“I doubt there is any such place,” Oliver said. “You and the children couldn’t have lived in any of the camps I was in, and none of them have a future.”
“Then you should have written and told me. How long have you been—fooling around with this irrigation scheme? Months, apparently. And not a word to me. Were you afraid, or ashamed, or what?”
“I told you. I had to be sure.”
Angrily she stared at him. He stood before her filled with an idiotic confidence, a county-fair Moses with his sleeves rolled up, ready to smite the rock. If he didn’t throw away his foolish staff and quit dreaming, he would humiliate her and himself, and justify every doubt her friends had ever had of him.
“I wrote you the minute I was sure we could pull it off,” he said.
He made her shake her head, he jarred out of her some hard laughter. “How can you say such a thing? How can you be sure you can pull it off, as you say? It would take millions of dollars.”
“Not right away. We’ll do it in stages.”
“Each stage taking only half a million.”
“Listen,” he said, and took her by the wrist, scowling down on her. Then he smoothed out the scowl and made it into a smile, he coaxed her with his eyes. “Come here.” He led her to the foot of the basket. The breeze from the window stirred the baby’s fine pale hair, and Susan reached to pull the sash clear down. Outside, though the August sunshine was full and hot, weather was building up. She caught a glimpse of thunderheads off beyond the river, and a far Bicker of lightning, too far away for thunder. Oliver held her by the wrist, looking down at the sleeping baby.
“Do you think you can bring her up?” he said. “Can you make a woman of that baby?”
“What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t think so?”
“You’re confident.”
“I hope so. I think so. Yes, why?”
“Will you believe me when I tell you I’m just as confident I can carry water to that desert?”
She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst. “I believe you’re confident,” she said. “I know I’m not.”
He led her to the bed and made her sit down; he drew from the pocket of his coat, hanging on the bedpost, a brochure in a green cover. I have a copy of it here. “The Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company,” it says. Inside, on the title page, fellaheen in loincloths are carrying water in pots slung on a pole, and underneath the woodcut is a quotation which with great difficulty I have determined comes from Psalms: “I have removed his shoulder from the burden; his hands were delivered from the pots.”
“I showed that to Clarence King,” Oliver said. “Did I tell you I met him on the train, coming East? He says that quotation alone insures us success.”
She was appalled: he was a child. “Mr. King is a great joker.”
“Maybe, but he wasn’t joking about this. Neither am I. Go ahead, read.”
Shakily she laughed. “I thought I was the only writer of fiction in this family.”
“Fiction, is it?” He flipped the page. “See who the president of this company is? General Tompkins, who is also president of American Diamond Drill. He’s not used to backing fictions. Look at the figures. Look at the facts.”
Unwillingly she read about damsites, weather, rainfall, storage capacities, topography, soil analyses, placer production from the Snake River sands. She read two interviews with settlers already irrigating out of Boise Creek, and thought them enthusiasts of the same stripe as her husband. He was a child. It took some tough financial pirate, some Gould or Vanderbilt, to do what he in his innocence thought he could do.
His thumb came down and dented the map spread before her, made a deep crease at a point where the contour lines crowded together and the wiggle of a stream flowed away. “There’s the principal damsite. We won’t do anything about it yet. At first we’ll just throw a diversion dike across the creek lower down, and turn the creek into our canal system. That alone will take water to thousands of acres.”
“I don’t see how you make money,” she said helplessly. “The land isn’t yours to sell.”
“We don’t sell land, we sell water rights and water. The more settlers come in, the greater the need. That’s when we’ll build the dam and lengthen the canal line clear to the Snake. Here goes the canal, along the edge of the mountain here, right across the drainage. The whole valley’s under the ditch.”
“I never could read contour maps,” she said.
“Never mind,” he said, and took the brochure from her lap. “Can you imagine one enormous sage plain that drops in benches—a big nearly level plateau for a mile or two, and then a fifty-foot drop, and then another bench? Can you visualize it? That canal will eventually run seventy-five miles and not cross any man’s land. Do you know what that means?”
“I know what it sounds like.”
He waited.
“It sounds like a country without life, people, schools, anything.”
“It sounds to me like a country with a future.”
“And no present.”
The impatience she created in him troubled her, and yet she had to resist his enthusiasm. For her own sake and the children’s sake and for his sake she had to be sensible. But she smiled, trying to express love even while she blocked his way; she felt that she begged, that he could not insist if she made it clear how much the prospect appalled her.
He flapped the brochure against his knuckles, thinking. “Boise’s not a village, it’s a little city, the territorial capital. The Oregon Shortline will go through it and put it on the main line to Oregon. There’s a cavalry post, there’re balls even. The mountains rise up right behind town, the riding’s wonderful. You can have a horse, so can Ollie.”
With her hands in her lap she sat, not wanting to look up at him. “And he can go to a one-room school. He’ll be starting, you know. This fall.”
“You were going to take a tutor along to Morelia. Why not to Boise?” But she remained silent, and he exclaimed in exasperation, “Don’t you see it? Any of it? Doesn’t it challenge you at all? Do you even see the significance of those seventy-five miles of canal across the public domain?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“No right of way problems. Not one old coot who can make you divert your ditch around his land. No lawsuits. Just one big simple engineering problem.”
“And one big money problem.”
“That’s not a problem.”
“What?” Now she did look up.
“General Tompkins has already lined up backing from Pope and Cole. We’re talking to them in New York tomorrow.”
Slowly she rose. Her shoulder twitched, she felt weak and tired, aggrieved that he kept her talking and resisting him instead of letting her go to bed. “You mean you’ve already committed yourself. Without ever talking to me.”
Beyond his head the maple leaves outside hung without movement, as still as his face. The air was brassy. “Everything moved so fast,” he said. “I hoped I could persuade you.”
“But how can I decide so suddenly! It’s so different from anything I was prepared for. I’m not strong yet, you really can’t expect...”
Women’s tactics, unfair. She saw them take effect. Moodily he turned his eyes out the window.
“It’s not only me,” she said. “Baby’s too small. I wouldn’t dare, with winter ahead.”
“Winters there are a whole lot milder and healthier than they are here.”
“But there’s no safe job. There’s only this ... speculation.”
“Do you think superintending a mine is safe?” he said, and laughed so unpleasantly that she wanted to cry. “Didn’t Almaden or the Adelaide teach you anything?”
“Yes,” she said, looking down. “So did Mexico. How easily something can go wrong—always goe
s wrong!”
“Sue, I know this scheme. I made it up, I surveyed it, I laid out the plans. It’ll work.”
Wearily she looked up, let her eyes meet his stubborn blue ones. “Well, go in to your meeting tomorrow and see what they say. We can’t settle it now.”
“There’s no point in talking to Pope and Cole if you aren’t willing.”
The flick of their eyes meeting and breaking apart again. “Suppose I wasn’t,” she said. “What would you do?”
It took him a few seconds. Then he answered steadily, “Stay here, I suppose. Get some sort of job. Pick apples. Hire out to John.”
The ghost of Mrs. Elliott was whispering to her. She took her throat in her hand and swallowed against the pressure of her fingers. “You know I wouldn’t stand in your way or make you ... give up what you want. Could you run it from out there and come back here for —between whiles? Like Conrad and Mary?”
“That’s the sort of arrangement you didn’t want when we were talking about Potosí.”
“It would be different, here at home.”
Another silence, while the baby stirred and sighed and turned half over. “No,” Oliver said at last. “Now I won’t have it. I’ve lived away from you all I want to.”
“Oh, Oliver!” she cried. “Don’t think I don’t love thee! Don’t think I want thee living apart from us! It’s only that I feel safe here. Thee is asking me to give up what I love almost as much as thee. That little mite there has taken all the recklessness out of me. Let me think. Go to the meeting, but let me think a while.”
For a while he held her there, saying nothing. Then he walked her to the window, where a wind was thrashing the maple outside and stirring the curtains through the cracks of the closed sash. She stood with his arm around her, leaning on him and looking down to where the ferns along the edge of the lane bent limberly in the gust. She heard him say, “Look at her. She’s nursing in her sleep.” His arm squeezed her, shook her, let her go. “All right. You get used to my news and I’ll get used to yours. Maybe they’ll turn out to be compatible.”
“Maybe.”
But she had already given in. She knew that sooner or later, this fall or next spring, she would be packing up her children and her depleted collection of household goods and going West again—not, as at first, on an adventurous picnic, and not with a solemn intention of making a home in her husband’s chosen country, but into exile.
VII
THE CANYON
1
Boise City, June 16, 1882
Darling Augusta—
I am sitting, or lying, in our old hammock—the same old hammock that hung on the piazza in New Almaden, and later served as a bed for Ollie in Leadville. It hangs now between two cottonwood trees in the ragged yard that surrounds this house, built by a missionary Jesuit since called to other fields. On hot afternoons it is my favorite spot, if I can be said to have a favorite spot in this drab new town where ladies say ma‘am and servants don’t, and Irish miners still calloused from pick and shovel are erecting their millionaire houses with porte cocheres and stone turrets. Oliver is out at the engineering camp in the canyon much of the week. With the help—it isn’t really that—of a good-natured clumsy town girl, I have been able to establish a routine of work in the mornings. I am writing another Leadville novel, being poor in experience and having to make do with what is at hand. In the afternoon when baby is fed and put down, and Ollie has gone up for his nap, I come out here to read, and write letters, and listen to the dry lonely rattle of wind through the cottonwood leaves.
It is a life without much stimulation or excitement. The bugles from the cavalry post just above us mark off the days as inexorably as the whistles of New Almaden or the church bells of Morelia. I open my eyes to First Call, rise to Reveille, nurse my baby to Mess Call. When I am working at my desk I am often spurred on by the thrilling notes of the Charge from the drill field beyond our pasture fence. When I hear To the Colors, as they lower the flag in the evening, I know it is time to bestir myself about supper. I go to bed to Taps, and drift off to sleep as Lights Out blows eastward across the mesa, a long, fading, musical relinquishment as sweet and sad as the call of a mourning dove.
The house is comfortable, the children are very well, Oliver’s work goes ahead steadily, I have my own work to keep me from thinking too much about all I left behind, and so I have no right to belittle this place where we shall spend our lives until Oliver gives up being a field engineer. There are one or two Army wives, Eastern ladies, who are good company. The town ladies I can say less for. You never saw such attention to dress and manners, and to so little purpose. They have been eager about paying calls, but most of their calls I shall not return. They may think me snobbish if they wish.
Oliver hoped that I would find the Governor and his wife attractive. We dined with them a few nights ago, and alas, I am afraid I thought him pretentious, his house tasteless, and his wife common. For O’s sake I do not admit this, for the Governor is his supporter, and of much use to him in cutting red tape.
It is strange to find ourselves people of consequence. My old boy has sold them all on his dream. I am sure they all hope to get rich out of him, or richer—some shareholders in the company are the Irish millionaires I mentioned. There has been a considerable land boom already, and the land office is doing-I just realized where the phrase comes from—a land-office business. Oh, couldn’t you and Thomas homestead a claim and lay the foundations for a western place of visitation? Quite seriously, it would be a profitable thing to do, and on “desert” or “timber-culture” claims there is no residence requirement as there is for a homestead. You need only have someone make minimal “improvements,” as they are called, and wait. Don’t you want to join us in the making of a new country? Have you no impulse to see the banks of the Snake? Or is that one of those horrid Western names that put you off?
The country, as distinguished from its improvements and its people, is beautiful—a vast sage plain that falls in great steps from the mountains to the canyon of the Snake, and then rises gradually on the other side to other mountains. It is one of the compensations of being a pioneer that one may see it wild and unbroken. Coming out, we had to leave the Union Pacific at Granger, in Wyoming Territory, and board the single passenger car attached to a construction train on the Oregon Shortline, which is not yet completed. Oliver met us with a democrat wagon at Kuna, the end of the line.
I wish I could make you feel a place like Kuna. It is a place where silence closes about you after the bustle of the train, where a soft, dry wind from great distances hums through the telephone wires and a stage road goes out of sight in one direction and a new railroad track in another. There is not a tree, nothing but sage. As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. The wind has magic in it, and the air is full of birds and birdsong. Meadowlarks pipe all around us, something else—pipits? true skylarks?—rains down brief sweet showers of notes from the sky. Hawks sail far up in the blue, magpies fly along ahead, coming back now and then like ranging dogs to make sure you are not lost. Not a house, windmill, hill, only that jade-gray plain with lilac mountains on every distant horizon. The mountains companionably move along with you as the dirt road flows behind. The plain, like a great Lazy Susan, turns gravely, and as it turns it brings into view primroses blooming in the sand, and cactus pads with great red and yellow blooms as showy as hibiscus.
We had miles of that, while Betsy slept and Ollie got to drive the team, seated between his father’s knees. It was touching to see how he responded to the wild empty country—touching and a little alarming. I would not be fully easy in my mind if I thought he might grow into a Western child, limited by his limited world.
And yet how beautiful it is! For the first time I understood Oliver’s enthusiasm. We went softly on that sandy trail among the sage, and that dry magical wind from the west blew across us, until at last we came out on a long bench above a river valley, with mountains close behind patched with snow and
forest. To our right, the stream broke out of a canyon cut through the sagebrush foothills. To the left, across a bridge, was Boise City climbing up its stepped benches. Below town the crooked line of cottonwoods marking Boise Creek groped across the plain until in the distance trees and river sank below the benches and the plains healed over. From a mile or two away, unless one is on a high place, neither the Boise nor the Snake can be seen at all, sunken in their canyons.
Canyon gate and creek and city were no more than a scribble on the great empty page across which Oliver hopes to write a history of human occupation. He stopped the team and we looked at it a considerable while. It was good for me to see it as he first saw it when he came down from the Coeur d’Alene and was struck by his great idea. Oliver knew, in that quiet way he has of knowing, that if I once saw it I would feel about it as he does. It is a great idea, difficult of accomplishment but not impossible. I have become half a believer, and though I cannot say I am fully reconciled to the life it will lead us, I am no longer fearful of failure.
Now that we are here and the work is going forward, there are even indications that the West which so lightly and cruelly separates and scatters people can bring them together again—that the binding force of civilization and human association is as strong, perhaps, as the West’s bigness and impersonality. I allude to the fact that Oliver has managed to locate his old assistant, Frank Sargent, and has arranged for him to join us here. I am glad—but not because, as you once or twice playfully suggested, Frank is romantically attached to a woman ten years older than himself. I have been concerned about him, a well-born and educated young man from the East, thrown among rough men in the rough camps where he has worked the past several years. He used to talk to me in Leadville about his mother and sisters, and about the temptations that assail any young man in the West, and his determination to resist them. But if rumor is correct, he has not been able to evade them entirely in Tombstone, as dreadful a camp as the West ever spawned. Oliver tells me that in Arizona Frank participated in the hunt for a man who had murdered a friend, and that the hunt ended, down across the line in Mexico, with the murderer swinging from a tree. It is hard to believe this of the Frank I know, so ardently gentle—and yet there was always a young warrior in him. When Pricey was beaten in Leadville, only Oliver’s restraint kept Frank from going after his assailants with a gun.
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