Nothing Daunted (16 page)

As the tracks were being laid, there were reliable rumors that Harriman intended to buy the railroad or put it under the control of the Union Pacific.
He established a dummy power company
to acquire land around Kremmling, west of the Divide, and block the Moffat Road’s right of way at Gore Canyon. In the spring of 1904, Harriman’s “consulting engineers” convinced the Interior Department to set aside twenty-eight sections of land to build a reservoir there. President Theodore Roosevelt loved the wild lands and game of northwestern Colorado, and he learned from a hunting companion who was also a mining executive that Harriman, along with Gould, was manipulating the Interior’s Reclamation Service. Roosevelt, no fan of monopolies, recently had fallen out with Harriman. He summoned the competing parties to Washington and quickly resolved the matter in Moffat’s favor.

Despite the scheming of his enemies and the technical and meteorological hazards, Moffat built his railroad over Rollins Pass down into Hot Sulphur Springs and Troublesome, Yampa and Oak Creek. By March 1911 Moffat had spent his fortune on it, and he returned to New York, hoping to raise enough money to bore the long tunnel through James Peak. Without it, the railroad would fail. It is unclear where Moffat secured a promise for the required funds, but he returned that night to the bar of the Hotel Belmont, where he celebrated loudly with some friends.
Although Harriman was no longer alive
, some of his company’s spies reportedly informed the lenders that if they went through with the deal, they could no longer expect to do business with Union Pacific. The next morning, the promise of assistance was withdrawn. Moffat died that day, March 18, in his room at the hotel, from a heart attack. He was seventy-one years old and had spent, by some accounts, $14 million of his own (the equivalent a century later of $310 million) on the Moffat Road.

As the
Denver Republican
reported the day after his death, a new power had risen in Wall Street in the early days of the building of the line, which was destined to dominate the railroad system of the nation: “Harriman would not have been Harriman had he permitted a rival line, financed mainly by local capitalists, to pluck his plums.”

Sam Perry and other investors took the Moffat Road into receivership, and its official name was changed to the Denver & Salt Lake Railroad Company, although no one called it that. The Moffat Road reached Steamboat Springs in 1909, and Hayden, four years later. The line stopped at Craig, the town west of Hayden. The 6.2-mile Moffat Tunnel was not completed for another sixteen years.

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For Dorothy and Ros, traveling on a glorious summer day, the sights along the route were a welcome distraction from their worries about teaching. So were the other passengers. They got to know a woman named Mrs. Chambers, a graduate of Bryn Mawr and the wife of a mining engineer. Dorothy described her as “one of the finest types of woman—having been to college—yet she lives in a narrow canyon—works terribly hard—has [three] small children—and was reading
Woman and Labor
!” Dorothy was referring to Olive Schreiner’s 1911 polemic on the evils of imperialism, war, and the subjugation of women. Schreiner, a South African political activist, was highly regarded among American feminists.

Dorothy and Ros didn’t know much about how women outside their closed social circle chose to live. While they were having bacon-bat picnics by a stream outside Northampton, a thirty-seven-year-old doctor named Susan Anderson was living alone in a log cabin in Fraser, on the west side of the Divide. Her duties included tending to the injuries of lumbermen and workers on the Moffat Road, and serving as the coroner for those who didn’t make it. When Dorothy and Ros were pouring tea for suffragists in Auburn, their counterparts in Colorado were going to the polls.
Susan B. Anthony went twice
to push the cause there in the 1870s, but it was local women’s organizations that prevailed. In 1876 women were permitted to vote in school elections and, in a referendum in 1893, they won full suffrage. Although the territory of Wyoming had granted women the vote twenty-four years earlier, Colorado was the first state. Anthony was not entirely pleased that her western sisters had done it without her. New York, despite all of the work of the Cayuga County suffragists, didn’t permit women full voting rights until 1917, three years before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed.

In Auburn, women who didn’t marry, like Rosamond’s “Auntie,” took care of their parents as they became old and infirm. They were little more than glorified servants and often died in the houses where they were born. In 1904, when the Underwoods went to Greece and Egypt, nine-year-old Arthur was left at home with Auntie, who was, as Dorothy put it, “a relic certainly of a very bygone day.” Auntie’s life was not the future Dorothy and Ros had in mind for themselves. “She did her hair in a big roll at the back of her neck with a net on it,” Dorothy said. “She had a sharp New England accent, and she very seldom came to the table. She lived in a little bedroom at the back of the second story hall, did the family mending, and lived her life mostly there alone.” One year Auntie needed a new winter coat, and Mrs. Underwood went downtown to buy one for her. Auntie put on the coat and said, “Oh, Grace, this makes me look like an old woman!” At the time, Dorothy thought it was one of the funniest remarks she’d ever heard. She said, “I thought then she was about one hundred.”

Mrs. Underwood’s family album contains a photo labeled “Auntie’s corner.” It shows a room with a narrow, neatly made bed covered with a crocheted bedspread, a side table and shelf crowded with knickknacks and an ornate clock, and an upholstered rocking chair with an antimacassar draped limply over the top. Dorothy often thought about Auntie as she grew up, and although she knew she was well taken care of, she said, “I don’t know if anybody ever thought there was any need for anybody like Auntie to have any pleasure.” Dorothy feared—correctly, as it turned out—that her smart, unlovely sister
Anna, who yearned to be an astronomer, would suffer a similar fate. Although Anna took over the best bedroom at 15 Fort Street and ran the household, she did not have a life of her own. In 1907, ten years after graduating from Smith, she wrote: “
[W]hile I have not taken to myself a husband
or any other regular occupation, I refuse to write myself down any sort of an idler. I do the social and philanthropic things that come up in a small city, often take care of our own large family, revel in my garden, and have had two superlatively glorious trips abroad. You see, I’m happy like the country whose annals are dull.”

The train climbed noisily, the wheels clacking as they rode over the track joints, past lingering patches of snow, curving around the pristine circle of Yankee Doodle Lake before making the final ascent, passing through the Needle’s Eye Tunnel, high above the tree line. They were about a third of the way from Denver to Hayden. As they approached Rollins Pass, the train entered the snowsheds. The rail stop town at the summit was called Corona, or “crown.”
As another traveler remembered
his arrival on a summer day: “Corona seemed like a settlement belonging to another planet. Vicious mountain winds shook, rattled, and banged loose parts of the layout. Spring and summer thunderstorms originated right overhead at this high altitude.”

A 1914 brochure printed by the railroad
described this
CREST OF THE MAIN RANGE OF THE MAJESTIC
“
ROCKIES
” as “lovely stretches of verdure, bespangled with myriads of beautiful blossoms, alternating with great drifts of glistening snow.” Soon the line would extend to Salt Lake, the brochure claimed, adding, “The vast agricultural empire being opened by the building of this railroad offers exceptional opportunities to those seeking a home in this new west.”

The train stopped to let the passengers off for lunch and to see the view from Rollins Pass,
advertised by the Moffat Road in a famous poster as the “Top O’ the World
.” Dorothy remembered that there were snowbanks as they approached the peak, and that the train pulled into “a little kind of a shanty place, where we had sandwiches and coffee.”

It was Corona’s restaurant, which was inside the snowsheds, a hundred feet from the tracks. The acrid fumes from the locomotives
sometimes caused trainmen and passengers to pass out. The prices on the menu were high because of the journey the food had to take. Dorothy and Ros walked outside for some fresh air, turning away from the unsightly water tower next to the tracks. They had unobstructed views of the distant mountains, which receded, range after range, in a purplish haze until they disappeared behind the clouds. Despite its rough beauty, the spot felt desolate even on a cloudless summer day. The silence was broken only by the songs of meadowlarks and the loud, piping sound of pikas. Aside from miniature bursts of potentilla and larkspur, the “crown” was covered with nothing but snow, parched grass, rocks and boulders, and rusty tin cans—remnants of the railroad workers’ meals, some years earlier, on the top of the world.

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The next day, down in Hayden, Ferry Carpenter gave Dorothy and Ros a hand as they clambered onto the seat of an old spring wagon. Their driver, named Guy, was an eighteen-year-old clerk from Wagner’s saddle shop. He was dressed for the occasion in a bright red sweater. Their trunks, topped by yellow slickers and secured by new ropes, towered behind them in the wagon’s box-bed. The horses were saddled and bridled and tied to the back of the wagon. Leaving Hayden on the clear day of July 28, 1916, they followed Long Gulch Road and headed toward the Harrison ranch, eighteen miles north. Crossing the Yampa River, they passed the spot where F. V. Hayden’s crew had camped not quite fifty years earlier, as they surveyed the Yampa Valley and the Elkhead Mountains.

The valley fell back behind a series of steep canyons and wide mesas. From a distance, the hills had looked welcoming, with rounded slopes that bore little resemblance to the jagged mountains they had crossed on the train. But the trip proved to be more strenuous than expected, and their admiration for the Moffat Road increased. The jarring wagon ride was a throwback to a mode of travel used in the
early days on the frontier. By comparison, the train was a model of comfort.

Dorothy wrote, “We wound in and out and up and down, going at a pace that put our hearts in our mouths, and we were sure the trunks were either going to careen over on us or our horses.” Later, she good-naturedly described the ride as the most uncomfortable in her life. Spring wagons were larger and heavier than buggies, and more utilitarian. There was no back to the wooden seat, and “I was so short that my feet were about a foot off the floorboard, just dangling all day.” At one point she looked down and saw that the wagon road seemed to be in motion, too, and she thought she was dizzy from the ride. She said to Ros, “Do you see something moving on the ground?” Ros replied, “Why yes, the whole thing is moving.” They leaned over and saw an army of field mice skittering across their path. Every time they came to a dry wash, Dorothy said, “a most forbidding-looking place filled with rocks and boulders, that boy would lash those horses and make them run down over those awful rocks.”

The hills, which had been green not long before, were scorched, and even the hardy clumps of silvery-teal sagebrush looked brittle. Even so, some of the wildflowers—sego lilies, Indian paintbrush, wild carrot, parsnip, and pink wild hollyhock—were still blooming. Ros commented on the beauty and variety of flowers and said that the landscape reminded her of Castle Hot Springs, with the cactus left out. Calf Creek, now dry, threaded its way through the valleys.

After a few hours, Guy drove down into a cultivated valley, home to the vast Adair ranch.
John Adair had arrived in Hayden on horseback
from Athens, Tennessee, in 1882 at the age of nineteen. By 1916 he had made a remarkable success of his cattle business. The Adairs, who had several ranches, were no longer living there, and the couple taking care of the place served the travelers a full dinner of meat, vegetables, and pie. When the two women offered to pay for it, their hostess was taken aback and refused the gesture, although she told them that the only money she had left was a ten-dollar bill she had put in her Bible several years earlier. Not long afterward, Dorothy learned
that in the rural West, any stranger who stopped by at mealtime was fed as a matter of course. They continued on their way, and by late afternoon the country had grown wilder. Patches of bare earth were visible between bunches of sagebrush, and there were few trees to be seen. They crossed Calf Creek and stopped where the road did, at the bottom of a high hill. On top of it was a newly built house.

The door opened, and their landlady, fifty-four-year-old Mary Harrison, childlike in her size and her eagerness, ran out to greet them. Dorothy and Ros stepped down from the wagon into long grass and sagebrush, lifted their skirts, and walked up to the house. It was “a square box, part log and part frame,” Dorothy wrote to her father the next day, “with a little smoke stack sticking up. The steps consist of a soap box shakily resting on stones. It is the simplest, plainest exterior—all built by themselves.”

Mrs. Harrison looked older than she was, “tiny and skinny and wrinkled, with her thin gray hair slicked back, and with the most astonishing set of false teeth.” Mary and her husband, Uriah, who went by Frank, had arrived from Missouri in 1897, taking several trains and, for the final leg of the journey, a covered wagon. They had been among thousands of families drawn to Routt County by the United States government with the promise of free land. Another couple arrived in 1914 at Dry Fork, south of Calf Creek, and thought that the low log shacks there resembled a prairie-dog colony.
Their granddaughter recalled, “Survival was tough
,” but “if you dug a well and found water, you could make it for awhile.”

The Harrisons had taken advantage of the railroads’ special “home-seeker” rates for cross-country boxcar trips. At a nominal fee, they filled up a few cars with their farm machines, milk cows and draft horses, along with their furniture and family, and transported the entire household. The government’s offer seemed too good to be true, and it was. The Homestead Act of 1862, signed by President Lincoln, was drafted by easterners who knew little about the climate and dry lands of the West. People came from Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oklahoma territory, Kentucky, and Michigan—and also
from Sweden, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, and other points east. They did exactly what Ferry Carpenter did, laying claim to 160 acres, or more if they had family members over the age of twenty-one. Most were unprepared for the severe, arid climate and the intractable farming conditions.
Ultimately, over one and a half million homesteads were granted
, a total of 420,000 square miles—10 percent of the land in the United States.