Frontier wildlife remained unafraid of humans in this unsettled region

Evidence

This is indeed far removed. It seems farther away from you than any place I have been to yet, except the frozen top of the volcano of Mauna Loa. It is so little profaned by man that if one were compelled to live here in solitude one might truly say of the bears, deer, and elk which abound, “Their tameness is shocking to me.” It is the world of “big game.” Just now a heavy-headed elk, with much-branched horns fully three feet long, stood and looked at me, and then quietly trotted away. He was so near that I heard the grass, crisp with hoar frost, crackle under his feet. Bears stripped the cherry bushes within a few yards of us last night. Now two lovely blue birds, with crests on their heads, are picking about within a stone’s-throw. This is “The Great Lone Land,” until lately the hunting ground of the Indians, and not yet settled or traversed, or likely to be so, owing to the want of water. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 163

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading purpose of landscape/wildlife encounters, and to the general theme of unprofaned wilderness matching Parable of the Sower’s stark nature and A Midwife’s Tale’s frontier hardscrabble. — connects to: Conservation corridors can displace humans twice across a century to favor wildlife. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1212

Related

• Wildlife in the Rockies shows no fear of human presence. (similarity 0.89)
• The parks are claimed by wildlife in the absence of settlers (similarity 0.78)