Nothing daunted : the unexpected education of two society girls in the West

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Wickenden, Dorothy

Edition:

1st Scribner hardcover ed.

Physical Description:

xiv, 286 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Summary:

"A captivating full-length book derived from a widely read and much beloved New Yorker piece about Wickenden's grandmother and her grandmother's best friend who left their affluent East Coast lives to "rough it" as teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Beginnings. -- Overland journey -- The girls from Auburn -- "A funny, scraggly place" -- "Refined, intelligent gentlewomen" -- Old World and New. -- Unfenced -- The grand tour -- Ferry's scheme -- Departure -- Hell Hill -- Working Girls. -- Turnips and tears -- The mad ladies of Strawberry Park -- Debut -- Reckonings. -- The cream of Routt County -- "Unarmed and defenseless" -- "The dark days are very few" -- Three-wire winter -- Commencement.

Subject Term:

Teachers -- Colorado -- Biography.

Education -- Colorado -- History -- 20th century.

Publication Information:

New York : Scribner, 2011.

Subject:

Teachers -- Colorado -- Biography.

Education -- Colorado -- History -- 20th century.

Woodruff, Dorothy

Underwood, Rosamond

Faculty (Education)

Instructors

School teachers

Schoolteachers

Children -- Education

Education, Primitive

Education of children

Human resource development

Instruction

Pedagogy

Schooling

Students -- Education

Youth -- Education

SAILS ISBN:

9781439176580

9781439176597

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Dartmouth - Southworth	371.1 WIC 2012	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent	371.1 WIC 2011	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	371.1 WICKENDEN	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... New Bedford Francis J. Lawler Branch	371.1 WIC 2012	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Raynham Library	920 WIC	BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Richards Memorial Library	371.1 W632	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Somerset Public Library	371.1 WIC 2011	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Taunton Public Library	978.8092 W6363N	3RD FLOOR STACKS	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

This exhilarating saga about two intrepid young women who leave the affluence of their New York home to teach school on the Western frontier in 1916 is authentically created using actual letters home and interviews with descendants.

Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood attended grade school and Smith College together, spent nine months on a grand tour of Europe in 1910, and then, bored with society luncheons and chaperoned balls and not yet ready for marriage, they went off to teach the children of homesteaders in a remote schoolhouse on the Western Slope of Colorado. They traveled on the new railroad over the Continental Divide and by wagon to Elkhead, a tiny settlement far from the nearest town. Their students came to school from miles away in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string.

Dorothy Woodruff was the grandmother of New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden. Nearly one hundred years later, Wickenden found the buoyant, detailed, colorful letters the two women wrote to their families. Through them, she has chronicled their trials in the classroom, the cowboys and pioneering women they met, and the violent kidnapping of a close friend. Central to their narrative is Ferry Carpenter, the witty, idealistic, and occasionally outrageous young lawyer and cattle rancher who hired them, in part because he thought they would make attractive and cultivated brides. None of them imagined the transforming effect the year would have--on the children, the families, and the teachers.

Wickenden set out on her own journey to discover what two intrepid Eastern women found when they went West, and what America was like at that uncertain moment, with the country poised for the First World War, but going through its own period of self-discovery.

Drawing upon the letters, interviews with descendants, research about these vanished communities, and trips to the region, Wickenden creates a compelling, original saga about the two intrepid young women and the "settling up" of the West.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

On July 24, 1916, the Syracuse Daily Journal printed the headline: "Society Girls Go to Wilds of Colorado." The two young women were Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, recent graduates of Smith College who, in order to defy their family's expectation of marriage, sought work in the small town of Hayden, Colo. Woodruff was the grandmother of New Yorker executive editor Wickenden, who herself becomes a central character in an informative and engaging narrative. Using letters from her grandmother, newspaper articles, and interviews with descendants, Wickenden retells how Woodruff and Underwood traveled to the newly settled state of Colorado to teach at a ramshackle grade school. The book offers a wide cross-section of life in the American West, but the core of the story is the girls' slow adaptation to a society very different from the one in which they were raised, and their evolution from naive but idealistic and open-minded society girls to strong-willed and pragmatic women who later married and raised families in the midst of the Great Depression. Wickenden brings to life two women who otherwise might have been lost to history and who took part in creating the modern-day West. Photos. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

A detailed study of two spirited and privileged young women who unexpectedly became a small part of the history of the American West.Rosamund Underwood and Dorothy Woodruff, both Smith College graduates, spent their 20s traveling to Europe and Manhattan and pouring tea for suffragettes at home in Auburn, N.Y. Nearing 30, they were becoming restless and, longing to do useful and interesting work, applied to become teachers in the small community of Elkhead, Colo. New Yorker executive editor Wickenden, Woodruff's granddaughter, relates their experiences with a vivid, gossipy flair, and readers get an excellent sense of what everyday life was like, not only for the privileged and highly educated, but for the mine worker, the homesteader, the elementary-school teacher. However, readers expecting a straightforward, linear narrative will be baffled by the sinuous curve of the story as it makes switchbacks and loops, like the much-discussed Moffat Road Railroad. In fact, the momentous first day of school for the young teachers doesn't arrive until halfway through the book. The earlier material covers their journey to Elkhead, their childhood and college years and their extensive domestic and international travel. The author's frequent diversions into local and national history demand careful attention, and they might delight one reader but bore another. Wickenden defers the discussion of the women's marriages until two-thirds of the way through the book, which both prioritizes their accomplishments and entices the reader. We know at the outset that Dorothy has children, and this knowledge pulls us gently through the narrative's many turns.An absorbing maze of a bookreaders may well, like Woodruff and Underwood, find their hearts lost to the West.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

New York Review of Books Review

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." 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. Wickenden, who is the executive editor of The New Yorker, begins and ends the book by describing her own efforts to round up the sources of the story, but her writerly presence is restrained, even a bit stiff. For the most part, she lets her material speak for itself, so the effect of reading the book is almost like visiting a museum. The tale of Dorothy and Ros is often gently put to the side while Wickenden explains, say, what's involved in the process of coal mining or the ins and outs of licensing teachers in early-20th-century Colorado. "Nothing Daunted" is pretty much the polar opposite of Jeannette Walls's "Half Broke Horses," which presents an account of Walls's own grandmother's rugged life in the West in an emotional, freewheeling fictional form. Wickenden doesn't seem overly concerned with the interior lives of her subjects. More than halfway through the book, for example, as you're wondering how Dorothy felt about the fact that Carpenter and Perry were openly competing for Ros's affections, Wickenden reveals that Dorothy was already secretly spoken for when the two women arrived in Colorado. Yet there's often a surprising imaginative power in Wickenden's approach. At its best, this book can recall Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's classic "A Midwife's Tale," which pioneered the method of teasing out an expansive story from the record of "unremarkable" women's daily lives. Individual scenes emerge with a lovely, almost pointillist clarity - like a Christmas party at the schoolhouse in the midst of a blizzard, with rustic dancing and gifts for the dazzled children sent by Dorothy's and Ros's families - while we never lose track of the larger forces at work, including the removal of the Indians and the brutal fights for mining and railroad riches. Although Wickenden's gaze remains steadily on her well-to-do subjects, she makes us aware of the human and environmental toll of the homesteader's life. In the end, the community that gathered around the Elkhead schoolhouse was short-lived as families moved to friendlier terrain. But perhaps something about its improbability brought out the best in many people, so it seems fitting that the schoolhouse became the centerpiece of this book, a historical rescue effort as impressive in its way as Dorqthy and Ros's adventure a century earlier. Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Library Journal Review

Wickenden (executive editor, The New Yorker) shares the story of her grandmother Dorothy Woodruff, who, along with close personal friend Rosamond Underwood, spent nine months teaching at a remote settlement school in northwestern Colorado in the early 20th century. This highly personalized and meticulously researched account is more than a simple family history: it tells a great backstory about American development in those years, an "alternative western," in Wickenden's words. These rich and well-educated young society women, tired of social conventions and frustrated by suffrage work, came face to face with another America in the years before World War I-one that was poor, diverse, remote, lacking in modern conveniences, occasionally violent, and yet spectacularly beautiful and "new." Although far from being a scholarly account, the story here adds to our understanding of the complexity of women's experiences in presuffrage America. As college students today do transformative volunteer work worldwide, so, too, did these two young women. Their lovingly preserved letters richly demonstrate how in seeking to assist others they also changed themselves. VERDICT Recommended for general readers interested in the development of the American West, teachers, and those seeking contributions by women to history. [See Prepub Alert, 12/20/10.]-Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

PROLOGUE One weekend afternoon in the fall of 2008, at the back of a drawer in my old wooden desk at home, I came across a folder I had forgotten. "Dorothy Woodruff Letters, Elkhead 1916-17." My mother had given me the file when my children were young, and I had put it away, intending to look through it, but life had intervened. I glanced at the first letter. Dated Friday, July 28, 1916, it was written on the stationery of the Hayden Inn. At the top of the sheet was a photograph of a homely three-story concrete-block house with a few spindly saplings out front. The inn advertised itself as "The Only First-Class Hotel in Hayden." Dorothy wrote: "My dearest family: Can you believe that I am actually far out here in Colorado?" She and her close friend, Rosamond Underwood, had grown up together in Auburn, New York. They had just arrived after a five-day journey and were preparing to head into a remote mountain range in the Rockies, to teach school in a settlement called Elkhead. Dorothy's letter described their stop overnight in Denver, their train ride across the Continental Divide, and their introductions to the locals of Hayden, whom she described as "all agog" over them "and so funny." One man could barely be restrained "from showing us a bottle of gall stones just removed from his wife!" She closed by saying, "They are all so friendly and kind--and we are thrilled by everything. We start now--four hours drive. Goodbye in haste.…" Dorothy Woodruff was my grandmother. As I began reading the letters, I recognized her voice immediately, even though they were written by a young woman--twenty-nine years old, unmarried, belatedly setting out on her own. An avid correspondent, she captured the personalities of the people she met; the harsh landscape; her trials with a classroom of unruly young boys; and her devotion to Rosamond, known to my brothers and me as "Aunt Ros." I also was struck by their unusually warm friendship with two men: the young lawyer and rancher who hired them, Farrington Carpenter; and Bob Perry, who was the supervisor of his father's coal mine. They were eighteen hundred miles away from their families, and from decorous notions about relations between the sexes. The letters revealed the contradictions of Dorothy's upbringing. She was a daughter of the Victorian aristocracy. Her forebears, like Rosamond's, were entrepreneurs and lawyers and bankers who had become wealthy during the Industrial Revolution. In 1906, the young women were sent to Smith, one of the earliest women's colleges, and afterward, they were indulged for a year with a grand tour of Europe, during which they saw their first "aeroplane," learned how to blow the foam off a mug of beer, expressed disdain for the paintings of Matisse, and watched Nijinsky dance. Then, like other girls of their background, they were expected to return home to marry, and marry well. Yet they had grown up surrounded by the descendants of some of the most prominent reformers in American history, including the suffragists who organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, fifteen miles west of Auburn; and the man who overturned barbaric penal practices at the Auburn state prison, Sing Sing, and penitentiaries across the country. Auburn was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and some of the families they knew had hidden runaway slaves in their basements. Dorothy's grandfather lived next door to William Seward, President Lincoln's secretary of state. One day when she was visiting my family in Weston, Connecticut, she recorded an oral history, speaking with unerring precision about her childhood and about her time in Colorado. Retrieving the transcript of the tape, I was reminded of the breathtaking brevity of America's past. I remember Dorothy as white-haired, impeccably attired, and sometimes stern. The second youngest of seven children, she grew up in a big hipped-roof clapboard house staffed by servants. Her bedroom and that of her younger sister, Milly, were in the nursery, reached by the back stairs. Raised largely by their nursemaid, they rarely stepped into the kitchen. When Dorothy's four children were growing up, she didn't know how to cook anything except creamed potatoes and hot cocoa. Every night she brushed her hair a hundred strokes with a French boar-bristle brush. She joked to us about her height--four feet eleven and shrinking every year. To reach her high mahogany four-poster bed, inherited from her parents, she had to use a footstool upholstered in needlepoint. She gave me tips in etiquette: how to file my nails, how to set a formal table, how to avoid acting "common." When I was a slouching teenager, she showed me how she had been taught to walk across the room with a book balanced on her head. On my eighteenth birthday, she wrote to me: "To be happy it is necessary to be constantly giving to others. I do not mean to give in work alone--but all of your self. That means interest in other people--not only by affection--but by kindness." She didn't like the fashions of the 1970s--curtains of hair, tie-dyed T-shirts, and tight bell-bottoms--and once told me haughtily, "I never wore a pair of trousers in my life." For all that, she was spirited and funny--not at all the deferential young woman she had been brought up to be. After she and Ros returned from Europe, they attended friends' weddings, along with traditional luncheons and balls, but six years later, they were still uninterested in the suitors who were interested in them. Chafing at the rigid social routines and not getting anywhere with the ineffectual suffrage work they had taken on, they didn't hesitate when they heard about two teaching jobs in Colorado. The nine months my grandmother spent there seemed to have shaped her as much as her entire youth in Auburn. She was full of expansive admiration for the hardworking people of Elkhead, and when she faced great personal difficulties of her own, she called to mind the uncomplaining endurance she had witnessed in the settlers and their children. She and Ros, like other easterners going west, were time travelers, moving back to the frontier. Although they ventured out after the first settlers, and went by train rather than covered wagon, their destination felt more like 1870 than 1916. They took with them progressive ideas about education, technology, and women--and postcards from their travels abroad. The homesteaders--motley transplants from across the country, Europe, and Russia--lived almost twenty miles north of Hayden. Effectively cut off from modern life by poverty and the Rocky Mountains, the pioneers found the two women as exotic as Dorothy and Ros found them. Although World War I was looming, such a cataclysm was unimaginable to Americans who knew nothing of combat. Dorothy sometimes talked disparagingly about her grandfather's brother, who had avoided service in the Civil War by paying a substitute to take his place--a common practice among wealthy families in the North. Just weeks before Dorothy and Ros left for Colorado, President Wilson averted war with Mexico. The prevailing spirit among the elites of Auburn, the industrialists of Denver, and the homesteaders of Elkhead was an exhilarating optimism about the future. These people were swept up in some of the strongest currents of the country's history: the expulsion of native tribes; the mining of gold, silver, and coal; the building of a network of railroads that linked disparate parts of the country and led to the settlement of the West; the development of rural schools; the entry of immigrants, African-Americans, and women into the workforce and the voting booth; even the origins of modern dance. Their lives were integral to the making of America, yet the communities they built, even their idioms, had all but vanished. As I got to know the children and grandchildren of the people my grandmother told us about, I began to see her story as more than a curious family history. It was an alternative Western. There were strutting cowboys and eruptions of violence, but the records the residents left behind turned out to be full of their own indelible characters and plot twists. Dozens of descendants in Denver, Steamboat Springs, Hayden, Elkhead, and Oak Creek had kept their family memorabilia from that year. Rebecca Wattles, a rancher in Hayden and the granddaughter of the secretary of the Elkhead school board, showed me the 1920 yearbook of the first five graduates of the school, all of whom had been Ros's students. They wrote: "It isn't the easiest thing in the world to buck trail for two or three miles when the trail is drifted and your horse lunges and plunges; nor yet to ski, when the snow is loose and sticky. But, if as we are told, it is these things that develop grit, stick-to-it-ive-ness, and independence--well, the children who have gone to school in Elk Head, ought surely to have a superfluous amount of those qualities." One Sunday in early October 2009, my husband and I pulled up to an old white Georgian house on a cul-de-sac in Norwalk, Connecticut. We were greeted at the front door by Peter Cosel, one of Ros's grandsons. He appeared to be mildly amused by my mission: a search for the letters that Rosamond had written from Elkhead. For a year I had been pestering him about going through the boxes he had in storage there. Peter called his brother Rob, also a lawyer, who arrived just as we finished a cursory examination of the attic treasures, including a trunk filled with papers dating back to the 1850s from a branch of the Underwood family that had settled in Chicago. I sat on the floor in front of a sagging box, blackened on the bottom from mildew and eaten away in spots by a squirrel, and began to unpack it, setting aside a stack of five-year diaries--fastidious chronicles by Ros's mother of her family's daily life in Auburn. Peter absently combed through some business documents of his great-grandfather's, a man named Sam Perry, who--I soon learned--was one of Denver's "empire builders," a financier of the railroad that Dorothy and Ros rode over the Continental Divide. Rob sat on the edge of the bed and talked about childhood visits to their grandmother's rustic summer cabin in the hills of Strawberry Park outside Steamboat Springs. Then my husband handed me a two-page typewritten letter. In the upper-right corner, it said, "Saturday Night. Aug. 6." I looked at the closing: "Dotty and I can hardly believe that this school is really ours to command! … Lovingly ROSAMOND." Ros's entire correspondence was there, each letter typed, folded, and numbered by her mother. The letters had been written to her parents, who, like Dorothy's, had left them for her children and grandchildren. Unwinding the string of a thick legal envelope, I looked inside. It contained dozens of articles and letters from October 1916. They confirmed the most improbable of all the tales my grandmother had told us, about the violent kidnapping of one of their friends. Sensational headlines were spread across the front pages from Denver to Los Angeles: HOW THE MILLIONAIRE'S SON WAS KIDNAPPED AND HELD FOR RANSOM; EXTRA! KIDNAPPER IS SLAIN. All of these papers and recollections, with their idiosyncratic details about the "settling up" of northwestern Colorado, provided a backstory to America's leap into the twentieth century. And they filled out the saga about two cosseted women from New York who shunned convention to head out to what was still, in many ways, the Wild West. © 2011 Dorothy Wickenden Excerpted from Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.