Nothing Daunted

Nothing Daunted (The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West) (2011) by Dorothy Wickenden. 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 western Colorado. Although neither of them had to work, they chose to take teaching jobs in a remote mountaintop schoolhouse near the tiny settlement of Elkhead. They lived a frontier life for a year, bravely facing winter in the Rocky Mountains and, seemingly, enjoying every moment of it. This book is an entertaining account of the girls' lives before, during and after their Rocky Mountain sojourn. It is by no means a great book, but it is diverting enough, and Wickenden did quite a bit of original research in order to present the lives of the two teachers as accurately as possible. Grade: B