A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird

We forded the river, whose course is marked the whole way by a fringe of cotton-woods and aspens, and traveled hour after hour with nothing to see except some dog towns, with their quaint little sentinels; but the view in front was glorious. The Alps, from the Lombard Plains, are the finest mountain panorama I ever saw, but not equal to this; for not only do five high-peaked giants, each nearly the height of Mount Blanc, lift their dazzling summits above the lower ranges, but the expanse of mountains is so vast, and the whole lie in a transparent medium of the richest blue, not haze--something peculiar to the region.

Explorer Isabella L. Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is an account of her 1873 travels throughout the Rockies, framed as a series of letters written to her sister. I put it on my Kindle on a whim for my trip to Colorado because I was struggling to find a book written by a woman--as you might know, I try to alternate--to go with Craig Child's travelogue about searching for Ancestral Puebloan sites on the western side of the state. Bird's book turned out to be delightful--a breezy, well-written account of life in Colorado in the late nineteenth century, accented by skillful descriptions of the land and droll accounts of the region's "characters."

Obviously, traveling in the Rocky Mountains in 1873 is not like the traveling I did there this week.  It takes an hour for the modern traveler to get from Denver to Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, but when Bird did it, it took several days of difficult travel by horse. And when she got there, Estes Park was not the town we know it today, but a true park, meaning a kind of valley or glad that might be home to a few houses. In this case, those houses belong to a pair of rival mountain guides, both of whom ingratiate themselves to Bird: Evans, with whom she typically boards, and the infamous desperado known as "Mountain Jim," whose bloodthirsty and frightening reputation is immediately belied by his chivalry toward Bird, with whom he strikes up an immediate friendship.

Birds account of Mountain Jim is, if I had to pick something, the most delightful thing about the book, and it's complicated by the numerous footnotes for publication revealing, little by little, that Jim met his end after the events of the book after being shot by Evans. We never get the whole story, which as I understand it is somewhat lost to history, but there's a bittersweetness to Bird's clear implication that it was Jim's reprobate ways, not Evans, that really brought his downfall. This knowledge brings a special irony to a late section where Jim, having guided Bird up a high winter pass, tearfully breaks down about his own "lost" nature.

But Jim is only one of a few fascinating characters who appear in Bird's travels, which include other trappers and guides, destitute farmers, and poor greenhorns who are in over their heads in the hardscrabble new territory. Bird notes that the thin mountain air has attracted many consumptives, and some of the saddest parts of the novel are depictions of tubercular patients who have arrived in the Rockies to live out the last moments of their lives. I also really liked her resentful account of a young boarder who eats everything, does no work, and loses the milk cow. But the most interesting character might be Bird herself, who despite some false modesty about her abilities, comes off as an intrepid and capable solo traveler. It's no wonder that, wherever she goes, the newspapers have announced the arrival of the remarkable "British lady." And part of that character is not just her ability to traverse the mountains, but really see them--her descriptions of the Rockies transcend the 150 years of stylistic difference, and I was particularly struck by her detailed account of climbing Longs Peak, a feat that challenges climbers even today.