Book description
Endlessly restless and endlessly curious, Isabella Bird (1831-1904)
travelled the world looking for new experiences, but never more
delightfully than in her pony-bound adventures in the Colorado Territory
at a time when it was only notionally under the control of the American
authorities. A vanished world of grizzly hunters, cowboys, isolated
cabins and plagues of rattlesnakes is here beautifully brought back to
life. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and
back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds
frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few
reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who
saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and
implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and
flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh,
to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each
other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so
much was still to be discovered. Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) was
the daughter of a clergyman and grew up in Tattenhall, Cheshire. In 1873
she set off for the Rocky Moutains. Isabella's intrepid journeys within
this fantastic landscape are relayed in the form of vivid letters she
wrote to her adored sister, Henrietta.
