Nothing Daunted (17 page)

In the early years after the Harrisons arrived, northwestern Colorado was untamed. Although the Utes were only a legend by then, some of the notorious cattle rustlers and train robbers were still at large.
The Harrisons’ first ranch, between Hayden and Craig, had been a headquarters
for the vast Two Bar outfit, owned by Ora Haley, one of the West’s biggest and most despised cattle barons. The stockmen allowed their cattle to overgraze, and fought homesteaders and small farmers and sheep men for the few water holes and the green pastures. Haley ran tens of thousands of cattle on land throughout the central Rockies.

The Harrisons avidly followed stories in the newspaper and among their neighbors about “Queen Ann” Bassett, a beautiful young rancher, educated at a boarding school in Boston, who had grown up in Browns Park, northwest of Hayden and Craig. Bassett’s father was friendly with Butch Cassidy, who liked to read in the Bassett library, and at the age of fifteen, Ann became Cassidy’s lover; her sister, Josie, got involved with Cassidy’s best friend, Elzy Lay.
Ann took it upon herself to fight off the cattle barons’ “devouring invasion,
” starting in 1901 with Ora Haley’s herds. In two sensational trials, in 1911 and 1913, she was tried for stealing and butchering a heifer belonging to the Two Bar. In August 1913 she was acquitted in the Craig County courthouse. She boasted in an unpublished autobiography, “I did everything they ever accused me of, and a whole lot more.” Cowboys shot off their guns in celebration, the town band held a parade, and she treated everyone to a silent movie, which was punctuated by a slide proclaiming,
HURRAH FOR VICTORY
! An all-night dance followed, presided over by Queen Ann.

By 1915 the valley had quieted down, and the Harrisons were focused on their bottom line. Overextended with their creditors, they had no choice but to sell their ranch. When Dorothy and Ros arrived in Upper Elkhead, Frank and Mary were still finishing their new home. Making a living in the mountains was an even riskier proposition than in the valley. Contrary to Ruth Woodley’s assurances about the climate, Elkhead was covered by snow for six months of the year. From December through March, temperatures sometimes dropped to 40 below, and springtime was no easier, with its ice, snowmelt, and heavy, wet adobe clay, known as gumbo, which clung to boots, stained clothes, and made the few roads and paths all but impassable. In late summer, creeks and streams dried up.

Nevertheless, the Harrisons shared with other Elkhead homesteaders
the unshakable belief that the mountains were suited to farming and raising cattle. With the three youngest of their seven children at home—Ruth (twenty-two years old), Frank Jr. (twenty), and Lewis (fourteen)—they had built their house on a rocky ridge, away from the productive lands where the cattle grazed. There were no trees to offer shade in the summer or a windscreen in winter.

The women from Auburn were relieved when they went inside and saw that the house was relatively comfortable. Dorothy tried to reassure herself, along with her parents, writing that “there is just one layer of rough, unfinished board between us and outdoors, but I presume they will fix it before snow.” The inside walls weren’t up yet, just partitions made of blankets and rugs. “This lends intimacy to an unimagined degree and you know it—every time any one turns over in bed, and it is especially sociable when the wind blows.”

Meals were eaten at one end of the large kitchen. The living room was outfitted with hardwood floors, pretty rag rugs, a couple of chairs, a folding bed, and a phonograph. “It’s divided from Mr. and Mrs. Harrison’s room by the best blankets,” Dorothy wrote, “an artistic shade of gray.” Their own room was reached by a set of “rather shaky and ladder-like” stairs. She and Ros shared an iron bed by the window, covered with a large featherbed and patchwork quilts. The
other furnishings were a bureau, a washstand, and a table. Dorothy was touched by the care Mrs. Harrison had taken on their behalf: “pretty embroidered covers on everything, her best towels and such nice bedding, real sheets and pillowcases with lace edging!”

Guy insisted on helping to get their trunks upstairs, and they were soon settled, propping up a few family photos on the bureau. Aside from their books, there wasn’t much unpacking to do, since the trunks held most of their clothes. Ros pointed out that if one of them fell out of bed, she would roll right down the stairs.

Working Girls

T
URNIPS AND
T
EARS

R
os and Dorothy were surprised to find the Harrisons sophisticated and well educated. Dorothy declared, “It is an entirely new type to me, for we never see such keen, receptive wide-awake intelligent people living such hard lives.” Mrs. Harrison had “a twinkle in her kindly blue eyes . . . and the most delicious keen humor.” Mr. Harrison was big and “slow of speech and action with the softest voice and drawl. . . . Ruth is short and as fat as a pigeon, with shiny red cheeks and the merriest eyes and laugh—and
very
deaf.” Lewis, the youngest, was “a perfect darling—
so
well-behaved and polite—and a regular little man—the way he works.” She added, “They are evidently pretty well-to-do for the region and are even hoping for a bathroom someday!”

They described their surroundings as clearly as they could. “You simply can’t conceive of the
newness
of this country,” Dorothy wrote.
“Here we are—a tiny cabin perched on a hillside covered with sage looking off in all directions . . . with here and there a creek lined with willows. We are on Calf Creek but it is dry now. We have been having several thunder showers which were terribly needed as the country was drying up and they only live by irrigation. The storms are wonderful, booming among the mountains and no one minds getting wet for it dries right off and the sun is soon out. Even the road, merely the surface turned over, which goes by the house, is new, and if anyone goes by, we all turn out to see them.” Similarly, Ros commented, “The roads are not well defined, and it is easy to get confused, with miles of hills and valleys all about you and very few signs of habitation.”

After breakfast on their first full day, Lewis saddled their horses and showed them to the schoolhouse, riding on his horse, Old Eagle. They had asked him to be their guide each day, for which they paid him, Ros said, “the princely sum of $2.00 a week.” They wore their khaki riding suits, and Dorothy was comfortable on Nugget. Ros told her father that her horse was “not well known in these parts,” but that “Mr. C.” had obtained him, so she was sure he would be fine. She named him Gourmand because he stopped so often to graze. Mr. Harrison called him Ol’ Gorman.

They rode down the hill from the Harrisons’ and followed the bed of Calf Creek, bordered by fresh green cottonwoods, before veering east and passing through an alfalfa field that was still shimmering with dew. As they came to the top of a wide draw, they could look down and see the ranch buildings and hay fields of the Adair place. The scale of the ranch struck them even more than it had when they had stopped there with Guy. The horses ambled slowly up and down the steep hills, swinging their hindquarters for balance as they descended, twitching their ears and swatting the flies with their tails. Ros commented that their “steeds” knew they were green, and they “couldn’t get any speed out of them at all—not having spurs or a whip.” As they followed a narrow, winding path through the brush, Dorothy wrote, “it is a strange sight, like a topographical map—roll after roll of rounded bare hills with little water, creases marking them—and no sign of a human
being or habitation.” The snowcapped mountains in the distance were purple and blue, their colors darkening with the movement of the clouds. “It took us an hour and a half so you can see what their idea of two miles is!”

The first sight of the building in the distance elicited a burst of eloquence from Ros. “The schoolhouse stands high on a mountain or hill between the two districts called ‘Little Arkansas’ and ‘Calf Creek.’ It is the Parthenon of Elkhead! You can see it for miles around and it looked so near that we were amazed to discover the real distance.” Dorothy wrote, “They didn’t have time to finish the road, so the last 200 yards you climb straight up through rocks and sage to the school. It is
perfectly beautiful
and a monument to the courage and ambition of these wonderful people.”

The school was constructed of gray-green mountain stones from nearby sedimentary rimrock. Put under crushing heat and pressure beneath the earth hundreds of millions of years earlier,
the stone was streaked, as if, one Routt County resident said, by the paintbrushes of God
. The formation extended at intervals over a hundred miles across Colorado and Wyoming. Residents referred to the building as the Rimrock School, or the Rock School.

They tied up their horses and went inside. The carpenter still had some work and cleaning up to finish. The desks—wrought-iron bases with wooden tops—had not yet been put in place or the books unpacked. But as Dorothy and Ros walked from the vestibule into the airy main room, they confirmed the accuracy of Carpenter’s claim about the school’s physical merits.

The floor was oak, and the walls were whitewashed and decorated with a ribbon of pale green painted stencil. The room, thirty by fifty feet, had high ceilings and enormous windows. There were long blackboards on either side. In the center was a folding wooden door, which would be closed during the school day to separate the classrooms, and thrown open for community events—weddings, elections, dances, and Sunday school, which was attended by adults along with the children, since there was no church in Elkhead. “The
pride of the building,” Ros wrote, “is the piano, (called by everyone in these parts—pie-anno.) The man who hauled it up there from Hayden, says he’ll never haul it down. It took him 17 hours to get it there—and he got $5.00 for doing it!” The room was sunny and looked out onto valleys and mountains all the way to Utah and Wyoming.