Nothing Daunted (33 page)

Reed told me that Ferry had dissolved his partnership with Jack White in 1926 and leased the Dawson Ranch near Hayden, where he had first worked as an eighteen-year-old. Two decades later, he bought the property—ranch house, barns and other outbuildings,
and almost twenty-five hundred acres by the Yampa River.
He hung a white sign at the end of the driveway
by Route 40 with its new name, the Carpenter Ranch.

For a time it seemed that the railroad would be the boon that everyone in the valley had expected. When the 6.2-mile Moffat Tunnel through James Peak was completed in 1928, trains shuttled between Denver and the Western Slope without the costly delays and catastrophic accidents caused by the original route over Hell Hill.
Cattle arriving in Denver from Routt County
were identifiable by the soot on their noses, acquired when the train went through the tunnel.
The homesteaders were paid well during the Great War
for their grain and beef. But afterward, as the demand for ranch products dropped and the Depression set in, they were unable to repay their loans. There was no market even for Ferry’s “growthy” Herefords, painstakingly bred for their large size and the quality and quantity of their meat, and he almost lost his ranch.

“
Something had to give
,” Lewis Harrison wrote in 1977 in an unpublished memoir. “Marginal operations were the first to go.” In the end, only about 40 percent of homesteaders nationwide were able to “prove up” on their claims. The Harrisons confronted “washed out reservoirs, uncompleted ditches, over-estimated land yields, and declining equipment quality.” Mr. Harrison, suffering more acutely from stomach ailments that had plagued him all his life, sold the ranch, and he and Mrs. Harrison moved to Oak Creek, where several of their children lived. Lewis noted that at the time, “income in that thriving community was much more promising.” Frank Jr. worked at the Moffat mine, and occasionally, so did his father, who also started a dairy and raised some chickens. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison had just enough money to get by.

Ferry’s ranch made a comeback, and he went on to become the district attorney for Routt, Moffat, and Grand Counties. Although he was a firm Republican, in 1934 he was appointed by FDR’s interior secretary, Harold Ickes, to be the first director of the Division of Grazing—now the Bureau of Land Management. He
implemented the Taylor Grazing Act, which addressed the crisis caused by unregulated overgrazing on public lands in the West, and entailed putting an end to the sheep and cattle wars—still being fought at gunpoint. He cajoled the two parties into finally speaking to each other, and without consulting Ickes—a proud advocate of big government—he created local advisory boards, made up of state and regional members of the stockmen’s industry, to regulate land use. Infuriated by this act of insubordination, Ickes tried to fire him. But
Roosevelt was impressed, writing to Ickes
, “In less than fifteen months after the law was enacted, the cattle and sheep men have buried their differences and combined in a joint effort to abolish unfair range practices and to conserve natural resources,” and when Senator Taylor appealed to the president, FDR reinstated Carpenter. Ickes subsequently secured his resignation, and Ferry returned to the ranch. He became one of the most storied cattlemen in Colorado.

Another was Isadore Bolten
, the Elkhead School’s cobbling teacher, who raised sheep as well as cattle, because sheep provided two crops: wool in the spring and lambs in the fall. Before the Grazing Act, it was a practice that bordered on suicide. One year a group of cowboys rode into the area where Isadore’s sheep were grazing, set fire to one of his wagons, and slaughtered much of his herd. Still, he persevered. He was an even cannier rancher than Ferry was, and he, too, belatedly found a well-educated bride. Nine years after Dorothy and Ros left Elkhead, Isadore married a librarian from Rawlins, Wyoming, where he wintered his sheep and spent his evenings at the public library. He bought the Harrison, Adair, and other ranches, and eventually acquired twenty-five thousand acres, described as
one of the largest singly owned tracts
of land in northern Colorado. He told someone who was curious about his life, “
There was nothing for me in Russia
—absolutely nothing. I had the whole world to move about in, but some kind destiny pulled me toward America. It is remarkable that there was a place in this distressed world where a penniless alien, knowing not a word of the language, could work out a place for himself.” He died a millionaire
in 1951, at the age of sixty-six. The remains of his homestead can still be seen south of the Elkhead School, leaning into the earth. Part of his pitched roof rests against one log wall.

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On February 20, 1930, Dorothy and Lem walked to a dinner party in the new suburb of East Grand Rapids. He recently had been promoted to president of the Old Kent Corporation. They were on a narrow lane when a car veered toward them. Lem pushed Dorothy out of the way, but he was struck and killed. He was forty-three years old. The bank’s monthly bulletin commended his benevolence, wit, and now quaint-sounding banking practices: “He was a keen student of the securities market. He never gave his consent to the purchase or sale of a bond in which he did not honestly believe.”

The country was mired in the Depression, and suddenly Dorothy was a single mother with four children between four and twelve years old. Lem’s scrupulousness as a banker did not yield enough in the way of savings to fully support the family. Nor did she inherit any money from the Woodruff family business. Her brother Douglas, who was running Auburn Button Works, had turned the factory into one of the earliest manufacturers of plastics in the country. He considered President Roosevelt a traitor to his class and Dorothy was incredulous when he refused all government contracts. As competition increased, the business failed.
Other early businesses also went under
, and like many post-industrial cities, Auburn suffered a century-long decline.

Dorothy prepared for her future by taking courses in typing and shorthand. She became friendly with other working women, establishing a club for them called the Hillman Guild. By 1932, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, she was running the Grand Rapids chapter of the Red Cross. When the Grand River overflowed after heavy rains, she went down to help the Ottawa Indians, who had nothing to eat but raccoons. Ferry, despite his
problems at the ranch, visited her several times in Grand Rapids, bringing phonograph records of his favorite cowboy songs for her children.

She wrote a terse entry in the spring of 1934 for her twenty-fifth Smith reunion book: “At present trying to run a full-time job and bring up four children.” Her daughter Caroline told me that she didn’t know how her mother would have coped if she hadn’t worked in Elkhead and seen how the women there managed their lives. “That year in Colorado became part of who she was,” Caroline said. “She took life by the throat and dealt with it.”

Ros’s comments in the reunion book
were far happier. She wrote chattily about her years with Dorothy in Auburn (“Those . . . years, were, as I look back upon them, like the Biblical ones—delightful ones of plenty!”), Europe, and Elkhead; her married life in Oak Hills and Denver, and her young family’s summers at their cabin in Strawberry Park. But several weeks later, Bob began suffering from fatigue and blackouts. Dr. Cole, the Moffat mine doctor and family friend, diagnosed a brain tumor. Bob and Ros went to the Mayo Brothers’ Hospital for the operation. Although it was successful, he came down with pneumonia, an illness that was often fatal in the days before antibiotics. He died in Rochester, Minnesota, on July 27, 1934, at the age of fifty.

Not long afterward, the mines in Oak Creek began to run out of coal, and in the 1940s, one after another closed. The town now has about eight hundred residents, some small businesses, and the Tracks and Trails Museum in the old Town Hall building. There are few cars or people on Main Street, and in Oak Hills up the road, all that remains of the Moffat Coal Company are the concrete foundations of a hoist, the heavy arches that supported a tipple, a flattened area by the creek where the company town stood, a water tower, some holes in the hillsides—the old entrances to the mine—and some piles of burned-off red slag. The anthracite coal deposits in Elkhead, for which Sam and Bob Perry had such hopes, turned out to be of poor quality and not worth mining.
Oak Creek’s depot, a former headquarters for
the Moffat Road, was sold in 1967 for thirty-five dollars. It is now a vacant lot.

When Dorothy and Ros were in their late sixties, Ros took her on a trip to the Caribbean. It was 1955, and Ferry’s wife, Eunice, had died from heart failure the year before. Ros had important news for her friend: Ferry had asked her to marry him. It was four decades since he had lured the Auburn women to Elkhead. Ferry’s children, like Dorothy, were delighted. His younger son, Willis, a lawyer in Denver, told me, “Dad was worried about how the news would affect us, but we all said, ‘Yes, of course.’ ” Ros knew that Ferry would not leave the ranch, so she moved from her big Tudor house in Denver. If she had any trouble adapting to ranch life, she didn’t say so.
In the summer of 1960, her great-nephew arrived from Auburn
for a visit. She took him up to Oak Point, and as they were walking around, Ros told him that rattlesnakes lived in the vicinity. She advised him to buy a new pair of blue jeans at F. M. Light & Sons. As long as the jeans were unwashed, she said, they would be thick enough to protect his legs from the fangs of any rattler.

All fifteen of Carpenter’s grandchildren, who were too young to know Eunice, grew up thinking of Ros as their grandmother. One of them, Belle Zars, told me that sometimes when she was staying at the ranch as a girl, she would come downstairs in the morning and see Ferry waltzing with Ros to the kitchen radio.

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In August 1973 I met Aunt Ros and Uncle Ferry. I spent my eighteenth summer working on a ranch in Carbondale for Rosamond’s granddaughter Roz, who had three children. At the end of my stay, we went to the Carpenter Ranch. Ros had become a good cook, and with the help of her housekeeper, she served an old-fashioned luncheon on the sunny back porch. It was hard to see in the gracious elderly woman the beautiful young adventurer my grandmother had so often spoken about.

Afterward, Ferry said that he had something to show me. He put on his cowboy hat, and we climbed into his battered pickup truck. He drove through Hayden and across the river, and we began a long, jarring ride into the hills. At eighty-seven, he was still witty and voluble, concentrating more on his stories than on his driving. The homesteaders, Ferry told me, had long since moved on, their cabins mostly dismantled and the lumber carted off to be used elsewhere.

We pulled up on a high, rocky ridge covered with withered beige grass, scrub oak, and wildflowers, just behind the Elkhead School. It had been boarded up and padlocked in 1938, after its windows were broken and it was ransacked. The basement furnace and stove were carted off, along with the two slate chalkboards and most of the children’s desks.
A no-trespassing sign was posted
. Ferry identified the mountains that surrounded us: Bears Ears, Pilot Knob, Agner, the Flat Tops. We sat on the steps and had our picture taken by a ranch hand who had come with us. Ferry said with satisfaction, “That’s three generations, sitting right here.” When I was back at college in the East, he sent me a letter on his official stationery:
CARPENTER HEREFORDS, WEIGH-A-HEAD—SINCE
1909. He wrote, “Sure wish you could be here this Saturday when we sell our bull calves. . . .
Ros joins me in sending love
& hoping you come visit again. Ferry.” He enclosed a photograph of one of his prize bulls, 2,455-pound Biggie.

Ros died the following February. She had written a letter to Ferry, asking him to send some gifts from the money she left to him. The first recipient was Dorothy Hillman,
her “great friend,” as she invariably referred to her
, of eighty-three years. She also had requested that the Elkhead School be pictured on the front of the memorial booklet. The service was held on a cold day in the white-frame Congregational Church of Hayden.
The windows were covered with yellowing paper that was designed to resemble stained glass
, and the old organ was jammed into the right-front corner. It was drafty inside, but the pews were closely packed with friends and relatives from Auburn, Denver, the ranch, Hayden—and some students from Rosamond’s class of
1917. Those who couldn’t squeeze into the church were seated in the parish house, rigged with a public address system. Dorothy, who was sick, was unable to make the trip.

At a time when only 10 to 15 percent of students in the country
who started high school ended up graduating, four of Ros’s students had gone on to college and others to professional school. Leila Ferguson, who had so cherished her first school desk, became an award-winning teacher in Colorado. She said of Dorothy and Ros six decades later, “
They really and truly had the interests of the children at heart
. . . . What they didn’t know about teaching methods, they made up in zeal.” Ezra Smith was a teacher in Michigan. Helen and Florence Jones—two of Tommy Jones’s sisters—were registered nurses. Lewis Harrison went to Colorado State University and got his master of science in forestry at Iowa State University. His education was subsidized by a fund established jointly by Ferry Carpenter and Ros’s mother. In 1957 Lewis became the chief forester for the state of Missouri.

Several of Ros’s and Dorothy’s former pupils spoke
at the memorial. Lewis talked about Miss Underwood and Miss Woodruff, “who came riding into our lives in a spring wagon late one afternoon.” He said, “Little did I realize at the time the important and lasting influence it was going to have, not only on me, but on most youths and many adults of the Elkhead community.” Robin Robinson, by then a sixty-four-year-old Hayden businessman and chairman of the Solandt Memorial Hospital, said, “I’ll never forget the first morning when Lewis Harrison and the two new teachers rode up to the school. . . . I don’t believe there ever was a community that was affected more by two people than we were by those two girls.”