Nothing Daunted (31 page)

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.

C
OMMENCEMENT

O
n 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, attended 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.

They were together until their wedding days. Back in Auburn, caught up in parties and planning, they nevertheless found time to assemble matching photograph albums, embossed in gold lettering on the front with their names and
COLORADO
1916–1917. In one of the last shots that Ros took in Elkhead, Dorothy crouches by the
henhouse in the sun-hardened mud. Surrounded by chickens, wearing a graying apron of Mrs. Harrison’s over her dress, she is burning the contents of the cardboard box they used as their scrap basket. Looking up at Ros, she smiles broadly. The lower eaves of the main house are hung with three-foot icicles, sharp as rapiers.

At four
P.M.
, on April 28, the Underwoods stepped into their carriage to ride the short distance to the Woodruff house. Dorothy’s mother was hosting a formal tea for fifty guests to mark the two engagements. Dorothy and Ros were dressed in white, and Ros wore a corsage of sweetheart roses and pink sweet peas, a gift from Bob, who had not yet come east for the wedding. The
Auburn Citizen
described the party as “
one of the most attractive
of the afternoon functions ever held in this city.”

The two women were inundated with letters, telegrams, and spring bouquets. Meanwhile, across the street at Aunt Helen’s house, a package arrived that Ros and Bob had planned months earlier—the first offspring of their alliance. Helen had not yet gotten her new dog, and as Grace wrote in her diary, “The Airedale pup named ‘Coal’ with collar marked R. M. Perry, Oak Creek, Colo.,” showed up at about the same time that Helen arrived from New York. “The pair took to each other at once, and are great cronies.”

Rosamond married Robert Perry at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Auburn on June 30. Four days later, Dorothy married Lemuel Hillman at her parents’ house on Fort Street. Ros was the matron of honor and Milly the maid of honor.

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Both Ros and Dorothy made return visits to Elkhead as soon as they could. In May 1920 Ros traveled alone from Oak Creek for the high school graduation of five seniors, her former students: Leila Ferguson, Ina Hayes, Ezra Smith, Helen Jones, and their intrepid guide, Lewis Harrison. She and Bob already had two small children of their own, and it was the first time that she had left them overnight. Preparing for
the weekend, she ripped up a four-year-old black suit skirt, shortened it, and pressed it. She hurried to pack, took a late train to Hayden, and arrived at three
A.M.
Despite the hour, Ferry met her at the depot. The boxcar had been replaced with a solid two-story brick station.

The next day he took her on a tour of two new projects on whose boards he served: the Solandt Memorial Hospital, named after Hayden’s first doctor/veterinarian/coroner; and the building site for the consolidated Hayden Union High School. The Elkhead School’s first graduating class was also its last. After that, the school district was incorporated into Hayden’s, and although the younger children stayed on at Elkhead, the high school students boarded in town during the school year. The tiny mountain community couldn’t offer the range of classes and facilities that would be available in Hayden. Carpenter didn’t dwell on the diminishing fortunes of Elkhead, and he got Ros to see it his way. “Both buildings are going to be perfectly splendid,”
she wrote to her mother
. “Think what it will mean to the poor people around the country to get medical & surgical care of the proper kind. The school is going to have everything down to a swimming pool.” It was the first such pool, Ferry told her, in Routt County.