Genius of Place (41 page)

Through that first year, the one constant had been the drought. But that changed in November 1864, and in spectacular fashion. The heavens opened, and dusty Bear Valley was hit with a deluge. It washed out coach roads, swelled streams, and drowned cattle. It also returned the mills to capacity, and then some. For the month, the Mariposa Estate yielded $83,000 in gold, nearly three times the July yield of $30,000.

Unfortunately, the production surge was partly due to a backlog of ore. Big chunks of raw quartz had been piling up at the stamp mills, awaiting the water necessary for processing. The next month, production fell again.

Down, then up. Up, then down. Olmsted just wished he knew where things were going.

CHAPTER 21

Un
settled in the West

GEORGE OPDYKE AND Thurlow Weed were the worst of enemies. Opdyke, now the former mayor of New York City, remained a principal of the Mariposa Company. Weed was the powerful editor of the
Albany Evening Journal
, who had lately taken to filling the pages of his paper with scandalous allegations about Opdyke.

Among Weed's claims: During his term as mayor, Opdyke had used his political clout to land a lucrative contract to supply blankets to the Union army. He'd proceeded to furnish the troops with ones that were threadbare and shoddy. Weed's paper also asserted that Opdyke had placed himself on a committee to investigate the case of a munitions plant destroyed during the New York City draft riots. The committee recommended that the city pay the plant's owners hefty damages, nearly $200,000. But Opdyke failed to disclose that he had a financial stake in the munitions plant.

Then there was the matter of a legendary California gold-mining property. When Opdyke and his colleagues had joined with Frémont to form the Mariposa Company, Weed maintained that they'd seized on the explorer's financial desperation to cut him unfavorable terms.

Opdyke sued Weed for libel. Weed, in turn, opted for a straightforward legal defense: He and his lawyers planned to prove that all the things the
Albany Evening Journal
had printed were patently true. The sensational trial played out in a New York City courtroom, packed with members of the press. Each day's testimony brought a stream of notable public figures and a fresh torrent of sordid accusations.

The highlight of the trial came on December 21, 1864, when John Frémont himself was called as a witness. Many Americans still viewed Frémont as “the Great Pathfinder,” a heroic figure instrumental in taming the frontier and settling California prior to statehood. But time had not been kind to Frémont. Years of financial anxiety had taken their toll on his famous man-of-action bearing. As he took the stand, onlookers noted that he looked haggard and gray.

Weed's lawyer grilled Frémont about the sale of the Mariposa Estate. At a crucial point, the lawyer asked the onetime explorer, “Was any unfair advantage taken of you by any of these gentlemen in any of the negotiations?”

Fremont paused for way too long.

“No, I-I-I think not,” he finally replied.

The stammer was telling. Frémont had just revealed that he viewed himself as the victim of a swindle. That made Opdyke and his colleagues swindlers, supporting Weed's newspaper accounts.

But Frémont-as-business-naïf was only half the story. During a lengthy questioning, Weed's lawyer teased various damning admissions out of Frémont. As it turns out, he had also swindled the swindlers. Frémont had engaged in all sorts of shenanigans, such as failing to disclose some big debts that later came back to bite the new company. These details—many of them already suspected by Olmsted since his arrival in Bear Valley—also came to light during the trial.

Opdyke had gone to court hoping to clear his name. It backfired. Instead, Weed succeeded in proving that it ain't libel if it's true.

During Frémont's testimony, however, another thing became abundantly clear to the assembled newspaper scribes. The Mariposa outfit was a den of thieves. A group of disreputable men had joined forces, cheating each other at every opportunity, but reserving their worst for the public to whom they sold shares in a gold company with modest production and a mountain of debt.

The jig was up. During the days immediately following the trial, Opdyke, Frémont, and the rest of the Mariposa chiselers raced to unload their shares. The company's stock, which had recently traded as high as $45, fell below $10.

Olmsted wasn't immediately aware of any of this. News from the East often took weeks to reach Bear Valley. In fact, the first Olmsted heard of the Opdyke-Weed libel trial and its disastrous fallout was on January 6, 1865, when three men showed up at the estate. The first was a representative of the Bank of California, which had just stopped honoring all Mariposa Company financial transactions due to insufficient funds. The second was a representative of Dodge Brothers, a wholesale supplier to the estate's general stores that was owed a great deal of money. The pair was accompanied by a sheriff, who planned to seize the property. It would be sold to pay back the various creditors.

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.