She climbed Long’s Peak unarmed despite urgings to carry a revolver.

Evidence

On my telling him that I traveled unarmed, he could hardly believe it, and adjured me to get a revolver at once. On arriving at the “Notch” (a literal gate of rock), we found ourselves absolutely on the knifelike ridge or backbone of Long’s Peak, only a few feet wide, covered with colossal boulders and fragments, and on the other side shelving in one precipitous, snow-patched sweep of 3,000 feet to a picturesque hollow, containing a lake of pure green water. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Her unarmed mountaineering connects to the period’s framing of respectable women as needing male protection versus her demonstrated self-sufficiency.
• BMF: The image of a woman climbing unarmed while her male guide assumes she must carry a hidden Derringer echoes the Independence narrative of a lone woman navigating hostile terrain in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.