At the time of the party, they had been in Elkhead under a month, and they reveled in their new social life. Carpenter and Perry were engaged in a serious but gentlemanly rivalry over Ros. Bob, despite his reserved temperament, was making his intentions clear. Ferry was less overt. He knew that Bob, with his collegiate good looks and promising career prospects with the Moffat Coal Company, was the more likely suitor. His own future in the cattle business was uncertain. Still, he may have hoped that he could win Ros with his quick mind and appealing personality. In any case, the competition didn’t interfere with the two men’s friendship. If anything, it brought them closer together.
Virtually every Sunday until the worst of the winter weather, Bob made the forty-five-mile trip from Oak Creek to Hayden. It was another ten miles on horseback to Oak Point, then he and Ferry rode the final five miles together to the Harrison ranch. Bob’s daughter-in-law, Ruth Perry, said, “It is remarkable that there was any courtship at all, given the distance.” Bob’s father, Sam, was known for his relentless work ethic, and “he was not one to give anyone much time off.” Frank Harrison, Jr., observed the suitors at dinner each week with lively interest. Looking back on those months as an older man, he described Ferry and Bob as “young fellows with tail feathers blooming.”
At the time, Frank Jr. was also trying to impress the women, as was virtually every other unmarried man in the vicinity. The county fair in Hayden, held at the end of the summer, attracted residents from all over Routt County, and the town and the fairgoers dressed for the occasion. The streets were ablaze with “Old Gory,” as one of Dorothy’s schoolchildren called the American flag. The students all had haircuts and looked “positively stylish.” Everette Adair was wearing a bright red satin shirt and sash, a tan plush sombrero, high-heeled boots with jangling spurs, and his flashing rings. Frank whispered to Dorothy in awestruck tones, “That shirt put him back seven and a half.” Lefty Flynn, a strapping former Yale fullback from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had come west with the dream of becoming a cowboy, had bought the Harrisons’ first ranch and “was the second best in the costume line—he had on a leather waistcoat embroidered in highly colored beads, front and back, & leather sleeves! Lefty had proved that Colorado isn’t always dry—& was having a time.” Although the state had banned alcohol in January 1916, four years before national prohibition, liquor flowed freely in Oak Creek and was not hard to come by in outlying towns.
The teachers picked up some packages at the post office, including one from Bob, which contained bunches of sweet peas for the women to wear that day. Then Frank escorted them to the fairgrounds, paid their entrance fee, offered to buy them pink lemonade, and secured good grandstand seats for the competitions. “I never saw such instinctive courtesy as these people have,” Dorothy said, not considering that—nine years younger than they were—he might have amorous hopes of his own.
Dorothy and Ros watched the bucking horses, the ladies’ race, and a relay race in which saddles were changed “in the twinkling of an eye.” The festive mood darkened when a horse swerved and crashed through a fence, rolling down a bank. The rider escaped with a few broken bones, but the horse had to be put down. Frank accompanied the women to lunch at the Hayden Inn, and later, they ran into Isadore Bolten, a Jewish émigré from White Russia—Elkhead’s most unusual bachelor. Carpenter had told them about Bolten’s near mythic journey to the American frontier. His mother had died when he was a little boy, and he had learned the cobbling trade from an uncle. In his late teens, he wandered through Europe, stopping in libraries to read whatever he could find about the American West. He traveled to New York by steerage and borrowed some money from a cousin to get to Chicago, where he worked at Marshall Field’s, then opened a cobbler shop. At night he learned English at Hull House, eventually finding his way to Elkhead, determined to become a rancher. Bolten told the schoolteachers in his thick accent, “I looked and looked for you young ladies to take you to dinner!” Ros wrote, “We were overcome by our popularity!”
Actually, she and Dorothy were accustomed to being admired and pampered, and they were baffled by occasional flare-ups of resentment. Iva Rench—a talented music and art teacher—was almost palpably hostile. She had been hired to teach at the tiny Mountain View School, not at grand Elkhead; it never occurred to Dorothy and Ros to wonder why or to think about how that might aggravate her. “Miss Rench descended on us one day,” Dorothy wrote, accompanied by her class of four. “She seems to be awfully jealous of us, for some unknown reason—and like lots of good people, is very irritating. She didn’t say one nice thing about the school or give us a friendly word.” Then she added, “However, she helped me tremendously with suggestions and I was too grateful to be mad, as Ros was.”
When Dorothy had to visit the dentist in Hayden, he charged her only a dollar—half price. Ros speculated it was because he took pity on her as an impoverished schoolteacher. Dorothy bantered with the dentist, saying that he would never get rich at those rates. This companionable exchange infuriated the next patient: “I suppose she thought he would make it up on her,” Dorothy commented.
—————————
Dorothy and Ros still didn’t know about Ferry’s ingenious matchmaking scheme. He, however, had discovered a secret of Dorothy’s. Soon after the teachers’ arrival, he noticed that she was receiving frequent letters from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He correctly surmised, before Dorothy’s parents did, that—somehow, somewhere, between her departure from Auburn and her arrival in Hayden—she had been spoken for.
Six months before her trip to Colorado, Dorothy had met a twenty-nine-year-old banker, Lemuel Hillman, in Grand Rapids, where she and Ros were visiting childhood friends Betty and Monroe Hubbard. Hillman had roomed with Hubbard at Colgate, and he was a guest at a dinner the Hubbards threw for their houseguests. Hillman looked the part of a banker of that era, serious and trustworthy, with his short hair parted on the side and combed back from his brow, a pair of pince-nez often perched on his nose. His father ran a rubber business in New York City, and after graduation Lemuel worked at the United States Rubber Company in Philadelphia, intending one day to take over his father’s plant. However, his mother, whom he adored, died suddenly, and his father remarried within the year. He and his stepmother did not get along. In 1911 Hubbard asked him to join a bond business he and some other friends were starting in Grand Rapids. Hillman needed no convincing to make the move. When Dorothy met him, he had just entered an investment-banking firm called Howe, Snow, Corrigan & Bertles.
She found him more entertaining than expected. He shared her intense curiosity about other people, and her sense of humor. She spent the evening talking to him in the parlor, and the next day he took her out to lunch and showed her his new office. They saw each other every day that week.
After Dorothy returned to Auburn, Hillman wrote to say that he had work to do in New York City and that he would like to stop and see her. Her family approved of him, and he visited again on the way back. They took a walk in Fort Hill Cemetery, where she showed him the monument to Chief Logan and her other favorite spots. When they sat down to rest on a bench overlooking the Woodruffs’ house and garden, he asked her to marry him. Flustered, she said that she had given Rosamond her word about the trip to Colorado and that she couldn’t possibly think of marriage just then. “He didn’t like that very well,” she recounted in later years. Disappointed but resolute, he wrote to her every day. When he learned that she and Ros would be spending the night in Chicago on their way to Denver, he insisted on meeting her there.
Dorothy agreed to have lunch with him. In a letter to her mother, she described the place he had chosen—the Blackstone Hotel, a luxurious establishment in the theater district—as “the most attractive hotel I have ever been in, outside of Paris.” The air “was artificially cooled by refrigeration, and it was simply blissful” on that 90-degree day. Hillman ardently pressed his case, but Dorothy was concerned that people at tables nearby would overhear him. He impatien
tly paid the check and hailed a taxi. They followed Lake Shore Drive out of the city, and when they reached a long stretch of beach, he asked the driver to pull to the side. They got out to take a walk, and she finally said yes. “I realized,” she said, “that I really was very much in love with him and he was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.”
He took her back to Mr. Underwood’s house, but she wouldn’t let him return that evening, saying that she didn’t want to tell even Ros just yet. They agreed to marry as soon as she returned from Colorado. Further testing his self-restraint, she asked him not to disclose their news to anyone. She was especially determined to keep it from her parents, who were likely to demand that she return at once.
That night, buffeted by the heat, her excitement, and a loud thunderstorm, she couldn’t sleep, but by the next morning she had recovered her equilibrium. She mentioned to her mother her lunch with Lem, adding that afterward they motored through the parks and along the lake. “It was so funny,” she wrote, “to see crowds of people nonchalantly walking along hot city pavements in sketchy bathing suits.”
Ros gleaned the truth on the train ride to Denver, when Dorothy absentmindedly said she had left her hairbrush in Grand Rapids. She reminded Dotty that they hadn’t been anywhere near Grand Rapids, and wanted to know every detail about the proposal. Hillman ended up confiding in a motherly high school principal named Miss Daniels, with whom he was boarding. Dorothy had met her during her visit to the Hubbards and at the end of August, Miss Daniels wrote her a congratulatory letter, to which Dorothy responded: “It was a great comfort to hear from you—the first to know of our happiness” (Ros didn’t count), “and it was so good of you to write me—It is all so new and unexpected—it all seems like a dream—and of course it seems much more so as I haven’t yet written my family.” She admitted that “Colorado would never have had charms for me if I had dreamed this would happen—but as long as I am here—I am finding it a fascinating life.” And, she said wistfully: “I don’t dare think how far off May is—won’t you write to me some time, again?”
—————————
Ros, witnessing her friend’s happiness about her engagement and her longing for Lem, inadvertently began to disclose her own state of mind. “What do you think?” she wrote to her aunt Helen the first week in October. “ ‘Hand and heart’ marriages which mean getting your life-mate thru an agency are quite usual out here. I heard about one yesterday, the father of 2 pupils, and I simply gasped.” Absorbed in a letter home on a nastily inclement day, she went on to offer some advice to her Aunt Helen, who wanted to buy a dog. Ros thought she should get an Airedale. She said a Scotch terrier would be too much trouble, and told her that Airedales “are so faithful and loyal, they’d stick to you and you can feed them anything.” She had learned about them from Bob Perry, who owned two.
As if on cue, Mrs. Harrison called upstairs, “Yonder comes two fellahs on horseback.” Perry and Carpenter were soaked and spattered with mud. “A regular hurricane at noon” had kept the women from Sunday school but hadn’t deterred the men from their weekly visit. They spent the afternoon inside, sitting in the “best” room, as Ros put it, “the stove red hot and the folding bed serving as sofa,—five Harrisons and the four of us.”
She made an affectionate observation about Ferry’s choice of clothes: “You wouldn’t dream any man could look as Mr. Carpenter did. Dot and I nearly expire over his costumes,—blue overalls, blue cotton shirt open at the neck and old rubber boots. Mr. Perry on the contrary wears a very nice-looking riding top and tends towards the immaculate.” In that regard, he took after his father, Sam, whom a friend remembered as always “shaved and barbered to a hair,” and dressed “like an English guardsman in mufti.” Dorothy described Ferry as “the best ‘raconteur’ I ever heard. . . . He is so picturesque not only in appearance but his vivid cowboy slang and such wonderful insight into human nature. It really is a treat to have him as a friend.”
Because of the lack of privacy at the Harrisons’, Dorothy and Ros saved their intimate conversations for their horseback rides to and from school. Lem wrote long letters to Dorothy virtually every day; she had finally found a more copious correspondent than she. Her days were so full, she was able to reply only on Saturdays, and his letters were so long, she later said, that she read them as they jogged along to school. As Lewis rode ahead, she read some parts out loud to Ros, and they discussed the comparative merits of Ros’s two suitors: Carpenter, the funny, intellectual risk-taker; and Perry, good-looking, steady, gallant—and well dressed.
That Sunday at the Harrisons’, the men talked about the closely fought presidential race, in which Woodrow Wilson was running for a second term against Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Although the war was being fought from France to Russia, and the Allies needed help, Wilson pledged to remain neutral. Hughes continued to advocate greater readiness even after Wilson got a preparedness bill through Congress, and he criticized Wilson for his handling of the Mexican civil war. Teddy Roosevelt had dissolved the Progressive Party and endorsed Hughes. Bob was a firm Hughes man. Ferry was a Republican, but he remained a devout believer in Wilson, considering him surpassed only by Abraham Lincoln among American presidents. As he subsequently wrote, “Wilson’s life sunk into the lives of many people who were fortunate enuf to know or to hear or to read him. This to an unusual degree.” Both passionately held forth, Dorothy swayed by Carpenter’s arguments and Ros siding with Perry.
Everyone around the two women tailored conversations to their genteel sensibilities and did their best to keep them entertained. Dorothy and Ros never tired of the company of Carpenter and Perry, or of the Harrisons, who followed Bob’s courtship of Ros with acuity. Mrs. Harrison ate some candy that Dorothy produced and laughed nervously at the lively political debate. “As for Mr. H.,” Ros wrote, “he literally disappeared from view every now and then behind the sofa-cushions when he was too full of mirth. It was an eventful afternoon for this household as callers are almost an unknown quantity!”
Around that time, Mr. and Mrs. Harrison took them on a camping trip to California Park, a huge tract of public land laced with trout streams and pine forests in the mountains ten miles northwest of the house. On one Friday morning, as Dorothy and Ros went to school, the two Harrisons left to make camp, the horses loaded with supplies. Frank Jr., Lewis, and Ruth stayed behind to do the daily chores.
The teachers and children were distracted all day by the sight of dozens of cowpunchers rounding up cattle nearby, tearing around the schoolhouse and down the hill at breakneck speed. Dorothy wrote that it was a wonderful sight—“magnificent big creatures,” galloping from one side to the other. “Sometimes we see hundreds of them in a long straight line silhouetted against the sky.”
After school, one cowboy, a “dashing specimen,” rode up to help them pack their horses: bedding, clothes, toothbrushes, and Ros’s Kodak. They stared at his Mexican saddle, just sent to him, he told them, by a friend who had been in a fight with the “greasers.” There was a hole through the back where the friend had killed a man. The saddle was stained with blood.
As they set out to meet the Harrisons, they were joined, Dorothy said, by a series of stunning-looking men in high, tooled boots with wicked spurs, chaps over their blue jeans, and sombreros. The men asked where they were going, “in the most frank curiosity—then told us to hurry,” dubious about them riding such a long distance in unfamiliar territory, especially after dark. One man pressed matches on them in case they needed to build a campfire. Ros and Dorothy continued by themselves, exclaiming over the quakers, which were in their full autumn glory. “The sunset light on those sheets of gold with here & there a great black pine or a mass of red oak was the most superb riot of color I have ever seen,” Dorothy wrote. As it got later, “the light would come in long shafts, just touching the tops, and it was positively ethereal.”
Frank Jr., recalling how the teachers loved the fall in Elkhead, later said, “You
know, after the frost had hit this country, we never thought anything about those quakers, they always turned yellow as soon as they frosted. They really marveled over the beauty of the country. You know, all we could see was the same old quakers.” Ros and Dorothy climbed a narrow canyon bordering the Elkhead River, and there were tremendous bare cliffs on one side “which looked wrinkled with age, like ‘The Ring’ scenery and all we needed was ‘Siegfried’!” Mrs. Harrison had tied rags to the trees for them to follow.
The horses began to flag, and as it got dark, the girls lost their sense of direction. They were reconciling themselves to a night in the brush when they heard a faint answer to their calls. Soon they were sitting around the campfire, wolfing down a supper of bacon, biscuits, and coffee. Mr. Harrison had made their beds—several layers of blankets with their slickers on top. They took off their shoes and crawled inside. In the morning, they looked out of their bedrolls at Mrs. Harrison making breakfast, “a little bit of a thin thing,” wearing an old cap of Lewis’s and his mackinaw, Ruth’s divided skirt, and a gingham apron.
They packed up and rode off, stopping to fish at a spot called the Pot Holes, a series of boggy canyons where all of the streams drained and formed gravelly pools. Afterward, they took a shortcut home, a narrow cattle trail straight up Agner Mountain. Mr. Harrison had to chop down branches with his ax to make space for their wide loads. Ros, fully acclimated by then, described the ride as a “real corker” but said, “I’d ride one of these horses up a telegraph pole now and think nothing of it.” Mrs. Harrison, though, did not like riding, and she screamed most of the way. Ros soothed her by talking about the trip her mother had taken down the Grand Canyon, telling her that “ ‘constant prayer’ pulled her thru alive.” Unconvinced, Mrs. Harrison got down and walked, and “Mr. H. guided his five lady passengers back to the home port, sans mishap.”
Nothing Daunted Page 15