A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains

“A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains”

Isabella L. Bird, an English woman offers an invigorating story of tremendous courage in her book, “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.” She tells of her days and nights spent exploring as she traveled through various territories, in light of her illness and young age.

The author accomplished a feat that few of us would dare to attempt as she ventured through extreme temperatures at the age of 22. This incredible journey was recorded in history through letters that were sent to her sister, Henrietta which documented her accounts and left behind ample evidence of her time traveling through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, in her search for finding inner peace.

In the year 1873, while traveling through the Colorado Rockies on horseback, Isabella Bird tells us about riding through the western states of America, after giving up a comfortable life that she had been accustomed to. She travels through winter, snow covered days and then spending nights, making sure that she didn’t freeze to death from the below zero temperatures. As she tries to write a letter, her ink freezes and you realize the severity of the cold weather in which the author was surviving in. Bird gives us a vivid description of the mountain wilderness she crossed while telling us about many events that occurred during this ancient era in history. Bird uses colorful words in describing the terrain in which she crossed.

Bird wore an “American riding dress,” which she described as a skirt that reached to the ankles and explains that the Turkish trousers draped over her boots. She tells of her ride through Truckee and elaborates on the steep-roofed homes and shanties that stood in a clearing, surrounded by the mountains and forest. She is unbelievably amazing with her words as she gives a clear description of the different places that she traveled through. She tells us about wagon roads, freight wagons drawn by oxen and