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who can instruct her sons in public questions will have more influence than another interested in a new hat. There is a psychological change in the world: in ages past women labored beside the men; then she came to be confined to house duties; now is the age of machinery, and woman’s work has been taken away from her.” She urged her audienceto consider that when one thing goes out of your life, you must find another to replace it, and she reminded them that women had “especial interest in educational, health, and corrective departments of work.” When tea was served, “Miss Underwood poured, assisted by Miss Woodruff.”
    By the spring of 1916, seven years out of college and not yet married, they began to think unenthusiastically about returning to New York City to pursue some kind of social work. They were “in this troubled state,” as Dorothy put it, when an unusual opportunity presented itself. In April, Emily Callaway, the leading lady of the Jefferson Stock Company, was in town to rehearse for the summer season. Callaway, another Auburn girl, was a 1906 Wellesley graduate who had a letter of introduction to Rosamond from one of William Seward’s grandsons. Ros’s mother invited her to tea, and Ros and Emily began to talk about how difficult it was for women of their background to find absorbing and useful work.
    Callaway mentioned that just that day, she had heard from a Wellesley friend, Ruth Carpenter Woodley, who had an adventure-some brother named Ferry Carpenter. She described his background and told Ros and Dorothy that he had worked with his neighbors for five years to build a consolidated schoolhouse in the Elkhead mountain range. Her brother was a man of vision, Ruth wrote to Emily, and he had asked her to look around New York for two young female college graduates who would consider teaching out there for a year or two.
    Mrs. Underwood knew that Rosamond felt constricted in her life at home, and as Callaway spoke, she saw her daughter’s animated response. She was not surprised to hear Ros say , “I’d like to try it myself, if my best friend and classmate from Smith, Dorothy Woodruff, would go with me.” Ros rushed to the telephone to call Dorothy, asking her, “How would you like to go out to Colorado and teach school? You must come over immediately. We’ve got to talk about this!”
    Within minutes Dorothy was at the door. On her brisk walk over, she had made her decision. They plied Callaway for more informationand got Mrs. Woodley’s address from her so they could write to express their interest. Nonetheless, Dorothy anticipated her family’s alarm: “No young lady in our town,” she later recalled, “had ever been hired by anybody.”
    A few years earlier, Ros had gone to a resort in Hot Springs, Arizona, to recover from a bronchial infection, and she had loved the informality and open spaces of the West. But neither woman knew much about the rigors of life in the Rockies. Their sense of the westward expansion came largely from Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s Letters of a Woman Homesteader, serialized in the Atlantic Monthly several years earlier and then published as a book—now a classic of life on the frontier. They had been riveted by Stewart’s account of living by her wits far from any urban center. Stewart wrote about a camping trip in December near her homestead in Burnt Fork, Wyoming: “Our improvised beds were the most comfortable things; I love the flicker of an open fire, the smell of the pines, the pure, sweet air, and I went to sleep thinking how blest I was to be able to enjoy the things I love most.”
    This, to Ros and Dorothy, was true romance. Stewart and her resourceful neighbor, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, were roused by a long, haunting wail. Stewart thought it was the cry of a panther, but upon investigating, they found that it was a girl in a new loggers’ encampment, in the throes of a difficult childbirth. The clearing consisted of two homes. Both husbands had