Nothing Daunted (39 page)

Carpenter asked his father for a loan:
Ibid., 50.

The last thing Ferry wanted to do:
OH 51, Denver Public Library.

which he proposed to do:
Confessions,
45.

He described the improvements he had made upon his first claim:
Department of the Interior, United States Land Office, Farrington R. Carpenter applications for homesteads, August 10, 1907, and August 14, 1914. Homestead Certificate, Department of the
Interior, United States Land Office, Glenwood Springs, CO, March 20, 1920.

It was as thrilling to him as the American Revolution:
Confessions,
45, 46.

C
HAPTER 6:
T
HE
G
RAND
T
OUR

Their parents held afternoon card parties:
“They Prospered with the Abundance,” 1957.

Seward, though, was a loyal patron of Delmonico’s:
Thomas, 93, 191.

The incomprehensible instructions:
Ranhofer, 1007.

Miss Elkins was reported to be in Vichy:
“Miss Elkins Not in Paris,”
New York Times,
August 28, 1910; “Miss Elkins Bride of W. F. R. Hitt,”
New York Times,
October 28, 1913.

they went to see Isadora Duncan . . . baby was born:
Kurth, 248–69.

The main house was a palatial, half-timbered Queen Anne:
Gayraud, 48.

an amateur botanist:
Cunisset-Carnot, 304.

One room, “The Lounge of the Queen Regent”:
La Vanguardia,
May 14, 1910.

He was a member of the Barcelona stock exchange:
“W. W. Stuart Dies in Spain,”
New York Times,
April 1, 1914.

Often he entertained his guests:
La Vanguardia,
April 23, 1911, and January 24, 1905.

C
HAPTER 7:
F
ERRY
’
S
S
CHEME

In 1912, when Ferry Carpenter set up:
Confessions,
57.

The bell was rung:
Leslie,
Images of America:
Hayden,
25.

Galloway said, “I see you’re going to”:
Confessions,
58.

He didn’t have many clients:
Ibid., 65.

The cattle business also took years:
According to Ferry’s son Ed Carpenter, Ferry and Jack ended the first year with a loss of $477.88.
Ferry’s father continued to subsidize them until 1914, when they had 225 head and made a profit of $2,150.
America’s First Grazier,
47.

“We ran him home,” Ferry told an appreciative group:
Speech at Colorado State University, accepting the Stockman of the Year Award, February 1967; Tread of Pioneers Museum.

one evening in Cambridge, Turner rebuked his daughter:
Letter from Farrington R. Carpenter to Henry Bragdon, December 11, 1967, Woodrow Wilson Collection, Princeton University.

Carpenter assured Bragdon that by then Wilson no longer shared Turner’s view of women. Carey Thomas, the second president of Bryn Mawr College and a well-known suffragist, had hired Wilson to teach history there in 1884. Carpenter wrote that Thomas had “knocked out of [Wilson’s] head his theretofore belief that all women’s minds were incapable of matching men’s intellectual structures.” But Bragdon says that at the time, Wilson believed that women lost their femininity when they chose to work with men. Wilson wrote to a friend at Bryn Mawr, “I find that teaching women relaxes my mental muscle.”

As Ferry put it, “The Sheep. Always we live in fear & hatred of them”:
Letter to Frederick Jackson Turner, October 6, 1922. TU Box 31A (20), Frederick Jackson Turner Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA.

In October 1913, writing from Oak Point:
October 13, 1913, TU Box 20A (3), Ibid.

A district attorney in Steamboat Springs instructed Ferry to take on the jurors one by one, as you would if you were shooting ducks. The DA said that he’d know when they were convinced: “When a man gets interested in something he is listening to, his neck begins to stretch as you grip his attention. When his Adam’s apple comes out so far that it finally chins itself on his collar, you know you have him.” Women—not yet allowed to be jurors in Colorado—would be more difficult. “They are always so conscious of how their back hair may be looking that they never allow their
necks to stretch and therefore can’t be totally swayed by oratory.”
Confessions,
71–72.

“Well, guess I’d better roll in—I think of you all every now & again”:
Letter to Turner, October 13, 1913, Frederick Jackson Turner Papers, Huntington Library.

“We did not want strays”:
Beverly Smith, “America’s Most Unusual Storyteller,”
Saturday Evening Post,
April 12, 1952.

Twenty-five people attended, the paper reported:
“Elkhead District Formed,”
Routt County Republican,
April 21, 1911.

education officials handed out postcards:
Zimmerman, 81, citing
Country School Legacy:
Humanities on the Frontier
(Silt, CO): Country School Legacy, 1981, 46.

Fulton had grown up:
Rebecca Fulton Wattles, in
History of Hayden & West Routt County,
186.

he said during a talk in Denver about his early experiences:
“The Adventures of a Tenderfoot,” January 9, 1964, Denver Public Library.

Early on the morning after the teachers arrived:
Confessions,
81–84.

As his son Ed recalled:
America’s First Grazier,
54–55.

Jack White was married in 1915, and I suspect that he played an unacknowledged role in Carpenter’s scheme. A few years earlier, either during a trip home or at a dance in Steamboat Springs (accounts vary), Jack had met a fearless society girl from Evanston—Ann Ehrat. The daughter of a wealthy importer, she had left for Colorado in 1908 and homesteaded on Cow Creek, south of Steamboat Springs, with her brother, William. Jack’s success at wooing Ann could well have spurred Ferry’s notion to recruit more women like her to Elkhead.

C
HAPTER 8:
D
EPARTURE

Postcard of South Street:
The gates in the left foreground are the entrance to the former Beardsley Roselawn estate.

Dorothy introduced the speaker, Mrs. Theodore M. Pomeroy:
“For Which Mrs. Pomeroy Was Prepared Because She Was ‘Born a Suffragist,’ ”
Auburn Citizen,
June 8, 1914.

She was not surprised to hear Ros say:
Grace Kennard Underwood, explanation of how Rosamond and Dorothy came to be hired at Elkhead School, and their early weeks, undated and unfinished.

Stewart wrote about a camping trip in December:
Elinore Pruitt Stewart, 198.

“We all got so much out of so little”:
Ibid., 211.

The domestic-science movement was led:
Shapiro, 3–10.

War with Mexico appeared imminent:
Cooper, 319–21.

He had just made second lieutenant:
“Kennard Underwood a Second Lieutenant,”
Auburn Advertiser-Journal,
June 10, 1916.

C
HAPTER 9:
H
ELL
H
ILL

“seems to be something of a joke”:
There were actually several passenger trains each day by 1916, weather permitting.

As an early historian of Colorado wrote:
Stone, 50.

This caused Thomas Durant, the vice president of Union Pacific, to gleefully announce:
Boner, 10.

Moffat was described by a friend as:
Stone, 51.

He promised it would reduce the travel time:
“New Line West of Denver:
David H. Moffat Completes Its Financing Arrangements,”
New York Times,
June 22, 1902.

The Moffat Road is still the highest standard-gauge railroad ever built in North America:
The section on the building of the Moffat Road is reconstructed from accounts in Bollinger, Boner, and Black, and from information provided by Dave Naples.

The railroad’s chief locating engineer:
Bollinger, 33–42.

“The battle of Gettysburg was a Quaker meeting”:
Boner, 81.

Argo wrote in his diary one June day:
Bollinger, 38.

Remarkably, no passenger was ever killed:
Interview with Dave Naples, June 30, 2010.

There was at least one birth:
Ibid.

“They brought some Chinese in to shovel the snow”:
Tom Ross, “Railroad Came to Steamboat 100 Years Ago,”
Steamboat Pilot,
January 16, 2008.

He established a dummy power company:
Bollinger, 35–39, 42.

Although Harriman was no longer alive:
Boner, 164–65.

Susan B. Anthony went twice to push the cause there:
Stephen J. Leonard, “Bristling for Their Rights:
Colorado’s Women and the Mandate of 1893,” in Grinstead and Fogelberg, 225–33.

“[W]hile I have not taken to myself a husband”:
Smith College,
Class of 1897 Reunion Book,
Smith College Archives.

As another traveler remembered:
“My 1926 Trip to Corona,” by William O. Gibson, in Griswold, 149.

described this
CREST OF THE MAIN RANGE
:
Griswold, 31.

advertised by the Moffat Road in a famous poster as the “Top O’ the World”:
Bollinger, back jacket.

John Adair had arrived in Hayden on horseback:
Janet Adair Ozbun, in
History of Hayden & West Routt County,
126.

Their granddaughter recalled, “Survival was tough”:
Audrey Galambos, e-mails, September 16–17, 2009. Galambos’s grandparents were Earl and Vella Rice.

Ultimately, over one and a half million homesteads were granted:
The National Parks Service and the Homestead National Monument of America:
http://www.nps.gov/home/historyculture/bynumbers.htm
.

The Harrisons’ first ranch, between Hayden and Craig, had been a headquarters:
Lewis Harrison, “Sketch of the Life,” 68; Jan Leslie, e-mail, February 12, 2010.

Ann took it upon herself to fight off the cattle barons’ “devouring invasion”:
McClure, 97–106. As Jan Leslie put it in a January 20, 2010, e-mail, “It wasn’t her perceived role as a rustler that made her a heroine when she was acquitted—this was the classic western movie plot that pitted the small rancher against the powerful cattle baron.”

Nevertheless, the Harrisons shared with other Elkhead homesteaders:
The
Routt County Republican
reported about Elkhead on May 31, 1912:
“The land is unusually rich in the hills and valleys there and will produce wonderful crops. It is a wonder how that country is settling up.”

C
HAPTER 10:
T
URNIPS AND
T
EARS

the stone was streaked, as if, one Routt County resident said, by the paintbrushes of God:
Paul Bonnifield, e-mail, July 7, 2010.

The entire field was estimated to be eight square miles:
Ninth Biennial Report of the Inspector of Coal Mines, State of Colorado 1889–1900,
87–88.

“You didn’t want to build a little wooden shack there”:
Ferry Carpenter, interview by Belle Zars, August 12, 1973.

“All the windows were made big, and all the light came in over the child’s shoulders”:
Ibid.

One of Ros’s ninth-graders, Leila Ferguson, had come west with her family:
Richard Ferguson, in
History of Hayden & West Routt County,
179.

“We had brand-new desks”:
Leila Ferguson Ault, interview by Zars, July 16, 1973.

“That consolidated point”:
Carpenter, interview by Zars.

He admired the teachers as “good sports from start to finish”:
Frank Harrison, Jr., interview by Zars, July 18, 1973.

“Mrs. Harrison told me she couldn’t say which one she liked best”:
Letter dated August 29, 1916.

he “gave a demonstration in corn bread making”:
Routt County Republican,
February 7, 1917.

In class, Rudolph Morsbach, age ten:
Rudolph’s classmates also were amused by his comments in class. The graduates of the class of 1920 wrote in their yearbook, “Rudolph was telling a story in English class, of an accident which happened to a couple of deer-hunters.
He was getting along nicely with his story, until he came to the most important part—when he became mixed and said: ‘After the man was shot, his partner built a fire, but, it was so cold that the wounded man froze to death. Then he got a pair of skis and went to find help!’ ”

He asked whether he could set up an account:
Farrington R. Carpenter to Harrick’s bookstore, October 26, 1916.

“and four-year-old Herbie didn’t survive”:
“Death of Herbie Jones,”
Routt County Republican,
August 19, 1910.

As Carpenter recalled, he and Mrs. Murphy:
Confessions,
79–80.