Knapp must have thought of the books. Dear Knapp! He remembers reading his last letter: “Ever since you left the whole house has had a sort of lonely look to me—as after the death of some dear friend on whom we had leaned and as if we had lost a something which we were never to get back. Every day and night I feel it.” It had made him cry, that letter. Before Olmsted left, they had privately discussed the possibility of Knapp coming to join him in California, at least once the war started to wind down. He made the same suggestion to Godkin; if he doesn’t make progress with the paper, he might consider it. Olmsted has also written to Jenkins that there is need for a good doctor on the Estate.
It is three and a half months since he left New York and he misses his friends. In spite of his headaches, he devotes a lot of time to answering letters. He writes about his everyday life to Mary, about the scenery to his father, about his loneliness to Knapp, about politics to Godkin and Brace, and about his plans to improve Bear Valley to Ketchum. A month ago he sent a long letter to Vaux. Vaux still frets about not receiving recognition for his work on Central Park. Lately, he has written that he feels slighted by Godkin’s farewell editorial in the Times, which he thinks overstates Olmsted’s contribution to Greensward. In fact, the editorial mentioned Vaux by name, and if he is unhappy, he should complain to Godkin, Olmsted thinks. He has enjoyed working with Vaux, but the little Englishman can be trying sometimes.
Olmsted has also heard from Bellows. The board of the Sanitary Commission has finally accepted Olmsted’s resignation officially—with “profound regret”—but has requested that he continue to serve as a board member. Olmsted agrees. He has already contacted the Commission’s California branch in San Francisco on Bellows’s behalf. He is glad that Bellows and he have remained friends. Before Olmsted left New York, Bellows asked him to take his young nephew, Henry, with him to California. Henry is now working as a clerk in the company store at the Princeton mine. He is a likable fellow, but as Olmsted has just written his uncle, he needs a wife—or a sister as a companion—to steady him lest he run wild in this uncivilized place.
Olmsted’s habit is to go for a walk at sunset. He puts on a coat—it is a cool evening—and goes downstairs. The street is almost empty. A woman in a large straw hat and black pantaloons hurries by. She is Chinese; more than half the miners on the Estate come from China. Olmsted admires the Chinese; they are more industrious—and cheaper to employ—than his other workers. The Italians, too, are hardworking. They also grow most of the produce. As for the rest of the miners, they are a rough lot, interested mainly in gambling and drinking. The Estate has let wages run up higher than at other mines, and Olmsted knows that, sooner or later, he is going to have to reduce their pay.
He walks up the street of Bear Valley, or Campo del Oso as the Spaniards called it. This remote site in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada was where Frémont established the headquarters of his mining empire. He named the large mountain that dominates the valley Mount Bullion. The auspicious name really refers to his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, popularly known as Old Bullion because of his opposition to paper currency. Millions of dollars of gold bullion have been shipped from Bear Valley. Yet after more than fifteen years the settlement remains little more than a makeshift mining camp. It has a population of two or three hundred people. A score of buildings line the single, dusty street. In addition to the miners’ shanties and tents, there are three saloons, two livery stables, a billiard parlor, a bakery, and a bathhouse—no church, no school. The most substantial structure is Oso House, a large stone structure surrounded by a shaded veranda. Originally built by Frémont for his own use, it is now a hotel and shares space with the Wells Fargo office. Mail is dropped off every other day; it takes more than a month for a letter to arrive from the East. Stockton, where there is a telegraph station—and a steamer connection to San Francisco—is eighty miles away, more than a day’s ride. Mariposa, the county seat, is about twelve miles in the other direction.
Olmsted walks away from the village. His limp is more visible as his stride lengthens. He climbs a large knoll in the middle of the valley. From the top, he admires the view. At the south end of the valley five miles away he can see Mt. Ophir, the site of another of his mines. The light from the setting sun is an odd violet-gray. The bare mountainsides are dotted with thorny chaparral and young pine. It reminds him of the heathery hills of Scotland. When he first arrived, he was repelled by this harsh landscape, so different from the lush, green hills of New England. It is beginning to grow on him.
A plume of smoke indicates the nearby Indian camp. The natives have a bad reputation among the miners, who scornfully call them Diggers because of their habit of grubbing for roots. The village of Bear Valley looks pitifully small below. He wonders if anything can ever be made of this place. He has written to Ketchum that his strategy is to devote the next six months to studying how the Estate can be put on a solid economic footing. To that end, he has engaged a mining consultant, William Ashburner. Ashburner, a former member of the California Geological Survey, is a New Englander and a graduate of Harvard and the École des Mines in Paris. He is considered the authority on mining on the Pacific coast. He and Olmsted have a lot in common and are becoming fast friends. Ashburner has proposed sinking an exploratory mine shaft, and building a large, modern stamp mill. Olmsted wants to diversify the income of the Estate. Thousands of acres of potentially valuable farmland only need water. He has asked Pieper to study the feasibility of constructing an irrigation canal. The canal could also be used to float logs down to the Estate for use as construction material and fuel.
When he and Pieper were exploring a possible route for the canal, they came across a remarkable sight: a grove of enormous ancient trees. Olmsted has never seen anything quite as grand as the 250-foot-tall giant sequoias. “Strangers from another world” is how he described them to Mary. It is one of the places that he wants to show her. He longs to see his family. They will be here soon; in fact, they may be aboard the steamer that is scheduled to leave New York two days hence on the long journey to Panama, whence they will journey by rail across the isthmus and catch another ship that will bring them to California. He still has not heard definite news of their departure date. When he does, he will know when to go to San Francisco to meet them.
Twilight does not last long in these mountains. He retraces his steps down the hill. He does not hurry. The distractions of Oso House, where he is living, are few. He may stop in the office and do some work—he likes to work at night and get up late in the morning. There are letters to answer, and reports to read. Barring that, there is always Sir Walter Scott.
Not until February 11, 1864, did Godkin telegraph Olmsted that Mary and the children were departing. The entire voyage would take a full month. Olmsted made plans to meet them in San Francisco. He had just completed a report for the Mariposa board describing the Estate’s finances. The detailed investigation confirmed his fears. Only two weeks after arriving in Bear Valley he wrote to Mary: “Things are worse here than I dare say to anybody but you—and to you with a caution. There is not a mine on the Estate that is honestly paying expenses.” He and Martin pored over the books and discovered that the previous management had deferred repairs and maintenance in order to show an increase in profits. The richest deposits were rumored to have been held in reserve until just before the sale in order to inflate the price. The prospectus prepared by Frémont included an assayer’s optimistic prediction—“It is my conviction that the amount of gold-bearing quartz that could be extracted is beyond all calculation”—and maintained that “the property is now producing from $60,000 to $100,000 per month, half of which, at least is profit.” When Olmsted arrived, he found that production had fallen precipitously to $25,000 per month. Moreover, his own careful inventory of the Estate’s physical assets was 40 percent lower than the original owners’ estimate.
He assumed that inefficiency accounted for these discrepancies. After all, the previous manager of Maripo
sa, Trenor Park, was now an officer of the new company, as was Frémont himself. Olmsted might have been less sanguine had he known that shortly after his departure from New York, the company issued a leather-bound monograph that reiterated the exaggerated production claims and predicted that annual net earnings of the Estate would eventually exceed $2 million. “The Board do not feel justified in promising immediately the handsome returns indicated,” the report primly warned, “. . . but the Board feel that the question of time involved is of small importance compared with a thorough and reliable system of driving the mines.” The person responsible for devising this system would be the new manager, Fred. Law Olmsted, who was praised for “his acknowledged and widely extended reputation for integrity, ability, and remarkable administrative faculty.” The last statement, at least, was true.
The board of directors approved the proposed irrigation canal but withheld the necessary funds until the Estate’s income improved. Olmsted undertook to increase production. He sent Pieper to the Nevada Territory to learn about a new process of milling ore; he ordered work to start on the exploratory shaft and the stamp mill. Martin reformed the bookkeeping procedures. To decrease costs, Olmsted ordered that single men be compelled to live in the company boardinghouses, which were currently underutilized. As an encouragement, he reduced the rates for room and board from one dollar to eighty-five cents a day and declared that henceforth the boardinghouses would be run at cost. This last was a conciliatory gesture, for he also put into effect another policy. He did what any conscientious manager of a troubled enterprise must also do: he trimmed labor costs.
The miners found their daily wages suddenly reduced from $3.50 to $3.15. They went on strike. They were emboldened by the success of a walkout the previous summer that had compelled Olmsted’s predecessor to retract a disciplinary measure. Olmsted had not expected a strike, since the reduction was slight and the new wage was competitive with that of other California mines. Yet he was not prepared to back down. “I don’t want the men to think that they can ever expect to gain anything from me by striking,—and the sooner they learn this the better in every respect shall we be situated,” he wrote the president of the Mariposa Company. He hired substitutes. The striking miners tried to disrupt work. Olmsted posted men at the mine entrances. The strikers attacked the guards. “The mob got the worst of it—no weapons but fists being used,” he reported, “we have had fire arms ready but kept them out of sight at all points.” He alerted the sheriff and had a warrant issued for the ringleaders, who fled the county.
After five days the strike collapsed. Olmsted was not vindictive. He offered to pay in full any miner who wished to leave—more than two hundred accepted; many went to the Nevada Territory, where gold had been discovered. They were soon replaced—Olmsted had put advertisements in the San Francisco newspapers the day the strike broke out. He reduced the number of skilled miners and hired less expensive unskilled laborers at $2.40 a day, as well as Chinese workers, whom he paid only $1.75 a day.
He had weathered the first crisis. A few days later he went to San Francisco to greet his family. Mary arrived with an entourage: her seventeen-year-old cousin, Henry Perkins, who was to work as Olmsted’s secretary; a maid; and an English governess for John, age eleven, Charlotte, nine, and Owen, now six—little Marion was two. It was a joyful reunion; Olmsted had been separated from them for six months.
Yet a cloud hung over the event. Olmsted had taken advantage of being in San Francisco to consult a physician about his “writing sickness.” Dr. William Ayres was an old acquaintance from his Hartford youth. His diagnosis was alarming. He attributed Olmsted’s distress to an enlarged heart. He advised living quietly and carefully, avoiding fatigue, and reducing writing and “brain-work” as much as possible. He told Olmsted that while his condition was not necessarily fatal, it was incurable—he would be an invalid for life.
In the absence of electrocardiographs and X-ray machines, identifying heart disease was a matter of guesswork. In fact, John Jenkins and William Van Buren, Olmsted’s old friends on the Sanitary Commission and both experienced physicians, disagreed with the prognostication. Olmsted reasonably pointed out that Ayres—not they—had examined him. He trusted Ayres, whom he had known a long time, and he had no reason to doubt his diagnosis. He was shaken. “I am sadly damaged,” he informed Bellows. His only consolation was that as manager of the Mariposa Estate he could “accommodate my own work to my strength,” as he put it. “I can live here a quiet life & give the children a fair education,” he wrote Vaux. In the same vein, he wrote his father, “I have had my full share of bustling life and shall be better content to live quietly for the rest or die where I am, than most men are.”
Ayres’s prescription had one beneficial result: for the first time in more than a decade Olmsted slowed down. He gave up the compulsive habit that he had fallen into while at the Sanitary Commission of working late into the night and rising at noon. He ate regularly—Mary saw to that. He stopped writing and dictated letters and reports to Henry Perkins. He learned to pace himself. He and Mary went riding every afternoon, often accompanied by the children on their donkeys—Kitty, Fanny, and Beppo. Evenings were spent at home. Mary read history to the children; John played his violin. Later, Olmsted rented a piano.
The landscape of Bear Valley may have been desolate, but the spring was delightful—warm, dry days and cool nights. Everyone thrived as a result of the healthy climate and the outdoor life. The children lost their sickliness; Mary relaxed. “There is a great dearth of incidents in our life here,” she wrote a friend, “so that I can only tell you that we live comfortably and that strange as it may seem, time does not hang heavily on our hands.”
Frederick and Mary had never had a real honeymoon; in their five years of marriage, vacations had been infrequent. Now when Olmsted went on a tour of the Estate, Mary, who had become a skilled horsewoman, accompanied him. “We went in a carriage with a servant on horseback, camped at night, put saddles on the horses in the morning and rode through the gulches and over the hills where a wagon couldn’t approach. . . . It was very rough riding & the weather pretty warm, but we both enjoyed it and collected a heavy pack-load of quartz samples for closer examination & assay at home. . . . Mary is getting a quick eye for quartz, and the children are all becoming experts with the ‘pan.’ ” It was an American version of The Swiss Family Robinson.
There were visitors. One was Benjamin Silliman Jr., a Yale professor of chemistry and geology like his father, whose classes Olmsted had briefly attended. Silliman, a leading authority on petroleum, was in California to evaluate oil properties on behalf of New York investors. Olmsted invited him to visit the Mariposa Estate and hired him to compile an evaluation of its gold-mining potential. Silliman was optimistic and endorsed Olmsted’s plans in glowing terms. Another visitor was Henry Whitney Bellows. His protégé Starr King, the dynamic forty-year-old pastor of San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church and the Sanitary Commission’s chief fund-raiser, had recently died of diphtheria. Bellows had come to California as a temporary replacement. He spent two days in Bear Valley in June. Despite his continued reservations about Olmsted’s retreat from civic duty, Bellows could not help but be impressed by his friend’s new life. “He is a kind of little monarch here,” he wrote back to his colleagues on the Sanitary Commission, “has his own horses & servants at command, is universally well-spoken of & respected—conquered in that strike business, has reduced wages, improved comfort among the men, retains the best workmen . . . & on the whole is much better situated than I feared to find him.”
Olmsted had intended to build a new house for his family, not in Bear Valley but farther south on the Princeton plateau, where it was cooler. Mary brought the architectural plans, prepared by Vaux after Olmsted’s notes. Olmsted decided that Marion House, as they named it, would now have to wait until the Estate turned a profit. As an interim measure, he converted his spacious office into combined working and living quarters. Bellows described it t
hus:
I am sitting in Olmsted’s office writing at his table, while he with cap on, is this moment examining various specimens of gold-bearing quartz, with true official expertness. The Map of the Mariposa estate hangs in large proportions on the wall; also a naval & military map of the United States & Bancroft’s Pacific states; a table covered with charts of the mines; a long American Flag is folded on the floor (it was flying yesterday in honor of my arrival.) The office is carpeted with brussels. It is one of a long suite of rooms, built over the Company Store, giving 8 or 10 large apartments—which Mr. O. has fitted up in a most comfortable and tasty manner for the accommodation of his family.
To Bellows, and to Olmsted’s other friends in the East, the distant Mariposa Estate seemed like a form of exile, a detour—if not an actual cul-de-sac—in a promising public career. That is not what Olmsted thought. “I never was happier, in the present, in my life,” he wrote his friend Godkin. He had been married almost five years, yet this was the first time he had been able to spend a long, uninterrupted period with Mary and the children. He had always found his satisfaction in work and work-related friendships. First Central Park, later the Sanitary Commission, had engaged his entire attention; his family had always come second. Now that changed.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 26