It looked like some wild beast’s den rather than the home of a man.īut, Isabella wrote, “As he spoke, I forgot both his reputations and appearance, for his manner was that of a chivalrous gentleman, his account refined, and his language was easy and elegant. A partial deer carcass hung at one end of the cabin, while in the entry rested a recently skinned beaver carcass. The top of Jim’s mud-roofed, black log cabin was draped with all manner of drying furs, and the horns and antlers of animals were lying all about. On their first meeting, Jim charmed Bird by offering her water in a homely little tin, then apologizing so graciously that he had nothing better to offer a lady such as herself. While sober, he was as courteous as a gentleman could be. He was a man with two faces - one terrible and the other as lovely and handsome as could be. His “tawny ringlets” cascaded down from hat to shoulders - a figure at once beautiful and tragic. Nugent could be quite gentle and kind, despite his reputation, Bird wrote.Īnd while he had lost an eye to a grizzly bear encounter and that side of his face was terribly “repulsive,” the other side looked as though it could have been “modeled in marble,” Bird wrote. The bandit was so wicked, he was said to come down the mountains once a month to steal naughty children away for his supper.īut that’s not the man Isabella Bird met. Jim Nugent was so infamous at the time Bird met him that mothers were known to warn naughty children to behave, or they’d leave them for Rocky Mountain Jim. It has become an enduring legend of the American West, which turns 150 years old this year. The story Bird writes as Estes Park’s first tourist is laced with hints of the unlikely romance between herself, a straight-laced Victorian woman, and the one-eyed scoundrel named Rocky Mountain Jim. That book would not only set Bird up for a life of travel, but would help put Estes Park on the map before it held anything more than a few squatters and seasonal hunters. “A Ladies Life in the Rockies,” would actually be her fourth book, but it was the bestselling and most popular of all the books she wrote. There she would also have an unlikely romance with a one-eyed desperado and write a book that would make her an international bestselling author. She was on her way to seek the healthy atmosphere of the Rocky Mountains, as well as adventure.

Prescribed travel for her health, Bird would stay in Cheyenne just long enough to help out a mother with a newborn baby, hiring a young woman to look after them.

Wyoming wasn’t yet a state, nor was Colorado, when Isabella Bird dropped by Cheyenne in 1873 on a Union Pacific train, right in the midst of a cholera outbreak.

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