Nothing Daunted (13 page)

The Moffat Road was just about to reach Hayden, and Carpenter’s clients had faced a “run of troubles.” One man’s irrigation ditch had been stopped up by the railroad, and he wanted an immediate injunction. The stage driver was demanding a redress after an automobile ran the mail coaches off the grade. The sawmill had shut down, and the company couldn’t pay some of the men, so a lien had to be filed. “So it goes,” he noted, “but always a little story out of real life & I like it.”

The ranch was growing, and although his crops had been short that year and hay was expensive, he had managed to raise an impressive array of vegetables. He was ready for the winter, with a cellar full of two tons of potatoes, beets, and turnips; thirty-six quarts of rhubarb, twenty quarts of strawberry jam, and a little peach butter. He loaned his rifle to a neighbor, who had shot a buck, so he was sure of some jerked deer meat. He concluded his letter to Turner, “
Well, guess I’d better roll in—I think of you all every now & again
, taking a sup of tea in your parlour & I’d like mighty well to throw in with you, but seeing I can’t you’d all better figure on going this way to the 1915
[Panama-California] Exposition & dropping off here on the Bear River & getting a first hand look at the way we try to knock the rough edges off these old Rocky Mountains & farm them.”

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Ferry was far from the guileless cowboy he liked people to think he was, a fact that didn’t escape his neighbors. Respectful of his education and cleverness, they asked him to address an enduring challenge they all faced: the absence of eligible young women. In Elkhead, there was not a single one. It wasn’t a community—just an agglomeration of isolated homesteaders. On Saturday nights, cowboys gathered at the cabin of Mr. and Mrs. George Murphy, an older couple who had been among the first pioneers in Elkhead. Mrs. Murphy, a plump, hospitable woman, cooked hearty meals for her company and talked longingly about building a schoolhouse, as other settlers had in their own locales, where children could get a good education and neighbors could gather for dances, picnics, church, and Christmas celebrations.

A solution occurred to Ferry that would solve both the cowboys’ problems and Mrs. Murphy’s: Elkhead was too far from Hayden for the homesteaders’ children to go to school there. He realized that if Elkhead created its own district and school board, they could recruit new teachers every year or two—supplying the children with instruction, the residents with a community center, and the cowboys with a steady influx of prospective brides. What was more, the area contained valuable undeveloped anthracite coalfields, partly owned by what he called “unlimited eastern capital.” When he and his neighbors organized, Carpenter said, “it was easy to vote a tax or bond issue or anything we wanted.” Most of the homesteaders paid no taxes on their land, since they didn’t have title to it yet—the costs were borne by a few Colorado landowners and the unknowing eastern capitalists.

As for the women they expected to attract, he once told a writer for the
Saturday Evening Post,
“
We did not want strays
. We had serious matrimonial intentions, and we decided that young, pretty
schoolteachers would be the best bet of all.” The
Republican
reported on August 5, 1910, that Carpenter had been out in the hills pressing the case for a separate district: “Come on school marms. Some nice-looking ranchmen up here. Now is your chance.” The petition for the new district indicated that there were forty-four school-age children in Elkhead.

George Smith, who was then the county commissioner of schools as well as the owner of the
Republican,
called a meeting at the Murphys’ house the following April, to form District 11.
Twenty-five people attended, the paper reported
, and “a bountiful dinner was provided by Mrs. Murphy.” Smith presided over the election of board members. Because of the size of the district—226 square miles—the group agreed to build two schoolhouses rather than one.

Those original schools in Elkhead—one on the Adair ranch and the other, the Dry Fork school, where Bull Gulch drained into Dry Fork Creek—were ill-equipped, drafty cabins, and they operated mostly in the summer months, whenever a teacher could be convinced to venture into the hills. Carpenter had something more ambitious in mind: a large, consolidated school that would provide a nine-month term and an education comparable to what urban children received at the best public schools. He was initiating a process in his neighborhood that was under way across the country: to raise and standardize the quality of teaching in rural areas, which was notoriously inferior to that of large, well-equipped urban schools. The state was aware of the dismal conditions in remote regions:
education officials handed out postcards
picturing six decrepit one-room schools, with the caption, “A National Disgrace.”

For five years Carpenter, along with Paroda Fulton, the secretary of the Elkhead board, and their neighbors doggedly worked toward building one of the best schools in Routt County.
Fulton had grown up
in Mt. Ayre, Iowa, and gone to Drake University in Des Moines. She moved to Colorado in 1906 to teach school in Hayden and in the Little Snake River Valley near the town of Craig. Two years later, she married Charlie Fulton, who had been homesteading on Dry Fork
since 1901. Until the arrival of Dorothy and Ros, and a teacher named Iva Rench from Muncie, Indiana, Paroda Fulton and Ferry Carpenter were the only college graduates in Elkhead.

On May 15, 1915, the
Republican
reported, after “much hot air and high flown oratory was indulged in, the district voted $5,000 in bonds to erect a fine central school house.” Carpenter asked his sister Ruth to put out the word among her friends in New York, and according to his account, an advertisement was placed in a teachers’ magazine, which described a superb school in the virgin hills. Promising generous pay, it said that no candidate would be considered without a recent photograph.

Like any good raconteur, Carpenter was fond of embellishments, and one of his most popular stories was his roguish account of how Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood came to be hired. As the applications for the jobs arrived,
he said during a talk in Denver about his early experiences
in Routt County, Jack White would call him on the one-wire telephone that was strung along the fence posts all the way down to Hayden, and report, “ ‘We got another one—it’s a blonde,’ and I’d say, ‘Pin ’em up on the logs above the sink.’ . . . Bye and bye it was halfway around the cabin with really flattering beautiful young ladies.” The cowboys would drop by and study the photos, and when it came time to vote, they all had strong opinions. “So we decided we’d have a pure democracy,” Carpenter said, “all the electors would decide.”

When the cowboys couldn’t reach an agreement, he pulled out a letter from two girls in Auburn, New York. “They went to Smith College and had traveled abroad and had many advantages that many of the local people hadn’t had,” he said. “But they didn’t have one advantage, we later discovered—they didn’t have a Colorado teacher’s license.” He laughed heartily, and the audience joined in. “We didn’t think about that in those days.” Nor did he worry that they had no experience as teachers, and “in fact had never done any work for pay.”

He recalled that Charlotte Perry, the sister of his best friend, Bob, had graduated from Smith in 1911. He called Bob to “get a
line on” the two women. Bob, a dapper thirty-one-year-old graduate of Columbia’s engineering school, was the supervisor of the Moffat mine—owned by his father, Samuel M. Perry, a leading industrialist in Denver. The mine, forty-five miles southeast of Hayden, outside a town called Oak Creek, was named after Perry’s friend and business partner, David Moffat, who built the railroad over the Continental Divide. Bob called Charlotte and immediately got back to Ferry. Bob was “excited when he called me,” Carpenter said, his own voice rising and his drawl becoming more pronounced, “He said: ‘
Don’t
overlook one of them! She was voted the best-looking girl in the junior class of Smith College! Don’t let her get away from you!’ ”

Early on the morning after the teachers arrived
, Ferry got a call from Bob, who was at the Hayden depot and wanted to know what the teachers looked like. Frustrated by his friend’s inconclusive reply, Bob told Ferry he would meet him at the inn. When Ferry got there, he wrote in his autobiography, half a dozen men, including Bob, “were standing around admiring them. I could see by the glazed look on Bob’s face as he stared at Rosamond that he was already smitten.” Bob, knowing that Ferry often delivered letters and packages to his neighbors in Elkhead, took him aside and said, “Watch her mail. Let me know if some man is writing her.” Carpenter omitted a key detail in his account: he, too, couldn’t stop staring at Rosamond.
As his son Ed recalled
, “The question was, who’s gonna win her, Ferry or Perry?”

D
EPARTURE

S
oon after Dorothy and Ros returned from Europe, the appeals of bridge parties and automobiling began to wane, and in 1911 they went to stay in New York City for several months. They saw it as another adventure; their parents hoped that through connections in the city, they would encounter some men who might meet with their approval. At the Webster, a small hotel off Fifth Avenue on West Forty-fifth Street, they rented a suite with a sitting room, a large double bedroom, and a bath, for which their parents paid six dollars a day. Ros, who acquired admirers everywhere she went, was pursued by Charlie Hickocks, a lawyer for a shipping company. He had his own brownstone and frequently took her out, with Dorothy going along “as baggage.” Although they were polite to him, privately they made fun of his odd looks and affectations, with Dorothy taking the lead. He had an unusually long neck topped by a very long, thin face. “We thought he was a regular ‘Miss Nancy,’ ” she said. “He had his linen all
embroidered with his initials and that kind of thing. Needless to say, Rosamond wasn’t interested in him.”

Back at home, they entertained guests at South and Fort streets, visited friends in other cities, and dallied with young men. For a few years Ros strung along another New Yorker, a lawyer named Billy, who expected to marry her, and whom she apparently saw as her default option if no one more exciting presented himself. The other men who pursued them were mostly studying at the Auburn Theological Seminary, which trained Presbyterian ministers. One of the most prestigious divinity schools in the country, it was headed by Allen Macy Dulles—the father of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles was a friend of Dorothy’s parents, who considered the seminary a good source of suitors. Although her sister Carrie-Belle had married one of the seminarians several years earlier, Dorothy was scornful of the type. She wrote to Anna from Cortina about a guest in the hotel: “There is a queer looking youth with long, black greasy hair—and he looked just like the worst of the seminary students.”

In their spare time, influenced by two generations of Auburn feminists and by their time at Smith, Dorothy and Ros supported Jane Addams’s Hull House and advocated women’s suffrage. They became members of the Cayuga County Political Equality Club, and in good weather, they stood on soapboxes in Owasco. In 1914 they organized a meeting at Suffrage Headquarters in the Woman’s Union.
Dorothy introduced the speaker, Mrs. Theodore M. Pomeroy
of Buffalo, who talked about her work as a national officer of the club and explained why she was a suffragist. Mrs. Pomeroy described canvassing house-to-house and running meetings all over the city, so that women would be ready when their time came to vote. Thousands of women were attending, she said, immigrants included. In the future, “a mother who can instruct her sons in public questions will have more influence than another interested in a new hat. There is a psychological change in the world: in ages past women labored beside the men; then she came to be confined to house duties; now is the age of machinery, and woman’s work has been taken away from her.” She urged her audience
to consider that when one thing goes out of your life, you must find another to replace it, and she reminded them that women had “especial interest in educational, health, and corrective departments of work.” When tea was served, “Miss Underwood poured, assisted by Miss Woodruff.”