Nothing Daunted (14 page)

By the spring of 1916, seven years out of college and not yet married, they began to think unenthusiastically about returning to New York City to pursue some kind of social work. They were “in this troubled state,” as Dorothy put it, when an unusual opportunity presented itself. In April, Emily Callaway, the leading lady of the Jefferson Stock Company, was in town to rehearse for the summer season. Callaway, another Auburn girl, was a 1906 Wellesley graduate who had a letter of introduction to Rosamond from one of William Seward’s grandsons. Ros’s mother invited her to tea, and Ros and Emily began to talk about how difficult it was for women of their background to find absorbing and useful work.

Callaway mentioned that just that day, she had heard from a Wellesley friend, Ruth Carpenter Woodley, who had an adventure-some brother named Ferry Carpenter. She described his background and told Ros and Dorothy that he had worked with his neighbors for five years to build a consolidated schoolhouse in the Elkhead mountain range. Her brother was a man of vision, Ruth wrote to Emily, and he had asked her to look around New York for two young female college graduates who would consider teaching out there for a year or two.

Mrs. Underwood knew that Rosamond felt constricted in her life at home, and as Callaway spoke, she saw her daughter’s animated response.
She was not surprised to hear Ros say
, “I’d like to try it myself, if my best friend and classmate from Smith, Dorothy Woodruff, would go with me.” Ros rushed to the telephone to call Dorothy, asking her, “How would you like to go out to Colorado and teach school? You must come over immediately. We’ve got to talk about this!”

Within minutes Dorothy was at the door. On her brisk walk over, she had made her decision. They plied Callaway for more information
and got Mrs. Woodley’s address from her so they could write to express their interest. Nonetheless, Dorothy anticipated her family’s alarm: “No young lady in our town,” she later recalled, “had ever been hired by anybody.”

A few years earlier, Ros had gone to a resort in Hot Springs, Arizona, to recover from a bronchial infection, and she had loved the informality and open spaces of the West. But neither woman knew much about the rigors of life in the Rockies. Their sense of the westward expansion came largely from Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s
Letters of a Woman Homesteader,
serialized in the
Atlantic Monthly
several years earlier and then published as a book—now a classic of life on the frontier. They had been riveted by Stewart’s account of living by her wits far from any urban center.
Stewart wrote about a camping trip in December
near her homestead in Burnt Fork, Wyoming: “Our improvised beds were the most comfortable things; I love the flicker of an open fire, the smell of the pines, the pure, sweet air, and I went to sleep thinking how blest I was to be able to enjoy the things I love most.”

This, to Ros and Dorothy, was true romance. Stewart and her resourceful neighbor, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, were roused by a long, haunting wail. Stewart thought it was the cry of a panther, but upon investigating, they found that it was a girl in a new loggers’ encampment, in the throes of a difficult childbirth. The clearing consisted of two homes. Both husbands had been gone for two weeks, to collect their wages and some supplies. The women helped the girl deliver her baby, and when they realized that the families would have nothing for Christmas, they returned to Stewart’s house and prepared a bundle of presents. For the children, they made paper birds, butterflies, and flowers; apples; and candies from fondant. For the new mother: oatmeal, butter, cream, and eggs, and a petticoat. They went back and decorated one of the empty cabins with pine boughs and a Christmas tree lit with candles. Everyone was enchanted. “
We all got so much out of so little
,” Stewart wrote. “I will never again allow even the smallest thing to go to waste.”

Their job applications submitted, Dorothy and Ros began to imagine themselves in a role much like Stewart’s. Letters flew back and forth between them and Mrs. Woodley, who wrote that the train ride from Denver to Hayden was the most scenic trip in the country, and she described the beautiful hills of “Elkhead country,” with the tallest of the Rockies visible in the distance. She downplayed the hardships and stretched the truth, assuring them that “from August till Dec. the weather will be glorious, cold nights and mornings but fine in the daytime. From Dec. till April the snow will be heavy and the weather cold. Everyone skis or snow-shoes and go on [bobsleds] when the roads are open. . . . If you are delicate, don’t undertake it, but a girl of ordinary strength who likes out-door life and doesn’t mind a few discomforts will get along beautifully.”

The teachers, she noted, must be able to teach domestic science—“adapted to rural life, with canning etc. and some practical manual training for boys would be a help. Home Decoration would be a wonderful thing and really anything is acceptable that would enrich their lives.”
The domestic-science movement was led
by middle-class women who had no maids or kitchen help, who believed that bringing modern methods of cleaning and cooking into the home would lead not only to greater freedom for them but also to curing the social scourges of alcoholism, disease, and even poverty. Mrs. Woodley said she had “refrained from enthusing,” because she wanted the girls to know the conditions they would be confronting, but added that if they “would like to catch a glimpse of one of the last of our fast disappearing frontiers, I’d urge you to try it.”

As for safety, she said that she spent much of her time in Elkhead, and there was little danger, “except what is always present when one lives in a primitive way. I mean you might be thrown from your horse, or you might let a log of wood fall on your foot etc.,” but she added that these were nothing compared to “the liability of being run down by an auto” or driving one. Ruth advised them not to promise their parents that no harm could come to them. They should instead say that they would “live a life considerably freer of dangers than in Auburn,
and a much more rugged, healthy one.” In mid-June, Dorothy and Ros learned that two of their top competitors for the job had dropped out, “owing to parental objections.”

Another of Ferry Carpenter’s recruiters was Miriam Heermans, an old friend of Ruth’s from Evanston and Wellesley, who in 1912, at Carpenter’s and Ruth’s urging, had taught at one of the first schoolhouses in Elkhead for five months; Ruth stayed with Miriam on the Adair ranch, where the school was located. Miriam wrote to Ros and Dorothy on June 11, saying that she thought the jobs were probably theirs as long as their parents weren’t adamantly opposed. Dorothy mailed Heermans’s note to Ros, who was out of town for a few days, writing on the bottom of the letter: “Sounds like business—doesn’t it! . . . I am awfully excited—I think I’d better acknowledge this—and hope I won’t put my foot in. I shall say I think our parents can be managed.”

Carpenter replied to Miriam on June 15, saying that he might be willing to take a chance on “those Auburn girls,” but he wanted to know, “Will they take the grief that goes with such a job and have they the pep to shed it off and go right on like nothing happened? What education have they? Let me hear from you and tell them to write direct to me at once.” He added that if she had “any doubt about their having the necessary gimp in them to handle this job why let them drop right now.”

Miss Heermans indiscreetly sent Carpenter’s note to Dorothy, saying, “He is really not as illiterate as this sounds but has merely fallen into the Elkhead dialect!”

Dorothy wrote a long letter to Carpenter, earnestly describing their education, their travels, and their social work before admitting, “You see this may not offer much specialized training for the Elkhead work—but we shall do as much as possible before we leave—we are very anxious to try this position & will do our best to fill the requirements. You may be sure that we would expect to stick it out—whatever our experiences might be.” Indicating their seriousness of purpose, she asked whether the school was equipped with good
blackboards, books, and maps of the world and the state of Colorado, and she said they would like to see any information he had about the subjects they would be teaching.

He sent a wire confirming their employment, but the following week, their preparations were abruptly halted.
War with Mexico appeared imminent
, after Pancho Villa and several hundred of his men attacked a U.S. Army garrison in Columbus, New Mexico. President Wilson ordered the mobilization of tens of thousands of National Guardsmen, one of whom was Ros’s older brother, Kennard Underwood.
He had just made second lieutenant in Company M, and the Underwoods
did not want two of their children far from home in potentially dangerous circumstances. Dorothy and Ros reluctantly sent a telegram to Carpenter saying that, under the circumstances, they had to refuse the position.

Then Wilson changed his mind. Preoccupied with the escalating war in Europe and the increasing bitterness between the U.S. and Germany, he initiated a mediation commission to negotiate the terms for a withdrawal. For the second time, the girls were told they could go. The school year was to begin in early August, and worried that in the interim Carpenter might have chosen two other teachers, Dorothy sent him a telegram on July 5, saying they were available after all, if the jobs weren’t taken. Two days later, she heard back:
POSITIONS OPEN AND YOU MAY CONSIDER YOURSELVES HIRED WILL WRITE
.

Ros typed a businesslike letter to Ferry, reiterating Dorothy’s request for information about the state syllabus and what books and supplies the school had. In response to a question from Carpenter about their living situation in Elkhead, she said they would rather board with a family than stay in a cabin by themselves. He replied that the district furnished all books and supplies, and said the school had a piano and would soon have a phonograph and records, which would be moved from one of the summer schools some miles away. It was a big project, he explained, to consolidate several tiny schools into one for a community that was so widely spread out.

The Princeton and Harvard man tailored his correspondence to “Miss Underwood” and “Miss Woodruff” to appeal to their ideals about teaching and to their excitement about a clean, active life in the Rockies. He told them about three Elkhead pupils who had just been to his cabin for dinner “and wanted to know all about you—I truly envy you the chance to be with those kids, as everything to them is a seven day wonder.” He recommended that they read John Dewey’s
Schools of To-morrow,
adding that although the conditions in Elkhead were unlike those in the urban schools Dewey wrote about, his philosophy of education should nonetheless apply: “learning by doing,” rather than by rote teaching and the rod.

Given Carpenter’s expectations for the school, he was surprisingly unconcerned about the new teachers’ lack of credentials. Dorothy and Ros didn’t begin to think in practical terms until after they were hired. Then, Dorothy said, “It began to frighten us very much. We’d realized what we’d done. We knew not the slightest thing about teaching, absolutely nothing.” Addressing their anxiety about domestic science, they made themselves dresses from foulard, a twill-weave silk, which, Rosamond said, “we thought were handsome.”

Cayuga County’s blue bloods were shocked by the news.
SOCIETY GIRLS GO TO WILDS OF COLORADO
, the
Syracuse Daily Journal
declared on July 24. “Forsaking their beautiful homes . . . for the life of a school teacher . . . the Misses Rosamond Underwood and Dorothy Woodruff, leading society girls, left for Hayden. The announcement of the departure for the lonely place in the heart of the Elkhart [
sic
] Mountains, 18 miles from a railroad station, surprised society when it became known today. Both have figured prominently in the many social events which have taken place in this city in the last few years.”

The women agreed that Ros would teach the older children, grades six through twelve. Dorothy, who was unsure about her skills in Latin and mathematics, would take grades one through five. They hired a teacher in Auburn to help them review some basic mathematics, and went to Ithaca to consult a rustic-schools expert at Cornell
University. Dorothy also visited the school superintendent in Auburn, who referred her to a teacher named Miss LeMay, from whom she received instruction on what she could hope to accomplish in a large class with widely different ages and abilities. Miss LeMay supplied her with a stack of books, “so I felt I at least had something to put my teeth into when I arrived,” Dorothy said.

As always, their wardrobes were a consuming issue, but their needs were different now. Ruth Woodley wrote a nine-page letter to Ros instructing her what to bring. She recommended a divided riding skirt with knickers underneath. It unbuttoned front and back while on horseback, and it became an ordinary skirt when buttoned back up upon dismounting. She warned against buying an English riding habit—coat and knickers—because it “shocks the sensibilities of the natives.” Long woolen underwear, good heavy shoes, rubber overshoes, a slicker, and galoshes were essential. She said that she always wore last year’s clothes—a simple shirtwaist or two of light flannel and a skirt and a serge dress, plus a couple of summer dresses. “You will find laundry quite a problem,” she said. “The last few years I’ve done my own.” A week later, she added a bathing suit and bedding to the list, mentioning that they couldn’t expect the standard of cleanliness to which they were accustomed. They forgot to buy the long woolen underwear but otherwise did exactly as she advised, sending away to Abercrombie & Fitch in New York for tweed riding suits with divided skirts. They also packed their fur coats.

As their date of departure approached, Carpenter wrote to say that they would have to take the Routt County teachers’ examinations, which consisted of questions in twelve subjects, though he did not specify which ones. They would take the tests in Steamboat Springs in August, soon after classes started. Ros anxiously asked him to send copies of tests from earlier years, so they could prepare. He wrote back offhandedly, “Don’t let those exams worry you at all for they’re easy.”