A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  The horses pawed the ground, the driver tightened his grip on the reins and with the crack of a whip, creaking of wheels, flailing of hooves in the mud, they were away. She turned to wave and watch and watch ‘“Mountain Jim”, with his golden hair yellow in the sunshine, slowly leading the beautiful mare over the snowy plains back to Estes Park, equipped with the saddle on which I had ridden 800 miles!’

  V

  ‘On her way home from the Sandwich Islands,’ records Miss Anna Stoddart, Isabella’s early biographer, ‘Miss Bird spent some months at a Sanatorium in the Rocky Mountains, achieved her famous ride and then made her way to New York and stayed with Mr and Mrs Robertson till her steamer sailed for Liverpool.’ Thus, with quiet and deadly decorum, the whole bizarre and passionate adventure of Colorado is de-fused and expurgated for the Edinburgh drawing-rooms to which Isabella returned, and Rocky Mountain Jim, shorn of all his volatile and sensual glamour, is relegated to an object fit only for the moral zeal and compassion of a good Christian woman. Miss Stoddart supposes that ‘She spoke very gently to him about the influence which redeems from sin and fortifies the repentant sinner, and repeated to him a text to keep ever in his remembrance as a reminder to the unhappy man whom her gentleness had restored to a measure of self-respect’. Truly, Isabella did lecture Jim about his drinking and talked to him of the love of God, and truly Jim himself, in moments of self-abasement, called upon the deity to save his black soul – but it did not, fortunately, happen in quite that squeamish and sanctimonious fashion. There was so much more sheer life, drive, passion in both Jim and Isabella than in trim, bloodless, conventional Miss Anna Stoddart who seldom left her Scottish hearthside and who could only begin to compass Isabella’s experiences by cutting them savagely down to her own size.

  But Isabella herself of course abetted and encouraged this emasculation process the moment she got off the steamer in Liverpool and hurried home to dear, good, predictable sister Hennie. The two Miss Birds visited friends, heard a fine sermon or two, had a boating holiday on the placid River Ouse; and Isa bella worked on the manuscript for a book about the Sandwich Islands, ‘throwing fragments of Hawaiian history’ into the concluding chapter and ‘excising a mass of personal detail’, Anna Stoddart says, so that, naturally, the ‘unannoying’ and almost unremembered Mr Wilson was mercilessly expunged.

  During that summer of 1874, just as Isabella was about to leave for a holiday in Switzerland, a letter came from Colorado: it said that Jim Nugent had been shot in the head by Griff Evans in Estes Park. Isabella says that she received five different versions of that shooting and wisely refused to publicise any of them. The tragedy, she says simply, ‘is too painful to dwell upon’. Yet, for a while, she must have dwelt upon it – that beautiful valley, indelibly stained with the blood of an evil deed perpetrated by a man she liked against a man she almost loved.

  The fullest published account of the tragedy by someone who was almost on the spot appears, rather improbably, in Notes on Sport and Travel by George Kingsley, father of the redoubtable Mary. Kingsley, in his usual capacity of sportsman-medico, was staying at the Evanses’ ranch with Lord Dunraven when it occurred. One sunny day in June, according to him, Griff was dozing on his bed, and on the cabin door-stoop sat Mr Haigh, the gentleman with the lemon kid gloves who ‘was dawdling about in these parts under the pretence of hunting’. Quite unaccountably, Mountain Jim suddenly lunged upon the scene in the ugliest of his ‘ugly fits’ and aimed at Haigh with his rifle. Haigh jumped up shouting, ‘Jim’s on the shoot’, Evans reached for his gun, bounced out of the door, peppered the desperado with buckshot, then rode off to the nearest town to take out a warrant against Jim for assault. Jim meanwhile lay under a clump of aspens with a bullet in his head. He was given first aid by the hastily-summoned Kingsley, who expected him to die there and then. But Jim lingered in Fort Collins hospital, even though, Kingsley says, ‘he had two halves of a bullet in his brain’.

  Obviously there was more to it than that, and two principal motives were proposed for the flaring of such murderous antagonism between the men. The anti-Jim faction maintained that his behaviour for some time had been increasingly eccentric and dangerous, and that he tried to seduce Evans’ daughter Jinny, a girl of about sixteen. Jim’s penchant in that direction is borne out by Platt Rogers who says that, when playing his local bard role, Jim wrote poetry ‘in praise of Jinny’s charms and about the deplorable condition in which he found himself because his passion was not returned’. This version, which Isabella undoubtedly heard, must have wounded her most deeply and may well be what she had in mind when she says, in a published footnote, that it was not ‘until after his death that I heard the worst points of his character’.

  But that may have been malicious gossip, spread to cover up the real, and in some ways more plausible-sounding motive for the murder. For it was a fact that the very Mr Haigh to whom Isabella had first introduced Jim the day the two parted was an agent of Lord Dunraven’s come to further the earl’s plan for the purchase of Estes Park as a private hunting-ground. According to Jim, who lived long enough to give his own version of the affair, he was shot because he refused to sell out to Dunraven and allow free access to the Park across his land; Evans had become ‘Dunraven’s creature’ and agreed to kill the man whom, as Isabella makes clear, he had loathed for years. The local papers reported the affray in accordance with their own prejudices. One informed its readers that Jim simply ‘blazed away’ at Griff who shot back in pure self-defence; another, that Jim was shot ‘by a creature of the Earl of Dunraven because of the fraudulent transaction regarding the sale of Estes Park’ (and if this motive is the right one, then Kingsley’s testimony is highly suspect). Jim got his own account published in the Fort Collins Standard stating that he was attacked without provocation ‘by two English ruffians’ with ‘well-filled pockets which they are willing to empty into the lap of the man’ who could keep them from the court. He concludes with a last bout of his fiery rhetoric: ‘Great God! Is this your boasted Colorado? That I, an American citizen, who has trod upon Colorado’s soil since 1854 must have my life attempted and deprived of liberty when the deep laid scheme to take my life has failed, and all for British gold!’

  Certainly poor Jim got less than justice in the end. Griff was arraigned for assault but allowed bail; Jim, while in hospital, was, he says, in the custody of the sheriff. For a short time, apparently Jim staged a sort of recovery and left the hospital, but seems to have taken no action against Evans. However, his condition soon deteriorated because of the bullet left in his skull and finally, says Kingsley with rather evident satisfaction, ‘he keeled over like a well-killed rabbit’. The Rocky Mountain News was clearly on Evans’s side and, in Jim’s obituary, said that he died from ‘bad whisky and too much of it’. There was not enough public sympathy for Jim to force the issue to the courts and, though a writ for assault with intent to murder had been filed against Evans, the case was dropped the following year without a hearing, and all witnesses to the deed melted conveniently away.

  So, if guilty of premeditated murder, cheery little Griff Evans got away with it, and the Earl of Dunraven got most of his Park for a few years too – although he found it unexpectedly burdensome owing to the difficulties of keeping out the plebs, which gentlemen with game-preserves could do with ease in Britain. For Isabella, there were the painful, upsetting letters each with its own version of the elusive truth, the knowledge that the fascinating Mr Nugent ‘lay buried in a dishonoured grave with a rifle bullet in his brain’ – and a vision. According to Anna Stoddart, Isabella went on her Swiss holiday after hearing the news ‘full of the distressing conviction that Jim had died unrepentant and occupied with the remembrance of their mutual promise’ – that they would meet again. As she lay in her hotel bedroom one morning in a state of suggestible melancholy, Jim appeared to her, Anna says, ‘in his trapper’s dress, just as she had seen him last … he bowed to her and vanished’. Later, naturally, the date of the vision was found to
be that of his actual death. Whatever the cause of the phenomenon, it does suggest the very powerful hold that Jim had on Isabella’s imagination, for she was not in the least subject to visions as a rule. Impossible to say how deeply she grieved at his fate, for it would, even at the time, have remained a partly secret sorrow; impossible to know how intense her passion had been. In a letter to a friend several years later, by which time the Colorado adventure must have seemed a rather unlikely and marvellous fantasy, she wrote, ‘Don’t let anybody think that I was in love with Mountain Jim … but it was pity and yearning to save him that I felt.’ So be it; it was over.

  The next year gave an early boost to her spirits with the publication by John Murray of Six Months in the Sandwich Islands. It was an instant hit, ‘a remarkable, fascinating and beautifully written book,’ applauded the Spectator; the Pall Mall Budget praised her sheer physical energy and enthusiasm in such a clime, where the very ‘richness of the soil fosters indolence’; the learned periodical Nature expressed gratified astonishment at the accuracy and breadth of her botanical knowledge. The few adverse comments noted a tendency to gush and a ‘flux of epithets applied with some lack of discrimination’. This was a fair stricture, as Isabella really knew, though she tried to justify the fault to her publisher by suggesting that ‘a redundancy in my style … is perhaps more excusable when writing amidst the luxuriousness of a tropical climate’ – a dubious analogy which probably amused, but did not convince, the shrewd John Murray. Anyway, she adds, ‘I assure you I am beginning to think it rather a nice book … there has been nothing but what is pleasant connected with it.’

  Buoyed up on this little crest of acclaim, Miss Bird throve for a year or so. She took histology lessons to further her botanical knowledge, she attended the Edinburgh May Assemblies, she involved herself in social work, including the provision of a ‘Shelter and Coffee Room’ for Edinburgh’s cab-drivers, and she spent part of each summer on the Isle of Mull, where her sister had recently leased a cottage. But then the familiar syndrome reasserted itself as she had dreaded it would: she began to suffer from neuralgia, ‘intermittent fevers’, spinal pain, bouts of listless depression. Again the doctors advised travel and she set her heart upon the Orient – the beginning of a twenty-year passion. Early in the year 1878 she sailed for Japan.

  CHAPTER III

  Japan

  THE Japan that Isabella Bird reached in the late spring of 1878 was, even at that time, Asia’s up-and-coming country. It had been just a quarter of a century since the American Commodore Perry had landed on its secluded shores and more or less forced the Tokugawa Shogun then in power to sign a treaty that eventually led to the opening of the country to foreign trade. From then on the Japanese were spurred into activity as if they had been just waiting for the West to blow the starter’s whistle – as indeed, some of the more far-sighted and progressive of them had – and their rate of progress had been phenomenal. By the end of the 1850s, three of their ports were open to trade and a few enterprising foreign merchants had set up shop; by the end of the 60s, other ports had opened, trade had greatly expanded, aspiring Japanese politicians had toured the capitals of the western world in order to assimilate everything they possibly could, the Shogun had been overthrown in a relatively bloodless civil war and the country was ruled by a generally forward-looking oligarchy under the sovereignty of the young Emperor Meiji. By the time Isabella was there, Japan had its first railways, banks, newspapers, post-offices, factories. Its peasants sent their children to the newly-enlarged schools to absorb western-style knowledge and sometimes stared at the telegraph wires strung across their paddies in the hope of seeing the messages go by; its urban sophisticates were riding in barouches and landaus, wearing morning suits and top-hats, drinking champagne, eating with knives and forks. In short, everything western, were it functional or frivolous, mechanical or monstrous, unsuitable or unsightly, had to be tried for size by the hustling Japanese of the 1870s.

  Isabella admired much of what she saw and was very much interested in it, but she didn’t love it. New Japan lacked what she always termed the ‘grooviness’ (and to Isabella this of course meant unexciting, hidebound) of the irredeemable, backward-looking, essentially immutable Orient that gave her true solace. She deplored, during this and later visits to Korea and China, the ‘hopeless darkness’ in which the oriental peasant lived; he was, she felt, ignorant, superstitious, bigoted, crafty, cruelly used by those in authority over him and cruelly bound by custom. Yet when she came to any large settlement where conditions for the common people were better – there were a few commercial enterprises perhaps, drains, a railway station, gas-lamps to lighten the darkness – she fled back to the ‘savage freedom of the wilds’. Her reason told her that the technology and learning of the West had come to enrich and invigorate the East, and she faithfully describes the developments in this process during her Japenese tour, but it evoked little emotional sympathy. She did not thrill to the sound of a steam-whistle where buffalo-carts used to trundle, or the sight of a store selling tinned meat and bottled beer where only dried fish and rice-wine were sold before. Secretly in a self-contradictory sort of way, she felt that the old was more genuine, honest and sane than the new. ‘I long to get away into the real Japan,’ she wrote after spending just one day in hybrid, thriving Yokohama, with its ponderous western-style buildings, its pavements, lamps and dignified hotels along the Bund with all ‘mod. cons.’ and rooms full of tourists talking ‘in a nasal twang’.

  For Japan was already on the edge of the globe-trotters’ circuit. It was exotic, people heard, but safe; romantic, but not dangerously wild; beautiful, but not inaccessibly awe-inspiring – and the people were so clean and polite. Such an impeccable list of virtues would entice hordes of western visitors to come and ‘do’ Japan during the next thirty years, and Isabella was only just ahead of the mob, which made it the more imperative for her to get away quickly into the hinterlands. Unbeaten Tracks in japan she calls her book, feeling the beat of the globe-trotting feet unusually close behind.

  The first stage in the escape was to get advice on such indispensables as an interpreter, ponies and ‘gear’, and for this she was fortunate and celebrated enough to have a letter of introduction to Sir Harry Parkes, British Minister in Japan. ‘A young-looking man, he was,’ she wrote after their first meeting, ‘scarcely in middle life, slight, active, fair, blue-eyed, a thorough Saxon with sunny hair and a sunny smile and a sunny geniality in his manner.’ Clearly she liked him immediately and they became firm friends, which was lucky because Sir Harry was just about the most experienced and informed expert on both Chinese and Japanese affairs then in the British Diplomatic Service. And to sit, as she did, in the Legation drawing-room after dinner and listen to his first-hand accounts of the development of modern Japan was a most pleasant and meaningful introduction to the country.

  Sir Harry had first come to Japan thirteen years before when the Shogun was still in power and foreigners were still very much the ‘red-haired barbarians from without’. While he had learned to admire the determination and energy the Japanese had displayed in coming to grips with western encroachment, he was beginning to feel that they were too often content to imitate modern innovations without fully understanding their substance or implications. His early enthusiasm for the country was tempered by certain disillusionment and this he undoubtedly voiced to Isabella. And she, in her turn, is cautious when estimating Japan’s material and social progress, emphasising that, while the country ‘had done many things well and wisely, much is still undone’. By her explorations of the remote interiors, Isabella saw much more than most westerners of what was still to be done if the Japanese were to achieve their dreams of modernisation; and it is these accounts, a revelation to many, of the oriental squalor and ignorance that lay behind the sophisticated westernised facades of the treaty ports and the capital that gave her book its highly original and popular appeal.

  Unlike many of the cautious foreign residents, who had nev
er ventured into such dark hinterlands themselves, the Parkeses were all in favour of Isabella’s journey. Lady Parkes contributed two baskets with oil-paper covers and an invaluable ‘india-rubber bath’; Parkes gave her a passport for practically unrestricted travel north of Tokyo. This document, required of all foreigners except diplomats who travelled outside the limits set by the international treaties, was a relic of the days of Japanese xenophobia, when it was considered dangerous to allow the ‘barbarians’ any rights of access. So foreigners had to state that they were moving about ‘for reasons of health, botanical research or scientific investigation’, and most were squeezed into one category or other – Isabella, presumably, in the elastic first. The passport, of a loquacious and lengthy nature, forbade its bearer to ‘light fires in woods, attend fires on horseback, trespass on game preserves, scribble on temple walls, ride fast on narrow roads … or shoot, trade or conclude mercantile contracts with the Japanese’. Isabella did not find any of these restrictions particularly burdensome; she stowed the document in a bag tied round her waist, donned her ‘travelling costume’ of ‘dust-coloured striped tweed, a bowl-shaped hat of plaited bamboo, laced boots of unblacked leather’, gave instructions to her interpreter-guide, Ito, a furtive-looking youth of eighteen, and was ready to start.

  The start was conventional – to the gorgeous grandeur of the shrines at Nikko, which had been a travellers’ mecca since they were built in the seventeenth century. Pebbled courtyards paved a gracious way to some of the nation’s greatest artistic masterpieces: bronze temple bells; treasure-houses sculpted with red-throated dragons, lilies, spike-toothed demons, topaz-eyed tigers; shrines whose roofs of weathered copper curved voluptuously skyward and whose interiors were hung about with brass incense-burners, and draperies of scarlet and pearl-white silk. On a fine day, light rebounded from the surfaces of polished lacquer, golden urns and porticoes vibrant with fabulous beasts and bursting blossoms. Yet, for Isabella, the shrines were at their loveliest when it rained and the sightseers stayed away. Then the purple curls of the thunder-god glowed deep and damp in his guardian niche, the cryptomerias behind the shrines dripped dark green, the little gold windbells rustled rainily from every eave, cascades of holy water plashed down into a stone cistern and the only other sound was that of straw-shoed acolytes scuffing to their rituals over the wet paving-stones.