A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains

“Born in 1831, Isabella Bird, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes in 1872 ‘in search for health’ and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode on her spirited horse Birdie through the American ‘Wild West’, a terrain only recently opened to pioneer settlement.
Here she met her ‘dear desperado’, Rocky Mountain Jim, who fell in love with her and helped her in climbing the ‘American Matterhorn’ – ‘a man any woman might love, but no sane woman would marry.’

The wonderful letters which make up this volume were first published in 1879, and were enormously popular in her lifetime. They tell of magnificent unspoiled landscapes and abundant wildlife, of small remote townships, of her encounters with Indians and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers.

Isabella Bird wrote many popular books, and remained an indefatiguable traveller virtually until her death in 1904. Between journeys – to Korea, Japan, Persia, Tibet – she lived in Edinburgh, where poor health kept her to her day bed, and from where she wrote articles on the social evils of her time. Abroad again, she had the ‘appetite of a tiger and the digestion of an ostrich’. A daring horsewoman, she rode a thousand miles in Morocco at the age of sixty-nine. She is buried in Edinburgh.”