Enter now to win a copy of
The Lady and the Mountain Man:
Isabella Bird, Rocky Mountain Jim, and their Unlikely Friendship
A vibrant summer sun blanketed the pristine Rocky Mountains with its far-reaching rays, reflecting lavender and amber colors on the clouds hovering over much of Estes Park. Mountain Jim, atop his white mule, rode through the vicinity of Griff Evans’ settlement, close to the tree line. Beaver pelts and squirrel carcasses dangled off the horn of his saddle. Horse and rider moved slowly, almost gliding. KA-BANG! KA-BANG! The sound of a shotgun roaring interrupted the serene setting. A slug struck Jim hard, knocking him to the ground. Five of the large, blue whistler shots plowed into his head and face. William Brown, a hunter traveling with Jim, hurried his horse to the spot where he lay to check on his downed companion. Jim was bleeding badly. Riding hard to the scene from the direction of the Evans’ ranch were three riders. Griff Evans, William Haigh, and the Earl of Dunraven himself, Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin. At just that moment, Dr. George Kingsley spurred his horse out of the tree line. He’d been hunting bear and content to continue his quest when he heard the men yelling at him to help. Dr. Kingsley obliged.
The four men were talking over one another with an inebriated Evans taking credit for the shooting when the doctor got to them. Disregarding the chatter, he jumped off his horse and rushed to the wounded mountain man lying under a clump of aspen trees. He quickly assessed the situation and announced to the group that one of the bullets had entered the back of the brain. Another had gone through the bones in his nose, splintering them when it hit and when it exited. The doctor and William transported Jim to a nearby log hut where everything was done to make the mountain of a man comfortable. Doctor Kingsley noted in his memoirs the date Jim was shot – June 29, 1874. “What a horrible case this would have been in a polluted war hospital,” he wrote. “But up here 8,000 feet above sea level not a single wound festered, and all healed as healthily as the cut of a healthy schoolboy.”
Shortly after the doctor’s initial diagnosis, Mountain Jim was moved to the hospital at Fort Collins. A second examination showed additional shots had penetrated the biceps of his left arm and his chest. Dr. Kingsley had tended to Jim before after one desperate occasion with the grizzly. Among the injuries he attempted to repair after the mauling was the serious scratch across the man’s right eye. The adhesions between the lid and eye had never properly healed, and the scar tissue was quite pronounced. “I often examined that eye of Jim’s with a view of releasing it from its too permanent curtain,” the doctor wrote in his memoirs. “The grizzly had performed a most remarkable operation, for a bear’s paw is not exactly an instrument well adapted to eye surgery.”
