A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  Isabella had scarcely found her feet in this mixed community when Jim Nugent called as he had promised and offered to guide her, Downer and Rogers up Long’s Peak, that 14,700 feet of lofty inaccessibility that had tantalised her from afar as had Mauna Loa. She did not like to keep seeing a mountain that she had not climbed, so she asked Mrs Evans to bake a three-day supply of bread, they chopped some steaks off the freshest steer and were away. Jim, Isabella says indulgently, cut ‘a shocking figure’ in a pair of baggy deer-hide trousers, four ragged unbuttoned waistcoats, ‘an old smashed wideawake’ and ‘with his one eye, his one long spur, his knife in his belt, his revolver in his waistcoat pocket, his saddle covered with an old beaver skin, from which the paws hung down; his camping blankets behind him, his rifle laid across the saddle in front of him and his axe, canteen, and other gear hanging to the horn, he was as awful looking a ruffian as one could see.’ First he showed off his equestrian paces on his skittish Arab mare, then pulled up alongside her and, ‘with a grace of manner which soon made me forget his appearance, entered into a conversation which lasted for more than three hours, in spite of the manifold checks of fording streams, single file, abrupt ascents and descents and other incidents of mountain travel’.

  She was fascinated, engrossed, amused. He was so breezy and clever, so merry, quick and melancholy by turns, above all so refreshingly ‘strange altogether’, so different from any man she had ever known. He seemed quite outside and extraordinarily irrelevant to those strict codes of moral behaviour which, carefully implanted in her childhood, she had seldom questioned. He was by no means a mere blarneying and shallow flirt, however – Isabella would have seen through that immediately. Several times she refers to his culture, the erudition of his wit and, as she emphasises, ‘though his manner was certainly bolder and freer than that of gentlemen generally, no imaginary fault could be found’. With such a delightful rapport established between them – for Isabella responded with wit, charm and intelligence of her own – the ride to Long’s Peak passed in a glow of beauty. ‘There were dark pines against a lemon sky, grey peaks reddening and etherealising, gorges of deep and infinite blue, floods of golden glory pouring through canyons of enormous depth, an atmosphere of absolute purity, an occasional foreground of cotton-wood and aspen flaunting in red and gold to intensify the blue gloom of the pines, the trickle and murmur of streams fringed with icicles, the strange sough of gusts moving among the pine tops – sights and sounds not of the lower earth, but of the solitary, beast-haunted upper altitudes. From the dry buff grass of Estes Park, we turned off up a trail on the side of a pine-hung gorge, up a steep pine-clothed hill, down to a small valley, rich in fine, sun-cured hay about eighteen inches high, and enclosed by high mountains whose deepest hollow contains a lily-covered lake, fitly named “The Lake of the Lilies”. Ah, how magical its beauty was, as it slept in silence, while there the dark pines were mirrored motionless in its pale gold, and here the great white lily cups and dark green leaves rested on amethyst-coloured water!’

  The lemon, gold, amethyst light dwindled; by the time they reached the camping-ground ‘a big half-moon hung out of the heavens, shining through the silver blue foliage of the pines on a frigid background of snow, and turning the whole into fairyland.’ They built a huge fire and sat near it chewing strips of beef while the moonlight and flames fused together on the edge of the frosted dark. Isabella made friends with Ring, Jim’s dog, ‘with the body and legs of a collie, but a head approaching that of a mastiff, a noble face with a wistful human expression and the most truthful eyes I ever saw in an animal. His master loves him, if he loves anything, but in his savage moods he ill-treats him.’ The two young men, who had ‘little idea of showing even ordinary civilities,’ did bestir themselves for the general entertainment after supper with student songs and spirituals, and Jim contributed ‘one of Moore’s melodies in a singular falsetto’ and they all joined in The Star-Spangled Banner. Then she bedded down in a bower of interlaced branches strewn with pine-shoots, covered with a blanket, a saddle for a pillow and Ring, at his master’s bidding, stationed against her back to keep her warm.

  But sleep eluded her. Everything was so exciting: ominous gusts of wind howled round the rocky heights she was expected to scale the next day, wolves and lions yowled painfully close, owls hooted, the fire crackled and, in front of the fire, lay the man, ‘a desperado, sleeping as quietly as innocence sleeps’ with, for sure, the best side of his handsome face turned towards her. What had grown so suddenly between them, she wondered? Surely she had sensed a spark of attraction from him that very evening? She confesses as much to her sister later, and then adds, ‘but I put it away as egregious vanity, unpardonable in a woman of forty’. But the attraction was there: Platt Rogers says casually that, during this expedition, ‘Jim took quite a fancy to her and she took quite a fancy to Jim.’ An extraordinary predilection on both sides, from the young man’s point of view!

  Dawn was a glory of rose-and-gold; faced with its splendours, Jim ‘uncovered his head and exclaimed, “I believe there is a God.”’ The gesture, Isabella assures us, and perhaps herself, was involuntary and reverent (but it sounds like a little bit of Irish theatre notwithstanding). As the sun wheeled up the sky, they began what was now more than a mere ascent for both of them. For Isabella it was a test of courage and endurance; it was her way of proving to Jim that she was the bravest, toughest, and most extraordinary English lady ever to have come his way; for Jim, it was a display of his own strength and expertise and an exercise in chivalry and hope. He really wanted her to live up to his expectations of her, and she did, though it was by far the most fearsome mountaineering exploit of her life.

  He half-dragged her to that summit, ‘like a bale of goods by sheer force of muscle’. He roped her to him and pulled her up. over great ice-strewn boulders, he bent and she climbed on over his shoulders, he made steps for her with his hands and feet and she ascended them, she crawled on hands and knees, swinging by both arms, and he caught her wrists and hauled her up to join him. It was a grotesque and cumbersome pas de deux, intimate and yet detached, perilous and yet preposterous. She put her life in his hands and he was proud to take good care of it. The last five hundred feet was a perpendicular crawl up a ‘smooth cracked face of pink granite’ that made her sick with fear and which even valiant Ring wouldn’t attempt.

  And then they were pinnacled triumphant at the top, above a panorama of ‘unrivalled combination’. In one direction the snow-born River Thompson sparked off towards the Gulf of Mexico and ice-splintered ranges piled to meet the clouds; nearer, green valleys still lay in the lap of summer; and to the east stretched the grey-brown of the endless plains. Isabella was enraptured, uplifted on ‘one of the mightiest of the vertebrae of the backbone of the North American continent’; she was also giddy, bruised, exhausted, and one of the young men, who had earlier made pointed remarks about the encumbrances of female-kind, was now more seriously incommoded by severe bleeding from the lungs due to the altitude. On the descent, the youths went ahead and Jim devoted himself entirely to her. In spite of his efforts she had ‘various falls’ and ‘once hung by my frock, which caught on a rock, and Jim severed it with his hunting-knife, upon which I fell into a crevice full of soft snow’!

  On their return to the camping-ground, Isabella pitched into exhausted sleep for several hours and when she awoke it was dark and Jim was sitting smoking by the fire, where she joined him. As the pine-knots crackled and the wild beasts yowled on the dark margins, Jim told her yarns of his misspent, ungoverned youth, how all his flair and energy had somehow gone the wrong way, how aimless and blighted his present life was. She listened, saddened, her kind heart flooded with sympathy, and yet withal, cautious – shrinking a little suspiciously from so much emotion so candidly and unreservedly offered on such a very short acquaintance. ‘His voice trembled, and tears rolled down his cheek. Was it semiconscious acting, I wondered, or was his dark soul really stirred to its depths by the silence, the beauty
, and the memories of youth?’

  The return to the ranch the next morning was uneventful and the days that followed were full of zest and happiness. ‘I really need nothing more than this log cabin offers,’ she declared. Each morning began with a thump on her cabin door and Griff’s cheery voice shouting, ‘I say Miss B. we’ve got to drive wild cattle today. I wish you’d lend a hand – I’ll give you a good horse.’ So it was out in the dawn when the lake turned from purplish-lead to orange, and the crested blue-jays ‘stepped forth daintily on the jewelled grass’. And it was away over the mountains with the wind biting her face and the dogs barking; she with the stockmen, the hunters and Evans, all ‘with light snaffle bridles, leather guards over our feet and broad wooden stirrups and each carried his lunch in a pouch slung on the lassoing horn of his saddle’. It was Hawaii all over again, because the terrain and the air and the company were so invigorating. They cantered madly towards the wild herds feeding in the valleys, and ‘“Head them off boys!” our leader shouted; “all aboard; hark away!” and with something of the “High, tally-ho in the morning!” away we all went at a hand-gallop down-hill…. The bovine waves were a grand sight: huge bulls, shaped like buffaloes, bellowed and roared, and with great oxen and cows with yearling calves, galloped like racers, and we galloped alongside of them and shortly headed them, and in no time were placed as sentinels across the mouth of the valley. It seemed like infantry awaiting the shock of cavalry as we stood as still as our excited horses would allow. I almost quailed as the surge came on, but when it got close to us my comrades hooted fearfully, and we dashed forward with the dogs and, with bellowing, roaring, and thunder of hoofs, the wave receded as it came. I rode up to our leader, who received me with much laughter. He said I was a “good cattleman,” and that he had forgotten that a lady was of the party till he saw me “come leaping over the timber, and driving with the others.”’

  Then it was back in the chill dusk, stiff, tired and content, with the owls hooting, the polecats snarling, the pole star hanging just opposite the cabin door, and inside the cabin, the warm smells of fire and food. And as they hugely ate, the talk was all of bear-tracks or the movements of the nearest big-horn herd, the merits of different types of rifle and/or fishing-tackle, the hunting skills of Ring as compared with those of Griff’s dog Plunk, the latest blood-curdling rumours of Injuns on the war-path, the arrival of a waggon that brought strange, irrelevant, silly news from the outside world. After the meals, Isabella performed extraordinary sartorial feats (‘I have just made a pair of drawers from the relics of a night-gown’, she tells Hennie), while the hunters lay on the floor playing euchre and making trout-flies. Mr Power, a young French-Canadian who had a wonderful way with a harmonium, produced an inexhaustible repertoire of ‘sonatas, funeral marches, anthems, reels, strathspeys’, and Evans led them all in rousing choruses of D’ ye ken John Peel and John Brown’s Body. ‘A little cask of suspicious appearance was smuggled into the cabin and heightens the hilarity I fear,’ she noted one night, in a surprisingly indulgent tone. Even the whisky, winking tawny-gold in the firelight cajoled her into the belief that it wasn’t quite so wicked here as elsewhere. Her ethical certainties were slightly blunted: by the strict standards of her upbringing, nearly all this company would stand condemned, of recklessness, laziness, self-indulgence at the least, and some – with their sporadic drunkenness, violence, fornication – were positively criminal. Yet they were so pleasant and easy to be with, she felt so happy and healthy there, warmed by the fire and the joviality, not thinking much, just being.

  And added to all this was the spice of Jim Nugent, whose ‘business as a trapper’ brought him to the ranch with uncommon frequency of late. She continued to find him ‘splendid company’, relishing his ‘remarkably acute judgment of men and events’, his sudden ‘graceful railleries’, the leaps of his mercurial imagination that seemed to her ‘full of the light and fitfulness of genius’. And when communication faltered, or the borders of circumspection were approached, they would change horses for the fun of it and go for a good gallop, ‘the fearful-looking ruffian on my heavy waggon horse, and I on his bare wooden saddle, from which beaver, mink, and marten tails and pieces of skin were hanging raggedly, with one spur, and feet not in the stirrups, the mare looking so aristocratic and I so beggarly!’ The blossoming friendship, undoubtedly a subject for log-cabin gossip, did not please Griff. He was bitterly envious of Nugent’s reputation and social flair and looked upon him as a rival claimant to the territory of Estes Park. As Isabella soon realised, even this remote spot seethed with hatred, pride and greed and ‘there is always the unpleasantly exciting risk of an open quarrel with the neighbouring desperado [Jim] whose “I’ll shoot you” has more than once been heard in the cabin.’ The violence trembled in the future, and would be worse than her worst imagining.

  After a few weeks Isabella felt she had to get away for a time. Perhaps the relationship with Jim was intruding too much upon her consciousness; perhaps she was simply and prosaically determined to see more of Colorado, a desire from which even Jim’s presence could not deflect her. At any rate, on October 19, she and the musical Mr Power jogged off together towards Longmount. At ‘Muggins Gulch’ (as it was popularly called) Jim waylaid her, looking as ragamuffin as always, ‘with his gentle cosy manner, low musical voice and slight Irish brogue…. He leant on my horse and said, “I’m so happy to have met you, so very happy. God bless you.” And his poor disfigured face beamed with nice kindly feeling. Mr Power remarked what a thorough gentleman he is and how very much he likes me, both of which things are true.’ This incident, told for Hennie’s benefit, sent Isabella on her way tremulous, flattered, happy, a little perturbed; probably she pushed it from her mind, to concentrate instead on the comparatively simple business of riding across part of the Rockies, beset only by snow blizzards and sub-zero temperatures.

  III

  Her companion, comfort, mainstay for the ride was Birdie, a bay Indian pony, ‘a little beauty with legs of iron, fast, enduring, gentle and wise’. This intelligent creature, ‘always cheerful and hungry’, with her ‘cunning, lively and pretty face’, her ‘funny blarneying noise’ of greeting and her nuzzling, faithful, willing ways became everybody’s favourite. She had but two bad habits: if a stranger led her, she reared up like a wild bronco; when saddled, she swelled herself up to quite abnormal proportions so that later, when she condescended to deflate, all her girths had to be tightened. On Birdie’s back, Isabella strapped her carpet-bag full of patched, reconstituted clothes, including the inevitable ‘black silk’, and the two of them trotted off across the plains towards Denver.

  Late that afternoon a wind whirled up, storm-and-dust-laden, grey as the two prairie wolves that loped ahead of her in cowardly flight. Cresting a slope, she saw ‘the great braggart city spread out brown and treeless, upon the brown and treeless plain which seemed to nourish nothing but wormwood and the Spanish bayonet’. Isabella sighed, dismounted and, she tells Hennie, reluctantly put on her skirt and ‘got on again sideways, using the horn as a pommel. To ride sideways now seems to be as if, having the use of two feet, one was compelled to always hop on one.’

  Riding thus, uncomfortably lady-like, she entered the braggart city, capital of the Territory since 1867, whose settlers had first begun to boast of its future ten years before that. In those days, the settlement had suffered its share of disasters: fire and then flood engulfed its makeshift shanties, Indians besieged it one year and grasshoppers besieged it several years, billions of them that clotted the ground and shredded bare the pioneers’ precious crops. By 1873 though, Denver was safely on the up and up; it had gaslights, horse-cars, law and order and, above all, trains. The first train had puffed importantly across the plain in the summer of 1870, had ridden magnificently over the solid silver spike that ceremonially nailed the last piece of track in place, had come to triumphant rest in an ‘elegant brick depot’, the local reporter explained. ‘Pretty nearly everybody was wild with enthusiasm,’
he continued. ‘Old timers who had toiled across the Plains in ox-teams or on foot in the early days, dodging the Indians in season and out of season, and enduring discomforts which tried their souls and bodies too, clasped hands in congratulations that the old order of the overland days was done and Denver was nearer to New York today than she was to many of the mining camps in the mountains.’

  The new railroad carried a diversity of peoples to Denver, so that its streets when Isabella saw them had ‘a harlequin appearance’. There were sufficient asthmatics come from the East in search of health to warrant the holding of an ‘asthmatic convention’, and sufficient consumptives come to try the fashionable ‘camp-cure’ of living rough in the mountains to ensure a brisk trade in tents, sleeping-bags and portable cooking-stoves. There were the old-timers still: ‘hunters and trappers in buckskin clothing; men of the Plains with belts and revolvers, in great blue cloaks, relics of the war; teamsters in leathern suits; horsemen in fur coats and caps and buffalo-hide boots with the hair outside, and camping-blankets behind their huge Mexican saddles’. And there were the newcomers: ‘Broadway dandies in light kid gloves; rich English sporting tourists, clean, comely and supercilious-looking’; and the oldest comers of all: ‘hundreds of Indians on their small ponies, the men wearing buckskin suits sewn with beads, and red blankets, with faces painted vermilion, and hair hanging lank and straight, and squaws much bundled up, riding astride with furs over their saddles’.