Genius of Place (38 page)

As manager, Olmsted was to be paid his $10,000 salary in gold, worth at least 20 percent more than the same salary paid in greenbacks, then racked by wartime inflation. During his first five years of service, he was also to receive $10,000 in stock annually, potentially worth many thousands more.

 

Just to get to his new job was no easy task. Olmsted elected to take the Panama route, one of several options for getting to the West Coast in those days. The Panama route, established in 1855, required traveling by steamer down the Atlantic Coast, then crossing the narrowest point in Central America, the Isthmus of Panama, via a forty-eight-mile interoceanic train ride. On the Pacific Coast, travelers boarded a new steamer and sailed up the coastline. The trip covered 5,500 miles and took
roughly three weeks. Cheaper choices, sailing around Cape Horn, the very tip of South America, or going overland by wagon, were more timeconsuming, requiring three months, minimum. There was also a Nicaragua route, both cheaper and potentially quicker than the Panama route, but featuring a harrowing land passage. In the years before the transcontinental railroad (1869) and the opening of the Panama Canal (1914), traveling from coast to coast was an ordeal.

Olmsted traveled without his family, planning to get settled on the Mariposa Estate before bringing them out in the spring of 1864. For the first leg of the journey, Olmsted sailed on the
Champion
, a rickety sidewheeler, operated by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had a reputation for stinting on safety. “The steamer on the Atlantic side was small, illsupplied, dirty and crowded,” Olmsted noted.

Before arriving in Panama, as was the practice, Olmsted started taking several grains of quinine each day, prophylactically, so as to ward off malaria. The “Chagres shakes”—named after a river that ran alongside the rail line in Panama—was a particularly virulent strain. In 1852, Ulysses Grant had lost 250 men while marching across Panama. As an old man, he'd remember the horrors of Panama more vividly than those of the Civil War.

At Aspinwall (now Colón), a Panamanian port, Olmsted made the switch from ship to rail. The train's seats were made of cane, and it was open-air—venetian blinds were the only thing separating passengers from the elements. The forty-eight-mile trip took roughly four hours, following the Chagres through deep gorges and requiring refueling stops every few miles at wood stations along the route. Olmsted was stunned by the natural drama unfolding outside his open window. Pelicans, looking prehistoric, floated in lazy circles, with the Andes towering in the distance. The punishing noonday sun was broken by a sudden shower, then sunlight again, stretching from the heavens in luminous shafts. Nearer the ground, directly across the Chagres, the foliage was so lush that the sun could scarcely get through, providing just a dappling of light amid deep shadows.

The variety of plants and trees seemed almost infinite, Olmsted noted, and they grew so close together, their branches interlaced, that you didn't
know where one began and another ended, and through everything twined thick tropical vines. There were fat yellow breadfruits, ripening coconuts, thick clusters of bananas. As Olmsted recounted in a letter to his wife that evening, the tropical luxuriance “makes all our model scenery—so far as it depends on beauty of foliage very tame & quakerish.”

Mary would be making this same passage soon enough. “Remember to point out the mountains to the children & tell them they are the Andes,” he urged. Like his own father, Olmsted wanted to make sure his children appreciated the scenery.

On the west coast of Panama, Olmsted boarded a new boat, the
Constitution
, operated by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. The vessel was superior in every way to Vanderbilt's
Champion
—newer, cleaner, safer. In fact, the
Constitution
was the largest and best-appointed boat on which Olmsted had ever traveled. “It's Fifth Avenue with the park, after Greenwich Street with the battery,” he wrote to Mary.

Chugging up the Pacific coastline toward San Francisco, Olmsted could not shake his memory of the scenery he had witnessed on the train ride. He puzzled over the landscape's meaning, morally speaking. Did it denote bounteousness, creativity, freedom, lack of restraint? He also began to wonder if it would be possible to reproduce some of this tropical superabundance in the Ramble, his ever-evolving wild garden in Central Park.

Olmsted no longer had a formal role with the park, having shed first his architect-in-chief duties and then the consulting position he shared with Vaux. But he still thought of the park as his own—his creation, his masterpiece—and always would. In fact, it would please him mightily the following year when park brass introduced a flock of sheep onto the parade ground. The move effectively prevented troops from conducting drills during the Civil War in Central Park—a place of peace, in his reckoning, above the fray. Forever after, the parade ground would be known as Sheep Meadow.

Onboard the
Constitution
, Olmsted dashed off a letter to Ignaz Pilat, the park's gardener. Would it be possible, Olmsted inquired, to plant some species such as purple barberry and honey locust, apt analogies to the tropical species he'd seen, but capable of growing in New York City's climate? He also suggested covering trees such as sycamores in clematis
vines. Such plantings, he wrote, “would under favorable natural circumstances, I believe, produce an effect having at least an interesting association with or, so to speak, flavor of tropical scenery and I should hope some little feeling of the emotion it is fitted to produce.”

Upon receiving the letter, Pilat would dutifully try out some of Olmsted's ideas, planting a few select new species thickly in the Ramble and training vines to snake through some of the existing trees. It wasn't a disaster—Olmsted's wild garden was a pretty forgiving space—but somehow the intended tropical effect failed to translate in the middle of Manhattan.

 

On October 11, 1863, a month after leaving New York, Olmsted arrived in San Francisco. As he disembarked from the steamship onto the crowded wharf, a horse kicked him in his lame leg. The kick didn't result in serious injury, but it struck Olmsted as an omen. Before him, there still lay a grueling two-hundred-mile journey to the town of Bear Valley, headquarters of the Mariposa Estate.

Olmsted had time only for a cursory impression of San Francisco. It wasn't a good one. Something about the way the town was laid out—a simple grid work against a hillside—well, he couldn't put his finger on it, but it unnerved him. He boarded a new steamer, which carried him by river into the California interior and to Stockton.

In Stockton, the last town of any size before Bear Valley, Olmsted rented a coach and two horses. Then he set out across the stifling San Joaquin Valley toward the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. California was in the midst of its worst drought in the nineteenth century. The contrast to the rain forests of Panama was stark; Olmsted described this portion of his journey as a trip through “a dead flat, dead brown prairie, with scattering remnants of trees.... The shade of one tree never connects with another, so far as I have seen.”

In the distance, the Sierra Nevada were like a painted backdrop. The coach clattered onward, mile upon dusty mile, but the mountains remained frozen, never drawing closer. The only thing breaking the general monotony, Olmsted noted, were the graves. Everywhere he looked, the dry plains were dotted with makeshift graves, a disturbing number of them belonging to children.

And then Olmsted's coach began to climb. At first the ascent was so subtle as to be nearly imperceptible. Olmsted had reached the Sierra Nevada foothills. Then, suddenly, his coach was climbing at a steep grade, through a mountain pass and into a densely wooded plateau. Here, the trip paused to give the horses a rest. After that, the coach climbed still higher into the mountains, through another pass, and down to his destination, Bear Valley.

Olmsted checked into Oso House, the town's lone inn. Olmsted ate his dinner sitting on a stool, as the inn didn't have a single chair. Then he retired to a room, only slightly larger than a closet and with walls made out of canvas. These provided little barrier to sound, of which there was plenty—men drinking and fighting and gambling well into the night. It would do—for now—but Olmsted knew he'd need to find different accommodations when his family arrived.

Besides Oso House, Bear Valley consisted of about twenty establishments lining a single unpaved street, perpetually aswirl with thick red dust. There were three saloons, including the notorious Bon Ton, a billiard hall, two laundries, an Odd Fellows lodge, and a bathhouse. There was also a butcher shop and the Frémont general store. Bear Valley's population—hard-luck eastern transplants stuck working as miners after their own gold dreams collapsed, Mexican immigrants, members of local Indian tribes, along with a smattering of wayward Europeans—was estimated at 1,000, but who really knew? For men with families, there were several extremely modest rooming houses run by the mining company. Single men, accounting for the bulk of the residents, were content to sleep in tents or booths—if they could raise the funds to purchase a few planks. Booths were little wooden structures with room enough to curl up and sleep.

Bear Valley had no churches and no schools. But it had the one establishment vital to a mining town—a Wells Fargo Express office. Bullion from the mines was regularly delivered to this office, from which it was transported by heavily armed coach along the arduous route to San Francisco. There, it was weighed, assayed, and credited to the mining company's account.

 

On waking the next morning, Olmsted immediately began a tour of the Mariposa Estate. The property consisted of seven separate mines. Despite
his damaged leg, Olmsted shimmied down a mine shaft at one point. He loosed a piece of quartz with a pickax and, with the aid of a candle, spied glittering specks of gold embedded in the rock. Olmsted continued on, familiarizing himself with the vast property he would now be supervising.

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.