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Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood attended grade school and Smith College together, spent nine months on a grand tour of Europe in 1910, and then, bored with society luncheons and chaperoned balls and not yet ready for marriage, they went off to teach the children of homesteaders in a remote schoolhouse on the Western Slope of Colorado. They traveled on the new railroad over the Continental Divide and by wagon to Elkhead, a tiny settlement far from the nearest town. Their students came to school from miles away in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string.
Dorothy Woodruff was the grandmother of New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden. Nearly one hundred years later, Wickenden found the buoyant, detailed, colorful letters the two women wrote to their families. Through them, she has chronicled their trials in the classroom, the cowboys and pioneering women they met, and the violent kidnapping of a close friend. Central to their narrative is Ferry Carpenter, the witty, idealistic, and occasionally outrageous young lawyer and cattle rancher who hired them, in part because he thought they would make attractive and cultivated brides. None of them imagined the transforming effect the year would have—on the children, the families, and the teachers.
Wickenden set out on her own journey to discover what two intrepid Eastern women found when they went West, and what America was like at that uncertain moment, with the country poised for the First World War, but going through its own period of self-discovery.
Drawing upon the letters, interviews with descendants, research about these vanished communities, and trips to the region, Wickenden creates a compelling, original saga about the two intrepid young women and the “settling up” of the West.
A detailed study of two spirited and privileged young women who unexpectedly became a small part of the history of the American West.
Rosamund Underwood and Dorothy Woodruff, both Smith College graduates, spent their 20s traveling to Europe and Manhattan and pouring tea for suffragettes at home in Auburn, N.Y. Nearing 30, they were becoming restless and, longing to do useful and interesting work, applied to become teachers in the small community of Elkhead, Colo. New Yorker executive editor Wickenden, Woodruff's granddaughter, relates their experiences with a vivid, gossipy flair, and readers get an excellent sense of what everyday life was like, not only for the privileged and highly educated, but for the mine worker, the homesteader, the elementary-school teacher. However, readers expecting a straightforward, linear narrative will be baffled by the sinuous curve of the story as it makes switchbacks and loops, like the much-discussed Moffat Road Railroad. In fact, the momentous first day of school for the young teachers doesn't arrive until halfway through the book. The earlier material covers their journey to Elkhead, their childhood and college years and their extensive domestic and international travel. The author's frequent diversions into local and national history demand careful attention, and they might delight one reader but bore another. Wickenden defers the discussion of the women's marriages until two-thirds of the way through the book, which both prioritizes their accomplishments and entices the reader. We know at the outset that Dorothy has children, and this knowledge pulls us gently through the narrative's many turns.
An absorbing maze of a book—readers may well, like Woodruff and Underwood, find their hearts lost to the West.
PROLOGUE
One weekend afternoon in the fall of 2008, at the back of a drawer in my old wooden desk at home, I came across a folder I had forgotten. “Dorothy Woodruff Letters, Elkhead 1916–17.” My mother had given me the file when my children were young, and I had put it away, intending to look through it, but life had intervened. I glanced at the first letter. Dated Friday, July 28, 1916, it was written on the stationery of the Hayden Inn. At the top of the sheet was a photograph of a homely three-story concrete-block house with a few spindly saplings out front. The inn advertised itself as “The Only First-Class Hotel in Hayden.” Dorothy wrote: “My dearest family: Can you believe that I am actually far out here in Colorado?”
She and her close friend, Rosamond Underwood, had grown up together in Auburn, New York. They had just arrived after a five-day journey and were preparing to head into a remote mountain range in the Rockies, to teach school in a settlement called Elkhead. Dorothy’s letter described their stop overnight in Denver, their train ride across the Continental Divide, and their introductions to the locals of Hayden, whom she described as “all agog” over them “and so funny.” One man could barely be restrained “from showing us a bottle of gall stones just removed from his wife!” She closed by saying, “They are all so friendly and kind—and we are thrilled by everything. We start now—four hours drive. Goodbye in haste.…”
Dorothy Woodruff was my grandmother. As I began reading the letters, I recognized her voice immediately, even though they were written by a young woman—twenty-nine years old, unmarried, belatedly setting out on her own. An avid correspondent, she captured the personalities of the people she met; the harsh landscape; her trials with a classroom of unruly young boys; and her devotion to Rosamond, known to my brothers and me as “Aunt Ros.” I also was struck by their unusually warm friendship with two men: the young lawyer and rancher who hired them, Farrington Carpenter; and Bob Perry, who was the supervisor of his father’s coal mine. They were eighteen hundred miles away from their families, and from decorous notions about relations between the sexes.
The letters revealed the contradictions of Dorothy’s upbringing. She was a daughter of the Victorian aristocracy. Her forebears, like Rosamond’s, were entrepreneurs and lawyers and bankers who had become wealthy during the Industrial Revolution. In 1906, the young women were sent to Smith, one of the earliest women’s colleges, and afterward, they were indulged for a year with a grand tour of Europe, during which they saw their first “aeroplane,” learned how to blow the foam off a mug of beer, expressed disdain for the paintings of Matisse, and watched Nijinsky dance. Then, like other girls of their background, they were expected to return home to marry, and marry well.
Yet they had grown up surrounded by the descendants of some of the most prominent reformers in American history, including the suffragists who organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, fifteen miles west of Auburn; and the man who overturned barbaric penal practices at the Auburn state prison, Sing Sing, and penitentiaries across the country. Auburn was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and some of the families they knew had hidden runaway slaves in their basements. Dorothy’s grandfather lived next door to William Seward, President Lincoln’s secretary of state. One day when she was visiting my family in Weston, Connecticut, she recorded an oral history, speaking with unerring precision about her childhood and about her time in Colorado. Retrieving the transcript of the tape, I was reminded of the breathtaking brevity of America’s past.
I remember Dorothy as white-haired, impeccably attired, and sometimes stern. The second youngest of seven children, she grew up in a big hipped-roof clapboard house staffed by servants. Her bedroom and that of her younger sister, Milly, were in the nursery, reached by the back stairs. Raised largely by their nursemaid, they rarely stepped into the kitchen. When Dorothy’s four children were growing up, she didn’t know how to cook anything except creamed potatoes and hot cocoa. Every night she brushed her hair a hundred strokes with a French boar-bristle brush. She joked to us about her height—four feet eleven and shrinking every year. To reach her high mahogany four-poster bed, inherited from her parents, she had to use a footstool upholstered in needlepoint.
She gave me tips in etiquette: how to file my nails, how to set a formal table, how to avoid acting “common.” When I was a slouching teenager, she showed me how she had been taught to walk across the room with a book balanced on her head. On my eighteenth birthday, she wrote to me: “To be happy it is necessary to be constantly giving to others. I do not mean to give in work alone—but all of your self. That means interest in other people—not only by affection—but by kindness.” She didn’t like the fashions of the 1970s—curtains of hair, tie-dyed T-shirts, and tight bell-bottoms—and once told me haughtily, “I never wore a pair of trousers in my life.”
For all that, she was spirited and funny—not at all the deferential young woman she had been brought up to be. After she and Ros returned from Europe, they attended friends’ weddings, along with traditional luncheons and balls, but six years later, they were still uninterested in the suitors who were interested in them. Chafing at the rigid social routines and not getting anywhere with the ineffectual suffrage work they had taken on, they didn’t hesitate when they heard about two teaching jobs in Colorado. The nine months my grandmother spent there seemed to have shaped her as much as her entire youth in Auburn. She was full of expansive admiration for the hardworking people of Elkhead, and when she faced great personal difficulties of her own, she called to mind the uncomplaining endurance she had witnessed in the settlers and their children.
She and Ros, like other easterners going west, were time travelers, moving back to the frontier. Although they ventured out after the first settlers, and went by train rather than covered wagon, their destination felt more like 1870 than 1916. They took with them progressive ideas about education, technology, and women—and postcards from their travels abroad. The homesteaders—motley transplants from across the country, Europe, and Russia—lived almost twenty miles north of Hayden. Effectively cut off from modern life by poverty and the Rocky Mountains, the pioneers found the two women as exotic as Dorothy and Ros found them.
Although World War I was looming, such a cataclysm was unimaginable to Americans who knew nothing of combat. Dorothy sometimes talked disparagingly about her grandfather’s brother, who had avoided service in the Civil War by paying a substitute to take his place—a common practice among wealthy families in the North. Just weeks before Dorothy and Ros left for Colorado, President Wilson averted war with Mexico. The prevailing spirit among the elites of Auburn, the industrialists of Denver, and the homesteaders of Elkhead was an exhilarating optimism about the future.
These people were swept up in some of the strongest currents of the country’s history: the expulsion of native tribes; the mining of gold, silver, and coal; the building of a network of railroads that linked disparate parts of the country and led to the settlement of the West; the development of rural schools; the entry of immigrants, African-Americans, and women into the workforce and the voting booth; even the origins of modern dance. Their lives were integral to the making of America, yet the communities they built, even their idioms, had all but vanished.
As I got to know the children and grandchildren of the people my grandmother told us about, I began to see her story as more than a curious family history. It was an alternative Western. There were strutting cowboys and eruptions of violence, but the records the residents left behind turned out to be full of their own indelible characters and plot twists. Dozens of descendants in Denver, Steamboat Springs, Hayden, Elkhead, and Oak Creek had kept their family memorabilia from that year. Rebecca Wattles, a rancher in Hayden and the granddaughter of the secretary of the Elkhead school board, showed me the 1920 yearbook of the first five graduates of the school, all of whom had been Ros’s students. They wrote: “It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to buck trail for two or three miles when the trail is drifted and your horse lunges and plunges; nor yet to ski, when the snow is loose and sticky. But, if as we are told, it is these things that develop grit, stick-to-it-ive-ness, and independence—well, the children who have gone to school in Elk Head, ought surely to have a superfluous amount of those qualities.”
One Sunday in early October 2009, my husband and I pulled up to an old white Georgian house on a cul-de-sac in Norwalk, Connecticut. We were greeted at the front door by Peter Cosel, one of Ros’s grandsons. He appeared to be mildly amused by my mission: a search for the letters that Rosamond had written from Elkhead. For a year I had been pestering him about going through the boxes he had in storage there. Peter called his brother Rob, also a lawyer, who arrived just as we finished a cursory examination of the attic treasures, including a trunk filled with papers dating back to the 1850s from a branch of the Underwood family that had settled in Chicago.
I sat on the floor in front of a sagging box, blackened on the bottom from mildew and eaten away in spots by a squirrel, and began to unpack it, setting aside a stack of five-year diaries—fastidious chronicles by Ros’s mother of her family’s daily life in Auburn. Peter absently combed through some business documents of his great-grandfather’s, a man named Sam Perry, who—I soon learned—was one of Denver’s “empire builders,” a financier of the railroad that Dorothy and Ros rode over the Continental Divide. Rob sat on the edge of the bed and talked about childhood visits to their grandmother’s rustic summer cabin in the hills of Strawberry Park outside Steamboat Springs. Then my husband handed me a two-page typewritten letter. In the upper-right corner, it said, “Saturday Night. Aug. 6.” I looked at the closing: “Dotty and I can hardly believe that this school is really ours to command! … Lovingly ROSAMOND.”
Ros’s entire correspondence was there, each letter typed, folded, and numbered by her mother. The letters had been written to her parents, who, like Dorothy’s, had left them for her children and grandchildren. Unwinding the string of a thick legal envelope, I looked inside. It contained dozens of articles and letters from October 1916. They confirmed the most improbable of all the tales my grandmother had told us, about the violent kidnapping of one of their friends. Sensational headlines were spread across the front pages from Denver to Los Angeles: HOW THE MILLIONAIRE’S SON WAS KIDNAPPED AND HELD FOR RANSOM; EXTRA! KIDNAPPER IS SLAIN.
All of these papers and recollections, with their idiosyncratic details about the “settling up” of northwestern Colorado, provided a backstory to America’s leap into the twentieth century. And they filled out the saga about two cosseted women from New York who shunned convention to head out to what was still, in many ways, the Wild West.
© 2011 Dorothy Wickenden
Prologue ix
Part 1 Beginnings
1 Overland Journey 3
2 The Girls from Auburn 14
3 "A Funny, Scraggly Place" 28
4 "Refined, intelligent gentlewomen" 35
Part 2 Old World and New
5 Unfenced 45
6 The Grand Tour 53
7 Ferry's Scheme 71
8 Departure 79
9 Hell Hill 89
Part 3 Working Girls
10 Turnips and Tears 107
11 The Mad Ladies of Strawberry Park 124
12 Debut 134
Part 4 Reckonings
13 The Cream of Routt County 149
14 "Unarmed and defenseless" 162
15 "The Dark Days Are Very Few" 172
16 Three-Wire Winter 187
17 Commencement 205
Epilogue 215
Acknowledgments 227
Notes 235
Bibliography 261
Index 275
More Photos from Dorothy Woodruff's Albums 287
l_manning
Posted June 20, 2011
I loved this book! It was so amazing and inspiring to read not only about Rosamund and Dorothy but all the different people trying to make a life of it in Colorado. They really were working hard and making the best of what they had. Of course, the two women at the middle of this book were really fantastic. They approached everything before them with an open mind and good attitudes. Coming from very wealthy backgrounds, you don't see any indication that they think they are better than the settlers in Colorado. Ros and Dotty were determined to make the most of their experiences, and this shaped their entire lives.
There was a lot of history given not only about our heroines, but also Colorado and the railroad there. Some of this was a bit dry to read. However, once the story in Colorado began in earnest, I was thoroughly engaged. I did not want to put the book down. I even found myself cheering for one potential suitor over another. You can clearly feel the personalities of the people coming through. Their stories have some interesting twists and turns, and I was so surprised by some things that happened. More than anything though, I felt like these were two women I could have been friends with. They lived their lives on their terms, and they were able to have some amazing adventures in the process. I think we could all stand to learn to take all the opportunities in our live with equal excitement. This was a great book, and I hope many people will take a chance to read it.
Galley provided by publisher for review.
12 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 13, 2011
If you want to learn about an era of the West that is not familiar to most of us, read this book. It's educational, entertaining and fascinating. The author certainly is to be commended on her research and patience in gleaning enough to write about.
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 11, 2011
What a disappointment! I wanted desperately to love this, since it told a parallel story to my own great grandmother's life. Good lord, could it have been any drier? I hoped for more excerpts of their letters and diaries; instead there was way too much on the permutations of what people wore, ate and did for entertainment. This wasn't a treatment of women's journey toward independence, nor even a story of two intrepid teachers... It was like reading a travel journal written by someone who didn't want to dig too deeply into their experience.
5 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 25, 2012
This book was extremely enjoyable. At first I thought the two upper class women were spoiled and lazy but their view of life at the school and their real life for the children made them very likeable and I found myself cheering them on remembering my first year as an inexperienced teacher. Some reviewers found the historical bits dry but I love history and turn of the century America is fascinating. I think this bits of history really brought their society and culture to live. I definitely recommend this book.
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 29, 2011
Wickenden does a good job keeping in thbe little details of the history of these remarkable women. If you love history and a little adventure this is a great read!
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.SuzeJones58
Posted July 8, 2012
Easy read about not too distant challenging circumstances. I highly recommend this book and am in the process of at least asking the older of my teenage daughters to read it. Why? As a counterpoint to the crass, crude and very depressing stories of the self-absorbed and entitled-feeling Kardashians, 16 & Pregnant girls and all the other awful media personalities who influence (& take down) our culture today. Regardless of how this story is written (yes - it could have been more lyrical), it is a WONDERFUL real-life story of two young women of substance, spirit, grit and adventure. I absolutely adore the epilogue (one of the most romantic end notes to a story I have ever read!). One fair criticism I feel I can write is, 'Gosh-darned, I really wish there were more photos throughout the book.' I cannot wait for someone to pick up the TV and movie rights to this book.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 28, 2011
Dorothy Wickenden's account of two adventurous women who travelled to Colorado to teach rural children is outstanding.
Wickenden's research blew me away. Saved letters are the basis of the book but her dogged work into the minutae of these women's lives while living for a year as single women in very rough country is a testament to her skills.
So many interesting details make the book a delight. Children walking miles in the snow only to arrive at school crying from the cold; a dance school that attracts Agnes DeMille to choreograph dance for them; a main character is kidnapped and escapes; the women's hometown reaching out to their "sister" town by sending clothing, books and Christmas presents for their much needier counterparts.
The two main characters are easy to like!
A great read...would be a good book for high school students to read regarding history and perseverance.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 3, 2011
I enjoyed and appreciated these very likable down to earth ladies who left their comfortable New York life of wealth and privilege and met and accepted a life of many sacrifices in early 20th century rural Colorado. They accepted much of their new lives with humor which added to the enjoyment of the book. Instead of being depressed and ready to call it quits during stressful times (truly stressful), they continue on with determination and dedication to this new life, new friends and their pupils, the school children, who are a very touching part of this book. There is a humorous conclusion to a long dark necessary night's horseback ride in deep freezing snow, an experience that would probably send most city girls back to the comforts of home, but not these two undaunted daring ladies. They find a surprising solution to this exhausting frightening journey and carry on. Humor and drama against the background of history with an interesting cast of characters who add to the enjoyment and appreciation of this adventure.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 3, 2012
I loved this story about two adventurous young women from western New York State. One gets a great feeling about the West (Colorado) in its early days. I love reading books about smart women and this is a good one.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 27, 2011
Nothing Daunted by Dorothy Wickenden is a fantastic documentary of two girls, Rosamond Underwood and Dorothy Woodruff, on the journey to become teachers in Colorado during the 1920s. Both girls came from very wealthy families in Auburn, New York and went to one of the best colleges in the United States and they were two of very few women to be accepted to colleges during the time period. After their lives of luncheons and courting the same men became a bore, Dot and Ros decided it was time to make a change in their life. They traveled to Paris to help learn French and be exposed to another culture, but decided to return to New York to become teachers. During the time of the Homestead Act, Colorado was just starting to develop, and Ferry Carpenter, a homesteader in the West, needed two teachers at the new school in Routt County. He also wanted to find a wife, and Rosamond and Dorothy seemed to be the perfect fit for the new job. He convinced them to come to Colorado. After moving west, Ros and Dot learned to love Colorado and became the most wonderful teachers the new school had ever seen. All throughout the story, Wickenden uses their letters home from Routt County to make a wonderful book.
The message of Nothing Daunted is to try something new and to go against all odds for a true passion and goal in life. By examining the girls, the reader can clearly see their dedication to teaching in Colorado even though it seemed so outrageous and risky during the early 1900s. Ros and Dot never once gave up during their journey and became a role model for other women during this time period. They had a passion very different from that of their parents, and decided to do something so different and adventurous that they would sometimes even doubt themselves. Both girls never gave up and tried their best to be different and discover their passion in life in a whole new way.
Nothing Daunted had many historical aspects to it, and could make any reader learn and cherish the book. Both girls in the story were very relatable people for women today and the author gave them so much personality. The reader was really able to connect to Ros and Dot through the use of their letters and the wonderful imagery throughout the story. Some negative aspects of the book were the dry historical chapters and the extensive descriptions of the time period. Occasionally, the reader would become bored because Wickenden discussed what people looked like too much and give historical facts rather than telling the story of the two girls.
Readers interested in history and women¿s rights should read this book, but understand there are some areas of the book that are very dry and hard to focus on. Another book like this to read would be the Little House on the Prairie series. Overall, the book receives 4 stars.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 14, 2011
Ther was a lot of backgroud information added which did not really enhace the story of these adventurous young women
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted July 28, 2011
I guess I expected more. I thought it was a little disjointed, slow and less interesting than I wanted it to be.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 10, 2012
I can relate so well to Dorothy and Rosamond-- I just wish I had been alive when heading west was still an adventure. I couldn't put this book down once I started!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 14, 2011
Would have liked more chapters on their teaching adventures. Too much background information.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 19, 2011
I teach AP US history and I'm always looking for something new to have them read. This would be fine for a high school student.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 1, 2013
This is an enchanting walk through the past. Whether you've grown up in the "wild west" or just dreamed about it, this book is a fun read, painting an incredible picture of life in rural Colorado when the world was still moving at about three miler per hour. You come to know the main characters intimately -- so much so that you hate the see this tale end!
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Posted November 30, 2012
Tedious at times
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 21, 2012
I Love this book! A VERY interesting read.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 11, 2012
Highly readable.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted June 24, 2011
No text was provided for this review.
Overview
Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood attended grade school and Smith College together, spent nine months on a grand tour of Europe in 1910, and then, bored with society luncheons and chaperoned balls and not yet ready for marriage, they went off to teach the children of homesteaders in a remote schoolhouse on the Western Slope of Colorado. They traveled on the new railroad over the Continental Divide and by wagon to Elkhead, a tiny settlement far from the nearest town. Their students came to school from miles ...