The painter was finding no shortage of worthy subjects. Ludlow was also finding success with his Post dispatches. The newspaper splashed them across its front page under the title “Letters from Sundown.” By the time the Colorado installments appeared, Ludlow had already graduated from a byline that was merely his initials—F. H. L.—to his full name. Though the Post was written for a general audience, Ludlow’s editors allowed him a few of his trademark two-bit words, including “enfilading” (directing a volley of gunfire) and “rotatory” (steady alternating movements, such as a horse’s legs). In one dispatch, he even described Bierstadt as “our Parrhasius,” a reference to an ancient Greek painter. Of course, Ludlow also fulfilled his free-travel obligations, making a few laudatory comments about railroads and stagecoaches.
All the while, he was planning something so much more ambitious. Even as he wrote the Post dispatches, Ludlow stowed away his finest thoughts in a diary. This is where he recorded his most acute and erudite observations, drawing on his vast knowledge of art, history, mythology, and religions of the world, past and present. To protect the diary, to keep it from getting wet, he even fashioned a little pocket for it made out of India rubber cloth.
Ludlow was trying to absorb everything. With extreme diligence, he attempted to identify the plants and wildlife he encountered. Whenever possible, he collected specimens to bring back. For example, he caught a number of horned lizards and placed them in a bucket. But a fellow stage passenger released them as a practical joke.
Relying on James Dana’s landmark System of Mineralogy as a guidebook, Ludlow also made various geological observations. He described a rock formation near Monument Creek in Colorado as follows: “The conglomerate of the latter was an irregular mixture of fragments from all the hypogene rocks of the range, including quartzose pebbles, pure crystals of silex, various crystalline sandstones, gneiss, solitary horn-blende and feldspar, nodular iron-stones, rude agates, and gun-flint; the whole loosely cemented in a matrix composed of clay, lime (most likely from the decomposition of gypsum), and red oxide of iron.”
The West was a massive subject. Ludlow planned to meet its challenge by writing a big, important book that would silence all doubters, securing his reputation once and for all.
Ludlow and Bierstadt crossed the Continental Divide at Bridgers Pass and then began a slow climb down out of the Rockies. As they moved into Utah Territory, Ludlow noticed that the mood in the stagecoach changed palpably, with his fellow passengers growing tense and wary. They had entered Mormon country, a region that inspired both curiosity and fear in travelers, due to the strange customs of its inhabitants. By now, New York City seemed incredibly distant. As one of the passengers remarked, they were now traveling through a separate and distinct kingdom.
It was the middle of the night, per usual, when they arrived in Salt Lake City. The coach rolled through the streets of the sleeping town, which seemed orderly to an unusual degree, featuring row upon row of little adobe houses. In the moonlight, Ludlow could see that each house had a neat square of lawn and a small garden. An incongruous lushness held sway here, so different from the harsh western landscapes he’d experienced. “To understand the exquisite beauty of simple green grass,” Ludlow wrote, “you must travel through eight hundred miles of sage-brush and grama.”
Visitors quickly drew notice in Salt Lake City in 1863, particularly distinguished ones from back East. The next day, Ludlow and Bierstadt received invitations to meet both Brigham Young and Porter Rockwell. According to Mormon tradition, it was Young who had received a divine communiqué instructing him to found Salt Lake City in this isolated desert valley. Porter Rockwell was the official protector of the Church of Latter-day Saints against its enemies. Rumor held that he had killed as many as a hundred men, and he was known by the unnerving sobriquet “the Destroying Angel.” (Rockwell had not been convicted of a single murder; then again, Utah territorial courts were considered suspect by outsiders.)
Rockwell delivered his invitation personally, explaining that he lived in a house at the western edge of Salt Lake City. No visitor left town without stopping for a meal. Rockwell hoped Ludlow and Bierstadt would avail themselves of his hospitality.
Ludlow set about exploring Salt Lake City—more of a town, really. Only sixteen years had passed since Young had begun the original settlement with 148 Mormon pioneers. The population had since grown to roughly 10,000. Construction was still under way on a massive temple the church had planned and would be for many years to come. Ludlow learned that the town received water via an irrigation system that carried snowmelt from the surrounding mountains across the desert floor. Canals ran down every street, and in front of every house a tributary branched off, flowing onto the property. That accounted for those orderly squares of lawn.
It wasn’t long before Ludlow witnessed another distinguishing feature of Utah Territory: polygamy. He hadn’t been sure how he’d feel about the institution. As author of The Hasheesh Eater, he had certainly documented some unusual practices. At Pfaff’s, he’d witnessed behaviors that were considerably outside the norm. Nevertheless, he found that he was appalled. While eating a meal, he was deeply embarrassed to discover that two women he’d taken for sisters were actually sister wives: “Yet I, a cosmopolite, a man of the world, liberal to other people’s habits and opinions to a degree which has often subjected me to censure among strictarians in the Eastern States, blushed to my very temples, and had to retire into the privacy of my tipped milk-bowl to screen the struggle by which I restored my moral equipoise.”
Rumor held that Young had as many as seventy wives and had pledged his devotion to hundreds of others who would join him in heaven. Ludlow simply could not fathom how multiple wives could be satisfied with the scraps of love provided by a single husband. That was the beauty of plural marriage, he was repeatedly assured. Tamping down one’s baser emotions such as bitterness and jealousy represented a “triumph o’ grace.” Still, he remained suspicious. Perhaps these women had figured out a way to bury their dissatisfactions deep, but he was sure something was amiss. “Heavens! What strange unsexing operation must their souls have gone through to keep them from frenzy—murder—suicide?”
The audience with Brigham Young took place during a formal ball held at the capacious opera house. Ludlow joined the Mormon leader on a theater balcony, where he was looking out over roughly three thousand of the faithful. Young was sixty-three, but to Ludlow he looked like a man in his forties. He was portly and dressed in a black suit. What most struck Ludlow, on first impression, was that he was in the presence of an autocrat the equal of Napoleon. The transformation from arid valley to lush greenery had been achieved through sheer force of will—Young’s will. It also occurred to Ludlow that he was in the company of a man who was likely as rich as a Rothschild.
For Ludlow, making conversation with Young proved extremely difficult. There was something distant and abstracted about his manner, a kind of “Scriptural dignity”—as Ludlow put it—to his speaking style. Topic after conversational topic simply died in the air between them. But Young finally warmed to the subject of the Civil War. “Your Union’s gone forever,” he said with evident glee, adding, “When your country has become a desolation, we, the saints whom you cast out, will forget all your sins against us, and give you a home.”
It was a refrain that Ludlow heard throughout his time in Salt Lake City. Here, the distant Civil War was commonly viewed as an act of divine retribution. Northerners and Southerners were bound to fight until every last soldier lay dead. Only widows would be left behind. The widows would then make their way out to Utah Territory, providing a massive influx of fresh brides for the saints. To many of the Mormons encountered by Ludlow, there was an indelible logic to the Civil War, as if it were directed by the hand of God, their God, and destined to unfold like a prophecy.
Young took his leave and went down onto the floor of the ballroom. Presently, Ludlow spotted him dancing. Th
e writer was amused to note that Young was doing a style of two-step that had fallen out of fashion years earlier in the East.
A highlight of the Utah visit was the Great Salt Lake. While Bierstadt worked, Ludlow waded out into the water. He was fascinated by the buoyancy he achieved, and he appreciated the lake’s brininess as well. It gave him a “pleasant pungent sense of being in a pickle, such as a self-conscious gherkin might experience.” For what must have been an hour, he simply floated lazily on his back. When at last he turned over, he was shocked to learn that he’d drifted into water that was less than a foot deep.
Emerging from the lake, Ludlow’s hair and beard were thickly caked with salt—his long hair and full beard. He had neither shaved nor visited a barber on the trip. He’d turned into a “Nazarene,” as he put it.
Then it was time to get back on the road. On departing Salt Lake City, Ludlow and Bierstadt dropped by the Destroying Angel’s house, as promised, for a visit and a home-cooked meal. Did they really have a choice? Ludlow began the visit feeling considerable trepidation. He studied Rockwell warily, noting his muscled arms, thick neck, and “mastiff head.” The man seemed designed specifically for violence, nothing else. But Ludlow noticed that one element of Rockwell’s appearance was extremely dissonant: his long black hair, streaked with gray, was twisted into a large bun that he held in place with a comb, like a woman. No other Mormon Ludlow had encountered wore their hair in this fashion. Joseph Smith—Young’s predecessor and the founder of Mormonism—had prophesied that, like Sampson, no one could harm Rockwell as long as he didn’t cut his hair.
As the meal progressed, Ludlow was able to relax. Rockwell’s two wives worked in harmony, bringing out plates of food. Rockwell grew downright genial, telling jokes and long, involved stories. At last, they took their leave of him without incident. Wisely, Ludlow chose not to include an account of his nervous dinner or any other incriminating details about Mormonism in his Post dispatches. Those articles ran while he was traveling, and he feared he might get hunted down and fall victim to swift western justice. Ludlow later described Rockwell as the “kindest hearted and most obliging murderer I ever knew.”
On July 17, 1863, Ludlow and Bierstadt arrived in San Francisco. Though they had successfully crossed the continent, their trip was far from over. Using San Francisco as a base, they made a series of excursions. The pair traveled to a spot that offered an unparalleled view of Mount Shasta, rising above the plains, and up the coast to Portland, Oregon. Without question, however, the most striking scenery they encountered on their entire trip was during a visit to Yosemite. This natural wonder, Ludlow later wrote, “out-Bendemered Bendemere, out-valleyed the valley of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and the Himmal’yeh in its precipices.” (More Ludlow erudition: Bendemere is a reference to a folk song about an idyllic landscape, the Valley of Rasselas supposedly an earthly paradise in ancient Abyssinia.)
Very few non–Native Americans had ever set foot in Yosemite, which remained supremely wild and isolated in this era. Bierstadt did studies of all the various features that would become the valley’s icons, such as El Capitan, Half Dome, and Bridalveil Fall. In fact, Bierstadt’s paintings would play a major role in familiarizing people with these features, thereby turning them into attractions.
Ludlow fell into his amateur-scientist role, making geological observations and collecting specimens of flora and fauna. While riding through a mountain meadow, he was enchanted to find himself surrounded by butterflies, all colors and varieties—the place fairly swarmed with them. Seized by sudden inspiration, he set about trying to catch some on horseback. According to Ludlow, this was how butterfly collecting was done in royal courts during the Middle Ages. He galloped around the meadow, brandishing a long-handled net like a lance. It all seemed very romantic. But the butterflies stayed well ahead of his horse. Mostly, he managed to annoy his mount by repeatedly swinging the net in front of its eyes.
Ludlow and Bierstadt pitched their tents on the banks of the frigid Merced River. The painter dubbed it “Camp Rosalie.” This was the second time in the course of the trip that he’d named something after his travel companion’s wife. He explained to Ludlow that he was paying tribute to “a dear absent friend.”
Suspicious, though. It was definitely rather suspicious.
By making San Francisco their base, Ludlow and Bierstadt were able to spend considerable time there between side trips. Ludlow got to know the city extremely well. Only fifteen years had passed since San Francisco was handed over by Mexico as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Because of its fortunate location, it had quickly grown into a gateway to the West. People arrived from everywhere: they sailed into its harbor from Asia and Latin America and came in from the East by wagon or on foot if necessary. As a consequence, the city, while relatively small—its population of roughly one hundred thousand was less than Cincinnati or Baltimore—possessed a wildly polyglot character. It reminded Ludlow of Manhattan. Here, too, he detected “that magnificent nonchalance and minding of each separate citizen’s business which so pre-eminently gives New York the unmistakeable urban stamp.”
In San Francisco, everything was possible and available. Ludlow even managed to fall in with a group of local artists. As it happened, the members fashioned themselves after Clapp’s New York circle of Bohemians. They frequented the bar at the Occidental Hotel, where they quipped and quaffed, trying gamely to reproduce one of those legendary Pfaff’s nights. They even had their own equivalent to the Saturday Press, a weekly paper called the Golden Era, published at 543 Clay Street. The Golden Era’s editor, Colonel Joe Lawrence, like Clapp, was described by one contemporary as an “inveterate pipe-smoker.”
Out in the wilds of California, at a time when both the SP and Vanity Fair had recently failed, Lawrence was managing to keep his publication alive—just barely—by sticking to a truly bizarre formula. Half of the Golden Era was devoted to useful information for prospectors and other gritty frontier sorts—or at least those who could read and were willing to pay five dollars for a year’s subscription. There were news items about mining claims, homely recipes for dishes like baked beans, and some of the most casually graphic obituaries imaginable: “James A. Rogers, blew his brains out, September 2 nd. Cause: discouraged.” The other half of the Golden Era featured the literary efforts of the West Coast Bohemians. This group possessed some serious talent, along with some genuine eccentricity—and plenty of blurring between the two categories.
The undeniable star was Bret Harte, then a relatively unknown writer. Harte was at the very beginning of a distinguished career, during which he would receive international acclaim for his depictions of miners and other hard-living California types. As a frequent contributor to the Golden Era, he wrote under several pseudonyms, including “Bohemian.” During Ludlow’s visit, Harte’s novella M’Liss was running in serial form in the paper. It would be one of the standouts of Harte’s classic collection, The Luck of the Roaring Camp, and Other Tales.
Joaquin Miller, meanwhile, had just arrived in San Francisco, down from Oregon for an extended visit. Among the Golden Era set, he filled the Adah Menken role. To anyone who’d listen, Miller spun out various episodes from his life story, skillfully blending verifiable details with outrageous falsehoods. Supposedly, he’d worked as a mining camp cook, a drover, and a rider for the Pony Express. He’d been both a judge and a horse thief, as well as a participant in William Walker’s famous expedition to Nicaragua. All this, and he was barely thirty. Or was he in his forties? Miller had as many birth dates as he had careers. In the course of his adventures, he claimed, he’d also endured his share of Indian attacks, one time receiving a serious leg injury. But it was duly noted that sometimes he limped with his right leg, sometimes his left.
As the self-styled “Byron of the Rockies,” Miller—like Menken—had aspirations to be taken seriously as a poet. Unfortunately, he was hampered by atrocious spelling, a tin ear for
meter, and a penchant for making quease-inducing artistic choices. He once attempted to rhyme “Goethe” and “teeth.” Thanks to his colorful persona, however, Miller was destined to achieve tremendous popular success in the years to come, even as he was savaged by critics. In fact, generations of nineteenth-century schoolkids would be forced to recite his purplish “Columbus”—a shoddy poem by any reasonable standard.
Yet another pillar of this Left Coast Bohemia was Charles Warren Stoddard. Stoddard had just turned twenty and had recently moved to San Francisco from New York City. As an aspiring poet, he was profoundly influenced by the third edition of Leaves of Grass. For Stoddard, the work suggested dazzling new possibilities of subject and form. The young poet was experimenting with free verse and publishing his efforts in the Golden Era under the pseudonym “Pip Pepperpod.” Stoddard was especially affected by Whitman’s “Calamus” poems, which he would always credit with helping him to realize his sexual orientation. In the years ahead, Stoddard would publish poetry, fiction, and memoirs, assembling a body of work distinguished for its time by an unusually relaxed and open attitude toward homosexuality. “I am what I was when I was born,” he once said. Among Stoddard’s works are South-Sea Idylls (an erotically charged travelogue published in 1873) and For the Pleasure of His Company (a 1903 novel).
These upstart Bohemians were thrilled to spend time with Ludlow. As a real-life representative of Pfaff’s, as a writer who had tasted success in the fierce eastern literary scene, Ludlow was what they aspired to be. Encountering such deference must have pleased Ludlow greatly, and he was generous in doling out advice and praise. He urged Stoddard to drop the ridiculous nom de plume “Pip Pepperpod.” (The writer followed his suggestion.) And he praised Harte for his “luscious richness of imagery” and “noble strength of original thought,” adding that major magazines back East would surely “welcome him with enthusiasm.” (Only a few years later, in 1871, the Atlantic would extend a contract to Harte, $10,000 for a dozen stories, the most it had ever paid a writer.)
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