Nothing Daunted (32 page)

That afternoon he dropped her off with his ranching partner, Jack White, and Jack’s wife, Ann. Ros found Ann White, a onetime society girl from Evanston, Illinois, a fascinating amalgam of East and West. Before her marriage, Ann had staked her own homestead claim outside Steamboat Springs. “She is very attractive—and her clothes are right up to date—
Vogue
is her constant companion—in spite of which she does
all
her own work—including washing, ironing—making butter—caring for the 2 boys 4 & 2—running a car—and caring for her house which is quite large for these parts.” The Whites had an enclosed porch, with a window seat doubling as a toy chest. Inside were two toolboxes with real saws, hammers, and screwdrivers. A trapeze hung from the ceiling, and the little boys rode horseback around the property without parental supervision.

Late Saturday morning, the women rode to Oak Point for a quick lunch with Ferry before continuing on to the school. It had rained
hard all night, but as they headed out and the air began to clear, Ros had a rush of euphoria: “The hills stretched out in front of us—and Bears Ears loomed up.” As the trail reached the main road to the schoolhouse, they saw a diminutive figure on horseback heading up the hill. It was Mrs. Harrison, carrying a huge sack of dishes for the banquet. Ros wrote, “She nearly fell off her horse—she was so glad to see us.” Mrs. Harrison told Ros that she had been taking care of two grandchildren for three months, and she was so determined to enjoy the ceremonies that she had asked Mr. Harrison to stay home with them. And so “poor ‘Pa H.’ missed seeing Lewis graduate.”

The boys came running out of the schoolhouse—Dorothy’s former students, grown larger. They had recently received a telegram from her, and clamored for information about what she was doing. Ros told them that Miss Woodruff, now Mrs. Hillman, was living in Michigan with her two-year-old son and her husband, who worked in a bank. The women went to the teacherage to change their clothes; Ros’s “girls” were waiting there for her and gave her an ecstatic welcome. Eunice Pleasant, the soft-cheeked but tough-minded teacher of the older students, was living there that year. The commodious stone cottage, completed the year after Dorothy and Ros left, was built out of the same rimrock as the schoolhouse. It contained a kitchen, a living room, and a library downstairs, and two bedrooms upstairs. It too had generous windows with clear views into Utah and Wyoming. When Eunice took the job, she wrote to her sister-in-law, “I think the chief joy in the whole situation will be having a home of my own.”

Eunice had met Ferry Carpenter at a dance in Hayden when she was visiting her brother, a musician in an orchestra in nearby Craig that was playing that night. She was young and single, spoke fluent German and some Greek, and had been teaching school since she was fifteen—paying her way through Kansas University over six years by alternating semesters of teaching and attending classes. Ferry had served in the war as a lieutenant, training recruits in Arkansas and Texas, and he was still single, but his marital scheme for Elkhead had an impressive record of success. In addition to Ros’s marriage to Bob
Perry, the two subsequent teachers at Elkhead, from Massachusetts, married local men.

Ferry asked Eunice to dance and started right in with his Elkhead sales patter. Afterward, Eunice wrote that she was impressed with what she heard of the enterprising community, the winter sports, and the dances at the school, which were famous for miles around. “This place is as much a community center as a school,” she explained. “I have met all kinds of school boards, and been asked all kinds of questions, but this is the first time a school board member ever asked me whether I danced, with the idea that my being fond of dancing is in my favor.”

Her letters were full of praise for Ferry. “I would never have gotten through had Mr. Carpenter not assisted me in various little ways. . . . He’s all business—and kind friendliness—and immune to other sentiment.” His advice about keeping house was both practical and singular. Suggesting that she make oatmeal cookies, which would “keep forever,” he told her he filled a jar as big as a barrel to get him through the winter. “He discoursed on the merits of a dish-mop, and gave me a lecture yesterday on wearing sufficient warm clothing when riding.” He often showed up at her house with gifts: a mixing bowl, a mousetrap, and, one cold day, two sticks of butter in his pockets. It was Ferry’s style of courtship, and it worked. Two months after the graduation, he and Eunice were engaged.

When Ros stepped into the school again, she was overcome. There were dozens of bouquets of the class flower, dog’s-tooth violet, on the windowsills and around the room. Miss Rench was the primary-school teacher that year at Elkhead, and she lived in her own cabin nearby. The walls of her classroom were covered with the children’s work, which was far more elaborate than anything Dorothy had overseen:
woven rugs, baskets, clay modeling
; bas-relief maps of the schoolyard, the school district, and the county; calendars; and paintings.

Ros asked her mother to send the letter on to Dorothy, and addressed part of it to her friend: “Dotty, Miss Rench’s exhibit was simply marvelous. I told Ferry my one regret was you weren’t there—but
I feared her exhibit would make you sick! I congratulated her & she said with that saucy look ‘Oh—just the material outcome of a little work’! I wanted to hit her.”

At seven
P.M.
, Eunice hosted a banquet for forty at the cottage: the graduating class and their parents, the school board, and selected guests. Dinner was served by three of the other younger girls, who carried out their duties flawlessly. The three banquet tables were set with wildflowers, and each place contained a gold-tasseled program made from blue construction paper by two of the graduating students. Ros observed that “everything was very correct.” Eunice described “Mrs. Perry” as one of the most charming people she had ever met—“just the best type of all-round college girl.”

The dinner included a full roster of speakers, with Lewis Harrison as a representative of his class. Quiet, steady Lewis was in agony at the thought of public speaking, but Ros reported to her mother that he gave the best talk of anyone. Afterward, they all walked down the hill for the graduating exercises at the school, where the rest of the parents and siblings had gathered. Professor George Reynolds, a Shakespearean and biblical scholar who headed the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, gave the main address. He told the audience that he had been to a great many rural schools in numerous western states, and none compared to Elkhead. Ros said, “He was simply carried away with all he experienced & saw,” and he told her that “the combination of these Eastern College girls working with these Westerners had produced these most interesting results!”

Carpenter presented the diplomas to each of the graduates, and a community dance followed. Ros noticed with the sympathy of a young mother that their friend Paroda—who now had five sons—looked sad and tired for the first time. Ros, too, was a little worn, as Mrs. Harrison wrote in her own letter to Mrs. Underwood after the event. “She looked her own sweet self—but she really is thin. She said her clothes just hung on her.” Bob was still having difficulty with union and safety issues at the mine, and Oak Hills was not the kind
of place they would have chosen for their early years of marriage. Sam Perry had been staying with them at a guest “bungalow” that Bob had built next to their house,
and Mrs. Harrison pointed out
that having “Grandpa P. there so long must have been the most trying—& he being sick part of the time.” Ros had some gray hairs already, “but don’t you worry about that—for she is just as pretty as ever—& every one was so glad to see her.”

Despite Ferry’s pending engagement to Eunice, that night he chose Ros for the first dance. She danced until three
A.M.
, and said that she never again expected to go anywhere in her life where she would be the popular belle she was in Elkhead. “Think of an ex school marm and mother having such a good time!”

—————————

During the summer of 1923, Dorothy and Lem left their two children at home with the housekeeper and went to Elkhead. In 1921 Ros and Bob had moved from Oak Hills to Denver, where Bob ran his father’s office, and they had their third child. On the trip from Denver to Hayden, the two couples drove up to Rollins Pass. Dorothy, her hair cropped short, wore trousers tucked into tall leather boots and a long pocketed cardigan buttoned up the front. Lem wore knickers, kneesocks, a tailored shirt, and a necktie. In a picture taken by Ros, he leans protectively over his wife.

Dorothy and Ferry were curious about each other’s spouses, and before visiting the schoolhouse, she and Lem went to Oak Point. She was impressed with Eunice’s intelligence, but—fiercely proud of her closest friends—felt that Eunice paled a little next to Ferry, with his quirky dynamism. Outside, she took a picture of him, bending over to grip the hand of his toddler, Ed, as they ambled through the garden. An American flag on a twenty-five-foot pole fluttered behind them near the cabin.

When Dorothy and Lem were visiting, Ferry invited some friends to join them, and the party turned into a series of hazing
rituals for Lem. As Dorothy recalled, the men stood around waiting for an opportunity to ridicule “this dude from the East.” His New York accent was a particular source of amusement. “They just loved it, and they’d crowd around and listen to him talk.” They found out that he had never been on a horse, and Dorothy was afraid he would disgrace himself. “I needn’t have worried,” she said, laughing. “He got on and . . . the horse went tearing around and he just handled him beautifully.” Then the men said they wanted to go shooting. Unaware of Lem’s training in the Michigan National Guard, they assumed he had never held a .22. He was handed a rifle, and when a flock of sage grouse rose into the sky, he brought down every bird.

T
oday two of the three year-round residents of Elkhead, Cal and Penny Howe, live in a comfortable log house and run a ranch on the old Harrison property. Nailed above their fireplace are several weathered cottonwood boards they scavenged from the ruins. Except for the stone foundations of the homestead and two apple trees—the survivors of an orchard planted by Mr. Harrison and Frank Jr.—the boards are all that is left. Hayden, now a bedroom community for Steamboat Springs, is a town of about sixteen hundred, its businesses struggling to hang on. Ferry’s old law office, sagging with age, is uninhabited. In 1978 his cabin was struck by lightning and burned to the ground, but his grandson Reed Zars, an environmental lawyer who lives in Laramie, Wyoming, rebuilt it, assisted by friends and family members.

On a warm day in February 2009, I went to see Oak Point, along with Rebecca Wattles, the fifty-three-year-old granddaughter of
Paroda Fulton. Paroda moved with her family to Hayden in 1922, and they built a ranch on the Yampa River. The property, now owned by Rebecca and her brother, contains the homestead built in 1881 by William Walker, one of the first settlers to arrive after the Utes departed. Rebecca’s father renovated the cabin, and her son and his family live there now.

Rebecca and I followed the winding county road through the hills to where the snowplow stopped. We got out of her truck and put on our skis. There were no houses in sight—just barbed-wire fences pushed at odd angles by winter storms, and sagebrush and scrub oak poking through the snow. The day was cloudless and the snow so dazzling that I wondered if Ros and Dorothy had survived the winter without sunglasses. It took me a moment to register a tall, angular man in his fifties wearing a red T-shirt and baseball cap, approaching on skis in a swift diagonal stride. As he got closer and greeted us with an open smile, weathered face, blue eyes, and western drawl, I almost called out, “Ferry!” Reed said that when he looked at old photos of his grandfather next to photos of himself, he had trouble telling them apart.

The ascent to the cabin was steeper than Reed had let on. When we reached the top, we saw nothing but hills and mountains in every direction.
A century after Ferry chose the spot for his homestead, the view was virtually unchanged
. Reed had replaced his grandfather’s fireplace of river stones with a woodstove, installing solar panels on the roof and a wind turbine behind the cabin. As we walked up the steps, he showed me a long rusted cast-iron boot scraper in the shape of a dachshund—Dorothy’s Christmas present to Ferry in 1916. Rising out of its back was a narrow bar that looked capable of removing even the thickest wads of gumbo. “By all rights, this is yours—if you can lift it.”