If it's the English lady traveling in the mountains - A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird

Since I was just in the Rocky Mountains, I will linger there for a day by writing about A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) by Isabella Bird, the greatest tourist of the 19th century.  In this book she is mostly in Colorado, exploring the mountain trails on horseback, often alone, sometimes assisted by the desperados, settlers, and other tough characters she encounters.

…  I at once inquired if I could get to Green Lake.  The landlord said he thought not; the snow was very deep, and no one had been up for five weeks, but for my satisfaction he would send to a stable and inquire.  The amusing answer came back, “If it’s the English lady traveling in the mountains, she can have a horse, but not any one else.”  (Letter XII)

Her adventures – her unlikely existence – featured in the Colorado newspapers, Bird becomes a celebrity while she is there.  She is not the only celebrity in Colorado, but perhaps the only one who is not an outlaw, like the terrifying Comanche Bill (“my intelligent, courteous companion was one of the most notorious desperadoes of the Rocky Mountains, and the greatest Indian exterminator on the frontier,” Letter XI) and a man who becomes Bird’s close friend and companion, Rocky Mountain Jim Nugent (“She was as proud of having him in her house as if he had been the President, and I gained a reflected importance!,” Letter XVII).

Mountain Jim guides Isabella Bird on her ascent of Longs Peak, a highlight of the book.  Nowadays I believe you can drive most of the way to the top, and Bird herself writes that “[t]ruly terrible it was for me, to a member of the Alpine Club it would not be a feat worth performing” (Letter VII).  Nevertheless Bird’s book is part of the 1870s mountain-climbing craze, in the less crazed division.  Photo from the National Park Service.  They also have a little tribute to Bird as one of the founders of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Once Bird started traveling, and writing, she never stopped.  Trips to and books about Australia and Hawaii preceded A Lady’s Life, and the next stop would be Japan.  She is the woman that rode the mule ‘round the world, so to speak (warning: music).  I have read Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880).  As interesting as that book is, it does not have as good a story as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, which in places has the narrative drive of an exciting novel and is curiously made more interesting by being less exotic.  Bird observes her own culture but in an unfinished form, as if civilization has collapsed but is being rebuilt amidst the rattlesnakes, blizzards, and black flies.  “Here the life was rough, rougher than any I had ever seen” she writes early in the book (Letter IV).  She not only develops a taste for certain parts of that roughness – not for the filth and flies – but helped develop that taste in who knows how many readers.

Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada with Clarence King - He has n’t what old Ruskin calls for

Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872).  What we have here is a series of informal, amusing and instructive articles written for popular magazines by a major American geologist.  The articles are about a scientific expedition in the mountains of California, mostly, during the 1860s of which King was a member.  King would soon after help create and serve as the first director of the United State Geological Survey.

King gives the strong impression that he is a geologist because it gives him a professional excuse to climb mountains.  The ascents of Mount Whitney, Mount Tyndall, and Mount Shasta are described in some detail, and there is a great deal of trooping around Yosemite Valley.  Fine adventuring in a spectacular landscape.

Under the later moonlight I rose and went out upon the open rocks, allowing myself to be deeply impressed by the weird Dantesque surroundings; - darkness, out of which to the sky towered stern, shaggy bodies of rock; snow, uncertainly moonlit with cold pallor; and at my feet the basin of the lake, still, black, and gemmed with reflected stars, like the void into which Dante looked through the bottomless gulf of Dis.  (Ch. IV, “The Descent of Mount Tyndall,” 92)

Then follows a short critique of the illustrations of Gustave Doré (“a conspicuous failure from an overbalancing love of solid, impenetrable darkness”) which I found odd, but King is a highly aestheticized naturalist, a follower, it is clear enough, of John Ruskin, introduced by name when a landscape painter appears in one of the book’s comic sketches:

“It’s all Bierstadt and Bierstadt and Bierstadt nowadays!  What has he done but twist and skew and distort and discolor and belittle and be-pretty this whole doggonned country?  Why, his mountains are too high and too slim; they’d blow over in one of our fall winds…  He has n’t what old Ruskin calls for.”  (Ch. X, “Cut-off Copple’s,” 210)

The comic intervals were not such a surprise after finding them in Murray’s contemporary book about camping in the Adirondacks.  I will present the punchline of Ch. V, “The Newtys of Pike,” which does a good job of showing off King’s is essentially one long joke:

He added, “Thet – thet – thet man what gits Susan has half the hogs!” (110)

Do you want to read up to that punchline or not?  Up to you.  I laughed, but that ain’t proof a’nothin’.

I read the Bison Books edition of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.  Its introduction by James Shebl includes a number of testimonials: “’along with Roughing It the high-water mark of frontier literature’” (Wallace Stegner), “as fine as The Oregon Trail or Before the Mast” (Van Wyck Brooks), and “’one of the obligatory books for readers who wish to know their country’” (Henry Seidel Canby).  Heaven save me from such overheated blurbage.  “Obligatory,” what twaddle.  And Brooks is nuts, too – Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast is far richer.  Stegner is all right.  Funny that Roughing It, a book about a different kind of mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, one that King holds in contempt, is also from 1872.

I am perhaps making King’s book sound ridiculous, but I am just taking the terrific nature writing and wilderness adventures for granted.  The descriptions of Yosemite Falls during the first fall blizzard, for example, a storm that nearly killed King but also rewarded him:

At one time a gust rushed upon the lip of the fall with such violence as to dam back all its waters.  We could see its white pile at the lip mounting higher and higher, still held back by the wind, until there must have been a front of from a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet of boiling white water.  For a whole minute not a drop poured down the wall; but gathering strength, the torrent overcame the wind, rushed out with tremendous violence, leaped one hundred and fifty feet straight out into air, and fell clear to the rocks below…  (Ch. VIII, “A Sierra Storm,” 168)

Even today, I doubt many people have seen this in person.  It’s a good book.

Sir, the winter is also very beautiful. - enjoying the view atop Indian Summer

Stifter carefully places his characters in a landscape.  Sometimes – often – he invents them, like the boulder-strewn hills in his novella “Limestone.”  I actually looked that one up in a book about Stifter several years ago, because I wanted to see photos.  But Stifter had made it all up.

The fields and Alps and glaciers of Indian Summer are not so unusual, so I am not sure what it would mean to say that Stifter had invented them, although in some sense he obviously did.  Instead, Stifter has a character, a painter, do the invention.  His immense painting features “naked cliffs towering up not as an ordered formation but as if by chance like massive boulders placed here and there indiscriminately on the earth, like strangers who, like the Norsemen, settled on islands that didn’t belong to them…  it was torn and jumbled, devoid of trees and bushes, it had dry grass lining white glaring furrows, and piles of quartz stones.”  (387)

And most importantly, it is all imaginary:

“He has set a task for himself of portraying a subject he has never seen,” my host said, “he only sees it through the power of his imagination.”

Those Norsemen were a surprise.  Indian Summer is generally sparse with the metaphors.  I do not really understand the purpose of this painting, but I certainly recognize it as Stifter’s work.

The narrator, Heinrich, begins the novel on a path to be a scientist, with geology and botany as his main interests.  I guess I am just writing about geology now.  Heinrich is pondering his collection of marble specimens:

Will a great deal, will everything completely change again?...  If through the influence of wind and water, the mountains are constantly broken off, if the rubble falls down, if they are further split and the river ultimately brings them to the lower areas in the form of sand, how much can that continue?...  Thus, will one day the mountains have disappeared completely?...

Such questions put me in a serious, solemn mood; it seemed as if a more profound existence had come into my very nature.  (192)

This is the sort of thing W. G. Sebald pulled out of Stifter.

In some sense the climax of the narrator’s story, before the host’s revelations and the romantic plot necessarily bring the book to a close, is a winter hike to an Alpine glacier that he had first visited around page 277.  The hike, in the company of a local mountaineer, is described in detail.  The glacier, the mountains, and the view shift into abstraction – e.g., the glacier’s “sides peered out from the general white in iridescent blue or green” (381) or “[e]verything stood out immovably, silently, solemnly in a gentle blue, a golden shimmer or a distant dull silver” (382).  A few pages earlier, lower down the mountain, Heinrich’s companion

standing beside me, commented, “Sir, the winter is also very beautiful.”

“Yes, Kaspar,” I replied, “it is beautiful, it is very beautiful.”  (379)

Some sort of perfect balance of science and art, of knowledge and beauty, has been achieved, a duality has been resolved, within one branch of the larger symbolic world of the novel, the rock side of the Plants and Rocks idea.  Roses and marble.  The garden and the glacier.  The ephemeral but continually renewed; the permanent yet continually changing.

Next, then, some flowers.