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he might be willing to take a chance on “those Auburn girls,” but he wanted to know, “Will they take the grief that goes with such a job and have they the pep to shed it off and go right on like nothing happened? What education have they? Let me hear from you and tell them to write direct to me at once.” He added that if she had “any doubt about their having the necessary gimp in them to handle this job why let them drop right now.”
    Miss Heermans indiscreetly sent Carpenter’s note to Dorothy, saying, “He is really not as illiterate as this sounds but has merely fallen into the Elkhead dialect!”
    Dorothy wrote a long letter to Carpenter, earnestly describing their education, their travels, and their social work before admitting, “You see this may not offer much specialized training for the Elkhead work—but we shall do as much as possible before we leave—we are very anxious to try this position & will do our best to fill the requirements. You may be sure that we would expect to stick it out—whatever our experiences might be.” Indicating their seriousness of purpose, she asked whether the school was equipped with goodblackboards, books, and maps of the world and the state of Colorado, and she said they would like to see any information he had about the subjects they would be teaching.
    He sent a wire confirming their employment, but the following week, their preparations were abruptly halted. War with Mexico appeared imminent , after Pancho Villa and several hundred of his men attacked a U.S. Army garrison in Columbus, New Mexico. President Wilson ordered the mobilization of tens of thousands of National Guardsmen, one of whom was Ros’s older brother, Kennard Underwood. He had just made second lieutenant in Company M, and the Underwoods did not want two of their children far from home in potentially dangerous circumstances. Dorothy and Ros reluctantly sent a telegram to Carpenter saying that, under the circumstances, they had to refuse the position.
    Then Wilson changed his mind. Preoccupied with the escalating war in Europe and the increasing bitterness between the U.S. and Germany, he initiated a mediation commission to negotiate the terms for a withdrawal. For the second time, the girls were told they could go. The school year was to begin in early August, and worried that in the interim Carpenter might have chosen two other teachers, Dorothy sent him a telegram on July 5, saying they were available after all, if the jobs weren’t taken. Two days later, she heard back: POSITIONS OPEN AND YOU MAY CONSIDER YOURSELVES HIRED WILL WRITE .
    Ros typed a businesslike letter to Ferry, reiterating Dorothy’s request for information about the state syllabus and what books and supplies the school had. In response to a question from Carpenter about their living situation in Elkhead, she said they would rather board with a family than stay in a cabin by themselves. He replied that the district furnished all books and supplies, and said the school had a piano and would soon have a phonograph and records, which would be moved from one of the summer schools some miles away. It was a big project, he explained, to consolidate several tiny schools into one for a community that was so widely spread out.
    The Princeton and Harvard man tailored his correspondence to “Miss Underwood” and “Miss Woodruff” to appeal to their ideals about teaching and to their excitement about a clean, active life in the Rockies. He told them about three Elkhead pupils who had just been to his cabin for dinner “and wanted to know all about you—I truly envy you the chance to be with those kids, as everything to them is a seven day wonder.” He recommended that they read John Dewey’s Schools of To-morrow, adding that although the conditions in Elkhead were unlike those in the urban schools Dewey wrote about, his philosophy of education should nonetheless apply: “learning by doing,” rather than by rote teaching and the