Nothing Daunted

by Wickenden, Dorothy

  Those original schools in Elkhead—one on the Adair ranch and the other, the Dry Fork school, where Bull Gulch drained into Dry Fork Creek—were ill-equipped, drafty cabins, and they operated mostly in the summer months, whenever a teacher could be convinced to venture into the hills. Carpenter had something more ambitious in mind: a large, consolidated school that would provide a nine-month term and an education comparable to what urban children received at the best public schools. He was initiating a process in his neighborhood that was under way across the country: to raise and standardize the quality of teaching in rural areas, which was notoriously inferior to that of large, well-equipped urban schools. The state was aware of the dismal conditions in remote regions: education officials handed out postcards picturing six decrepit one-room schools, with the caption, “A National Disgrace.”

  For five years Carpenter, along with Paroda Fulton, the secretary of the Elkhead board, and their neighbors doggedly worked toward building one of the best schools in Routt County. Fulton had grown up in Mt. Ayre, Iowa, and gone to Drake University in Des Moines. She moved to Colorado in 1906 to teach school in Hayden and in the Little Snake River Valley near the town of Craig. Two years later, she married Charlie Fulton, who had been homesteading on Dry Fork since 1901. Until the arrival of Dorothy and Ros, and a teacher named Iva Rench from Muncie, Indiana, Paroda Fulton and Ferry Carpenter were the only college graduates in Elkhead.

  On May 15, 1915, the Republican reported, after “much hot air and high flown oratory was indulged in, the district voted $5,000 in bonds to erect a fine central school house.” Carpenter asked his sister Ruth to put out the word among her friends in New York, and according to his account, an advertisement was placed in a teachers’ magazine, which described a superb school in the virgin hills. Promising generous pay, it said that no candidate would be considered without a recent photograph.

  Like any good raconteur, Carpenter was fond of embellishments, and one of his most popular stories was his roguish account of how Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood came to be hired. As the applications for the jobs arrived, he said during a talk in Denver about his early experiences in Routt County, Jack White would call him on the one-wire telephone that was strung along the fence posts all the way down to Hayden, and report, “ ‘We got another one—it’s a blonde,’ and I’d say, ‘Pin ’em up on the logs above the sink.’ . . . Bye and bye it was halfway around the cabin with really flattering beautiful young ladies.” The cowboys would drop by and study the photos, and when it came time to vote, they all had strong opinions. “So we decided we’d have a pure democracy,” Carpenter said, “all the electors would decide.”

  When the cowboys couldn’t reach an agreement, he pulled out a letter from two girls in Auburn, New York. “They went to Smith College and had traveled abroad and had many advantages that many of the local people hadn’t had,” he said. “But they didn’t have one advantage, we later discovered—they didn’t have a Colorado teacher’s license.” He laughed heartily, and the audience joined in. “We didn’t think about that in those days.” Nor did he worry that they had no experience as teachers, and “in fact had never done any work for pay.”

  He recalled that Charlotte Perry, the sister of his best friend, Bob, had graduated from Smith in 1911. He called Bob to “get a line on” the two women. Bob, a dapper thirty-one-year-old graduate of Columbia’s engineering school, was the supervisor of the Moffat mine—owned by his father, Samuel M. Perry, a leading industrialist in Denver. The mine, forty-five miles southeast of Hayden, outside a town called Oak Creek, was named after Perry’s friend and business partner, David Moffat, who built the railroad over the Continental Divide. Bob called Charlotte and immediately got back to Ferry. Bob was “excited when he called me,” Carpenter said, his own voice rising and his drawl becoming more pronounced, “He said: ‘Don’t overlook one of them! She was voted the best-looking girl in the junior class of Smith College! Don’t let her get away from you!’ ”

  Early on the morning after the teachers arrived, Ferry got a call from Bob, who was at the Hayden depot and wanted to know what the teachers looked like. Frustrated by his friend’s inconclusive reply, Bob told Ferry he would meet him at the inn. When Ferry got there, he wrote in his autobiography, half a dozen men, including Bob, “were standing around admiring them. I could see by the glazed look on Bob’s face as he stared at Rosamond that he was already smitten.” Bob, knowing that Ferry often delivered letters and packages to his neighbors in Elkhead, took him aside and said, “Watch her mail. Let me know if some man is writing her.” Carpenter omitted a key detail in his account: he, too, couldn’t stop staring at Rosamond. As his son Ed recalled, “The question was, who’s gonna win her, Ferry or Perry?”

  8

  DEPARTURE

  Postcard of South Street in Auburn, New York, early 1900s

  Soon after Dorothy and Ros returned from Europe, the appeals of bridge parties and automobiling began to wane, and in 1911 they went to stay in New York City for several months. They saw it as another adventure; their parents hoped that through connections in the city, they would encounter some men who might meet with their approval. At the Webster, a small hotel off Fifth Avenue on West Forty-fifth Street, they rented a suite with a sitting room, a large double bedroom, and a bath, for which their parents paid six dollars a day. Ros, who acquired admirers everywhere she went, was pursued by Charlie Hickocks, a lawyer for a shipping company. He had his own brownstone and frequently took her out, with Dorothy going along “as baggage.” Although they were polite to him, privately they made fun of his odd looks and affectations, with Dorothy taking the lead. He had an unusually long neck topped by a very long, thin face. “We thought he was a regular ‘Miss Nancy,’ ” she said. “He had his linen all embroidered with his initials and that kind of thing. Needless to say, Rosamond wasn’t interested in him.”

  Back at home, they entertained guests at South and Fort streets, visited friends in other cities, and dallied with young men. For a few years Ros strung along another New Yorker, a lawyer named Billy, who expected to marry her, and whom she apparently saw as her default option if no one more exciting presented himself. The other men who pursued them were mostly studying at the Auburn Theological Seminary, which trained Presbyterian ministers. One of the most prestigious divinity schools in the country, it was headed by Allen Macy Dulles—the father of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles was a friend of Dorothy’s parents, who considered the seminary a good source of suitors. Although her sister Carrie-Belle had married one of the seminarians several years earlier, Dorothy was scornful of the type. She wrote to Anna from Cortina about a guest in the hotel: “There is a queer looking youth with long, black greasy hair—and he looked just like the worst of the seminary students.”

  In their spare time, influenced by two generations of Auburn feminists and by their time at Smith, Dorothy and Ros supported Jane Addams’s Hull House and advocated women’s suffrage. They became members of the Cayuga County Political Equality Club, and in good weather, they stood on soapboxes in Owasco. In 1914 they organized a meeting at Suffrage Headquarters in the Woman’s Union. Dorothy introduced the speaker, Mrs. Theodore M. Pomeroy of Buffalo, who talked about her work as a national officer of the club and explained why she was a suffragist. Mrs. Pomeroy described canvassing house-to-house and running meetings all over the city, so that women would be ready when their time came to vote. Thousands of women were attending, she said, immigrants included. In the future, “a mother who can instruct her sons in public questions will have more influence than another interested in a new hat. There is a psychological change in the world: in ages past women labored beside the men; then she came to be confined to house duties; now is the age of machinery, and woman’s work has been taken away from her.” She urged her audience to consider that when one thing goes out of your life, you must find another to replace it, and she reminded them that women had “especial interest in educational, health, and corrective
departments of work.” When tea was served, “Miss Underwood poured, assisted by Miss Woodruff.”

  By the spring of 1916, seven years out of college and not yet married, they began to think unenthusiastically about returning to New York City to pursue some kind of social work. They were “in this troubled state,” as Dorothy put it, when an unusual opportunity presented itself. In April, Emily Callaway, the leading lady of the Jefferson Stock Company, was in town to rehearse for the summer season. Callaway, another Auburn girl, was a 1906 Wellesley graduate who had a letter of introduction to Rosamond from one of William Seward’s grandsons. Ros’s mother invited her to tea, and Ros and Emily began to talk about how difficult it was for women of their background to find absorbing and useful work.

  Callaway mentioned that just that day, she had heard from a Wellesley friend, Ruth Carpenter Woodley, who had an adventure-some brother named Ferry Carpenter. She described his background and told Ros and Dorothy that he had worked with his neighbors for five years to build a consolidated schoolhouse in the Elkhead mountain range. Her brother was a man of vision, Ruth wrote to Emily, and he had asked her to look around New York for two young female college graduates who would consider teaching out there for a year or two.

  Mrs. Underwood knew that Rosamond felt constricted in her life at home, and as Callaway spoke, she saw her daughter’s animated response. She was not surprised to hear Ros say, “I’d like to try it myself, if my best friend and classmate from Smith, Dorothy Woodruff, would go with me.” Ros rushed to the telephone to call Dorothy, asking her, “How would you like to go out to Colorado and teach school? You must come over immediately. We’ve got to talk about this!”

  Within minutes Dorothy was at the door. On her brisk walk over, she had made her decision. They plied Callaway for more information and got Mrs. Woodley’s address from her so they could write to express their interest. Nonetheless, Dorothy anticipated her family’s alarm: “No young lady in our town,” she later recalled, “had ever been hired by anybody.”

  A few years earlier, Ros had gone to a resort in Hot Springs, Arizona, to recover from a bronchial infection, and she had loved the informality and open spaces of the West. But neither woman knew much about the rigors of life in the Rockies. Their sense of the westward expansion came largely from Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s Letters of a Woman Homesteader, serialized in the Atlantic Monthly several years earlier and then published as a book—now a classic of life on the frontier. They had been riveted by Stewart’s account of living by her wits far from any urban center. Stewart wrote about a camping trip in December near her homestead in Burnt Fork, Wyoming: “Our improvised beds were the most comfortable things; I love the flicker of an open fire, the smell of the pines, the pure, sweet air, and I went to sleep thinking how blest I was to be able to enjoy the things I love most.”

  This, to Ros and Dorothy, was true romance. Stewart and her resourceful neighbor, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, were roused by a long, haunting wail. Stewart thought it was the cry of a panther, but upon investigating, they found that it was a girl in a new loggers’ encampment, in the throes of a difficult childbirth. The clearing consisted of two homes. Both husbands had been gone for two weeks, to collect their wages and some supplies. The women helped the girl deliver her baby, and when they realized that the families would have nothing for Christmas, they returned to Stewart’s house and prepared a bundle of presents. For the children, they made paper birds, butterflies, and flowers; apples; and candies from fondant. For the new mother: oatmeal, butter, cream, and eggs, and a petticoat. They went back and decorated one of the empty cabins with pine boughs and a Christmas tree lit with candles. Everyone was enchanted. “We all got so much out of so little,” Stewart wrote. “I will never again allow even the smallest thing to go to waste.”

  Their job applications submitted, Dorothy and Ros began to imagine themselves in a role much like Stewart’s. Letters flew back and forth between them and Mrs. Woodley, who wrote that the train ride from Denver to Hayden was the most scenic trip in the country, and she described the beautiful hills of “Elkhead country,” with the tallest of the Rockies visible in the distance. She downplayed the hardships and stretched the truth, assuring them that “from August till Dec. the weather will be glorious, cold nights and mornings but fine in the daytime. From Dec. till April the snow will be heavy and the weather cold. Everyone skis or snow-shoes and go on [bobsleds] when the roads are open. . . . If you are delicate, don’t undertake it, but a girl of ordinary strength who likes out-door life and doesn’t mind a few discomforts will get along beautifully.”

  The teachers, she noted, must be able to teach domestic science—“adapted to rural life, with canning etc. and some practical manual training for boys would be a help. Home Decoration would be a wonderful thing and really anything is acceptable that would enrich their lives.” The domestic-science movement was led by middle-class women who had no maids or kitchen help, who believed that bringing modern methods of cleaning and cooking into the home would lead not only to greater freedom for them but also to curing the social scourges of alcoholism, disease, and even poverty. Mrs. Woodley said she had “refrained from enthusing,” because she wanted the girls to know the conditions they would be confronting, but added that if they “would like to catch a glimpse of one of the last of our fast disappearing frontiers, I’d urge you to try it.”

  As for safety, she said that she spent much of her time in Elkhead, and there was little danger, “except what is always present when one lives in a primitive way. I mean you might be thrown from your horse, or you might let a log of wood fall on your foot etc.,” but she added that these were nothing compared to “the liability of being run down by an auto” or driving one. Ruth advised them not to promise their parents that no harm could come to them. They should instead say that they would “live a life considerably freer of dangers than in Auburn, and a much more rugged, healthy one.” In mid-June, Dorothy and Ros learned that two of their top competitors for the job had dropped out, “owing to parental objections.”

  Another of Ferry Carpenter’s recruiters was Miriam Heermans, an old friend of Ruth’s from Evanston and Wellesley, who in 1912, at Carpenter’s and Ruth’s urging, had taught at one of the first schoolhouses in Elkhead for five months; Ruth stayed with Miriam on the Adair ranch, where the school was located. Miriam wrote to Ros and Dorothy on June 11, saying that she thought the jobs were probably theirs as long as their parents weren’t adamantly opposed. Dorothy mailed Heermans’s note to Ros, who was out of town for a few days, writing on the bottom of the letter: “Sounds like business—doesn’t it! . . . I am awfully excited—I think I’d better acknowledge this—and hope I won’t put my foot in. I shall say I think our parents can be managed.”

  Carpenter replied to Miriam on June 15, saying that he might be willing to take a chance on “those Auburn girls,” but he wanted to know, “Will they take the grief that goes with such a job and have they the pep to shed it off and go right on like nothing happened? What education have they? Let me hear from you and tell them to write direct to me at once.” He added that if she had “any doubt about their having the necessary gimp in them to handle this job why let them drop right now.”

  Miss Heermans indiscreetly sent Carpenter’s note to Dorothy, saying, “He is really not as illiterate as this sounds but has merely fallen into the Elkhead dialect!”

  Dorothy wrote a long letter to Carpenter, earnestly describing their education, their travels, and their social work before admitting, “You see this may not offer much specialized training for the Elkhead work—but we shall do as much as possible before we leave—we are very anxious to try this position & will do our best to fill the requirements. You may be sure that we would expect to stick it out—whatever our experiences might be.” Indicating their seriousness of purpose, she asked whether the school was equipped with good blackboards, books, and maps of the world and the state of Colorado, and she said they would like to see any information he had about the subje
cts they would be teaching.

  He sent a wire confirming their employment, but the following week, their preparations were abruptly halted. War with Mexico appeared imminent, after Pancho Villa and several hundred of his men attacked a U.S. Army garrison in Columbus, New Mexico. President Wilson ordered the mobilization of tens of thousands of National Guardsmen, one of whom was Ros’s older brother, Kennard Underwood. He had just made second lieutenant in Company M, and the Underwoods did not want two of their children far from home in potentially dangerous circumstances. Dorothy and Ros reluctantly sent a telegram to Carpenter saying that, under the circumstances, they had to refuse the position.

  Then Wilson changed his mind. Preoccupied with the escalating war in Europe and the increasing bitterness between the U.S. and Germany, he initiated a mediation commission to negotiate the terms for a withdrawal. For the second time, the girls were told they could go. The school year was to begin in early August, and worried that in the interim Carpenter might have chosen two other teachers, Dorothy sent him a telegram on July 5, saying they were available after all, if the jobs weren’t taken. Two days later, she heard back: POSITIONS OPEN AND YOU MAY CONSIDER YOURSELVES HIRED WILL WRITE.

  Ros typed a businesslike letter to Ferry, reiterating Dorothy’s request for information about the state syllabus and what books and supplies the school had. In response to a question from Carpenter about their living situation in Elkhead, she said they would rather board with a family than stay in a cabin by themselves. He replied that the district furnished all books and supplies, and said the school had a piano and would soon have a phonograph and records, which would be moved from one of the summer schools some miles away. It was a big project, he explained, to consolidate several tiny schools into one for a community that was so widely spread out.