At midnight Ros and Dorothy, heedlessly defying the tradition of the all-night party, slipped out and set off for home. It was still snowing, and about a mile from the Harrison ranch, Pep stumbled and fell in the deep snow. The women were frightened, recalling stories they had been told about people losing their bearings in winter storms. But they followed the instructions they had been given for this kind of emergency, removing the snowshoes from their saddles and leaning over to drop them onto the snow. Dismounting in the winter was always difficult because of their layers of clothing, and this time they had to strap on their snowshoes in the deep powder. Pep lunged and flailed as he tried to get up, and they were a poor match for the 1,000-pound horse. They finally coaxed him back onto his feet and to the trail.
When they reached the ranch, they chopped through the ice in the buckets by the barn to water the horses, unsaddled them, and stumbled into the house. Dorothy said, “I know there’s a bottle of whiskey here because I saw Old Man Harrison have some one night.” In Auburn, they never would have thought of consuming hard liquor, but they hunted until they found the bottle, and each took a large swig. Dorothy noticed that the whiskey gave them “a good furnace inside,” and they climbed the stairs and fell into bed with their boots on. The next morning, the family returned. One of them commented, “You had quite a time last night, didn’t you?” It was all written in the snow.
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A few days later, they left for a New Year’s party at Bob’s cabin in Oak Hills. Covered by masses of wraps and blankets, they rode to Hayden in a sled full of straw pulled by Frank Jr. on his horse, reading novels, eating Christmas candy, and clutching hot-water bottles. The train was supposed to leave Hayden at seven-fifteen, but when they got there, they learned that it wasn’t expected even to depart Denver for twenty-four hours. Used to the delays, Dorothy filled some of the time writing letters. She told Herm that “the place is full of men—such a funny lot . . . and they all vied in entertaining the school moms—as they all call us—such hair-raising stories of people lost in the snow—frozen to death, & then old settlers’ stories of Indians, etc. How you would have loved it all.”
Milly, who was planning a long stay with them in February, was next. Dorothy blithely described the worst months of the year in Elkhead, telling her she could ride one of Mr. Harrison’s horses, learn to ski, join them at school, and “see the neighborhood.” Her visit, Dorothy said, would be a godsend, making the winter pass quickly and bringing the joy of being with her again. “Of course, we have a fierce amount of snow,” she continued, “but . . . the cold is dry & not bad at all . . . It is a glorious day—and 22 degrees below! Do you think you will mind?”
When Dorothy and Ros finally left for Oak Creek, they settled in for the beautiful ride along the river. The towering cottonwoods looked like another species in the winter, their dark branches coated in feathery white depth hoar. The cattle stood out sharply against the snow. As they passed through Steamboat Springs, the train made a sickening, grinding noise when the engineer jammed on the emergency brake and the rail crumpled underneath them. The car rocked and pitched alarmingly before coming to a slow, screeching halt.
Dorothy continued her letter to Herm—in pencil, on the back of a Barkalow Bros. dining car conductor’s report. “We can’t say a word, we are so glad to be alive, but I imagine we will stay here all day. They have sent for a wrecking train & we still hope to make Oak Creek tonight. Do you suppose I shall still have nerve enough to urge Milly to brave this railroad?” In derailments on the Moffat Road, train cars sometimes tumbled off mountainsides and into rivers. The railroad was diligent about getting the cars and debris from the wrecks back to the rail shops, so it could salvage as much as possible, but the deepest canyons of the Rockies were the resting place, here and there, for rusting train carcasses.
They were aggravated by yet another delay. “We had to possess our souls in patience while they sent out an S.O.S. to Phippsburg,” Ros wrote to her father, so they were pleased when the conductor showed them “the whole works,” including the inside of the locomotive cab. They had their picture taken in front of the train. The seventeen-foot engine dwarfed the two women, Ros in her fur coat, holding her clutch; Dorothy in wool and a porkpie hat, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. At two P.M., a wrecking train and crew arrived from Phippsburg. Bob and Marjorie were on board, with a fitted lunch box containing turkey sandwiches, cookies, and milk. Departing again eight and a half hours later, they arrived at Oak Creek at eleven-thirty P.M. They didn’t have much time or energy for the holiday party, “having been 15 hours on the way from Hayden.”
The next morning, they got a ride home in the caboose of a thirty-five-car freight train to Mt. Harris, a coal town near Hayden. It was poorly lit, and in place of seats, it contained two cots: “The bumps are not to be taken standing,” Ros commented. Bob had arranged for a sleigh to meet them at Mt. Harris, and they had a snug moonlit ride to the Hayden Inn. Ros wrote, “Our holiday is over and to-morrow we go back to work and shall be very busy getting new plans for the next month. The corner has been turned now—1917 is here and the time will fly till we are back home again.”
Dorothy thanked her mother for allowing Milly to make the long trip to see them, saying that she had been walking on air ever since she got the final confirmation. “You may be sure that I shall even take more care of Milly than I would of myself.” And she wrote to Anna, “You probably think it would be like a trip to Siberia but I think she could have a good time.” She called Ferry to tell him the news, and he laughed, telling her that Mr. Shaw had just seen him on the street and informed him, “Well, Mildred’s coming!” And then Ferry said, “I’ve got a little greeting for you from Lem!” She didn’t mind. “It really isn’t as much pure nerve as it sounds but more Western interest in everyone’s affairs.”
She began to look at the Harrisons through Milly’s eyes: the milling cattle, the clucking chickens, the house draped once a week with drying underwear. Milly was to get one of the boys’ rooms. It had only a bed in it, but Dorothy hoped that with the featherbed, Milly wouldn’t feel the need for anything else; she would, though, have to get up in the cold and the dark, as they did. “I know she will be horrified at our clothes & I hope she will have something pretty,” she wrote to her mother. “Just think of all the things I want to ask & talk over!” She ended with an apology for the brownish tinge to her script: “This ink freezes every night—hence its color.” And she told her mother, “I sent Herm the Hayden paper, which I thought might amuse you. Please save it and my pictures. I might want them someday.”
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In the depths of the worst winter in anyone’s memory, outings were restricted, and Dorothy’s cabin fever became apparent. On some weekends, even Bob and Ferry failed to make it. “I doubt if we have any of the diversions which we have been so lucky about. We just plain have to stay,” she wrote to Anna. Lewis amused himself by shooting his .22 out the window to make a coyote stop howling. Ferry managed to take the Boy Scouts for a “snowshoe hike” one clear Saturday, and they spent the night at his cabin. Some fathers, inspired by their sons’ resoling accomplishments, started giving carpentry lessons to the older boys. Mr. Harrison ventured into Hayden to buy nails: “Imagine taking a 2 day trip for nails!”
They were lucky not to be snowbound on the day of Milly’s arrival. Lewis escorted Dorothy and Ros to Oak Point, and Ferry took them by sleigh into Hayden. The road was in a bad state, and the three friends, invigorated by the outing and the prospect of welcoming another Auburn girl to Elkhead, carelessly invited the third traveling mishap within two weeks. Describing Ferry as “rather a casual driver,” Dorothy wrote to Anna that in the midst of a particularly entertaining story, the sleigh tipped over and she found herself flying through the air with her enormous overshoes shooting past her face. She landed neatly on her feet, like an acrobat, some fifteen feet below the road in a ditch, buried up to her waist in powder. Ros and F
erry were facedown in a drift, along with their possessions. Ferry brushed himself off, helped Ros back into the sleigh, and then made his way down to rescue Dorothy. “Well, we bundled back & started off—only to tip over again! This time there was no bridge & it was merely a little snow down your neck.”
Milly, Dorothy said, made a complete conquest of the Harrisons and the schoolchildren. Apparently encouraged by her admiration of their managerial skills in the classroom, Ros wrote, “I have to pinch myself at times to realize that it is really I who am teaching. It’s such an education as I never hoped to receive.” Every Friday after recess, the teachers opened up the doors between the classrooms, and Milly taught the children folk dances, accompanied by the Victrola. On Valentine’s Day, Dorothy had a bad cold, and Milly insisted on substituting for her. She wrote to Anna that she had her hands full with seventeen students, and Ros said, “She had a time she won’t soon forget. She seemed to get a good deal of entertainment out of it, ’tho, and survived.” Milly oversaw the younger children as they worked on their valentines, commenting, “they really showed quite a lot of ingenuity,” and after school, helped Ros prepare for the evening dance.
The teachers had become adept at organizing community-wide parties. Ros had started a group of Camp Fire Girls, the sister organization to the Boy Scouts, and the girls fixed up a small room in a corner of the basement, equipped with a sofa and “boarded off by the big boys,” as Milly put it, “where all of the babies are to be stowed for the night.” Ros’s girls also decorated the classroom and made fourteen cakes and towers of sandwiches. There were no more jokes about bumbling in the kitchen; Ros approached it all with the efficiency of a restaurateur. Everyone was in good spirits, and the evening was sparklingly clear. The fiddler arrived on skis, with his fiddle over his shoulder. Ros’s girls served the supper, charging five cents each for a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and a piece of cake. Ros reported that they cleared over twenty dollars, enough to pay for the costumes for the play, an ice-cream freezer for the community, and a nest egg for the Camp Fire treasury. It was the first time the families didn’t provide the food, and the decorations were skillfully executed. “The home-made or rather school-made effusions were hailed with more enthusiasm and delight than Zepp’s best,” Ros wrote, referring to a stationery store in Auburn. The “tiniest scholars” hopped around on the dance floor, having been “demoralized” by Milly’s dance lessons. “Even the poor little blinking babies had a better time than at Christmas.”
In the last week of February, Dorothy and Milly and Ros went to Winter Carnival in Steamboat Springs. They had been hearing about the event for months. Marjorie Perry, along with her other outdoor activities, was a skiing enthusiast. Several years earlier, she had become friendly with Carl Howelson, a thirty-four-year-old champion skier from Norway. He had lived in Denver, where he worked as a stonemason, but he went every winter to the Hot Sulphur Springs Carnival. Marjorie met him there, and persuaded him to visit Steamboat Springs. In 1913 he moved to Strawberry Park. He introduced the sport of ski jumping to the town and organized cross-country skiing races. These events turned into the carnival, the annual weekend highlight of the winter season in Routt County.
Still, Dorothy was concerned about the final weeks of school. It was nearly April, when the students would be needed to help with the farm work, and the melting snow and mud would hinder their efforts to get there. “We will have to work hard to get backward children up to par—and get ready for closing day,” she wrote. Ferry had told them that they would need to present some sort of exhibition of the students’ work, but he was vague about the specifics, so Dorothy asked Anna to visit Miss LeMay, who had helped her prepare for her classes, hoping she would have some suggestions. They also conferred with Paroda Fulton. She helped them work out their calendar, their final lesson plans, and the closing ceremonies. State law required that they teach twenty days every month, and they calculated that if they added a few Saturdays, they could finish their classes on April 12. They then visited the school in Hayden, to “match up” their work with that of the teachers there and to see what they were planning for the end of the year. Ros wrote, “We’re counting the weeks now . . . six from today will be Easter Sunday and it will come before we know it.”
Caught up in their work and unable to get their letters to town, Dorothy and Ros stopped writing home. The two last letters they sent from Elkhead were dated late February 1917. On March 3, Milly sent a telegram to her parents from Steamboat Springs: TWO SPLENDID DAYS, WONDERFUL SKIING, GIRLS LEFT THIS AFTERNOON ON A FREIGHT FOR HAYDEN. I SHALL STAY HERE WITH MARJORIE TILL TUESDAY THEN TAKE THE TRAIN FOR DENVER WITH HER. . . .
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Early springtime in Elkhead, beginning in mid-March, had its own excitements and drawbacks. At night the snow froze solid—a treacherous surface to navigate. In the morning, Calf Creek ran swiftly under a fragile layer of ice; by the afternoon it was a brown torrent, rushing higher and faster each day. Spring at the Harrisons’ came sooner than it did up at the schoolhouse, where patches of mud over a layer of ice were, as the locals put it, “slick as snot,” causing Pep and Gourmand to skid and stumble.
The glimmers of the approaching season made the children restless, and so did the extra work the teachers gave them in preparation for their exams. Everyone looked forward to the end of the school day. As Dorothy and Ros rode home, Lewis helped them spot returning blackbirds and robins, killdeer investigating the wet patches of the meadows, and butterflies flitting low across the snow. When Lewis unsaddled their horses and stood in one place too long, he sank almost to his knees in mud that had the consistency of thick chocolate pudding. His boots made a rude slurping sound as he extricated them.
By the last day of school, the aspens were beginning to leaf out, and sage buttercups and bluebells and stretches of brilliant green grass were eclipsing the snow. The closing exercises took place on Thursday evening, April 12. Parents left home twelve hours in advance. “In spite of the fact that it was impossible to get a horse over the roads on account of the melting snow,” the Routt County Republican reported, “about 30 parents and residents walked upon the crust early in the morning and were on hand for the exercises.” Dorothy’s students, dressed up as characters from Mother Goose, delivered monologues, and Ros’s acted in a farce. The teachers played an unexpected role in the proceedings: Ferry presented each of them with a gold medallion—a gift from the Elkhead Board of Education. On one side was a simple etching of the stone building, and on the other, their names with an inscription: “For bravery in attendance, loyalty in work, as teacher 1916–17.”
The Republican reported, “The attendance and the work at the school throughout the long and exceptionally severe winter have shown that a winter school is feasible for the rural districts of any county.” After the ceremony and before the dance, the adults gathered for a “war meeting.” Two weeks earlier, President Wilson had declared in the House of Representatives that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” After learning of the Germans’ intention to begin unrestricted submarine warfare, he deferred his plea for a just and secure peace: “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace. . . .” The assembly in Elkhead uniformly pledged their support for the war.
17
COMMENCEMENT
“At the Great Divide on our trip to Ferry’s homestead,” 1923
On Saturday, April 14, Mr. Harrison and Frank Jr. loaded the teachers’ trunks onto wagons with runners attached, and Dorothy and Ros left for Hayden. From there they took the train back to Denver, where they were joined by their parents. Finally, Grace and George Underwood had an opportunity to meet Bob and the senior Perrys. The next morning, Ros woke her mother early, climbing into bed with her in one of the Perry guest rooms to show her the gold medallion. Sam and Lottie had a dinner party that night, attend
ed by family friends, where they announced Bob’s engagement to Rosamond. Ferry had come, too, from Oak Point. Grace Underwood recorded in her diary, “All so happy. Our new son is lovely.”
The following week, the Underwoods and Woodruffs left for Chicago, and Grace noted: “Soldiers guarding all bridges as we cross over Mississippi.” Platt Underwood, Ros’s uncle, was at the station to meet them, along with Lemuel Hillman. Dorothy had anticipated the reunion with her fiancé with some trepidation, having spent far more time and in much closer quarters with Ferry and Bob than she had with him, but as soon as she saw him, she said, “he looked very natural and very good to me.” He was fit after his training in the Naval Reserve, and unabashedly delighted to see her.
Years later, though, it was the departure from Elkhead that Ros and Dorothy recalled most vividly. Ros said of that day, “I lost my heart to the west right then and there.” In truth, she had lost it many months earlier, perhaps as early as the July morning in Hayden when they rode in the spring wagon from Hayden to Elkhead for the first time. So had Dorothy, who recalled, “I fell in love with that beautiful country. We didn’t know whether or not we wanted to make this a career, and it was decided for both of us. If we hadn’t married, we would probably have continued.” Although they didn’t question the social convention dictating that finding a good husband meant forfeiting a profession, they regretted that they would be sacrificing some of the intimacy of their friendship. For the first time, the two friends were preparing for lives apart. Ros and Bob would start off in his house in Oak Hills, with the promise of Denver in their future. Dorothy would move to Grand Rapids. In some ways, they were likely more apprehensive about this departure than they were as they set off together for Colorado. Ros told her grandchildren that the year in Elkhead was the best in her life. It was clear that Dorothy felt the same way.
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