Nothing Daunted (37 page)

DR:
But this is crazy. Colorado in those days is the other side of the moon!

DW:
Yes, and they knew very little about the West. And they knew, as my grandmother admitted, absolutely nothing about teaching.

DR:
In what spirit did they go there? To do good? For an adventure? In the spirit of Teach For America?

DW:
It was the beginning of the Progressive Era. They were brought up with the sense that you should do good for others. And they also thought it sounded like a lark. They applied impulsively and, to their amazement, they got hired. Then, my grandmother said, “We realized what we had done. We didn’t know anything about teaching, and we began to be very frightened.”

DR:
At what point did they realize that Carpenter had a motive?

DW:
This became the comic crux of the book. Ferry was a visionary. He really had an earnest desire to educate the children of these homesteaders. He had high ideals, which he conveyed in the letters he wrote to them.
But he didn’t tell them he had an ulterior motive. He lived up in Elkhead, which was a settlement of about twenty-five people. There were no single young women, and the cowboys were lonely and asking Ferry for help. So he decided to build this schoolhouse, and then use it as a lure for cultivated, pretty young women from the East. The idea was that a few teachers would come out every year or two, an ongoing source of marriageable women for all the young cowboys.

DR:
You had to work with big themes about women, feminist history, expansion westward, otherness in America. Sometimes you read a family story and it’s just itself.

DW:
Sometimes when you’re doing a research project like this, everything just falls into place. People began giving me things. My aunt and my mother were librarians, so they had kept all the photographs and letters. My grandmother had said that her grandfather lived next door to William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state. When I went to Auburn, and to the Seward Museum, and I asked the executive director whether she remembered correctly. “Oh, yes!” he said. He pointed out the library window at the municipal parking lot. “Harmon Woodruff. He lived right there and his children played with Seward’s children.”

Auburn was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, and Seward hid slaves in his basement. Some of these big themes of American history had just preceded my grandmother’s time. Dorothy and Rosamond learned their history through their relatives, who would tell stories about their neighbors. After the Civil War, Seward had helped Harriet Tubman buy a house down the street. When my grandmother was three or four, she’d see Tubman, an elderly woman, riding her bicycle up and down South Street, stopping to ask for food donations for her home for elderly African-Americans. I got the personal side and the bigger backdrop, and I tried to meld the two.

DR:
You go from archive to letter drawer to museum and, like a reporter, like a historian, you’re building a base of information. And then you get to the writer part and it has to have an architecture.

DW:
One of the great things about my job is that I work with some of the best writers in the world. I watch how great narratives are written. But I defied one of my own rules. I almost always tell writers who get tangled up in
their narratives: Just tell it chronologically. If you try these fancy moves, they can be a disaster. So I wasn’t sure about the flashbacks. The trick was how to do them, and do the bigger panorama of American history, without losing sight of my main characters.

DR:
Your mother is very much alive. And, I presume she read this book. Was it revelatory to her? Did she know everything?

DW:
She knew most of it because one of the things she did as a devoted daughter and librarian was transcribe every letter—which made my job much easier. She knew the stories anyway because her mother had told them to her over and over again when she was growing up. But she didn’t know all the history of Auburn. She didn’t know the early history of Denver. I spent part of one chapter on the building of the railroad that the heroines took over the Continental Divide. The railroad was only three years old. It was a four-car train on a winding track that went all the way up and over the Continental Divide. My grandmother said in her letter, “This is a miracle of engineering. I don’t know how they ever did it.” And I thought, “I wonder how they did do it.” I did some reading and research and I found an expert on the building of this railway. It was an incredible story. So I was telling the story of Dorothy and Ros on the train, and I stopped and had a little interlude on the history of the railroad, and then I came back to them when they got to the top of the mountain.

DR:
How did it make you feel differently about America? It seems to me that this is a real American story and these two women both embody and bump into a lot of large American themes.

DW:
I found the writing really liberating. You and I spend so much of our days thinking about all the horrors of the twenty-first century—the floods, and the tsunamis, global warming, and the wars. My grandmother’s story was an escape to a simpler time. It was also a very idealistic time.

I also loved my characters and what they said about America. It was right before World War I. Most of these people had no experience of war. They hadn’t experienced the Civil War. So these aristocrats from Auburn and these dirt-poor homesteaders all shared the idea that America was the greatest country in the world. They thought they were going to build something really extraordinary on, of all places, a remote mountaintop.
They were going to build a school, which, to the homesteaders, symbolized America and moving beyond who they were and where they had come from.

The ending wasn’t particularly happy, but the fourteen-year-old son of the homesteaders they lived with would go out every morning and break the trail for them. They could never have found their way to the schoolhouse on their own. It was three miles. I found his daughter and grandson. His grandson said, “My grandfather, Lewis, talked about your grandmother with such admiration. He always made me feel that education is the most important thing in your life.” Lewis went to college on a scholarship funded by Ferry Carpenter and Rosamond’s mother; he went to graduate school and became the chief forester for the state of Missouri. It’s a great American success story. That year changed his life just as it changed my grandmother’s life and Ros’s life. Both women said that for all of the wonderful things that had been bestowed upon them, this was by far the best year of their lives.

M
uch of
Nothing Daunted
is based on approximately one hundred letters written by Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, starting in 1897 and ending in 1973. Dorothy wrote forty letters home from Europe in 1910–11, which became the foundation of
Chapter 6
. From July 1916 to February 1917, together they sent fifty long letters to their families from Elkhead. I was extraordinarily lucky to have two such engaging and trustworthy correspondents.

Virtually all quotations from Dorothy’s letters are from the Dorothy Woodruff Hillman Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Quotations from Rosamond’s letters, from Grace Underwood’s papers and diary, and from Ruth Carpenter Woodley’s and Miriam Heermans’s letters are courtesy of the Perry and Cosel families. Quotations from Lewis Harrison’s unpublished memoir about his parents, Uriah and Mary Harrison, are thanks to Lewis’s daughter, Jane Harrison Telder, and his great-niece, Linda Harrison Williamson. I have retained their spelling, punctuation, and peculiarities of style.

I drew as well from Dorothy’s oral histories about her years growing up in Auburn and her nine months in Elkhead. Both were taped and transcribed in Weston, Connecticut, in the early 1980s by my mother. The transcripts are in the Sophia Smith Collection. On May 15, 1973, Rosamond’s friend Eleanor Bliss interviewed her at the Carpenter Ranch about her experience in Elkhead. That oral history is in the collection of the Tread of Pioneers Museum in Steamboat Springs.

Bob Perry’s kidnapping was reported in papers across the country and
in the
Routt County Sentinel,
the
Routt County Republican,
the
Oak Creek Times,
the
Rocky Mountain News,
the
Yampa Leader,
the
Denver Times,
and the
Denver Post.
Most of Colorado’s early newspapers are available online, at the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.

Ferry Carpenter’s papers are scattered. His family and mine have some of his letters. Tapes and CDs of his talks and reminiscences are in the Denver Public Library’s Western History collection; the Colorado Historical Society in Denver; and the Tread of Pioneers Museum. Ferry’s letters to Henry Bragdon, one of Woodrow Wilson’s biographers, and notes about Ferry’s recollections of Woodrow Wilson (which he used when writing his autobiography,
Confessions of a Maverick
) are in the Princeton University Library. The Huntington Library, which contains the papers of Frederick Jackson Turner, has three letters that Ferry wrote to Turner between 1913 and 1926.