Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted sat down with the three men and pieced together the story. He was flabbergasted. But he persuaded them to hold off on any action until he could get in contact with the Mariposa board. Of course, a telegraph on the estate would have facilitated long-distance communication. But plans for one had been scrapped due to financial problems. Instead, Olmsted resolved to go to San Francisco. Once there, he hoped to establish a dialogue with the board via telegraph and maybe learn what options were even possible.

  Before departing, Olmsted gathered up $4,000 in gold bullion and some mining equipment. He wrote a bill of sale, transferring this property to himself. Olmsted’s handshake deal with the Mariposa board—he had failed to get a written contract—called for him to receive his entire salary at the end of each year’s work. He was owed $10,000. He figured the gold bullion and equipment would about cover what he was due and that this might be his only chance to get paid. (Luckily, Olmsted had sold much of his stock a month before the Opdyke-Weed trial.)

  It took Olmsted three days to travel to San Francisco, a hard journey that ordinarily required two days. Ironically, the same rainstorm that had caused a temporary bump in the Mariposa Estate’s gold yield had damaged the coach roads. At the Bank of California’s offices, he used the company’s telegraph to send an anxious dispatch. He waited. No answer.

  Olmsted checked into a hotel. Over the next few days, he visited the bank offices repeatedly, hoping for some word from back East. None. “I have made no progress & heard nothing from New York,” he wrote Mary from San Francisco. “... A lingering death of Mariposa—uncertainty and hope deferred, seems the most disagreeable prospect for us—for me.”

  But there was news from Bear Valley. And it was ominous. Because the miners had stopped getting paid, they’d stop working. They were panicked, hungry, and threatening to loot the general stores. Olmsted sent yet another telegram to New York, still more urgent than the last. Finally, he received a reply: “Should a few guarantee present indebtedness can we rely implicitly on early profits of Estate for reimbursement.”

  Olmsted couldn’t believe it. Even by telegraphic standards, this was an enigmatic response. It reminded him of the bewildering counsel provided by Jack Bunsby in Dombey and Son, Dickens’s novel concerning a shipping company.

  By now, Olmsted knew he was working for a bunch of crooks. Even so, the extent of their brazenness seems to have taken him by surprise. The Mariposa Company still owned real working mines full of expensive equipment and capable of producing gold, overhyped expectations notwithstanding. He figured the board would offer something—a directive, a strategy, a warning. But all they had provided was this “Bunsbyish impertinence,” as he termed the telegram.

  Olmsted asked the bank to give him one hundred days to sort things out. As a first step, he composed an executive order and mailed it to one of the managers back at the Mariposa Estate. He requested that it be read aloud in front of each mine and then posted. The decree has been lost, but the gist of his message to the miners was as follows: Get back to work, as the mines are the source from which everything else flows. Olmsted arranged for a sheriff to distribute the miners’ pay directly from the gold that was produced. Gold would also be used to pay off the debt to the general stores, so they might agree to reopen. The miners would have employment and something to buy with their salaries; the general stores would have a market for their goods.

  It was a total improvisation on Olmsted’s part, a kind of Wild West bankruptcy workout. Many of the miners, seeing the logic in Olmsted’s order, returned to their jobs. Olmsted opted to remain in San Francisco, sending out telegraphs, hoping for some kind of resolution.

  Waiting was excruciating. For much of the time, Olmsted sat by himself in a hotel room. Looking out the window, at one point, he counted six hundred people walking along Montgomery Street. He noted with alarm that nearly all the passersby were vigorous, fast moving, displaying a marked sense of purpose. Olmsted counted only two people—two!—who were unequivocally over forty. He was forty-two now. The West was a young man’s world, and he wasn’t sure that he had what it took.

  Periodically, he met with angry creditors and tried to keep them appeased. Or he’d drop by the bank office checking for dispatches that never came.

  One advantage of this exile in San Francisco, at least, was that it was possible to stay current on the progress of the Civil War. Here, it was so much easier than in remote Bear Valley. When he heard about the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital, he knew the conflict was nearing an end. It was only a matter of time.

  On April 9, 1865, Olmsted went alone to a morning service at San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church. As the congregation launched into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Olmsted pitched suddenly into a mood of near-unfathomable darkness. It was as if all the events of recent months washed over him. He was devastated. Why, he wondered, had he traded duty with a wartime medical outfit for the sucker promise of a gold mine? Now, Union victory was drawing near, and he was away in a distant outpost. What was he doing in San Francisco? Where was he headed?

  All these feelings, coursing about, found focus in an upwelling of longing for John: “But, today, singing Glory! Hallelujah! with a great congregation and looking at the great flag of victory held over us, though of all with whom I ever had conscious sympathy or hope and prayer for this day I stood alone—and my heart cried back stronger than ever to my poor, sad, unhopeful brother, who alone of all the world, ever really knew me and trusted me for exactly what I was.”

  That very same day, on the other side of the continent, General Lee was defeated in the battle of Appomattox Court House. It was the final major battle of the Civil War. Less than one week later Lincoln was assassinated. He was pronounced dead on April 15, 1865, at 7:22 a.m. Olmsted was on his way to the bank office when the news reached San Francisco. All around him, the ordinarily bustling streets fell silent; people were in shock, moving as if in a dream. “I have never seen such an intense and pervading public feeling,” Olmsted wrote to his father. In a letter to a friend, he added: “I can’t help feeling that the best part of me is pining here in a sort of solitary confinement, & a man is never so lonely as in a crowd of strangers—even though a sympathetic crowd.”

  Olmsted joined a group of 15,000 San Franciscans in a solemn march from Washington Square to a pavilion on Stockton Street, where the Reverend Horatio Stebbins delivered a eulogy. It was all so sudden. When Lincoln died, a formal treaty ending the war had not even been signed yet. But the South was done, utterly vanquished. “At any rate the nation lives and is immortal and Slavery is dead,” Olmsted wrote.

  Olmsted sent a letter to Mary in Bear Valley, instructing her to drape their home in black cloth in Lincoln’s memory. “I would do so simply to impress the event in the minds of the children,” he wrote, adding that “the awful calamity of the country ... almost disables me from thinking of anything else.”

  Soon the one hundred days that Olmsted had requested from the bank was up. There was still no word from New York, so Olmsted had to make a decision himself. The mining firm remained thousands of dollars in debt. He worked out a deal with Dodge Brothers, the general-store supplier. Dodge Brothers agreed to run the mines, using the proceeds to pay themselves back along with the many other creditors. As part of the arrangement, Olmsted stepped down as manager.

  Late in the spring of 1865, Olmsted rejoined his family in Bear Valley. Money was quickly running out. Despite everything he’d been through, he clung to a perverse hope that something might change with the Mariposa Company. Maybe there would be a fresh twist and he’d be rehired at his old salary. Too much had happened, too soon, and it was hard to process.

  Barring that, Olmsted would need to stir up new work. He planned to use the Bear Valley as a base, such as it was, and periodically make the long, dusty commute to San Francisco to try to stir up opportunities. That was his plan—plan being a very loose term at this point. He began casting about. As a sailor-turned-farmer-turned
-park maker, lately a gold-mine supervisor, there were so many things he had done, more still that he might do. He found himself pulled this way and that by all the possibilities—a tyranny of choices.

  Journalism was an option. Godkin had finally lined up funding for the publication that he and Olmsted had tried to launch at the height of the Civil War. Rather than any of the names Olmsted had suggested, it was to be called the Nation. Godkin wrote Olmsted suggesting that he write a series of West Coast dispatches for the new publication similar to his earlier Southern dispatches: “Why won’t you prepare to do for the Nation about the Pacific Coast what you did for the Times about the Seaboard States?” Olmsted declined. With a startup publication, whether his work would actually appear in print was a speculation, and low pay was an outright guarantee.

  Maybe he’d try the oil industry instead. Oil had recently been discovered in California. There was a ready market: It could be burned for heat or used to lubricate heavy machinery. During the past year, he’d traveled to several spots in the state to visit wells. Of all things, he had been elected in abstentia as president of an oil company. The tiny upstart offered no salary, only a block of valueless stock. Olmsted had said no thanks to that offer. The more he thought about oil, the less sense it made. Oil appeared even more speculative than mining for gold, if that was possible.

  Olmsted even checked out the wine business in Sonoma. Because California wine making was still very much in its infancy, Olmsted was actually able to land a consulting assignment. Olmsted visited the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society run by Agoston Haraszthy. Since emigrating from Hungary, Haraszthy had worked as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi and served as the first town marshal of San Diego. In 1861, he traveled to Europe, returning with 100,000 grapevine cuttings. He introduced them in his Sonoma vineyard to see what grew. Olmsted spent two days on his property before producing a report that concluded, “The business is one promising extraordinary profits.”

  As a wine consultant, Olmsted’s advice was dubious. During his visit, the first evidence of phylloxera, also known as root louse, must have been visible. Within a year, the infestation would decimate Haraszthy’s vineyard, prompting him to abandon Sonoma for Nicaragua. There, he tried to start a sugar plantation before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Haraszthy’s horse was found tied near the banks of an alligator-infested river, but he was never heard from again. He was presumed eaten.

  Haraszthy is often called the “Father of California Viniculture.” If Olmsted was wrong about the state of his vineyards, he was right at least about the prospects for California wine.

  Unsettled in the West, desperate for money, Olmsted rattled this way and that. Tellingly, he reserved his greatest energy for seeking out landscape architecture jobs. Yet despite his enduring passion for the outdoors and his success with Central Park, he was less certain than ever that there was enough demand to make a living as a landscape architect.

  The first project he embarked upon was actually one that he’d been handed while still supervising the Mariposa Estate. It was also his first solo commission, landed without Vaux. Now that his gold-mine obligations appeared finished, Olmsted turned his attention to the job.

  The Mountain View Cemetery was to occupy 200 acres in the hills above Oakland. In preparing a design sans Vaux, Olmsted worked with a hired draftsman. As with Central Park, he showed an unusual sensitivity to the unique requirements of the site. He came up with a variety of thoughtful cemetery-design touches. Many of the people who would be buried in the cemetery were Chinese immigrants. So Olmsted’s plan included a “receiving tomb” to hold bodies temporarily until they could be returned to China, as was then the practice. There was also a preponderance of single men in California’s highly transient population, as Olmsted had noted. So his plan included an unusual number of single plots.

  The land set aside for the cemetery was a bowl consisting of a flat, dusty floor surrounded by steep barren hillsides. When it came to plantings, this was quite a challenge. A stately canopy of elms was simply not going to be possible. Here again, Olmsted proved extremely imaginative, suggesting a tree—the cypress—that he believed would thrive on the grounds while striking the perfect note of reverence:Being an evergreen, and seeming more than any other tree to point toward heaven, it has always been regarded as typical of immortality. For this and other reasons, it was considered by the Persians and Hebrews of old, as it is by the Turks and Oriental Christians of the present day, more appropriate than any other tree for planting about graves. Thucydides mentions that the ashes of the Greeks who died for their country were preserved in Cypress; and Horace speaks of the custom among the Romans of dressing the bodies of the dead with Cypress before placing them in the tomb. It is the gopher-wood of Scripture, of which, according to the tradition of the Hebrews, the Ark was made; and it constituted the “exalted grove” of Mount Sion, spoken of in Ecclesiastes. Here, then, is a tree which seems peculiarly fitted by its associations, as well as its natural character, for your purposes.

  Olmsted’s plan greatly pleased his client; he received a much-needed $1,000. He also chased several other landscape architecture projects, but with far less success.

  Earlier, during his lonely stay in San Francisco, Olmsted had haunted the Bank of California office, awaiting telegrams that never came. It was a display of doggedness that greatly impressed the bank’s president, Darius Mills. While Mills was appalled by the Mariposa Company and its team of Wall Street chiselers, he developed a great respect for Olmsted and asked him to draw up a plan for his large country estate. Back in Bear Valley, Olmsted received word that he’d failed to win the commission. But the name Olmsted suggested for the estate stuck: Millbrae. (Over time, a city grew up on the land, still known today as Millbrae, California.)

  Another possible landscape job came from Henry Coon, mayor of San Francisco. He met with Olmsted, and the pair walked over a desolate, wind-whipped section of land. Apparently, there was some desire to create a park here. But the city commissioners and other interested parties were intent on a reprise of Central Park in San Francisco. Olmsted argued for a park more appropriate to the city’s climate and topography. Mayor Coon asked Olmsted to draft a proposal. Meanwhile, the trustees of the soon-to-be-opened College of California contacted Olmsted. He was asked to submit a preliminary design for the campus grounds and also the surrounding community. Both of these projects struck Olmsted as highly speculative; neither seemed likely to progress quickly.

  While Olmsted cast about, Vaux was busy back in New York. He entered into a heated battle with Richard Morris Hunt. Hunt, the first American to attend Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, was an architect with a flair for the grand. His star was lately on the rise, and he had proposed that a series of monumental gates be placed at various entry points into Central Park. This was very out of keeping with Olmsted and Vaux’s humanscale, rustic treatment. Vaux succeeded in derailing Hunt’s proposal. To achieve this required Vaux to reopen communication with the Central Park board of commissioners. This was his first real contact with them since he and Olmsted had resigned a couple years earlier.

  There were also encouraging signals about a possible Brooklyn park. Plans had been on hold for years. But with the end of the Civil War, there was a sudden burst of progress. The park’s commissioners decided to reconsider a design they had accepted some years back, generally agreed to be a thoroughly lackluster effort. They approached Vaux, asking him to submit a competing proposal.

  During the spring and summer of 1865, while Vaux pursued the commission, he wrote Olmsted repeatedly, trying to enlist his participation. Olmsted dutifully responded. Given the vagaries of the mail—it could take a month for a letter to travel between the coasts—there was a crazy-quilt quality to their correspondence. Sometimes Vaux reiterated a point, not realizing that Olmsted had already addressed it in a letter then in transit. Other times, Olmsted tried to anticipate an argument that Vaux might make, only to receive a letter that went off in a tot
ally different direction.

  Despite this fractured time sequence, the major themes of their exchange remained intact. Vaux felt certain that he was closing in on a commission—a major park commission. Olmsted felt compelled to hold back. There was nothing firm yet; it was a tentative prospect at best. Vaux’s letters only added to his dizzying array of possibilities. “I trust you are getting on pretty well,” Vaux wrote. “We may have some fun together yet. I wish you could have seen your destiny in our art. God meant you should. I really believe, at times, although he may have something different for you to do yet he cannot have anything nobler in store for you.” He signed the letter, “With love, Yours, C. V.” Back in the autumn of 1863, when they’d gotten into a scrape, Vaux had used the far chillier “Yours faithfully.” With the reference to “your destiny in our art,” Vaux reopened those earlier arguments about art versus business, the world of ideas versus the world of men.

  Olmsted wrote back, “I love beautiful landscapes and rural recreations and people in rural recreations—better than anybody else I know. But I don’t feel strong on the art side. I don’t feel myself an artist, I feel rather as if it was sacrilegious in me to post myself in the portals of Art.” He protested again that there was more to him, so much more, than could be summed up in simple art. He had such diverse abilities; he’d occupied so many roles in life. Why, the job he’d lately done—and many of the options he was considering—were far afield from art, capital A, Art.

  “Nobody cares two straws for the mines in St. Francisco,” Vaux asserted. “As yet you are the representative man of the C. P. [Central Park] and not much else to New Yorkers, and very likely the majority of those who think of the matter at all suppose you still to be at work there.” In this, Vaux showed a wily side and a deep understanding of his friend’s psychology.