“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 for my umbrella folded over 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.” —Isabella Bird Bishop
In the spring of 1878 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Isabella Bird, a 47-year-old “spinster,” was once again suffering from poor health. She had just received a marriage proposal from a proper gentleman, and she responded to it by departing on one more adventure to another part of the world.
This time Isabella was headed to Japan for an exploration off the beaten path, to places visited by few Europeans. During the three-month journey she traveled nearly 1,500 miles, most of it on horseback. She visited cities, ancient temples, and hot springs, but the most exciting part of the trip was staying in the home of an Ainu chief. The Ainu lived in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, where they had hunted and harvested food from the fields and forests for many centuries.
Isabella in her Hawaiian riding dress.
Frontpiece A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains 1879 John Murray, London
At the time of Isabella’s visit, the Ainu were under the rule of the Japanese, who came from islands to the south. The Ainu were abandoning many of their traditions as they were forced to adopt Japanese customs. Isabella found Ainu culture fascinating. In her letters she described their intricate body tattoos, bark-fiber clothing, and bear-worshipping ceremonies. Despite referring to them as savages, Isabella felt comfortable and welcome in their community. As always, during this journey Isabella recovered her health and vitality.
Isabella Bird was born on October 15, 1831, into a prosperous middle-class family in Boroughbridge, England, within the heart of northern Great Britain. Her parents were members of the Clapham Sect, a group devoted to abolishing slavery. Her father, who was trained as a lawyer, served as a vicar in the parish church. Her mother, who grew up as the daughter of a vicar, taught at the Sunday school in her husband’s church.
Isabella was sickly as a young girl. As was common during these times, her doctor prescribed outdoor activity as a cure, and in Isabella’s case it proved successful. She adored horseback riding around the parish with her father, and by age 10 she could handle a full-size horse. She and her father had an especially close relationship. Isabella suffered from one illness after another. At the age of 23, her father gave her money to travel to the United States to visit relatives, hoping this would cure her most recent ailment. This journey was the start of her life of travel and travel writing. The letters she wrote to her family describing her travels were the foundation for her first book, An Englishwoman in America, published in 1856. Following her father’s death two years later, she moved with her sister and mother to Edinburgh, Scotland. These years were uneventful as Isabella lived a quiet, homebound life. All this changed in 1868, when Isabella’s mother passed away. All of a sudden she was free to live her own life. Her sister, Henrietta, moved to the Isle of Mull off the far-northwest coast of Scotland, but Isabella had other plans. Once again her health was poor. When her doctor suggested that she travel, Isabella was more than ready.
In July 1872, at the age of 40, Isabella sailed off for Australia and New Zealand, where she explored until the end of the year. On New Year’s Day 1873, she boarded a barely seaworthy ship bound for Hawaii. During the passage they encountered a hurricane, and most of the passengers were terrified and seasick—but not Isabella. Under hardship and duress she rose to the occasion. She was the only one aboard willing and capable to care for a gravely ill passenger. For Isabella each day at sea was an adventure.
Before leaving Great Britain Isabella’s back pain had been so severe that she had ceased horseback riding. In Hawaii she took to the saddle again, but now she sat astride the horse. In Great Britain only men rode this way, but on the islands most women had given up riding sidesaddle and replaced long riding dresses with more comfortable riding apparel. Life was freer in the South Pacific, and Isabella quickly adapted to wearing bloomers and boots with spurs as she sat snugly on a Mexican saddle. As she explored Hawaii, her health improved day by day. This life, with fewer social restraints and more physical exercise, suited her. She was hosted by Hawaiians in their simple homes and climbed volcanoes to view eruptions. On the Big Island Isabella accepted an invitation from a man she had just met to join him in ascending Mauna Loa, the largest volcano on Earth. In a letter to her sister, she described her experience of sleeping in a tent at an elevation of more than 13,000 feet atop “the mightiest volcano in the world.”
By then Isabella felt ready to visit the wild American West and boarded a ship bound for San Francisco. In her luggage was her special riding outfit composed of a half-fitting jacket, an ankle-length skirt, and Turkish bloomers. Tiring soon of the hustle, bustle, and frigid, foggy weather of San Francisco, Isabella traveled by train to the Rocky Mountains. In 1873 the region that now encompasses Rocky Mountain National Park was not easy to reach. The transcontinental railroad had just been completed, and Denver, Colorado, was still a small city. Isabella arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and traveled south via stagecoach to Fort Collins, Colorado, where she managed to hire a guide who agreed to take her to the remote and reportedly beautiful Estes Park. Boastfully he informed her that he could find it blindfolded, but all he did was get them lost. By the end of the trip he had to rely on Isabella to lead them back to the nearest settlement, the frontier town of Longmont. There on the plains the heat was so unbearable that Isabella considered abandoning her goal of visiting Estes Park. However, she learned just in time of two young men who were about to ride there and arranged to accompany them. It took many miles of hard riding on a faint trail to arrive at a long gulch with broad meadows enclosed by pines, fir, and spruce. At the mouth of this narrow valley, dubbed Muggins Gulch, they found a crude log cabin. Out front of it stood a lovely mare and a large, growling collie. On the cabin’s mud roof were the pelts of lynx, beaver, and other animals, which had been set out to dry.
Alerted by the barking dog, a grizzled-looking man, appearing more beast than human, emerged from the front door. His face would have seemed handsome except for his one empty eye socket. Isabella later wrote that he had “desperado” written all over him, but she forgot his appearance when he addressed them with the cultured voice of a gentleman. He served Isabella a cup of fresh water and related the story of how he lost his eye in a recent encounter with a grizzly bear. Later she found out that this new acquaintance had a reputation throughout the Colorado Territory as a daring scout and dangerous outlaw. She and Jim Nugent, also known as “Rocky Mountain Jim,” would become close friends during Isabella’s stay in the mountains.
Arriving finally in Estes Park, she and her companions came to the homestead of a Welshman by the name of Griffith Evans. He and his partner rented Isabella a log cabin where she had a view of the towering Longs Peak. It was unlike anything she had seen before, and she wanted to climb it as she had Mauna Loa. Taking advantage of the last of the mild weather, Rocky Mountain Jim offered to guide her there. They set off, with the two young men tagging along, carrying several days’ worth of provisions in their saddlebags. By the following day they had gone as far as they could on horseback and continued on foot. After “leaping from rock to rock,” they were halted by an impassable cliff. There was no choice but to backtrack and locate a better route. Each step they scrambled upward became more and more challenging for Isabella. Mountain Jim patiently encouraged her while they sought out footholds, sometimes on minute knobs, and crawled on hands and knees along narrow ledges of cliffs that dropped off 3,000 feet to the slopes below. Isabella could proceed only by looking up, not down. Gasping for her breath, she finally reached the icy summit. Only two years before, Addie Alexander had become the first woman to summit the peak, and in mid-September 1873 Anna Dickinson had climbed the peak with the Hayden Expedition. Then Isabella became the third female to experience the spectacular view from the 14,259-foot peak.
Longs Peak.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
During the next couple of weeks, Isabella spent hours in conversation with Mountain Jim. Though charmed by his gentlemanly manner and mountain-man roughness, she was frightened by his behavior whenever he drank whiskey.
As autumn passed, heavy snow carpeted Estes Park, and more was on its way. On October 20, Isabella packed her belongings and rode toward the plains on Birdie, her bay Indian pony. Jim met her on the trail and wished her good-bye. It was a long ride to Denver, where Mrs. Evans graciously welcomed Isabella into her winter residence on the edge of the plains. Isabella soon tired of “civilization” and rode south to Colorado Springs. As she traveled solo she found shelter each night wherever she could, whether it be a rich man’s ranch, a lonely settler’s cabin, or a boardinghouse. On the first of November she turned northward toward the Great Divide of the Rocky Mountains. Back at Longmont she decided to return to Estes Park, where she would wait for Griffith Evans to arrive with some money he owed her. It turned out to be a long wait. Griffith and his partner had gone to Denver, leaving their ranch in the care of two young hunters. Isabella spent her time riding through the mountains with Mountain Jim. On one of these outings he confessed his love for her, which had started on their climb of Longs Peak. Despite her warm feelings for him, Isabella refused his proposal to marry. Upset by her rejection, Jim claimed he would camp out in the hills until she departed and then galloped away. Though she was attracted to him, Isabella felt pity for the “ruin he had made of his life” and wrote, “He is a man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry.”
After Griffith returned and Isabella’s loan was repaid, Jim offered to escort her to the stagecoach stop 30 miles away on the plains and then bring Birdie back to the ranch. During her travels in Colorado she had ridden more than 800 miles, most of it over rough terrain. She had experienced extreme cold, hunger, and fatigue, but saying good-bye to Mountain Jim was the most difficult of all. Before he departed Isabella begged him to abandon his wicked ways. Unable or unwilling to take her advice, he died a mere five months later in a gunfight.
Soon after Isabella returned to Edinburgh, John Bishop, a young doctor in his 30s, asked for her hand in marriage. As usual, once she was back at home, her health had declined. She didn’t wish to be a sickly wife, so she packed her bags again and departed for a seven-month trek in Japan and five-month exploration of the Malay Peninsula. In 1880 her sister died, leaving her the only one in her family still living. Her sister’s death was a great loss, and perhaps this was the reason she married John Bishop the following year. Despite her constant poor health, they lived a happy life together. He adored her, and when he was asked how such a frail woman survived her wild adventures, he said that she had “the appetite of a tiger and the digestion of an ostrich.”
Tragically, Isabella found herself a widow just a few years later in 1886, when John suddenly passed away. As a cure for both her physical and emotional health, Isabella returned to her life of adventures. The first journey was through India, and next she rode her “hard, hungry, silver-grey Arab” horse through the high mountains and plateaus of Tibet for two months. This was followed by a trek in Persia, where she accompanied a British army survey. During this journey she traveled on a big mule along a mountain trail in a blizzard so fierce that she couldn’t even see her mule’s neck. Later, when she rode with hired muleteers into Kurdistan, “shrieking, yelling, and juggling” Kurdish horsemen rode alongside. A year after returning home from that journey to write a book and lecture about her travels, she became the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographic Society.
Isabella was unstoppable. Her next voyage was through China and Korea, where her mount was a Korean pony with an “evil glare in his eyes and a hyena-like yell” that rushed at any other ponies they came near. At age 70 Isabella visited Morocco and trotted for 30 miles per day on a stallion so large she needed a ladder to mount him. Only two years later, in 1903, with her bags packed for a return trip to China, Isabella fell ill. This time her condition was too severe to be cured by travel. When she died a year later, Isabella Bird left behind hospitals that she had helped establish in India, China, and Korea. Friends and admirers around the world mourned her passing. Her many sketches and photographs from her trips abroad, as well as the 14 travel books that she wrote, remain a testimony to her courage, curiosity, and boundless energy.
