2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award Gold Winner for Western Biographies and Memoirs

The love they shared for an untamed land brought them together.

Isabella Bird was a proper Victorian lady, a minister’s daughter, a writer who traveled the globe. She was expected to marry a man of means and position instead she was drawn to a gruff mountain man, a desperado named Jim Nugent.

The unlikely pair met in Estes Park, Colorado in 1873. Jim was enchanted by Isabella and she was infatuated with him. In a published version of Isabella’s letter to her sister, she said of Jim that “he was a man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry.” On a climb to the top of Longs Peak their friendship blossomed into more than expected.

This book reveals the true story of Bird’s relationship with Nugent as they traveled through the dramatic wilderness of the Rocky Mountains.