Nothing Daunted (6 page)

During Auburn’s military funerals for its fallen soldiers, she and Milly sat on the curb in front of their house and watched the aged veterans of the Civil War marching solemnly by in faded uniforms. Dorothy remembered that Brigadier General William H. Seward, Jr., led “a fife and drum corps which used to wail famous funeral marches which I can hear to this day.”

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Dorothy and Ros were separated for the first time in their third year of high school, when Ros went to Germany with her family. The Underwoods asked Dorothy to join them, and she desperately wanted to go, but she thought that if she didn’t apply herself to her schoolwork, she might not get into Smith College, which she and Ros had long planned to attend together. Dorothy’s oldest sister, Anna, a brilliant, serious girl with a long, heavy braid down her back, had gone to Smith in 1893—a major event in the family. Few women went to college, and Dorothy was prepared to sacrifice for
that experience. Nevertheless, she came to rue her decision to stay home.

While Ros was becoming worldly—learning German, traveling to Greece, and journeying up the Nile in a dahabeah—Dorothy was attending Rye Seminary, a girls’ boarding school on the Boston Post Road in Rye, New York. The school gave its students a sober Christian education, with an emphasis on college preparatory work. Although it eventually morphed into the well-appointed Rye Country Day School, it was a spartan place early in the twentieth century. At mealtime, the girls clattered down the iron stairs into the basement, where the French teacher presided over one table and the German teacher the other, and no English was spoken. As a result, conversations were halting and garbled. Dorothy shared a large bedroom with two other girls. Each had an iron bed and a washstand, and there was also a piano in the room. Girls were excused from class for their weekly baths. A schedule was posted on the bathroom door at the end of the hall.

In her letters home, Dorothy wrote about extracurricular activities off school grounds. In 1903, when she was sixteen, she described a day in New York, where she and her classmates went to Wagner’s
Die Walküre.
“Oh, Grandma,” she wrote, “I have just come home, and the opera was the most wonderful thing I have ever seen. I was afraid that it would be deep and perhaps it was, but I never enjoyed anything so much in all my life.” The next fall, she told about a trip with her friends to Lakehurst, New Jersey. The girls stayed at a beautiful inn where, she wrote, “the spirit is so lovely that it doesn’t seem a bit like a hotel.” They played tennis, danced, and took walks in the woods.

At Thanksgiving, Dorothy and three other girls were invited to a friend’s house near Port Chester, and she wrote to her mother on November 27 about their trip into Manhattan, where they shopped at Altman’s, had lunch, and went to the Hudson Theater to see
Sunday.
“Ethel Barrymore is simply perfect,” she announced, “and I am crazy about her.”

Although Dorothy said she didn’t learn much at Rye, she was strongly influenced by one teacher who sometimes invited her to her room, where she served little cakes and pastries and gave her books of poetry by Shelley and Keats. “I just loved her,” Dorothy said, “and this is a perfect example of what a good teacher can do to stimulate a growing young person’s mind and imagination.”

“A
FUNNY, STRAGGLY PLACE
”

O
n the morning after their arrival in Hayden, Dorothy and Ros woke up early. They would be leaving in several hours for Elkhead, in the mountain range that abutted the Yampa Valley, and as Dorothy recalled, “We could hardly wait to see what was in store for us.” When they walked into the dining room, half a dozen cowboys were seated at a large round table. “Of course nobody got up or anything, they simply stared at us.” As they sat down, the man next to her said, “Good morning, ma’am.” He was wearing a boiled white shirt with no collar, and a diamond stud in the neckband. The table was covered with hot cereals and biscuits and jams and coffee, and she and Ros ordered eggs, “once over, in the most approved manner.” Then “started a great procession of right and left,” as the men passed the food around, so persistently that it was hard to eat. The women tried to make conversation, “but all we got out from anybody was ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am’ or ‘I wouldn’t know, ma’am,’ ” and when they
handed a dish to a neighbor, he would say, “ ‘I wouldn’t wish to care for any, thank you, ma’am.’ ”

Their breakfast companions bore no resemblance to the refined young men they were accustomed to. Nor did Farrington Carpenter, who soon came in, introduced them to the cowboys, and said he had two ponies for them, as well as a conveyance to take them to the Harrison ranch. “We are tremendously impressed by Mr. C., who is a big man,” Dorothy wrote that morning. “He has a gentle, kindly manner, with keen eyes, a fine sense of humor and a regular live wire along every line.” He took them to his office to talk everything over, and Dorothy—not wanting to confirm her mother’s preconceptions about the uncouth West—avoided any mention of the office’s history as a one-lane bowling alley, the electrical cord dangling from the ceiling to Carpenter’s desk lamp, or the homely floral curtains.

Instead, she wrote: “His library was perfectly amazing, it showed such broad up-to-date interests, and we are certainly going to have to work night and day to keep up our end.” His books included a complete set of Shakespeare,
The Life of David Crockett, An Autobiography,
a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and lectures,
The Greek View of Life,
a biography of Walt Whitman, a six-volume edition of the poetry of Robert Burns, several biographies of Abraham Lincoln,
The Colorado Justice Manual,
and a book called
Swine,
a breeding and feeding guide. They spent two hours discussing their work at the school, and Ros wrote that morning with undisguised relief: “He is anxious to have us run the whole thing as we want to run it—and says we don’t have to teach Domestic Science if we don’t want to—or Sunday School either.” She and Dorothy, having grown up in households staffed by maids and cooks, were more nervous about teaching domestic science, a turn-of-the-century precursor to home economics, than any other subject. “We didn’t know anything about domestic science,” Ros later admitted.

As for Hayden, Dorothy wrote, it was “a funny, straggly place,” and its residents “snappy and entertaining,” their good manners “as surprising as the kind of English they speak.” Neither of them mentioned the cowboys in the dining room. Ros wrote, “The air is like tonic—and
we are cool at last after dreadful heat in Denver. The country here is flat—with blue mountains in the country towards we go.” Dorothy’s pony was a sorrel called Nugget, on loan from Carpenter. She said he “is so little that I can hop off and on with the greatest ease.” Ros’s horse came from Steamboat Springs, and she was to name him herself.

At Earnest Wagner’s saddle shop, they rented saddles and bought bits, bridles, ropes, spurs, and ponchos, then shook hands with all of the townspeople in the street. “We were introduced to each one, who gave us a terrible grip with their horny paws,” Dorothy wrote innocently. As they were about to embark on their long, dusty ride to Elkhead, Ros scribbled: “Mr. C. has just telephoned that he is coming to lunch with us, and start us on our way—so no more now. Rosamond.”

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Straggly Hayden, like so many western towns, had come into being quickly and violently. Among its first settlers was the extended family of Porter M. Smart, the superintendent of the Western Colorado Improvement Company. In December 1874, the
Rocky Mountain News
referred to Smart as “
one of that peculiar and persevering class
of pioneers who are always in the van of civilization.” He had built his house in “the remotest settlement of Western Colorado.” That winter, his son Albert took in a few families who had been unable to provide for themselves, and one man began to steal flour, bacon, and groceries. The “culprit was arrested, tried, convicted, tied up to a tree and ‘larruped’ with long switches, and then given forty-eight hours to leave the country. He left.” The
News
declared, “The company of which Mr. Smart is the representative is doing a world of good in thus extending family altars into the wilderness.”

The Smarts and their few neighbors were sometimes visited by Ute Indians, members of a nomadic tribe whose name for the Rockies was “the shining mountains.” They had inhabited the land for over five hundred years. In return for dinner and a few sacks of potatoes, the
Utes offered game and buckskins. But relations with the Utes became difficult over the next several years, as miners and merchants began to settle in the region.

Like the early gold prospectors in Denver, people rushed out after learning of the region’s natural resources. This time the riches were publicized almost single-handedly by one man: Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, the world-famous geologist who in 1871 had led an expedition to survey all of Yellowstone country, and helped convince Congress to establish it as the first national park. Hayden spent the summers of 1873–75 conducting a similarly exhaustive study of the Colorado Rockies. One of his teams of surveyors, photographers, and scientists, working for the Department of the Interior, camped by the Bear River, near where the Smarts lived; the surveyors’ mail was addressed simply to “Hayden Camp.”

A thin, obsessive scholar
with dark pouches under his eyes and an irascible disposition, Hayden had a genius for transforming highly technical geographical and geological data into popular science. He also was an outspoken advocate of development, writing to the secretary of the Interior Department about how rapidly the region would grow with the coming of the railroads, thus rendering it “
very desirable that its resources be made known
to the world at as early a date as possible.”
He gave lectures in Washington and New York
in the mid-1870s about his discoveries of fantastic geysers and bubbling gray mud pots in Yellowstone, and hidden valleys with thriving communities in the Rockies. The talks included slides by a member of his team, the renowned photographer William H. Jackson, projected on a stereopticon. Hayden’s
Atlas of Colorado,
published in 1877, was glowingly written about in both the United States and Europe.
William Blackmore, a British investor in American ventures
, claimed that English schoolboys couldn’t name the presidents, but “all knew intimately the stories of Dr. Hayden’s expeditions in to the wild Indian country of the far West.”

The atlas gorgeously laid out every feature of the state in a succession of oversize maps showing its topography, drainage, geology—and its economic resources, including “Gold and Silver Districts” and
“Coal Lands.” The region west of the Divide was densely speckled with prospective mining sites. The atlas also revealed how much of that land the Utes controlled, according to a treaty signed in 1873: twelve million acres on the Western Slope—over half of the Colorado Rockies. Two pages of the atlas, showing northwestern Colorado, were marked with large capital letters crossing the book’s gutter and filling almost the entire map:
RESERVATION OF THE UTE INDIANS
.

By the late 1870s, Colorado’s second mining boom was well under way, and Leadville and other camps were built on Ute territory. The Utes rebelled, setting fires to settlers’ homes and to timber and prairie grass. This fueled a propaganda campaign in the pages of the
Denver Tribune,
with the slogan “The Utes Must Go!” Governor Frederick W. Pitkin emphatically shared that view, and did his part to encourage the growing public uproar.

The most serious trouble between the settlers and the Utes
was precipitated by Nathan Meeker, head of the White River Agency, forty-five miles southwest of Hayden. Meeker was attempting to build a model agricultural community, teaching the Indians to become good farmers and Christians; educating their children; and disabusing them of numerous uncivilized practices. The Ute men, though, believed that farming was women’s work and that horses were not meant to pull a plow but to be ridden and raced. They despised Meeker, with his arrogant paternalism and his threatening claim that the U.S. government owned their land.