Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted immediately set off to New York to meet with Mayor Opdyke and the other backers. The position was his, he was told, if he chose to accept it. As he weighed the Mariposa offer, he generated far more than his usual volume of letters to friends and family. These letters show Olmsted divided, wrestling with various issues: his obligations to the war effort, the turmoil of uprooting his family once again, and whether by taking the position he’d be selling out. In choosing jobs, Olmsted had always placed the ability to effect social reform above financial considerations; running a gold mine decidedly did not equal social reform. He also felt a vague misapprehension about the eastern moneymen. Yet for every argument Olmsted could summon, a part of him was already leaning westward.

  The money was a draw, no question. Olmsted had borrowed $5,500 from his father in buying into Putnam’s, and the publishing company’s collapse had saddled him with an additional obligation of $8,000. He’d retired very little of this debt and still owed $12,000 by his own calculations. Olmsted worried about what would happen if he fell seriously ill, went blind, or broke his other leg. If—God forbid—he died, Mary and the children would be left in “absolute poverty.”

  Even more so than the money, Olmsted appears to have been thrilled by the opportunity to try something new. He had built up the USSC, set it on its course, and now all that was left were maintenance and aggravation. Mariposa was a fresh, blank canvas. He was caught up in the romance: California, the West, epic scenery, a gold mine.

  Bellows tried to talk Olmsted out of leaving. Despite their recent scuffles, the reverend valued Olmsted as an administrator and viewed the younger man as a good friend, too. Bellows appealed to Olmsted’s ambition, deeming him one of just “a half-dozen men in the whole North” with the potential to shape weighty affairs of state in the years ahead. And Bellows appealed to Olmsted’s patriotism. “The country can not spare you at such a juncture,” wrote the reverend, italicizing generously. “I think you must feel this in your bones.”

  Olmsted’s mind was made up. On September 1, 1863, he resigned from the Sanitary Commission.

  The USSC continued on to the end of the Civil War, operating under two more general secretaries that followed Olmsted. Its record of battlefield relief is stunning. Working with 286 local aid societies, the USSC solicited an estimated $15 million (in 1860s dollars) worth of supplies and another $5 million in cash that was used to buy medicine and other items.

  Right after Antietam, Olmsted had launched a hospital directory to better connect wounded soldiers with their loved ones. The USSC set up a department for discharged veterans, helping them fill out forms, obtain pensions, and otherwise navigate the bureaucratic maze in Washington. A series of pamphlets, produced by the USSC and circulated to army field surgeons, offered some of the era’s best medical guidance. The USSC’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, initiated by Olmsted, conducted 1,482 camp inspections. The data gathered has been of immense value to the historians.

  The USSC also gets credit for goading the Medical Bureau into action, by pushing for the 1862 reform bill. The same army that began the Civil War with 26 surgeons finished with 11,000! The same army that started the war with a handful of field hospitals ended it with 204, featuring 137,000 beds. When General Meade described the “inestimable blessings and benefits conferred by that noble association upon the sick and suffering soldiers,” he was referring, of course, to the USSC.

  There’s even a crucial connection between the USSC and the American Red Cross. After the Civil War, Bellows sought to keep the spirit of the USSC alive. He founded an organization called the American Association for the Relief of the Misery of Battlefields. The AARMB’s primary purpose was to get the United States to comply with the Geneva Convention. This treaty (signed on August 22, 1864) conferred neutrality on medical workers on the battlefield, along with the injured soldiers in their care. It was signed by countries such as Belgium, France, and Prussia, but not the United States. The AARMB’s board featured substantially the same cast as the USSC’s board, including George Templeton Strong, Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, and Olmsted. The outfit also had its own flag, a white Greek cross on a red background, reminiscent of the Sanitary Commission flag.

  Clara Barton, the legendary Civil War battlefield nurse, who had operated independently of both the Medical Bureau and the USSC, also took up the cause of getting America to ratify the Geneva treaty. Through tireless effort, Barton convinced President Garfield to sign. But he was assassinated before he could make good on the promise. At this point, Barton turned to Bellows, asking him to write a letter supporting her efforts. Bellows did so only a few weeks before his own death in January 1882. President Chester Arthur signed the Geneva treaty on March 1, 1882. This gave official recognition to an organization Barton had founded the previous year, the American Red Cross.

  The Red Cross began life as a battlefield relief outfit with substantially the same mandate as the original USSC. Over time, it would evolve into an organization that also provided aid during peacetime disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. As one historian put it, the USSC played “mid-wife to the Red Cross.”

  But all this was years in the future. Right now, Olmsted was headed to California.

  V

  “There Seems to Be No Limit”

  CALIFORNIA, 1863–1865

  CHAPTER 19

  Gold Dust

  ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1863, Olmsted departed New York bound for the Mariposa Estate, a sprawling concern in the heart of California gold country. This stretch of land was legendary, described by Horace Greeley, who had visited during a recent cross-country journey, as “perhaps the finest mining property in the world.” It also had a colorful back story, full of intrigue and double-dealing, some of which was known to Olmsted and some of which would soon be revealed.

  John Frémont, the famous western explorer, had purchased the Mariposa Estate for $3,000 in 1847, when the land was still under Mexican control. The 44,387 acres were a floating grant, a Mexican real estate anomaly whereby the size of a property was fixed, but the precise location was not. This made it possible to shift a claim, akin to moving a blanket on a beach.

  In his youth, Frémont had been an imposing figure. People who met him were often struck that every facet of his being—his hard-angled face, distant gaze, and compact muscular build—seemed designed only for action, never contemplation. Once, as an Indian prepared to fire an arrow at Kit Carson, Frémont rode to his friend’s aid, rearing up on a horse and stomping the Indian to death.

  When gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada, Frémont simply floated his land grant to cover some of the most coveted territory. Prospectors who had already staked claims on the land were apoplectic. Once California gained statehood in 1850, they finally had a means to pursue their grievances. The ensuing legal wrangle went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Frémont won in 1859.

  Mariposa gold made him a very wealthy man. But he fell just as quickly into debt, thanks to his legal fees, the cost of maintaining the mines, and the financial toll of his heady political ambitions. (Frémont was the brand-new Republican Party’s very first presidential candidate in 1856. Olmsted voted for him, but Frémont lost the election to Democrat James Buchanan.) “Why, when I came to California I was worth nothing,” he once joked, “and now I owe two millions of dollars.”

  In 1863, Frémont managed to erase some of this debt by selling most of his property to the group of investors that included Mayor Opdyke. It was a different time, one when a big-city mayor could launch a business while in office. The investors organized the Mariposa Company, headquartered at 34 Wall Street, and drew up a prospectus, filled with projections from mining consultants. One consultant calculated that the Mariposa Estate would yield one hundred tons of raw ore daily for the next 388 years. Another stated, “There seems to be no limit to the extent to which mining and milling operations can be carried out.” The Mariposa Company quickly sold $10 million worth of stock to a gold-fevered public. Frémont was named a
trustee of the new entity, and he retained an equity stake. If the company proved successful, he’d be able to pay off still more of his debts. Frémont dreamed of one day reclaiming full control of his mining business.

  As manager, Olmsted was to be paid his $10,000 salary in gold, worth at least 20 percent more than the same salary paid in greenbacks, then racked by wartime inflation. During his first five years of service, he was also to receive $10,000 in stock annually, potentially worth many thousands more.

  Just to get to his new job was no easy task. Olmsted elected to take the Panama route, one of several options for getting to the West Coast in those days. The Panama route, established in 1855, required traveling by steamer down the Atlantic Coast, then crossing the narrowest point in Central America, the Isthmus of Panama, via a forty-eight-mile interoceanic train ride. On the Pacific Coast, travelers boarded a new steamer and sailed up the coastline. The trip covered 5,500 miles and took roughly three weeks. Cheaper choices, sailing around Cape Horn, the very tip of South America, or going overland by wagon, were more timeconsuming, requiring three months, minimum. There was also a Nicaragua route, both cheaper and potentially quicker than the Panama route, but featuring a harrowing land passage. In the years before the transcontinental railroad (1869) and the opening of the Panama Canal (1914), traveling from coast to coast was an ordeal.

  Olmsted traveled without his family, planning to get settled on the Mariposa Estate before bringing them out in the spring of 1864. For the first leg of the journey, Olmsted sailed on the Champion, a rickety sidewheeler, operated by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had a reputation for stinting on safety. “The steamer on the Atlantic side was small, illsupplied, dirty and crowded,” Olmsted noted.

  Before arriving in Panama, as was the practice, Olmsted started taking several grains of quinine each day, prophylactically, so as to ward off malaria. The “Chagres shakes”—named after a river that ran alongside the rail line in Panama—was a particularly virulent strain. In 1852, Ulysses Grant had lost 250 men while marching across Panama. As an old man, he’d remember the horrors of Panama more vividly than those of the Civil War.

  At Aspinwall (now Colón), a Panamanian port, Olmsted made the switch from ship to rail. The train’s seats were made of cane, and it was open-air—venetian blinds were the only thing separating passengers from the elements. The forty-eight-mile trip took roughly four hours, following the Chagres through deep gorges and requiring refueling stops every few miles at wood stations along the route. Olmsted was stunned by the natural drama unfolding outside his open window. Pelicans, looking prehistoric, floated in lazy circles, with the Andes towering in the distance. The punishing noonday sun was broken by a sudden shower, then sunlight again, stretching from the heavens in luminous shafts. Nearer the ground, directly across the Chagres, the foliage was so lush that the sun could scarcely get through, providing just a dappling of light amid deep shadows.

  The variety of plants and trees seemed almost infinite, Olmsted noted, and they grew so close together, their branches interlaced, that you didn’t know where one began and another ended, and through everything twined thick tropical vines. There were fat yellow breadfruits, ripening coconuts, thick clusters of bananas. As Olmsted recounted in a letter to his wife that evening, the tropical luxuriance “makes all our model scenery—so far as it depends on beauty of foliage very tame & quakerish.”

  Mary would be making this same passage soon enough. “Remember to point out the mountains to the children & tell them they are the Andes,” he urged. Like his own father, Olmsted wanted to make sure his children appreciated the scenery.

  On the west coast of Panama, Olmsted boarded a new boat, the Constitution , operated by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. The vessel was superior in every way to Vanderbilt’s Champion—newer, cleaner, safer. In fact, the Constitution was the largest and best-appointed boat on which Olmsted had ever traveled. “It’s Fifth Avenue with the park, after Greenwich Street with the battery,” he wrote to Mary.

  Chugging up the Pacific coastline toward San Francisco, Olmsted could not shake his memory of the scenery he had witnessed on the train ride. He puzzled over the landscape’s meaning, morally speaking. Did it denote bounteousness, creativity, freedom, lack of restraint? He also began to wonder if it would be possible to reproduce some of this tropical superabundance in the Ramble, his ever-evolving wild garden in Central Park.

  Olmsted no longer had a formal role with the park, having shed first his architect-in-chief duties and then the consulting position he shared with Vaux. But he still thought of the park as his own—his creation, his masterpiece—and always would. In fact, it would please him mightily the following year when park brass introduced a flock of sheep onto the parade ground. The move effectively prevented troops from conducting drills during the Civil War in Central Park—a place of peace, in his reckoning, above the fray. Forever after, the parade ground would be known as Sheep Meadow.

  Onboard the Constitution, Olmsted dashed off a letter to Ignaz Pilat, the park’s gardener. Would it be possible, Olmsted inquired, to plant some species such as purple barberry and honey locust, apt analogies to the tropical species he’d seen, but capable of growing in New York City’s climate? He also suggested covering trees such as sycamores in clematis vines. Such plantings, he wrote, “would under favorable natural circumstances, I believe, produce an effect having at least an interesting association with or, so to speak, flavor of tropical scenery and I should hope some little feeling of the emotion it is fitted to produce.”

  Upon receiving the letter, Pilat would dutifully try out some of Olmsted’s ideas, planting a few select new species thickly in the Ramble and training vines to snake through some of the existing trees. It wasn’t a disaster—Olmsted’s wild garden was a pretty forgiving space—but somehow the intended tropical effect failed to translate in the middle of Manhattan.

  On October 11, 1863, a month after leaving New York, Olmsted arrived in San Francisco. As he disembarked from the steamship onto the crowded wharf, a horse kicked him in his lame leg. The kick didn’t result in serious injury, but it struck Olmsted as an omen. Before him, there still lay a grueling two-hundred-mile journey to the town of Bear Valley, headquarters of the Mariposa Estate.

  Olmsted had time only for a cursory impression of San Francisco. It wasn’t a good one. Something about the way the town was laid out—a simple grid work against a hillside—well, he couldn’t put his finger on it, but it unnerved him. He boarded a new steamer, which carried him by river into the California interior and to Stockton.

  In Stockton, the last town of any size before Bear Valley, Olmsted rented a coach and two horses. Then he set out across the stifling San Joaquin Valley toward the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. California was in the midst of its worst drought in the nineteenth century. The contrast to the rain forests of Panama was stark; Olmsted described this portion of his journey as a trip through “a dead flat, dead brown prairie, with scattering remnants of trees.... The shade of one tree never connects with another, so far as I have seen.”

  In the distance, the Sierra Nevada were like a painted backdrop. The coach clattered onward, mile upon dusty mile, but the mountains remained frozen, never drawing closer. The only thing breaking the general monotony, Olmsted noted, were the graves. Everywhere he looked, the dry plains were dotted with makeshift graves, a disturbing number of them belonging to children.

  And then Olmsted’s coach began to climb. At first the ascent was so subtle as to be nearly imperceptible. Olmsted had reached the Sierra Nevada foothills. Then, suddenly, his coach was climbing at a steep grade, through a mountain pass and into a densely wooded plateau. Here, the trip paused to give the horses a rest. After that, the coach climbed still higher into the mountains, through another pass, and down to his destination, Bear Valley.

  Olmsted checked into Oso House, the town’s lone inn. Olmsted ate his dinner sitting on a stool, as the inn didn’t have a single chair. Then he retired to a room,
only slightly larger than a closet and with walls made out of canvas. These provided little barrier to sound, of which there was plenty—men drinking and fighting and gambling well into the night. It would do—for now—but Olmsted knew he’d need to find different accommodations when his family arrived.

  Besides Oso House, Bear Valley consisted of about twenty establishments lining a single unpaved street, perpetually aswirl with thick red dust. There were three saloons, including the notorious Bon Ton, a billiard hall, two laundries, an Odd Fellows lodge, and a bathhouse. There was also a butcher shop and the Frémont general store. Bear Valley’s population—hard-luck eastern transplants stuck working as miners after their own gold dreams collapsed, Mexican immigrants, members of local Indian tribes, along with a smattering of wayward Europeans—was estimated at 1,000, but who really knew? For men with families, there were several extremely modest rooming houses run by the mining company. Single men, accounting for the bulk of the residents, were content to sleep in tents or booths—if they could raise the funds to purchase a few planks. Booths were little wooden structures with room enough to curl up and sleep.

  Bear Valley had no churches and no schools. But it had the one establishment vital to a mining town—a Wells Fargo Express office. Bullion from the mines was regularly delivered to this office, from which it was transported by heavily armed coach along the arduous route to San Francisco. There, it was weighed, assayed, and credited to the mining company’s account.

  On waking the next morning, Olmsted immediately began a tour of the Mariposa Estate. The property consisted of seven separate mines. Despite his damaged leg, Olmsted shimmied down a mine shaft at one point. He loosed a piece of quartz with a pickax and, with the aid of a candle, spied glittering specks of gold embedded in the rock. Olmsted continued on, familiarizing himself with the vast property he would now be supervising.