A woman can claim wild land by love and memory

Evidence

You will ask, “What is Estes Park?” This name, with the quiet Midland Countries’ sound, suggests “park palings” well lichened, a lodge with a curtseying woman, fallow deer, and a Queen Anne mansion. Such as it is, Estes Park is mine. It is unsurveyed, “no man’s land,” and mine by right of love, appropriation, and appreciation; by the seizure of its peerless sunrises and sunsets, its glorious afterglow, its blazing noons, its hurricanes sharp and furious, its wild auroras, its glories of mountain and forest, of canyon, lake, and river, and the stereotyping them all in my memory. Mine, too, in a better than the sportsman’s sense, are its majestic wapiti, which play and fight under the pines in the early morning, as securely as fallow deer under our English oaks; its graceful “black-tails,” swift of foot; its superb bighorns, whose noble leader is to be seen now and then with his classic head against the blue sky on the top of a colossal rock; its sneaking mountain lion with his hideous nocturnal caterwaulings, the great ”grizzly,” the beautiful skunk, the wary beaver, who is always making lakes, damming and turning streams, cutting down young cotton-woods, and setting an example of thrift and industry; the wolf, greedy and cowardly; the coyote and the lynx, and all the lesser fry of mink, marten, cat, hare, fox, squirrel, and chipmonk, as well as things that fly, from the eagle down to the crested blue-jay. May their number never be less, in spite of the hunter who kills for food and gain, and the sportsman who kills and marauds for pastime! — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 124

Categorization

• SEED: The conception of ‘owning’ a landscape through memory and appreciation rather than deed is a strong through-line for any essay on belonging to place.
• XREF: connects to: Loving the land acts on the world, not merely in the heart — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 904; Calling a place by its true name transforms wilderness into homeland — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 123; Sunrise over the plains restored her courage to continue — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 94

Broader Connections

• Loving the land acts on the world, not merely in the heart #corroborates (0.82) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 904
• Calling a place by its true name transforms wilderness into homeland #qualifies (0.74) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 123