A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  ‘My pack with my well-worn umbrella upon it, was behind my saddle. I wore my Hawaiian riding-dress, with a handkerchief tied over my face and the sun-cover of my umbrella folded and tied over my hat, for the sun was very fierce. The queerest figure of all was the would-be guide. With his one eye, his gaunt, lean form, and his torn clothes, he looked more like a strolling tinker than the honest worthy settler he is. He bestrode rather than rode a gaunt mule, whose tail hair had all been shaven off, except a tuft for a tassel at the end. Two flour bags which leaked were tied on behind the saddle, two quilts were under it, and my canvas bag, a battered canteen, a frying pan, and two lariats hung from the horn. On one foot Chalmers wore an old high boot, into which his trouser was tucked, and on the other an old brogue, through which his toes protruded.’

  Their surroundings, however, became increasingly enchanting as they climbed higher. Heavy-headed elks gazed shyly from the cottonwood trees, crested blue-jays jabbered in the pines and beavers flipped about in the rivers. The forests were fringed with sloping glades, the streams with cherry-trees; ‘dwarf-clumps of scarlet poison oak like beds of geraniums’ flared in the grassy dells and there was a tangle of plants whose local names, though unknown to her, were homely and pleasing – wild-hog peanut, for instance, red baneberry, beard-tongue, staghorn sumach and buffalo currant. Above all this, cynosure and crown, ‘the splintered, pinnacled, lovely, ghastly, imposing, double-peaked summit of Long’s Peak, the Mont Blanc of Colorado’, reared into the blue. She felt a shiver of expectation as she looked at that dramatic height and knew that, at its base, waited the deep hollow of Estes Park.

  But she was not to get there yet. With his characteristic bumptious ineptitude, Chalmers led them into a steep ravine along which, he thought, was a man-made trail, but this, as it turned out, was one padded down by bears in search of cherries. That night they slept in the open, and when they woke the horses had disappeared because Chalmers had forgotten to bring picketing pins to tether them. While the squabbling pair went off in search of the steeds, Isabella got so hungry that, she says, she ate the kernels of some cherry-stones she found in the stomach of a dead bear! After Chalmers returned with the horses, he again searched for a trail, but by mid-afternoon he had to confess that not only had he failed to find one, but he couldn’t find the way home either. At this, his ‘wife sat down on the ground and cried bitterly. We ate some dry bread, and then I said I had had much experience in travelling, and would take the control of the party, which was agreed to and we began the long descent. Soon after his wife was thrown from her horse, and cried bitterly again from fright and mortification. Soon after that the girth of the mule’s saddle broke, and having no crupper, saddle and addenda went over his head and the flour was dispersed. Next the girth of the woman’s saddle broke, and she went over her horse’s head. Then Chalmers began to fumble helplessly at it, railing against England the whole time, while I secured the saddle and guided the route back to an outlet of the park. There a fire was built, and we had some bread and bacon; and then a search for water occupied nearly two hours, and resulted in the finding of a mud-hole, trodden and defiled by hundreds of feet of elk, bears, cats, deer and other beasts, and containing only a few gallons of water as thick as pea-soup, with which we watered our animals and made some strong tea.’ Late that night they got back ‘home’, Estes unfound, the ‘frolic’ a disastrous failure.

  Soon after this, Isabella went to stay with the Hutchinsons, vastly more agreeable settlers who found the going equally tough. They were idealists of a different sort, a young doctor and his wife who, shaking the dust of materialistic Britain from their feet sought the beautiful, the simple and the good in Colorado. The first they found; the simple was complex at first because they had no farming or domestic skills: Hutchinson didn’t know how to saddle a horse or his wife how to boil an egg. The good never materialised because, Isabella says, they were shamelessly cheated by other settlers who regarded people with such refined manners and high ideals as ‘fair game’. Hutchinson taught himself to yoke oxen, milk cows, raise crops, saddle horses; his wife learned to patch clothes, churn butter, raise the hens as well as boil their eggs. But it was a harsh, careworn, monochrome existence and basically ‘against the grain’. Isabella felt sad and anxious for the Hutchinsons’ welfare, and one day urged them to take a brief respite together while she did all the chores: ‘After baking the bread and thoroughly cleaning the churns and pails, I began upon the tins and pans … and was hard at work, very greasy and grimy, when a man came to know where to ford the river with his ox-team, and as I was showing him, he looked pityingly at me, saying, “Be you the new hired girl? Bless me, you’re awful small!”’

  That was one of Isabella’s favourite stories, for it highlighted so sharply the gulf between Miss Bird, seemly gentlewoman of Edinburgh, and the travelling Isabella who could actually be taken for a hired girl! The story had the additional point that she enjoyed vigorous physical work when it was basic and open-air: ‘It is all hollow and sickly that idea at home of degradation in manual labour. I am sure all women – except weaklings like you,’ she added hastily for Hennie’s benefit, ‘would be better for stirring about their own homes.’ But though she was stirring about and feeling marvellously fit doing it, Isabella still had not reached Estes Park. So she went down to Longmont, (then Longmount) another recent settlement of ‘dust-coloured frame-houses set down at intervals on the dusty buff plain, each with its dusty wheat or barley field adjacent, the crop not the product of the rains of heaven, but of the muddy overflow of “Irrigation Ditch No. 2”. Then comes a road made up of many converging waggon tracks, which stiffen into a wide straggling street, in which glaring frame-houses and a few shops stand opposite to each other. A two-storey house, one of the whitest and most glaring, and without a verandah like all the others, is the “St Vrain Hotel”, called after the St Vrain river, out of which the ditch is taken which enables Longmount to exist. Everything was broiling in the heat of the slanting sun, which all day long had been beating on the unshaded wooden rooms. The heat within was more sickening than outside, and black flies covered everything, one’s face included.’

  The hotel’s landlord was an amiable fellow in spite of his establishment, and it was he who finally facilitated her passage to Estes by arranging that she be guided thither by two young men going that way, who, he said, ‘seemed very innocent’. Their names were S. Downer and Platt Rogers, and the latter, who later became a Mayor of Denver, mentioned the incident in his recollections of some Colorado worthies. When he and Downer were asked by the landlord to ‘escort a lady’ to Estes they agreed eagerly, he says, hoping for some young and pretty lass to beguile the way. But when Isabella appeared ‘wearing bloomers, riding cowboy fashion, with a face and figure not corresponding to our ideals’ they were quite huffy and wished they had never agreed to it. Apparently they never recovered from their sulks, for Isabella mentions once or twice that the pair, though ‘innocent’ enough, were most unmannerly and sullen – though she did not, presumably, know why.

  Anyway, the next morning the three of them left together, bound for the Park. The parks of Colorado, as she explains, had nothing in common with the type of decorous demesne that graced the Home Counties with ‘“park palings” well-lichened, a lodge with a curtseying woman, fallow-deer and a Queen Anne mansion’. Colorado parks were high-lying wild grassy valleys, famous for hot-springs, minerals, wild flowers, juicy pasture. Red-waistcoated trout teemed in their rapid rivers, busy beavers built dams across their bright streams and, upon their meadows, hundreds of elk cast their magnificent branches of horn.

  The parks were well away from such beaten tracks as Colorado had, and to reach Estes, Isabella and the innocents followed a devious trail over the prairie, across the rushing St Vrain, through canyons and gulches – a glorious day-long ride. Isabella’s horse was ‘all spring and spirit, elastic in his motion … a blithe joyous animal to whom a day among the mountains seemed a pleasant frolic’. He carried her pas
t aspens shivering gold over silver streams, higher until the gritty plains fell away and the air tightened till it was as ‘elastic’ as his movements. The enchantment of the mountains cloaked her; as the sun set, water rushed blood-red through the purple canyons; they came to an open stretch and she cantered across it, the evening air stinging her cheeks. She reined, and there was a ‘trim-looking log-cabin, with a flat mud roof, with four smaller ones; picturesquely dotted about near it, two corrals, a long shed, in front of which a steer was being killed, a log-dairy with a water-wheel, some hay-piles, and various evidences of comfort; and two men, on serviceable horses, were just bringing in some tolerable cows to be milked’. It was as if she had come home: ‘Estes Park!!!’ she begins her next triumphant letter.

  Estes Park, Isabella’s own, she says, ‘by right of love, appropriation and appreciation’, was an irregular narrow valley, about eighteen miles long, for ‘park palings there are mountains, forest skirted, 9000, 11,000, 14,000 feet high; for a lodge, two sentinel peaks of granite guarding the only feasible entrance; and for a Queen Anne mansion an unchinked log cabin with a vault of sunny blue overhead.’ Its moods, all grand and sublime, ranged through the fury of a hurricane, the promise of a winter sunrise mirrored in its lake, the sizzle of white-hot noon, the menacing quiet of long-lying snow. Its most numerous inhabitants were beavers, deer, both ‘black-tailed’ and ‘big-horned’, skunks and skulking mountain lions, gruff grizzlies, coyotes, lynxes that spat like wild-cats and ‘all the lesser fry of mink, marten, hare, fox, squirrel and chipmunk’, and the names of its parts were thus fitting – Bear River, Fish Creek and Rabbit Ears Mountain.

  Apart from this casual dubbing, man had as yet made scant impression on the park scene. Indians had cantered through from time to time and felled a few of its denizens with bow and arrow; some twenty years ago, the ‘mountain men’ had arrived – fur trappers in search of beaver who caught their prey in steel traps using the sex gland of a dead victim for bait. These ‘whites’ were renowned for gambling, drinking, cohabiting with squaws, and one of their number was Joel Estes, who gave the park its name. There were a few pioneer families now, who bred cattle, farmed, hunted and acted as guides to the newest comers of all – the wealthy British sportsmen. These later remarked a scornful journalist, ‘know very little at home and do not travel abroad for the purpose of adding to their stock of knowledge; landing at New York, they look neither right nor left but streak across to the West for the sole purpose of slaughter’. People like that would soon despoil Isabella’s ‘grand, solitary, uplifted, sublime, remote, beast-haunted lair’. There would be dude ranches and phony hunting-lodges with elk-heads over the fireplaces and nervous ladies trotting side-saddle and millionaires in deerstalkers with ghillies in attendance. And one of the first to encourage this trend, who was running a sort of dude ranch years before they were officially recognised as such, was the ‘short pleasant-looking’ man who gleefully shook hands with Isabella when she arrived that first evening and ‘introduced himself as Griffith Evans, a Welshman from the slate quarries near Llanberis’.

  Evans helped her to dismount and took her over the main cabin, ‘a good-sized log room, unchinked however, with windows of infamous glass, looking two ways; a rough stone fireplace, in which pine logs, half as large as I am, were burning; a boarded floor, a round table, two rocking chairs, a carpet-covered backwoods couch; and skins, Indian bows and arrows, wampum belts, and antlers, fitly decorated the rough walls, and equally fitly, rifles were stuck in the corners. Seven men, smoking, were lying about on the floor, a sick man lay on the couch, and a middle-aged lady sat at the table writing. I went out again and asked Evans if he could take me in, expecting nothing better than a shakedown; but, to my joy, he told me he could give me a cabin to myself, two minutes’ walk from his own.’ That night, staring from the window of her very own little cabin at the blue-black pines, the blue-black lake nearby, she realised that, at last, she had found ‘far more than I ever dared to hope for’.

  II

  During that day’s glorious ride, Isabella had also met a man – one who was in some respects closer to her ideal of manhood than she had ever dared hope for. The meeting had occurred at the Park’s entrance where, riding through ‘a long gulch with broad swellings of grass belted with pines’, she had noticed a pretty hobbled mare feeding, ‘a collie dog barked at us, and among the scrub, not far from the track, there was a rude black log cabin, as rough as it could be to be a shelter at all, with smoke coming out of both roof and window…. The mud roof was covered with lynx, beaver and other furs laid out to dry, beaver paws were pinned out on the logs, a part of the carcass of a deer hung at one end of the cabin, a skinned beaver lay in front of a heap of peltry just within the door, and antlers of deer, old horseshoes, and offal of many animals, lay about the den. Roused by the growling of the dog, his owner came out, a broad, thickset man, about the middle height, with an old cap on his head, and wearing a grey hunting-suit much the worse for wear (almost falling to pieces, in fact), a digger’s scarf knotted round his waist, a knife in his belt, and a “bosom friend”, a revolver sticking out of the breast-pocket of his coat; his feet, which were very small, were bare, except for some dilapidated moccasins made of horse hide. The marvel was how his clothes hung together, and on him. The scarf round his waist must have had something to do with it. His face was remarkable. He is a man about forty-five, and must have been strikingly handsome. He has large grey-blue eyes, deeply set, with well-marked eyebrows, a handsome aquiline nose, and a very handsome mouth. His face was smooth-shaven except for a dense moustache and imperial tawny hair, in thin uncared-for curls, fell from under his hunter’s cap and over his collar. One eye was entirely gone, and the loss made one side of the face repulsive, while the other might have been modelled in marble. “Desperado” was written in large letters all over him. I almost repented of having sought his acquaintance. His first impulse was to swear at the dog, but on seeing a lady he contented himself with kicking him, and coming up to me he raised his cap, showing as he did so a magnificently-formed brow and head, and in a cultured tone of voice asked if there were anything he could do for me? I asked for some water, and he brought some in a battered tin, gracefully apologising for not having anything more presentable. We entered into conversation, and as he spoke I forgot both his reputation and appearance, for his manner was that of a chivalrous gentleman, his accent refined, and his language easy and elegant. I inquired about some beavers’ paws which were drying, and in a moment they hung on the horn of my saddle. Apropos of the wild animals of the region, he told me that the loss of his eye was owing to a recent encounter with a grizzly bear, which, after giving him a death hug, tearing him all over, breaking his arm and scratching out his eye, had left him for dead. As we rode away, for the sun was sinking, he said, courteously, “You are not an American. I know from your voice that you are a countrywoman of mine. I hope you will allow me the pleasure of calling on you.”’

  The man was Jim Nugent, ‘known through the Territories and beyond them as “Rocky Mountain Jim”’, and known to George Kingsley, who met him the following year, as ‘The Mountainous One’, ‘on account of the extraordinary altitude of his lies’. Some said he was an unfrocked priest or an ex-schoolmaster, some that he was a ‘hard-case’, a ‘wind-bag’, a ‘four-flusher’, and a ‘scoundrel’; Jim himself said he came from good Irish-Canadian stock, had run away from home because he couldn’t marry his first love and was, all in all, more sinned against than sinning. Certainly he had been a fur-trapper for the Hudson Bay Company and then an Indian Scout in the pay of the Government; in which capacities he had slaughtered first animals and then Indians with little mercy or discrimination. When Isabella met him he had a ‘squatter’s claim’ in Estes Park and forty head of cattle; he earned money by trapping, casual guiding, stock-raising, and spent all he made in orgies of drunkenness and ruffianism during which few men cared to cross his path unarmed. Nevertheless, there was ‘a certain dazzle’ about him, it
haloed him, romantic, picturesque, fascinating as his careless golden curls. He was a legendary figure on the Colorado landscape – celebrated for daring, chivalry, eloquence and pride; notorious for vindictiveness, brutality, bitterness and dissipation. He was a complex man who sought a simple setting: his past crimes prodded him to guilt, his lost chances curdled him to self-pity, his present weaknesses jeered him to shame. So he skulked, lonely, moody, slovenly in his black cabin at the entrance to Estes. When his world looked fair, he wrote poetry and essays; when melancholy returned, he drowned in whisky-wild oblivion; he was as vain as any Dick Turpin about his reputation as both knight-errant and desperado. He loved the natural beauty of his surroundings, and was gentle with the melting charm of the Irish to children, who adored him in return. It had been a long time since Jim Nugent had found any other creatures worthy of his affection.

  Isabella, interested in him from their first meeting, heard some of this from Griff Evans, the ‘hospitable, careless, reckless, jolly, social, convivial, peppery, good-natured’ little Welshman who, in spite of his usual affability, loathed Jim and so regaled her with the less savoury details of his history. Not that Griff could be too self-righteous, for he shared Jim’s ruinous love of the bottle, and his money, too, Isabella said, ‘went into a “bag with holes’” and so did little to ease the lot of his overworked wife and children. Into Griff’s holey bag, Isabella put eight dollars a week, for which she hired the cabin and was given unlimited food. The cabin had a stone chimney, a hay-bed, a tin basin and a skunk that lived under the floorboards. Each night she fell asleep to the sound of its snorts, scrapes and scuffles, but no one dared dislodge him for fear of the resulting effluvium that would have made the cabin untenable for weeks. In that sharp air, all food was exquisite and ‘as much as you could eat’ was a lot. Steers were simply hacked apart and devoured from head to tail, hunks of oven-warm bread were gilded with just-churned butter, puddings made with molasses came piping hot and toffee-brown. The company gathered for meals in the main cabin, and when Isabella first arrived it included a ‘high-minded and cultured’ American couple in search of health, prospectors in search of silver, hunters in search of elk, and an English youth who ‘because he rides English saddle and clings to some other insular peculiarities is called the “Earl”’. The permanent residents were Evans and family, including a daughter called Jinny, a lugubrious ‘hired man’ and Evans’s partner, Edwards, ‘tall, thin, condemnatory looking, keen, industrious, saving, grave’, a teetotaller who ‘grieved at Evans’s follies’ – and probably foretold his ruin with secret zest.