Nothing Daunted

by Wickenden, Dorothy

  Dorothy, less composed and orderly than Rosamond, had arrived at the station only moments before the train left for Chicago, and as she climbed aboard, she could almost hear her mother saying “I told you so” about the importance of starting in plenty of time. Her last glimpse of her parents was of her father’s reassuring smile. He and Ros’s mother championed their adventure. Her mother and Ros’s father, though, were convinced their daughters would be devoured by wild animals or attacked by Indians. When Ros showed her father one of Carpenter’s letters, he turned away and put up his hand, saying, “I don’t want to read it.”

  The girls prevailed, as they invariably did, when their parents saw they were determined to go through with their plans. As Mrs. Underwood put it, “They were fully competent to decide this question.” Although intent on their mission, they had bouts of overwhelming nervousness about what they had taken on. During the ride to Chicago, they took notes from the books on teaching that Dorothy had borrowed from a teacher in the Auburn schools. They also reread the letter they had received the previous week from Carpenter:

  My dear Miss Woodruff and Miss Underwood,

  I was out to the new school house yesterday getting a line on how many pupils there would be, what supplies and repairs we would need etc. . . . I have not heard from you in regard to saddle ponies, but expect you will want them and am looking for some for you. . . .

  I expect you are pretty busy getting ready to pull out. If you have a 22 you had better bring it out as there are lots of young sage chicken to be found in that country and August is the open season on them.

  With best regards to you both I am very truly

  Farrington Carpenter

  They were met at the Chicago station by J. Platt Underwood, an uncle of Ros’s, who was, Dorothy observed, “clad in a lovely linen suit.” A wealthy timber merchant, he did much of his business in the West, and when they told him that Carpenter had advised them to bring along a rifle, he agreed it was a good idea. The next morning he took them from his house on Lake Park Avenue into the city to buy a .22 and a thousand rounds of shot. It was already 90 degrees downtown and exceedingly humid. Dorothy wrote to her mother that everyone laughed when she tried to pick up the rifle. “I could hardly lift the thing. . . . Imagine what I’ll be in Elkhead!” She had better luck at Marshall Field’s, where she found a lovely coat: “mixed goods—very smart lines & very warm for $30.00.” She and Ros bought heavy breeches at the sport store and got some good leather riding boots that laced up the front.

  The oppressive heat wave followed them as they left Chicago, and it got worse across the Great Plains, clinging to their skin along with the dust. Although transportation and safety had improved since the opening of the West, and there were settlements and farms along the railway, the scenery, if anything, was starker than ever. When they were several hundred miles from Denver, there were few signs of life. The riverbeds were cracked open, and there was no long, lush prairie grass or even much sagebrush, just furze and rush and yucca. The few trees along the occasional creeks and “dry rivers” were stunted. The Cheyenne and Arapaho and the awkward, hunchbacked herds of buffalo that had filled the landscape for miles at a stretch were gone. From the train window, Dorothy and Ros caught only an occasional glimpse of jackrabbits.

  They had not been aware of the gradual rise in terrain, but they were light-headed as they stepped into the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. Ros was tall, slender, and strikingly pretty, with a gentle disposition and a poised, steady gaze—“the belle of Auburn,” as Dorothy proudly described her. Dorothy’s own round, cheerful face was animated by bright blue eyes and a strong nose and chin. People tended to notice her exuberant nature more than her small stature. Under their straw hats, their hair had flattened and was coming unpinned.

  Half a dozen well-dressed gentlemen sat in the lobby on tufted silk chairs, reading newspapers or talking; women were relaxing in the ladies’ tearoom. A haberdashery and a barbershop flanked the Grand Staircase, and across the room was a massive pillared fireplace made of the same golden onyx as the walls. The main dining room, with gold-lacquered chairs and eight-foot potted palms, was set for dinner. As they approached the reception desk, they saw that the atrium soared above the Florentine arches of the second story. Each of the next six floors was wrapped in an ornate cast-iron balcony, winding up to a stained-glass ceiling. The filtered light it provided, along with the high wall sconces, was pleasantly dim, and it was relatively cool inside.

  Ros signed the register for both of them—Miss D. Woodruff and Miss R. Underwood—in neat, girlish handwriting, with none of the sweeping flourishes of the male guests who had preceded them from Kansas City, Philadelphia, Carthage, and Cleveland. On a day when they would have welcomed a strong rain, they were courteously asked whether they preferred the morning or afternoon sun. A bellman showed them to Room 518, with a southeastern exposure and bay windows overlooking the Metropole Hotel and the Broadway Theatre. They were delighted to see that they also had a private bathroom with hot and cold running water. Each of them took a blissful bath, and despite Dorothy’s assurances to her mother after her purchases at Field’s (“Nothing more for nine months!”), they went straight to Sixteenth Street to shop. They had no trouble finding one of the city’s best department stores, Daniels & Fisher. Modeled after the Campanile at the Piazza San Marco, it rose in stately grandeur high above the rest of downtown.

  Denver was up-to-date and sophisticated. Its public buildings and best homes were well designed, on a grand, sometimes boastful scale. The beaux arts Capitol—approached by paved sidewalks and a green park—had a glittering gold-leaf dome. There was a financial district on Seventeenth Street known as “the Wall Street of the West”; a YMCA; a Coca-Cola billboard; electric streetcars; and thousands of shade trees. Under the beautification plan of Mayor Robert Speer, the city had imported oaks, maples, Dutch elms, and hackberries, which were irrigated with a twenty-four-mile ditch carrying water from the streams and rivers of the Rockies. The desert had been transformed into an urban oasis.

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  Dorothy and Ros had heard about the Pike’s Peak gold rush of 1859, and they could see how quickly the city had grown up, but beyond that, their knowledge of early Western history was hazy. It was hard to imagine that not even sixty years earlier, Denver City, as it was then called, was a mining camp with more livestock than people. Still part of Kansas Territory, it consisted of a few hundred tents, log cabins, Indian lodges, and shops huddled on the east bank of Cherry Creek by the South Platte River. The cottonwoods along the creek were chopped down for buildings and fuel. Pigs wandered freely in search of garbage. Earthen roofs dripped mud onto the inhabitants when it rained, and they frequently collapsed. The only hotel was a forty-by-two-hundred-foot log cabin. It had no beds and was topped with canvas.

  The more visionary newcomers looked past the squalor. One of them was twenty-eight-year-old William Byers, who started the Rocky Mountain News. In his first day’s edition of the paper, he declared: “We make our debut in the far west, where the snowy mountains look down upon us in the hottest summer day as well as in the winters cold here where a few months ago the wild beasts and wilder Indians held undisturbed possession—where now surges the advancing wave of Anglo Saxon enterprise and civilization, where soon we fondly hope will be erected a great and powerful state.” Already Byers was Colorado’s most strident advocate, and he became part of the business and political class that made sure his predictions came true. Thousands of prospectors, stirred by exaggerated tales about gold discoveries, imagined the region as “the new El Dorado.”

  Few valuable minerals were found at Pike’s Peak until long after the gold rush had ended. Nevertheless, in the winter and spring of 1859, the first significant placer deposits were found, in the mountains at Clear Creek, thirty-five miles west of Denver; they were soon followed by finds at Central City, Black Hawk, and Russell Gulch. By the end of the year, a hundred thousand prospectors had arrived. />
  Denver City became an indispensable rest and supply stop for gold diggers on their way to and from the Rockies, as it was for trail drivers and lumbermen. Wagon trains from Missouri and Kansas came to town filled with everything from picks and wheel rims to dry goods, whiskey, coffee, and bacon. Gold dust was the local currency, carried in buckskin pouches and measured on merchants’ scales. There was enough of it to start a building boom in everything from gambling halls to drugstores.

  With the accumulation of creature comforts in Denver, some speculators were confident that they could domesticate the mountains, too, with dozens of towns and resorts. In the meantime, men returned with stories of suffering and gruesome deaths in the wilderness. In June 1859 a forest fire swept through the dry pines on gusty winds, killing over a dozen people. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, had recently stopped in Denver during his famous “Overland Journey,” and he made some harsh but titillating assessments of what he had found. “Within this last week,” he reported on June 20, “we have tidings of one young gold seeker committing suicide, in a fit of insanity, at the foot of the mountains; two more found in a ravine, long dead and partially devoured by wolves.” A month earlier, a man from Illinois, Daniel Blue, had stumbled into Station 25 of the Leavenworth & Pike’s Peak Express, skeletal and nearly blind. He said that he and his brothers and the others in their party had lost their way along the Smoky Hill Route, and their packhorse had wandered off. In mid-March, they had used up their remaining ammunition and food, subsisting for a week on grass, boiled roots, and snow. When one of the group died of starvation, the Blue brothers resorted to cannibalism.

  One entrepreneur with grandiose ideas about Colorado’s future was Henry C. Brown, a tenacious carpenter who opened a workshop by Cherry Creek and eventually owned and ran the Denver Tribune and, with a partner, the Bank of Denver. In 1867, when Denver’s power brokers were competing with their counterparts in Golden to be the capital of Colorado Territory, Brown settled the issue by donating ten acres of his 160-acre homestead to the city. He stipulated that the capitol be built on the highest point, envisaging the neighborhood as both the city’s commercial center and its finest residential district. The Civil War was over, and influential Coloradans, many from northern states, were firm Republicans. Brown gave the new streets resonant pedigrees: Broadway was surrounded by Lincoln, Sherman, Grant, and Logan.

  When Brown was ready to build a luxury hotel, he hired Frank Edbrooke, a young architect from Chicago who had designed Denver’s spectacular Grand Opera House and one of its earliest office buildings, which was fronted with plate-glass windows. Edbrooke planned the hotel to fit a large triangular plot that Brown had used as his cow pasture. The project took four years and cost $2 million, including the furnishings and fittings. The Brown Palace opened in 1892, sixteen years after Colorado became the thirty-eighth state.

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  By the time Dorothy and Rosamond arrived, the hotel presided over Denver’s business and theater districts. The Union Pacific Railroad delivered passengers to Union Station at the northwest end of Seventeenth Street, near the original site of Denver City; and automobiles—along with trolleys and bicycles—were replacing horses along Broadway. The new “machines” were unreliable and noisy but left behind none of the bacteria, odors, and mess of manure. Colorado, with its high altitude and dry air, was the Baden-Baden of the United States. Hospitals in Denver specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis, and spas had been built in mountain towns known for their mineral waters. Thanks to the boosterism of the Rocky Mountain News and other newspapers, the aggressive advertising campaigns of the railroads, and stories of medicinal miracles in Colorado Springs, Manitou, Steamboat Springs, and Hot Sulphur Springs (a town owned by William Byers), tourism had replaced gold as the state’s biggest lure.

  The two women from the East were surprised to find themselves gazing at the white peaks and blue skies of the Rockies through a heavy haze that was just as bad as the air in Auburn. The pollution was less noticeable in the summer, when coal wasn’t needed for heat, but coal fired the electrical generator of the Brown Palace and other businesses, and half a dozen smelters ran year-round, processing mountain ore into gold and silver and emitting their own noxious odors. As in other industrial cities, plumes of gray-black smoke rose throughout downtown; the Brown Palace already had been sandblasted to remove a dark residue that had settled on its facade. The Denver Tramway Company provided service to the “streetcar suburbs.” Businessmen who wanted to escape the grit and crowds at the end of the day moved their families south, east, and west of the city, away from the prevailing north winds.

  Rosamond and Dorothy had dinner that evening with Palmer Sabin, the son-in-law of Platt Underwood, and his family. The Sabins must have been charmed by their visitors’ gumption and social graces. They were worried, though, about how well the two women would manage in Elkhead. The Western Slope lagged decades behind the Front Range of the Rockies. Although the region had fertile valleys and mineral deposits that exceeded those on the eastern side, an 1880 tourists’ guide called it “an unknown land.” Denver society referred to it as “the wild country.” The mountains where they would be living were far from Hayden and the railroad. Elkhead was not a town; it barely qualified as a settlement. It had several dozen scattered residents, no shops or amenities of any kind, and a brutally punishing climate.

  Farrington Carpenter had arranged for them to stay with a family of homesteaders. He wrote to them, “I dropped down onto Calf Creek and took dinner with the Harrisons about 2 miles from the school and Mrs. Harrison said she would take you to board if I would explain in advance that they do not run a regular boarding place, but are just plain ranch folks. They have a new house and can give you a room together for yourselves. . . . They will charge you $20 per month apiece for board and room. You will be expected to take care of your own room and that price does not include washing. . . .” Palmer’s mother, Rosamond said, “was very discouraging about our adventure.” She told them, “No Denver girls would go up there in that place. It will be terribly hard.”

  Friends at home believed they were wasting yet another year. Unlikely to find worthy suitors among the cowboys and merchants of Routt County, they were apparently dooming themselves to be old maids. Dorothy and Ros, however, were more bothered by the idea of settling into a staid life of marriage and motherhood without having contributed anything to people who could benefit from the few talents and experiences they had to offer. The notion of a hard life—for a limited time—was exactly what they had in mind.

  “We were nothing daunted,” Ros recalled, “and spent the night in grandeur at the Brown Palace Hotel . . . the hottest night I ever spent in my life.”

  2

  THE GIRLS FROM AUBURN

  Dorothy (front) and Rosamond on Owasco Lake

  Dorothy and Ros met in Miss Bruin’s kindergarten in 1892. The school, started ten years earlier, was one of the first kindergartens in the United States. Miss Bruin was kind to the children, but they shrank from her hugs and kisses because, Dorothy said, “her face bristled with stiff hairs.” Dorothy briefly attended a public school on Genesee Street, but when her parents heard about the outside toilets and the unsanitary water pail with a tin cup fastened to it with a chain, they moved her to a private school that Rosamond was attending. Happy to be with Ros again, she didn’t mind her solitary mile-and-a-half walk through the village, but her trips home from the primary school on North Street unnerved her. She had to pass through the business district, which was lined with saloons. They had old-style swing doors and smelled strongly of stale beer. Occasionally in the afternoon, she and her friends saw men stumbling out onto the street, and they would run down the block as fast as they could.

  Dorothy had six siblings. Anna, the oldest, was followed by Carl, Hermione, Carrie-Belle, Douglas, Dorothy, and Milly. Their mother, Carrie, Dorothy later said, didn’t really understand how babies were conceived. Consumed by her ma
ny domestic and philanthropic duties, she had little time for the fancies of young children. “I used to beg my mother to tell me stories about what life was like when she was a little girl and how she lived and what Auburn was like,” Dorothy said. “But she never seemed able to do it.” She revered her mother, and worried about how frequently she displeased her. One spring day, Dorothy was walking by her older cousin’s house on South Street, and noticed the garden was full of blooming hyacinths. “I thought they were perfectly beautiful, and how much my mother would like them,” she said. “So I walked up and picked every one, took them home, and proudly gave them to Mother. She was absolutely horrified.” Carrie insisted that Dorothy go back and apologize to her cousin. In July 1897, when she was ten years old, her parents went off on an extended holiday, and she and her siblings were left with their nursemaid, Mamie. She wrote a winsome note: “My dear Mama . . . I can’t imagine that a week from today you will be away out at sea. I do hope that you won’t be seasick and that Papa won’t have any occasion to put an umbrella over him. . . . I promise to try my best to mind Mamie, so that when you come back you will find me improved. With millions of love, Dorothy.”

  Carrie, the image of Victorian rectitude in ornate, high-necked dresses, closely watched the household budget, though immigrant labor was cheap. The staff included several maids, a cook, and a gardener. Carrie lived to be ninety-three, one of her daughters-in-law wrote, “in spite of the vicissitudes of a big family.” And she never cooked a meal in her life. “Her theory was that if she didn’t know how, someone could always be found to do it for her.”