Genius of Place (42 page)

Maybe he'd try the oil industry instead. Oil had recently been discovered in California. There was a ready market: It could be burned for heat or used to lubricate heavy machinery. During the past year, he'd traveled to several spots in the state to visit wells. Of all things, he had been elected in abstentia as president of an oil company. The tiny upstart offered no salary, only a block of valueless stock. Olmsted had said no thanks to that offer. The more he thought about oil, the less sense it made. Oil appeared even more speculative than mining for gold, if that was possible.

Olmsted even checked out the wine business in Sonoma. Because California wine making was still very much in its infancy, Olmsted was actually able to land a consulting assignment. Olmsted visited the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society run by Agoston Haraszthy. Since emigrating from Hungary, Haraszthy had worked as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi and served as the first town marshal of San Diego. In 1861, he traveled to Europe, returning with 100,000 grapevine cuttings. He introduced them in his Sonoma vineyard to see what grew. Olmsted spent two days on his property before producing a report that concluded, “The business is one promising extraordinary profits.”

As a wine consultant, Olmsted's advice was dubious. During his visit, the first evidence of phylloxera, also known as root louse, must have
been visible. Within a year, the infestation would decimate Haraszthy's vineyard, prompting him to abandon Sonoma for Nicaragua. There, he tried to start a sugar plantation before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Haraszthy's horse was found tied near the banks of an alligator-infested river, but he was never heard from again. He was presumed eaten.

Haraszthy is often called the “Father of California Viniculture.” If Olmsted was wrong about the state of his vineyards, he was right at least about the prospects for California wine.

Unsettled in the West, desperate for money, Olmsted rattled this way and that. Tellingly, he reserved his greatest energy for seeking out landscape architecture jobs. Yet despite his enduring passion for the outdoors and his success with Central Park, he was less certain than ever that there was enough demand to make a living as a landscape architect.

The first project he embarked upon was actually one that he'd been handed while still supervising the Mariposa Estate. It was also his first solo commission, landed without Vaux. Now that his gold-mine obligations appeared finished, Olmsted turned his attention to the job.

The Mountain View Cemetery was to occupy 200 acres in the hills above Oakland. In preparing a design sans Vaux, Olmsted worked with a hired draftsman. As with Central Park, he showed an unusual sensitivity to the unique requirements of the site. He came up with a variety of thoughtful cemetery-design touches. Many of the people who would be buried in the cemetery were Chinese immigrants. So Olmsted's plan included a “receiving tomb” to hold bodies temporarily until they could be returned to China, as was then the practice. There was also a preponderance of single men in California's highly transient population, as Olmsted had noted. So his plan included an unusual number of single plots.

The land set aside for the cemetery was a bowl consisting of a flat, dusty floor surrounded by steep barren hillsides. When it came to plantings, this was quite a challenge. A stately canopy of elms was simply not going to be possible. Here again, Olmsted proved extremely imaginative, suggesting a tree—the cypress—that he believed would thrive on the grounds while striking the perfect note of reverence:

Olmsted's plan greatly pleased his client; he received a much-needed $1,000. He also chased several other landscape architecture projects, but with far less success.

Earlier, during his lonely stay in San Francisco, Olmsted had haunted the Bank of California office, awaiting telegrams that never came. It was a display of doggedness that greatly impressed the bank's president, Darius Mills. While Mills was appalled by the Mariposa Company and its team of Wall Street chiselers, he developed a great respect for Olmsted and asked him to draw up a plan for his large country estate. Back in Bear Valley, Olmsted received word that he'd failed to win the commission. But the name Olmsted suggested for the estate stuck: Millbrae. (Over time, a city grew up on the land, still known today as Millbrae, California.)

Another possible landscape job came from Henry Coon, mayor of San Francisco. He met with Olmsted, and the pair walked over a desolate, wind-whipped section of land. Apparently, there was some desire to create a park here. But the city commissioners and other interested parties were intent on a reprise of Central Park in San Francisco. Olmsted argued for a park more appropriate to the city's climate and topography. Mayor Coon asked Olmsted to draft a proposal. Meanwhile, the trustees of the soon-to-be-opened College of California contacted Olmsted. He
was asked to submit a preliminary design for the campus grounds and also the surrounding community. Both of these projects struck Olmsted as highly speculative; neither seemed likely to progress quickly.

 

While Olmsted cast about, Vaux was busy back in New York. He entered into a heated battle with Richard Morris Hunt. Hunt, the first American to attend Paris's École des Beaux-Arts, was an architect with a flair for the grand. His star was lately on the rise, and he had proposed that a series of monumental gates be placed at various entry points into Central Park. This was very out of keeping with Olmsted and Vaux's humanscale, rustic treatment. Vaux succeeded in derailing Hunt's proposal. To achieve this required Vaux to reopen communication with the Central Park board of commissioners. This was his first real contact with them since he and Olmsted had resigned a couple years earlier.

There were also encouraging signals about a possible Brooklyn park. Plans had been on hold for years. But with the end of the Civil War, there was a sudden burst of progress. The park's commissioners decided to reconsider a design they had accepted some years back, generally agreed to be a thoroughly lackluster effort. They approached Vaux, asking him to submit a competing proposal.

During the spring and summer of 1865, while Vaux pursued the commission, he wrote Olmsted repeatedly, trying to enlist his participation. Olmsted dutifully responded. Given the vagaries of the mail—it could take a month for a letter to travel between the coasts—there was a crazy-quilt quality to their correspondence. Sometimes Vaux reiterated a point, not realizing that Olmsted had already addressed it in a letter then in transit. Other times, Olmsted tried to anticipate an argument that Vaux might make, only to receive a letter that went off in a totally different direction.

Despite this fractured time sequence, the major themes of their exchange remained intact. Vaux felt certain that he was closing in on a commission—a major park commission. Olmsted felt compelled to hold back. There was nothing firm yet; it was a tentative prospect at best. Vaux's letters only added to his dizzying array of possibilities. “I trust you are getting on pretty well,” Vaux wrote. “We may have some fun together
yet. I wish you could have seen your destiny in our art. God meant you should. I really believe, at times, although he may have something different for you to do yet he cannot have anything nobler in store for you.” He signed the letter, “With love, Yours, C. V.” Back in the autumn of 1863, when they'd gotten into a scrape, Vaux had used the far chillier “Yours faithfully.” With the reference to “your destiny in our art,” Vaux reopened those earlier arguments about art versus business, the world of ideas versus the world of men.

Olmsted wrote back, “I love beautiful landscapes and rural recreations and people in rural recreations—better than anybody else I know. But I don't feel strong on the art side. I don't feel myself an artist, I feel rather as if it was sacrilegious in me to post myself in the portals of Art.” He protested again that there was more to him, so much more, than could be summed up in simple art. He had such diverse abilities; he'd occupied so many roles in life. Why, the job he'd lately done—and many of the options he was considering—were far afield from art, capital
A
, Art.

“Nobody cares two straws for the mines in St. Francisco,” Vaux asserted. “As yet you are the representative man of the C. P. [Central Park] and not much else to New Yorkers, and very likely the majority of those who think of the matter at all suppose you still to be at work there.” In this, Vaux showed a wily side and a deep understanding of his friend's psychology.

Olmsted suggested that park work was unattractive because it would necessarily subject him to meddlers such as Andrew Green. “A scheme that can be upset by a Green is sure to be upset, for men of his caliber are to be found everywhere,” answered Vaux.

Why, Olmsted demanded, didn't Vaux simply plan to do the Brooklyn park by himself? Vaux's response: “Your objection to the plan is I believe at heart because it involves the idea of common fraternal effort. It is too republican an idea for you, you must have a thick line drawn round your sixpen' worth of individuality. . . . Well! Well!”

Eventually, Vaux grew weary of Olmsted's heel dragging. As the correspondence carried on, he couldn't resist a few zingers. He called Olmsted a “stubborn cemetery maker in California.” In another, Vaux dubbed him “Frederick the Great, Prince of Park Police.” Even these jibes were
carefully crafted—sly, remarkably candid, designed to get what he wanted. He saw Olmsted clearly. Moreover, he knew how Olmsted preferred not to see himself. Vaux let fly: “If I go on and do Brooklyn alone, well or ill, you suffer because the public naturally will say, if Olmsted really was the prime mover in the C. P., why is he not ready to go forward in the path that he started in.”

 

Right in the middle of this epistolary slugfest, another letter arrived from a man of whom Olmsted had never heard: William B. Scott. Olmsted received it in late July 1865. Apparently, the Mariposa Company had reorganized; Scott was the new president. It was the first message Olmsted had received from New York in nearly six months. And it was far simpler and clearer than that earlier Bunsbyish telegram. Under the new management, Scott explained, Olmsted's services were no longer needed. Just like that, any lingering hopes Olmsted had about renewing his work as a gold-mine supervisor were extinguished.

Scott's tenure as president would last just one month. He was replaced, then his replacement replaced, and so it would go. The Mariposa Estate would stagger on for decades to come. No end of people were beguiled by the promise of riches. There was always someone willing to try where others had failed, and soon a company would be formed and investors found, but never much gold, and so the Mariposa mines kept on through endless iterations right up to the eve of World War II. “Its business history,” as historian Allan Nevins once wrote, “is a thorny and profitless maze.”

As for Frémont, he'd go down as one of the nineteenth century's greatest riches-to-rags story. Within a few years, he'd be forced to look to the kindness of his few remaining friends for his next meal and a place to lay his head at night. Once worth $10 million, he died nearly penniless.

 

The seesaw rhythm of Olmsted's life—and indeed of his times—continued. Hot on the heels of Scott's letter came news from Vaux. He had landed a commission to submit a preliminary design for the Brooklyn park. Not only that, but the Central Park board had requested that he and Olmsted return as landscape architects. These were two real jobs
offering real money—the kind of opportunity that might prompt someone to uproot his family again and move back across the continent.

Olmsted replied at once, agreeing to return to New York. In a subsequent letter, Olmsted would rather imperiously ask Vaux to find him a horse and locate suitable housing for his family. There could be no doubt as to the terms of this partnership: It would be Olmsted and Vaux, never Vaux and Olmsted. Vaux didn't mind. There was art to be done, and he knew that he needed Olmsted.

 

Before leaving California, Olmsted had one last act, one that would reverberate through the centuries ahead. It involved his role as chairman of the commission on Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove. In a local paper, he had seen a mention that Schuyler Colfax was planning to visit Yosemite. Colfax was the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Back in 1860, when an overland mail route across the United States was completed, Colfax had planned to commemorate the event with a cross-country trip, ending with a visit to Yosemite. But his plan, like so many other plans, had been interrupted by the Civil War.

At last, Colfax had embarked on his journey. He planned to arrive in the Sierra Nevada in early August. Several journalists were accompanying Colfax, among them reporters for the
New York Tribune
and
Chicago Tribune
, as well as Samuel Bowles. Bowles was the much-respected editor of the
Springfield (Mass.) Republican
and an advocate of brevity when bloated passages were the rule. Olmsted greatly admired Bowles and considered the
Republican
one of the best papers in America.