Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Mary and the four children were accompanied by Harriet Errington, an English-born teacher who had run a school for girls on Staten Island. Growing up, Mary had been her pupil. Miss Errington had been hired as a governess for the Olmsted children in schoolless Bear Valley.

  Olmsted bid good riddance to Oso House and moved his family and the governess into a suite of rooms above the Mariposa Company general store. The children instantly took to the freedom and exoticism of a western mining town. Miss Errington tailored her teachings to the setting, taking the children outdoors for their lessons. She rode on horseback, pointing out plants and fossils embedded in stone, while the three older children tailed behind on donkeys named Fanny, Kitty, and Beppo. The kids got to pan for gold and found it thrilling. To everyone’s delight, two-year-old Marion said her first full sentence: “I know what stage say—stage say God damn!” Apparently, the little girl had noted the colorful language used by coach drivers.

  It was a happy reunion between Olmsted and his family. He’d been away for much of his marriage. He’d missed long stretches of the children’s lives as they grew up. Olmsted felt the most at ease he had in months, perhaps years. An entry from eleven-year-old John Charles’s diary captures the flavor of Olmsted family life on the frontier: “I was very busy sewing my overall so that I could climb the pine trees to get the nuts out of the cones to eat. We have an owl that is two months old. Mother and father rode out and they saw a brown fox limping along. The therm 96 [degrees].”

  There was even a rapprochement with Vaux. As a kind of peace offering, Vaux sent a blueprint of a proposed Bear Valley home for the Olmsted family. It was called “Marion House”—a tribute to the youngest daughters in the Olmsted and Vaux families, both named Marion.

  Whenever Vaux designed rural houses, especially during his partnership with Andrew Jackson Downing, one of his principal tenets was asymmetry. Taking a free-form approach, following nature’s dictates, was key in Vaux’s view to creating a proper respite for his clients, a place where they could escape overordered city life. For the Mariposa Estate, Vaux sensed, the design challenge was precisely the opposite. Chaos reigned in this place; order was the requirement if a family home was to be a sanctuary. Thus, Vaux designed Marion House to be utterly symmetrical. (The house would never be built for lack of funds, and, sadly, the plan has been lost.)

  In the summer of 1864, California was still in the throes of a terrible drought. Water had grown so scarce by late July that the Mariposa gold mills were working way below capacity. Precious little was getting done; Olmsted found himself supervising an operation that had grown skeletal.

  To escape the oppressive heat, he decided to take his family on an extended wilderness camping expedition, with Yosemite as their ultimate destination. He planned to return alone to the estate periodically to check on the gold mines. In autumn, when production could be expected to bump up, he’d resume full-time duties.

  The Olmsted family set out with another couple as their companions, the Ashburners. (William Ashburner was a mining consultant whom Olmsted had met through his Mariposa job.) The party also included Miss Errington, a housekeeper, and a guide—eleven people in total—requiring a caravan of ten saddle horses, eight mules, and two carriages. Traveling over treacherous mountain passes, two full days were needed to cover the forty miles to their first destination, Galen Clark’s ranch. Clark was a garrulous, wild-bearded woodsman who spun out leisurely and vividly detailed adventure tales for his visitors. His log cabin and surrounding property served as a kind of way station for travelers bound for Yosemite.

  A mere fifteen years earlier, Yosemite had been known only to Indians. That changed with the Gold Rush, as settlers flooded the California frontier. Hunting deer and other game, sometimes to the point of depletion, brought the settlers and Indians quickly into conflict. Partly out of retaliation, partly from sheer hunger, the local Ahwahneechee had taken to butchering and eating the settlers’ horses. On March 25, 1851, an armed battalion of frontiersmen set out after a band of Ahwahneechee, pursuing them into a remote valley. The Indians promptly got away. But that was the first recorded “visit” to Yosemite.

  By 1864, Yosemite still remained incredibly isolated; to go there was a true adventure. By one account, only about six hundred non-Native people had entered the valley. That meant Olmsted’s eleven-person party represented 2 percent of the total traffic to this point. Clark seemed to have met every last one of these travelers, leading Olmsted to dub him “the doorkeeper of Yosemite.” Each of these visitors, in turn, seems to have produced an account of their journey in one form or another.

  Carleton Watkins entered the valley with twelve mules to lug his photographic equipment, including his “Mammoth camera” and another for taking stereographic pictures. He developed the photos on-site in a darkened tent. Watkins’s work became the major draw at a New York gallery, generating great acclaim and much curiosity.

  Fitz Hugh Ludlow had contributed to the Atlantic a widely read article, “Seven Weeks in the Great Yo-Semite.” Albert Bierstadt had spent the summer of 1863, right before Olmsted arrived in California, making sketches in Yosemite. The sketches were studies for two paintings that caused a sensation, Domes of Yosemite and Valley of Yosemite.

  Olmsted’s party set up a base camp on the banks of a mountain stream that ran through Clark’s spread. The men and boys slept under the stars wrapped in blankets. The women slept in tents. Not long after the party’s arrival, Indians began to gather on the land directly across the stream from them. There were only a few at first, but even that was cause for concern. They kept arriving by the hour, and soon their ranks had swelled to more than fifty.

  As it turned out, they were Miwok. Where the Ahwahneechee were legendary warriors, the Miwok were relatively peaceful. They had gathered for an annual tribal ritual. The Indians busied themselves catching trout in the stream. They sold some of their haul to the Olmsted party. Fish was far superior to bear. A couple of nights earlier, a hunter who had felled a grizzly had passed through the camp. He’d shared some of the meat. Olmsted decided that “poor, coarse beef” was the most charitable description of grizzly.

  Olmsted’s children established contact, through funny faces and laughter, with the Indian children on the other side of the stream. They begged to cross, and Olmsted let them go. Of course, the Olmsteds spoke no Miwok. The Miwok knew just a few words of broken Spanish, picked up from earlier California settlers. Lack of a common language proved no barrier whatsoever, and the children played together happily.

  The trip was off to a great start, already qualified as a memorable adventure. Yosemite still lay ahead. But first, there was a side journey to the Mariposa Grove, a stand of giant sequoias. There were six hundred trees, the oldest dating to roughly 500 BC, making them contemporaries of Pythagoras and Confucius.

  Giant sequoias are the largest living things on the planet if one takes into account both their height and their girth. Olmsted was awed by the Grizzly Giant, a sequoia that tops two hundred feet and is more than ninety feet in circumference. He deemed it “probably the noblest tree in the world.” He and the others slept under this giant canopy. He noted that the campfire’s flickering light didn’t reach much beyond the foot of any given tree; from there, the black trunks seemed to stretch all the way to the stars. In the morning, he took measurements of some of the trunks—and then it was on to Yosemite.

  The party split in two, with Olmsted, Mary, some of the children, and the guide setting off in advance. The plan was to establish a camp on the valley floor, and then the guide would return for the others. Olmsted paused at Inspiration Point to take in what would become the classic Yosemite vista, a wooded valley bracketed by El Capitan on one side, Half Dome on the other. Olmsted scribbled some notes: “Previous expectations—photographs, sketches—reports of several visitors ... Yet taken by surprise.”

  Descending into the valley on horseback was challenging. It took most of a morning. Olmsted and his advance party arrived
in time for a picnic lunch on the banks of the Merced. Afterward, searching for a suitable campsite, Olmsted selected a spot with a view of Yosemite Falls, the highest waterfall in North America. It’s incredibly dramatic, featuring a river that flows over a cliff, crashes onto a shelf of rock, regrouping into rivulets that flow over another cliff, only to repeat this again—water plunging down three separate tiers, plummeting nearly a half mile.

  Olmsted put great effort into positioning the tents just so. He wanted to make sure that Yosemite Falls was perfectly framed. Tie back the flaps, and a tent dweller’s view was a triangle, precisely bisected by a line of crashing water in the distance. The effect was akin to Vaux’s ever-artful archways framing Central Park scapes as if they were living paintings.

  The guide went back for the other half of the party. In the days ahead, they explored the valley, sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot. Mary was an equestrian quick study, regaining the skill from a youth spent riding. Miss Errington, an especially fearful rider, was given a docile horse.

  Olmsted was struck by the extent of the greenery. The ground was thickly carpeted with ferns and wild flowers, such a contrast to dusty Bear Valley. The Merced, he found, reminded him of nothing so much as the Hockanum, a river that flowed near his boyhood home in Connecticut. There was something remarkably gentle about the valley. But one need only look up, he found, and that gentleness was overwhelmed by grandeur. All around, sheer cliff faces jutted straight up from the valley floor, perpendicular for thousands of feet. He had the perception, common to Yosemite visitors, of being remarkably enclosed. And he was intrigued by how even subtle shifts—a morning haze, a cloud’s shadow creeping over a rock outcropping—changed the mood of his surroundings.

  Olmsted spent more than two weeks in Yosemite. Though he grew familiar with the individual landmarks, he saw this landscape as a total composition. “The union of the deepest sublimity of nature with the deepest beauty of nature,” he wrote, “not in one feature or another ... but all around and wherever the visitor goes, constitutes the Yo Semite the greatest glory of nature.”

  In Bear Valley, Olmsted had experienced a recurring dream about the English countryside. A mere thirty miles away, he had found wilderness that took his breath away.

  In the first week of September 1864, the camping party returned to Bear Valley. On arrival, Olmsted received some pleasant and unexpected news: He had been named to a committee to preserve Yosemite, a place he had only just visited for the first time.

  Earlier in the summer, Senator Conness’s bill had passed both houses of Congress. Because the nation was still in the midst of the Civil War, the measure generated little discussion and less interest. President Lincoln had signed the bill into law on June 30, 1864. The bill deeded Yosemite Valley and also the nearby Mariposa Grove to the State of California, meant to ensure that this land didn’t fall into the hands of private developers. The national park system didn’t even exist yet. Preserving a piece of land for its scenic value alone was a novel idea. The best way to go about it, therefore, appeared to be a federal law dictating an action to be taken by a state.

  As for choosing the committee, California governor Frederick Low simply copied the names suggested in the original letter from Raymond, the steamship executive. Among the eight members were Raymond; Ashburner, the mining consultant; and Galen Clark, Yosemite’s doorkeeper. Since Olmsted’s name headed the list, he became the de facto chairman of the commission. All members were to serve without pay.

  As his first act, Olmsted commissioned a survey of the boundaries of Yosemite. He paid for it himself. As a man with a “game” leg, as he called it, he recognized that Yosemite was a challenging destination, difficult even for intrepid adventurers. So he proposed that more convenient campgrounds should be established for tenderfoots. He also envisioned a kind of carriage circuit, connecting Yosemite, the Mariposa Grove, Galen Clark’s ranch, and the gold-mining estate, the last civilized settlement, such as it was. This would make it possible for people to access these wilderness wonders more easily. In a letter to one of the surveyors, he advised, “There should be no very long hills of a grade so high that six good horses could not be kept upon a slow trot, taking up an ordinary stage coach load.”

  In the year since Olmsted had left the East, his life had taken on a curious seesaw rhythm. He’d been down and then up: He’d been desperately lonely, and then the arrival of his family had ushered in one of his happiest times. He’d been up and then down: Olmsted made a great deal of money, but he’d never seen it slip away so fast.

  Recently, he had sold a block of his Mariposa Company stock for a good profit. Yet he was devoting a considerable portion of his earnings to repaying the debts he owed, giving priority to what was due his father. He was alarmed by how quickly he was burning through what was left. There were unexpected expenses, like employing a governess to teach the children in the absence of a school. Factor in the need for basic items—a piece of cloth, a chair to sit in—and the cost of frontier life became downright exorbitant.

  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

  Unsettled 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.