Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Mariposa was a high-tech operation by nineteenth-century standards. Mechanized hoists were used to pull big chunks of quartz out of the mines. The quartz was loaded onto cars and sent along a rail—more like a roller coaster—that dipped and twisted through the mountains, carrying raw ore from the mines to the mills for processing.

  Each mill had a number of stamps, big metal weights that struck the quartz repeatedly, upwards of fifty times a minute, until it was crushed to powder. Once the quartz had been pulverized, water was added, creating a thick slurry. The mixture was then run slowly across an amalgamation table, which featured a layer of mercury.

  Gold is one of the heaviest elements on earth. As the slurry slid across the amalgamation table, even the tiniest specks of gold drifted to the bottom of the mix and dropped into the bed of mercury.

  Gold and mercury’s chemical relationship is nonexistent. Bits of gold simply collected in the mercury until the mercury was utterly laden. Then it was “clean-up time.” The so-called amalgam was scooped into buckets and carried to a retort room. There, it was heated in iron kettles until all the mercury had vaporized, leaving behind gold. Gold captured in this fashion is called doré. Olmsted noticed that the doré looked like a filthy sponge cake.

  Even at first glance, Olmsted could also see that a great deal was wrong with the operation. Sure, Mariposa and bonanza were synonymous in the popular imagination. In the months before the eastern investors purchased the property, the estate was turning a profit of $50,000 per month—unheard of. Yet the mines Olmsted visited were in great disrepair, and many of the mills were at a standstill. He immediately wrote a letter to his bosses back in New York: “These facts, all new and entirely unexpected to me, coming to my knowledge mostly in one day . . . gave rise at first to a feeling of very great disappointment.”

  The better Olmsted got to know the Mariposa Estate, the worse it looked. The drought was so severe that several streams indicated on maps had ceased to exist. The estate’s most crucial source, the Mariposa River, was just one foot deep. With water so scarce, gold mining was difficult. Water was needed to power the mills that crushed the quartz. Water was necessary to create the gold-bearing sludge that washed across the amalgamation tables.

  Besides the vagaries of nature, Olmsted began to hear whisperings about human schemes. Supposedly, Frémont had ordered the previous manager to work the property hard, upping the gold yield. Nothing about this was illegal per se. The estate had been for sale; stellar results were needed to entice a buyer. Frémont’s real sin was ignoring a cardinal rule of gold mining: Even in the midst of the gaudiest pay streak, you had better be thinking about the future. All streaks eventually end. Frémont had pushed his mining machinery to the limit, deferring routine maintenance to the next owner. He hadn’t bothered with exploration that might have located fresh veins of gold. Now, with the onset of a terrible drought, mining was drying up, quite literally.

  Late into the night, Olmsted pored over his predecessor’s financial ledgers. Only one thing was really clear. Recently, the mines had been turning a fat profit. Now they were losing $80,000 a month. “Things are worse here than I dare say to anybody but you,” he wrote his wife, in a letter that he marked “X Private,” as in extremely private.

  Olmsted started making plans to revive the property to its recent glory. So-called deadwork—placing underground timber supports—had been neglected and needed to be done before a tunnel collapsed. Olmsted intended to drop a series of test shafts, looking for promising new spots to mine. He wanted to string a telegraph line to Bear Valley, opening communication with the outside world, making the mining property less remote. Most important, Olmsted proposed digging a long canal to convey water onto the estate from the Merced River, a deeper, more reliable source. “I can make nothing of it without water,” he noted.

  Before Olmsted could even get started, however, his plans hit a snag. Years earlier, Frémont had borrowed $7,847 at a usuriously high interest rate. Compounding monthly, the tab had by November 1863 reached $308,000, and what’s more, the loan’s contract specified that the amount must be repaid in gold.

  A reorganized Mariposa company, freshly infused with capital from the sale of stock to the public, yet with Frémont still a legal trustee—what a perfect opportunity to collect this ancient debt. In fact, a San Francisco banker had been canny enough to purchase the debt from its original holder. Now, the banker signaled that he intended to pursue collection voraciously. Back East, Opdyke and the rest of the Mariposa board instantly recognized the severity of the situation. (The company would settle within months, agreeing to the following terms: $300,000, in gold, payable in three annual installments, no more compounding interest.)

  Meanwhile, Olmsted received a dispatch from the Mariposa board. Due to this new and unforeseen Frémont debt, the company’s financial position had worsened. Olmsted was forced to reevaluate his plans for refurbishing and upgrading the mines—this, when he’d barely gotten started. Some of his most ambitious ideas, such as the telegraph line and the canal, were now unaffordable. Going forward, capital improvements to the estate would have to be realized through increased gold production—as if that was even possible, paradoxically, without capital improvements.

  What had he gotten himself into, Olmsted started to wonder? Looking at his surroundings through the prism of all this recent frustration, Olmsted was struck anew by what a barren land this was. The foliage—thorny chaparral and clumps of dwarf chestnut—seemed to him stunted and alien. Even the topography was needlessly severe. California, he was certain, was made up of two Latin words, calor (heat) and fornax (furnace).

  On a Sunday night, Olmsted heard a commotion in the street in front of Oso House. Looking out, he saw that a dogfight was in progress, and the two animals were tearing at each other, kicking up dust. A crowd of miners had gathered, and they were whooping and cheering and laying down bets. “Evening services” was how Olmsted termed the event in a letter to Mary, adding, “I rather think that if I had known what the place was I should not have asked you to come here. You must be prepared for a hard life.... But it’s too late to retreat.... A region possessing less of fertility—less of living nature—you scarce ever saw.”

  When he could sleep, always a problem for Olmsted, he began to have a recurring dream where he found himself in the English countryside. The dream’s locale was very specific: outside the town of Leamington Spa in the county of Warwickshire, a favorite spot from his travels.

  Around this time, he also sent out a number of letters, exploring different ideas, trying to make something happen. He invited a doctor he’d known during his USSC service to set up a new practice in Bear Valley. He sent $75 to his friend Edwin Godkin, the New York editor, requesting that Godkin start subscriptions to a list of roughly thirty magazines—Harper’s, Punch, Mining and Smelting, and the Leisure Hour among them—and arrange for them to be sent to the estate. Olmsted planned a reading room for the miners.

  Olmsted also contacted David Parker and Company, an innovative Shaker-run company in New Hampshire that produced one of America’s first automated appliances, a steam-powered washing machine. Perhaps cleaning the miners’ filthy clothes would prove a route to increased productivity. “I think something of the sort is more wanted here than a church,” Olmsted wrote to a friend, describing his plan.

  But the doctor didn’t come. War was still on, and his services were sorely needed. For want of water, the washing-machine idea was quickly abandoned. The magazines began to arrive, but there’s no record of the miners’ response to the Leisure Hour or any of the other titles. In his own way, Olmsted was hoping to reform this godforsaken place. But it was mere fancy; even Olmsted knew this at some level. Disappointment—that was reality of his new life out West—and it just kept coming.

  Next, a letter arrived from Vaux. The letter was five weeks old; that’s how long it could take for mail to travel from New York to Bear Valley. But Vaux’s anger was still fresh: “My special object in wri
ting is to speak of a matter about which, in view of your proposed long absence, something needs to be said. The public has been led to believe from the commencement of the Central Park work to the present time that you are pre-eminently the author of the executed design, and such we all know is the general impression throughout the country today.”

  Back in September, on the day Olmsted had left New York, a couple of newspapers had run articles about his new job running a gold mine in California. One article assigned the bulk of credit for Central Park to Olmsted, while the other neglected to even mention Vaux, slights duly noted by his erstwhile partner. Perhaps, Vaux suggested, Olmsted was receiving outsize credit because he had undertaken certain administrative duties that kept him in the public eye. Or maybe the credit flowed from the title of “architect in chief.” Why had Olmsted been so comfortable accepting that title, Vaux demanded? And why hadn’t Olmsted done more to correct misimpressions about their roles? He reminded Olmsted that they both shared credit for the park.

  Olmsted’s response—characteristically logorrheic—opened with a note of hurt. He’d received Vaux’s letter right before Thanksgiving. “Your letter of the 19th October comes in to make its chilly, lonely dolefulness more perfect,” he wrote. From here, Olmsted crafted a couple of surprising parries, meant to pull the rug out from under Vaux. Absolutely, Olmsted conceded, they should share credit for the park’s design. But by being so fixated on the design issue, Olmsted pointed out, Vaux was guilty of an unwitting slight of his own. Clearly, Vaux placed no value on Olmsted’s administrative achievements or policing innovations, treating these as though they were lesser endeavors. These were also crucial to the park’s success, he pointed out. But perhaps Vaux was too much the artist, too hung up on his “superior education in certain directions,” as Olmsted termed it.

  As for “architect in chief ”—the title Vaux so clearly coveted—well, that was just empty words. Rearing up, Olmsted asserted that no mere title could capture the breadth of his skills. He could move fluidly between art and administration, between the high-flown world of ideas and the practical world of men. That, all of that, is what he had brought to their work together, and how dare Vaux challenge him? He concluded, “By fact of natural gift . . . I have been worth most to the park.”

  There was an unexpected hauteur to Olmsted’s letter. Also more than a hint of defensiveness. Broad skilled though he may have been, he had so far succeeded in bringing neither administration nor artistry to the Mariposa mines.

  It had been a terrible autumn, and the clincher came when Olmsted received word that a fire had burned a couple of barns on the Staten Island farm. The fire destroyed some furniture he was storing, realia from his trips through the South, and an old letter he owned that had been written by George Washington. On New Year’s Day, 1864, Olmsted composed a letter to his father. The recent barn fire, he wrote, “helps to strengthen an unpleasant sense of being cut off from my past life.... I confess I am sadly homesick. It is very hard to make up my mind to adopt this as my home or to begin life over again in making friends here.”

  Yet there was hope, hope being one by-product of Olmsted’s boundless energy. When things were at their darkest, by ceaselessly casting about, he was often able to find that first tiny marker—a vague idea, a general direction, something, anything—pointing the way to redemption.

  During a mine inspection, at the edge of the Mariposa property, Olmsted had spotted an amazing sight in the distance. This, he knew, was Yosemite. He hadn’t had a chance to visit yet. Besides Indians, who until recently had lived in the valley for millennia, only a few hundred people had ever entered the place. But Olmsted had seen photographs. He’d read about this natural wonder in popular accounts published back East in magazines like the Atlantic. The most striking feature that Olmsted could make out was a huge bare cliff of palest granite. El Capitan. “Think of it as 13 times as high as Trinity spire,” he wrote to Mary. It was a reference to Trinity Church, at 284 feet the tallest building then in New York City.

  Way in the distance, Olmsted had spied something that promised an alternative to all this dust and disappointment.

  CHAPTER 20

  Yosemite

  THE MARIPOSA OPERATION continued to stagger along. One month the yield would bump up only to fall right back the next—all very confounding.

  Olmsted was starting to realize the cruel calculus of gold mining. Yes, there was gold in these mountains. Yes, Mariposa had once been profitable, had the potential to be so once more. But something had to change. He needed to luck into a serious pay streak. Or maybe Mother Nature would cooperate with a deluge, swelling the rivers, putting those defunct streams back on the map.

  Instead, he contended with a steady flow of Frémont creditors. Former mine managers, equipment suppliers, and dry goods merchants showed up one after another, hands outstretched. “He (Fremont) seems to have worn out the patience, after draining the purses, of all his friends in California,” Olmsted wrote to his father. “Whether he is more knave or fool is the only question. I am over-run with visits from his creditors who all hope to get something from the new owners of the estate.”

  The prospects looked bleaker each day. But 125 miles to the north, the mines in the Grass Valley section of California were on a production rampage, thanks to a quirk of geography. These mines were lower in the Sierra foothills and had more reliable water sources. Recently, the Grass Valley operations had grown highly profitable. The owners, wisely, were using some of their proceeds to buy new equipment and to invest in technology such as more efficient stamps and new amalgamation processes. Spend money, make money; it was a virtuous circle, and Grass Valley was putting Mariposa to shame.

  Olmsted dispatched his chief engineer to Grass Valley to learn the most current gold-mining methods. But there wasn’t anything that could be readily applied to the Mariposa Estate. Unable to increase production, stymied on capital improvements, Olmsted used the only lever he had to keep the struggling concern going.

  On March 1, 1864, after first hiding every weapon he could locate, Olmsted cut the miners’ salaries. Pay on the Mariposa Estate, by his reckoning, was five times higher than in New York. It was higher than other California mining outfits, too, another sign of the previous management’s carelessness. Olmsted cut the miners’ wages from $3.50 to $3.15 per day. The miners immediately went on strike. This is what Olmsted did, whispered the men; this is why he had been brought out West. He held firm, content to lose many of the workers, particularly the bitter, failed prospectors who filled the ranks. “They hate regularity, order and discipline,” he complained, “and they influence the whole body of our hands. They have never done with their recollections of the days when the working miners governed matters as they wished, with revolvers in their belts as they worked.”

  As a small concession, Olmsted lowered the cost of the company-run boardinghouses. This is where married men lived, the most stable element in his labor force. He wanted to encourage these particular workers to stay. Otherwise, Olmsted played rough. He placed ads seeking new hires in San Francisco papers. He brought in Chinese immigrants, willing to work for as little as $1.75 a day. With a flood of replacement workers, the strike broke quickly, and more than half of his original workforce simply walked away.

  While Olmsted was busy putting down a mine strike, he became the beneficiary of a proposal put forth by a complete stranger. Olmsted wasn’t even aware of the honor, but he would learn about it shortly.

  Israel Raymond sent a letter about Yosemite to John Conness, a U.S. senator from California. Raymond was one of the earliest advocates for preserving the valley. His concern was partially borne out of his job as an executive with a steamship company. Conveying tourists to California to visit Yosemite could be a boon to his business. But steps were required to curb other commercial interests, ones that might not be so partial to the scenery. Already people were timbering near Yosemite, and miners couldn’t be far behind.

  Raymond urged that some kin
d of intervention was needed on behalf of this natural marvel. With his letter, he included a set of stereographic prints by Carleton Watkins, a photographer who had captured some of the first images of the valley. Raymond also provided a list of names, Olmsted’s among them, of people who would be well qualified to serve on a Yosemite commission. There is zero evidence that Olmsted and Raymond had even met at this point. Rather, it appears that Raymond—aware that the distinguished gentleman behind Central Park was now in his midst—simply placed Olmsted’s name on a list of viable candidates.

  In a young America, a pioneering spirit prevailed, nowhere more than in California. All things were possible. Manage the staff of a wartime medical outfit, get tapped to supervise a gold mine. Supervise a gold mine, get included on a list of the wilderness advocates best qualified to preserve Yosemite. (With the environmental movement still decades away, the irony here—that Olmsted’s gold mine was a terribly ungreen business—didn’t even register.)

  Senator Conness was moved by Raymond’s plea. He forwarded the letter to California’s General Land Office, requesting that it be used as the framework for crafting a bill. The legislative process was rolling and would move remarkably fast.

  A welcome distraction from mine business was the arrival of Olmsted’s family in California. Their original departure from the East Coast had encountered a series of delays. Then they’d spent a month journeying on the Panama route. When the family disembarked near midnight on March 11, after a full day sitting in the San Francisco Harbor waiting for the fog to clear, Olmsted was relieved that they’d made it at last.