Nothing Daunted (18 page)

Lewis showed them the basement, pointing out where the coal furnace would go. In another room, a complicated wooden contraption hung from the beams—the gymnasium equipment. A third room held a cookstove and benches for the classes in domestic science. “Mr. C. told us Friday,” Ros wrote, “that we could have anything we wanted in the way of books and equipment. He is so fine and broadminded about things—and ready to co-operate in any way. The people in this country are all perfectly devoted to him, and he certainly has been a real missionary in this place, without being one in name or manner at all.”

Five years earlier, after the Elkhead residents voted for the construction of the school, financing had to be obtained, and the few big ranchers in the area agreed to pay the taxes needed to support the project. So did the absentee owners of the anthracite coal deposits east of Dry Fork. Anthracite coal, which is extremely hard and burns cleaner, longer, and hotter than bituminous coal, was so close to the surface that it was exposed in some places, a glistening black. The owner of the largest tract was Sam Perry. As the coal in Pennsylvania was mined out, the owners believed that the anthracite in Elkhead would command a very profitable market.
The entire field was estimated to be eight square miles
, with deposits worth over $50 million.

Ferry anticipated that the population would soon double or triple, and said, “
You didn’t want to build a little wooden shack there
.” The Adair school and the Dry Fork school, slipshod affairs, would close, although a school for several primary students, known as Mountain View, was built in the far southern end of the district. In the Elkhead School, Ferry explained, “
All the windows were made big, and all the light came in over the child’s shoulders
and no light came in on his face. . . . I had read up on it and I knew the light would come that way.”

The homesteaders helped with the construction, clearing ground and hauling rocks, and they built a barn in back for the horses. Along with the coal furnace, the electric lights, and the domestic-science room, the school had a projector with educational slides donated by the Ford Motor Company. It even had a telephone. The final critical component was the teachers, and on August 4, 1916, the
Republican
reported that the two schoolteachers “come very highly recommended” and that “Elkhead people count on a splendid school this term.”

The community was proud of its big new school.
One of Ros’s ninth-graders, Leila Ferguson, had come west with her family
from Medicine Lodge, Kansas, with a few chickens and turkeys in crates and some equipment for the household, including a Singer sewing machine. Leila said that as a young girl, she had been taught by her mother, “and she wasn’t much of a teacher. She had no patience.” In 1910 the Fergusons were strong advocates of the new district, and Leila attended the Dry Fork school before Elkhead was built. “
We had brand-new desks
,” she told Ferry’s granddaughter Belle sixty-three years later. “I’ll never forget seeing them uncrate those desks and knowing one was going to be mine. I wouldn’t have put a mark on it, a scratch on it, for anything. I just loved every minute of school.”

Everyone knew how difficult it would be for the children to get to school in bad weather; the site had been chosen with equal access in mind. A civil engineer created a survey indicating where each family lived and the number of school-age children, drew a series of concentric circles that indicated each mile mark, and then located a spot in the center. None of the students would have over a three-mile trip each way. “
That consolidated point
,” Carpenter said, “was on top of a hill with not even a road to it.” It also happened to have the finest views in Elkhead.

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On Sunday morning, two days after their arrival, Rosamond wrote: “Dearest papa:
You
are just getting ready for St. Peter’s. I have thought
of you and mother so much, while Dotty and I have been sitting in the sun drying our heads, after washing them in the most wonderful soft sulphur water (which has to be carried about ¼ mile from a spring!).” On Sunday mornings in Auburn, coachmen readied the carriages as the church bells began ringing around town. The middle class and the poor walked to their neighborhood churches. Catholics had separate congregations for German, Italian, Polish, Russian Orthodox, and Ukrainian immigrants. At the Harrisons’, Ros described the tranquil beauty of the mountains, the little creek, the sagebrush, the wildflowers, and “the cultivated spots” where “grain of all sorts flourishes.”

Later, they accompanied the family in “the so-called spring wagon” to Sunday school at the schoolhouse—Mr. and Mrs. Harrison on the seat, and Ruth, Lewis, Ros, and Dorothy spread about in the back. It was the social event of the week, and virtually everyone turned out. Dorothy wrote to Milly, “Our beautiful new school seems so out of place, perched on that lonely mountain side and the people seem even more so.” It was the teachers’ first introduction to the neighbors. The men wore sombreros and overalls and spurs; the women were “nice & intelligent-looking—a lot of shy girls and a perfect swarm of small boys who were introduced to me en masse—as being
my
pupils.” One little boy, whose family somehow had not been counted in the survey, told her that he would be riding eight miles each day.

Miss Iva Rench, an officious young woman from Muncie, was teaching at Mountain View and had been conducting Sunday-school services at Elkhead. Her lessons consisted of “Pauline doctrines of the stiffest kind,” Ros commented. She was not one of the more popular people in Elkhead. Nevertheless, she conducted an impressive Sunday-school sermon on Paul’s missionary journey which Dorothy and Ros sat through in fear that she would ask them questions. “She is expecting to turn the [Sunday school] over to us, which is appalling,” Dorothy wrote, “but I suppose we can do it.”

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On the first day of school, Tuesday, August 1, the new teachers got up at five-thirty and had a quick sponge bath. They ate breakfast with the Harrisons, and Lewis met them at the door at seven-fifteen with their horses. Ferry had exchanged Nugget for Rogan, a huge, awful-looking beast, Dorothy thought, with the stolid manner of a dray horse and a broad back that made for a more uncomfortable ride. When she mounted, she needed a boost from Lewis or Frank Jr., who, at the age of twenty, was still called “Boy” at home. The four Harrisons saw them off, laughing at the sight of the teachers futilely kicking their horses’ sides as they tried to keep up with Lewis. As the family advised, they soon started wearing spurs, which reduced the ride by almost fifteen minutes.

A few students had arrived before the teachers, who barely had time to change out of their riding skirts and boots before the others began to appear. Dorothy had ten boys between grades one and five, and one little girl, age six, who was joined a few months later by a second. The boys, in bare feet, wore cutoff overalls and ragged shirts. The teachers were captivated: “Without any exception, they are the cutest-looking children I ever saw,” Dorothy wrote, “every one freckled as they can be—hair cut very short and the most snappy eyes!” Ros said that the children’s faces were all “burned to a crisp,” and “I have so far only two boys—one of them Lewis Harrison . . . ! Others will come later, when they’re not needed for the haying. I have six girls, five of them in the ninth grade!”

The children and their parents couldn’t have imagined how nervous Miss Woodruff and Miss Underwood were. Ros confessed, “Dot and I are scared to death for fear we’ll make a slip at school—the country side might be in a terrible to-do in consequence.” They weren’t yet fully aware of the awe with which college-educated teachers in such far-flung areas were regarded. They spoke perfect English and other languages, too. They valued education for its own sake, not simply as a way to escape the hardships of life at home. Most astonishingly, these two young women from New York seemed genuinely excited by the opportunity of teaching the children.

In the morning, the two classes met for opening exercises. Ros played “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on the piano and learned that few of the children knew even the first verse. She also had to teach them the Pledge of Allegiance. “Dotty does the speechifying,” Ros wrote, “and reads the Psalms. She does it with all the composure of an experienced hand too!”

Dorothy attributed whatever success she had to her preparatory work with Miss LeMay in Auburn. It “has meant everything to me, for I have a definite system and could go right at it. The children love it and are going to do very well, I hope.” She asked all of her students to come up to the front and sit on a long bench where they recited their lessons, “and they simply convulse me,” she wrote, “as they sit there swinging those bare legs. . . .” She worked hard at arranging the best sequence of lessons, and in the early weeks, she changed it every day. Ros took a photograph of Dorothy in front of her class. She looks small in the large room, standing behind her high desk, but reasonably in command, the blackboard covered with her day’s lesson and Ray’s birthday announced in the corner. An American flag is pinned on the wall to her right, and the children are attentive, except for two boys whose faces are blurred as they turn to see what their friends are up to.

She listed her students for Milly: Ray and Roy Hayes (“Ray is the biggest boy and not all there”); Rudolph, Jesse, and Oliver Morsbach (“my cutest ones,
all
look exactly alike, talk every minute”); Tommy and Minnie Jones, two of ten children (“Tommy can’t say an ‘s’ and is an imp,” Minnie “is very shy and demure—dressed so prettily in little checked ginghams with sunbonnet to match”); Jimmy and Robin Robinson (“very demure & good”); and Richard Ferguson, Leila’s brother (“very bright & good”).

Ros taught algebra, Latin, ancient history, history of the U.S., geography, and English. She wrote, “As soon as we get things going there will be other things—like sewing (a’hem!) and domestic science (a’hem! a’hem!!) that we’ll have to have occasionally!” She found that although the students could read adequately and were hungry for work
in English, they were not well grounded in mathematics. Recalling the help she’d gotten from her father as a child, she mentioned one kind of question that she’d never been able to solve, let alone explain: “I shall sigh for Papa on those Arith. problems!! His letter and the enclosures on ‘Lost Motion’ were so welcome. We laughed heartily over the latter.” Dorothy was even more fearful of the subject. “We had perfectly terrible problems,” she later said about her experiences in seventh and eighth grade. “You remember those old things about men digging a ditch and rowing against the current upstream, and oh, the percentages and everything.”

Before too long, Rosamond was sounding more self-assured, telling her parents that both she and Dotty were getting their work systematized, and that the children were beginning to take hold. Her algebra and Latin came back to her, and she particularly liked teaching the ninth grade. “I’m very good on English and composition—but I hope to improve.” The adults who came to Sunday school were astounded by their postcard albums of the tour of Europe—pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Gothic churches and turreted lakeside resorts of Austria, Germany, and Italy. Thinking back to the way things were done in Auburn, Ros said they hoped to give some “Travel Talks” in the winter.

Ros told Dorothy that she looked 100 percent better than she had in Auburn, and Dorothy said, “I never felt so full of health and good spirits.” Even waking up at dawn was a pleasure. She wrote to Milly, “It is perfectly amazing to me the way in which I have changed my hours, and you would hardly believe it if you could see me getting up a little before six, actually cheerful and animated! Eight-thirty is very apt to see us tucked under an astonishing patch-work quilt and sighing with joy as we hit our feather beds.”

The school day, with a break for lunch at noon, ended at three-thirty. The teachers packed their meals in cut-plug tobacco tins, and Mrs. Harrison always added a piece of cake or pie. They generally stayed after school until six or seven
P.M.
, working on the next day’s lessons. One night the first week, they were caught in a storm on their
ride home. Without any warning, the skies opened up and drenched the dry hills with a heavy rain. They put on their yellow ponchos, which they kept tied to their saddles, and stayed relatively dry. There were also occasional electric storms, which Ros described as “marvelous, lightning plays all about you, but it doesn’t always follow that you have thunder and rain.—I presume the distances are responsible.” When the lightning got close, the static electricity made their loose hairs stand on end, a signal to seek shelter.

As they arrived at the Harrisons’ each evening, the family rushed out to greet them “like returning prodigals,” as Dorothy put it. “We have the most sincere affection for them all, and our meals are always hilarious, we so mutually amuse each other—and such suppers!” Attentive as always to the pleasure of eating well, she wrote, “Hot fried chicken, big fresh peas cooked in cream and other vegetables, hot bread, cocoa or milk, and endless jams and pickles and some delicious dessert! The table groans with food.” It didn’t seem to occur to her that the seven-dollar weekly rent that she and Ros paid made much of this possible. Mr. H., as they referred to him, “asks such a sweet blessing.” After supper, on clear nights, she and Ros went outside to admire the sunsets and the stars that appeared on all sides as darkness fell: “they are thick down to the mountain-tops—great glowing eyes.”

Frank Jr., who had dropped out of school after the eighth grade, refused their pleas to join Rosamond’s class. He would have been older than any of the other students, and he later described himself as “too wild, I guess.”
He admired the teachers as “good sports from start to finish
,” though he was puzzled by their reaction to the lonely place where they had landed. “They were highly enthused over the whole deal. They couldn’t take it in fast enough.” They told him, he said, that they didn’t think they could have done it “without Mother Harrison taking them in and making them a home. Well, turned around the other way, we didn’t know what Mother could have done without them. They were quite a little comfort to Mother. It was kind of raw, the country was at that time. They were the highlight. They kind of
broke the monotony for awhile, when those folks came and inhabited the schoolhouse.”