A LADY'S LIFE
IN THE
ROCKY MOUNTAINS
Isabella L. Bird
Introduction by
Ann Ronald
University of Nevada, Reno
To My Sister,
to whom
these letters were originally written,
they are now
affectionately dedicated.
Contents
Introduction, by Ann Ronald
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.
LETTER II
A lady's "get-up"--Grizzly bears--The "Gem of the Sierras"--A
tragic tale--A carnival of color.
LETTER III
A Temple of Morpheus--Utah--A "God-forgotten" town--A distressed
couple--Dog villages--A temperance colony--A Colorado inn
--The bug pest--Fort Collins.
LETTER IV
A plague of flies--A melancholy charioteer--The Foot Hills--A
mountain boarding-house--A dull life--"Being agreeable"--Climate
of Colorado--Soroche and snakes.
LETTER V
A dateless day--"Those hands of yours"--A Puritan--Persevering
shiftlessness--The house-mother--Family worship--A grim Sunday--A
"thick-skulled Englishman"--A morning call--Another
atmosphere--The Great Lone Land--"Ill found"--A log camp--Bad
footing for horses--Accidents--Disappointment.
LETTER VI
A bronco mare--An accident--Wonderland--A sad story--The children
of the Territories--Hard greed--Halcyon hours--Smartness-Old-fashioned prejudices--The Chicago colony--Good luck--Three
notes of admiration--A good horse--The St. Vrain--The Rocky
Mountains at last--"Mountain Jim"--A death hug--Estes Park.
LETTER VII
Personality of Long's Peak--"Mountain Jim"--Lake of the Lilies--A
silent forest--The camping ground--"Ring"--A lady's bower--Dawn
and sunrise--A glorious view--Links of diamonds--The ascent of
the Peak--The "Dog's Lift"--Suffering from thirst--The
descent--The bivouac.
LETTER VIII
Estes Park--Big game--"Parks" in Colorado--Magnificent
scenery--Flowers and pines--An awful road--Our log
cabin--Griffith Evans--A miniature world--Our topics--A
night alarm--A skunk--Morning glories--Daily routine--The
panic--"Wait for the wagon"--A musical evening.
LETTER IX
"Please Ma'ams"--A desperado--A cattle hunt--The muster--A mad
cow--A snowstorm--Snowed up--Birdie--The Plains--A prairie
schooner--Denver--A find--Plum Creek--"Being
agreeable"--Snowbound--The grey mare.
LETTER X
A white world--Bad traveling--A millionaire's home--Pleasant
Park--Perry's Park--Stock-raising--A cattle king--The Arkansas
Divide--Birdie's sagacity--Luxury--Monument Park--Deference to
prejudice--A death scene--The Manitou--A loose shoe--The Ute
Pass--Bergens Park--A settler's home--Hayden's Divide--Sharp
criticism--Speaking the truth.
LETTER XI
Tarryall Creek--The Red Range--Excelsior--Importunate
pedlars--Snow and heat--A bison calf--Deep drifts--South
Park--The Great Divide--Comanche Bill--Difficulties-Hall's Gulch--A Lord Dundreary--Ridiculous fears.
LETTER XII
Deer Valley--Lynch law--Vigilance committees--The silver
spruce--Taste and abstinence--The whisky fiend--Smartness--Turkey
Creek Canyon--The Indian problem--Public rascality--Friendly
meetings--The way to the Golden City--A rising settlement--Clear
Creek Canyon--Staging--Swearing--A mountain town.
LETTER XIII
The blight of mining--Green Lake--Golden
City--Benighted--Vertigo--Boulder Canyon--Financial straits--A
hard ride--The last cent--A bachelor's home--"Mountain Jim"--A
surprise--A night arrival--Making the best of it--Scanty fare.
LETTER XIV
A dismal ride--A desperado's tale--"Lost! Lost! Lost!"--Winter
glories--Solitude--Hard times--Intense cold--A pack of
wolves--The beaver dams--Ghastly scenes--Venison steaks--Our
evenings.
LETTER XV
A whisky slave--The pleasures of monotony--The mountain
lion--"Another mouth to feed"--A tiresome boy--An
outcast--Thanksgiving Day--The newcomer--A literary humbug-Milking a dry cow--Trout-fishing--A snow-storm--A desperado's
den.
LETTER XVI
A harmonious home--Intense cold--A purple sun--A grim jest--A
perilous ride--Frozen eyelids--Longmount--The pathless prairie-Hardships of emigrant life--A trapper's advice--The Little
Thompson--Evans and "Jim."
LETTER XVII
Woman's mission--The last morning--Crossing the St.
Vrain--Miller--The St. Vrain again--Crossing the prairie--"Jim's"
dream--"Keeping strangers"--The inn kitchen--A reputed
child-eater--Notoriety--A quiet dance--"Jim's" resolve--The
frost-fall--An unfortunate introduction.
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 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 color; 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 1,700 feet
deep. It lies at a height of 6,000 feet, and the snow-crowned
summits which wall it in are from 8,000 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 fullness. 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 degrees in the shade, and the fine white
dust was stifling.
In the late afternoon we began the ascent of the Sierras, whose
sawlike 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 broken ridges and deep ravines, the ridges becoming
longer, the ravines deeper, the pines thicker and larger, as we
ascended into a cool atmosphere of exquisite purity, and before 6
P.M. the last traces of cultivation and the last hardwood trees
were left behind.[1]
[1] 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 traveled 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.
(Author's note to the third edition, January 16, 1880.)
At Colfax, a station at a height of 2,400 feet, I got out and
walked the length of the train. First came two great gaudy
engines, the Grizzly Bear and the White Fox, with their
respective tenders loaded with logs of wood, the engines with
great, solitary, reflecting lamps in front above the cow guards,
a quantity of polished brass-work, comfortable glass ...
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