A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
1879
In 1873, a forty-two-year-old Englishwoman with a bad back and an unquenchable curiosity rode alone through the Colorado Rockies, and nothing about the American West would look the same to her again. Isabella Bird had no guide, no companion, and no business being there, yet she climbed fourteeners, slept in miners' cabins, and rode for days through wilderness that still bore the marks of violence and possibility. What she found was a frontier that defied her Victorian expectations: rough men who showed her unexpected gentleness, landscapes so staggeringly beautiful they made her feel 'less small than usual,' and a freedom she had never known in the orderly world she'd left behind. Written as letters to her sister, this narrative crackles with Bird's irrepressible personality - her exasperation at crude table manners, her awe at alpine meadows, her sharp observations about the vigilantes and outcasts she encountered. It's a portal to a vanished West, seen through the eyes of a woman who refused to behave like one.
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“I sat down and knitted for some time - my usual resource under discouraging circumstances.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“Everything suggests a beyond.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“Yet, after all, they were not bad souls; and though he failed so grotesquely, he did his incompetent best.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“In traveling, there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries, and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“I dreamt of bears so vividly that I woke with a furry death hug at my throat, but feeling quite refreshed.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“It is the election day for the Territory, and men were galloping over the prairie to register their votes. The three in the wagon talked politics the whole time. They spoke openly and shamelessly of the prices given for votes; and apparently there was not a politician on either side who was not accused of degrading corruption.””
— Isabella L. Bird
“he "fyked" unreasonably about me, the mare, and the crossing generally,””
— Isabella L. Bird
“In all this wild West the influence of woman is second only in its benefits to the influence of religion, and where the last unhappily does not exist the first continually exerts its restraining””
— Isabella L. Bird
“Young Lyman talked in a "hifalutin" style, but with some truth in it, of the influence of a woman's presence, how "low, mean, vulgar talk" had died out on my return, how they had "all pulled themselves up," and how Mr. Kavan and Mr. Buchan had said they would like always to be as quiet and gentlemanly as when a lady was with them.””
— Isabella L. Bird
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Bird, Isabella L.. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-lady-s-life-in-the-rocky-mountains-c61ada5f-3ce5-4a93-a31d-56a3aa917076.Bird, I. L. (1879). A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-lady-s-life-in-the-rocky-mountains-c61ada5f-3ce5-4a93-a31d-56a3aa917076Bird, Isabella L.. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-lady-s-life-in-the-rocky-mountains-c61ada5f-3ce5-4a93-a31d-56a3aa917076.
