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A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird
page 35 of 242 (14%)
being more "ugly" and treacherous than mules. There is only one
horse in Greeley "safe for a woman to ride." I tried an Indian
pony by moonlight--such a moonlight--but found he had tender
feet. The kitchen was the only sitting room, so I shortly went
to bed, to be awoke very soon by crawling creatures apparently in
myriads. I struck a light, and found such swarms of bugs that I
gathered myself up on the wooden chairs, and dozed uneasily till
sunrise. Bugs are a great pest in Colorado. They come out of
the earth, infest the wooden walls, and cannot be got rid of by
any amount of cleanliness. Many careful housewives take their
beds to pieces every week and put carbolic acid on them.

It was a glorious, cool morning, and the great range of the Rocky
Mountains looked magnificent. I tried the pony again, but found
he would not do for a long journey; and as my Vermont
acquaintance offered me a seat in his wagon to Fort Collins,
twenty-five miles nearer the Mountains, I threw a few things
together and came here with him. We left Greeley at 10, and
arrived here at 4:30, staying an hour for food on the way. I
liked the first half of the drive; but the fierce, ungoverned,
blazing heat of the sun on the whitish earth for the last half,
was terrible even with my white umbrella, which I have not used
since I left New Zealand; it was sickening. Then the eyes have
never anything green to rest upon, except in the river bottoms,
where there is green hay grass. We followed mostly the course of
the River Cache-a-la-Poudre, which rises in the Mountains, and
after supplying Greeley with irrigation, falls into the Platte,
which is an affluent of the Missouri. When once beyond the
scattered houses and great ring fence of the vigorous Greeley
colonists, we were on the boundless prairie. Now and then
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