My Dear Mrs. Woodruff—
. . . I want to thank you for lending us these nice girls of yours for this winter. I know it must have been hard to give them up, but we surely do appreciate having them. I feel like it was a big undertaking and took a lot of courage—but they are not lacking in that. They seem to enjoy everything—this morning I was helping Miss Woodruff to get started & it was blowing and snowing. I said, “it is pretty bad—I wish you had started ½ hour ago as tis getting worse.” She said, “Oh I like the sound” and they get on their horses & ride off as if they were perfectly at home on them. Of course they write you about their work & everything they do but I just wanted to tell you how very much we think of them & how nice & sweet they are all the time. I try to do all I can for them to make it comfortable but it is not hard to do things for girls that are so appreciative as they are.
Sincerely yours,
Mrs. Harrison
The storms continued almost without letup through December. With snow covering the top of the barbed-wire fences, it was already what they called “a three-wire winter.” At night, despite Mr. Harrison’s daubing, it snowed through the chinks in the logs upstairs onto Dorothy’s and Ros’s bed, and many mornings they woke up under a coverlet of snow. Mrs. Harrison came up the ladder at five A.M., thumped on the floor, and called out, “Girls, time to get up.” She left them a pail of boiling water, which they poured into their pitcher, to break up the ice on top. They took turns being the first out of bed—rushing to the washstand, hastily scrubbing themselves under their nightdresses—and then put on their riding breeches, skirts, silk blouses, and sweaters. Downstairs they warmed their feet on the rim around the stove and laced up their boots while Mrs. Harrison prepared breakfast: salt pork with cream sauce, cereal with cream, biscuits and jam, and coffee. Afterward they dashed upstairs, made the bed, picked up their books and papers, and returned to the kitchen to make sandwiches for lunch and put on their outer garments.
They wore heavy tights and bloomers and pulled oversize German socks over their shoes and galoshes. These outfits were topped by their fur coats and woolen scarves. Ros wrote to Aunt Helen, “We can hardly heave ourselves into the saddle, but once there, we sit warm as toast, and the riding in the snow is most exhilarating.” They always rode with snowshoes hung over their saddles. Dorothy said, “I thought if we fell off and I fell down in deep snow I might be suffocated.”
The children had none of this insulation. “They just have to stand it, so they do,” Ros said. Dorothy’s pupils often arrived in tears, and she rubbed snow on their hands and feet, thinking that it was a quick way to warm them up. The older ones later wrote in their yearbook, “In the morning there were always at least a dozen small boys holding a crying concert around the furnace. But when noon came, who thought of such a thing as frosted feet and fingers?”
As the snow got deeper, Lewis Harrison marked the path to school with willow whips, and he broke the trail each morning after a fresh snowfall—a small boy on a large white horse, up to its withers in snow, plunging through a vast rolling white hillside. On December 10, a several-day blizzard blew in, and at dawn on the thirteenth Dorothy and Ros saw a dozen cattle huddled around the henhouse with the snow up to their bellies and about six inches piled on their heads and backs. Dorothy commented, “This snow is very thrilling and beautiful from the inside looking out, but we now have the working girls’ point of view!” She described her ride that day to her sister Herm, “It snowed so hard that we could only see a few feet in front of us—& it was like looking into white cloth. I kept my eyes shut most of the time—for one thing there is no danger of us running into anything! We looked like arctic explorers this morning, and all I could think of was a desert of snow.” Ros took her boots out of the stirrups and trailed them in the powder on either side of the narrow path.
There were only fifteen children at school that day. The three Mitchell boys, who had joined Dorothy’s class—Claude (twelve), Richard (eleven), and Joseph (nine)—walked three miles from home in snow that was almost up to their necks in some spots. Others arrived on horseback, some riding behind their fathers, who sat around the basement furnace all day, relishing the unaccustomed time off and a chance to relax in the warmth with their neighbors. The storm ended just before school let out, but then the wind began to blow, creating sweeping drifts with nothing to stop them for fifty miles.
The two groups of students began the Christmas season by preparing a box of presents for the Children’s Hospital in Denver. Dorothy wrote, “It would make you cry to see what the children have brought from their treasures! A squirrel hide, piece of porcupine hide, dried oak leaves, and an old Christmas card!” They helped the students make raffia napkin rings and placemats for their parents; the teachers had to explain what the napkin rings were for. Dorothy tried to teach the boys how to cross-stitch, “and it was awful! It was ‘Miss Woodrough—’every other second—with sticky needles to thread—and I shudder to think of the results for ‘Mama.’ ” Ferry gave the teachers a can of powdered milk that they used to make cocoa. Although Dorothy thought it was revolting, she told the boys it was fine, and they smacked their lips over it.
One morning the students told the teachers when they arrived that a pack rat had run into the supply closet. The closet was also the teachers’ changing room, and Dorothy—determined to save face before her students, and to spend the day in dry clothes—braced herself to go in. As she started to pull on the brown skirt she wore for class, she saw that it was in shreds. “Wasn’t that a shame—& I a poor teacher?” she commented. Her petticoat was still serviceable, “although lacking in a vital place,” and since it was the only cotton one she had left, she asked her mother to send another. With the children’s help, they set traps for the rat, which had also eaten the tops of all of their plants except the paper-white narcissus, which was in full, fragrant bloom.
They took advantage of a lull between storms to spend a Friday night with Paroda Fulton, the secretary of the school board; her husband, Charlie; and their four boys. As they rode over the hills, it was very cold but clear. On such afternoons, the farthest mountains were deep blue and appeared so near, Dorothy wrote, that you felt as if you could walk to them. “This immense expanse of snow reflects the color of the sky—until it is really bluer than any Impressionist pictures I have ever seen.” When the sun slipped behind the mountains, it shed a rosy glow all around them. Then a full moon rose. The snow was marked only by the hieroglyphs of small animals: foxes, coyotes, mice, and varying hares, which turned white in the winter.
In the social hierarchy of Elkhead, Mrs. Fulton was a “personage,” as Dorothy described her. Only two years older than the two teachers, she had a reputation for being “exclusive,” with her education and teaching background, her formal manner, and her executive abilities. She was credited, along with Ferry Carpenter, with setting high standards for education in Elkhead. Even before her own children were of school age, Paroda had served on the school board and advised the inexperienced teachers who showed up to teach at the early one-room schools. The books in her house included Dickens and Shakespeare, and she often made loans to Ros from her library for use in the classroom.
Her two guests watched as she got supper, talking to them and moving around the tiny kitchen with her baby perched on her hip. “She is one of those calm, poised people whom I always admire,” Dorothy said. They discussed plans for the school Christmas party and agreed that Paroda would serve as the general manager. The program—play, recitations, carols—would start at about three-thirty, followed by the lighting of the tree, distribution of the children’s stockings, supper, and a dance.
Soon after their visit, another blizzard struck, and Dorothy began to yearn for Auburn: “I shall think of you so much [on Christmas] day & wish with all my heart that I could fly home. Don’t think I am homesick for I am too busy but you do want me to miss you all, don’t you? . . . Just think—next year Lem and I will be coming home for Christmas. . . . No ‘
visiting’ about it, you understand, but coming home!” She and Ros called the girl in the Hayden post office and begged her to try and get the mail out to Elkhead. The girl intercepted a man who worked on the Adair ranch, and he took it up the mountain to them. The sack was full of letters and packages, and the Harrisons talked about it for days. Dorothy’s aunt Mollie sent a box of ornaments for the tree, packed so carefully that none had broken.
With Paroda Fulton organizing most of the party’s events, the teachers had to worry only about the decorating of the room and the children’s presents and exercises. The barrels containing the gifts, held up by the Moffat Road, which had taken to three-day-a-week service, were delivered to the school just in time. Even the teachers were awed by the contents: clothes and Christmas stockings for every child. The stockings, sent by the King’s Daughters in Auburn, were stuffed with candy, soap, baseballs, caps, mittens, and purses containing coins. Dorothy wrote, “Everything was so new & such a quantity—we were simply speechless & I don’t see how we can thank them.”
On the Saturday before Christmas, Dorothy and Ros went to school to clean the room and wait for the tree, which some Elkhead volunteers brought in at four. Three children helped decorate it with candles and ornaments from home and popcorn and straw chains made by the students. They built a stage for the play and hung the piano with colored paper streamers and red bells, which stretched across the room to the stage. As the teachers were working, they looked out and saw their friend Isadore Bolten laboring straight up the hill on his skis, carrying a mail pouch. Dorothy and Ros agreed that it must have weighed fifty pounds.
Isadore, a member of the school board, had endeared himself to them by taking an active interest in their work, and they were awed by his extraordinary personal story. After leaving Chicago, he had worked on farms in Wisconsin and South Dakota, and then he read in the Denver Post’s supplement, the Great Divide, about the glories of the Western Slope. He walked to Elkhead from Steamboat Springs and supported himself at first by working at the Adair ranch. When he was looking for land to make his claim, he came upon Ferry and Jack White repairing a fence, and Ferry directed him to “rimrock country.” He built his cabin with a steeply pitched roof, like the houses in Russia, so the snow would slide off more easily. As a homesteader, he wasn’t looked kindly upon. Ranchers didn’t like the influx of new settlers and all the fences that were closing off the open land. They were particularly unwelcoming, he felt, because he was Jewish.
He didn’t mind making certain changes to ensure that he was accepted by his neighbors. He convinced Ferry to help him get his name legally changed from Israel Boloten, and he became a Mason. Admiring Ferry’s library and envying his status in Hayden and Elkhead, Bolten persuaded him to give him lessons in the law. Ferry later said, “I swear he was about the brightest law student with whom I ever talked.” Ferry bought some cobblers’ tools for the school so that Isadore could give the boys a weekly class in shoemaking.
That evening Bolten stayed at the school until Dorothy and Ros finished, and he strongly advised them not to go home in the dark. The wind had been blowing hard all day, and the trail would be covered. The women knew the Harrisons would worry about them, but decided he was right, and after assuring him they would spend the night there, he skied home.
The basement was warm, with its furnace and stove, and they cooked a meal of cream-of-tomato soup and fried potatoes. Still unsure of themselves in the kitchen, they painstakingly followed the recipes in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (the first edition of Fannie Farmer). They were pleased with their impromptu supper, and they melted snow in a pot to wash the dishes, as Mrs. Harrison sometimes did. Otherwise, she simply stepped outside and snapped off a long icicle from the roof.
They were just about to take their bedding from the supply trunk when they heard a whoop outside. It was Frank Jr. and a hired man sent over by Mrs. Harrison. The women felt like two naughty children, sorry about the worry they had caused. The sky had cleared, and aided by the snow’s reflected light, they could see quite well in the dark. Dorothy described the trip home, “four of us single file—just riding along in that whiteness. . . . ‘Boy’ was ahead of me—so long & graceful, riding bareback & singing weird cowboy melodies.”
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The Harrisons and the teachers opened their presents on Christmas Eve. Dorothy wrote of Mrs. Harrison, “I don’t suppose she ever saw so many things, although they were few compared with our usual number.” Dorothy and Ros gave her a lamp for the kitchen and the sewing basket Mrs. Woodruff had prepared. Mrs. Harrison gave them each a waterproof bag to hold their papers and carry on their saddles; their string bags weren’t much use in the winter, no matter what method they devised to protect them from the snow. Ros’s mother sent Mrs. Harrison an apron, a dress, a set of handkerchiefs, and some mincemeat and preserves; and Dorothy, some books for school and a pair of angora gloves. The teachers gave Lewis a leather scabbard for his gun, “which delighted his soul,” Dorothy said, and Frank Jr. an electric torch.
Ros received a scarf from a family friend, and Dorothy, a yellow hand-knit sweater from her aunt Mollie. Ros was happiest with some photographs from home taken at Aunt Helen’s house on Thanksgiving Day. “I just had to hold back the tears—when I opened that, and saw you all sitting there!” Dorothy had the same reaction to a photograph her mother sent of herself: “I nearly burst into tears—it is so beautiful . . . and I look and look at it. . . . The light on your hair is marvelous, and your dress is so lovely. I am so proud of my mother!” And there was a box from Lem. Exhibiting a sure sense of his fiancée’s tastes, he had wrapped the presents with beautiful paper and gold cord: a black umbrella handle inlaid with gold, an “exquisite” set of Thoreau, a Russian novel, a box of candy, and, she added, “I guess I won’t tell you the other,” referring to a negligee, presumably, or some other romantic offering.
Ros did not say whether she had bought something personal for Bob, but she and Dorothy had planned well ahead for identical gifts for him and Ferry. A month earlier Dorothy had asked Lem to buy two cast-iron boot scrapers, made to resemble dachshunds, she had seen at a store in Grand Rapids the previous winter. Together they weighed ninety pounds. Lem sent them by express mail, and Dorothy wrote that they “nearly caused a riot in Hayden.” Mr. Shaw—who had said to Ferry that summer, when the teachers had to temporarily call off their teaching plans, “Get out you handkerchief, Ferry! The girls have turned you down”—told Ferry that the cost for shipping the heavy package was $4.80. He was particularly impressed that Lem had prepaid, commenting, “He must think a lot of that girl!” Ferry and Bob gave Dorothy and Ros two wolf hides they had admired in town that fall, which they were having made into rugs.
Late on Christmas afternoon, in the midst of yet another blizzard, families began arriving at the school on big sleds, wagons, and horses. Dorothy wrote, “My heart just ached for those poor people as they came in—covered with snow, and half frozen—many of them having been on the road for hours—some of them . . . never got there at all.” Ros added, “I cannot describe to you the scene! . . . Old and young—in all sorts of costumes, most of them having endured what they call out here much ‘grief’ to arrive at all, gathered together to celebrate the big day in the year, and forget the hardships of winter.”
The children were treated to their first Santa Claus: Shorty Huguenin in full costume, who burst in, shaking off the snow. Shrieks filled the room as the stockings were distributed and their contents examined. Ros told her family that “the children were wild with joy.” The year before, there had been no gifts, and a little boy had asked Dorothy the previous week why not, since children in stories always got presents. Dorothy found Oliver Morsbach, Rudolph’s seven-year-old brother, behind the piano “in a trance of joy—over a doll’s tea set, probably intended for a girl & mixed by mistake—but he just loved it!” The play was followed by pieces prepared by Dorothy’s children, then by some Christmas carols. The seven youngest
children sang “Holy Night” in high, quavering voices. Ros was pleased with it all but said, “Babies wailed through the performances, and then proceeded to be sick!—not that I wondered.” She fed them the favored antacid of the day, aromatic spirits of ammonia—a blend of ammonia, ammonium carbonate in alcohol, and distilled water perfumed with lavender, lemon, and nutmeg oils—“not knowing what else to do.”
Large quantities of food were spread out on the tables downstairs. The pianist didn’t get there, but a fiddler did his best (“it was pretty bad,” Ros said), and the dancing—Virginia reels, folk dances, and quadrilles—began at eight. “You would have laughed to have seen Dotty and me,” Ros wrote, “being put thru the paces of the square dances, with two of the rustic swains! . . . I think it’s stupid that we don’t dance them any more.” Dorothy commented, “You do a queer kind of jig step . . . and then solemnly ‘promenade’ around the room, arm in arm, and then you are dumped with no ceremony whatever—the quadrilles are fascinating & I love to do them—they have so much dash & everyone enters into it with such spirit.”
She evoked it all for her family: “It was such a queer assemblage way out here, on top of a mountain, in a storm. Some of the men kept on their hats—most of them smoked. Some were dressed up, even to a collar, but suspenders were the predominant feature. Tired, gaunt-looking women trying to keep children off the floor or put crying babies to sleep & one after another, the little children would topple off to sleep, & were rolled up and tucked away from underfoot.” Even so, there seemed to be babies everywhere—under tables, on benches, desks, piles of clothing—until “you didn’t dare sit down without investigating.” All of this “in our beautiful modern building, handsomely decorated! I wonder if there is anything so fine, and so remote, in the country.”
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