Nothing Daunted (21 page)

The two made a good team. Portia, the self-confident, dreamy daughter of a Chicago lawyer, had rippling masses of auburn hair to her waist. Her father died soon after he saw her off to Northampton, and as a dance teacher, she largely supported herself, her sister, and her mother. At Smith, she had convinced the physical-education teacher, Senda Berenson—the sister of the art critic Bernard Berenson—to start a class in ballet. Berenson focused on classical technique while Portia experimented with an improvisational style inspired by Isadora Duncan, whose work wasn’t yet widely known.

In 1910, after graduation, Portia moved to Omaha. She had heard that the city had a vibrant cultural life, and she had no trouble getting work. She knew early on that, much as she loved to dance, her real
gift was as a teacher.
In Omaha, she saw Anna Pavlova
a former member of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes, in
The Dying Swan,
a performance that she said changed her life.
She was also strongly influenced by Sergei Diaghilev
, whose “Russian dancers” had so impressed Dorothy and Ros in Paris. Like Diaghilev,
Portia borrowed from many art forms
—painting, drama, ballet, costume, and lighting—but she encouraged her students to move as naturally as possible.

As the camp got under way, Charlotte worked as chief set designer, costume-maker, and general manager. Portia was the choreographer. They enrolled fifteen students the first summer, including a girl from New York City whose parents, Francois and Mary Tonetti, were prominent sculptors and friends of Isadora Duncan. Alexandra Tonetti, who was thirteen that summer, recollected that Portia was “a sort of Greenwich Village artist,” and Charlotte, raw-boned and businesslike. “
She grew straight and had never been twisted
. Very Western.” They made a profit of five hundred dollars after the first season and soon established a winter studio in New York and a summer traveling dance company. Sam Perry, no longer contemptuous about the venture, attended some of the performances and loaned them horses from his stable in Denver. Marjorie Perry led the students’ afternoon and weekend trail rides.
In coming years, the camp became nationally known
for its superb teachers and choreographers and its experimental approach to the arts.

For the first decade, the camp was lit only with candles and kerosene. The hand pump drew water from the spring at the bottom of the hundred-foot cliff. The students made lanterns out of recycled peanut-oil cans, which they pierced in decorative patterns. A chandelier was created from a cast-off wagon wheel and hung from the ceiling. There were Indian rugs on the floors and flowers in an array of Indian baskets. Ros wrote to her parents about the living room, “really it is one of the loveliest and most artistic rooms I have ever seen.” Dorothy and Ros could scarcely believe what Charlotte and Portia had accomplished in such a short time. Ros described the camp as “a dream come true,
and these two girls saved every penny for it from their earnings as dancing teachers.”

Many neighbors in Steamboat Springs, though, were shocked by the stories of barefoot young women in diaphanous dresses dancing on the lawn to the accompaniment of strange music. In the eyes of local ranchers, whose notion of dance was a good hoedown, the activities at the camp were sinful. They wouldn’t allow their wives and daughters past the front gate, telling them that the two madwomen were in league with the devil. Milk and butter deliveries were left in the creek, to be picked up later in the morning.

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Ros and Dorothy spent the next day at the camp, watching the students rehearse. “They dance in filmy costumes of chiffon—Greek style—and all colors,” Ros wrote. “It was a fascinating sight—such a contrast between the Rocky mountain setting and the return to Rome and Greece.” At noon, Bob drove up from Oak Creek, bearing freshly shot grouse. They spent the afternoon together and had a picnic with him at camp. “This Bob Perry,” Dorothy wrote, “is very attractive and saved our lives by offering to bring us home by machine.” Ros, for her part, was beginning to take more than a friendly interest in Bob, with his fine features, athletic prowess, and generosity.

They left the camp at eight-thirty on Saturday night, drove back to Steamboat Springs, where they picked up their belongings at the hotel, and continued on to Hayden, a three-hour drive. Several days earlier, when they had registered at the Hayden Inn, the proprietor announced to Dorothy and Ros, “You schoolmarms want to marry some rich ranchers & settle out here.” Dorothy was sure they scandalized him when they showed up close to midnight with the most desirable bachelor in the county.

Bob called for them at five the next morning, and they stole out in the dark. It turned out to be a beautiful late-summer day, and his little Dodge somehow conquered the steep grades to Elkhead.
Dorothy wrote, “We came sailing over the new road; when it looked impossible, we would get out, figure out the one way, and plow on.” To the Harrisons’ amazement, they got to within a mile of the house, the first time an automobile had ever made it that far. Bob carried their suitcases, they took their bundles, and they reached the house by seven
A.M.

After a hasty glass of milk, he hurried back to meet his father at the mine in Oak Hills. “Imagine being escorted home 60 miles!” Dorothy wrote. “It has been
some
trip I can assure you—each night in a different bed and every hour crammed full! We were so glad to get home and had a most enthusiastic welcome from the Harrisons who were bursting with pride over a new Sears Roebuck stove & a new brass bed in our room!” What was more, Lewis had found Ros’s lost skirt, caught in some sagebrush, when he had returned with their horses on Wednesday.

They soon received their teacher’s certificates, signed by Emma H. Peck. Dorothy’s average was 90
5
/
12
, and Ros’s, 90
5
/
6
. Dorothy wrote to her father, “It is a great satisfaction for of course everyone will know it and they will have much more confidence in us now.” Ros, noting the uncanny similarity in their scores, said, “Mother Dear, . . . Well, Dotty and I are overcome at these magnificent grades. . . . I think Mrs. Peck must have been perjuring her soul, to give them to us.”

D
EBUT

E
very August, Ferry Carpenter held a birthday party for himself at Oak Point, transforming his quiet bachelor’s cabin into a boisterous all-night dance that drew more than a hundred guests, from many miles away. That year he saw the occasion as a “kind of coming out party” for the teachers. On the evening of the party, Dorothy and Ros stayed at school until seven-fifteen, and then had an hour’s ride to Oak Point, watching the sun set and the moon rise over the mountains. When they arrived, the party was well under way. Out front was a big bonfire of logs and brush, topped with an old washtub of coffee. The furniture had been moved outside to make room for the dancing.

“I wish you could have seen that picture,” Ros wrote to her family. “The low ceilings—the log walls—dimly lighted by kerosene lamps—the musicians huddled over their fiddles, playing the strangest music,
and the oddly dressed couples whirling through the steps of the square dances which are the popular thing here. . . . One dark complexioned cow puncher leaned against the door jamb calling the figures.” They played quadrilles, waltzes, and two-steps, and she and Dorothy had more partners than they could count. “Bob Perry (whose sister I knew slightly at Smith) was there and so nice to us. He whisked us through the quadrille in great shape.” Still, she added, “Mr. C.,” for the first time dressed up in a white shirt and tie, “was a better dancer than Mr. P.”

Ros was aware that, even in that peculiar locale, she was acting the part of a traditional debutante. Ferry’s party was far more diverting than the balls at the Owasco Country Club, but she couldn’t take seriously most of the men who presented themselves to her. One bachelor, a pig farmer named Roy Lambkin, asked her to be his company at supper. Lambkin had helped Carpenter break up his land and plant crops in his early years as a homesteader. “I had to lay down the law to him later,” she wrote, “and assure him that schoolmarms hadn’t a moment to themselves—Sundays were our busiest days!” She didn’t add that the afternoons were reserved, after church, for Bob and Ferry.

Twenty-four-year-old Everette Adair, the son of the wealthy rancher John Adair, was especially persistent. The object of frequent jokes between Ros and Dorothy about his flamboyant style of dress and his flashy rings, he showed up at the house a few weeks later, leading two horses. When they consulted with Mrs. Harrison about the propriety of going riding with him, he poked his head inside and answered for her: “They will be just as safe as tho they were in the arms of Jesus.” Still, as Dorothy put it after the party, the real “belle of the ball” was Carpenter’s newly installed bathroom.
Ferry wrote more graphically
, “Everywhere guests rushed up to me and said: ‘Happy Birthday! Show me the flush toilet!’ ”

At midnight, Mrs. Murphy served a supper of sandwiches, cake, and ice cream outside. Afterward, fueled by food and coffee, the dancers picked up the pace, and the fiddlers started a double quick.
“How I wish you could have seen us madly dancing around those two small low-ceilinged rooms!” Dorothy wrote to her father. Ferry, in a letter to his parents,
said that it was the fastest music he had ever “stepped to,
” but his partner was Annie Elmer, the prize hay pitcher of Morgan Bottom—the productive flat land just north of the Yampa River—and they had no trouble keeping up. “Round and round we tore—it was fine with the floor all to ourselves—an occasional whoop or yell of encouragement as ‘Stay with ’em Tex’ or ‘Go to it Ferry,’ & soon we all had our coats off & the sweat a rolling off of us—well there were no quitters & after nearly an hour the musicians gave it up & slowed down to a last step & quit amid much shouting & clapping.”

By daybreak, the babies were asleep in their mothers’ arms; most of the older children were piled upstairs in the loft on some bedding Ferry had strewn about. But Tommy Jones was still wide awake at five
A.M.
He told Ros, “ ’Ere were ’ifteen auto ’ere ’at night!” She commented, “He can’t talk any other way but he’s cute as he can be.” At six-thirty, the musicians played “Home Sweet Home,” and people began getting into their rigs and autos. The two women rode wearily home and slept until noon.

Dorothy wrote to her father that it was “a never-to-be-forgotten experience,” an impression Ros confirmed over sixty years later, when she said that as they rode back to the Harrisons’, she realized it was “the first time in my life that I’d seen the sun set, moon rise, the moon set, and the sun rise all in one night.”

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At the time of the party, they had been in Elkhead under a month, and they reveled in their new social life. Carpenter and Perry were engaged in a serious but gentlemanly rivalry over Ros. Bob, despite his reserved temperament, was making his intentions clear. Ferry was less overt. He knew that Bob, with his collegiate good looks and promising career prospects with the Moffat Coal Company, was the more likely suitor. His own future in the cattle business was uncertain.
Still, he may have hoped that he could win Ros with his quick mind and appealing personality. In any case, the competition didn’t interfere with the two men’s friendship. If anything, it brought them closer together.

Virtually every Sunday until the worst of the winter weather, Bob made the forty-five-mile trip from Oak Creek to Hayden. It was another ten miles on horseback to Oak Point, then he and Ferry rode the final five miles together to the Harrison ranch. Bob’s daughter-in-law, Ruth Perry, said, “It is remarkable that there was any courtship at all, given the distance.” Bob’s father, Sam, was known for his relentless work ethic, and “he was not one to give anyone much time off.” Frank Harrison, Jr., observed the suitors at dinner each week with lively interest. Looking back on those months as an older man, he described Ferry and Bob as “
young fellows with tail feathers blooming
.”