Nothing Daunted (4 page)

When Brown was ready to build a luxury hotel, he hired Frank Edbrooke, a young architect from Chicago who had designed Denver’s spectacular Grand Opera House and one of its earliest office buildings, which was fronted with plate-glass windows. Edbrooke planned the hotel to fit a large triangular plot that Brown had used as his cow pasture.
The project took four years and cost $2 million
, including the furnishings and fittings. The Brown Palace opened in 1892, sixteen years after Colorado became the thirty-eighth state.

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By the time Dorothy and Rosamond arrived, the hotel presided over Denver’s business and theater districts. The Union Pacific
Railroad delivered passengers to Union Station at the northwest end of Seventeenth Street, near the original site of Denver City; and automobiles—along with trolleys and bicycles—were replacing horses along Broadway. The new “machines” were unreliable and noisy but left behind none of the bacteria, odors, and mess of manure. Colorado, with its high altitude and dry air, was the Baden-Baden of the United States. Hospitals in Denver specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis, and spas had been built in mountain towns known for their mineral waters. Thanks to the boosterism of the
Rocky Mountain News
and other newspapers, the aggressive advertising campaigns of the railroads, and stories of medicinal miracles in Colorado Springs, Manitou, Steamboat Springs, and Hot Sulphur Springs (a town owned by William Byers), tourism had replaced gold as the state’s biggest lure.

The two women from the East were surprised to find themselves gazing at the white peaks and blue skies of the Rockies through a heavy haze that was just as bad as the air in Auburn. The pollution was less noticeable in the summer, when coal wasn’t needed for heat, but coal fired the electrical generator of the Brown Palace and other businesses, and half a dozen smelters ran year-round, processing mountain ore into gold and silver and emitting their own noxious odors. As in other industrial cities, plumes of gray-black smoke rose throughout downtown;
the Brown Palace already had been sandblasted
to remove a dark residue that had settled on its facade. The Denver Tramway Company provided service to the “streetcar suburbs.” Businessmen who wanted to escape the grit and crowds at the end of the day moved their families south, east, and west of the city, away from the prevailing north winds.

Rosamond and Dorothy had dinner that evening with Palmer Sabin, the son-in-law of Platt Underwood, and his family. The Sabins must have been charmed by their visitors’ gumption and social graces. They were worried, though, about how well the two women would manage in Elkhead. The Western Slope lagged decades behind the Front Range of the Rockies. Although the region had fertile valleys
and mineral deposits that exceeded those on the eastern side,
an 1880 tourists’ guide called it “an unknown land.” Denver society referred to it as “the wild country
.” The mountains where they would be living were far from Hayden and the railroad. Elkhead was not a town; it barely qualified as a settlement. It had several dozen scattered residents, no shops or amenities of any kind, and a brutally punishing climate.

Farrington Carpenter had arranged for them to stay with a family of homesteaders. He wrote to them, “I dropped down onto Calf Creek and took dinner with the Harrisons about 2 miles from the school and Mrs. Harrison said she would take you to board if I would explain in advance that they do not run a regular boarding place, but are just plain ranch folks. They have a new house and can give you a room together for yourselves. . . . They will charge you $20 per month apiece for board and room. You will be expected to take care of your own room and that price does not include washing. . . .” Palmer’s mother, Rosamond said, “was very discouraging about our adventure.” She told them, “No Denver girls would go up there in that place. It will be terribly hard.”

Friends at home believed they were wasting yet another year. Unlikely to find worthy suitors among the cowboys and merchants of Routt County, they were apparently dooming themselves to be old maids. Dorothy and Ros, however, were more bothered by the idea of settling into a staid life of marriage and motherhood without having contributed anything to people who could benefit from the few talents and experiences they had to offer. The notion of a hard life—for a limited time—was exactly what they had in mind.

“We were nothing daunted,” Ros recalled, “and spent the night in grandeur at the Brown Palace Hotel . . . the hottest night I ever spent in my life.”

T
HE
G
IRLS FROM
A
UBURN

D
orothy and Ros met in Miss Bruin’s kindergarten in 1892. The school, started ten years earlier, was one of the first kindergartens in the United States. Miss Bruin was kind to the children, but they shrank from her hugs and kisses because, Dorothy said, “her face bristled with stiff hairs.” Dorothy briefly attended a public school on Genesee Street, but when her parents heard about the outside toilets and the unsanitary water pail with a tin cup fastened to it with a chain, they moved her to a private school that Rosamond was attending. Happy to be with Ros again, she didn’t mind her solitary mile-and-a-half walk through the village, but her trips home from the primary school on North Street unnerved her. She had to pass through the business district, which was lined with saloons. They had old-style swing doors and smelled strongly of stale beer. Occasionally in the afternoon, she and her friends saw men stumbling out onto the street, and they would run down the block as fast as they could.

Dorothy had six siblings. Anna, the oldest, was followed by Carl, Hermione, Carrie-Belle, Douglas, Dorothy, and Milly. Their mother, Carrie, Dorothy later said, didn’t really understand how babies were conceived. Consumed by her many domestic and philanthropic duties, she had little time for the fancies of young children. “I used to beg my mother to tell me stories about what life was like when she was a little girl and how she lived and what Auburn was like,” Dorothy said. “But she never seemed able to do it.” She revered her mother, and worried about how frequently she displeased her. One spring day, Dorothy was walking by her older cousin’s house on South Street, and noticed the garden was full of blooming hyacinths. “I thought they were perfectly beautiful, and how much my mother would like them,” she said. “So I walked up and picked every one, took them home, and proudly gave them to Mother. She was absolutely horrified.” Carrie insisted that Dorothy go back and apologize to her cousin. In July 1897, when she was ten years old, her parents went off on an extended holiday, and she and her siblings were left with their nursemaid, Mamie. She wrote a winsome note: “My dear Mama . . . I can’t imagine that a week from today you will be away out at sea. I do hope that you won’t be seasick and that Papa won’t have any occasion to put an umbrella over him. . . . I promise to try my best to mind Mamie, so that when you come back you will find me improved. With millions of love, Dorothy.”

Carrie, the image of Victorian rectitude in ornate, high-necked dresses, closely watched the household budget, though immigrant labor was cheap. The staff included several maids, a cook, and a gardener. Carrie lived to be ninety-three, one of her daughters-in-law wrote, “in spite of the vicissitudes of a big family.”
And she never cooked a meal in her life
. “Her theory was that if she didn’t know how, someone could always be found to do it for her.”

Dorothy’s father, a commanding figure with a receding hairline and a bushy walrus mustache, was known in Auburn for his quick wit and his generosity. On his birthday every year, all of the guests would find twenty-dollar gold coins in their napkins. Dorothy looked forward
to the formal family dinner each night, seeing it as an opportunity to spend uninterrupted time with her parents and her older brothers and sisters. She particularly liked sitting next to her handsome brother Carl, despite his occasional offhand cruelty. One evening she showed him her new pair of white button boots, and when he teased her about her baby fat, she burst into loud sobs and was sent to her room. There was no discussion about who was to blame. Mrs. Woodruff was a strict disciplinarian, and the children were forbidden to interrupt or ask questions at the table. Nevertheless, Dorothy, the product of a pre-psychoanalytic culture, looked back on her childhood in almost idyllic terms. She said of her father, “We just swallowed everything he said and thought it was perfect.”

She spent much of her time with her maternal grandmother, Anna Porter Beardsley, a short, erect woman with a strong but embracing personality. Anna had four colonial governors in her lineage, and Dorothy was expected to know their histories. That branch of the Beardsleys lived in a rambling clapboard Greek Revival house, with extensive formal gardens and a level expanse of lawn on which the family gathered to play croquet. The grounds were kept by a gardener who had a square-trimmed beard, a strong Irish brogue, and always kept a clay pipe in his mouth.

On cool days, Dorothy often found her grandmother reading on her bedroom sofa, a wood fire burning in the fireplace. The room contained a bed, a bureau, and a dressing table, painted a pale green, that Dorothy’s grandparents had bought soon after they were married. She was told that the furniture had been made by Italian inmates at the Auburn state prison on the other side of town, and she noticed that they had decorated it in delicate brushstrokes with butterflies, trees, and flowers. In the summer, the gardener lined up tomatoes and peaches to ripen on the railing of a porch off the dressing room.

The drawing room, with a white marble fireplace and tall windows covered by embroidered French white curtains, was used only for formal occasions, such as funerals and the Beardsleys’ holiday dinners. “
The Beardsley family and its connections
by marriage had grown
so large,” according to one account of early Auburn, “that when the family Christmas dinner was eventually reduced to twenty-five, it seemed to some of the members so small [as] to be hardly worth having.”

Dorothy’s mother and father were married in the Beardsley mansion in 1872 near a wooden full-length mirror set on a low marble stand. Her father told her that the only thing he remembered about the wedding was looking into the mirror and seeing the shine on his boots—“not very romantic to my young ears.” To Dorothy, the dining room was memorable chiefly for the heating register in the floor, where she and her sisters liked to stand and feel the warm air billow their skirts around their legs. Her grandfather had his own use for the heating vent: a servant warmed his pie on it before it was served to him.

Alonzo Beardsley had an aquiline nose, very blue eyes, a bald pink head with a fringe of white hair, and a trailing white beard on which he was apt to spill food. He and his brother Nelson were among the richest men in Auburn. In 1848, along with several colleagues, they had invested in a cornstarch factory nearby.
The many uses for cornstarch
—from stiffening shirt collars to thickening blancmange—were just being discovered, and in the decades after the Civil War, the Oswego Starch Factory became the most extensive factory of its kind in the world. Each year it burned six thousand tons of coal and used 701,000 pounds of paper and five million board feet of lumber. After dinner, Alonzo retired to his library, which had a floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcase with glass panes in the door. The only books Dorothy ever took out were James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, and she read them all.

She was happiest when she was with Rosamond. The Underwoods’ good spirits were contagious, and Ros, who had three brothers but no sisters, cherished her companionship. Ros’s mother, Grace, was almost completely deaf—the result of an attack of scarlet fever when she was thirty. No one took much notice of her handicap, despite the ear trumpet she sometimes used. “Mrs. Underwood was a remarkable
mother,” Dorothy said with unintended poignancy, “because she was so understanding of children and used to play games with us.” Mr. Underwood called her “Dotty with the laughing eyes.”