Author’s note: In Chapter 13, Mary is a 37-year-old woman who made a choice that affected the rest of her life. The excerpt is pivotal in adding depth and intrigue to Mary’s character and introduces her “hidden years” — specifically the 1887-1888 academic year at the beginning of her love affair with her student, Will Housel.
Will Housel, a handsome young man with brown hair and intense brown eyes, enrolled in Mary’s German class in the fall of 1887. Several years earlier, Will had taken a few classes in the university’s preparatory department, but he stayed only a short time. He then worked for a year or two and attended a school in the Midwest. When he returned to Boulder, he entered the university as a four-year bachelor’s degree candidate in the Department of Philosophy and the Arts. The degree requirements at the time included four courses of Latin and Greek and two each of mathematics, rhetoric, oratory, and German. Will came from a prominent Boulder family. His father, Peter Housel, had operated a grist mill, was an elder in the Boulder Valley Presbyterian Church, and served as Boulder County’s first judge. According to Mary’s student Ernest Pease, who had grown up in Will’s neighborhood, the Housel family was “well-educated and had more books in their home than anyone else.”
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Like the others in Mary’s class, Will’s introduction to German was in grammar and pronunciation. Then he could begin the study of literature. Germany was still considered the educational and cultural center of the world, so a study of German literature was regarded as a necessary part of one’s education. In the spring of 1888, after Will had signed up again, Mary led his German literature class through the usual study of Goethe’s classic drama Faust. According to newspaper editor Amos Bixby, who still visited the campus and reported on the goings-on from time to time, German literature students longed for the time when “Mephistopheles no longer [was] a painted Devil but a sentient presence whom you are perfectly conscious is ready at any moment to drive a sharp bargain for your soul.”
Translation practice included the Song of the Spirits in which Mephistopheles conjured up a vision to lull the character Faust to sleep. It began with the lines “Melt, ye confining vaults up yonder!” and led into Faust’s revelation of nature, the cosmos, and spiritual beauty. The spirits hypnotized Faust by praising sensuality and relaxed his inhibitions by singing:
Yield to the shining
Ether’s fonder
Cerulean gaze!
Cloudbanks darkling
Dwindle for sparkling
Starlets winking,
Milder sun-rays
Drinking the haze!
Heavenly offspring’s
Graces uplifting,
Swaying and turning,
Drifting they wander,
Lovelorn yearning
Follows them yonder
And their garments’
Fluttering garlands
Cover the far lands,
Cover the arbor
Where thought-rapt lover
Lifelong trusting
Pledges to lover
Arbor to Arbor.
With Mary’s dedication to teaching, it is likely that she gave Will individual attention. They probably discussed the themes in Faust as the story unfolded. Dr. Faust, Goethe’s main character, determined to plumb the depths of how it felt to be human. At twenty-five, Will was a few years older than his classmates. He lived with his parents on their farm at Seventy-Fifth Street and Arapahoe Avenue, a few miles east of Boulder. Each day he rode his horse to the university, stabling him in the wagon shed behind Old Main.
“Separate Lives”
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By this time, Mary had purchased a sidesaddle and a horse named Fanny. Often Mary rode her horse and looked for wildflowers, just as she had done earlier with horses rented from the livery. Even when riding, Mary dressed like a lady in custom-made clothing. Society’s restrictions in the Victorian era dictated a tight-fitting bodice over a corset with voluminous skirts and even a bustle extending the yards of material on the back of the skirt.
It is possible that Mary and Will rode together as she and Winthrop Scarritt had done. At any rate, their teacher–student relationship evolved into a friendship, and at some point, even with all the clothing, the friendship escalated into a romance.
No one will ever know the details of Mary and Will’s relationship during this time. In the spring of 1888, Mary boarded at the home of a rancher who informed her that he and his wife would be gone from Boulder for a few weeks in order to drive their cattle down from higher pastures in North Park. Perhaps Mary and Will took that opportunity to become lovers.
Mary kept meticulous diaries year after year, yet none from this time period have survived. However, an undated poem, possibly the only written evidence of their intimacy, was stuck into a later diary. It read:
We smiled and stood together for awhile,
swift impulse made us do it.
Your hand reached out toward mine,
your kindly hand.
Or was my hand the first?
What did it matter?
We knew and shared the solitude of crowds,
Lofting above the clatter.
Like Faust, Mary had stepped outside the bounds of morality. Considering the prominence she had achieved in her profession and the idealized role model she had become, her actions were extraordinarily risky.
Silvia Pettem is a Colorado-based historical researcher, writer, and author of more than 20 books on history, biography, missing and unidentified persons, and true crime. She also has a knack for pulling intriguing women out of the past. “Separate Lives” is set in the late 19th century. “In Search of the Blonde Tigress” exposes and expands upon a true crime story from the 1930s, while “Someone’s Daughter” follows a murder investigation from the 1950s. Pettem lives with her husband and two cats in the mountains west of Boulder. She can be reached through her website, silviapettem.com.
