Nothing Daunted (12 page)

Josephine and Clement showed Dorothy and Ros around their home, which they had bought only four months earlier.
The main house was a palatial, half-timbered Queen Anne
, flanked by sentries of towering palms. Off the Avenue du roi Albert, Villa Les Lotus had been built in 1883 by the duchess Albine de Persigny, wife of Louis Napoléon—ambassador to the court of Saint James. Josephine, in a tribute to her father’s legacy, called her new home Roselawn. “It seemed like a dream,” Dorothy wrote, to walk through the two-story entry hall, past the library and the billiard room with high, coffered ceilings, and to enter one of the grand salons and “find Mother and all the others—and a great crackling fire.”

When she woke up the next morning, she looked out the window at the aquamarine Mediterranean glinting in the sun. The view from the breakfast room was even better, and she was torn between gazing at the sea and at “the all-absorbing choice of jams.” The duchess had
been
an amateur botanist
, and her plans for the gardens were influenced by a recent trip to Japan. She came back to Cannes with statuary and Japanese maples, along with various rare arboreal specimens. She also imported some wood and Japanese workers for the construction of her teahouse. She hired the French horticulturalist and landscape architect Édouard André to organize the nine-acre park. It had stretches of lawn interrupted by masses of junglelike palms and cacti, cedars, cypresses, magnolias, araucaria, fig trees, and eucalyptus.

The Browns employed twelve gardeners. “The mimosa trees are beyond adjectives,” Dorothy wrote, “but imagine great trees of goldenrod, with the sun on it—against a deep blue sky! It was almost intoxicating after our dull Paris skies—and the air is so soft and delicious.” The most remarkable flower bed contained dozens of varieties of flowers, all in various shades of red. When she got up the next day, the gardeners had changed the color scheme to all white. “Cousin Josephine,” as she later put it, “said that when the weather got warm in the spring, along about the end of May, the gardeners would roll up the lawn—and throw it away, I suppose.”

One day Ros and Dorothy went to Monte Carlo with the Woodruffs. It was a beautiful drive on the Corniche Road, winding high above the sea, through hill towns balanced on rocks, where all the houses were the same shade of gray, and then bright orange groves, which reminded Dorothy of a Maxfield Parrish picture. Far below the rocks was the jagged coastline, “with the blindingly white towns, standing out against the glorious sea.” At Monte Carlo they went to the casino, which she and Ros found disappointing: “the people were such an ordinary uninteresting-looking lot—and the decorations were so tawdry.”

Back at the villa, Josephine kept her company busy. “It has been as strenuous as Paris,” Dorothy commented, “with so many engagements, and a mortal terror of being late to meals,” which were served by footmen in striped waistcoats and short breeches. Every day they went out to drive in an open victoria with two men on the box and two horses done up in a dressy harness. “I never lived in such luxury
and magnificence, and I can tell you—after a winter with a French family—I am ready to appreciate it.”

After their stay with the Browns, the Woodruffs and Ros went to Barcelona, where it was cold and rainy. Although the girls were excited to see their first “aeroplane” meet, they were tired of sightseeing, and Dorothy told Milly that they were desolate: “We didn’t see how we were going to put in the day.” Walking down the street with Mr. Woodruff, huddled under their umbrellas, they were approached by a portly man with a gray beard. He stepped up to her father and said, “You must be an American.” They chatted with him briefly, and then stopped in at a bank. When they came out, he was waiting for them on the sidewalk. He introduced himself as Mr. Stuart, “once from New York.” He told them he had lived in Barcelona for twenty-one years, “being driven over by domestic trouble!”

He invited them to his house, saying he had a few things that might interest them. “Papa said yes, so we puddled along behind,” Dorothy said, surprised by the unlikely encounter and by Mr. Woodruff’s courtesy to a peculiar stranger. Ros, who had withdrawn a significant amount of cash, whispered to Dorothy that she was sure he was going to rob them, as in stories they’d seen in the
Herald
about naive “Yankees.” He led them to Rambla de Catalunya in the Eixample, the best part of town, “and the minute we got inside, our eyes flew open,” Dorothy wrote. “It was like a very rich Oriental palace—and it was the last touch when his servant put a red fez on his head.”

The house was a maze of rooms overflowing with priceless works of art: “You never saw so many pictures in a private house—and such wonderful ones!” This time Dorothy admired the Rubens, along with the silk rugs on the walls and the Persian carpets on the floor.
One room, “The Lounge of the Queen Regent
,” had thirteen Goya tapestries, commissioned by the royal family.

Mr. Stuart, who was seventy-one, turned out to be William Whitewright Stuart, a graduate of Princeton and the son of a New York banker.
He was a member of the Barcelona stock exchange
but
didn’t consider himself a businessman. He described himself as a painter and a mountaineer. When Dorothy’s father said they didn’t want to take up too much of his time, he assured them his only engagements for the day were his piano and reciting lessons. He liked to preside over salons and dinners to which he invited artists and dancers and the nobility of various countries.
Often he entertained his guests
by playing the piano and singing operettas in Spanish and Italian; one night he recited from
Hamlet.
“It was a very weird experience,” Dorothy concluded, but it made the sodden trip to Spain worth taking.

Then their year of travel, highbrow culture, and unlikely encounters was over. They were twenty-three years old and going home.

F
ERRY
’
S
S
CHEME

I
n
1912, when Ferry Carpenter set up
Hayden’s first law practice, the town was a modestly thriving outpost of four hundred people or so, with three hotels; a Congregational church; a weekly newspaper, the
Routt County Republican;
two livery stables; three blacksmith shops; Emrich’s barbershop; two banks; two drugstores; two movie theaters; a surveyor’s office; two general-merchandise stores; Ernest Wagner’s saddle shop; and the Edison School, a two-story clapboard building with a big bell tower.
The bell was rung
not only to summon students but also to call parishioners to church and to issue fire alarms. John V. Solandt served as the doctor, veterinarian, and coroner. One of the two bathtubs in town was at the Hayden Inn; the other was at Emrich’s, where the cowboys lined up on Saturdays for occasional baths.

Hayden didn’t really need a lawyer, but Ferry didn’t want to
disappoint his father. Besides, he believed that everyone should have an official job to subsidize what he really wanted to do—in his case, ranching. He rented a narrow lean-to on Walnut Street, abutting the Yampa Valley Bank. Ferry asked his Elkhead neighbor, a carpenter named Al Galloway, to put up a wall in back so he could have a bedroom in Hayden during the winter, when the commute to Oak Point was impossible. Responding to Ferry’s dual duties as lawyer and rancher,
Galloway said, “I see, you’re going to
bleed ’em up here, and breed ’em back there.” In the summer, Ferry rode to town each day—an extremely hilly round trip of twenty miles—on a Dayton bicycle he’d bought in Cambridge.

He didn’t have many clients
at first, and his income averaged about $125 a month, over half of it from his fees as the town’s notary public. He spent many hours at the office talking to farmers, who liked to loaf and gossip in front of his stove while down the street their wives bartered eggs and cream for groceries. Influenced by the civic-spirited principles of Woodrow Wilson and by the work of the early settlers, Ferry became a prodigious community organizer. Among other activities, he joined the board of directors of the First National Bank of Hayden, and he persuaded the town board to replace the picturesque communal pump in the center of town with a proper water and sewage system.

The cattle business also took years
to get fully established. In 1911 Ferry and Jack White owned ninety-three head of purebred Hereford cattle, which they raised and sold to other cattlemen, rather than running range cattle. They took their cue from the experience of the Colorado gold rush, knowing that it was usually not the miners who became wealthy but the merchants who sold them supplies and equipment.

The profession required some imaginative improvisations. In one of the early years, a big red shorthorn bull kept escaping from a homestead nearby and visiting their white-face heifers. Ferry and Jack made a couple of barbed-wire quirts. “
We ran him home,” Ferry told an appreciative group
of stockmen in 1967, “and by golly he
beat us back again.” He had become a gifted storyteller, playing to his audiences, sometimes shamelessly. “We had to do something, and you’ll realize what it was. . . . We stretched him out, and then began to dispute which one would hold the knife. . . .” He went on to describe Jack’s mother as a lady who was fond of nice things; he said she had sent Jack some hardware for his cabin, including “a couple of glass doorknobs—which he got—and which the trespassing shorthorn bull went away with swinging.”

Although Oak Point was about as far from the world of eastern privilege and power as Ferry could have gotten, he continued to cultivate some of its best-known exemplars. At Harvard Law School, he had sought out Frederick Jackson Turner, a faculty member who sometimes invited him to his house on Sunday for tea or a meal. Carpenter admired Turner deeply but questioned some of his more retrograde views. In his Frontier Thesis, Turner had decreed that the West was “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” And Ferry mentioned in a letter to Henry Bragdon, the Wilson biographer, that
one evening in Cambridge, Turner rebuked his daughter
, who had tried to contradict one of them. “Women’s minds,” Turner remarked, “are like the Platte River—a mile wide and a foot deep.”

In Hayden, Ferry sporadically corresponded with Turner, writing entertainingly about his law cases, the coming of the Moffat Road, his progress in the cattle business, and the violent wars between cattlemen and sheep men over grazing rights. The battles had been fought throughout the West since the 1870s. Most of the ranchers in Routt County raised cattle, and they deplored sheep, which overgrazed, gnawing the grass down to the dirt, and polluted the streams where the cattlemen watered their herds.
As Ferry put it, “The Sheep. Always we live in fear & hatred of them
. In Wyoming on our north & Utah on our West they reign supreme & look across the line with covetous eyes on our green grass.”

In October 1913, writing from Oak Point
, Ferry asked Turner to recommend some new histories and biographies: “You see I’m away from the land of books, but I haven’t lost my taste for them.”
He then described his job. One of his clients was a homesteader who was fighting the government to retain rights to the coal on his land. The case unfolded over three days and an evening in the town hall, the settlers cheering Ferry on. He wrote, “a crowd set out to tar & feather the Gov. Attorney who was representing the Interior Dep’t—I still think it was the good looking lady stenographer whom he brot in who saved his hide.” During the District Court’s spring term, he represented a horse thief, whom he convinced to plead guilty. With his wife and baby in the court, the thief was sentenced to fourteen months to two years in the penitentiary, “much to the natives’ disgust.” Ferry’s compassion, though, crept in between the lines. “I got to know the man very well & his Family & saw that his crime was only his futile effort to get even with some spiteful neighbors.” In the previous term, he had prosecuted a right-of-way case against the railroad and had gotten his client a hundred dollars per acre for the three acres taken, plus a thousand dollars in damages. There was a note of pride from the twenty-seven-year-old attorney: “first time I ever faced a jury.”