Mountains So Sublime: Nineteenth-Century British Travelers and the Lure of the Rockey Mountains West

Picturesque,
immense,
fantastic, and sublime are but a few of the words that early British travelers used to describe the nineteenth-century Rocky Mountain landscape and surrounding terrain. As part of a long tradition of travelers’ tales, these British tourists, explorers, adventurers, writers, scientists, artists, missionaries, and merchants all looked for ways to describe and illustrate places they visited–in this instance, the vast and strange wilderness landscape of the North America’s Rocky Mountains. Using both published and unpublished resources, Terry Abraham weaves these observations, their aesthetic, and their Britishness into a refreshing and unique view of an all-but-vanished West. In their efforts to make the Rocky Mountain West real to a readership on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, these visitors from two centuries past encouraged a growing realization that this part of the North American landscape was unique, a special part of the world’s natural heritage. Many also tried to describe the changes that were being visited on the Rockies by onrushing progress. They were among the first who cautioned against excessive human encroachment on the landscape; in fact, they demonstrated what might be called environmental pre-awareness. Twenty-first century readers will discover surprising parallels between modern environmental and conservation issues and the concerns expressed by these early travelers from the nineteenth.