Nothing Daunted (7 page)

The Utes in Yampa Valley appealed for help to Major James B. Thompson, who ran a trading post by the Bear River and had won their trust. In response, Thompson, Smart, and the other settlers sent a petition to the Interior Department, asking for an investigation of Meeker and for protection for their families. Troops were sent, but to Hot Sulphur Springs, the closest town, about a hundred miles southeast. Porter Smart’s daughter-in-law Lou, the mother of four children and pregnant with her fifth, was visited repeatedly by Utes in June 1879 when her husband, Albert, was away. She wrote in a letter afterward that they demanded food and matches, and that one
of them wanted to trade back a gun that Albert had given him in exchange for a pony: “ ‘
The gun no good
. Would not kill buckskin, wanted trade back, give five dollars take pony go away no trouble squaw.’ ”

That summer, she said, she had “another dreadful miscarriage, worse even than the last.” For ten days she couldn’t sit up in bed. The Utes returned, camping near the house. When they heard that a company of Negro soldiers—Company D of the Ninth Cavalry—was not far away, waiting for orders, “They said they didn’t care how many white men came but they wouldn’t stand Negroes (that was too great an insult).” They set fire to two houses before riding off.

In August, after an altercation with the Utes’ medicine man at the White River Agency, Meeker, claiming serious injuries, requested that Governor Pitkin send troops for his protection. Pitkin, a former mining investor and one of the more unscrupulous proponents of Manifest Destiny, had long argued that, treaty or not, the situation with the Utes was untenable. A few weeks later, three cavalry companies crossed onto Ute land at Milk Creek, the northern border of the reservation; about a dozen soldiers were killed and many more injured. The ambush came to an end when Company D arrived to rescue the men, but the White River Utes turned on Meeker, shooting him in the head, burning his farm to the ground, and abducting his wife and daughter.

Major Thompson, anticipating disaster, had already left. The Smarts and other families hurriedly packed their belongings and moved out. They stopped at Steamboat Springs, which consisted of little more than the homestead of James Crawford, the town’s founder. They barricaded themselves in at the Crawfords’ cabin for a few days, continuing on to Hot Sulphur Springs when it seemed safe. They arrived ten days after leaving home. Lou Smart and her husband learned that their house had been robbed of everything edible; chicken bones and feathers were scattered about inside. She said she feared that the Ute war had only just begun, yet she went on, “The only thing that worries me is the children not having any schooling, especially
Charlie. There is no school here and they say there is to be none this winter.” Lou Smart died a few months later of complications from her miscarriage.

The Meeker Massacre, as newspapers across the country labeled it, gave Governor Pitkin an opportunity to make a special announcement to the press about the Ute threat: “
My idea is that, unless removed
by the government, they must necessarily be exterminated.” He pointed out “The advantages that would accrue from the throwing open of twelve million acres of land to miners and settlers. . . .” In August 1881 the U.S. Army force-marched virtually all of the Colorado Utes 350 miles to a reservation on a desolate stretch of land near Roosevelt, Utah.

As the Utes were being dispensed with, the settlement by the Bear River grew.
A log school and a store were built on the homestead of Sam and Mary Reid
, who had moved to the valley in 1880. Mary became postmistress the following year. The mail came by buckboard from Rawlins, Wyoming, three times a week, and the mailman crossed the river in a canoe. Sam Reid’s brother-in-law, William Walker, moved from North Carolina; several years later, he was joined by his wife and children. They homesteaded on a parcel of land just north of town previously held by Albert Smart.
A man named Ezekiel Shelton
, trained as an engineer in Ohio, was sent to Yampa Valley by some Denver businessmen in 1881 to investigate stories of coal beds in the Elkhead Mountains. His reports were positive, and so was his response to the valley. Shelton helped establish the Hayden Congregational Church, to which one of the settlement’s first three women, Mrs. Emma Peck, donated her organ. Shelton and Emma Peck even started a tiny literary society. Other pioneers followed, and the town of Hayden was incorporated in March 1906, when Farrington Carpenter and Ros and Dorothy were in their first year of college.

“R
EFINED, INTELLIGENT GENTLEWOMEN
”

O
ne Sunday afternoon that month, Dorothy got a letter from her father, reminding her to dedicate herself to her studies at Smith. “We follow your life at College as reflected in your letters with deep interest & while you evidently enjoy the days as they pass I doubt not you are doing your work—I want you to master your French so that you can make it practical, learn to converse fluently. . . .”

Smith students were caught between the college’s aspirations for them and the social mores of the day—some of which the school administration shared. Not all of the women made it through four years.
Seventy-five of Dorothy and Ros’s classmates
, about a fifth of the class of 402, withdrew before commencement.
One graduate wrote
a “Senior Class history of 1909” for the yearbook, in which she coyly presented their dilemma as they entered the world: “We have not yet decided whether to ‘come out’ in society or ‘go in’ for settlement work.”
Jane Addams had started Hull House, the country’s first settlement house, in Chicago in 1889. The underprivileged, regardless of race or ethnicity, took advantage of its social services, including school for their children and night classes for themselves.
Addams had longed to go to Smith
, to prepare for a career in medicine, but her father wouldn’t allow it; he believed that her duty was to serve her family. In the years after his death, she became known across the country for her advocacy for civil rights, unions, female suffrage, and an end to child labor. To many college women, she was a model of enlightened thought and industry.

Yet, the Smith graduate continued in the yearbook, “Unlike our neighbor Holyoke ‘over the way,’ we have not troubled our busy heads over the right and wrong of woman suffrage, but are discussing whether psyches make long noses look longer and just who
are
the best-looking girls in the class. Some of us are hoping for an M.A., others, to quote a scintillating Junior, are hoping for a M.A.N. A few of us look, may look, forward to getting Ph.D.’s after our names, a few more of us, however, are looking forward to getting M-r-s. in front of them.”

Smith College, started by Sophia Smith, a maiden lady who lived in Hatfield, near Northampton, was young: chartered in 1871, it opened in 1875. The only other full-fledged women’s colleges in the country at that time were Elmira, Mary Sharp, and Vassar. Mount Holyoke and Wellesley were still known as female seminaries, where students attended Bible-study groups, church services, chapel talks, and prayer meetings. Twice a day they performed private devotions. Wellesley Female Seminary changed its name to Wellesley College in 1875, and Mount Holyoke, eighteen years later. The pastor of Sophia Smith’s church had repeatedly urged her to pursue the idea of a college for women, and three months before her death, she made a codicil to her will in which she declared her belief that a higher Christian education for women would be the best way to redress their wrongs and to increase their wages and their “
influence in reforming the evils of society
. . . as teachers, as writers, as mothers, as members of society.”

This belief—that women and men should be educated in separate colleges—was not widely shared among public intellectuals along the Eastern Seaboard. Henry Ward Beecher, for one, thought that the solution to higher education for women was to admit them to men’s colleges, a practice already being followed in the Midwest and the West. (Oberlin became the first coeducational college in the country in 1837, when it enrolled four women. Two years earlier, it had admitted its first African-American students.) At Amherst’s semi-centennial celebration in July 1871, Beecher gave a speech in which he pressed his alma mater to admit women. So did the former governor of Massachusetts. Lengthy deliberations followed at Amherst and at Yale, Harvard, Williams, and Dartmouth, but the notion was not pursued at any of these colleges for another century. When Radcliffe College opened in 1879, it was known as “the Harvard Annex.”

The president and trustees of Smith were clear about their mission. In June 1877, while Lou Smart was negotiating trades with the Utes in Yampa Valley,
President L. Clark Seelye wrote
in an annual circular in Northampton, “It is to be a woman’s college, aiming not only to give the broadest and highest intellectual culture, but also to preserve and perfect every characteristic of a complete womanhood.” He often said that one of Smith’s missions was to teach its students to become “
refined, intelligent gentlewomen
.”

The college intended to provide a curriculum just as rigorous as that of the best men’s schools, but Seelye conceded that many of the students were not entirely ready for the academic demands. He and his successor expected Smith to stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity and help them develop an appreciation of the scientific method.
However, since most of them had “neither the call nor the competence
to devote their lives to research,” they were encouraged to work on “the development of the character and capacities of the personality.”

The exceptions were notable. After graduation, Jane Kelly, Class of 1888, went to Northwestern University Women’s Medical School and then to Johns Hopkins for a year of postgraduate work in medicine—there,
she was required to sit in the balcony behind a curtain during lectures. She established both a medical practice and a family in Boston.
After a week at Wood’s Hole in the summer of 1902
, she wrote to her classmates, “There was a large number of Smith girls working in the Laboratories, which speaks well for the scientific spirit fostered in our Alma Mater.”

Dorothy did not have that calling. She had graduated from Rye Seminary with strong grades and managed to pass
Smith’s entrance examinations, which included
translating English sentences into Greek, Latin, French, and German, and—in the English section—writing on the themes of
Julius Caesar, The Vicar of Wakefield,
and
Silas Marner
; and on the form and structure of
Macbeth, Lycidas, L’Allegro,
and other texts. She was not strongly motivated, though, and claimed that Rye had not taught her how to study. “The fact that I’d gone to Smith College to learn, I don’t think made much impression on me,” she said. The first semester, she got the equivalent of Ds in her two English classes, C- in French, B- in German, C- in Latin, and C+ in mathematics. She was put on probation. Ros did better, with a C, two B-’s, a B, and two A’s. Dorothy’s record improved somewhat as the semesters wore on, but she never excelled and was not overly concerned about her grades.

She had warm recollections of one teacher at Smith, just as she’d had at Rye. In her junior and senior years, she took European history with Charles Hazen, whom she described as the first teacher she’d ever had who “could make you live the way those characters lived so long ago and the events in history seem so real.” Dorothy’s fascination with the past, sparked in Auburn and revived by Hazen, stayed with her throughout her life.

Admitting that her academic performance over her four years was undistinguished, she described herself as “romping” through Smith: “I loved every minute . . . I was invited to join all of the fun and social clubs that there were.” She and Ros both belonged to the Phi Kappa Psi Society, the Current Events Club, and the Novel Club (its goals were to write a good novel and to have a good time; no one seemed
to bother with the novel). She was a “tumble bug” at the Junior Frolic event at “the Hippodrome” and helped design costumes for the senior production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Ros was a member of the Smith College Council. Their friendship was no less close in those years; it simply expanded to include others. “Life was very relaxed and easy,” Dorothy noted. “Although of course we studied, we nevertheless had plenty of time to be with each other.” They kept in touch with their Smith friends for sixty years.