Nothing Daunted (34 page)

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During my visits to Hayden and Elkhead in February 2009, I had wanted to ride from the old Harrison place up to the schoolhouse, but there were no horses and no one to break trail. Instead, Rebecca Wattles and a friend from the Hayden Heritage Center had arranged
for us to make the climb by snowmobile. Sam Barnes, the public works director of Hayden and another grandchild of Elkhead homesteaders, provided three Arctic Cats and was our guide for the day. Rebecca took a steep turn too quickly, tipping over in the deep powder, as Ferry had with Dorothy and Ros in his sleigh. Sam—a tall man of few words and a generous girth—stopped and helped her to set things right. We made a noisy arrival, snow flying out on either side of the machines. When the engines were shut off, the silence felt like a reproach.

It was another brilliant, balmy day. Sam unlocked the door and threw open the shutters. Sunlight slanted in, revealing the outlines of where the blackboards used to hang. Sometimes the school is rented out to hunters, and there were half a dozen bunk beds in the middle of the room, along with an open kitchen and a bathroom by the back wall. The huge windows had been replaced with smaller ones. Otherwise, the room looked much as it had when Lewis first showed it to Dorothy and Ros. It wasn’t hard to imagine Miss Woodruff trying to keep order on her side of the room while Miss Underwood walked around examining the older students’ work on her side. The basement was in some disarray. There was a gaping dirt hole where the furnace had been ripped out of the concrete floor, and no sign of the domestic-science room. The folding wooden door that had separated the two classrooms was lying on its side; half a dozen wrought-iron bases of the children’s desks hung from the rafters. So did an ungainly wooden exercise apparatus—all that was left of whatever had constituted the gymnasium.

The school was a source of inspiration, though, until it closed. One evening in the summer of 1935, Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield, who had been running their performing-arts camp for twenty years,
drove up from Strawberry Park with their new dance teacher, thirty-year-old Agnes de Mille
. She had asked them if they knew where she could see her first square dance. The camp directors had a knack for attracting uncommonly talented young dancers, choreographers, and actors—
among them Merce Cunningham and John Cage
, who arrived together and in 1944 created their second major collaboration there, a
play-dance called
Four Walls.
It starred Cunningham and Julie Harris.
In the late 1920s, over three summers, Ferry Carpenter had taken his young nephew Richard Pleasant
to the girls’ camp. Pleasant lived in Maybell, a town of twenty-five people in far western Colorado, and Ferry thought that Portia and Charlotte could impart some culture to him. Pleasant went on to found American Ballet Theatre, with Lucia Chase, in 1940. Later, a boys’ camp was added at Perry-Mansfield, and Dustin Hoffman studied acting under Charlotte.

At the schoolhouse that night, women stood on one side of the room and men on the other. As Portia described the scene, a group of “ancient and bearded” fiddlers were playing, and de Mille watched as the cowboys, in Levi’s and boots, whirled the women about in their full-skirted dresses. Portia asked the fiddlers to play “Turkey in the Straw,” and when they struck up the tune, she urged “Aggie” to do a solo. De Mille jumped out to the open floor and began to dance, startling the cowboys, who called out, “That’s it, girlie! You get ’em! Go to it!” As the music ended, a long line of dancers grabbed de Mille by the hand and “cracked the whip,” sending her out the open doors of the schoolhouse into the sagebrush.

Seven years later, her ballet
Rodeo,
accompanied by Aaron Copland’s exultant score, was performed for the first time in New York, by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with de Mille as the lead dancer. She received twenty-two curtain calls, and Rodgers and Hammerstein asked her to choreograph
Oklahoma!
De Mille told Portia, recalling her visit to Elkhead, “I think
Rodeo
began that night.”

I walked outside and stood on the stoop where I’d had my picture taken with Ferry in 1973. The rough hills, softened by layers of snow, wandered off toward Utah and Wyoming. The people who built this school on top of an unpopulated mountain were aroused by the same vision of America’s future that drove Ferdinand V. Hayden, David Moffat, and Sam Perry. That dream also sparked Charlotte and Portia and Dorothy and Rosamond, and the students they taught. Frederick Jackson Turner once urged Ferry to write down the details of his daily life on the frontier. He replied that he was too busy. But
others recorded as much as they could, with pencil stubs in a derailed train car and in ink thinned by the cold. When Ros first glimpsed the school, she exclaimed, “It is the Parthenon of Elkhead!” Six-year-old Robin saw a churning ocean in the “crick” outside his father’s log cabin.
The graduates of 1920 described
gazing out from the school at the seemingly limitless miles of blue and purple mountains. They felt, they said, as if they were standing on top of the world.

T
his book was a collaborative undertaking. I reconstructed the events described here with the unflagging help of dozens of people, many of whom shared intimate details about their parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ lives. My thanks go first, wholeheartedly, to my mother, Hermione Hillman Wickenden, and my aunt, Caroline Hillman Backlund, to whom
Nothing Daunted
is dedicated. Both retired librarians, they saved Woodruff and Beardsley letters, photographs, and memorabilia going back to the mid-1800s. Without them, I could not have told the story.

I am very grateful to my contemporaries, and to their surviving parents, in the Underwood, Perry, Carpenter, and Cosel families. When I contacted Rosamond’s granddaughter Roz Turnbull, in Carbondale, Colorado, for the first time in dozens of years, she instantly called her ninety-year-old mother, Ruth Perry, to enlist her help. Several months later, we all met up in Steamboat Springs. There and in subsequent e-mails, letters, and family papers, they conveyed what they knew about Ros’s year in Elkhead, and about the lives of the Perrys: Sam and Lottie, Charlotte and Marjorie, and Bob and Rosamond.

Ferry Carpenter’s granddaughter Belle Zars, who lives in Austin, Texas, and is writing a book about the Elkhead community, generously supplied me with interviews she had conducted in 1973 with Ferry and the children of several homesteaders, and with copies of the letters Eunice Pleasant wrote from Elkhead to her sister-in-law, Gertrude Pleasant. She sent me Ros’s photo album and provided invaluable personal contacts. She helped me find Iva Rench’s and Isadore Bolten’s homesteads, and reminded me of the cast-iron
dachshund boot scrapers that Dorothy and Ros gave to Ferry and Bob for Christmas in 1916. Belle’s brother Reed Zars entered into my project with enthusiasm, showing me Oak Point in February 2009 and the two successive summers. He and his daughter Cordelia joined Rebecca Wattles and me in July 2009, when we explored Elkhead on Rebecca’s horses, Titian and Troy (Reed and Cordy went on mountain bikes).

Mary Pat Dunn, the former curator of the Hayden Heritage Center, was a warm, dedicated guide to the center’s collection. She and Rebecca, who is president of the board of directors, organized my other Elkhead excursion that year: on skis and snowmobiles. Sam Barnes, the public-works director of Hayden, provided the snowmobiles and the key to the schoolhouse. The owner of the school, Mary Borg, came along. She teaches at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and became a resource on the school’s history and on the Meeker rebellion. Her family secured a historic designation for the building in January 2008. Penny and Cal Howe, who live on the property once owned by the Harrison family, have given me lunch, tours of their ranch, descriptions of old threshing equipment and the seasons and wildlife of Elkhead, stories about Lewis’s and Frank Jr.’s visits to the place where they grew up, and an understanding of how deeply the early settlers were attached to their land.

Ros’s son Kennard Perry—who lives in the Tudor house that Ros and Bob built on the outskirts of Denver—and Ken’s daughter, Barbara, talked to me about Ros, Sam, and Bob, the Moffat Coal Company, and the exploits of Marjorie Perry. I found Lewis Harrison’s daughter, Jane Harrison Telder, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and her son, Richard, in Atlanta, Georgia; they rounded out the life story of Lewis, the undersize fourteen-year-old boy who guided the teachers to and from school each day.

Two of Rosamond’s grandsons, Peter Cosel and his brother Rob, met me in Norwalk, Connecticut, in the fall of 2009 and let me root through their family’s boxes of papers until I found Ros’s letters from Elkhead, her mother’s diaries, and the legal envelope full of newspaper clips about Bob’s kidnapping.

Timothy Jones, the grandson of another pioneering Colorado schoolteacher, Leah Mae Mahaney, sent me her unpublished autobiography about her experience teaching in Kremmling, Colorado, in 1916, at the age of nineteen.

Professional and amateur historians, from Auburn to Oak Creek, assisted me with resourcefulness and verve:

A
UBURN AND
O
WASCO
L
AKE

For over a year, Sheila Tucker, the Cayuga County historian, worked with me to track down Auburn characters, events, photographs, and genealogies, and she read
Chapter Two
for accuracy. Peter Wisbey, the former executive director of the Seward House Museum, and Jennifer Haines, the education director, conveyed little-known facts about the Sewards and early Auburn history; Barbara Woodruff and Erik and Sheila Osborne were generous hosts at their cottages on the lake. Barbara and Jean Marshall (Ros’s niece by marriage) took a group of us to dinner at the Owasco Country Club. Erik loaned me family papers and gave me glimpses into his remarkable ancestry. David Connelly, who is writing a book about the prison reformer Thomas Mott Osborne, Erik’s grandfather, tipped me off to Osborne’s friendship with FDR. He, too, read the Auburn chapter. Devens Osborne and Betsey Osborne, Leland Underwood Kruger Coalson, Richard L. Coalson, and Chuck Underwood Kruger helped me sort out five generations of their families, and supplied scrapbooks and personal histories.

Eileen McHugh, executive director of the Cayuga Museum of History and Art, pointed me to sources on the Woodruffs and Beardsleys and the Auburn state prison. Joanne O’Connor, an insatiable Auburn history buff, and her brother, Peter, own the summer house on Owasco Lake that once belonged to Rosamond’s parents. Peter showed me around one summer afternoon; Joanne sent a steady supply of newspaper clips and books. Joe O’Hearn, who publishes “O’Hearn’s Histories” of Auburn, a monthly online newsletter, unearthed obscure information about various secondary characters. My friend Mike Connor, who grew up in Auburn, read the chapter and cheered me on in the project.

P
ARIS
, C
ANNES, AND
B
ARCELONA

Friends at the
New Yorker
helped in various ways: Peter Schjeldahl, with the Fauve movement and the relationships among Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and
Matisse; Paul Goldberger, with the architecture of Les Lotus in Cannes; and Jon Lee Anderson, with old Barcelona.

Marianne Billaud, Marie Hélène Cainaud, and Marie Brunel, of Ville de Cannes, Archives Municipales, sent photographs and histories of Villa Les Lotus; Christopher Glazek helped with French translation and Nicholas Backlund with Paris and Cannes research; Janet Skeslien Charles looked into the location of Mme Rey’s school; Jean Strouse put me in touch with David Smith, who contacted Sandra Ribas in Barcelona, who uncovered the identity of the mysterious art collector Mr. Stuart, whose name was mentioned (and misspelled) by my grandmother in one of her letters.

D
ENVER, THE
M
OFFAT
R
OAD, AND
S
TEAMBOAT
S
PRINGS

Debra Faulkner, the historian of the Brown Palace Hotel, told me about the hotel’s early days and showed me the guest ledger signed by Ros on July 26, 1916. Moya Hanson, a curator at the Colorado Historical Society, was an excellent guide to Denver’s past.

Dave Naples, president of the Moffat Railroad Museum project and the Grand County Model Railroad Club, was an amiable companion on this part of my journey. He read and made adjustments to the “Hell Hill” chapter, and supplied me with details about the size of the locomotives and the setup of the parlor cars. He showed me the site of his future museum in Granby and took me around Fraser, where Dr. Susan Anderson practiced at the turn of the twentieth century; her examination table and the contents of her doctor’s bag are in a room upstairs at the Cozens Ranch & Stage Stop Museum.

One of my happiest early discoveries was Ros’s oral history at Tread of Pioneers Museum. When I put the CD in the computer and heard her inflections and turns of phrase as an elderly woman describing her year in Elkhead, I felt as if I were listening again to my grandmother. I have since spent many hours in the museum, assisted by curator Katie Peck Adams and executive director Candice Lombardo. Daniel Tyler and Betty Henshaw were solicitous hosts, as were Renny Daly and Jain Himot—proving my grandmother’s point about the hospitality of Westerners. Holly Williams, who has maintained a decades-long relationship with the Perry-Mansfield Camp,
led me further into its remarkable history. The former executive director, June Lindenmayer, provided contacts and context. Karolynn Lestrud, the camp historian, sent early photographs. T. Ray Faulkner, a retired professor of dance who worked as the assistant to Portia and Charlotte from 1957–65 and as a volunteer from 1969–2008, was a delightful source of personal recollections about them and the early days of modern dance.