A Frontier Schoolhouse Story
NYT Sunday Book Review
Lawrence M. Sawyer/Corbis
In the spring of 1916, two society girls from Auburn, N.Y. — Smith graduates who, having already done a European tour, were iffy about charity work but picky about husbands — found by chance the answer to the question of what to do with themselves. A lady who’d come for tea mentioned a friend who had a brother, a Princeton man, who was looking for two college-educated women to teach at a schoolhouse he’d built with his neighbors in the Elkhead Mountains of Colorado. Instantly, both knew they wanted to go. One of them, Dorothy Woodruff, was the grandmother of Dorothy Wickenden. And in “Nothing Daunted,” Wickenden has painstakingly recreated the story of how that earlier Dorothy and her friend Rosamond Underwood embarked on a brief but life-changing adventure, teaching the children of struggling homesteaders. Mining a trove of letters as well as oral histories and period documents, including an autobiography published by their employer, Farrington (Ferry) Carpenter, Wickenden lets their tale of personal transformation open out to reveal the larger changes in the rough-and-tumble society of the West — “a back story,” as she aptly puts it, “to America’s leap into the 20th century.”
NOTHING DAUNTED
The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West
By Dorothy Wickenden
Illustrated. 286 pp. Scribner. $26.
Excerpt: ‘Nothing Daunted’ (Google Books)
On both ends there were parties who needed convincing. The girls’ parents had to be reassured of the relative safety of the plan. Carpenter wanted to know about their gumption. “Will they take the grief that goes with such a job,” he wondered, “and have they the pep to shed it off and go right on like nothing happened?” Yes and yes: The two women from whom nothing much had ever been expected proved unfailingly cheerful and open-minded, beginning with the long train journey to Elkhead, which culminated on the treacherous Moffat Road (the hair-raising history of which Wickenden pauses to tell, noting that it’s “still the highest standard-gauge railroad ever built in North America”). Ros and Dorothy even loved their drafty, cramped lodgings with the surprisingly well-educated Harrison family and relished the two-mile trip on horseback to school each day, sometimes through snow as high as the horses’ withers. “You simply can’t conceive of the newness of this country,” Dorothy wrote home.
The women improvised their way into teaching, nervous and unaware, Wickenden writes, of the “awe with which college-educated teachers in such far-flung areas were regarded.” They were alternately smitten and exasperated by the children, and amazed at their own capacity to rise to an occasion. Later, both looked back on their year in Elkhead as the best time in their lives. As the months went by, their confidence grew as they toured a coal mine owned by their new friend Bob Perry; traveled to Steamboat Springs to take their state teaching exams; visited the Rocky Mountain Dancing Club, the first performing-arts camp in the country; and attended a raucous all-night party for Carpenter’s birthday. At one point, Perry was kidnapped by disgruntled miners, providing thrilling fodder for letters home.
Known in Denver as “the wild country,” Elkhead was a kind of last-chance outpost for settlers taking advantage of the 1862 Homestead Act, the government’s offer of up to 160 acres to anyone willing to stake a claim in the untamed West. The area’s Ute Indians had been “dispensed with” by the Army, force-marched to a desolate patch of Utah, but the land itself was barely habitable. (Today Elkhead has just three year-round residents.) The Harrisons arrived there only after their cattle ranch in a more fertile nearby valley had failed.
Elkhead, Wickenden explains, was “covered by snow for six months of the year” and springtime brought nearly impassable mud. The homesteaders’ children had had little schooling; many lacked basic necessities like warm clothes and shoes. But thanks to Ferry Carpenter, who had worked on a ranch during his summer breaks from college and had staked his claim on his 21st birthday, the schoolhouse became an inspirational community center.
Carpenter emerges as a fascinating character, both high-minded and practical, generous and self-interested. “I felt that this remarkable system of land distribution,” he later wrote, “was the keystone to the success of American democracy.” Neither Dorothy nor Ros comes across as an exceptional personality, yet they were clearly ready for something more than the staid milieu upstate New York had on offer. Even their well-chaperoned grand tour of Europe, while eye-opening, was not life-changing. (At Amiens Cathedral, we learn, in one of many unexciting anecdotes, Dorothy looked up at the ceiling and “my head went back, my hat dropped off — in my hurry I had come away without any hatpins.”) The romance of the West was the perfect medicine.
Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
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