800 Years of Women's Letters by Olga Kenyon

Author:Olga Kenyon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: 800 Years of Women’s Letters
ISBN: 9780752472003
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-10-21T21:00:00+00:00

SETTLERS IN AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Isabella Bird trekked through the Rocky Mountains, on horseback, mainly alone. Her letters home given an informative picture of the life of the new settlers in America in 1873.

Great Platte Canyon Oct 23

Denver is busy, a distributing-point for an immense district, with good shops, some factories, fair hotels, and the usual deformities and refinements of civilisation. A shooting affray in the street is as rare as in Liverpool, while asthmatic people form a veritable convention of patients cured and benefitted.

Numbers of invalids who cannot bear the rough life of the mountains fill its hotels and boarding-houses, and others who have been partially restored by a summer of camping out, go into the city in the winter to complete the cure. It stands at a height of 5000 feet, on an enormous plain, and has a most glorious view of the Rocky Range. I should hate even to spend a week there. The sight of those glories so near and yet out of reach would make me nearly crazy. Denver is at present the terminus of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.

The number of ‘saloons’ in the streets impresses one, and everywhere one meets the characteristic loafers of a frontier town, who find it hard even for a few days or hours to submit to the restraints of civilisation, as hard as I did to ride sidewise to ex-Governor Hunt’s office. To Denver men go to spend the savings of months of hard work in the maddest dissipation, and there such characters as ‘Comanche Bill,’ ‘Buffalo Bill,’ ‘Wild Bill,’ and ‘Mountain Jim,’ go on the spree, and find the kind of notoriety they seek. A large number of Indians added to the harlequin appearance of the Denver streets the day I was there. They belonged to the Ute tribe, through which I had to pass, and ex-Governor Hunt introduced me to a fine-looking young chief, very well dressed in beaded hide, and bespoke his courtesy for me if I needed it. The Indian stores and fur stores and fur depôts interested me most. The crowds in the streets, perhaps owing to the snow on the ground, were almost solely masculine. I only saw five women the whole day. There were men in every rig: 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; Broadway dandies in light kid gloves; rich English sporting tourists, clean, comely, and supercilious-looking; and 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.

I. BIRD, A LADY’S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS (1982)

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