A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Lucy Bird

Her father died two years later, when she, her sister and mother moved to Edinburgh, Scotland - the place Isabella Lucy Bird would always call home. She returned home to write her first book, The Englishwoman in America, published in 1856 when Bird was 25. She’s shown here (center) in her tent during the six-month caravan she organized to travel through northern Iran, Kurdistan, Armenia and Turkey. Bird traveled to some of the then-most remote areas of the world to gather information for her books. Fiercely independent and determined to do things her own way, the fact that parts of New England were in the midst of a cholera outbreak when she arrived in 1854 didn’t seem to deter her. She booked passage on a steamer to Canada and the northeastern United States, staying for several months. This time, when her doctor prescribed a bracing sea voyage to cure what ailed her, her father gave her £100 and his blessing to travel wherever she liked until the money ran out. With an insatiable curiosity and a keen eye for detail, she put her time outdoors to good use, studying her surroundings, then writing about them.Īt 18, she had spinal surgery for what’s been described as a fibrous tumor– a risky procedure that left her with bouts of depression and insomnia. When doctors prescribed fresh air and outdoor activity, her parents encouraged her to take up rowing and horseback riding - sidesaddle, of course. It detailed her adventures in Colorado, became an international bestseller, and put the area now known as Rocky Mountain National Park on the map.īorn in 1831, Isabella Bird was the small, sickly child of a clergyman.

Her book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, was published in 1879 as a letter to her sister in England. In 1972, a bespectacled, shaggy-haired singer-songwriter named John Denver celebrated his love affair with Colorado in a song called “Rocky Mountain High.” But more than a century earlier, an intrepid Englishwoman named Isabella Lucy Bird beat him to it.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Lucy Bird