Nothing Daunted (27 page)

The Woodruffs and the Underwoods had come to think of Dorothy and Ros as missionaries, and they responded to their daughters’ pleas for help. Dorothy’s father took her letters to his office and had his secretary type them up. Grace Underwood, using Ros’s typewriter, transcribed the letters herself. Copies were distributed to friends and family in Auburn. The two families, and the city’s congregations, went to work. In late fall,
Ros’s mother spoke at a monthly meeting of the King’s Daughters
of the First Baptist Church, a group of wealthy young women intent upon improving the lives of the poor. Their motto was: “Look up, not down; look forward, not back; look out, not in; lend a hand.” Mrs. Underwood passed around pictures that Ros had sent of the children and the schoolhouse.

Soon boxes and barrels began appearing in Hayden; they were taken to Elkhead whenever someone had a wagon available. Dorothy and Ros put clothing donations in the supply closet and distributed them when the need arose. Early one afternoon, a box of clothes from Ros’s aunt Nellie was delivered just before a blizzard struck. Ros tore open the box and clapped a sweater and shawl and her own green coat on three of the girls who had come to school in cotton dresses.

One box from the Woodruffs was full of sneakers and rubber overshoes. Ros told the boys that if they made goals for a basketball court and laid out the field, she would donate the ball, and she and Miss Woodruff would coach—a generous if improbable thought,
probably inspired by the basketball lessons Charlotte Perry had given to children at Hull House in Chicago.

Grace Underwood sent books from her daughter’s childhood library, and as Ros unpacked
Things Will Take a Turn, Each and All
, and a Dickens storybook, she thought about how happy she was to see them being used by the children rather than stored in an attic box. She and Dorothy started a library of their own, and the students loved borrowing books. Louisa May Alcott was a favorite. Ros had to tactfully dissuade Mrs. Underwood from sending any more
Spirit of Missions
from the Episcopal Church, telling her, “They like spicier reading here in Routt Co!!” Zane Grey was popular among the adults.

The teachers were also recipients of the cross-country literary exchange. When Ferry was through with his magazines, he passed them along to the teachers: the educational reviews, the
Yale Review,
the
Unpopular Review,
and the
Christian Science Monitor
. Ros asked her mother if she could send along copies of the
Atlantic
and the Sunday
New York Times
as well.

Two days of blustery October wind and rain shook the house and blew in their bedroom window. The third morning they woke up to a blinding snowstorm. Waving aside the Harrisons’ advice to stay home, they rode to school, leaning into the wind as they tried to make out Lewis on Old Eagle ahead of them. Ferry, assuming they wouldn’t be able to get there and planning to substitute for the day, arrived just as they did. Fourteen children were already inside, and they had a fire going in the furnace.
Robin Robinson’s father mined the anthracite coal on the hillside
and hauled it to the Rock School. It burned so hot that the grates lasted only six weeks. The children lined up their shoes, caked with mud, in front of the furnace to dry them out. Even the horses had trouble extracting their hooves, and the teachers couldn’t see how the children had made their way on foot. Ferry spent the day doing odd jobs around the building, observing the classes, and chatting with the students. The teachers ate their lunch indoors with the students, as they always did on stormy days. Dorothy told Anna, “The din would make your hair stand on end. We laugh
about it, for we are just like those oblivious mothers who don’t hear their children.” That night the snow stopped falling, and Ros noted, “a heavenly crescent moon and one of the real western sunsets makes me hopeful for tomorrow.”

Like the sudden shifts to clear skies, the students’ responsiveness in class compensated for the most trying moments. Dorothy found that it wasn’t hard to distract them from their discomfort. Drawn as the children were to tales at sea, she told them in current-events class about the destruction of the
Memphis,
an armored navy cruiser that had been struck by a seaquake a few months earlier in the Dominican Republic. The boat was wrenched from her anchorage, tossed above the waves, then repeatedly slammed into the harbor bottom. Three sailors were washed overboard, seven were killed when some steam pipes burst, and thirty drowned after their lifeboats capsized in the gigantic waves. Robin, unable to contain himself, shouted, “We have a
crick
by
our
house!”

Dorothy wrote, “The nicest part about it all is the way they love school, and their rapt attention is really thrilling,” and, in another letter, the children “fairly eat up work, and I rack my brains to keep them busy.” She told them a story at the end of every day and made up a long series about a little boy who was traveling around the world on a spectacular boat—the best way she had found to teach geography. When she held up her postcards from Antwerp, Zermatt, and Paris, there was a stampede to the front of the room as everyone jostled for a closer look. Ros told her mother, “My Ancient History class gets the collection of Greek p.c.’s and views of Corinth today.”

They all loved an excuse for a school party, and spent weeks preparing for Halloween, laying in a supply, as Ros put it, of peanuts, apples, and other provisions, along with more galoshes and heavy stockings. Ferry bought decorations in town, and the teachers arranged for a ghost in the closet, apple-bobbing, and pin the tail on the donkey. The children made a decorative border of witches and pumpkins on the blackboard while Dorothy and Ros set the tables in the basement. They had some trouble with their popcorn balls. “We wasted a can of molasses,” Ros
wrote, “and got into a terrible mess, before we finally ‘swam out’! By 6 o’clock we had about 60 good balls, and they vanished like snow under the noon day sun.”

Report cards were issued to the children each month on two-sided preprinted index cards, with a signature line for the parents. Dorothy prepared them for her fourteen students, hesitating over
the choice of grades
: A (admirable; 95–110), E (excellent; 85–95), F (fair; 75–85), P (poor; 60–75), and M (very poor; below 60). The report cards stated: “Any Grade lower than FAIR will not be honored by promotion.” She wrote, “I felt so
mean,
” adding that it still felt odd to her to be in a position of such authority. Nevertheless, she doesn’t seem to have given any of the children a P or an M, even slow Ray. And, she went on, “Our ‘warrant’ is now due and I don’t suppose any one ever felt prouder than we will of that
earned
money!”

—————————

School was closed for Election Day, November 7. About seventy-five men and women cast their ballots there, while back home in suffrage country, only men were going to the polls. Ros had written earlier about the primary, a ritual that she imagined taking place at public buildings across the country. “Just here I’d like to remark that it is a beautiful sight to see happy family parties hand in hand casting their ballots in a fine clean school room—no smoking—no profanity!!!”

It was a close election. Wilson had stuck to his promise of nonintervention, while Charles Evans Hughes continued to attack his stand, and argued that Wilson’s support for progressive labor laws was inimical to industry. Ros wrote to her brother George and his wife, “It has seemed so queer to be so far away from any political excitement. I hear you and Ken [the second lieutenant] are quite the leaders in the Hughes Alliance, George. We have been so crazy to hear the returns.” Around noon on November 9, Ferry telephoned the school to say that so far Wilson had won three more states than Hughes; the California results were yet to come in. “What an election it has been!”
Ros commented. Wilson “is idolized out here and it is astonishing to hear how he’s considered. Hughes’ strength is not in the west!”

The following Sunday, Ferry and Bob arrived at the Harrisons’ with sacks of mail and buffalo meat (rare even in that part of the country), duck, celery, and an issue of the
Breeder’s Gazette.
Carpenter told them that some buffalo had been shipped in recently for breeding, and that one bull had rampaged and had to be shot. They ate it for dinner, and it joined the list of exotic meats they had sampled—deer, bear, elk, and rabbit. Lewis recently had trapped a muskrat, and the Harrisons laughed when Ros asked if they were going to eat it, too. There was great excitement when Frank Jr. went up Agner and returned with a buck slung over the back of his horse. He came in at suppertime waving a bloody liver, which, Dorothy said, “was the signal for much rejoicing—it is a welcome change to us all, and the fact that it is against the law only makes it taste better.”
There were very few deer and elk at the time
, and the homesteaders, often desperate for food, ignored the injunction against hunting out of season.

Dorothy and Ros longed for a newspaper with more information about the election results. Ferry told them what he knew. As expected, Wilson appeared to have carried most states in the West, but he had eked out a victory in the Northeast and the Midwest. Ferry also seized the occasion to talk about Wilson’s years at Princeton and his extraordinary intellect. He said that the president was a long-suffering idealist, working for the good of the country despite his personal distaste for public life. Ros, in keeping with her family’s Republican sympathies, wrote, “We’ve been so excited waiting to hear the presidential returns. I can’t
bear
to have W.W. reelected and I guess he surely has been now.” The margin of victory was slim. If California had gone for Hughes, Wilson would have lost the election. Echoing Ferry, not Ros, Dorothy told her family, “It is
real
utopian democracy out here—& so interestingly in conflict with all our inherited prejudices.”

—————————

Everette Adair, oblivious to the teachers’ disparagement, began to accompany them home from school. One fall evening he presented them with a box of candy, “clear from Hayden!” as he put it, causing Dorothy to remark to her audience at home, “He is such a ridiculous, vain, picturesque boy!” Another day, as they were heading back to the Harrisons’, Everette rode up to them and suggested they stop to take a look at Shorty Huguenin’s cabin. Huguenin, whose French parents had emigrated to Colorado in 1877, was married with two daughters and ran a restaurant and an ice business in Hayden. He was building a homestead near the school, and Ferry had arranged with him for Dorothy and Ros to live there in the worst of the winter months, when the two-and-a-half-mile commute would be too difficult.

The women were beginning to vaguely anticipate the difficulties. It was only the first week of November, and their horses went crashing through the ice in Calf Creek every morning. When they got up one day, it was 10 degrees. Still, by noon it was hot, and the air was so clear it almost vibrated. They had deep snow for a few days, followed by a day when the temperature rose from 20 to 95 degrees. In mid-November, during a rare week of good weather, the snow melted off the south side of the hills, giving the women a new view as they rode to school: one side naked and brown, the other clad in snow. It was hard to imagine that the winter would be quite as bad as everyone predicted.

Coming upon Shorty’s cabin, Everette laughed and said, “Your winter residence looks like a hog pen, only it isn’t large enough to be a comfortable hog pen!” For once they found his comments apt. The work had only just started, and Ros wrote to her mother, “It is the funniest looking affair you can imagine. So far, merely logs laid on top of each other—just like a corn crib with no signs of doors or windows.”

Since the lumber wasn’t even sawed yet, they decided they would stay at the Harrisons’ for a while longer. Dorothy admitted, “I couldn’t bear [the prospect of living there], if it weren’t for the convenience of having it so near the school.” Ros dismissed her mother’s worry
about blizzards; she was sure the horses would find their way home. Striking a colloquial note, she added, “Also, if it ever storms too bad, we have our packing trunks with
all our bedding
in it, in the supply closet at school, and supper enough in the Domestic Science larder to last us through.”

Even before Thanksgiving, they were beginning to plan for Christmas, since their presents for the Harrisons and the children would have to be bought in Auburn. Dorothy had trouble deciding what to give Mrs. Harrison, who wouldn’t have any use for extravagant gifts. Trying to get her mother to imagine their landlady’s limited horizons, Dorothy wrote, “She hasn’t been farther than the school house since last February—I think perhaps one of those spool baskets nicely fitted out would please her, a bright colored one. I think she would like something different to look at.” Mr. Harrison was boarding up the kitchen, “daubing” with cement and sawdust, fortifying the house against the winter blasts. Soon Dorothy and Ros gave up on the idea of staying in Shorty’s cabin and were relieved by their decision. They loved the morning and early-evening rides and knew that they couldn’t oversee their own comfort the way Mrs. Harrison did.

The children cut willow sticks for poles and started skiing to school on the curved slats from old barrel staves, which they propped up against the stone building before they went inside. Seeing the students’ meager midday meals, some of which consisted of nothing but cold fried potatoes, Ros and Dorothy began cooking soup on the basement stove. Robin Robinson later remembered getting snowed in during November and running out of “grub.” His father and a neighbor skied to Hayden to bring back some food but got delayed by a storm and didn’t return for three days. “
That school lunch at noon was about the greatest thing in our lives
,” he said. “We had nothing at home to eat but boiled wheat.”

On sunny days at recess, the students liked to ski down the hill and across a pond. The teachers, who had never been on skis, took part enthusiastically. Dorothy wrote, “I went down a fine long hill today and it took me 35 minutes to come up! All the little boys went
by me with gleeful smiles . . . while ‘teacher’ puffed & panted up the hill—they walk up on skis but I can’t do that & had to plow through snow up to my knees.” The boys cheered when the women got to the foot of the hill without falling.