Isabella Lucy Bird connected with Colorado's beauty
Kevin Cook
Plains she found empty and dull; canyons she found dark and cramped; valleys and mountain parks she found exhilarating.
She did not phrase her feelings in such manner, but Isabella Bird described what she saw and what she experienced in a manner that reveals the orientation of her aesthetic preferences.
Bird won fame as the first woman to stand atop Longs Peak; and as too often happens in the lives of people who live fully and robustly, such fame glows with a borrowed light.
Born an Englishwoman in 1831, Isabella Lucy Bird grew into adulthood during a time when doctors had no clue that germs cause disease so that medical treatment was often limited to having a little brandy, getting some rest, taking in fresh air, traveling.
When back problems arose for her, ailment became a lifestyle. Ultimately, she took the advice and traveled. And traveled. And traveled.
Bird was 41 and single when she entered Colorado on Sept. 9, 1873; she was 42 and still single when she left Colorado on December 12.
While here she spent most of her time in Estes Park, but she traveled to Garden of the Gods, across South Park and through many of the mining towns. More than just traveling, she engaged the places she visited and the people she encountered.
Isabella Bird did not just pass through Colorado. She connected with it.
We can understand this connection by the letters she wrote to Henrietta, her sister. After returning to England, she assembled those letters into the book, "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains," a book that endures to this day.
While traveling from Cheyenne to Greeley, she could see the far off Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, a view that stimulated her to write, "The Alps, from the Lombard Plains, are the finest mountain panorama I ever saw, but not equal to this...."
Her pen — the ink for which she occasionally had to place on a stove to thaw it for writing — recorded her thoughts about the tameness of elk and bighorn sheep, of the great forests of huge pines, of the plains rivers sparsely grown with small trees.
Of prairie dogs she expressed both her fear that they would eventually destroy everything on the plains because they were so numerous and her admiration of them for the way they could thrive in such a desolate place.
Such conflicting sentiments honestly balanced portray a person keen of eye and deep of thought, a person who noticed things and paid attention to details. Her observations endure as a basis of comparison that we might gauge how Colorado has changed yet remained the same over the last century and a half.
This is the full measure of fame by which Isabella Bird should be remembered.
Write to Kevin J. Cook at the Coloradoan, 1300 Riverside Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80524
Views and Vistas
Subject: Writing Colorado — More Than Mountain Climbing
Where: Old Town Public Library, 200 Peterson St., Ft. Collins
When: Noon to 1 p.m., Tuesday, Apr. 14
Cost: Free and open to the public
Overview: Fourth program in a year-long series about books that detail the natural history of Colorado, "Mountain Climbing " will present details of Isabella Bird's travels through Colorado in 1873 and interpret their relevance to the Colorado of today.