A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  Confused and uneasy in this predominantly masculine throng, Isabella made but two calls in town. Her first was to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, who duly recorded it in his personal column: ‘Miss I. Bird … a noted traveller in new and strange countries is in Denver … She travels almost altogether on horseback and has laid out a pretty good winter’s work for herself.’ Her second call was to ex-Governor Hunt of Colorado, who assisted her ‘winter’s work’ by giving her a map and introductory letters to settlers en route, for, as in Hawaii, there were no inns, and it was customary for people to receive travellers in their homes. Hunt, incidentally, was a man typical of his time and place: finder of a fortune in the gold rush of ’49 and loser of it over a poker-table; blazer of trails to the mines and over the mountains in the past, and now wheeler-dealer in railroads and local politics; governor of the territory during the Indian troubles of the later 60s and now friend of the Ute tribe, one of whom he introduced to Isabella. But she failed to appreciate the picturesque vitality of such men, because she was not really very interested in the grand adventure of ‘Opening up the West’. Her cast of mind was essentially conservationist and non-partisan; she took little satisfaction in seeing an iron track tame a hitherto inaccessible pass, or brick-and-stucco burgeoning where there was wood-and-daub before. Men like Hunt with their railways and politics, their paved streets and tourist hotels were pushing back the freelance extemporary loners such as Evans and Nugent with whom she felt a natural kinship of temperament.

  So she left the cocky city with its hustlers and hucksters just as soon as possible and headed south for the open spaces. There the snow was marked only by the claw of bird, paw of squirrel, track of solitary rider like herself, and the local names had that homespun ring suggestive of a less pushy age – Horseshoe Gulch, Rattlesnake Divide, Sweetwater Range, Handcart Gulch, Yellow Pine Peak and Bitter Foot Mountain. On the third day out she climbed the Arkansas Divide where ‘Everything was buried under a glittering shroud of snow. The babble of the streams was bound by fetters of ice. No branches creaked in the still air. No birds sang. No one passed or met me. There were no cabins near or far. The only sound was the crunch of snow under Birdie’s feet.’ At the Divide’s 7,975-foot-high summit lay an ice-green motionless lake, owls shrieked along its pinewood margins, the solitude was ‘unspeakable’, palpable as a presence. The next day began ‘grey and sour’, but brightened as she wended a lonely way among gorges of coloured rock, through cold valleys crouched below ghastly peaks, past a ‘decayed-looking cluster of houses bearing the arrogant name of Colorado City’ and into Colorado Springs, where she again donned the hated skirt and rode side-saddle, ‘though the settlement scarcely looked a place where any deference to prejudices was necessary. A queer embryo-looking place it is …!’ and to Isabella quite unappealing.

  Colorado Springs had been highly recommended to her by Rose Kingsley, eldest daughter of the celebrated Charles, who, with her brother Maurice, had been there two years previously when its condition was positively ovular. When Rose arrived, a plough had only recently furrowed the direction of its main streets, twelve wooden huts and a few tents were scattered about and each night packs of coyotes plunged by in search of sheep, with demoniacal howls that sounded shudderingly like Injuns on the war-path. The plucky little ‘Denver and Rio Grande’ narrow-gauge railroad ended there then, and the Santa Fe stage took over. Rose, peeping from the railway company’s office above Fields & Hill dry-goods store, often watched the transition. Mails and luggage were stowed outside the coach, glum passengers stuffed inside, and then ‘when all is ready and not till then’ out walked the driver ‘in yellow blanket coat and hat securely tied down with a great comforter, he mounts the box, arranges himself leisurely, the messenger is beside him wrapped in buffalo robes, then the reins are put in his hand and as he tightens them away go the horses with a rush that take one’s breath away.’ Rose, very much an indoor young lady compared with Isabella, spent much time sewing, feeding caged snow-birds, learning how to roast antelope, and her main enterprise was the formation of Colorado Springe’s first ‘intellectual society – The Fountain Society of Natural Science’ – hopefully intended ‘to keep young men away from the drinking saloons in Colorado City’.

  By the time Isabella rode on the scene, the stage and its drivers were quaint memories, for the railway had plunged on southwards to Pueblo. Now the town, ‘laid out as a beautiful residence city’, said the hand-outs, boasted rows of houses, the Colorado Springs Hotel, billed as ‘the most elegant hostelry between Chicago and San Francisco’, and enough ‘intellectuals’ among its inhabitants to support the publication of the literary magazine Out West, whose editor, Mr Liller, entertained Isabella. She slept at a nearby boarding house and there had a rather gruesome experience which epitomised for her the casual callousness of pioneer life. Sitting in the parlour talking to the establishment’s landlady that first evening, she noticed a door opposite ‘wide open into a bedroom, and on a bed opposite … a very sick-looking young man was half lying, half sitting, fully dressed, supported by another, and a very sick-looking young man much resembling him passed in and out occasionally…. Soon the door was half-closed and some one came to it, saying “Shields, quick a candle!” … All this time the seven or eight people in the room in which I was were talking, laughing and playing backgammon, and none laughed louder than the landlady, who was sitting where she saw that mysterious door as plainly as I did. All this time … I saw two large white feet sticking up at the end of the bed. I watched and watched, hoping those feet would move, but they did not; and somehow, to my thinking, they grew stiffer and whiter, and then my horrible suspicion deepened, that while we were sitting there a human spirit untended and desolate had passed forth into the night. Then a man came out with a bundle of clothes, and then the sick young man, groaning and sobbing, and then a third, who said to me with some feeling that the man who had just died was the sick man’s only brother. And still the landlady laughed and talked, and afterwards said to me, “It turns the house upside down when they just come here to die; we shall be half the night laying him out.”’ ‘Colorado for Consumptives’ was the battle-cry among local promoters, but it obviously didn’t work for some who, coming there only to die, didn’t even have enough money left to bury themselves decently, as the Springs’ inhabitants grumbled.

  Behaving, briefly, like an obedient tourist, Isabella went to the ‘Garden of the Gods’, in which, she remarks, ‘were I a divinity, I certainly should not choose to dwell’. There, according to the guide-book, he should have seen bizarre rock formations featuring ‘The Sphinx of Egypt,’ ‘Elephant attacking Lion’ and ‘Seal making love to a Nun’ (this last was soon bowdlerised to ‘Seal and Bear’). She stayed that night at the luxurious Manitou Hotel, whose nearby medicinal springs were guaranteed, in the words of a local enthusiast, Dr Solly, to cure ‘increased venosity, gravel, catarrh of the bowels’ and promote ‘diminution of fat’ – a sure sign of the invasion of well-padded easterners on the lean pioneering western scene! But Isabella was not impressed: ‘I am now quite sure there is no place in Colorado like my glorious rathole [Estes] with all its comforts, its huge fires, rocking chairs and hot stones and jovial spirits,’ she told Hennie. The theme was repeated several times during her ride, but she carried on stubbornly nevertheless.

  Westwards first, across the Ute Pass where the Indians used to wait for the buffalo coming down to winter pasture and, occasionally, for whites, six of whom had been scalped there five years before. She followed the course of the Fountain River, a fair stream ‘cutting and forcing its way through hard rocks, under arches of alabaster ice, through fringes of crystalline ice, thumping with a hollow sound in cavernous recesses cold and dark, or leaping in foam from heights with rush and swish….’ Dwarf oaks, white cedars, juniper, majestic redwood of the Pacific, grand balsam-pine of the Atlantic all crowded the water’s edge and above all ‘towered the toothy peaks of the glittering mountains’. It was ‘Grand! glorious! su
blime! but not lovable’.

  And she felt roughly the same about many of the pioneers she met; there was a certain grandeur about the very fierceness and perseverance of their enterprise under such arduous circumstances, but only a few were ‘lovable’. There was, she diagnosed, that same money-grubbing stinginess of mind and spirit abroad that had characterised the Chalmerses. ‘The almighty dollar is the true divinity’, and a brash, unprincipled ‘smartness is the quality thought most of’. Among the rough-and-ready settlers, the English were specially unpopular, and at one cabin Isabella met a nutty old grandmother with a stentorian voice and a clay pipe who ‘raged at English people, derided the courtesy of English manners and considered “Please” and “Thank you” and the like were “all bosh” when life was so short and busy’. The unpopularity was mainly attributable to the number of wealthy British gentlemen travelling in the region, and Isabella’s description of one of them is interesting, as evidence of her refreshingly candid contempt for the loving of the English lord (quite a common affliction among her social peers) and as a salutary reminder of just how dreadful members of that species could be. ‘This gentleman was lording it in true caricature fashion, with a Lord Dundreary drawl and a general execration of everything; while I sat in the chimney corner, speculating on the reason why many of the upper class of my countrymen – “High Toners”, as they are called out here – make themselves so ludicrously absurd. They neither know how to hold their tongues or to carry their personal pretensions. An American is nationally assumptive, an Englishman personally so. He took no notice of me till something passed which showed him I was English, when his manner at once changed into courtesy, and his drawl shortened by half. He took pains to let me know that he was an officer in the Guards, of good family, on four months’ leave which he was spending in slaying buffalo and elk, and also that he had a profound contempt for everything American. I cannot think why Englishmen put on these broad mouthing tones and give so many personal details.’ Isabella’s own accent, incidentally, must have been quite free of affectation, for she was often mistaken for a Swede or an Australian.

  Farther away from Colorado Springs, she penetrated higher and deeper into the mountains, where there were no marked tracks and general opinion informed her that the route was impassable. Yet she came to no harm and did not lose her way. ‘I have developed the most extraordinary organ of locality,’ she told Hennie, and needed it to make sense of such directions as ‘Keep along a gulch four or five miles till you get to Piker’s Peak on your left, then follow some wheel-marks till you get to some timber, and keep to the north till you come to a creek, where you’ll find many elk tracks; then go to your right, cross the creek three times, then you’ll see a red rock to your left … etc.’ Well, she found the way, wheel-marks, elk-tracks and all, and spent that night at the cabin of a hunter called Link. After supper, a vehement argument brewed between Link and other travellers present about which way she should go next. Mrs Link, she tells Hennie, ‘wondered that a person like me “who looked so dreadfully delicate” could ride at all. I fear I must look mean, for in spite of my stout figure people often say so – women that is, men usually think I am as strong as themselves!’ In this case even the men doubted her capacities: ‘The old hunter acrimoniously said he “must speak the truth”, the miner was directing me over a track where for twenty-five miles there was not a house, and where, if snow came on, I should never be heard of again. The miner said he “must speak the truth”, the hunter was directing me over a pass where there were five feet of snow and no trail. The teamster said that the only road possible for a horse was so-and-so … Mr Link said he was the oldest hunter and settler in the district, and he could not cross any of the trails in snow. And so they went on. At last they partially agreed on a route – “the worst road in the Rocky Mountains,” the old hunter said, with two feet of snow upon it, but a hunter had hauled an elk over part of it, at any rate.’

  However, two more days’ ride brought her safely in sight of the glittering ranges of the Great Continental Divide on the far side of South Park, a treeless, high-lying prairie that had been thoroughly ‘rushed’. Its chief centre, Fairplay – thus dubbed by miners hopeful of a better deal than they’d had in neighbouring camps – was, nevertheless, pretty lawless and uncompromisingly masculine, and she was probably wise to give it a wide berth.

  By so doing, Isabella met one of those picturesque characters so bedaubed with later legend and song that it is hard to believe they ever really existed. But apparently they did, for riding casually though a little larger than life, along the frozen Denver waggon road was a man who wore a big slouch hat, from under which a number of fair curls hung nearly to his waist. His beard was fair, his eyes blue, and his complexion ruddy … He was dressed in a hunter’s buckskin suit ornamented with beads, and wore a pair of exceptionally big brass spurs. What was unusual was the number of weapons he carried. Besides a rifle laid across his saddle and a pair of pistols in the holsters, he carried two revolvers and a knife in his belt, and a carbine slung behind him.’ In spite of his weaponry, his manner to her was ‘respectful and frank’ and she found him ‘good company’. They ate some bread and his venison steaks together and rode up to the crest of the Divide, he beguiling the way with yarns spun around the two great themes of the West: wild animals and wilder Indians. His name, she later learned, was Comanche Bill, a ‘notorious desperado’ whose family had been massacred by the Cheyennes and whose life since had ‘been mainly devoted … to killing Indians wherever he can find them’.

  She left Bill atop the Divide and turned reluctantly north-east, down through an icy canyon in the pitch darkness, and ended up, perforce, at Hall’s Gulch, in a roofless, doorless shed and among a company of whisky-sodden miners whose looks she did not at all like. Jim had made her promise to carry a loaded revolver on her journey; she took it out for the first time that night and slept with its cold metal against her cheek – a flimsy bulwark for, she remarked, ‘I cannot conceive of any circumstances in which it could do me any possible good.’ When she awoke, the day was cheerful and she ridiculed her fears. But she heard later that a man had been ‘strung up’ by the Hall’s Gulch miners on a tree near the shed just the previous day; presumably the corpse had been swinging in the dark a few yards from where she slept.

  Unscathed and pleased with her success, she started back towards Denver, but even before she came within range of the city – symbol of the restraints and complexities of ‘civilisation’ – the old frets and problems crowded in upon her. She spent the last night of the adventure lying sleepless on the floor of a grocery store with three families of teamsters, worrying, she told Hennie, about the prospect of returning home ‘with nothing fixed to do. I am beginning to be so afraid of breaking down as soon as I leave this life.’ She recalled with dread and clarity her state when she had left home some sixteen months before: the sense of frustration, tension, unchannelled energies, the pain, lassitude, insomnia. She tortured herself with the conundrum of her own temperament – how could she be so strong, tireless, vital when travelling, so vulnerable, sickly, depressed at home? It was an insoluble enigma, and, back at Denver, she found a foolproof excuse for shelving it. A financial crisis, that had been threatening for weeks, had struck the West, the Denver banks would not cash her circular notes; Griff Evans, to whom she had rashly lent money, could not repay her, for cash was unobtainable. Stranded penniless without a train-fare and pleased to be, she decided that the most, indeed the only sensible plan was to return to Estes where she could, in all senses, live free. ‘It does not seem a very hard fate,’ she confessed, as she and Birdie cantered away to the icy, sublime, beast-haunted solitudes.

  IV

  And Estes Park was indeed solitary now, most of its ‘jovial spirits’ driven away by the onset of winter and, at the ranch, only a couple of young men ‘batching’, that is, looking after themselves and the stock. Their supplies were low and Isabella realised that they would scarcely jump for joy at the unforese
en arrival of an English maiden lady come to stay for ‘an indefinite period’. However, unlike the two ‘innocents’ of her early acquaintance, these two, Kavanagh and Buchan by name, were courteous and friendly and agreed to share the work and the remaining supplies with her. Kavanagh made the best bread, Buchan and he brought in the wood, water, and fed the stock, she got most of the meals and ‘did the parlour’, that is she swept piles of mud and ash off the floor with a buffalo’s tail several times a day. The three of them rubbed along nicely together. ‘The men are so easy to live with,’ she told Hennie after a week, ‘they never fuss or grumble or sigh or make a trouble of anything’ – Isabella always enjoyed the simplicities of unconstrained male company.

  But with Jim Nugent, waiting for her down at Muggins Gulch, such easy companionship was no longer possible. The story of their emotionally-charged and increasingly complex relationship during the next weeks is partially told in the letters to Hennie – a strange tale of a frangible but powerful attraction between two hopelessly disparate people. Its very incongruity and improbability in that magnificently wild setting gives it a touching air of late romance that borders on fantasy. And it is difficult to imagine how Hennie, and the intimate circle of letter-readers responded to Isabella’s latest from Estes Park, dated November 18. ‘There is a tragedy about Mr Nugent that has made me too terribly nervous,’ she begins. The fact was that while out riding with her on the second day back, Jim confessed that ‘as soon as I had gone away he had discovered he was attached to me and it was killing him. It began on Long’s Peak, he said. I was terrified, it made me shake all over and even cry. He is a man whom any woman might love but whom no sane woman would marry. Nor’ she adds hastily, ‘did he ask me to marry him. He knew enough for that. A less ungovernable nature would never have said a word, but his dark proud fierce soul all came out then. I believe for the moment he hated me and scorned himself, though even then he could not be otherwise than a gentleman.’