Colorado settler life combined brutality with safety and greed with generosity

Evidence

The scarcity of inns and the common practice of taking in transients for the night gave her an intimate view of the “Wild West” (as she called it). Nothing is more impressive than her feeling for the nuance and variety of that life. She saw and noted the opposites of which life everywhere is made. She saw some cabins thick with filth, where food flecked with flies was served from a common greasy pan, and she saw others neat as a London parlor. She saw a society where, in a sense, everyone was young, yet where the most painful sight was “the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children, only debased imitations of men and women.” She saw a world of vigilance committees, lynchings, and desperados quick on the trigger, who would shoot a friend for an “impertinent remark.” Yet she carefully noted that there were “few flagrant breaches of morality.” Bricks of silver could be safely left unattended in a wagon on the street of a mining town; life and property, she said, were generally safer in Colorado than in England. She found a brutish sullenness in public places and a shocking crudity of table manners; yet nowhere did she fail to find gentleness or chivalry. She reported that her desperado-companion, Mountain Jim, had ridden sixty miles to find a doctor for a sick child. She found an oppressive lack of privacy amid the exhilarating solitudes of the wild mountains. She found people pinchpenny, parsimonious, greedy, yet willing to share their short rations or escort her on horseback hundreds of miles through a snowstorm. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 47

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the reader’s interest in the daily life of pioneer settlers and their volatile passions; extends the ‘On Sacrifice’ theme with Mountain Jim riding sixty miles for a sick child.
• QUESTION: The contrast between ‘few flagrant breaches of morality’ and lynchings/desperados suggests vigilante justice functioned as a stabilizing force worth investigating.

Related

• Colorado frontier settlers prized sharp dealing yet kept property and women safe. (similarity 0.82)
• Contrary to traveller talk, Colorado settlers welcomed her warmly (similarity 0.78)
• Frontier mining settlements were morally steady and safer than British cities. (similarity 0.78)