Try a sample Leadville evening.
The light was gentle, a mixture of firelight and the soft radiance of two Moderateur lamps bought at a frightening price at Daniel and Fisher’s. The cots were curtained off, the table was shoved against the wall, which was hung with the geological maps of the King Survey. Susan had put these up, not Oliver; and they were for decoration, not study. Frank was sitting on the floor with his chin on his knees and the firelight in his eyes. Between stove and wall Pricey sat reading, and the noise of his rocking creaked in the lulls of their talk like an overindustrious cricket.
“What are you reading that’s so absorbing, Pricey?” Susan said.
Pricey did not hear her. His tiny feet in their clumsy boots came down tippy-toe, pushed against the floor, and floated upward again. His nose was ten inches from the page. His hand moved, a page turned, his feet came down, pushed, floated upward. The floor squeaked. They watched him, smiling among themselves.
“I think it’s a total lack of vanity,” Oliver said. “Anybody else who hears his name will look up, it’ll jar him a little. Not Pricey, not when he’s reading. Look at him, like a kid on a rockinghorse.”
“I saw him riding that old Minnie mule along the road the other day with his nose in a book,” Frank said. “Mule could have stumbled and tossed him down a shaft, he’d have gone right on reading. Maybe he’d have wondered why it got dark all of a sudden.”
Oliver raised his voice slightly to say, “I may have to ask him not to come over here any more. He’ll rock every nail out of the floor.”
They projected their joking toward Pricey and he heard nothing. Creak creak, creak creak. The little boots tapped the planks, floated upward. Pricey turned another page. Out of her suppressed laughter Susan shook her head at the other two. Don’t laugh at him. Don’t make fun.
Oliver said, “There’s one thing the oblivious Pricey doesn’t know. That rocker creeps. Five minutes more and he’ll be in the fire.”
“I doubt if it’d get his attention,” Frank said.
With preposterous daintiness the boots came down, tapped the planks, rose, hung, descended. CREAK creak, CREAK creak. Wetting his thumb, Pricey turned another page.
“I swear,” Oliver said, and stood up. “This is serious.”
He stepped along the wall to the bookcase that stood behind Pricey’s chair. Pricey hunched his shoulders aside slightly to make passage room, and a small interrogative humming issued from his nose, but he did not look up. The rockers rose and fell. Standing close behind him, Oliver took in each hand a volume of the King Survey reports-great quartos that ran six pounds to the book, the concentrated learning of King, Prager, Emmons, the Hague brothers, a dozen others who had been Oliver’s guides and models.
For a moment Susan was afraid he was going to drop the books on Pricey’s unconscious head, and she made a restraining motion. But Oliver only stood a moment, adjusting to Pricey’s rhythm, and then stooped quickly and shoved a book under each rocker.
Pricey stopped with a jolt, his head snapped back, his jaw snapped shut. He looked up startled into their laughter. His face went pink, his pale eyes circled wildly looking for a focus. “S-s-s-sorry!” he said. “What?”-and then the long acceptant “hawwwww!” like a groan.
Yet only a day or two after that, this same Pricey showed Susan some of the incongruous possibilities of Leadville. He had been the one delegated to take her riding, and they were down on the Lake Fork of the Arkansas at a place where they must ford. It was a time of high water, the infant Arkansas was swift and curly. “Come on, Pricey!” Susan called, and quirted her horse into the water.
The creek broke against his knees, and then as he surged carefully ahead, feeling for footing, against his shoulder. His hoofs were delicate among the slippery bottom stones. Susan pulled her foot out of the stirrup of the sidesaddle and sat precariously, thrilled and dazzled by the cold rush going underneath. When the water shallowed, the horse lunged out, shedding great drops, and as she felt for the stirrup she turned to see how Pricey was making it. There he came, strangling the horn with both hands. From midstream he sent her a sweet, desperate smile.
She guided her horse through willows and alders and runted birches, leaned and weaved until the brush ended and she broke into the open. She was at the edge of a meadow miles long, not a tree in it except for the wiggling line that marked the course of the Lake Fork. Stirrup-high grass flowed and flawed in the wind, and its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks and splashes of flowers-rust of paintbrush, blue of pentstemon, yellow of buttercups, scarlet of gilia, blue-tinged white of columbines. All around, rimming the valley, bare peaks patched with snow looked down from above the scalloped curve of timberline.
All but holding her breath, she pushed into the field of grass. The pony’s legs disappeared, his shoulders forced a passage, grass heads and flowers snagged in her stirrup and saddle skirts. The movement around and beneath her was as dizzying as the fast current of the creek had been a moment before. The air was that high blue mountain kind that fizzes in the lungs. Rising in her stirrup to get her face and chest full of it, she gave, as it were, a standing ovation to the rim cut out against the blue. From a thousand places in the grass little gems of unevaporated water winked back the sun.
She heard Pricey come up and stop just behind her. His horse blew. But she was filling her eyes, and did not turn. Then she heard Pricey say, in his fine cultivated Oxonian voice, strongly, without the trace of a stammer,
Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire.
Who but Pricey? Where but Leadville?
Mice have gnawed Grandmother’s Leadville letters and created some historical lacunae. The packet is thin, moreover. That much time in New Almaden and Santa Cruz produced a bale of correspondence. Leadville’s letters number only thirty.
The reminiscences don’t help much, and neither do the three novels that deal with the Leadville experience, sympathetically misunderstood from the fireside. Real people and real actions may be traced in them, but they operate within plots full of the scruples of attenuated virgins of a kind that Grandmother certainly never found in Leadville. Their heroes are young engineers like Oliver Ward reduced to pasteboard, their villains are claim jumpers and crooked managers. Once the heroine is the daughter of the villain, a device that Grandmother used again in a later story. The villain has to die repentant before the young lady can marry the upright engineer.
These fictions would have been pretty much the same, with only a repainting of the background scenery, if she had been writing about Tombstone or Deadwood. She really was protected, somewhat by her husband and just as much by her fastidiousness. The reality in these stories is only decorative.
But a Leadville as authentic as it is unexpected lies buried in the mouse-shredded letters. It is the Leadville that found its way to her fireside.
A camp that strikes it rich in the middle of a depression speaks as urgently to the well-trained as to the untrained. In Leadville, Harvard men mucked in prospect holes, graduates of MIT and Yale Sheffield Scientific School worked as paymasters and clerks and gunguards, every mine office was approached daily by some junior engineer with a diploma and a new mustache. The Clarendon Hotel heard the accents of Boston, New York, and London; Mosquito Pass was a major flyway for migrating mining experts and capitalists.
Leadville roared toward civilization like a runaway train. Amid talk of an opera house, three mine managers, including Oliver’s distant cousin W. S. Ward, were planning houses on Ditch Walk, and hoped to have wives in them before another summer. The principal boardinghouse at its Younger Sons Ball drew social lines as rigid in their way as Newport’s. The best saloons were gorgeous with walnut, crystal, and William Morris wallpapers. All this was just beginning to fall into place, like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, when Susan settled down to pig it in her cabin on the ditch.
One morning a knock came on the door, and Susan opened it to see a stout,
bright-eyed, self-assured little lady standing there. Helen Hunt Jackson, sent to her like a valentine by their mutual friend Augusta. As a literary lady married to a mining engineer, and resident in the West, Mrs. Jackson could hardly have been more reassuring to Grandmother. If Helen Hunt of Amherst, Massachusetts, was not lost when she became Helen Hunt Jackson of Denver, then why should Susan Burling of Milton, New York, lose her identity now that she was Susan Burling Ward of Leadville? The two were intimates within fifteen minutes.
Another day several wagons, many mules, and a half dozen men set up a camp higher on the ditch, in the edge of the aspens. This was the new United States Geological Survey party, all veterans of King’s Survey of the Fortieth Parallel. A little while after they arrived, a long, thin, chinless, slouching man who wore his ugliness as elegantly as his snow-white buckskins rode down and made himself known: Samuel Emmons, one of the giants, Leadville’s Homer, one of Oliver’s heroes and an old companion of Prager, Clarence King, and Henry Adams. He had written a book that Oliver looked upon as a bible, and he had helped make the geological maps that he was now charmed to see pinned as decorations on the log walls. It took a woman, he said, to see the aesthetic possibilities of the Silurian.
Within days, Prager and Henry Janin came over the range, and within a week Clarence King himself, a man glitteringly famous, director of the Geological Survey, author of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, climber of Mount Whitney, exposer of the great diamond hoax. Susan didn’t think of him as “the best and brightest man of his generation,” because John Hay hadn’t yet made that remark about him; but she knew him as a literary man and she knew Oliver’s respect for him as a scientist; she had heard of him as the wittiest of talkers and a prince of story tellers. In a tone somewhere between awe and a giggle, she wrote Augusta that in his tent at the Survey camp he was served by a black valet, that he possessed an apparently inexhaustible supply of fine wines, brandy, and cigars, and that his riding clothes, like those of Emmons, were made by London tailors out of snow-white deerskins dressed by Paiute squaws in the Carson Valley of Nevada. Except for her report of one evening, her letters contain no samples of King’s celebrated conversation. Perhaps the mice got them.
With King was a large good-natured man named Thomas Donaldson, chairman of the Public Lands Commission, and in the two months that their camp was pitched there it drew a stream of celebrities. Where did they spend their evenings? Grandmother’s cabin, naturally. She was a lamp for every moth that flew. In her single room whose usable space was hardly fifteen feet square there assembled every evening an extraordinary collection of education, culture, talent, eloquence, reputation, political power, and intellectual force. There was no way to keep the two cots curtained off; they were always being exposed to serve as sofas. I doubt that Grandmother was offended to have her bedroom once again invaded; she was never more stimulated in her life. Braced for dutiful and deprived exile, ready to lie in the rude Western bed she had made, she found herself presiding over a salon that (she told herself more than once) Augusta’s studio itself could hardly have matched for brilliance.
If you do not believe we live gaily in Leadville, let me tell you about our July Fourth. I had Mrs. Abadie and Mrs. Jackson, whose husbands had not returned from inspection trips. Mr. Ward dropped in with his hands full of wildflowers, and then Frank Sargent on his way fishing. He helped me get lunch-Oliver has burned his leg with nitric acid and can’t stoop down as one must do to cook on our open Franklin. We had fish chowder (canned) from Boston, white muscat grapes (canned) from California, tea (English breakfast, contributed by Mr. Ward), tapioca pudding with raisins à la Leadville, contributed by the Geological Survey cook who saw we were having a celebration, and toast, made and burned by Frank. Our table service was somewhat permiscus. Frank sat on a packing box, Mr. Ward rocked in our rocker and pretended he was a bad little boy bent on spilling things (he is always the wag of the party, to his own great amusement), Oliver twirled in an old screw office chair and ate his grapes out of a Budweiser tumbler left over from our last picnic. After lunch an ice cream man came mournfully crying his wares along the ditch. Oliver and Mr. Ward rushed out (or Mr. Ward rushed and Oliver hobbled), and Mr. Ward bought some oranges as well. When we went down to dinner that evening there was a foot race going on, accompanied by a brass band. Nothing can be done here, from a tightrope performance to a show by a lot of short-skirted girls at the Great Western Amphitheater, without a band. After supper Mr. Ward took us to Chittenden’s to select carpets and cretonnes for his “trousseau”-he is building a house near us and next year will have a wife. You have no idea what elegant things can be bought here for money-lots of it.
Somehow we kept picking up other friends, and when we arrived home we bulged our little cabin. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Abadie had returned, which gave us three sedate couples, but there were in addition Mr. King, Mr. Emmons, and Mr. Wilson of the Survey, Conrad Prager and Henry Janin who have recently arrived, Mr. Donaldson of the Public Lands Commission, Oliver’s clerk Pricey, who hid under the chairs, practically, but immensely enjoyed himself, and Frank, who had returned from fishing with two fish which he handsomely presented to me. He helped me do the dishes left from lunch. Mr. King went up to his camp and brought back a bottle of brandy, and we toasted the republic and sang war and jubilee songs around the fire.
Most of these people are skeptical about our determination to bring Ollie out, and my determination to stay myself. Mr. King and Mr. Jackson, in a cynical way, pretended to believe that long and frequent separations are the only basis for a sound marriage. This brought Mrs. Jackson up yipping like a little terrier, for like me she followed her husband West. Yet even she doubts Leadville as a home. She urged Denver upon us. Leadville, she said, is too high. Grass won’t grow here, hens won’t lay, cows won’t give milk, cats can’t live. Needless to say, none of them persuaded us. Oliver, who normally tests his condition by how he feels after a hundred-mile ride, says he never felt better, and I must say I feel exhilarated.
I closed the evening by getting out a note I had just had from Professor Rossiter Raymond, who had left us a little while before, after a mine inspection. He had enjoyed himself by our fire, but had caught a tremendous cold as soon as he left the mountains. He sent this humorous little roofer to express his sentiments.
Let princes cough and sneeze
In their palaces of ease
Let colds and influenzas plague the rich;
But give to me instead
A well-ventilated head
In a little log cabin on a ditch.
Don’t you think we have pleasant times? The only single hard thing is that Oliver has to be so much away inspecting mines that, as they say here, are too poor to pay, too rich to quit. He envies the Survey men, who can ride off in the morning with a sandwich and a geological hammer and spend the whole day hunting fossils, or just looking at magnified mountains through a theodolite.
5
“Let me pose you a question,” said Helen Hunt Jackson. “It has nothing to do with the Indian. I know how Americans respond when their interests conflict with the Indian’s rights. They respond dishonorably. But I would like to know something else. How does a government scientist act when he finds himself in possession of information worth millions to some capitalist, when all his closest friends are mining experts in search of precisely that sort of information?”
Filling the rocker but not rocking, she sat with arms folded across her stomach, her shoes hanging like sash weights two inches off the floor. Imperturbably she met the smiles, murmurs, and cries of mock dismay-when she chose to, she could make every eye in the room turn her way, every mouth stop talking. All but Mr. Jackson, who looked at the ceiling and clapped a hand to his brow.
Clarence King raised his plump, animated face and laughed. “I hope you’re not suggesting that any of us would have trouble telling the public interest from our own.”
“I suggest nothing,” said Mrs. Jackson comfortably. “I ask a quest
ion that occurs to me. Here sit you geologists charged with surveying the resources of the Public Domain, and here sit your friends whose whole business it is to get hold of such information, preferably before it’s published. It seems to me to offer a nice ethical problem.”
“Now,” said her husband, “you see the consequences of letting women in where men are transacting business. She’ll bring on a congressional investigation.”
“Tell me, Mr. King,” said Mrs. Jackson. “You’re the head of this great new bureau. Have you never been tempted to drop a word and make a friend’s fortune?”
Hoots of pained protest. King, spreading his hands, said, “Should you be asking me? All I have is authority. I defer to Emmons, who has information.”
“There speaks a man who has been questioned by many Congressmen,” said Conrad Prager.
“If Emmons refuses to answer, I can order him to,” King said.
“Why should I refuse?” said Emmons. From the right-hand horn of their conversational crescent he turned his chinless, amused face to the middle, where Mrs. Jackson sat like Buddha in a bustle. “What’s information for, except to inform? What higher bond is there than friendship? What virtue outranks loyalty? Of course I drop confidential words. There isn’t a man here who isn’t richer for my friendship. I’m a good man to know.”
Protests, cries of “Judas!” W. S. Ward, the wag, pretended to take from his wallet and bum in the fire certain incriminating papers. From over against the wall, Oliver squinted through the smoke of his cigar. Frank and Pricey were crowded back on Susan’s cot in the corner.
Angle of Repose Page 29
