As NACBS conference attendees land at Denver International Airport this November and make their way downtown, they will be struck with a view of the Front Range similar to the one British traveler Isabella Bird saw when she visited this area in 1873. Three years before Colorado became a state, Bird stopped there for a few months on her way back to England from the Hawaiian islands and wrote descriptive and poetic letters home to her sister. She was much further north than Denver when she first saw the Rocky Mountains, but I think the effect is similar as you get your first glimpse of the city on your way from the modern entry point at DIA. The gently rolling hills and oceans of grass are dramatically broken by a wall of stout peaks that stretches as far as the eye can see to both the left and right. I hope that a little peek into the travels of an astounding British woman will provide some insight into the history of traveling in Colorado and engagement with our city.
Bird wrote of her first view of the Rocky Mountains: "Five distinct ranges of mountains, one above the other, a lurid blue against a lurid sky, upheaved themselves above the prairie sea. An American railway car, hot, stuffy, and full of chewing, spitting Yankees, was not an ideal way of approaching this range which had early impressed itself upon my imagination. Still, it was truly grand." The Yankees you find yourself surrounded by on the RTD light rail to downtown hopefully won't be chewing and spitting, but the "grand" westward vista outside of the comfortable light rail car speeding down the tracks will be almost identical to the one Bird saw from her railway carriage. The layers of foothills and mountain peaks are still arranged one behind the other like rows of students in a class picture. Depending on the time of day you arrive, the skyline will be accented in myriad shades of lurid blue, pale pearl-gray, and magisterial purple.
Isabella Bird’s adventure on the Front Range is a truly astounding story. She rode hundreds of miles across Colorado mountains and valleys on a capable and kind horse aptly named "Birdie." She summited Long’s Peak with the infamous "desperado" Mountain Jim. She made friends everywhere she wandered, and her reputation began to precede her. On her sojourn up to Georgetown, she needed to borrow a horse, and when her innkeeper asked the local stable, the reply was, "If it’s the English lady travelling in the mountains, she can have a horse, but not any one [sic] else." She overcame injury and the elements, and poetically and engrossingly described it all in letters to her sister. What she accomplished, saw, and survived in three months would be impressive today with all the conveniences and amenities of modern life and travel, and she did it all alone, and mostly unarmed, in the 19th century!
Reading British travelers’ accounts of the Rocky Mountains as a 21st-century Denverite was a fascinating exercise in observing continuity and change. Some aspects of Colorado and Denver that Bird and her contemporaries highlighted are still well-known and appreciated by locals and visitors alike: the "almost perpetual" incandescent sunshine and lack of continuous cloud cover, the dry air, and the unique mix of animal life. But what I find most noticeable about Bird’s enchanting narrative of travel among the Rocky Mountains is how the only constant in her account is change.
Bird noted upon reaching Denver that it was "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 lamp-posts when one looks out in the morning!" Here, Bird references the travel writings of a British historian and traveler, William Hepworth Dixon, who stopped in Denver seven years before Bird, and recorded his experience in a travel narrative entitled New America. Hepworth Dixon described Denver as a "city of demons" with an excess of gambling dens and bars populated by lawless and violent men. The Denver Isabella Bird visited was still rough around the edges but had cleaned up its act significantly in seven years. Bird wrote that she only saw five women during her stay in Denver, a marked improvement over the "wifeless city" that Dixon visited. Dixon quoted one man he met in Denver as saying, "Five years ago, when I first came down from the gulches into Denver, I would have given a ten-dollar piece to have seen the skirt of a servant-girl a mile off." The city that Dixon described seems like the larger-than-life "Wild West" populated by strong characters and set among the harsh realities of the frontier.
Bird and Dixon both noted how quickly change occurred in Denver and the Western United States generally. Dixon exaggerated that "time runs swiftly in these western towns; two years take you back to the middle ages, and a settler of five years' standing is a patriarch." Bird reckoned with how fast Colorado changed in a note to the third edition of her book, published in 1880, seven years after her travels. She informed readers that while her writings were a faithful picture of the society and landscape that she saw at the time, "[f]riends who have returned from the West within the last six months tell me that things are rapidly changing, that the frame house is replacing the log cabin, and that the footprints of elk and bighorn may be sought for in vain on the dewy slopes of Estes Park." In both tellings, life and the environment seemed to change faster than could be recorded.
This is part of why travel narratives can be illuminating. They serve as a snapshot of a place and space taken with the observant eye of an outsider. Robert Athearn writes in Westward the Briton that "these people [British travelers] were literate, intelligent, well-traveled, and above all, not favorably influenced by the local manifest destiny virus…they had a basis of comparison." An observant traveler is not an objective set of eyes, but what we can learn from the narratives and impressions of British travelers is what stood out to them as extraordinary. Bird’s basis of comparison was her other travels and life back home in Victorian England. What she found noteworthy was filtered through the lens of what her sister, the original audience of her letters, would find impressive or out of the ordinary. Historical accounts of travel like Bird’s can show what a certain location was like in the past to a certain individual, and how the societal norms of the traveler can influence their point of view and what they found notable. While the conference will likely take up the majority of our brief time in Denver this November, it may be worth while to to spend at least a few minutes ruminating about the space and place in which we find ourselves and what stands out to us as notable. Bird highlighted the impressiveness of the wildlife, landscape, and environment of Colorado in her time and in doing so deepened my appreciation for the same aspects of my home state as they exist today.
Reading Bird’s account of Colorado and Dixon’s account of his brief stay in Denver made me think of how much this area continues to change at breakneck speed. In my short lifetime, Denver has boomed. The Denver that my dad tells me about sounds unrecognizable. What are now prominent and well-developed suburbs like Parker and Highlands Ranch were then "wide spots in the road" or still served as actual ranches on the outskirts of town. I’m sure modern Denverites of "five years' standing" feel like elders. Even since the last NACBS conference in Denver in 2017, the city has changed in numerous ways. Traveler Isabella Bird used her perceptive outsider’s eye and expressive pen to capture an astute image of Colorado by noticing the similarities and contrasts to Britain. As conference attendees gather in November, you might take note of what is recognizable and what is unfamiliar.
Lukas Rasmussen is an MA student studying history at the University of Colorado Denver. His focuses are European history and the history of travel and tourism.
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