Chris Enss - The Lady and the Mountain Man: Isabella Bird, Rocky Mountain Jim, and their Unlikely Friendship

A touching, well-researched story of the love shared between a prolific author and Victorian lady in the Rocky Mountains and the renegade trapper who helped her realize her dream of climbing Longs Peak.

New York Times best-selling author of GiveYour Heart to the Hawks, Win Blevins

Thank you Chris Enss, for this marvelous introduction to Isabella Bird, an English lady who refused to let unremitting pain keep her from exploring the American West. Isabella was a prolific writer whose reports on all she saw and experienced brought admirers from across the world to bask in the wonders of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains. Americans today will gain greater appreciation for our country, seeing it through this womans eyes even as she fell in love with a crusty, drink-riddled mountain man. Enss, a prolific and engaging writer in her own right, beautifully brings this woman to life.

Two-time Western Writers of America Spur Award winner, Carol Crigger

A delightful account of the peregrinations of Isabella Bird, footloose nineteenth-century English travel and inspirational writer. She documented journeys in Britain and the Pacific, finally ending in Colorado, where she befriended legendary Rocky Mountain Jim Nugent. Her wanderlust later took her to Asia and north Africa. If you dont know Isabella Birds story, youre in for a treat. A good read by Chris Enss, a perennial winner.

Spur Award finalist and Will Rogers Medallion winner, Harlan Hague

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Copyright 2021 by Chris Enss

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Enss, Chris, 1961- author. | Ireland, Deborah, writer of foreword. Title: The lady and the mountain man : Isabella Bird, Rocky Mountain Jim, and their Unlikely Friendship / Chris Enss ; foreword by Deborah Ireland, Royal Geographical Society.

Other titles: Unlikely friendship of Isabella Bird and Rocky Mountain Jim

Description: Helena, Montana : TwoDot, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Isabella Bird was a proper Victorian lady expected to marry a man of means and position. Instead she was drawn to a gruff mountain man, a desperado named Jim Nugent. This book reveals the true story of Birds relationship with Nugent as they traveled through the dramatic wilderness of the Rocky Mountains Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020055703 (print) | LCCN 2020055704 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493045921 (paper ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781493045938 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Bird, Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy), 18311904TravelRocky Mountains. | Bird, Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy), 18311904Friends and associates. | Nugent, Jim, 1827 or 1828Friends and associates. | Rocky MountainsDescription and travel. | Estes Park (Colo.)Description and travel. | Women travelersRocky MountainsBiography. | BritishRocky MountainsHistory19th century.

Classification: LCC F782.R6 E67 2021 (print) | LCC F782.R6 (ebook) | DDC 978/.020922dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055703

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055704

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.

For my daring niece, Jennifer

It is absolutely fitting that the first book to cover the time that Isabella Bird spent in the Rocky Mountains is written by a distinguished American author who is the leading expert on the subject of Women in the Old West. Her knowledge and experience reveals the true story of Isabella Birds time in Colorado. Even more appropriately, Chris Enss shares a way of telling a story which Isabella Bird would recognize and very much approve of. Always entertaining and full of life, her words provide a rich insight into the lives of those people who make up the American Westthe great and the good and also the stories of ordinary folk whose lives were often just as daring and heroic.

When Isabella Bird visited Colorado in 1873, the experience would change her life forever and would also have a profound effect on the Rocky Mountains. In her letters to home, she described a landscape of such beauty and wonderthe wildness, the wildlife, but most of all a land of adventure. She made it real, describing the courageous people she met who endured all kinds of discomfort and harsh living conditions to carve out a life on the land and make the mountains their home.

Her letters were edited and first published in a magazine, The Leisure Hour, and then in her book A Ladys Life in the Rocky Mountains and they were immediately popular. She had the ability to write prose that was page-turning as well as entertaining, thrilling, and informative. Her writing excited both the armchair reader and those souls brave enough to risk all for the chance of a new life and adventures in Colorado. Her audience was eager to read about life, as it was lived in the Rockies, from rounding up cattle to riding through blizzards so cold that tears froze her eyelids together. The first edition of A Ladys Life in the Rocky Mountains was published in 1879 with a print run of 2,060 copies. It completely sold out in its first year and was immediately reprinted. It remained in print throughout her life and continued to pay her royalties at a very favorable rate of two-third until her death in 1904. Her book acted as an advertisement for the American West, encouraging travel to a land full of hope and adventure.

The unedited letters to her sister are more candid than those published and reveal her need for money and the true situation in which Isabella and her younger sister, Henrietta, found themselves. They had been raised as gentlewomen in strict Victorian English society, where marriage (to a suitable man) and childbearing was expected. Any form of work, unless charitable, was frowned upon. Family money was entailed away to the male line, and this was the exact predicament Isabella faced. As a single woman, approaching middle age, she depended on meagre diminishing funds, which would have to support her in old age. The royalties and fees she earned through her writing provided a vital source of income.

She wrote with astonishment to her sister that all women in America worked. She described how they kept house and did their own housework; there was no shame attached to manual work! How ill-prepared and helpless she was when she first arrived in Hawaii, not even able to work the American cooking stove, but she was a quick learner. By the time she had reached the Rockies she could keep house, clean, scrub and sweep, cook batches of bread, bake cakes, churn butter, lasso horses, and drive cattle.