Rocky Mountain Jim

My apologies in advance for the long posting today...I've become a little obsessed with Isabella Bird and her friendship with Rocky Mountain Jim Nugent. Yesterday I saw my old friend, Susan, a former Michener fellow who lives here now. We had lunch and then she showed me her favorite stores in Old Town (pictures tk). Anyway, we went into a used bookstore because I wanted to get a copy of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains before I left town. Turns out the bookstore owner was an even bigger fan of the book than I am. I asked her what she thought of Mountain Jim's death--he was shot 8 months after Bird left the U.S. I had read that he was shot while walking by the door of this man, think his name was Allen, but that the reasons for it were debated. Allen said it was an accident, but I read somewhere else that it was actually believed that he shot him for political reasons. Apparently there were some debates going on about how the land in Estes Park was to be governed, and Mountain Jim was involved, on the side of preserving the land. The bookstore woman said, "Sitting behind this desk, I've heard all kinds of theories about Mountain Jim's death and none of them sit right with me." (I loved that she talked about his death as though it had just happened.) In any case, Bird lavishes more words on her description of Mountain Jim than she does on any other person in the book, as she generally saving her descriptive powers for the landscape. It's an interesting portrait of a man, but also of a mountaineer--in her words, a desperado--of the period:

Roused by the growling of the dog, his owner came out, a broad, thickset man, about the middle height, with an old cap on his head, and wearing a grey hunting suit much the worse for wear (almost falling to pieces, in fact), a digger's scarf knotted around his waist, a knife in his belt, and "a bosom friend," a revolver, sticking out of the breast pocket of his coat; his feet, which were very small, were bare, except for some dilapidated moccasins made of horse hide. The marvel was how his clothes hung together, and on him. The scarf around his waist must have had something to do with it...He has grey-blue eyes, deeply set, with well-marked eyebrows, a handsome aquiline nose, and a very handsome mouth. His face was smooth shaven except for a dense mustache and imperial. Tawny hair, in thin uncared-for curls, fell from under the hunter's cap and over his collar. One eye was entirely gone, and the loss made one side of his face repulsive, while the other might have been modeled in marble...We entered into conversation, and as he spoke I forgot both his reputation and appearance, for his manner was that of a chivalrous gentleman, his accent refined, and his language easy and elegant.

As the book goes on, she spends a lot of time with Mountain Jim, who loves poetry, and writes it (lost the eye to a fight with a bear). He's extremely well-read and well-educated, apparently, but had killed so many men that mothers would use him to scare their children, as in, "If you're not good, Mountain Jim is going to get you." Everywhere she went with him, people were always in awe of Jim, and amazed that she could travel safely in his company. But he actually goes well out of his way throughout the book to keep her from harm. According to her bio (and this was on one of the links in the last posting about her), he proposed to her before she left, and she turned him down, knowing that he really wasn't the kind of man a woman could make a life with. (Or maybe she just wasn't quite ready to settle down...)