A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird (1831-1904) is a book that began as a series of letters. Isabella was prompted to travel to improve her health, and she made stops in the United States, Australia and Hawaii, writing books about her travels. By 1873 she was in the US again exploring the Territory of Colorado, sending letters to her sister back home in England describing her adventures in the mountains. The letters were latter edited and assembled as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. The book gives the reader a glimpse of life in the sparsely populated area and descriptions of the beautiful scenery as she travels by horseback through the mountains. One of the main characters she meets is “Mountain Jim” Nugent, a local hunter, trapper and “desperado.” She is both morally repulsed and intellectually attracted to the drunken mountain man who can converse with her intelligently on any subject. There may have also been a physical attraction as well, as she writes, “He has large grey-blue eyes, deeply set, with well-marked eyebrows, a handsome aquiline nose and a very handsome mouth.” She arrived in the mountains in autumn of 1873 and made her 800 mile journey by horseback into the early winter, lodging with various locals, who she describes along with the magnificent terrain. A fun and fascinating tour of the mountains and the people who lived in them at the tail end of the old west.