Nothing Daunted

by Wickenden, Dorothy

  Mrs. Harrison, Dorothy said, “evidently can’t make out why we are teaching if we don’t have to.” Work was her life, not an aspiration. She asked them one evening, “You girls aren’t here for the money you can make, are you?” and warned that it would be expensive for them to feed their horses in the winter. Ros told her parents, “She has been perfectly lovely to us—but she has fired questions at us, until she knows our life histories, and it’s not her fault that she doesn’t know our fathers’ incomes! She evidently feels that we are different from the ordinary schoolmarms—and she is so concerned about us—and our comfort.”

  Galvanized by Mrs. Harrison’s energy and fortitude and unfailing good humor, they tried to satisfy her curiosity about the books they read and what they taught at school. They were also grateful for her kindness as they ineptly tackled basic household chores. Dorothy described how they had set out to launder their silk shirts the first week, walking to the sulfur spring for water, then heating it on the stove. “We spent all of yesterday p.m. doing them,” Dorothy wrote, “and she went into hysterics at our efforts. . . . How are we going to teach domestic science?” Mrs. Harrison took the contents of their laundry bags into the kitchen, and when they got home, they found everything washed and ironed on their bed. She told them, “You girls aren’t used to doing this sort of thing, and I am.” She charged them a dollar extra each week for doing their wash.

  The teachers found their work strenuous but rewarding: preparing for classes, attending to the children’s diverse academic needs, and seeing that everyone was paying attention and behaving. Dorothy said: “The most thrilling and satisfactory time in my day, is the time devoted to storytelling. . . . They make a mad scramble to pick up all loose papers, put their desks in order—and then fold their hands and sit at attention! When I stand there and look down at those eager little faces—I forget how naughty they are, and I try to thrill and please them as I never tried before.” On Fridays, “I tell them about current events if I know any, and then two children from each room recite, they hang onto their suspenders & dig a grimy toe into the floor & just agonize through it.”

  Ferry was pleased with the “schoolmarms,” as he teasingly called them. He wrote to Ros’s mother, telling her that the young ladies were winning their way into the hearts of all the people in Elkhead. “Mrs. Harrison told me she couldn’t say which one she liked best because she thought them both perfect. They have taken hold of the work with enthusiasm and as circumstances arise, their resourcefulness will be called into play, but there is no question about their making a success of the work and in all probability one which will be of big and lasting value to our whole county and state, and being blest with a good sense of humor they will enjoy everything as they go along.”

  They always welcomed his visits to the school. For one thing, he was their mail carrier to and from Hayden, although occasionally an absentminded one. “At last,” Ros wrote, “the letters we wrote you three weeks ago to-day turned up in Mr. Carpenter’s coat pocket I believe. At any rate, he told us Friday that he had found ’em and started them along.” He ran a civics class, read Tennyson to the children, led the Boy Scout troop, and once the domestic-science class was under way, he helped out in the basement kitchen. He knew considerably more about cooking than Dorothy and Ros did, and one day, the Republican reported, he “gave a demonstration in corn bread making, old bachelor style. The corn bread was fine.”

  Dorothy was charmed but exasperated by the boys. At noon, they grabbed their tin pails, gobbled down their lunches, and chased woodchucks and squirrels until they were called back inside, or until someone got hurt. One morning she broke up three fights, and she spent many lunchtimes and recesses doctoring cuts with medical plasters and emollients from a kit provided by Ros’s aunt Nellie. Virtually every day, she pulled out splinters and tended to cracked feet. “A trip to the ‘First Aid’ box is a panacea for all ills,” she said. “My boys . . . say such funny things—but they are regular imps of Satan, too.” Slow Ray “is a fine butt for all their teasing, they are such heartless little demons, & then he flies at them and the result is a pitched battle. When I say anything, he hurls himself on the ground and bursts into tears, which was disconcerting at first but I am learning to manage him. The day simply flies.”

  In class, Rudolph Morsbach, age ten, corrected Dorothy when she told the children that London was the biggest city in the world: “No, Mam, my father says New York is!” Dorothy responded, “ ‘Would you care to teach the class, Rudolph?’ He wilted for a moment, then a happy look crossed his face and he said, ‘Well, it might have been Kansas City!’ ” Dorothy was reading from the Book of Genesis about Joseph one morning when Rudolph the irrepressible, as Dorothy called him, volunteered: “Miss Woodruff, Papa told us about that & we have a book about it—at home, Miss Woodruff, which you hain’t never saw, Miss Woodruff.” She replied sternly, “Never mind now, Rudolph,” as the rest of the class giggled, but, she noted, “you might as well try to stop the north wind.” He also informed her that Mr. Carpenter was the president of the United States. The boys ignored her warnings about the dangers of throwing rocks until she bribed them with the promise of a gift of rubber balls—a real inducement, since their own were made of string. One day Dorothy reported, “Rudolph cracked Tommy over the head with a board & nearly killed him.”

  Ros, with her far more sedate class, mostly girls, soon wrote to her mother that school was going nicely, “although my whole program was upset by the appearance of a new ungraded pupil;—they drop in all the time. The fights among the small boys continue to cause much excitement—they keep Dotty on the jump.” She thanked her mother for sending a collection of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, saying that Dotty had been longing for stories to read to her students. There was always a need for more books. Carpenter wrote to Harrick’s book store in Denver, identifying himself as the treasurer of rural School District No. 11, Routt County. He asked whether he could set up an account and immediately procure three copies of Rip Van Winkle and six copies of Ivanhoe, adding that he would like a 30 percent discount.

  While Ros juggled her academic subjects, Dorothy confronted the matter of corporal punishment. The Harrisons’ oldest daughter, Marjorie, who had taught at the Little Bear School, about fifteen miles north of her parents’ ranch, visited the two classes one day and gave some advice to the novices. For one thing, she thought that Dorothy needed to exert stronger control over the boys. Dorothy was not convinced: “How could I spank those children? I have already reduced three to tears by ‘after-school reproofs’ and I think that is better than beatings.”

  A few weeks later, she was beginning to get a slightly surer handle on the situation. She wrote to her father: “Yesterday at recess Ray . . . now my devoted ally, came rushing in to tell me that ‘Jimmy was getting the floor bloody something awful!’ ” Dorothy tore out, and “there was Jimmy having a nose bleed while the rest of the boys stood around in cold, unsympathetic silence.” She asked what had happened, and Jimmy sobbed, “Rudolph punched my face,” to which Rudolph replied, “Yes, ma’am, and I’ll do it again if he don’t let me alone!”

  Dorothy ordered Rudolph to get a pail of water and scrub up the bloody remains of the fray. He said the winter snow would take it off, but Dorothy stood over him until it was done. “You see how hardened I have become and I am as cool now as a regular nurse.” She added: “The minute it is over, [they] are the best of friends. But I am determined to stop this fighting if I can. I had a visit from an irate mother the other day whose son’s face resembled an ancient tomato when he got home, but I don’t see what I can do about it after they leave school.”

  Over time, her attitude evolved even further. At the end of September, she wrote that her week had been very hard, “for the children were so bad—I wielded the ruler with great effect on green-eyed Roy yesterday & he is such a coward that I hope he will be scared into being good for some time. . . . They all lie with skill, & I can’t find out who is the guilty
one.” Once when she had her back turned as she was mending a chart, her adhesive plaster disappeared from the table. They all swore they hadn’t seen it. The next day Rudolph met her outside with the plaster in his hand, saying he had found it behind the barn. Dorothy told them that no one could have recess until the guilty one confessed. After a long silence, Jimmy’s six-year-old brother, Robin Robinson, spoke up: “I did it.” Dorothy let the others go and “tried to talk to him seriously but his great brown eyes fairly danced & he has a thatch of light hair which stands on end—& he is so irresistible in his rags & dirt!” When she asked why he hadn’t told her before, he replied, “I didn’t think I did it until today!” On October 26 she reported that the week had included only two whippings.

  Dorothy affectionately described twelve-year-old Tommy Jones as “my despair.” He “looks like an angel and is the worst of the lot. He can’t say an ‘s’ and when I try to get him to say it, he just hides his face and won’t say a word. He doesn’t know anything, just never having tried, and his spelling is a work of art.” One Saturday in August, Tommy appeared at the Harrison ranch, “clutching a turnip as big as a cabbage in one hand, a squash under one arm, and a bunch of poppies squeezed in his hot little hand!” Mrs. Harrison asked him to stay for their midday dinner, and afterward he climbed up behind Dorothy on Rogan, and she and Ros took him home.

  The Joneses lived in a tiny log cabin about a mile and a half northeast of the Harrisons. It was beautifully situated in a clump of “quakers,” with a thriving vegetable and flower garden. The cabin was divided into two rooms. The living room contained a sewing machine, one homemade chair, a long wooden box with a quilt over it (the family’s supply closet), and an antiquated phonograph—a present from an uncle, the teachers were told. The logs were pasted over with newspapers, and the floor was bare. “The place was neat as wax,” Ros wrote, “but pitifully empty.” The Joneses had encountered rough times in Michigan and “came out here with nothing,” Dorothy said, “and after 6 years they practically have no furniture at all.”

  Soon after their move to Elkhead, the entire family had come down with amoebic dysentery, and four-year-old Herbie didn’t survive. As Carpenter recalled, he and Mrs. Murphy, the able pioneer, had gone up to help. Sending the two oldest boys outside with water for the men digging the grave, Mrs. Murphy took a kettle of potatoes off the stove, threw the contents outside, and filled it with fresh water and some rice that she had brought with her. As the water boiled, she took out an old black underskirt and tore it into strips. She had the older girls use it to line the inside of the coffin, and fashioned two miniature pillows to cushion each side of Herbie’s head. In the absence of a clergyman, Carpenter presided over the service with his Bible, and he remembered the quavering voices singing the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  When Dorothy and Ros arrived at the cabin, Tommy’s parents had just gotten back from the school, where his mother had played the piano, and Herbert, the custodian, did some masonry. Ros wrote to her father that Mrs. Jones had played for seven hours—“practicing all her old pieces and had been blissfully happy at touching a piano again.” The Joneses insisted that the teachers stay for supper. “I never saw a finer spirit of hospitality,” Dorothy said.

  The two parents, the children, and their guests couldn’t all sit down at once. The kitchen consisted of a tiny stove, a rough-hewn table with two benches, and two chairs that had lost their backs. The table was covered with an oilcloth, a few china plates, tin cooking dishes, and a silver pitcher—a “relic of former prosperity!” The Joneses had no cows, and, Ros wrote, “they gave us their best for supper—poor things—they make flour and water do in place of the cream sauce Mrs. H. always cooks her vegetables in. I have three of the girls in my room—and they’re so nice and well-behaved.” Dorothy, who had sweet Minnie and rambunctious Tommy in her class, noted that Mrs. Jones kissed them goodbye and said such nice things about them that they almost cried.

  On the way back to the Harrisons’, Dorothy and Ros stopped at the Hayeses’ house. One of the teachers’ duties was to pay calls on the children’s parents, to get a better sense of the “conditions” at home. It was a less happy visit. “Mrs. Hayes is a gaunt, silent woman with the sadness of ages in her face,” Dorothy wrote. “She told us all the details of losing a little girl last spring. Ray and Roy hung on the door & were too shy to come in. Ray was a strange picture in overalls which had one leg torn off above his knee while the other dangled around his ankle,” but, she added, “He has become my strong ally and doesn’t give me any real trouble except for occasional wild bursts of tears. I tell you there is nothing monotonous about my days.”

  11

  THE MAD LADIES OF STRAWBERRY PARK

  Dancers at the Main Lodge, 1920s

  When Dorothy and Ros had difficulty with their classes, they reminded themselves how much progress they had already made. In the early weeks after their arrival, they had spent every spare moment cramming for the state exams, knowing that if they didn’t pass, Elkhead would be stranded without teachers, and they would return to Auburn in disgrace.

  School was closed on Wednesday, August 14, for three days, and at seven A.M., they started on their forty-eight-mile journey to Steamboat Springs. They tied their bags and bundles to leather thongs attached to their saddles, hanging their sport suits separately, so they wouldn’t wrinkle. Lewis rode behind Ros, and they stopped a few miles east of the Harrisons’ at the Fredericksons’ house. A couple of Swedish descent who had arrived from Nebraska in 1909, the Fredericksons lived on a ridge above Elkhead Creek in a cheerful log cabin with ruffled curtains and geraniums at the windows. They called it Sunny Shelf Farm.

  The Fredericksons had come for dinner at the Harrisons’ recently, and Ros described the two children as “fat as butter.” She said, “I wish you could have seen those Swedish children ‘stoke’ the food. We had this for a menu—delicious cold ham—fried potatoes—peas—Lima beans—beet greens—beets—radishes—pickled peaches—gooseberry jam—pickles—lemon pie—milk—bread and butter and last but not least stewed tomatoes. Every one of the vegetables came from the H’s garden and never have I tasted better.” The two children, five and seven, “made away with all the various dishes set before them; but the tomatoes made the biggest hit. They passed their saucers again and again and the little boy sat and ate on long after we had all finished. Then his mother remarked later that he had grown so thin!”

  The steep hillsides behind the Frederickson house provided good pastureland, and they were able to grow alfalfa and grains, but they soon found, like other Elkhead homesteaders, that 160 acres were not enough to provide for their family. Arthur Frederickson stacked hay each summer on the Adair ranch and mined coal for his neighbors in the winter at nearby wagon mines, small enterprises run by one or two men. Loads were hauled out by horses and sold by the wagon rather than by the ton. Others found additional sources of income by logging or by trapping animals and selling the hides.

  When the teachers dismounted, Ros realized that her suit skirt had come untied and slipped off. She asked Lewis to look out for it on his way back, and told her family, “Think of my losing my suit skirt off my saddle and sailing about Steamboat in that dreadful khaki skirt for four days!” Mrs. Frederickson, a strong, husky woman, had agreed to take them the rest of the way to Hayden. She drove an immense pair of horses hitched to a lumber wagon. Dorothy and Ros rolled around in back with the two plump Frederickson children and Miss Rench, who boarded with the family that year. She, too, was taking the exams. “We crossed 12 streams and went through 15 gates!” Dorothy wrote. “You can’t conceive of anything like it, and we even took down a barbed-wire fence!” When they reached Hayden four and a half hours later, they had lunch at the inn and studied all afternoon. Ferry arrived at 6:45 to escort them to the depot.

  The train ride took them through the valley to Steamboat Springs. The tracks followed the rushing Yampa River into a landscape of cultivated fields, a few large ranches with h
undreds of grazing cattle, unbroken miles of shaggy fifty-foot cottonwoods, and, as they approached town, ponderosa pines and firs. The smooth-skinned aspens, with their pale green fluttering leaves, looked impossibly delicate by comparison. After dingy little Hayden, Steamboat Springs felt like a city—a town of about twelve hundred people centered on the generously scaled main street, Lincoln Avenue, and surrounded by mountains on all sides. “The air fairly sparkles, just like Cortina,” Dorothy wrote. “It is surely as beautiful as any watering place over there.”

  The setting may have resembled parts of the Old World, but the atmosphere was unmistakably American West, and Dorothy and Ros were no longer twenty-two-year-olds on a prolonged holiday. F. M. Light & Sons billed itself as “the pioneer clothing store of Northwestern Colorado.” Men shopped there for cowboy boots, overalls, suits, and hats. One of its maxims was “A customer is not a cold statistic . . . he is a flesh-and-blood human being with feelings and emotions like our own, and with biases and prejudices.” A & G Wither Mercantile offered everything from toothpicks to barbed wire. After their quarters at the Harrisons’, the Steamboat Cabin Hotel felt sumptuous, with its gabled roof, contrasting wood trim, wraparound porch, and a room that looked out onto the river and the mountains. Dorothy noted afterward, “the nervous strain of the exams was awful for everyone makes so much of them here and you realize you are a public official. . . . They weren’t as bad as they might have been, by any means, but so silly, and taking ten [actually, twelve] exams in two days is not a pleasure trip!”

  The tests, taken by a few dozen women and overseen by Emma Peck, who was the Colorado county schools superintendent from 1896–98 and again from 1912–20, were given in the district courthouse. Dorothy and Ros noticed that there was a one-eyed man kicking back in the corner, and they agreed that he must be one of the “spotters” they had been told would be in attendance, but later, they found out that he was a janitor. The subjects were arithmetic, reading, penmanship, physiology, orthography, history, school law, grammar, theory and practice (of teaching), geography, civil government, and natural science. Some of the questions were more idiosyncratic than they had expected, including “Describe the changes that take place in ‘egg on toast’ during the process of digestion,” “Explain methods of bidding on and letting road work by contract,” and “Give a physiological reason for not boxing children’s ears.” Ros wrote, “I presume we got through but not with very fine results, I fear. . . . I fell down on Colorado law and civil government.”