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The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West
Scribner
June 2011
On Sale: June 21, 2011
304 pages
ISBN: 1439176582
EAN: 9781439176580
Hardcover
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Women's Fiction
In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond
Underwood, close friends from childhood and graduates of
Smith College, left home in Auburn, New York, for the wilds
of northwestern Colorado. Bored by their soci-ety luncheons,
charity work, and the effete young men who courted them,
they learned that two teach-ing jobs were available in a
remote mountaintop schoolhouse and applied—shocking their
families and friends. “No young lady in our town,” Dorothy
later commented, “had ever been hired by anybody.” They took the new railroad over the Continental Divide and
made their way by spring wagon to the tiny settlement of
Elkhead, where they lived with a family of homesteaders.
They rode several miles to school each day on horseback,
sometimes in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or
skied on barrel staves, in tattered clothes and shoes tied
together with string. The man who had lured them out west
was Ferry Carpenter, a witty, idealistic, and occasionally
outrageous young lawyer and cattle rancher. He had promised
them the adventure of a lifetime and the most modern
schoolhouse in Routt County; he hadn’t let on that the
teachers would be considered dazzling prospective brides for
the locals. That year transformed the children, their families, and the
undaunted teachers themselves. Dorothy and Rosamond learned
how to handle unruly children who had never heard the Pledge
of Allegiance and thought Ferry Carpenter was the president
of the United States; they adeptly deflected the amorous
advances of hopeful cowboys; and they saw one of their
closest friends violently kidnapped by two coal miners.
Carpenter’s marital scheme turned out to be more successful
than even he had hoped and had a surprising twist some forty
years later. In their buoyant letters home, the two women captured the
voices and stories of the pioneer women, the children, and
the other memorable people they got to know. Nearly a
hundred years later, New Yorker executive editor Dorothy
Wickenden—the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff—found the
letters and began to reconstruct the women’s journey.
Enhancing the story with interviews with descendants,
research about these vanished communities, and trips to the
region, Wickenden creates an exhilarating saga about two
intrepid young women and the “settling up” of the West.
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