I must say no more of this. I beg you to think no more of it.
Oliver, having just returned from New York, has had to turn around and start back, to confer with General Tompkins and two members of the London syndicate who have just arrived. It seems there is dissatisfaction with the progress of the Susan Canal, which these gentlemen believe should have been completed to its full twenty miles last fall, so as to be ready for use this spring; and someone seems to have raised a question as to Oliver’s judgment in pressing ahead with the Big Ditch at the same time. It makes me worse than cross to think of people who have only the dimmest idea about this project, questioning the man who conceived it and has pushed it through against every sort of odds. To him, the Susan is only a sop to the skeptics. It means little by comparison with the Big Ditch-is only a secondary canal to that great one, and even if completed now would not put any large acreage under irrigation.
Still, he has had to go and justify himself. He hates it. More talkee-talkee. At least, he told me as he left, he can now bring back a lot of bare-root roses. The varieties available here are somewhat common. I know he is bent upon that rose garden for my sake. He hopes it may help repay me for all the dust and discomfort of last summer, and persuade me that the waiting is not in vain, and that life in the Boise Valley can be given grace and beauty, and that we will not have to wait until Agnes is a woman before our surroundings are fit for civilized living.
He is so good a man I want to weep, and what makes me want to weep most of all is my failure of faith in him. For I cannot help it. Though there has been, ever since my return, a blessed absence of that trouble you know of, I have seen that weakness among all his strengths, and I cannot forget it. I fear the strain of uncertainty, I am frightened by these long wearing trips and the influence of the kinds of people they throw him among. I watch him, I wonder if he watches me. We are polite to each other.
We do not speak of any of this. It is impossible for Oliver to discuss such personal matters, he is made voiceless by them. We pretend that by not speaking of them we have made them not exist. Yet it is not the marriage I dreamed of, not the marriage it was. It is a bruised and careful truce; we walk in bandages and try not to bump our wounds. After fourteen years, that bride whose judgment you questioned finds herself unable fully to trust either the man she married, or herself. Without you and Thomas shining so steadily there on your rock, this darkness would be darkness indeed.
The Mesa
June 17, 1890
Dearest Augusta -
Yesterday the water was turned into the first fifteen miles of the Susan Canal. This much, at least, is done after eight years. Oliver and the juniors are only half happy about it, for the diversion of effort has stopped the Big Ditch, and since even the Susan is being put to work before it is ready, the money return to the Syndicate will be small. Nevertheless, with Idaho due to become a state on July 4, and all here convinced that the eyes of the nation and the world are upon them, Oliver thought it as well to make an occasion. The Governor and his wife and many dignitaries (who would not be dignitaries anywhere but Idaho) assembled on the mesa to watch the first water come down. Frank and Wiley were disappointed that I was not asked to break a bottle of champagne against something, perhaps a clump of sagebrush, inasmuch as the canal is named for me, but I decided that the Governor should have the limelight, he craves it so, and so he was given the principal role, with a shovel instead of with a bottle.
Frank and Wiley were stationed up at the diversion dam at the canyon mouth, to open the gates at a specified time. Ollie, who had not been home from school three days before he begged, and got, permission to live in the canyon with the engineers, came flying down the line on his pony as soon as the gates were opened. He rode so fast that he beat the water to us by several minutes. It was dreadfully hot and unprotected. The dignitaries had removed their coats, and the ladies were melting under their parasols and surrey canopies as we waited by the raw ditch.
Then, around the gentle curve of the canal, there it came, a low, rolling, muddy tide that actually kicked up dust ahead of itself, and rolled over the dust and absorbed it in its thick wave. Twigs and weeds and grass and dirty foam rode the surface. The crowd raised a cheer—and indeed it was exciting to see the result of all our work actually flowing toward the dry earth. The Governor dug a hole beside the ditch and one of his aides set a Lombardy poplar in it, which another aid then watered with a bucket of mud dipped from the ditch. Eventually (it is all part of Oliver’s dream) willows and Lombardies will line the Susan from the canyon mouth to its lower end, and bind its banks together with their roots, and drop their leaves on its current to spin in its slow whirlpools and snag on weeds and roots and make a resting place for darning needles and dragon-flies. By their living green presence along the line of the ditch they will be, he says, the truest testimony to the desert’s fertility, and the beacon of hope to settlers and their families. This is all in that future when our grove will be tall and cool around our house, and when we will leave that coolness for a different coolness on the banks of the Big Ditch, under its line of sheltering trees, and watch the sunsets reflected in our man-made river sixty feet wide.
Within a few minutes the first dirt and trash was swept away, and the water came more cleanly, filling the ditch within eighteen inches of the top. There was much laughter and congratulations, and the Governor made a speech in which he particularly praised Oliver, and aired visions of the future far more grandiose (and based on far less knowledge of the limiting facts) than those of my engineers, who pride themselves on being realists with vision.
Later the party came to the Mesa for cakes and champagne, and some of the gentlemen, playing their game of the visionary future, made a pretense of walking the ladies in the grove. The sun soon ended their charade, for the trees are no higher than a lady’s bonnet. But the Mesa did serve its function as show piece, and drew much admiration, especially our new lawn on the west side, which we keep green with the hose cart, and the rose garden, which is now beginning to bloom. What a joy those roses are, more than two dozen varieties, including everything from exotic hybrids such as the immaculately white Blanc Double de Coubert and the black-crimson Deuil de Paul Fontaine to such old favorites as the General Jacqueminot, which you remember from Milton, and the Maréschal Niel. And on the piazza pillar our old Harison’s yellow from the canyon, a hardy pioneer if there ever was one, a rose we have seen in every mining camp in the West.
It might have been a pleasant affair, for everyone was in high spirits, and it was a triumph for Oliver, and a fitting preliminary to the coming statehood celebration. But it was spoiled for me by the misery of my Belgian girl Sidonie, whom I hired this spring because of the floods of people we have had to feed and entertain. She was to have been married this summer, to a lawyer named Bradford Burns. He has been associated with the canal company as their “connection” man to the Land Office, was a delegate to the state convention, and has been appointed County Surveyor of this county. He is considerably above her in education and position.
Well, she went to town two weeks ago to see about the final arrangements, and met Burns accidentally in the street. They went to the house of a friend, and there on the piazza, the friend being away, he told her that he had changed his mind, that she wouldn’t be up to her position as his wife. Imagine the poor thing coming home with this to be known by everybody! I had already arranged for another Chinese, a friend of Wan’s, but Sidonie was so crushed I could not possibly let her go. She declares she will work for me all her life, and I more than half wish this cup would pass from me, for though she is good-natured and good, she is not a good servant.
Now imagine that on the day of the celebration, with Sidonie in her white apron passing cakes on the piazza and through the rooms, this man Burns was one of the guests. Poor Sidonie could not bring herself to pass near him, and I hope he got no cakes at all. Yet there was no way he could have been excluded, short of his own realization of the delicacy of her pos
ition, for he is one of the political crowd, and a “coming” man. He, of course, brazened it out and chatted and laughed, while that poor clumsy girl, who might have been attending the affair as his wife, went red and numb among the guests with her tray of cakes!
Oh, you must come to Idaho! It is the only place I know where your servants’ problems and your guests’ problems turn out to be the same. At least, Idaho being what it is, some other young man is likely to come to my relief, for Sidonie is a handsome creature, however untrained.
My little girls, whose first “big party” it was, were allowed to dress themselves in their best frocks, and attend for a time, and help serve. They ate too many cakes and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. As usual, the gentlemen all fell in love with Agnes, who was a shameless flirt and quite irresistible. But I am glad to say the ladies found Betsy what I know her to be. More and more I am thankful that we named her what we did. She is Bessie all over again, in sweetness if not in beauty—and who can tell what nine will become by nineteen?
Now that the opening of the Susan has made water available for their claims, Bessie and John plan to order the requisite “improvements” made, and in the fall will sell the last of the old Milton place and move out here. I hate the thought of Milton’s being entirely gone, and I confess that when I heard they had gambled their little savings on the ditch I felt the blackest premonitions. I felt like the scapegoat that had led them to their destruction. But now I think my greatest happiness will be to have Bessie living only a little more than two miles away. John has always ached to come west, and Bessie is the most loyal of wives. What a joy it will be (and how tired I get of writing “will be” rather than “is”!) to have her come calling in the afternoons when her work is done, and to have her to sit with through whole evenings, and talk with, and read with, and remember with, and lend things to, and borrow from! I live in a busy but lonely house. Next to you, Bessie is the only person who could redeem it for me, and to see her Eastern children thundering with my Western ones up the lane on their ponies will be-will be!-pure heaven.
Meantime, the Big Ditch is stalled until the Syndicate decides to provide this summer’s construction money, and all salaries are in arrears. The engineers occupy themselves with finishing and improving the embankment of the diversion dam, and riding the length of the Susan to detect and repair leaks.
The Mesa
July 2, 1890
My darling Augusta-
I can hardly bear to write you this letter, and would not if it could possibly arrive in time to spoil your pleasure in the medal a grateful city will be giving Thomas day after tomorrow. Believe me when I say I would be thinking of nothing but his deserved honor, and doing nothing but read and memorize the magnificent poem you sent me that he has composed for the occasion, if we had not had poured upon us enough trouble, deserved and undeserved, to unhinge my mind and break down all my defenses. Will you listen, and give me your silent sympathy? I cannot write to Bessie—not yet, not until every hope is exhausted, as I fear it will be.
First, the Big Ditch is dead again. The Syndicate are quarreling among themselves and accusing General Tompkins and Oliver of Heaven knows what. Mr. Harvey, our friend and supporter, is cruelly dead, by the most brutally unpredictable accident. An absent-minded, enthusiastic, childlike man, he walked one morning, reading his London Times, and stepped in front of a train. If he were alive, I should have more hope. Now funds are cut off, the contractors are unpaid and angry, Oliver and the juniors are unpaid and apprehensive, the ditch is stopped at the three-mile, mark-the ditch which was to extend for seventy-five miles. All chance is gone for the massive effort that Oliver hoped to put out this summer. What faces us is either a painful reorganization, with the originator of the scheme perhaps squeezed out and his authority assumed by men eight or ten thousand miles away, or the total collapse of everything.
And that is but the beginning.
I must have written you about the claims that Oliver filed on for Bessie and John, nearly a year ago. In his eagerness to come West, John also invested in canal company stock to a considerable extent. A month before, he might have bought a wagon load of it for very little, but by the time he came in, the news of the reformed syndicate had gone around, and there was none for sale except at very inflated prices. So Oliver, thinking he was doing John a favor, and needing money for the building of this house, sold him some of ours—two thousand dollars’ worth, at what was then a bargain.
That stock now stands a good chance of being worthless. When I think of what that much money means to John and Bessie, when I think that it represents my mother’s and father’s lives, and my grandparents’ lives, and great-grandparents’ lives, all the loving labor that went into the Milton orchards and fields, now poured out into a dusty ditch in Idaho! It is bad enough for our money to go that way, but theirs!
And that is not the worst.
The worst is the work of our slippery acquaintance Bradford Burns, the man who so cruelly jilted poor Sidonie. He is one of those who came west looking for the main chance, a lawyer who would do any sort of little job, and was particularly active in land claims. Because he was always an energetic believer in irrigation, the company used him as its representative ; and Oliver, when he was frantically busy completing his Irrigation Survey, and organizing the beginning of the canal work, and getting this house built, and the well drilled, and the road graded, and the trees planted, left a good many details to him.
The other day, just one day after the bad news had come from General Tompkins, Oliver was in Bums’s office and happened to mention the Grant claims.
“The Grant claims?” says Mr. Burns. “What are they?”
“The ones I left with you for preliminary filing,” Oliver said. “A year ago.”
“I guess I don’t remember them,” says Burns. “I file so many I forget. If you left them for filing, I must have filed them. Where are they located? Show me on the map.”
He got the map out and Oliver showed him, two half-sections side by side under the Susan Canal.
“But those are my claims!” exclaims this Mr. Burns. “You told me your relatives weren’t interested, so I filed on them myself.”
“Weren’t interested?” said Oliver. “When did I say anything like that? I left the completed papers with you to be executed.”
“You must have forgotten,” says Bums. “I remember now. You put them on the desk and said they were one thing, at least, you didn’t have to take care of now. You recall telling me that.”
“No,” Oliver said. “I remember nothing of the kind. I said nothing of the kind. What did you do with those papers?”
“Lord,” Burns says, “I suppose I probably threw them away. I wouldn’t have kept them. You said your relatives had decided against filing.”
Augusta, it was your claims he was speaking of, or pretending to speak of-the ones I had urged you to file on simply as a speculation, in the hope that I might by that means lure you and Thomas out to Idaho for a visit. I had written Oliver from Victoria, asking him to start the formalities. And Oliver had told Burns to discard those, after he heard that you weren’t interested. So he couldn’t entirely deny the possibility of a misunderstanding. He made Burns search all his files and drawers, and he checked the Land Office, but of course no papers were found, and the claims were discovered in Burns’s name. It is one man’s memory, and one man’s word, against another’s, and Bums is smooth and persuasive, and Oliver is not. Unless we can somehow manage to shame or force them out of him, that man now owns Bessie’s and John’s claims, with water from the Susan to make them valuable, and he can show the proper papers and receipts, and we can show nothing. He has jumped those claims, in short.
Oliver, who never mistrusts anyone unless the evidence is overwhelming, is inclined to take the blame. He says that Burns could have made an honest mistake. I say he did not. He had access to the company’s maps and plans, he knew exactly where the Susan would go, he knew that water would reach those clai
ms before it could reach any of the lands higher up. And he will make no gesture toward redeeming his “mistake.” He says he has made his first payment on that land, has little money, can’t be asked to give up what he has staked his future on. In some desperation Oliver offered to buy the claims, but Bums says he is making plans to build. He already has another wife in mind, the daughter of one of the pick and shovel millionaires. Wouldn’t you think he might be sure enough of his future to sacrifice those acres of desert? Tomorrow I shall send Oliver back to town to see if Bums won’t sell one of the claims, at least. I know the answer in advance. And if he should say yes, where would we get the money? We are in debt up to our necks.
So I shall not see my sister this fall, and my children will not have cousins to ride with or do lessons with (Nellie was prepared to enlarge her school to take in Bessie’s three). Poor John will not realize his dream of coming West. We may or may not have money to send Ollie back to St. Paul’s. We may not even have a job, we may have not a leftover crumb of hope. But we do have a great deal of dry land, unless when we weren’t looking someone has jumped ours too.
Forgive me, I should not be bitter. Yet I cannot see one ray of light. Perhaps we can sell this house to someone who can afford it, Bums perhaps, and move down into the Mallett cabin and herd people’s sheep or plow their sagebrush. It seems the logical conclusion of our effort to reclaim and civilize the West.
4
From the wide doorway where she perched on her stool with the drawing pad in her lap, she looked out into and through the piazza, past the hammock where Betsy was reading to Agnes, past the heavy pillars and the balustrade on which sat the old Guadalajara olla with its inscription half visible—asita- and on across the lawn and the spreading sagebrush to the far line of the mountains. The indoor light was tea-colored, sepia; the lawn was whitened under the sun like an overexposed photographic negative, the sagebrush went palely, growing dimmer and paler with distance, until it ended at the foot of the mountains that were pale, dusty blue against a sky even paler and dustier. She thought it was like being inside a cool cave and seeing out into an allegorical desert plain, the sort of place where wayfarers are bewildered and creatures die of thirst.
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