Nothing Daunted (23 page)

As they set out to meet the Harrisons, they were joined, Dorothy said, by a series of stunning-looking men in high, tooled boots with wicked spurs, chaps over their blue jeans, and sombreros. The men asked where they were going, “in the most frank curiosity—then told us to hurry,” dubious about them riding such a long distance in unfamiliar territory, especially after dark. One man pressed matches on them in case they needed to build a campfire. Ros and Dorothy continued by themselves, exclaiming over the quakers, which were in their full autumn glory. “The sunset light on those sheets of gold with here & there a great black pine or a mass of red oak was the most superb riot of color I have ever seen,” Dorothy wrote. As it got later, “the light would come in long shafts, just touching the tops, and it was positively ethereal.”

Frank Jr., recalling how the teachers loved the fall in Elkhead, later said, “
You know, after the frost had hit this country, we never thought anything about those quakers
, they always turned yellow as soon as they frosted. They really marveled over the beauty of the country. You know, all we could see was the same old quakers.” Ros and Dorothy climbed a narrow canyon bordering the Elkhead River, and there were tremendous bare cliffs on one side “which looked wrinkled with age, like ‘The Ring’ scenery and all we needed was ‘Siegfried’!” Mrs. Harrison had tied rags to the trees for them to follow.

The horses began to flag, and as it got dark, the girls lost their sense of direction. They were reconciling themselves to a night in the brush when they heard a faint answer to their calls. Soon they were sitting around the campfire, wolfing down a supper of bacon, biscuits, and coffee. Mr. Harrison had made their beds—several layers of blankets with their slickers on top. They took off their shoes and crawled inside. In the morning, they looked out of their bedrolls at Mrs. Harrison making breakfast, “a little bit of a thin thing,” wearing an old cap of Lewis’s and his mackinaw, Ruth’s divided skirt, and a gingham apron.

They packed up and rode off, stopping to fish at a spot called the Pot Holes, a series of boggy canyons where all of the streams drained and formed gravelly pools. Afterward, they took a shortcut home, a narrow cattle trail straight up Agner Mountain. Mr. Harrison had to chop down branches with his ax to make space for their wide loads. Ros, fully acclimated by then, described the ride as a “real corker” but said, “I’d ride one of these horses up a telegraph pole now and think nothing of it.” Mrs. Harrison, though, did not like riding, and she screamed most of the way. Ros soothed her by talking about the trip her mother had taken down the Grand Canyon, telling her that “ ‘constant prayer’ pulled her thru alive.” Unconvinced, Mrs. Harrison got down and walked, and “Mr. H. guided his five lady passengers back to the home port, sans mishap.”

Reckonings

T
HE
C
REAM OF
R
OUTT
C
OUNTY

T
he teachers worked Monday through Friday, and except for their morning duties at Sunday school and their preparations for the following week’s classes, they were free on the weekends. Sometimes Bob managed to get to Elkhead on Saturday, to take the teachers on excursions without Ferry. They went with him on one “all day jaunt” to his future anthracite coal mine in Elkhead. “Mother dear,” Ros wrote on September 2, “I am sitting under a pine tree with the most beautiful blue sky above—and a veritable grove of pines and quaking aspens about me. . . . We are having the best kind of a time. We rode all morning—now [Mr. P.] is interviewing the man who is in charge of the land while we sit and laze, until we eat our picnic lunch. The horses are grazing away nearby—and I wish you could see the whole scene—the little tent down between two hillsides covered with ferns and trees. We appreciate trees, after our sage brush.”

As they were luxuriating, Bob’s horse got loose, and when they noticed it was gone, they leaped up and began a frantic search, futilely calling and whistling. Perry got onto Dorothy’s horse, Pep. She had traded in Rogan, offering a bonus, which the buyer refused. Pep was a small sorrel, and Bob galloped off, finally catching his horse halfway back to the Harrisons’.

The following weekend, he invited them to his house in Oak Hills, telling them he’d give them a tour of the Moffat mine. They would be joined by his sister Charlotte and Portia Mansfield, and by two young women from Lexington, Kentucky, who were coming for a visit. Dorothy and Ferry had discovered that each had a friend there: Anne Holloway, whom Dorothy knew from Smith; and Dot Embry, a Vassar graduate, whom Ferry had met when he was in law school. He had been sporadically wooing Dot for a few years, but without any apparent ardor.

On their way to pick up Dot and Anne at the Oak Creek depot, they drove to Bob’s other property—a homestead in Twenty Mile Park, between Hayden and Oak Creek. It was set in a meadow of oat and wheat fields. Dorothy commented, “It is wonderful to see them break up sagebrush & change virgin land—into a fertile farm land.” Bob’s tiny shack was surrounded by “very high mountains all around which looked dark & cavernous as if they were peopled by gnomes, and I expected to see giants & ogres.” After Bob spent some time talking to his overseer, they got back into the Dodge and “tore up, down, & around those mountains at a perilous pace and just reached Oak Creek as the train pulled in.” Faced with three pairs of women, two of which contained “Dorothys,” Bob simplified matters by calling Dot and Anne “The Kentuckys,” and the teachers “The Auburns.” Ros described the weekend as a lopsided house party, “the ratio being 6 ladies to 1 gentleman.”

Bob’s low-slung frame house in Oak Hills, its back porch strewn with saddle blankets and other paraphernalia, was even more comfortable and up-to-date than Ferry’s cabin. It had electric lights, steam heat, a bathtub, and hot running water. Unwanted wildlife,
though, shared it with him. Dorothy and Ros had learned from Marjorie Perry that during one of her recent visits, a pack rat had made off with one of her stockings, and she had to go home without it. Dorothy commented: “They are as big as cats,
on dit,
& called pack rats because they ‘pack off’ everything—that is cowboy slang for ‘carrying away.’ ” The women slept in three double beds in the living room. They were chary of using Bob’s blankets until he assured them that the previous guests had washed them. “Mr. Perry,” Dorothy wrote, stayed on “the piazza, talking to us all the time.”

The house stood on a bluff, overlooking an unsightly hamlet consisting of miners’ boardinghouses, company stores, blacksmith shops, repair shops, an electric generator plant, and several shacks. The mines were in a narrow gulch with steep slopes covered by gnarled scrub oak. The main line of the railroad ran through the gulch, with several switch tracks leading to and from the tipple.

In 1916 workdays for the miners
depended on the availability of railroad cars and market orders, and the mine usually closed down in the spring, reopening in September or October, when the weather got cold and demand for coal picked up. When the mines were working, steam hissed from numerous machines, whistles blew signals, and bells announced moving equipment. As cars were loaded, the racket was magnified by the sounds of the tipple shakers and coal falling into place. Coal smoke belched from the generator plants, locomotives, and steam-powered equipment. The burning slag pile emitted a stinking smoke of its own, and the air was filled with hot cinders that occasionally flew into workers’ eyes. On a quiet Saturday afternoon, with the mines shut, Ros was able to focus on the “real grass terrace with lovely flower garden, whence came the sweet peas” for the county fair. Her determination to see the best of Oak Hills was the most overt indication so far that she was coming to reciprocate Bob Perry’s feelings. Still, she added: “Oak Creek and Oak Hills are merely mining towns and very rough,—not at all like Hayden.”

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Ros was right. The culture of Oak Creek and the company town of Oak Hills, built for the miners and providing everything from housing and mess halls to doctors, bore no resemblance to the folksy atmosphere of Hayden or the bustle of Steamboat Springs. She and Dorothy, though, weren’t privy to some of the more sordid characteristics of coal towns. Oak Creek—started by a disreputable operator named Sam Bell, who had been the sheriff and run the brothels in Cripple Creek—
was built “to meet the needs of the men who dug the coal
from the bowels of the earth and brought it to the surface for loading and shipping,” wrote Paul Bonnifield, a former miner and local historian. “These miners were a special breed and they needed a town suited to their style.” In addition to an Episcopalian church, respectable homes, and a log school outside town, Oak Creek had bars, gambling parlors, and brothels—or, as the church ladies later alluded to them over tea, “sporting houses.”

The residents were German, Italian, Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Greek, Turkish, Japanese, and African-American. The immigrant and African-American men, who had made their way west after the Civil War, worked in the mines. Their wives washed dishes, cleaned houses and commercial buildings, and in the summer picked lettuce and spinach on ranches in nearby Yampa. The immigrants formed their own clubs and gathered at one of the pool halls or gambling parlors after work. Italians (the most recent arrivals) and African-Americans lived in a neighborhood called Hickory Flats, near the tipple of the Pinnacle mine, owned by the Victor American Fuel Company. Hickory Flats consisted of dilapidated shacks coated with coal cinders and one-room cribs where prostitutes conducted business. It was known for stabbings and shootings, and the town marshal refused to go there after dark.

At times violent clashes arose. The local newspaper, the
Oak Creek Times,
gave matter-of-fact accounts of some incidents that occurred around the time Ros and Dorothy went to Colorado. “
Man Beats Aged Miner
: Murderous Foreigner Crunches Head of American”; “
Mexican Meets Death by Severe Blow in Abdomen
”; “
Harry Gray . . . A Rope Rider
, in Moment of Fear Plunges Sharp Instrument Through
Heart of Routt County Boy.” Women, alone during work hours at their homesteads in the countryside or their houses in town, were easy prey.
In June 1917 a young woman was attacked
by a Greek friend of her Italian husband. When her husband returned unexpectedly and came upon the friend pressing his wife against the kitchen table, one hand over her mouth, the other tearing off her clothes, he blew the man’s brains out.