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Isabella Bird
English traveller and writer
1831-1904 A selection from
A LADY'S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
Narrated by Wanda McCaddon
This file is 2.7 MB;
running time is 11 minutes
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This audio program is copyrighted by Redwood Audiobooks.
Permission is granted to download for personal use only;
not for distribution or commercial use.
ESTES PARK, COLORADO TERRITORY, October 2
How time has slipped by I do not know. This is a glorious
region, and the air and life are intoxicating. I live mainly out
of doors and on horseback, wear my half-threadbare Hawaiian
dress, sleep sometimes under the stars on a bed of pine boughs,
ride on a Mexican saddle, and hear once more the low music of my
Mexican spurs. "There's a stranger! Heave arf a brick at him!"
is said by many travelers to express the feeling of the new
settlers in these Territories. This is not my experience in my
cheery mountain home. How the rafters ring as I write with songs
and mirth, while the pitch-pine logs blaze and crackle in the
chimney, and the fine snow dust drives in through the chinks and
forms mimic snow wreaths on the floor, and the wind raves and
howls and plays among the creaking pine branches and snaps them
short off, and the lightning plays round the blasted top of
Long's Peak, and the hardy hunters divert themselves with the
thought that when I go to bed I must turn out and face the storm!
You will ask, "What is Estes Park?" This name, with the quiet
Midland Countries' sound, suggests "park palings" well lichened,
a lodge with a curtseying woman, fallow deer, and a Queen Anne
mansion. Such as it is, Estes Park is mine. It is unsurveyed,
"no man's land," and mine by right of love, appropriation, and
appreciation; by the seizure of its peerless sunrises and
sunsets, its glorious afterglow, its blazing noons, its
hurricanes sharp and furious, its wild auroras, its glories of
mountain and forest, of canyon, lake, and river, and the
stereotyping them all in my memory. Mine, too, in a better than
the sportsman's sense, are its majestic wapiti, which play and
fight under the pines in the early morning, as securely as fallow
deer under our English oaks; its graceful "black-tails," swift of
foot; its superb bighorns, whose noble leader is to be seen now
and then with his classic head against the blue sky on the top of
a colossal rock; its sneaking mountain lion with his hideous
nocturnal caterwaulings, the great "grizzly," the beautiful
skunk, the wary beaver, who is always making lakes, damming and
turning streams, cutting down young cotton-woods, and setting an
example of thrift and industry; the wolf, greedy and cowardly;
the coyote and the lynx, and all the lesser fry of mink, marten,
cat, hare, fox, squirrel, and chipmunk, as well as things that
fly, from the eagle down to the crested blue-jay. May their
number never be less, in spite of the hunter who kills for food
and gain, and the sportsman who kills and marauds for
pastime!
But still I have not answered the natural question, "What is
Estes Park?" Among the striking peculiarities of these mountains
are hundreds of high-lying valleys, large and small, at heights
varying from 6,000 to 11,000 feet. The most important are North
Park, held by hostile Indians; Middle Park, famous for hot
springs and trout; South Park is 10,000 feet high, a great
rolling prairie seventy miles long, well grassed and watered, but
nearly closed by snow in winter. But parks innumerable are
scattered throughout the mountains, most of them unnamed, and
others nicknamed by the hunters or trappers who have made them
their temporary resorts. They always lie far within the flaming
Foot Hills, their exquisite stretches of flowery pastures dotted
artistically with clumps of trees sloping lawnlike to bright
swift streams full of red-waist-coated trout, or running up in
soft glades into the dark forest, above which the snow peaks rise
in their infinite majesty. Some are bits of meadow a mile long
and very narrow, with a small stream, a beaver dam, and a pond
made by beaver industry. Hundreds of these can only be reached
by riding in the bed of a stream, or by scrambling up some narrow
canyon till it debouches on the fairy-like stretch above. These
parks are the feeding grounds of innumerable wild animals, and
some, like one three miles off, seem chosen for the process of
antler-casting, the grass being covered for at least a square
mile with the magnificent branching horns of the elk.
As I intend to make Estes Park my headquarters until the winter
sets in, I must make you acquainted with my surroundings and mode
of living. The "Queen Anne mansion" is represented by a log
cabin made of big hewn logs. The chinks should be filled with
mud and lime, but these are wanting. The roof is formed of
barked young spruce, then a layer of hay, and an outer coating of
mud, all nearly flat. The floors are roughly boarded. The
"living room" is about sixteen feet square, and has a rough stone
chimney in which pine logs are always burning. At one end there
is a door into a small bedroom, and at the other a door into a
small eating room, at the table of which we feed in relays. This
opens into a very small kitchen with a great American
cooking-stove, and there are two "bed closets" besides. Although
rude, it is comfortable, except for the draughts. The fine snow
drives in through the chinks and covers the floors, but sweeping
it out at intervals is both fun and exercise. There are no heaps
or rubbish places outside. Near it, on the slope under the
pines, is a pretty two-roomed cabin, and beyond that, near the
lake, is my cabin, a very rough one. My door opens into a little
room with a stone chimney, and that again into a small room with
a hay bed, a chair with a tin basin on it, a shelf and some pegs.
A small window looks on the lake, and the glories of the sunrises
which I see from it are indescribable. Neither of my doors has a
lock, and, to say the truth, neither will shut, as the wood has
swelled. Below the house, on the stream which issues from the
lake, there is a beautiful log dairy, with a water wheel outside,
used for churning. Besides this, there are a corral, a shed for
the wagon, a room for the hired man, and shelters for horses and
weakly calves. All these things are necessaries at this height.
I shall not soon forget my first night here.
Somewhat dazed by the rarefied air, entranced by the glorious
beauty, slightly puzzled by the motley company, whose faces
loomed not always quite distinctly through the cloud of smoke
produced by eleven pipes, I went to my solitary cabin at nine,
attended by Evans. It was very dark, and it seemed a long way
off. Something howled—Evans said it was a wolf—and owls
apparently innumerable hooted incessantly. The pole-star,
exactly opposite my cabin door, burned like a lamp. The frost
was sharp. Evans opened the door, lighted a candle, and left me,
and I was soon in my hay bed. I was frightened—that is, afraid
of being frightened, it was so eerie—but sleep soon got the
better of my fears. I was awoke by a heavy breathing, a noise
something like sawing under the floor, and a pushing and
upheaving, all very loud. My candle was all burned, and, in
truth, I dared not stir. The noise went on for an hour fully,
when, just as I thought the floor had been made sufficiently thin
for all purposes of ingress, the sounds abruptly ceased, and I
fell asleep again. My hair was not, as it ought to have been,
white in the morning!
I was dressed by seven, our breakfast hour, and when I reached
the great cabin and told my story, Evans laughed hilariously, and
Edwards contorted his face dismally. They told me that there was
a skunk's lair under my cabin, and that they dare not make any
attempt to dislodge him for fear of rendering the cabin
untenable. They have tried to trap him since, but without
success, and each night the noisy performance is repeated.
October 3
This is surely one of the most entrancing spots on earth. Oh,
that I could paint with pen or brush! From my bed I look on
Mirror Lake, and with the very earliest dawn, when objects are
not discernible, it lies there absolutely still, a purplish lead
color. Then suddenly into its mirror flash inverted peaks, at
first a dawn darker all round. This is a new sight, each morning
new. Then the peaks fade, and when morning is no longer "spread
upon the mountains," the pines are mirrored in my lake almost as
solid objects, and the glory steals downwards, and a red flush
warms the clear atmosphere of the park, and the hoar-frost
sparkles and the crested blue-jays step forth daintily on the
jewelled grass. The majesty and beauty grow on me daily. As
I crossed from my cabin just now, and the long mountain shadows
lay on the grass, and form and color gained new meanings, I was
almost false to Hawaii; I couldn't go on writing for the glory of
the sunset, but went out and sat on a rock to see the deepening
blue in the dark canyons, and the peaks becoming rose color one
by one, then fading into sudden ghastliness, the awe-inspiring
heights of Long's Peak fading last. Then came the glories of the
afterglow, when the orange and lemon of the east faded into gray,
and then gradually the gray for some distance above the horizon
brightened into a cold blue, and above the blue into a broad band
of rich, warm red, with an upper band of rose color; above it
hung a big cold moon. This is the "daily miracle" of evening, as
the blazing peaks in the darkness of Mirror Lake are the miracle
of morning. Perhaps this scenery is not lovable, but, as if it
were a strong stormy character, it has an intense fascination.
More information about Isabella Bird from Wikipedia
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