Dorothy Wickenden

Camp Whiteface Mountain alum Dorothy Wickenden – better known as the executive editor of the New Yorker – recently published “Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West,” a book that succeeds by being both panoramic and intimate.

In 1916, Wickenden’s grandmother, Dorothy Woodruff – in her late 20s, unmarried and in search of adventure – spent a formative year teaching and living with impoverished homesteaders’ children in Elkhead, Colorado.

Wickenden writes that Elkhead gave her grandmother the chance to be a “time traveler” who returned to the severe American frontier of the 1800s. The experience provided the affluent descendant of factory owners and colonial governors with perspectives that served her well when her life subsequently detoured off of easy street.

The author says that her story’s other protagonists are Rosamond Underwood (Woodruff’s lifelong best friend) and Ferry Carpenter – an Ivy Leaguer, lawyer, rancher, homesteader and character for the ages.

Carpenter set his mind to building the community school that employed Woodruff and Underwood in part to import eligible women for all the love-starved cowboys in the area. Though required to submit photos with their applications, Woodruff and Underwood had no inkling of this aspect of the enterprise. Wickenden uses Carpenter’s autobiography, her own memories, diligent shoe-leather reporting, her subjects’ voluminous correspondence (which is remarkably still extant) and a huge array of other sources to chronicle her subjects’ lives and simultaneously create an “alternative Western,” a compelling account of settler life, a cozy family narrative, and, best of all, a bracing piece of American history.

Do you advise people not to get into journalism because the field’s so difficult right now?
I have to give a talk at the Columbia publishing course, and I’ll give them a pep talk about how it’s going to be great, but people are very honest with them about how hard it is.

Well, it’s no secret.
I know (laughs), and you never go into it because you think it’s going to be great career move down the line.

I actually wanted to ask you how many people the New Yorker has trying to figure out how to make revenue from the Internet.
Wait, are we talking about the New Yorker or about my book?

About your book, but I have a lot of – I mean, I could talk to you for hours.
Yes, you could (laughs). What’s the question? I probably don’t know the answer.

How many people do you have trying to figure out how to make money from the Internet?
It doesn’t quite work that way. We have such a tiny staff. We have a handful of full-time people working on the website, probably about eight.
We also are part of the Conde Nast behemoth.
I’m not the best person to talk to about this stuff. I’m a print dinosaur (laughs).

How many hits does “The Political Scene” get – and that’s the last New Yorker question.
Great. The last time I checked, we had 18,000 subscribers, and I don’t know about the hits. It seems to be holding pretty steady.
In Colorado, people came up to me and said, “I love the Political Scene!”
So, people who listen, they listen every week. It’s free.

It’s great. Because this interview’s for an Adirondack newspaper, I want to ask you: Did any moments in the book remind you of your time in the Adirondacks?
Well, as you know, I went to camp in the Adirondacks, near Wilmington, and the smell of the pine immediately brought it back.
The first time I noticed that was a couple of years ago, when I was driving to the top of the Continental Divide for the first time, and what I was doing for the book was trying to retrace, as literally as I could, the trip that my grandmother and her friend took.
They had taken the train from Auburn, New York to Chicago, across the Great Plains to Denver, spent the night in Denver, and got on a different train – and it was new, it was only about three years old – and the original route went up and over the Continental Divide.
You can do Amtrak for part of that route, but not all of it, so I rented a car and I stupidly drove the sedan up this dirt path. It was this really funky pitch, boulder-strewn, branches across the road, and within 10 minutes there was snow on the sides of the road.
As I got up into the pine, I just rolled down the windows and it smelled exactly like the Adirondacks. It was a great moment.

Do you have a favorite memory of the Adirondacks?
The hiking was always one of the absolute best things. We used to hike up a mountain and there’s a beautiful lake at the top [Copperas Pond]. That’s where I got my love of mountain climbing, and how I could completely understand what my grandmother was talking about, about her love for the mountains out West, although they’re quite different.
And I always loved clambering around the Flume. It’s just a magical place.

Who’s the audience for the book?
When I wrote it, my agent and probably my editor assumed it would be very appealing to women, but I also wanted it to be as broad an audience as popular. My hope is that it it’s going to be a crossover.
There are all kinds of things that I wrote about the history of America at that time that I wanted to appeal to everybody who was interested in American history: the building of the railroad, what it was like to be in the mining industry at the time, a flashback to the time when the Utes were driven out of Colorado.
It’s a part of American history that hasn’t been told terribly much, and it certainly hasn’t been told from the perspective of the people who were living it, and that was what appealed to me so much, because I had all these letters, and through all these contacts that I made, I was really able to imagine what it was like.
My hope is that it could be taught in college courses.
Right now, people of all kinds seem to be reading it: men and women, young and old.
At my book talks there’ve been quite a few younger readers, which pleases me. I was afraid it was going to be for grandmas and mothers and sisters (laughs).

My favorite line from the book is, “the breathtaking brevity of America’s past.” Can you expound on what that phrase means?
I was stuck by that when I went back to my grandmother’s oral history, which she did when she was in her 80s, probably in the early 1980s.
I remember sitting down with the tape recorder in front of her. She mentioned, just in passing, “My grandfather lived next door to William Seward.”
I thought, “That’s amazing – she lived in the same time period as Lincoln’s Secretary of State!”
It blew my mind. I didn’t quite believe it. One of the things I had to do was go back and check the accuracy of everybody’s recollections. So I went to the William Seward house and asked if a man named Woodruff had lived next door, and they said, “Oh yeah, he lived right there, right next door, where the municipal parking lot is today.”
So that struck me, and I think the most striking thing, and I put this in the book, is that when Dorothy and Rosamond were three or four they could see Harriet Tubman riding her bicycle, and she would stop at the houses of people she knew were sympathetic to her and her cause – she ran a home for indigent African-Americans – and she would ask for donations for her cause. Seward was good friends with Harriet Tubman.
I just thought, “Wow – my grandmother saw Harriet Tubman.”
So, she had this direct connection to the Civil War, and she was jumping forward into the 20th century in the time that the book takes place.
The young man who hired them knew early on that he wanted to become a rancher. While Ros and my grandmother were off gallivanting in high style in Europe, he was taking a stagecoach on the last leg of his journey to Hayden, Colorado.
My grandmother, on her letters from Europe, writes about how excited she was that her parents got her first automobile and how great it was going to be to go automobiling.
All these changes are taking place within these lifetimes. These people lived almost the span of the 20th century.

There were telephones at the same time that people were homesteading.
Although the phone system in Elkhead was pretty rudimentary (laughs) – the wire was literally strung along fenceposts 18 miles, all the way to the schoolhouse. There was no phone where my grandmother was living with the homesteaders. If they wanted to make a phone call, they had to make it from the schoolhouse, or there was a neighbor about five miles away. They could ride on horseback to the neighbor’s to make a phone call.
In their house there was no electricity, no running water.

What would you ask your grandmother if you could talk to her?
Where are your love letters? She’d gotten engaged to my grandfather in Chicago on the way out, and clearly she was writing to him all the time. She wrote about him writing to her almost every day.
They were so busy: The only time she could read his letters was when she was on horseback going to school. She mentioned sitting on the horse, letting the horse amble along, ‘cause he knew the way, and reading the letters. She probably read some of them out loud to Rosamond, and they’re all gone.
They were Victorian women, so they wrote very discretely. As Rosamond developed her romance with Bob Perry, it was all very circumspect. I would have loved to have known more about that.
There are a million things – I would have asked her more about her trip to Europe. She was impressed by that, but that was much more familiar to her. That was much more the life she had grown up knowing. The year in Colorado completely changed who she was, and Rosamond, too.

It gave them some very valuable perspective.
It did. They were spoiled society girls.

They’d never worked. At the age of 29, they’d never had a paying job.
As my grandmother said, “No young lady in our town had ever had a job of any kind.”
It was volunteer work. They would do charity work. They weren’t allowed in the kitchen, so they didn’t know how to cook. There were cooks in the kitchen.
They had no idea how to do the wash. When they tried to wash their blouses, their landlady said, “Oh, you girls don’t know how to do that. I’ll take care of that.”
She charged them a dollar a week for their laundry.
They were incredibly impressed by these pioneer women. Even though they were feminists when they went out there, it was these women who showed them what could be done.
The women that they had grown up with – who were active suffragists – still lived very, very cultivated lives.

Leisurely.
Very leisurely, yes – lots of teas.

Does that economic class still exist?
I mean, look around you. I was thinking about that today.

Well, I never see it.
You do, sort of, if you go to any wealthy community – near where you’re living, probably. If you go to any wealthy community, like Greenwich, Connecticut – those who still have money – it’s a totally stratified society, so in that sense, it probably is just as unequal as it was then.
Dorothy and Ros – and Ferry Carpenter – saw the West as this great breeding ground for democracy. It was a great leveler. They thought that was fabulous.
They couldn’t believe that their landlord and landlady were educated people, because they lived in such a rudimentary way.
One of the things that worries me now is that our society’s so stratified – there is no mixing of class – and that was true then, too, and that was why they had such fun in Elkhead, because they were able to mingle with shopkeepers and cowboys and all these people who normally they wouldn’t have had any access to.

Who’s the protagonist of the book?
That’s a very good question. Nobody’s asked me that. When I started the book, I thought that Ferry Carpenter was going to be the protagonist, because I found an autobiography that was published posthumously, and it was hilarious and wonderful and told the story from his perspective, obviously, but when I read my grandmother’s letters for the first time, I decided, with the help of a friend who, when I read them to her said, “You have to tell it from the perspective of your grandmother and Rosamond.”
So, in effect there are three protagonists. Most of the book is told from their perspective, but because I had access to all of his tape recordings and speeches and his book and everything else, I was able to juxtapose their naïve expectations and responses [with] his.
And that’s where the comedy comes in: him bringing them out in part to be brides for the young cowboys – something they knew nothing about. They thought they were just going out there to teach school to these young urchins.

Why do you call the book an “alternative Western?”
When I was growing up, as much as I was mesmerized by my grandmother’s stories, I was not that interested in traditional Westerns. I didn’t really go see Western movies, because they were all told from the perspective of men and they were a little formulaic.
This just seemed like a completely different way of approaching a Western – them coming from the East after the first pioneers went out.

Is it apt to call Ferry Carpenter a community organizer?
When I was writing a piece for the New Yorker, which is where the book began, I was thinking about him specifically in those terms, because Barrack Obama was running for president and I had read Obama’s two books, and I thought, “This is incredible.”
For instance, they had a town pump and he thought, “This has got to go.”
Even though it was incredibly picturesque and everybody in the town used to gather there and get their water, he said, “No, we need a real sewage system,” so he got his community together and they figured out how to build a water system, and then they did the same thing with electricity. And that was how the West was built. And, of course, he organized his neighbors to build the school, which was both an incredible thing to do and kind of a crazy thing to do. He just had a gift for this.
When that school failed, he was on the local board of the hospital and on the board of the Hayden school, and was just there for every step.
He later worked for FDR, even though he was a Republican. He had a sense – which he’d gotten from Woodrow Wilson, when he was an undergrad at Princeton when Wilson was there – that your responsibility was first to your family and second to your community.

What are the most important things your grandmother taught you to avoid being common
(Laughs) Yes, she had a horror of being common. I was thinking today, as I put my shorts on, “Grandma wouldn’t have liked that.”
Even though she grew up in an incredibly snobbish society, she really was inculcated with the values that she learned out West. She made it clear that you treated everyone the same. You were polite to everyone and you could learn from anyone that you met. Being rude was just completely unacceptable.
That was an interesting blend of the manner with which she had been brought up and the sense that: Don’t think you’re above anyone else; look at what these people have accomplished in their lives, with nothing.

Your grandmother said that, “To be happy, it’s necessary to be constantly giving to others.” Is that true?
I think it is true, and I think it’s something that’s been lost in our society, speaking in very general terms.
One of the things that gave me pleasure as I was writing this book was recapturing this very interesting moment in American history.
Right before World War One there was an enormous sense of optimism among the homesteaders, among the community organizers, the industrialists who were building the railroads, and these young women who thought, “We can make a difference in the world – not by staying in Auburn and giving money to charities and advocating for women’s rights, but by going out there and teaching these children what they can make of their lives.”
And they did. That what I found: I went back and found that they had made a huge difference to a lot of these children, and their parents and their children and grandchildren.

Kurt Vonnegut said that when you write, you should keep someone you love in mind and think of them as your audience. Do you think that’s true? Are you familiar with that quote?
I’m not – I love it, though. It’s a really wonderful way to think about it. I had a similar revelation when I was reading my grandmother’s letters.
I’ve been an editor for 30 years or whatever it’s been, and I thought, “She never realized that she’s a brilliant writer,” and because she was writing these letters to her family, they’re so full of her love and her sense of herself and so unselfconscious – I suddenly realized I was learning about good writing from her.
So, when I wrote the book, one of my goals was to try and tell it from her perspective to the extent that I could, and it was an extraordinary experience as a middle-aged woman: reading my grandmother at age 22 and age 29.
A couple of readers have said, “Your love for your grandmother comes through in the book.”
I think it’s so true: To be a writer, you have to be completely engaged with your subject.
I could never be a biographer of somebody that I hated. How could you spend five years of your life delving into somebody’s mind and not liking them?

What did she teach you about writing?
She never veers from the point. She’s writing letters, so everything is concrete. She was trying to entertain her family, so she would write about the day in the classroom and she would create these scenes of her interactions with the children, especially the little boys, who were completely ill-behaved and said these funny things. She was so struck by everything they said. She would immediately go home and write it all down and there was this incredible immediacy in all of that, which I think a lot of writers lose – you get so absorbed and you go off on tangents.
She didn’t go off on tangents – she knew she had to keep them entertained.
She knew her audience very well, she kept them in mind, and she only wrote things that were very interesting to her and that she thought would be very interesting to her audience.
There’s no pretension in her writing – and her voice comes shining through.

Can you talk about letter writing, the view that letter writing is a lost art and the importance of letters to your effort?
This is something that comes up at just about every single talk I’ve given and a number of people have written to me about it, too, because so many families have these amazing letters and they’ve been sitting in attic boxes as some of these letters were.
I really was struck when I read my grandmother’s letters and Rosamond’s letters, what extraordinary letter writers they were. The art is gone. Nobody begins to write anything like that anymore.
I’ve read many, many letters, and I was lucky that my characters and Ferry Carpenter happened to be particularly good and vivid writers, and it’s one of the things that gives my book life: It’s their voices coming at us.
What makes me sad is that future generations won’t have these wonderful details about what daily life was like. We need to have these records somehow. I urge everyone who has letters to donate them to a library or somebody who will preserve them, because historians are going to want to go back at some point and recapture some of this.
At the New Yorker we don’t write to authors on paper anymore. Sometimes we edit on paper at the very end of the process, but it’s all by email and telephone. It’s gone.

Has it made you a more eager correspondent?
Not yet, because I’m so busy. We’re so busy all the time, and everything is so much faster now.
I asked my mother once: How did [my grandmother] remember all of this 80 years later, and with such vivid recall? She said, “Well, they didn’t have as much in their lives to do every day.”
We’re just bombarded every second by information.