"She saw off bandits with her revolver": the unbelievable adventures of Fanny Bullock Workman

Mountaineering was still in its infancy when Fanny Bullock Workman took to the peaks of Europe and Asia. Daniel Light salutes a pioneer who was also a groundbreaking geographer and one of the first women to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris

A black‑and‑white collage places a woman in ornate formal clothing and a fur stole at the front. Behind her are images of snow‑covered mountain peaks, roped climbers, and a smaller figure holding a newspaper with the headline “Votes for Women.”

Published: July 31, 2026 at 4:00 PM

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“This is very dangerous,” said Matthias Zurbriggen. He stopped and found what footing he could. “We won’t be getting down today.” Fanny and Hunter Workman, roped together with Zurbriggen, stopped too. Midway through their third season in the Himalayas, this was the first time they had seen their Swiss guide thrown ‘off balance’.

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The ice had been fine that morning, firm and fast. Zurbriggen had cut neat little steps as he led the couple and their porter to the 19,260-foot crest of an avalanche-scored ice-wall. Now, as they descended, the furnace heat of the midday sun had turned their steps to mush. With camp still more than 1,000 feet below, they were in trouble.

Fanny knew there was no question of staying put, crowded together, the mountainside melting beneath them. So, after a little food and a short rest, they resumed their descent. Zurbriggen had read the danger well. They had gone a few more steps when their porter, Giuseppe Muller, slipped and fell.

Six mountaineers stand on a snowy landscape holding walking sticks or ice axes, with a bundled pack resting on the snow in front of them.

Hunter and Fanny (centre) c1912 with members of their Himalayan expedition. Indigenous porters would often endure harsh treatment at the hands of the couple | Credit: Getty Images

For Fanny, such a moment of danger was nothing new. She had long known mountains as places of high drama. Born to a wealthy family in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1859, she had finished her education in the European cities of Paris and Dresden, drawing on visits to the Alps as inspiration for short stories set among its snowy peaks.

Returning home in 1879, Fanny found society life stifling. She escaped by hiking in the hills, or by disappearing into the books of English mountaineers such as Alfred Wills and Edward Whymper. Her marriage, in 1881, to Dr William Hunter Workman, was an ideal match. Twelve years her senior, Hunter introduced her to climbing as the pair spent their summers exploring New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Fitter and more ambitious than her husband, Fanny came to lead these expeditions.

In 1889, the Workmans moved to Dresden with their five-year-old daughter, Rachel. Later that year a son, Siegfried, was born. Leaving their children in the care of others, Fanny and Hunter explored Europe on their ‘safety bicycles’ – a revolutionary design employing wheels of equal sizes. In 1891, they cycled to the Alps and climbed Mont Blanc. In 1892, it was the Matterhorn. Then, the following year, days after their return from a tour of Italy, tragedy struck. Siegfried contracted influenza. Pneumonia took hold. Within weeks, he was gone.

Four early mountaineers in thick winter clothing make their way up a steep, snow‑laden mountainside, driving their ice axes into the slope for support. The mix of snow and exposed rock conveys the harsh, demanding terrain of early alpine expeditions.

Members of the Bullock Workman expedition ascend an ice wall in the Himalayas | Credit: Getty Images

Grief proved a driving force. Following a period of mourning, Fanny and Hunter went farther, wider – and higher. They cycled through Spain and Algeria, writing books about their experiences. Fanny saw off bandits with her revolver, wild dogs with her whip.

While in Spain and Algeria, Fanny saw off bandits with her revolver and wild dogs with her whip

Fanny hoped that, by combining lavish description with robust scientific observation, her books would appeal to a broad readership. But they enjoyed only moderate success, neither substantive enough for the geographical establishment nor frivolous enough for the masses. In part because she craved a bigger audience, her thoughts turned east. Late in 1897, she and Hunter made port at Colombo, Sri Lanka. In the months that followed, they meandered 4,000 miles north through India, until the summer heat on the plains chased them up into the foothills of the Himalayas.

At the hill station of Darjeeling, Fanny planned her first Himalayan mountaineering expedition. It was not a success. The Workmans were forced to turn back after just four days. Some of the 60 local porters and guides she employed deserted. Others, lacking confidence in the enterprise, burned their boots.

Effective partnership

Fanny was back the next summer, with Zurbriggen as her guide. The Swiss had climbed in the Karakoram, a range at the western end of the Himalayas, on the Conway expedition of 1892. He knew the mountains, and how better to manage those who called them home.

Two people cross a shallow river in the mountains, one walking using a stick as support, the other on the first person's back, hitching a ride

Fanny hitches a lift as she crosses the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram mountain range, c1912 | Credit: Library of Congress

With their big personalities, Fanny and Zurbriggen inevitably clashed. He would go off “on long tirades as to what a great guide he was”, Fanny wrote in her journals. Zurbriggen was “a fool about taking care of himself”, she added, “and an ass in most respects”.

But their partnership was effective. In 1899, Zurbriggen led Fanny to a new women’s world altitude record, on a peak she christened the ‘Siegfriedhorn’. Four days later, she broke her own record, on the newly appointed ‘Mount Bullock Workman’. Another week and she broke it again. Braving a snowstorm to reach the 20,997-foot summit of Koser Gunge, Fanny became the first female mountaineer known to have climbed higher than 20,000 feet.

Focused and resolute when climbing, Fanny was meticulous in her preparations, indefatigable on the mountainside and seemingly impervious to the worst excesses of altitude sickness. She kept a cool head even in the most precarious of situations – never more so than when, high on the ice wall of the Bhayakara Col in 1902, she watched Giuseppe Muller slide away down the mountainside.

A person dressed in a light long‑sleeved shirt and a dark neck scarf stands outside, wearing a cap with goggles resting on top. The background shows an open, wintry outdoor setting.

Fanny, seen here c1905, broke several women’s altitude records during her lifetime | Credit: Getty Images

Fanny knew that if Hunter, next on the rope, failed to arrest the porter’s fall, she would take the weight of both men. Zurbriggen, above her, already had his ice axe buried deep in the ice, the rope looped twice around it, but there was no guarantee this ‘anchor’ would hold.

It did not come to that. Hunter, seeing Muller slip, took hold of “a small ice projection” in one hand, tightened his grip on the rope with the other. As the porter’s weight came onto him, Hunter’s stance held. Time froze as Muller searched for a footing. Then, to Hunter’s relief, the rope slackened. Muller was saved, only to be subjected to a torrent of abuse from Zurbriggen, who scolded the porter for his carelessness.

“We went on,” wrote Fanny, “but the feeling of danger was tremendous.” Getting down took five hours. “Zurbriggen called it,” noted Hunter, “the most difficult col [the lowest point on a ridge between two peaks] he had ever made.”

Fanny broke her women’s altitude record again the following year, twice in one day. Then, in 1906, she ascended a 22,740-foot peak in the Nun Kun massif on the border of Kashmir and Ladakh. She had reached a height more significant than even she knew: the highest Himalayan summit known to have been trodden by woman or man. She named it ‘Pinnacle Peak’, fitting for the apex of her climbing career.

A skater wearing a long skirt, thick sweater, gloves, scarf, and hat glides across an outdoor ice surface. High snowbanks rise behind them in this black‑and‑white winter scene.

Fanny, pictured c1910, was a renowned geographer, and one of the first female members of the Royal Geographical Society | Credit: Getty Images

The special leader

Fanny was more than just a mountaineer. She was a serious geographer who, from her final Himalayan expedition, to the Siachen Glacier in 1912, produced a map so accomplished that even the high minds of the Royal Geographical Society were impressed. She was a campaigner, pictured on that last expedition holding a newspaper with the headline “Votes for Women”. And she was always careful to identify herself as “the initiator and special leader” of her expeditions, aided by her husband’s “valuable cooperation”.

As a woman, Fanny faced unique challenges as she sought to command the confidence of those in her charge

Sadly, Fanny did not extend the same equanimity to the couple’s Indigenous porters and guides. They were “bawling” and “unendurable”, she wrote of those who, without the warm clothes, snowshoes or full stomachs taken for granted by their bosses, carried heavy loads to 20,000 feet. On one occasion, when some of the local men refused to march, Hunter pelted them with stones.

However, it’s worth noting that, as a woman, she faced unique challenges as she sought to command the confidence of those in her charge. And for all the problems she faced – plenty of her own making – she was one of the pre-eminent explorers of her day in the Himalayas. She was widely honoured, the first American woman to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris and one of the first to be made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

As a teenager, Fanny imagined mountain summits as places where anything was possible. Climbing rewarded her dreaming, empowered her to rise above the world as it was. In the Himalayas, leading pioneering expeditions to record-breaking heights, she found something closer to the world as she would have liked it to be.

Daniel Light is a climber and the author of The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering (Oneworld, 2024)

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This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

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