In 2008, New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden discovered her grandmother's hundred-year-old letters. Her grandmother was Grand Rapids' Dorothy Woodruff Hillman (1887-1979), most recently known as the mother of a distinguished, long-serving Grand Rapids judge: Douglas W. Hillman (1922 - 2007). But she has quite a story of her own. Dorothy Woodruff's letters give a vivid account of her experience as a school teacher in the Colorado Rockies with her friend Rosamond Underwood. Drawing on the extraordinarily detailed letters, Dorothy Wickenden has constructed an exhilarating western saga of two privileged but open-minded young women from the East.

From professional and entrepreneurial families in Auburn, New York, whose civic leaders had been among the foremost abolitionists, suffragists, and prison reformers in the country, Woodruff and Underwood graduated from Smith College, after which they spent a year touring Europe and learning French in Paris. They were still restless after their return and were hardly looking to marry uninspiring Auburn men. So in the spring of 1916, the two young women responded to an ad for teachers in Hayden, Colorado, boarded a train and finally climbed into a wagon for a bumpy trip into the mountains.

Nothing Daunted is both intimate and epic. Wickenden shows how two women were swept up in some of the strongest currents of the country's history, and captures their extravagant hopes for improving the lives and schools of rural America. She captures the uncomplaining frontier women, strutting young cowboys, and the dialect and personalities of her grandmother's young students.

Still, a year later Dorothy and Rosamond were ready to leave-and here's the local angle. In Colorado, Dorothy was secretly engaged to Lemuel Hillman, an Auburn banker. The couple married and in 1919 moved to Grand Rapids, where they had four children. The third, Wickenden's great-uncle Douglas Woodruff Hillman, was born here in 1922 and practiced law in Grand Rapids for thirty years before being appointed U.S. district judge by President Carter in 1979, the year his adventurous mother died at 92. After she was widowed in 1930 with four young children, Dorothy Woodruff headed the local Red Cross chapter and eventually took a position with the national organization. Join us on October 26^thto hear her story.

*** If you miss Dorothy Wickenden at the GRPL, she will speak on Thursday, October 27^th, at the Women's City Club at 11:00 am. The charge to nonmembers is $4. Reserve for lunch at the Club afterwards for $15.00 (www.womenscityclubgr.org/).

Schuler Books and Music has several copies at $19.50.

The book can also be purchased at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Daunted-Unexpected-Education-Society/dp/1439176582/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316052193&sr=8-1

or from the publisher's website http://books.simonandschuster.com/Nothing-Daunted/Dorothy-Wickenden/9781439176580.