Nothing Daunted (9 page)

That fall, he invited Wilson to speak about the Quad Plan at the Campus Club. Wilson had just returned from a trip to the University of Wisconsin, where he had delivered a lecture on Abraham Lincoln. He was full of what he had seen there,
telling his acolyte
: “At those great state institutions, the gates are flung wide open. The wind of public opinion sweeps unobstructed through them. . . . But here at a proprietary institution, we are surrounded by a great high wall, which admits little from the outside world.”

After dinner, Wilson instructed the students, “
When you go out into the world and have to make your own living
, you may have to sit at a desk next to a man who spits all over his own shoes, and you won’t be able to take it because you have been so careful to avoid all unpleasantness in your college associations.” In 1909 a majority of the trustees and a number of influential members of the administration at Princeton forced Wilson to drop the Quad Plan. The fight embittered him, but it also steeled him for a career in politics.
Aristocracy, he informed a despondent Ferry Carpenter
, was a fact of life even in democratic America.

Wilson and Ferry shared an interest in the American West.
Wilson had gotten to know Frederick Jackson Turner
in 1889, when Turner was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and Wilson a visiting professor. They lived in the same boardinghouse, and their conversations about the role of the West in American history helped Turner to develop his Frontier Thesis. Four years later, Turner made his renowned speech in Chicago, arguing that “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

Carpenter chose to be inspired by Wilson’s view of the West rather than bow to social realities in the East. He, too, believed that American democracy was born on the frontier. Growing up in Evanston, Ferry had idolized two of his father’s cousins from Vermont who had become ranchers in North Dakota. They visited the Carpenters whenever they went to Chicago to sell their cattle at the stockyards. “
They wore big black hats
and buffalo robe overcoats that hung to their ankles,” Carpenter wrote. When he begged his relatives to take him back with them, they told him there were Indians in North Dakota “just looking for a chance to scalp young boys.” He couldn’t get enough of these stories, and he twice convinced his mother to take him to Chicago to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

He was a spindly youth. Injured in an ice-hockey scrimmage in high school, he was taken to New Mexico to regain his strength. After washing dishes and doing the family laundry at a twenty-thousand-acre ranch, he managed to get a job as a ranch hand in Colfax County, for a legendary pioneer named J. B. Dawson. At the age of fifteen, Carpenter had found his western role model. In the 1850s Dawson drove cattle fifteen hundred miles from Arkansas to California; during the Pike’s Peak gold rush, he took his herds from Texas to the soon-to-be territory of Colorado. He served as a Texas Ranger during the Civil War and fought Indians on the Plains. Dawson had a disfiguring scar on his right hand, caused by an arrow wound.
During a raid on Paint Creek
, a Comanche who was no more than seventeen, having witnessed the death of a comrade, rode straight at Dawson and met
him, Dawson told a journalist, “face to face about ten steps apart. We both started to shoot almost at the same time, I with my pistol, he with his bow. He was a little quicker than I was and his arrow went into my right hand . . . and into the lock on my pistol, disabling it and rendering me helpless.” One of Dawson’s companions shot the Indian, and he fell from his horse. “When we looked at his body,” Dawson claimed, “we found he had one rifle wound and nine pistol wounds, besides the wound made by the shotgun. . . . His shirt was as bloody as if it had been dipped in blood.” Dawson told people when recounting this story, Ferry doubtless among them, “He was the bravest man I ever met.”

In 1905 Dawson sold his ranch and bought two thousand acres in Routt County, Colorado, an idyllic stretch of land by the Yampa River (formerly the Bear River), four miles outside the village of Hayden. The previous owner had added onto his cabin by putting four abandoned homesteads on some roped-together logs and pulling them over by mules. He put the cabins together like Lincoln Logs.
As one of Dawson’s granddaughters described it
, “Floors met at different levels. . . . Ceilings jigged up and down, sometimes as much as three feet higher in the middle of a hallway; walls, butted together, refused to stand amicably side-by-side. . . . On the inside the rough logs or rough-sawn timbers were covered with a kind of construction paper which absorbed moisture. Brown stains like thin tobacco juice ran down the walls.”

Carpenter was mesmerized by Dawson’s description of Colorado: “the place for a young man to go. The hills . . . are full of deer and elk and antelope, and the streams are full of trout.”
The alfalfa was so high
, Dawson told him, “that you couldn’t see Ol’ Coley’s back when he pulled the mowing machine through it. And the bees made all the honey that you wanted. The public domain, open and unfenced, was available to any citizen over twenty-one. All you had to do was file on a homestead and, by living on it for seven months a year for five years, get title to 160 acres of free land.” Dawson talked of a town (Steamboat Springs), twenty-two miles away, as a place that had every
kind of mineral water, which could “cure anything from gripes to the hiccups . . . and you’d come out a new man.”

In the Princeton library
, Carpenter read about Routt County and learned that it stretched 150 miles west from the Continental Divide near Steamboat Springs to the Utah border. From the Wyoming line, the county made its way south almost to the Grand River—now the Colorado River. In 1900 the entire population of Routt County was thirty-six hundred people, and, Carpenter wrote, “for a hundred miles to the west, not a single town was shown on the map and the land was marked ‘sage and bad lands.’ ” There was no railroad in the region, although he learned that David Moffat, a Denver tycoon, was building one from Denver to Salt Lake City.

Ferry asked if he could work for Dawson again that summer, and in June 1906, after his freshman year, he headed to Wolcott, Colorado, by train and, the final three days, by stagecoach. Carpenter trained Dawson’s mares and watched over the wild elk, buffalo, and deer that Dawson had brought to the ranch. Ferry returned the following summer as well. He regarded the fertile Yampa Valley, he wrote, “as one of the most beautiful spots on earth.”

On arriving that second summer, Ferry was asked to “take a letter to Dave Moffat,” who wanted to run the tracks of his railroad through two and a half miles of Dawson’s meadows, a few hundred feet from the ranch house. Old Man Dawson, Ferry said, had known Moffat ever since Moffat ran a little stationery store in Denver City.
As Carpenter recalled, Dawson “could read, but he couldn’t write. . . . [H]e used me as his amanuensis.” The letter read:

Friend Dave,

I came over here to Northwest Colorado to get away from railroads. Now you’ve surveyed a railroad right in my doorstep. I can’t stop civilization. When you get ready to build, I’ll give you the right of way.

All Dawson asked in return was a flag stop and load-out facility, which he could use to get his cattle to market. The railroad stock cars
were parked on a siding, with a chute for herding the cattle inside. The cars were then picked up by a passing freight train. Dawson and his wife, Lavinia, could ride the rails to Denver right from the ranch.

One of Ferry’s jobs was to help Dawson’s surveyor identify the borders of some state-owned land that Dawson wanted to lease. On one excursion into the Elkhead Mountains north of Hayden, the two stopped to eat lunch on a rise above Morgan Creek. Wolf Mountain was visible to the east, and the Flat Top Mountains about forty-five miles to the south. Consulting his calculations during lunch, the surveyor noted with surprise that the only water within miles, a flowing spring, was twenty-four feet from the state land. It was part of the public domain and therefore available for homesteading.

Carpenter said he felt as if he had stumbled on a gold mine
, and he moved quickly. He was only twenty years old and barely broken into ranch life, but after consulting with Dawson, he put up a sign saying that the land was Farrington R. Carpenter’s homestead. He took his camp supplies, bedding, and rifle to a spot by the spring and watered his horse there every day. Six weeks later, on the morning of his twenty-first birthday, August 10, 1907, at the Department of the Interior’s land office in Hayden, he filed his claim for 160 acres under the Homestead Act of 1862. He called the property Oak Point, and five years later, when he received his certificate of approval from the Glenwood Springs land office, he felt that he was “a frontiersman at last, a citizen of the American fraternity of empire builders.”

In June 1908 a childhood friend from Evanston, Jack White, with whom Ferry had spent some time in Taos and who longed to settle in the West, came to see Elkhead for himself. Carpenter suggested that they join forces. White filed on land near Carpenter’s, and they began to plan their future together as partners in the cattle-ranching business.
Carpenter asked his father for a loan
of $2,500 to buy twenty-five purebred Herefords. Carpenter Sr. agreed, with two provisos: he would receive one third of the profits, and Ferry would study law before settling in Routt County.
The last thing Ferry wanted to do
, he said, was “sit at a steam radiator and stare at a book all day long.”
Nevertheless, he complied, and Jack took care of the cattle while Ferry attended Harvard Law School, returning to Elkhead in the summers. In a 1909 photograph, Ferry sits very tall in his saddle in shirtsleeves, vest, bow tie, spurs, and bowler hat, in the center of Hayden. There is a mud path running by the false-fronted Hayden restaurant, and his horse, Nugget, stands up to his knees in weeds.

In August 1914 Ferry filed for an adjoining 160 acres under the Desert Land Act of 1877. One could obtain title to “desert land” by irrigating twenty acres,
which he proposed to do
by impounding the overflow from the spring into a reservoir he was building.
He described the improvements he had made upon his first claim
: a three-room house (30 x 30) and barn (18 x 20), three corrals, a branding chute, a squeezer (“all well-built”), a cellar, and four hundred feet of piping from spring to garden and house; fifteen acres grubbed of scrub oak, broke, and fenced; five acres of oats; four acres of potatoes, corn, “garden stuff, strawberries, raspberries, etc.”; sixty apple trees, “the first to live in my altitude. About 20 of them are alive today, and thriving.”

In answer to a question on the land office’s form about whether he had any personal property elsewhere, he declared, “I have about $500 worth of books in Hayden, Colo.” He wrote in his autobiography, “Part of my joy in that homestead derived from my feeling that I was playing a role in a unique historical process.”
It was as thrilling to him as the American Revolution
. “I felt that this remarkable system of land distribution, in contrast to the feudal system in the rest of the world, was the keystone to the success of American democracy.”

T
HE
G
RAND
T
OUR

D
orothy and Ros took seriously President Seelye’s admonition that they meet their full potential. He liked to ask students, “Are you a leaner or a lifter?” Life in Auburn, though, was highly ritualized and didn’t allow for much lifting. Its social routines continued much as they had for generations. Ros volunteered at the Auburn City Hospital, the day nursery at Eliza Osborne’s Woman’s Union, and the Ambulance Aid Society. Both joined the Young Ladies Benevolent Association, and Dorothy was a member of the Auburn College Club.
Their parents held afternoon card parties
, followed by suppers of grapefruit (a novelty fruit), pastry shells filled with chicken and mushrooms or sweetbreads and canned peas, hot rolls, and ice cream and cakes from Sherry’s in New York. Many in their social circle were members of the Euchre or Whist Club and the Toboggan Club, to which they wore special suits made out of heavy Canadian blankets.