With the country holding it's collective breath (or blowing hard for their preferred candidates) and awaiting the upcoming election, there is a stillness in the policy arena that is at once frustrating and refreshing. It also leads to a lack of pithy stories for our October edition of the Outdoor News Bulletin. So, in keeping with the masterful command of literature and language by former ONB editor, Dick McCabe, this month we're reinstating a periodic column of McCabe's that spotlighted a book that had attracted (or distracted) him that was worth sharing with our readers.

Westward expansion. Manifest destiny. Our grade school history books are replete with stories of how we conquered this country and moved our way through the wilderness that we found. We learn about the Homestead Act and the development of railroads, and as natural resource professionals we've learned about how the use of these resources defined much of our path across the West. But what is often missing in the history books (or perhaps doesn't stick in our grade school brains) is the personal tales, the reflections of life a century ago.

In Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker, weaves together the tale of her grandmother and her grandmother's best friend who left behind wealthy families in the east to teach in the wilds of Colorado in 1916. Pulling together personal stories from her grandmother's prolific letter writing as well as historical details, Wickenden captures the essence of a West that has been largely settled yet is still defining itself.

Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood were raised as society girls in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Provided with the many luxuries of the day, the girls attended Smith college and came of age in a time where women were looking beyond traditional roles and embracing civic responsibility. Unwed and home from a year on a "grand tour" of Europe the women were seeking a way to give back to society. They responded to an invitation from cattleman and lawyer Farrington (Ferry) Carpenter to teach at a remote school in Elkhead, Colorado. The year they spent in rural Routt County defined the rest of the women's lives.

Chafing at the rigid social routines and not getting anywhere with the ineffectual suffrage work they had taken on, they didn't hesitate when they heard about two teaching jobs in Colorado. The nine months my grandmother spent there seemed to have shaped her as much as her entire youth in Auburn. She was full of expansive admiration for the hardworking people of Elkhead, and when she faced great personal difficulties of her own, she called to mind the uncomplaining endurance she had witnessed in the settlers and their children.

Wickenden masterfully recounts a tale of America at the beginning of the 20^th Century. Using her grandmother's story as the thread that ties it all together, Nothing Daunted wanders through the growth of Denver, the rise of the cattle industry in northwest Colorado, the fearless workers who dared to build a railroad through the Rockies, and the poor homesteaders desperate to scratch a better life for their children from the harsh environment. The story provides glimpses of a Colorado that was untouched, and describes the changes as it was "conquered".

These people were swept up in some of the strongest currents of the country's history: the expulsion of native tribes; the mining of gold, silver, and coal; the building of a network of railroads that linked disparate parts of the country and led to the settlement of the West; the development of rural schools; the entry of immigrants, African-Americans and women into the workforce and the voting booth; even the origins of modern dance. Their lives were integral to the making of America, yet the communities they built, even their idioms, had all but vanished.

Late this summer, my family and I were in northwest Colorado to scout for elk north of the Yampa River. Without realizing it, we were exploring the exact area that was the setting for the book. We drove past the old Elkhead Community Center on a bluff near the Elkhead Ranch and we had seen Ferry Carpenter's ranch near Hayden that is now protected by The Nature Conservancy. Outside of Elkhead, we ran our dog through BLM land and flushed ten sage-grouse ? a bird mentioned several times in Dorothy's letters home. The country is still vast and largely unpopulated and it wasn't difficult to imagine the children and schoolteachers riding miles to the central schoolhouse.

Nothing Daunted is another entry into the class of historical nonfiction that welcomes the reader in to the lives of the individuals who made history and connects you to how history impacted the lives of the individuals.It is published by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster and is available in paperback. (jas)