Dorothy and Ros longed for a newspaper with more information about the election results. Ferry told them what he knew. As expected, Wilson appeared to have carried most states in the West, but he had eked out a victory in the Northeast and the Midwest. Ferry also seized the occasion to talk about Wilson’s years at Princeton and his extraordinary intellect. He said that the president was a long-suffering idealist, working for the good of the country despite his personal distaste for public life. Ros, in keeping with her family’s Republican sympathies, wrote, “We’ve been so excited waiting to hear the presidential returns. I can’t bear to have W.W. reelected and I guess he surely has been now.” The margin of victory was slim. If California had gone for Hughes, Wilson would have lost the election. Echoing Ferry, not Ros, Dorothy told her family, “It is real utopian democracy out here—& so interestingly in conflict with all our inherited prejudices.”
—————————
Everette Adair, oblivious to the teachers’ disparagement, began to accompany them home from school. One fall evening he presented them with a box of candy, “clear from Hayden!” as he put it, causing Dorothy to remark to her audience at home, “He is such a ridiculous, vain, picturesque boy!” Another day, as they were heading back to the Harrisons’, Everette rode up to them and suggested they stop to take a look at Shorty Huguenin’s cabin. Huguenin, whose French parents had emigrated to Colorado in 1877, was married with two daughters and ran a restaurant and an ice business in Hayden. He was building a homestead near the school, and Ferry had arranged with him for Dorothy and Ros to live there in the worst of the winter months, when the two-and-a-half-mile commute would be too difficult.
The women were beginning to vaguely anticipate the difficulties. It was only the first week of November, and their horses went crashing through the ice in Calf Creek every morning. When they got up one day, it was 10 degrees. Still, by noon it was hot, and the air was so clear it almost vibrated. They had deep snow for a few days, followed by a day when the temperature rose from 20 to 95 degrees. In mid-November, during a rare week of good weather, the snow melted off the south side of the hills, giving the women a new view as they rode to school: one side naked and brown, the other clad in snow. It was hard to imagine that the winter would be quite as bad as everyone predicted.
Coming upon Shorty’s cabin, Everette laughed and said, “Your winter residence looks like a hog pen, only it isn’t large enough to be a comfortable hog pen!” For once they found his comments apt. The work had only just started, and Ros wrote to her mother, “It is the funniest looking affair you can imagine. So far, merely logs laid on top of each other—just like a corn crib with no signs of doors or windows.”
Since the lumber wasn’t even sawed yet, they decided they would stay at the Harrisons’ for a while longer. Dorothy admitted, “I couldn’t bear [the prospect of living there], if it weren’t for the convenience of having it so near the school.” Ros dismissed her mother’s worry about blizzards; she was sure the horses would find their way home. Striking a colloquial note, she added, “Also, if it ever storms too bad, we have our packing trunks with all our bedding in it, in the supply closet at school, and supper enough in the Domestic Science larder to last us through.”
Even before Thanksgiving, they were beginning to plan for Christmas, since their presents for the Harrisons and the children would have to be bought in Auburn. Dorothy had trouble deciding what to give Mrs. Harrison, who wouldn’t have any use for extravagant gifts. Trying to get her mother to imagine their landlady’s limited horizons, Dorothy wrote, “She hasn’t been farther than the school house since last February—I think perhaps one of those spool baskets nicely fitted out would please her, a bright colored one. I think she would like something different to look at.” Mr. Harrison was boarding up the kitchen, “daubing” with cement and sawdust, fortifying the house against the winter blasts. Soon Dorothy and Ros gave up on the idea of staying in Shorty’s cabin and were relieved by their decision. They loved the morning and early-evening rides and knew that they couldn’t oversee their own comfort the way Mrs. Harrison did.
The children cut willow sticks for poles and started skiing to school on the curved slats from old barrel staves, which they propped up against the stone building before they went inside. Seeing the students’ meager midday meals, some of which consisted of nothing but cold fried potatoes, Ros and Dorothy began cooking soup on the basement stove. Robin Robinson later remembered getting snowed in during November and running out of “grub.” His father and a neighbor skied to Hayden to bring back some food but got delayed by a storm and didn’t return for three days. “That school lunch at noon was about the greatest thing in our lives,” he said. “We had nothing at home to eat but boiled wheat.”
On sunny days at recess, the students liked to ski down the hill and across a pond. The teachers, who had never been on skis, took part enthusiastically. Dorothy wrote, “I went down a fine long hill today and it took me 35 minutes to come up! All the little boys went by me with gleeful smiles . . . while ‘teacher’ puffed & panted up the hill—they walk up on skis but I can’t do that & had to plow through snow up to my knees.” The boys cheered when the women got to the foot of the hill without falling.
Ros noted, “The sun is certainly a joy—the dark days are very few. The little boys’ hands are at last emerging white and clean. The dirt of ages is being worn off by the winter snows!” The girls in her class were inclined to stay inside at lunch hour, reading from Aunt Helen’s gift to the school—the “High School Series,” a selection described by its publisher as “clean, wholesome stories that will be of great interest to all girls of high school age”—but Ros pried them from their seats and shooed them outside.
Dorothy’s children continued to elicit contradictory impulses in her. One afternoon, noticing that Jimmy Robinson was shivering, she took him into the supply closet and gave him a sweater. A few minutes later, she had to usher in Tommy Jones to punish him for disobedience. He began to weep, saying, “You give Jimmy a sweater and me a whipping!” Dorothy wrote to her mother, “Wouldn’t that have melted a stone? He is literally in rags so I gave him one, too, & he was soon wreathed in smiles with tears pouring down his cheeks. I know you think I am a brute but you ought to be with me for a day—I’ll bet you’d think you were in a lunatic asylum.” Then, with the querulousness that occasionally still surfaced when she was feeling overlooked, she said, “You never mention school and I wonder if you ever think of me at the noon hour—eating sandwiches, while you consume salads & soufflés.”
None of her letters disclose her engagement, but she must have sent a telegram in late October, since her father wrote to express his approval. In his even, sloping handwriting on Auburn Button Works letterhead, he began:
My dear Dot
We had a very good visit from Lem and he confirmed the impression his former visits made—I like him very much indeed, and I am entirely satisfied that he will make you just the husband I could wish for you; he has high ideals, coupled with good business sense & I think sound judgement. Money is not the first thing with him, but I am confident you will never come to want if he has his health. . . .
The two families were sometimes incredulous that the “girls” could be as contented as they said they were. Dorothy responded to Anna, who had asked what it was like to be so far away from her fiancé: “You want to know about my real feelings but they vary! I could, of course, be very easily homesick but I won’t let myself and I know I must stay.” She wrote confusedly, “You have all been so lovely about Lem . . . of course, it is terribly hard not to see him for so long but on the other hand, I am very happy, and the weeks go by very quickly. Of course, I get discouraged when things go badly at school and when I don’t get mail for a long time but you know Ros and I have to cheer each other on. It never lasts long, and I am so absolutely well that I am always blatantly cheerful & happy.” And, she pointed out, they had a surrogate family: “The Harrisons are too good to be true, & I lo
ve them all.”
—————————
They were ready for the Thanksgiving holiday. After school that Wednesday, they rode with Lewis to Oak Point, and Lewis returned home with their horses. Ferry had two big horses hitched to a sleigh, and a new moon lit their way to town. Dorothy wrote that she had an odd feeling, “flying into Hayden in that funny little home-made sleigh—as if I were really about a hundred years in the past—going to a Thanksgiving party. . . . [Y]ou can’t know what a glorious feeling we have on these precious vacations!”
Ros was even more elated. Bob had just asked her to marry him. As Dorothy later recalled, “Having become engaged myself, I could see that romance was sprouting very heavily with Bob and Ros.” Ferry could not have missed the signs either, and he must have stifled his disappointment over dinner with the teachers at the Hayden Inn, and afterward, at his office, where they sat around the stove talking about politics, education, religion, and the Boy Scouts. He was the troop leader in Hayden, and two boys appeared, asking to take the examination. That night Dorothy and Ros shared a lumpy bed at the inn and took the seven-fifteen train with Ferry to Oak Creek, where they were enthusiastically greeted by the Perry family and other guests: Bob, his parents, Charlotte and Marjorie and Portia Mansfield, by then all good friends of theirs; and a cousin, Mrs. Holbrook, from Milwaukee.
It was a momentous introduction to Sam and Lottie. Bob had just told his parents the news, but Ros hadn’t yet informed Mr. and Mrs. Underwood. Instead, she wrote, “They are a lovely family, very devoted and full of fun. . . . Mrs. P. is quite frail, but very sweet and bright.” Almost identically, Dorothy commented, “Mrs. Perry is a most cordial, enthusiastic person, sweet as she can be,” but added, “Mr. Perry is a stern old war horse without much to say.” The attractive Mrs. Holbrook was “a woman about forty whom they nearly killed off in their athletic zeal.”
Sam Perry had organized Thursday’s activities. Driving a sleigh pulled by four mules and loaded with seven pairs of skis, he took the entire entourage, except his wife, to the top of a mountain, where the teachers had their first skiing lessons. They returned to the house in time to lie down for a few minutes before dressing for dinner at four. “My gown for the occasion was my last year’s blue serge, but it was quite all right,” Ros wrote. Mrs. Perry had arranged the seating with place cards. Ferry, as Ros referred to him at last, dropping the formality of “Mr. Carpenter,” had brought sweet peas for a centerpiece, and Mrs. Holbrook had created a framed silhouette for everyone: Dorothy’s was a figure on skis, and Bob’s, a man bound in rope. The eating “assumed real proportions as an occupation,” Dorothy wrote. They devoured everything that Bob’s housekeeper put before them: duck, grouse, fruitcake—and fresh vegetables and fruit of all kinds, a particular treat out of season. After dinner they played a card game called Racing Devil, and danced to the Victrola. Dorothy, oppressed by the steam heat, opened the door a crack to let some fresh air into the room.
Soon after Thanksgiving, Ros wrote to her parents, starting the letter with the command: “Please read this together.” Mrs. Underwood complied, putting the letter in her desk drawer. She wasn’t able to retrieve it until half past ten that night, when she and her husband returned from a dinner in town. Mr. Underwood, awed by her self-control, admitted that he never would have been able to wait. They sat down to read it by the lamp in the living room, then read it two more times before sending Ros a deliberately cryptic telegram: WE ARE ALL WELL AND HAPPY AFTER RECEIVING YOUR LETTER. Ros, like Dorothy, had asked that her engagement be kept secret until they returned to Auburn and could make the announcement themselves. Her father wrote on December 13, “I hope you & Dorothy understood our telegram & that no one else did. How I wish we could see you both!” Ros had told her parents that Mr. Shaw, who ran the telegraph office in Hayden, liked to gossip about their telegrams. Ros’s mother wrote that it would be hard not to share the good news, “but you can trust us dear.”
She didn’t hesitate, though, to tell the family, summoning to 72 South Street all of the Auburn relatives. They peppered her with questions over lunch. Was it about Arthur? Was he engaged? Fired from his job? Or was it Ros? She said only that she had a letter from Arthur that she wanted to get their advice about. Aunt Helen was late to arrive, but finally, Mrs. Underwood ushered them into the music room, where she read Arthur’s letter. It was so banal that they knew the real news was from Ros. Mrs. Underwood requested silence until she had read the letter all the way through. As she came to the end, she broke down in tears.
Then everyone started talking at once. George Jr., who had been pacing up and down the room, came to a stop before his mother and whispered, “I think it’s wonderful.” Aunt Helen rushed home to write to Ros, recalling the anxious weeks before she left for Colorado: “To think—you . . . set your face westward little thinking your Fate was there!” She also congratulated her on her high standards. “I could dance for joy that you never were weak enough to be coaxed, harried, cajoled, pushed . . . or fooled into taking the near right thing! As I march through them . . .—Harold-Dudley-Charlie-Douglas-Billy, Theologues & the Lord knows who—they all are found lacking, they did not move you—the inner soul of you. I am all for Bob—already—you love him—das [ist] genug. But when did you begin to be interested in him—when he was in danger?”
George Jr., following the same line of thought, wrote, “I know he is a real man,” underscoring the last words three times. He asked her to tell Bob that he was mighty glad to have him for a brother, and added, “Won’t this old town sit up and take notice when the good news is told?” Mrs. Underwood told her, “It is an awfully comforting feeling to know that if anything happened to us, you would have someone to lean on, & fill your life with the best that life affords.” Her father wrote, “It was a pity you could not have been here to see your bombshell explode. You would have enjoyed it.”
The jubilation at the Underwood house indicated both how much the family had come to appreciate Ros’s experience in Elkhead and how relieved her parents were that, contrary to all expectations, she had found a fiancé whom even the most straitlaced matrons of Auburn could admire. Ros’s mother then asked the Woodruffs to come for Sunday supper. There was an air of excitement when everyone sat down at the dining room table, and Mrs. Underwood said, “Let’s take hold of hands circling the table and congratulate each other.” Carrie Woodruff—acting more like her daughter than like herself—burst out: “Is Rosamond engaged?” and Grace replied, “Yes she is, to Bob Perry.” Carrie said that she knew it was either Mr. Perry or Mr. Carpenter, but she couldn’t have guessed which one. Carrie could wholeheartedly share the Underwoods’ joy, calling to mind Dorothy’s upstanding banker, and she must have pitied Grace for being unable to meet her future son-in-law for another five months.
In her own letter to Ros, Mrs. Woodruff revealed a warmer side than Dorothy was inclined to grant her, and more resilience. Despite her reservations about the Elkhead adventure, she had come to recognize that it was inevitable and—implicitly, at least—how it had begun to change them all.
Dearest Rosamond,
What thrills of pleasure and excitement you have given Mr. Woodruff and me! . . . My dear children I do congratulate you—from the bottom of my heart. Everything that you and Dorothy have written about Mr. Perry and Mr. Carpenter have proved their kindness, thoughtfulness, and devotion. . . . It is lovely to think of you as being so happy, and I realize fully that after this year neither you nor Dorothy would have been truly contented doing the same things which kept you busy before you went away. As I think of you and Dorothy growing up together, it certainly is extraordinary that your interests and occupations have always been identical. It is an unusual friendship which will I am sure never diminish—O how lovely it is that you both have this new bond of affection!
16
THREE-WIRE WINTER
Lewis Harrison breaking trail, 1917
In early December, Dorothy wrote to Anna that they had ridden to schoo
l that day in a blizzard. She admitted, “the wind & snow just cut—I can tell you.” The following week, Mrs. Harrison, uncharacteristically, was close to despair. Her husband and Frank Jr. were at another ranch trying to thrash, Dorothy wrote, “with an antique thrashing machine which Mr. H. would buy—against her better judgment.” A thrashing machine, which separated the grain from the chaff and the straw, was set up at a central location so that ranchers nearby could use it. The grain had to be dry, or mold would grow in the sacks. The fact that they were still at it in December indicated the difficulties they’d had with the machine and their desperation to save what grain they could. Although a new one had been ordered, no one knew when it would arrive. “Farm life can be really tragic,” Dorothy observed, “so much of it is uncertain and I pity the women!”
Mrs. Harrison’s practical nature was a contrast to Mr. Harrison’s aspirational one. He foresaw a future in which their pastures would be full of healthy cattle and their apple orchard would bear fruit for the market as well as the family. However, the winter descended with unexpected velocity. The Harrisons had no sheds for most of the livestock, not enough feed, and they were running out of coal, which meant long trips for Frank Jr. over unbroken roads to the nearest wagon mine. “You can’t imagine how hard every thing is out here—to just keep alive,” Dorothy wrote. “Boy goes very often after coal—an all day trip or maybe two—with four horses, and he is lucky to bring home a sled half full.” The cattle milled around the house at night, seeking warmth and looking balefully in the windows.
Mrs. Harrison commended her two boarders for their hardiness. She had joined in the correspondence to and from Auburn, and she wrote to Carrie on December 6:
Nothing Daunted Page 19