such books as Bad Girl’s Guide to the Open Road (Cameron Tuttle; 1999) and Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write from the Road (Ed. Jennifer Leo; 2003). Furthermore, in 2003, a report by New York University indicated that in America women were estimated to make up 40 percent of business travelers. It’s without a doubt that Isabella Bird impacted woman’s place in the world at large.

Stephanie Nikolopoulos is an editor at Barnes & Noble Books. Her writing has appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States.

CONTENTS

LETTER I

LETTER II

LETTER III

LETTER IV

LETTER V

LETTER VI

LETTER VII

LETTER VIII

LETTER IX

LETTER X

LETTER XI

LETTER XII

LETTER XIII

LETTER XIV

LETTER XV

LETTER XVI

LETTER XVII

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

LETTER I

Lake Tahoe—Morning in San Francisco—Dust—A Pacific Mail-Train—Digger Indians—Cape Horn—A Mountain Hotel—A Pioneer—A Truckee Livery Stable—A Mountain Stream—Finding a Bear—Tahoe.

LAKE TAHOE, September 2.

I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one’s life and sigh. Not lovable, like the Sandwich Islands, but beautiful in its own way! A strictly North American beauty—snow-splotched mountains, huge pines, red-woods, sugar pines, silver spruce; a crystalline atmosphere, waves of the richest colour; and a pine-hung lake which mirrors all beauty on its surface. Lake Tahoe is before me, a sheet of water twenty-two miles long by ten broad, and in some places 1700 feet deep. It lies at a height of 6000 feet, and the snow-crowned summits which wall it in are from 8000 to 11,000 feet in altitude. The air is keen and elastic. There is no sound but the distant and slightly musical ring of the lumberer’s axe.

It is a weariness to go back, even in thought, to the clang of San Francisco, which I left in its cold morning fog early yesterday, driving to the Oakland ferry through streets with side-walks heaped with thousands of cantaloupe and water-melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, pears, grapes, peaches, apricots—all of startling size as compared with any I ever saw before. Other streets were piled with sacks of flour, left out all night, owing to the security from rain at this season. I pass hastily over the early part of the journey, the crossing the bay in a fog as chill as November, the number of lunch baskets, which gave the car the look of conveying a great picnic party, the last view of the Pacific, on which I had looked for nearly a year, the fierce sunshine and brilliant sky inland, the look of long rainlessness, which one may not call drought, the valleys with sides crimson with the poison oak, the dusty vineyards, with great purple clusters thick among the leaves, and between the vines great dusty melons lying on the dusty earth. From off the boundless harvest-fields the grain was carried in June, and it is now stacked in sacks along the track, awaiting freightage. California is a land flowing with milk and honey. The barns are bursting with fulness. In the dusty orchards the apple and pear branches are supported, that they may not break down under the weight of fruit; melons, tomatoes, and squashes of gigantic size lie almost unheeded on the ground; fat cattle, gorged almost to repletion, shade themselves under the oaks; superb red horses shine, not with grooming, but with condition; and thriving farms everywhere show on what a solid basis the prosperity of the Golden State is founded. Very uninviting, however rich, was the blazing Sacramento Valley, and very repulsive the city of Sacramento, which, at a distance of 125 miles from the Pacific, has an elevation of only thirty feet. The mercury stood at 103° in the shade, and the fine white dust was stifling.

In the late afternoon we began the ascent of the Sierras, whose saw-like points had been in sight for many miles. The dusty fertility was all left behind, the country became rocky and gravelly, and deeply scored by streams bearing the muddy wash of the mountain gold-mines down to the muddier Sacramento. There were long