She was a frequent contributor to the Boston Evening Transcript as well as several other prominent papers, her writings having attracted widespread attention.

Agnes Deans Cameron, Elizabeth Taylor, and Clara Coltman Rogers Vyvyan were Colcleugh's contemporaries in traveling through the Western Arctic.

In 1884, she published a series of illustrated articles in the "Journal of Education", continuing from February till June, after which she visited Alaska, and then delivered a lecture on that area before clubs and lyceums.

She traveled in the West extensively in 1886–87, and in 1888, she extended her journeys into Canada, penetrating the Hudson's Bay Company's country, where no other reporter had ventured.

[4] During her Subarctic travels, she encountered Athapaskan and Algonquian speakers, such as the Cree, Chipewyan, and Slavey people.

[6] The years 1889, 1891, and 1892 found her exploring unfrequented areas in British America and the Queen Charlotte Islands.

[7] She traveled to Porto Rico, immediately after the hurricane, and went into Central Africa in 1902 (before the Uganda railway was completed) as the special correspondent.

"[7] Of her picnic with Tahitians, she was to say, "To tell just how this was brought about would involve a long story of a disabled steamer, rescue by natives, long days of waiting in one of the Tahitian villages upon the beautiful island of Morea, and the final chartering of a row-boat and crew of Tahitians, to hurry me to Papeete, 25 miles (40 km) away, in time for the sailing of the steamer for New Zealand..."[8] She described a "pathetic incident" during her trip to the Yukon and Northwest Territory, "I saw an Indian woman whose husband had deserted her for a fairer squaw, and she with her babe on her back had in the dead of winter made her way alone almost a hundred miles from their wilderness hunting-ground to the Hudson Bay Fort (at the Peel River, about 64 degrees north), knowing well that there she would be cared for.

Both breasts frozen, and almost famished, she had managed to keep alive her little one and drag herself to the post enclosure, where they had difficulty in restoring her.

Contrary to the advice of her friends, who attempted to dissuade her from the expedition, Colcleugh sailed from New York City in May 1902 for Mombasa, where she boarded the Uganda railway to Lake Victoria, Nyanza Province.

Crossing in a small lake steamer to Mengo, Uganda, she made that the central point from which to conduct short expeditions through the surrounding country for study of the conditions and the peoples, and she brought home many valuable and interesting relics.

Her letters from Cuba at the time of the Spanish–American War appeared in the Providence Journal, Boston Transcript, New York Evening Post, and other periodicals.