Nothing Daunted (20 page)

T
HE
M
AD
L
ADIES OF
S
TRAWBERRY
P
ARK

W
hen Dorothy and Ros had difficulty with their classes, they reminded themselves how much progress they had already made. In the early weeks after their arrival, they had spent every spare moment cramming for the state exams, knowing that if they didn’t pass, Elkhead would be stranded without teachers, and they would return to Auburn in disgrace.

School was closed on Wednesday, August 14, for three days, and at seven
A.M.
, they started on their forty-eight-mile journey to Steamboat Springs. They tied their bags and bundles to leather thongs attached to their saddles, hanging their sport suits separately, so they wouldn’t wrinkle. Lewis rode behind Ros, and they stopped a few miles east of the Harrisons’ at the Fredericksons’ house.
A couple of Swedish descent who had arrived from Nebraska in 1909
, the Fredericksons lived on a ridge above Elkhead Creek in a cheerful log cabin with ruffled curtains and geraniums at the windows. They called it Sunny Shelf Farm.

The Fredericksons had come for dinner at the Harrisons’ recently, and Ros described the two children as “fat as butter.” She said, “I wish you could have seen those Swedish children ‘stoke’ the food. We had this for a menu—delicious cold ham—fried potatoes—peas—Lima beans—beet greens—beets—radishes—pickled peaches—gooseberry jam—pickles—lemon pie—milk—bread and butter and last but not least stewed tomatoes. Every one of the vegetables came from the H’s garden and never have I tasted better.” The two children, five and seven, “made away with all the various dishes set before them; but the tomatoes made the biggest hit. They passed their saucers again and again and the little boy sat and ate on long after we had all finished. Then his mother remarked later that he had grown so thin!”

The steep hillsides behind the Frederickson house provided good pastureland, and they were able to grow alfalfa and grains, but they soon found, like other Elkhead homesteaders, that 160 acres were not enough to provide for their family. Arthur Frederickson stacked hay each summer on the Adair ranch and mined coal for his neighbors in the winter at nearby wagon mines, small enterprises run by one or two men. Loads were hauled out by horses and sold by the wagon rather than by the ton. Others found additional sources of income by logging or by trapping animals and selling the hides.

When the teachers dismounted, Ros realized that her suit skirt had come untied and slipped off. She asked Lewis to look out for it on his way back, and told her family, “Think of my losing my suit skirt off my saddle and sailing about Steamboat in that dreadful khaki skirt for four days!” Mrs. Frederickson, a strong, husky woman, had agreed to take them the rest of the way to Hayden. She drove an immense pair of horses hitched to a lumber wagon. Dorothy and Ros rolled around in back with the two plump Frederickson children and Miss Rench, who boarded with the family that year. She, too, was taking the exams. “We crossed 12 streams and went through 15 gates!” Dorothy wrote. “You can’t conceive of anything like it, and we even
took down
a barbed-wire fence!” When they reached Hayden four and a half hours
later, they had lunch at the inn and studied all afternoon. Ferry arrived at 6:45 to escort them to the depot.

The train ride took them through the valley to Steamboat Springs. The tracks followed the rushing Yampa River into a landscape of cultivated fields, a few large ranches with hundreds of grazing cattle, unbroken miles of shaggy fifty-foot cottonwoods, and, as they approached town, ponderosa pines and firs. The smooth-skinned aspens, with their pale green fluttering leaves, looked impossibly delicate by comparison. After dingy little Hayden, Steamboat Springs felt like a city—a town of about twelve hundred people centered on the generously scaled main street, Lincoln Avenue, and surrounded by mountains on all sides. “The air fairly sparkles, just like Cortina,” Dorothy wrote. “It is surely as beautiful as any watering place over there.”

The setting may have resembled parts of the Old World, but the atmosphere was unmistakably American West, and Dorothy and Ros were no longer twenty-two-year-olds on a prolonged holiday. F. M. Light & Sons billed itself as “the pioneer clothing store of Northwestern Colorado.” Men shopped there for cowboy boots, overalls, suits, and hats.
One of its maxims was “A customer is not a cold statistic
. . . he is a flesh-and-blood human being with feelings and emotions like our own, and with biases and prejudices.”
A & G Wither Mercantile offered everything
from toothpicks to barbed wire. After their quarters at the Harrisons’, the Steamboat Cabin Hotel felt sumptuous, with its gabled roof, contrasting wood trim, wraparound porch, and a room that looked out onto the river and the mountains. Dorothy noted afterward, “the nervous strain of the exams was
awful
for everyone makes so much of them here and you realize you are a public official. . . . They weren’t as bad as they might have been, by any means, but
so
silly, and taking ten [actually, twelve] exams in two days is not a pleasure trip!”

The tests, taken by a few dozen women and overseen by Emma Peck, who was the Colorado county schools superintendent from 1896–98 and again from 1912–20, were given in the district courthouse. Dorothy
and Ros noticed that there was a one-eyed man kicking back in the corner, and they agreed that he must be one of the “spotters” they had been told would be in attendance, but later, they found out that he was a janitor. The subjects were arithmetic, reading, penmanship, physiology, orthography, history, school law, grammar, theory and practice (of teaching), geography, civil government, and natural science. Some of the questions were more idiosyncratic than they had expected, including “Describe the changes that take place in ‘egg on toast’ during the process of digestion,” “Explain methods of bidding on and letting road work by contract,” and “Give a physiological reason for not boxing children’s ears.” Ros wrote, “I presume we got through but not with very fine results, I fear. . . . I fell down on Colorado law and civil government.”

On Thursday, after their first six-hour ordeal, they treated themselves to the hot sulfur baths down the street. They had not had an “all-over” since their night at the Brown Palace three weeks earlier. Ros loved the public swimming pool but found the stench of the water dreadful. In 1923
the town’s founding father
, James Crawford, described how he had been fascinated by “the very nest of springs” when he came upon them fifty years earlier, and how the sulfur “continues to the present time to attract the attention of the olfactories.” The spring near the future site of the Moffat depot sounded then “exactly like a steamboat laboring upstream.” That evening they got to know Mrs. Peck. She was three years older than Mrs. Harrison and about the same size. The state seemed to be full of invincible tiny women who never complained—a source of inspiration, particularly to Dorothy.

Mrs. Peck, formerly Emma Hull, first taught school
at the age of sixteen in Clear Creek County, thirty-five miles west of Denver. Some of her students were older than she was.
She liked to tell a story
about a hulking seventeen-year-old who went home after the first day and told his mother that his teacher was “a little girl who isn’t any bigger than a half pint.” Three years later, Hull married Harry B. Peck, and in October 1883 they moved with their first two children to Hayden.

Dorothy described Mrs. Peck as “thoroughly delightful—and
such
stories as she told us! Originally her territory was as big as the state of Mass. . . . and she drove 1,200 miles her first year! She had four little children at the time she was teaching, took them all to school all day and kept house and did regular ranch work, too!”
A reporter made the same observation a century later
: “While she washed dishes, or mixed bread, or churned, she heard one child say his multiplication tables and upbraided another for never seeming to be able to learn the principal exports of Germany.” Soon she was asked to teach at a new school in Craig, and when she heard she would have sixty-two pupils, she demanded that the board add another teacher for the older ones. It was the first “graded” school in the county. Like other frontier women, in addition to her work in the house and on the ranch, she took on wider duties as called for, delivering babies and closing the eyes of the dead.

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The teachers finished the last exam on Friday afternoon, and that night Ferry turned up in Steamboat Springs and took them out for a celebratory steak dinner. He was on his way to Salt Lake City for his monthlong civilian military training at Fort Douglas. Although President Wilson was campaigning for his second term with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” the armed forces were preparing for possible American involvement in the European conflict. Carpenter had invited Bob Perry’s sister Charlotte to join them. Charlotte had been two years behind them at Smith; Ros and Dorothy remembered her as an active participant in drama. She was tall and thin, with springy red hair and blue eyes.
As one friend described her
, she “moved like a bullet shot out of a machine gun.” Charlotte, along with her own close friend from Smith, Portia Mansfield, had recently started the Rocky Mountain Dancing Club, later renamed the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts Camp, hidden away in a corner of Strawberry Park, a few miles outside Steamboat Springs.
The first of its kind in the
country—more of a school, except in its rustic setup—it offered young women serious training in dance and theater. Charlotte insisted that they go see it and spend the night there.

The teachers readily agreed, curious about Charlotte and Portia and their ambitious undertaking. Ferry accompanied them on their two-mile walk through Steamboat Springs, along Soda Creek, and onto a narrow trail into the woods. Dorothy and Ros discussed school matters with him, aware that in his absence, they would be managing the school on their own.

Hiking along a trail of pine needles, they found themselves in a landscape that was completely unlike Elkhead—a densely forested hillside of fir trees and aspens that overlooked a green meadow and the close backdrop of the snowy Rockies. At the top of the steep bank above the creek, they passed six white canvas tents, their wooden floors built on a foundation of tree stumps. Partway down the hill, they came upon a clearing and the main lodge. It consisted of a dance studio, screened on three sides, and a big living room, its log walls stained dark, Elizabethan-style, and a stone fireplace at the far end. Hung on display were the skins of bears, coyotes, and wild cats—shot by Bob’s and Charlotte’s older sister, Marjorie.

Charlotte, who was more artistic in her tastes, had always been uninhibited in her undertakings, pursuing her interest in theater despite her parents’ misgivings. Once, when her father was in New York raising money for the Moffat Road, and she was taking part in a performance of
Robin Hood
at Miss Wolcott’s School in Denver, she ripped the green felt off her father’s billiard table for costumes. He had an explosive temper, but it didn’t intimidate her. Her mother, Lottie, had expected her to be a Denver debutante.
When she told her parents that she and Portia
intended to start a dance camp, Sam Perry scoffed at the idea,
but Lottie, more indulgent and open-minded
than her husband, convinced him to let her try. He warned Charlotte that he would disinherit her if the camp failed.

They set out to make a go of things. Bob found a piece of land for them in Strawberry Park, and Charlotte and Portia spent two years
in Chicago, living in Hull House, where they made enough money to buy the property.
Charlotte gave Bible lessons and taught basketball
, while Portia taught dance. In addition, Charlotte studied and taught drama and art, and Portia taught classes at the Hotel del Prado in classical, athletic, Russian, interpretive, eurythmic, toe, and social dancing. They also went to the Lewis Institute, where they convinced some Irish coffin-makers to show them how to make furniture that could be disassembled and screwed back together. They built a few large tables and a chair for the main cabin at the camp, then took them apart and put them on the train to Colorado.

There was an abandoned homestead on the property that served as Charlotte and Portia’s home—and soon as the camp’s music room. They took blue theater curtains and hung them on rods held in place at either end by Y-shaped tree branches. Bob Perry loaned them half a dozen carpenters and an ill-tempered mule from the Moffat mine to help build the main lodge and the tents for campers. The two women worked alongside the men throughout the construction. They also cooked for them, and Charlotte had to tearfully consult with Bob when the workers threatened to quit, complaining that they couldn’t eat the meals. Portia recalled, “
He told us to soak the potatoes in grease, over-cook the meat
, boil the coffee, and serve them soggy pie. We tried this formula, and they loved every bite.”