Another was Isadore Bolten, the Elkhead School’s cobbling teacher, who raised sheep as well as cattle, because sheep provided two crops: wool in the spring and lambs in the fall. Before the Grazing Act, it was a practice that bordered on suicide. One year a group of cowboys rode into the area where Isadore’s sheep were grazing, set fire to one of his wagons, and slaughtered much of his herd. Still, he persevered. He was an even cannier rancher than Ferry was, and he, too, belatedly found a well-educated bride. Nine years after Dorothy and Ros left Elkhead, Isadore married a librarian from Rawlins, Wyoming, where he wintered his sheep and spent his evenings at the public library. He bought the Harrison, Adair, and other ranches, and eventually acquired twenty-five thousand acres, described as one of the largest singly owned tracts of land in northern Colorado. He told someone who was curious about his life, “There was nothing for me in Russia—absolutely nothing. I had the whole world to move about in, but some kind destiny pulled me toward America. It is remarkable that there was a place in this distressed world where a penniless alien, knowing not a word of the language, could work out a place for himself.” He died a millionaire in 1951, at the age of sixty-six. The remains of his homestead can still be seen south of the Elkhead School, leaning into the earth. Part of his pitched roof rests against one log wall.
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On February 20, 1930, Dorothy and Lem walked to a dinner party in the new suburb of East Grand Rapids. He recently had been promoted to president of the Old Kent Corporation. They were on a narrow lane when a car veered toward them. Lem pushed Dorothy out of the way, but he was struck and killed. He was forty-three years old. The bank’s monthly bulletin commended his benevolence, wit, and now quaint-sounding banking practices: “He was a keen student of the securities market. He never gave his consent to the purchase or sale of a bond in which he did not honestly believe.”
The country was mired in the Depression, and suddenly Dorothy was a single mother with four children between four and twelve years old. Lem’s scrupulousness as a banker did not yield enough in the way of savings to fully support the family. Nor did she inherit any money from the Woodruff family business. Her brother Douglas, who was running Auburn Button Works, had turned the factory into one of the earliest manufacturers of plastics in the country. He considered President Roosevelt a traitor to his class and Dorothy was incredulous when he refused all government contracts. As competition increased, the business failed. Other early businesses also went under, and like many post-industrial cities, Auburn suffered a century-long decline.
Dorothy prepared for her future by taking courses in typing and shorthand. She became friendly with other working women, establishing a club for them called the Hillman Guild. By 1932, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, she was running the Grand Rapids chapter of the Red Cross. When the Grand River overflowed after heavy rains, she went down to help the Ottawa Indians, who had nothing to eat but raccoons. Ferry, despite his problems at the ranch, visited her several times in Grand Rapids, bringing phonograph records of his favorite cowboy songs for her children.
She wrote a terse entry in the spring of 1934 for her twenty-fifth Smith reunion book: “At present trying to run a full-time job and bring up four children.” Her daughter Caroline told me that she didn’t know how her mother would have coped if she hadn’t worked in Elkhead and seen how the women there managed their lives. “That year in Colorado became part of who she was,” Caroline said. “She took life by the throat and dealt with it.”
Ros’s comments in the reunion book were far happier. She wrote chattily about her years with Dorothy in Auburn (“Those . . . years, were, as I look back upon them, like the Biblical ones—delightful ones of plenty!”), Europe, and Elkhead; her married life in Oak Hills and Denver, and her young family’s summers at their cabin in Strawberry Park. But several weeks later, Bob began suffering from fatigue and blackouts. Dr. Cole, the Moffat mine doctor and family friend, diagnosed a brain tumor. Bob and Ros went to the Mayo Brothers’ Hospital for the operation. Although it was successful, he came down with pneumonia, an illness that was often fatal in the days before antibiotics. He died in Rochester, Minnesota, on July 27, 1934, at the age of fifty.
Not long afterward, the mines in Oak Creek began to run out of coal, and in the 1940s, one after another closed. The town now has about eight hundred residents, some small businesses, and the Tracks and Trails Museum in the old Town Hall building. There are few cars or people on Main Street, and in Oak Hills up the road, all that remains of the Moffat Coal Company are the concrete foundations of a hoist, the heavy arches that supported a tipple, a flattened area by the creek where the company town stood, a water tower, some holes in the hillsides—the old entrances to the mine—and some piles of burned-off red slag. The anthracite coal deposits in Elkhead, for which Sam and Bob Perry had such hopes, turned out to be of poor quality and not worth mining. Oak Creek’s depot, a former headquarters for the Moffat Road, was sold in 1967 for thirty-five dollars. It is now a vacant lot.
When Dorothy and Ros were in their late sixties, Ros took her on a trip to the Caribbean. It was 1955, and Ferry’s wife, Eunice, had died from heart failure the year before. Ros had important news for her friend: Ferry had asked her to marry him. It was four decades since he had lured the Auburn women to Elkhead. Ferry’s children, like Dorothy, were delighted. His younger son, Willis, a lawyer in Denver, told me, “Dad was worried about how the news would affect us, but we all said, ‘Yes, of course.’ ” Ros knew that Ferry would not leave the ranch, so she moved from her big Tudor house in Denver. If she had any trouble adapting to ranch life, she didn’t say so. In the summer of 1960, her great-nephew arrived from Auburn for a visit. She took him up to Oak Point, and as they were walking around, Ros told him that rattlesnakes lived in the vicinity. She advised him to buy a new pair of blue jeans at F. M. Light & Sons. As long as the jeans were unwashed, she said, they would be thick enough to protect his legs from the fangs of any rattler.
All fifteen of Carpenter’s grandchildren, who were too young to know Eunice, grew up thinking of Ros as their grandmother. One of them, Belle Zars, told me that sometimes when she was staying at the ranch as a girl, she would come downstairs in the morning and see Ferry waltzing with Ros to the kitchen radio.
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In August 1973 I met Aunt Ros and Uncle Ferry. I spent my eighteenth summer working on a ranch in Carbondale for Rosamond’s granddaughter Roz, who had three children. At the end of my stay, we went to the Carpenter Ranch. Ros had become a good cook, and with the help of her housekeeper, she served an old-fashioned luncheon on the sunny back porch. It was hard to see in the gracious elderly woman the beautiful young adventurer my grandmother had so often spoken about.
Afterward, Ferry said that he had something to show me. He put on his cowboy hat, and we climbed into his battered pickup truck. He drove through Hayden and across the river, and we began a long, jarring ride into the hills. At eighty-seven, he was still witty and voluble, concentrating more on his stories than on his driving. The homesteaders, Ferry told me, had long since moved on, their cabins mostly dismantled and the lumber carted off to be used elsewhere.
We pulled up on a high, rocky ridge covered with withered beige grass, scrub oak, and wildflowers, just behind the Elkhead School. It had been boarded up and padlocked in 1938, after its windows were broken and it was ransacked. The basement furnace and stove were carted off, along with the two slate chalkboards and most of the children’s desks. A no-trespassing sign was posted. Ferry identified the mountains that surrounded us: Bears Ears, Pilot Knob, Agner, the Flat Tops. We sat on the steps and had our picture taken by a ranch hand who had come with us. Ferry said with satisfaction, “That’s three generations, sitting right here.” When I was back at college in the East, he sent me a letter on his official stationery: CARPENTER HEREFORDS, WEIGH-A-HEAD—SINCE 1909. He wrote, “Sure wish you could be here this Saturday when we sell our bull calves. . . . Ros j
oins me in sending love & hoping you come visit again. Ferry.” He enclosed a photograph of one of his prize bulls, 2,455-pound Biggie.
Ros died the following February. She had written a letter to Ferry, asking him to send some gifts from the money she left to him. The first recipient was Dorothy Hillman, her “great friend,” as she invariably referred to her, of eighty-three years. She also had requested that the Elkhead School be pictured on the front of the memorial booklet. The service was held on a cold day in the white-frame Congregational Church of Hayden. The windows were covered with yellowing paper that was designed to resemble stained glass, and the old organ was jammed into the right-front corner. It was drafty inside, but the pews were closely packed with friends and relatives from Auburn, Denver, the ranch, Hayden—and some students from Rosamond’s class of 1917. Those who couldn’t squeeze into the church were seated in the parish house, rigged with a public address system. Dorothy, who was sick, was unable to make the trip.
At a time when only 10 to 15 percent of students in the country who started high school ended up graduating, four of Ros’s students had gone on to college and others to professional school. Leila Ferguson, who had so cherished her first school desk, became an award-winning teacher in Colorado. She said of Dorothy and Ros six decades later, “They really and truly had the interests of the children at heart. . . . What they didn’t know about teaching methods, they made up in zeal.” Ezra Smith was a teacher in Michigan. Helen and Florence Jones—two of Tommy Jones’s sisters—were registered nurses. Lewis Harrison went to Colorado State University and got his master of science in forestry at Iowa State University. His education was subsidized by a fund established jointly by Ferry Carpenter and Ros’s mother. In 1957 Lewis became the chief forester for the state of Missouri.
Several of Ros’s and Dorothy’s former pupils spoke at the memorial. Lewis talked about Miss Underwood and Miss Woodruff, “who came riding into our lives in a spring wagon late one afternoon.” He said, “Little did I realize at the time the important and lasting influence it was going to have, not only on me, but on most youths and many adults of the Elkhead community.” Robin Robinson, by then a sixty-four-year-old Hayden businessman and chairman of the Solandt Memorial Hospital, said, “I’ll never forget the first morning when Lewis Harrison and the two new teachers rode up to the school. . . . I don’t believe there ever was a community that was affected more by two people than we were by those two girls.”
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During my visits to Hayden and Elkhead in February 2009, I had wanted to ride from the old Harrison place up to the schoolhouse, but there were no horses and no one to break trail. Instead, Rebecca Wattles and a friend from the Hayden Heritage Center had arranged for us to make the climb by snowmobile. Sam Barnes, the public works director of Hayden and another grandchild of Elkhead homesteaders, provided three Arctic Cats and was our guide for the day. Rebecca took a steep turn too quickly, tipping over in the deep powder, as Ferry had with Dorothy and Ros in his sleigh. Sam—a tall man of few words and a generous girth—stopped and helped her to set things right. We made a noisy arrival, snow flying out on either side of the machines. When the engines were shut off, the silence felt like a reproach.
It was another brilliant, balmy day. Sam unlocked the door and threw open the shutters. Sunlight slanted in, revealing the outlines of where the blackboards used to hang. Sometimes the school is rented out to hunters, and there were half a dozen bunk beds in the middle of the room, along with an open kitchen and a bathroom by the back wall. The huge windows had been replaced with smaller ones. Otherwise, the room looked much as it had when Lewis first showed it to Dorothy and Ros. It wasn’t hard to imagine Miss Woodruff trying to keep order on her side of the room while Miss Underwood walked around examining the older students’ work on her side. The basement was in some disarray. There was a gaping dirt hole where the furnace had been ripped out of the concrete floor, and no sign of the domestic-science room. The folding wooden door that had separated the two classrooms was lying on its side; half a dozen wrought-iron bases of the children’s desks hung from the rafters. So did an ungainly wooden exercise apparatus—all that was left of whatever had constituted the gymnasium.
The school was a source of inspiration, though, until it closed. One evening in the summer of 1935, Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield, who had been running their performing-arts camp for twenty years, drove up from Strawberry Park with their new dance teacher, thirty-year-old Agnes de Mille. She had asked them if they knew where she could see her first square dance. The camp directors had a knack for attracting uncommonly talented young dancers, choreographers, and actors—among them Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who arrived together and in 1944 created their second major collaboration there, a play-dance called Four Walls. It starred Cunningham and Julie Harris. In the late 1920s, over three summers, Ferry Carpenter had taken his young nephew Richard Pleasant to the girls’ camp. Pleasant lived in Maybell, a town of twenty-five people in far western Colorado, and Ferry thought that Portia and Charlotte could impart some culture to him. Pleasant went on to found American Ballet Theatre, with Lucia Chase, in 1940. Later, a boys’ camp was added at Perry-Mansfield, and Dustin Hoffman studied acting under Charlotte.
At the schoolhouse that night, women stood on one side of the room and men on the other. As Portia described the scene, a group of “ancient and bearded” fiddlers were playing, and de Mille watched as the cowboys, in Levi’s and boots, whirled the women about in their full-skirted dresses. Portia asked the fiddlers to play “Turkey in the Straw,” and when they struck up the tune, she urged “Aggie” to do a solo. De Mille jumped out to the open floor and began to dance, startling the cowboys, who called out, “That’s it, girlie! You get ’em! Go to it!” As the music ended, a long line of dancers grabbed de Mille by the hand and “cracked the whip,” sending her out the open doors of the schoolhouse into the sagebrush.
Seven years later, her ballet Rodeo, accompanied by Aaron Copland’s exultant score, was performed for the first time in New York, by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with de Mille as the lead dancer. She received twenty-two curtain calls, and Rodgers and Hammerstein asked her to choreograph Oklahoma! De Mille told Portia, recalling her visit to Elkhead, “I think Rodeo began that night.”
I walked outside and stood on the stoop where I’d had my picture taken with Ferry in 1973. The rough hills, softened by layers of snow, wandered off toward Utah and Wyoming. The people who built this school on top of an unpopulated mountain were aroused by the same vision of America’s future that drove Ferdinand V. Hayden, David Moffat, and Sam Perry. That dream also sparked Charlotte and Portia and Dorothy and Rosamond, and the students they taught. Frederick Jackson Turner once urged Ferry to write down the details of his daily life on the frontier. He replied that he was too busy. But others recorded as much as they could, with pencil stubs in a derailed train car and in ink thinned by the cold. When Ros first glimpsed the school, she exclaimed, “It is the Parthenon of Elkhead!” Six-year-old Robin saw a churning ocean in the “crick” outside his father’s log cabin. The graduates of 1920 described gazing out from the school at the seemingly limitless miles of blue and purple mountains. They felt, they said, as if they were standing on top of the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was a collaborative undertaking. I reconstructed the events described here with the unflagging help of dozens of people, many of whom shared intimate details about their parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ lives. My thanks go first, wholeheartedly, to my mother, Hermione Hillman Wickenden, and my aunt, Caroline Hillman Backlund, to whom Nothing Daunted is dedicated. Both retired librarians, they saved Woodruff and Beardsley letters, photographs, and memorabilia going back to the mid-1800s. Without them, I could not have told the story.
I am very grateful to my contemporaries, and to their surviving parents, in the Underwood, Perry, Carpenter, and Cosel families. When I contacted Rosamond’s grandda
ughter Roz Turnbull, in Carbondale, Colorado, for the first time in dozens of years, she instantly called her ninety-year-old mother, Ruth Perry, to enlist her help. Several months later, we all met up in Steamboat Springs. There and in subsequent e-mails, letters, and family papers, they conveyed what they knew about Ros’s year in Elkhead, and about the lives of the Perrys: Sam and Lottie, Charlotte and Marjorie, and Bob and Rosamond.
Ferry Carpenter’s granddaughter Belle Zars, who lives in Austin, Texas, and is writing a book about the Elkhead community, generously supplied me with interviews she had conducted in 1973 with Ferry and the children of several homesteaders, and with copies of the letters Eunice Pleasant wrote from Elkhead to her sister-in-law, Gertrude Pleasant. She sent me Ros’s photo album and provided invaluable personal contacts. She helped me find Iva Rench’s and Isadore Bolten’s homesteads, and reminded me of the cast-iron dachshund boot scrapers that Dorothy and Ros gave to Ferry and Bob for Christmas in 1916. Belle’s brother Reed Zars entered into my project with enthusiasm, showing me Oak Point in February 2009 and the two successive summers. He and his daughter Cordelia joined Rebecca Wattles and me in July 2009, when we explored Elkhead on Rebecca’s horses, Titian and Troy (Reed and Cordy went on mountain bikes).
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