Her poetic descriptions and a would-be romance with "Mountain Jim" Nugent, a one-eyed desperado, helped make the book a bestseller at the time and a classic of the genre. Her letters back to her sister, Henrietta ("Henny"), became one of Bird's best known books, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, published in 1879. Bird visited Canada, Scotland, Australia and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) all before 1873, when she took a cross-continental trip that included riding and walking 800 miles through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Her compiled travel articles were published in 1856 as The Englishwoman in America, and thereafter Bird had a long career as a travel writer, explorer, photographer and all-around adventurer. Her father, a Church of England minister, gave her some money and sent her to America in 1854, partly in the belief that such a journey would help her overcome some undetermined illness. Name at birth: Isabella Lucy BirdIsabella Bird was an English missionary and explorer of the 19th century, known best for her books The Englishwoman in America and A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.
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