Izzy Bird, spice cake

Isabella is still in the cabin in Estes Park. Today’s entry is simply labeled “November ?.”*
Isabella washed her one change of clothes and hung them on the outdoor line to bleach in the sun. “… when some furious gusts came down from Long’s Peak, against which I could not stand, and when I did get out all of my clothes were blown into strips from an inch to four inches in width, literally destroyed!”
Rather than dwell in the fact that she no only has the clothes on her back, she merely points out that very little is truly necessary for comfort and happiness. Which is a fundamental truth, really.
Then she “made a four-pound spiced ginger cake, baked some bread, mended my riding dress, cleaned up generally, wrote some letters with the hope that some day they might be posted and took a magnificent walk, reaching the cabin again in the melancholy glory which now immediately precedes the darkness.”
I lied about the guest arriving today. He’ll arrive tomorrow. Try to get over the disappointment.
 
* This is a long entry and a lot happens so I’m going to break it up over the next few days.

Izzy Bird, November, maybe?

Isabella is still in the cabin in Estes Park. Much like us right now, time is doing weird things.

“We have lost count of time, and can only agree on the fact that the date is somewhere near the end of November. Our life has settled down into serenity, and our singular and enforced partnership is very pleasant. We might be three men living together, but for the unvarying courtesy and consideration which they show to me.”

Keeping the house functional is work that never stops. And, despite the addition of the elk, the three are still hungry.

“The men are so easy to live with; they never fuss, or grumble, or sigh, or make trouble of anything. It would amuse you to come into our wretched little kitchen before our disgracefully late breakfast, and find Mr Kavan busy at the stove frying venison, myself washing the supper dishes, and Mr Buchan drying them, or both the men busy at the stove while I sweep the floor.”

On Saturday, the men shot a deer but for reasons that are unclear, left it in the place until the next day. When they got there, they found nothing but the hind legs.* They followed some tracks that they thought would lead them to something else they could shoot and eat, but, instead, “came quite carelessly upon a large mountain lion, which, however, took itself out of their reach before they were sufficiently recovered from their surprise to fire at it.

“These lions, which are really a species of puma, are bloodthirsty as well as cowardly. Lately, one got into a sheepfold in the canyon … and killed 30 sheep, sucking the blood from their throats.”

Tomorrow: a guest arrives.

 

* Honestly? I’m not a hunter and this seems unwise even to me.


Izzy Bird, pickled pork

Isabella is still in the cabin in Estes Park.

She and the young men were happy to have finished up the pickled pork last night because they had grown weary of it but are now without meat. Fortunately, the young men shot an elk the previous day. Unfortunately, they intended to keep it intact to sell in Denver. Fortunately, they gave up on that plan and Isabella awoke to the smell of venison.

Supplies are running low. “… there is only coffee for one week,* and I have only a scanty three ounces of tea left. The baking powder is nearly at an end.” They are economizing by breakfasting late and having two meals rather than three. They hope Evans comes soon with a resupply.

Still, the mood is light. “Our evenings are social and pleasant. We finish supper about eight, and make up a huge fire. The men smoke while I write to you. Then we draw near the fire and I take my endless mending, and we talk or read aloud.” They also discuss their present circumstance re: supplies and sick calves and “the possible intentions of a men whose footprints we have found and traced for three miles.” These are all topics that recur, she says, “and few of which can be worn threadbare.”

 

* this, my friends, would be my limiting factor.


Izzy Bird, hazy shade of winter

Isabella is still in the cabin in Estes Park. The bleakness of late November is starting to get to her.*

“This is a piteous day, quite black, freezing hard, with a fierce north-east wind. The absence of sunshine here, where it is nearly perpetual, has a very depressing effect, and all the scenery appears in its grimness of black and gray.”

Three of the horses, including Birdie, leapt the fence the previous night and they have no way to round them up. The two men were out looking for them and saw Jim returning to his cabin. He had “an awfully ugly fit on him” and they chose to avoid making their presence known. The two men are also weary of Estes Park, given that they promised to look after the place for five days until Evans returned. It has been five weeks.

“… in the grimness of a coming storm, Had that view of the park which I saw first in the glories of an autumn sunset. Life was all dead; the dragon-flies no longer darted in the sunshine, the cotton-woods had shed their last amber leaves, the crimson trailers of the wild vines were bare … How can you expect me to write letters from such a place, from a life ‘in which nothing happens?’”

Spoiler: Isabella finds a way to keep writing.

 

* Isabella is all of us, right now.


Izzy Bird, beaver dams

Isabella is still in the cabin in Estes Park. Jim just showed up on her doorstep.
He “walked in very pale and haggard looking, and coughing severely. He offered to show me the trail up one of the grandest of the canyons and I could not refuse to go.”
The pair rode along and Isabella admired the work of the local beavers, whose “engineering skill is wonderful.”* The canyon, she says, “was glorious beyond any other, but it was a dismal and depressing ride. The dead past buried its dead….Not an allusion was made to the conversation previously. Jim’s manner was courteous, but freezing, and when I left home on my return he hardly thought he should be back from the Snowy Range before I left. Essentially an actor, was he, I wonder, posing on the previous day in the attitude of desperate remorse, to impose on my credulity or frighten me; or was it a genuine and unpremeditated outburst of passionate regret for the life which he had thrown away? I cannot tell, but think it was the last.”
Historians have speculated that Jim was her one, true love but I don’t know. I think her true love was the freedom to travel and everything else was secondary.
 

 


Izzy Bird, labor

Isabella is still in the Estes Park cabin with the two young men. She’ll be here for a bit so just settle in.

The three are figuring out how to make the workflow easier, especially for Mr Buchan, who is, apparently, delicate.

“You will wonder* how three people here in the wilderness can have much to do. There are the horses which we keep in the corral to feed on sheaf oats and take water twice a day, the fowls and dogs to feed, the cow to milk, the bread to make, and to keep a general knowledge of the whereabouts of the stock in the event of a severe snow storm coming on.”

There is also wood to cut and stack as well as niceties like cooking, washing and mending. The men hunt and fish. Plus, there are two** sick cows to mind.

One died the day before she wrote this letter. “It suffered terribly, and looked at us with the pathetically pleading eyes of a creature ‘made subject to vanity.’” Disposing of the body was the hardest part. The wagon horses are off in Denver and the other horses refuse to pull it. Eventually, the manage to get it outside the shed and call it good enough.

“… a pack of wolves came down, and before daylight nothing was left but the bones. They were so close to the cabin that their noise was most disturbing, and on looking out several times I could see them all in a heap wrangling and tumbling over each other.”***

* Honestly? I don’t wonder that because life on the frontier in the 1870s sounds labor intensive under the best of circumstances.

** soon to be one

*** This reminds me of the old “Dogs in Elk” internet list serve thing.


Izzy Bird, sourdough

After her time in the snow storm with Jim, Isabella returned to the cabin in Estes Park that she is sharing with two young men while she waits for the banks to honor her circular checks.

Her life right now is not glamourous.

“I cleaned the living room and the kitchen, swept a path through the rubbish in the passage room, washed up, made and baked a batch of rolls and four pounds of sweet biscuits, cleaned some tins and pans, washed some clothes, and gave things generally a ‘redding up.’* There is a little thick buttermilk, fully six weeks old, at the bottom of a churn, which I use for raising the rolls; but Mr Kavan, who makes ‘lovely’ bread, puts some flour and water to turn sour near the stove, and this succeeds admirably.”

Which just goes to show you that our recent turn to starting our own sourdough bread during the pandemic is nothing terribly new. When you are stuck, make sourdough.

Isabella is concerned about her clothing, however. She has been in Colorado for three months, during which the season has changed. She has only what she could carry in a small carpet-bag and after “legitimate wear, the depredations of calves, and the necessity of tearing some of them up for dish-clothes,” she is down to a single change of clothes. She needs new shoes but can’t buy any in Denver because of the money situation. She does have a formal black dress and coat, which she has taken to wearing during dinner so that she can spend the evening mending her daily outfit.

* This phrase should be familiar to all Pittsburghers everywhere.


Izzy Bird, storms

Isabella confesses that Jim’s story ended where it did because foul weather closed in. He guided her to a sheltered place and, after some more words (which I’ll detail below), rode off into the storm.

Jim confessed that he believed in God and that Isabella “stirred the better nature in me too late. I can’t change. If ever a man were a slave, I am.”*

Jim then made Isabella promise that some of the things he said must never be revealed, “I promised, for I had no choice; but they come between me and the sunshine sometimes, and I wake at night to think of them. I wish I had been spared the regret and excitement of that afternoon.

“My soul dissolved in pity for his dark, lost, self-ruined life, as he left me and turned away in the blinding storm to the Snowy Range, where he said he was going to camp for a fortnight; a man of great abilities, real genius, singular gifts, and with all the chances in life which other men have had.”

With that, Isabella waited until the worst of the snow had passed, then started her way back to the cabin in Estes Park.

* you in danger, girl.


Izzy Bird, Jim's story part 2

Isabella is still listening to Jim’s story.

He spent years as an Indian Scout, each more bloody than the last. “As an armed escort of emigrant parties he was evidently implicated in all the blood and broil of a lawless region and period, and went from bad to worse, varying his life by drunken sprees, which Brough nothing but violence and loss.”

The narrative jumps then, according to Isabella.* Jim picks up when he is on a homestead in Missouri and would soon move to Colorado. Once in Colorado, he made a squatter’s claim and has 40 head of cattle in addition to his trapping business. “…. but envy and vindictiveness are raging within him. He gets money, goes to Denver, and spends large sums in the maddest dissipation, making himself a terror … and when the money is done returns to his fountain den, full of hatred and self-scorn, till next time.”

And, there, his tale is done.

* and she’s not so naive as to not know that the lapse likely involves drinking and violence and, possibly, the law.