In the year before she left Britain in 1872, Isabella Bird was forty years old, living alone, so weak that she required a steel support to hold her head up, and spent most of her time confined to a bed. Periods like this were not unusual for her. From early childhood, she had suffered from a spinal condition serious enough that she underwent a surgical operation at 18. The operation brought some relief but not a cure. Isabella cataloged what she felt in a letter to her sister, Henrietta: “neuralgia, pain in my bones, pricking like pins and needles in my limbs, excruciating nervousness, exhaustion, inflamed eyes, sore throat, swelling of the glands behind each ear, stupidity.”

Finally, her doctors prescribed travel - specifically, a sea voyage and fresh air in a place beyond Britain. In 1854, with £100 from her father and his blessing to go wherever she liked, Isabella sailed for North America. And just like that, it was almost as if whatever plagued her was now gone. The doctors could not explain why this happened; it was simply what experience now showed. When Isabella left Britain, she often improved. When she returned, she often relapsed. She spoke about the this poignantly. About traveling, she wrote: “It is to me like living in a new world, so free, so fresh, so vital, so careless, so unfettered, so full of interest that one grudges being asleep.” About coming home: “Every step now seemed not a step homewards but a step out of my healthful life back among wretched dragging feelings and aches and nervousness.”

Scholars have debated what, precisely, afflicted Isabella. Some have suggested a chronic infection. Others have argued that the treatments of the era — enforced confinement, prescribed inactivity, and the practices of Victorian medicine applied to conditions it did not fully understand — may themselves have contributed to her suffering. The diagnosis remains uncertain. The pattern, however, was clear.

That does bring up the question of why she kept coming back. The answer was largely Henrietta. The sisters lived separately, but they were deeply close. In later years, when Henrietta passed away, Isabella would write, “The anguish is awful. She was my world, present or absent, seldom absent from my thoughts.” To leave permanently would have been to sever her most meaningful relationship, despite the nearly daily letters she wrote Henrietta over the years.

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“There never was anybody who had adventures as well as Miss Bird.”

By the autumn of 1873, Isabella was traveling alone in borrowed boots and a Hawaiian dress from California through Wyoming and into Colorado. Still a territory then, Colorado was home to about 100,000 people, concentrated mostly in Denver and the mining towns strung along the eastern face of the Rockies, places that had erupted almost overnight from the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush of 1858. The region still had the raw, provisional quality of settlements that were not entirely sure they would last; full of tent saloons and assay offices and men who had arrived for riches and adventures.

Beyond the mining towns, the land opened into gleaming mountains and wide valleys where a handful of ranchers and trappers had staked their claims, occupying rough log cabins with sod roofs and dirt floors, running cattle across land with no fences or clear ownership. Isabella loved it: “The scenery is the most glorious I have ever seen, and is above us, around us, at the very door,” she wrote.

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