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Now onto tonight's episode. Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. If you enjoy our show, please write us a review on the Podcasts app. Also, share us with a friend. Find us on Snewscast.com and follow us on social media and wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by our Patreon supporters and by The Sinking Sun. Tonight by Patreon supporter request, we'll read a lady's life in the Rocky Mountains, a travel book by Isabella Bird, describing her 1873 trip to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The book is a compilation of letters that Isabella Bird wrote to her sister Henrietta. Women were infrequently found in the Western United States of the

late 19th century and a middle-aged English lady traveling alone by horseback was quite a phenomenon. Bird was a 19th century British explorer, writer, Photographer and naturalist.

For Merleon, Bird was frail and suffered from headaches and insomnia. Doctors recommended open air and exercise, so Bird learned to ride horseback. In 1873, at the age of 42, she covered over 800 miles in the Rocky Mountains on horseback, riding not side-saddle like a lady, but frontwards like a man. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. Letter 1. Lake Tahoe September 2. I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh. Not lovable like the Hawaiian Islands, but beautiful in its own way, a strictly North American beauty. Snow splotched mountains, huge pines, red woods, sugar pines, silver spruce, a crystalline atmosphere, waves of the richest color, and a pine-hung lake, which mirrors all beauty on its surface. Lake Tahoe is before me. A sheet of water, 22 miles long by 10 broad, and in some places 1,700 feet deep. It lies at a height of 6,000 feet, and the snow-crowned summits which walled in are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet in altitude. The air is keen and elastic. There is no sound but the distant and slightly musical ring of the Lumber's axe. It is a weariness to go back, even in thought, to the clang of San Francisco, which I left in its cold morning fog early yesterday, driving to the Oakland ferry through streets with sidewalks, heaped with thousands of cantaloupe and watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, pears, grapes, peaches, apricots, all of startling size as compared with any I ever saw before. Other streets were piled with sacks of flour, left out all night, owing to the security from rain at this season. I passed hastily over the early part of the journey, the crossing the bay in the fog as chill as November, the number of lunch baskets, which gave the car the look of conveying a great picnic party, the last view of the Pacific on which I had looked for nearly a year, the fear sunshine and brilliant sky inland, the look of long reignlessness which one may not call drought. The valleys, with sides crimson with the poison oak, the dusty vineyards, with great purple clusters thick among the leaves, and between the vines great dusty melons lying on the dusty earth. From off the boundless harvest fields the grain was

carried in June and it is now stacked in sacks along the track awaiting Fridich.

California is a land flowing with milk and honey. The barns are bursting with fullness. In the dusty orchards, the apple and pear branches are supported, that they may not break down under the weight of fruit. Melons, tomatoes, and squashes of gigantic size lie almost unheated on the ground. Fat cattle, gorged almost to a completion, shade themselves under the oaks. Superb red horses shine, not with grooming, but with condition. And thriving farms everywhere show on what a solid basis the prosperity of the golden state is founded. Very uninviting, however rich was the blazing Sacramento Valley and very repulsive, the city of Sacramento, which, at a distance of 125 miles from the Pacific, has an elevation of only 30 feet. The mercury stood at 103 degrees in the shade, and the fine white dust was stifling. In the late afternoon we began the ascent of the sea-arras, whose saw-like points had been in sight for many miles. The dusty fertility was all left behind. The country became rocky and gravely, and deeply scored by streams bearing the muddy wash of the mountain gold mines down to the muddier sacramento. They were long broken ridges and deep ravines. The ridges becoming longer. The ravines deeper. the pines thicker and larger, as we ascended into a cool atmosphere of exquisite purity. And before 6 p.m., the last traces of cultivation and the last hardwood trees were left behind. At Colfax, a station at a height of 2,400 feet, I got out and walked the length of the train. First came two great gaudy engines, the grizzly bear and the white fox, with their respective tenders loaded with logs of wood. The engines with great solitary, reflecting lamps in front above the cow guards. a quantity of polished brass work, comfortable glass houses, and well-stuffed seats for the engine drivers. The engines and tenders were succeeded by a baggage car, the ladder loaded with bullion and valuable parcels, and in charge of two express agents, each of these cars is 45 feet long. Then came two cars loaded with peaches and grapes, then two silver palace cars, each 60 feet long, then a smoking car, at that time occupied mainly by Chinese laborers, and then five ordinary passenger cars with platforms like all the others, making altogether a train about 700 feet in length. The light of the sinking sun from that time glorified the sea-arras, and as the dew fell, aromatic odors made the still air sweet. On a single track, sometimes carried on a narrow ledge excavated from the mountain side by men lowered from the top in baskets, overhanging ravines from 2000 to 3000 feet deep. The monster train snaked its way upwards, stopping sometimes in front of a few frame houses, at others where nothing was to be seen, but a log cabin with a few Chinese labors hanging around it. But where trails on the sides of the ravines pointed to a gold country above and below. So sharp and frequent are the curves on some parts of the ascent that on looking out of the window one could seldom see more than a part of of the train at once. At Cape Horn, where the track curves round the ledge of a precipice, 2,500 feet in depth, it is correct to be frightened and a fashion of holding the breath and shutting the eyes prevails.

But my fears were reserved for the crossing of a trestle bridge over a very deep chasm,

which is itself approached by a sharp curve. This bridge appeared to be overlapped by the cars, so as to produce the effect of looking down directly into a wild gulch with a torrent raging along it at an immense depth below.

Shivering in the keen, frosty air near the summit pass of the Sierras, we entered the snow sheds, wooden galleries, which for about 50 miles shut out all the splendid views of the region as given in dioramas, not even allowing a glimpse of the gem of the seeras, the lovely Donner Lake. One of these sheds is 27 miles long.

In a few hours, the mercury had fallen from 103 degrees to 29 degrees, and we had ascended 6,987 feet in 105 miles. After passing through the sheds, we had several grand views of a pine forest on fire before reaching trucky.m., having traveled 258 miles. Truckee, the center of the lumbering region of the Sierra's, is usually spoken of as a rough mountain town, And Mr. W. had told me that all the ruffs of the district congregated there, that there were nightly pistol fights in bar rooms. But as he admitted that a lady was sure of respect, and Mr. G. strongly advised me to stay and see the lakes I got out, much dazed and very stupid with sleep, envying the people in the sleeping car, who were already unconscious on their luxurious couches. the cars drew up in a street. If street that could be called, which was only a wide, cleared space intersected by rails, with here and there a stump, in great piles of sawn logs, bulking big in the moonlight, and a number of irregular clapboard steep roofed houses, many of them with open fronts, glaring with light and crowded with men. We had pulled up at the door of a rough western hotel with a partially open front, being a bar room crowded with men drinking and smoking, and the space between net and the cars was a moving mass of loafers and passengers. On the tracks, engines, tolling heavy bells were mightily moving. The glare from their cyclopian eyes dull dulling the light of a forest, which was burning fitfully on a mountainside, and on open spaces great fires of pine logs were burning cheerily, with groups of men round them. A band was playing noisily, and the unholy sound of Tom Tom's was not far off. Mountains The seeras of many a fireside dream seemed to wall in the town, and great pines stood out, sharp and clear cut against a sky in which a moon and stars were shining frostily. It was a sharp frost at that great height, and when me and my carpet bag were deposited in a hotel lobby which answered for the parlor, I was glad to find some remains of pine-knot still light in the stove. A man came in and said that when the cars were gone, he would try to get me a room, but they were so full that it would be a very poor one. The crowd was solely masculine. It was then 11.30 pm, and I had not had a meal since 6 am. But when I asked, hopefully, for a hot supper with tea, I was told that no supper could be got at that hour. But in half an hour, the same man returned with a small cup of cold, weak tea and a small slice of bread, which looked as if it had been much handled. I asked the clerk about the hire of horses, and presently a man came in from the bar, who he said could supply my needs. This man, the very type of a western pioneer, bowed through himself into a rocking chair, drew a spittoon beside him, cut a fresh quid of tobacco, began to chew energetically, and put his feet, cased in myri-high boots into which his trousers were tucked on the top of the stove. He said he had horses which would both lope and trot that some ladies preferred the Mexican saddle, that I could ride alone in perfect safety. And after her route had been devised, I hired a horse for two days. This man wore a pioneer's badge as one of the earliest settlers of California.

But he had moved on as one place after another had become too civilized for him.

But nothing he added was likely to change much in trucky. I was afterwards told that the usual regular hours of sleep are not observed there. The accommodation is too limited for the population of 2000, which is masculine mainly, and is liable to frequent temporary additions. And beds are occupied continuously, though by different occupants throughout the greater part of the 24 hours. Consequently, I found the bed and room allotted to me quite tumbled looking. Men's coats and sticks were hanging up. Boots were littered about, and a rifle was in one corner. There was no window to the outer air, but I slept soundly, being only once awoke by an increase of the same den in which I had fallen asleep. varied by three pistol shots fired in rapid succession. This morning, trucky war a totally different aspect, the crowds of the night before had disappeared.

There were heaps of ashes where the fires had been. A sleepy German waiter The only person about the premises. The open drinking saloons were nearly empty, and only a few sleepy looking loafers hung about in what is called the street. It might have been Sunday, but they say that it brings a great

a session of throng and jolly.

Public worship had died out, had present.

Work is discontinued on Sunday, but the day is given up to pleasure. Putting a minimum of indispensables into a bag and slipping on my Hawaiian riding dress over a silk skirt and a dust cloak overall. I stealthily crossed the plaza to the livery stable, the largest building in trucky, where twelve fine horses were stableed, installs on each side of a broad drive. My friend of the evening showed me his rig. Three velvet-covered side-sattles almost without horns. Some ladies, he said, used the horn of the Mexican saddle, but none in the part, rode cavalier fashion. I felt abashed. I could not ride any distance in the conventional mode, and was just going to give up this pleasant ravage when the man said, ride your own fashion here at Truckee. If anywhere in the world people can do as they like. Blissful Truckee. In no time a large gray horse was ripped out and a handsome silver-bossed Mexican saddle with ornamental leather tassels hanging from the stir-up guards and a housing of black bear's skin. I strapped my silk skirt on the saddle to posited my cloak in the corn bin and was safely on the horse's back before his owner had time to devise any way of mounting me, neither he nor any of the loafers who had assembled showed the slightest sign of astonishment, but all were as respectful as possible. Once on horseback my embarrassment disappeared and I rode through trucky, whose irregular, steep, roofed houses and chantes set down in a clearing, and surrounded closely by mountain and forest, looked like a temporary encampment, passed under the Pacific Railroad, and then for twelve miles followed the windings of the Truckee River, a clear, rushing mountain stream in which immense pine logs had gone aground, not to be floated off till the next fresh it, a loud, tongueed, rollicking stream of ice-cold water, on whose banks no ferns or trailers hang, and which leaves no greenness along its turbulent progress. All was bright with that brilliancy of sky and atmosphere, That blaze of sunshine and universal glitter, which I never saw till I came to California, Combined with an elasticity in the air, which removed all

lassitude and gives one strength and spirit enough for anything. you you you