Isabella Bird

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains Isabella Bird

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. Isabella Lucy Bird, married name Bishop, 15 October 1831 - 7 October 1904, was a nineteenth-century English explorer, writer, photographer, and naturalist. With Fanny Jane Butler she founded the John Bishop Memorial hospital in Srinagar. She was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Bird left Britain in 1872, going initially to Australia, which she disliked, and then to Hawaii, her love for which prompted her second book (published three years later). While there she climbed Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. She then moved on to Colorado, then the newest state in the USA, where she had heard the air was excellent for the infirm. Dressed practically and riding not sidesaddle but frontwards like a man (though she threatened to sue the Times for saying she dressed like one), she covered over 800 miles in the Rocky Mountains in 1873. Her letters to her sister, first printed in the magazine The Leisure Hour, comprised Bird's fourth and perhaps most famous book, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.