"Glorious Denver" by Englishwoman Isabella L. Bird, 1873
"There were ... 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."
In the fall and early winter of 1873, Englishwoman Isabella Bird traveled alone in the Rocky Mountains, often by horseback and often through rugged terrain and in miserable weather. Her letters to her sister in England became her book A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.
Denver is no longer the Denver of Hepworth Dixon. A shooting affray in the street is as rare as in Liverpool, and one no longer sees men dangling to the lampposts when one looks out in the morning! It is a busy place, the entrepôt and distributing point for an immense district, with good shops, some factories, fair hotels, and the usual deformities and refinements of civilization.
Peltry shops abound, and sportsman, hunter, miner, teamster, emigrant can be completely rigged out at fifty different stores. At Denver, people who come from the East to try the “camp cure,” now so fashionable, get their outfit of wagon, driver, horses, tent, bedding, and stove, and start for the mountains. Asthmatic people are there in such numbers as to warrant the holding of an “asthmatic convention” of patients cured and benefited....
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 civilization, as hard as I did to ride sidewise to 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 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 depots 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.
From A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird, 1879, available on Amazon*
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More from Isabella L. Bird:
Isabella L. Bird’s story “Donner Lake” from A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879)
Isabella L. Bird’s story “Meeting Mountain Jim” from A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879)
Isabella L. Bird’s story “The Wild West” from A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879)
Isabella L. Bird’s story “Climbing Long’s Peak” from A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879)
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Image: Denver from the Highlands by Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier, 1874, Denver Public Library, public domain.