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MOUNTAIN JIM.The devotees of that most satisfactory spot in northern Colorado known os Estes Park—those, that is, who go there year after year, and think no other resting place so well worth while—have a text book, which is to their cnlt what “Science and Health” is to the Christian Scientists. This is the account of that region published by Miss Isabella Bird in 1873. They read it at their meetings and think the last word has been said. Indeed if there are any terms of rapturous appreciation in the language which do not appear in Miss Bird's Book, they must be words introduced since 1878. She was the first of the writing tourists to penetrate to that “blue hollow at the foot of Long’s Peak, and the charms of it smote upon her soul and caused her to resound like a bass drum. The charms are all there, and the impression they made upon this Englishwoman was genuine and that is why her book still sells.No one who ever read it can have forgotten Mountain Jim, the melodramatic desperado who stalks through its pages, now with sixteen golden curls hanging over his shoulders, now waving the murderous six shooter; now reciting poetry of his own brewing, now damning and swearing most dreadfully; now worshiping at BunriBe from a mountain top, and now telling his sympathizing companion horrid tales from his own mysterious past, and ending darkly in a foot-note “in a dishonored grave, with a rifle bullet in his biain.” The writer, who is a sincere admirer of Estes Park and of Miss Bird as well, and who endorses every one of her adjectives, has long been an interested spectator of Jim’s pyrotechnics, as displayed in her pages ; and took Bome pains, in the course ol a recent visit to the park, to leurn what was remembered of him there ; with a result that is in the nature of a disillusion.They know him still bb Mountain Jim, and there is no doubt that he existed; but the old-timers call him merely “Old Jim by preference. They remember him very well; ne died in the fall of
Newspaper Details
Nebraska City Conservative
Nebraska City, Nebraska, US
Thu, Nov 29, 1900
Page 13
Full Page
Clipped by
Michelle P.
CA 05 Feb 2025
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Nebraska City Conservative
