Nothing Daunted (30 page)

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.”

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 Ferry 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.