INTRODUCTION

In the summer of 1863, Frederick Law Olmsted resigned from his position as head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, overseeing the health of the volunteer soldiers in the Union army, to become manager of the Mariposa gold-mining estate in California. His decision was a surprising one for a man known and valued for his service to the nation. In the preceding ten years he had written three influential books on the slaveholding South, been co-designer and architect-in-chief of Central Park in New York, and served as the principal administrator of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the largest philanthropic organization the country had ever seen. Olmsted justified his acceptance of the lucrative position of manager of the 44,000-acre Mariposa Estate by saying that he wanted to free himself from financial worries, and, by proving his abilities as a practical businessman, to command the respect of influential men for his ideas. However, the business aspect of his two years in California failed to meet his expectations. The great bonanza of the Mariposa mines had ended before he arrived, and soon after it hired him, the Mariposa Company cut off his working capital; later it even refused to pay his salary. Yet the writing that Olmsted did in California between 1863 and 1865 proved to be very valuable. It shows a creative man at a difficult turning point in his career, and provides a vivid eyewitness account of the mining frontier by an experienced observer and analyst of American society. It also reveals the response of a great landscape architect to the California landscape: his initial aversion to its dryness, his gradual appreciation of its beauty, and his ultimate development of design principles for regions with limited rainfall.

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Olmsted’s determination to define and foster civilization in America pervades what at first appears to be a disparate collection of personal letters, business and landscape design reports, newspaper articles, and an unfinished book. Confronted with the lawlessness of the frontier, he worked out a concept of civilization based on a sense of community and loyalty to law. Against this standard he measured the behavior he observed at Mariposa: the constant moving from place to place, slipshod work, corrupt elections, and casual violence by white Americans against the Chinese, blacks, and Indians. These phenomena confirmed his New England disposition to believe that emigration to the frontier brought a decline from civilization into barbarism. Yet Olmsted also recorded that the frontier nurtured self-reliance and encouraged basic forms of cooperation.

As an administrator, landscape designer, and journalist, Olmsted applied his energies to enhancing civilization in California. He recognized the challenge of the frontier and looked forward to combatting what he considered its decivilizing tendencies. At Mariposa he opened a reading room on the Estate as an alternative to the saloons and began to create a settled community to replace the scattered “squatterations” he found there. Olmsted was both administrator and observer, seeking to keep the vast mining operations of the Estate on a paying basis while he pondered the development of social order on the 44,000-acre portion of the frontier in his charge. Ever since his journeys through the antebellum South he had been fascinated by the effects of frontier settlement upon society. In 1863 he took up the theme in an account of his travels through the Mississippi Valley. In California he composed a description of the frontier community of Mariposa, and began a treatise on the effect of emigration and the frontier on American society. In the process, he clarified his own definition of civilization.

When failure of the Mariposa Company became imminent, Olmsted turned to other pursuits, including the practice of landscape architecture. Through the series of projects that he began at that time, he translated into the medium of landscape design the concepts of civilization that he was attempting to define. Beginning in 1864, he demonstrated the role a physical planner could play in structuring frontier society and introducing the amenities of civilization. In the San Francisco Bay area he produced models for a cemetery, a residential neighborhood, a college campus, and a city park system. Neither his original design for the Berkeley campus and neighborhood nor his plan for a park system for San Francisco was ultimately carried out, but his reports show how he began to define a distinctive style of landscape architecture appropriate for California and the semiarid American West. The location of the new Yosemite reservation in Mariposa County, as well as Olmsted’s reputation as creator of Central Park, led to his appointment as the head of the first [3]Yosemite Commission. The report on the management of the reservation that he prepared during the summer of 1865 was the first comprehensive statement on the preservation of natural scenery in America.

Olmsted’s two years in California began a turning point in his career. A man in his early forties, he had already started several professions—as writer, publishing executive, park planner, and public administrator. In California he considered this wide range of alternatives for the last time. At the end of his sojourn there, he ruled out administration in government, and could find no suitable opportunity in business. He temporarily joined Edwin L. Godkin in editing the Nation on his return to New York, but eventually Calvert Vaux, eloquent in the cause of landscape architecture and persistent in the pursuit of park jobs, persuaded him to make landscape design his final and greatest profession.

At this time there was no established profession of “landscape architecture,” and in his letters to Vaux, Olmsted argued that the term did not encompass all that he wanted to do. Olmsted’s four design reports in this volume, as well as his attempts to structure the growth of community in Mariposa, show that he intended to shape far more than the landscape. He was an architect of society—a social planner whose special genius lay in determining the ultimate aims of an institution and then spelling out the practical details through which these aims could be achieved.

Olmsted’s broad aim was to end the “sojourning habits” of the frontier and to encourage Californians to put down roots instead of moving on or returning to the East when they had made their fortunes. To this end he called for a wide range of civilized amenities. At Mariposa he planned to establish a reading room, a steam laundry, and well-stocked stores to supply the needs of the population. For the new college town at Berkeley, he proposed houses with “outdoor apartments” that would bring sun and fresh air into domestic life. For San Franciscans he designed a “promenade” where they could gather daily for healthful exercise and friendly meetings. As head of the Yosemite Commission, he proposed a scenic carriage road that would allow the citizens of San Francisco to reach the new reserve and be restored by the lush green landscape of the valley. For intellectual nourishment he laid out a scheme for a book-buying association-an early version of a book-of-the-month club, with books to be selected by thoughtful people such as himself. He also urged Edwin L. Godkin to make his new weekly, the Nation, serve the craving for intellectual stimulation felt by many Americans isolated on the frontier.

Few of these projects were realized, however, and by 1865 Olmsted found himself the victim of a mining swindle that negated his purpose for going to California. The Mariposa Company officers in New York, victims of the former management themselves, not only stopped [4]paying Olmsted the large salary they had promised; they also refused him the means to civilize their domain on the frontier.

With this setback, Olmsted turned his attention to the blossoming civilization in California. Study of the traits of his neighbors in Bear Valley had confirmed his belief that the conditions of pioneer life, rather than democracy, were responsible for the less admirable qualities in the American national character. He had observed this same pioneer condition of society in the slave states and in the crowded cities of the North, but in California he identified its redeeming countermovement. Despite the disrespect for the law and the violence against Indians, Chinese, and blacks that Olmsted witnessed at Mariposa, he came to believe that the frontier gave the independent rural American far more potential for advancing in civilization than his ancestors in the dependent classes of Europe had possessed.

When Olmsted left for Mariposa, his friends protested his departure from the East. “At this special juncture in our National life, I have the gravest objections to your taking yourself out of the centre of affairs, & giving to Mariposa, what belongs to your Country & mankind,” wrote Henry W. Bellows, president of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. “I don’t know a half-dozen men in the whole North, whose influence in the next five years I should think more critically important to the Nation.”]

Many hoped that Olmsted would help administer a program for the freed slaves. He had been an important commentator on the issues of slavery since the 1850s, when, as a newspaper correspondent traveling though the Southern states, he had described the slaves and the slave economy from careful personal observation. Three series of his letters appeared in the New-York Daily Times and the New-York Daily Tribune, and were later published in book form as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, A Journey Through Texas, and A Journey in the Back Country. In 1863 Godkin stated that Olmsted’s letters on the South had “done more to influence public opinion touching the social and economical results of Slavery, than all the rest of the innumerable publications put together.” Early in the Civil War, when the federal government captured the sea islands of South Carolina, Olmsted had sought a position overseeing the slaves. He had also drafted congressional legislation to guide the management of the plantations. Though Olmsted later turned down opportunities to work with the slaves because he perceived that the government was not committed to a comprehensive plan, numerous friends and admirers hoped he might return “when the work of reorganizing the South comes to be done.”

Olmsted had demonstrated his skill as an organizer on New York’s Central Park, which he had designed with Calvert Vaux. Appointed superintendent of the park in 1857, Olmsted had directed the crews clearing [5]the site and had submitted with Vaux the winning entry in a competition for the park’s design. From 1858 to 1861, as the park’s architect-in-chief, Olmsted deployed a work force of hundreds in major earth-moving and construction operations. Drainage systems, lakes, roads, bridges, and terraces were built, and lawns, bushes, and trees were planted. Carefully planned features organized public circulation. Sunken roads routed heavy commercial traffic across the park, and carriage drives were separated from bridle trails and walking paths. To educate citizens in the proper use of the park, Olmsted established a special force of park “keepers,” described at the time as “the first properly disciplined, decently clothed and decently behaved police force which had been seen in the United States.” Central Park was an immediate popular success that many other American cities attempted to duplicate in the decades following the Civil War, and Olmsted was widely recognized for his part in it. The Mariposa Company board of trustees could thus easily justify their choice of Olmsted: “As to their ’Manager,’ and his fitness for the position, they need say no more than refer the public to his great and enduring work of the Central Park, and his acknowledged and widely extended reputation for integrity, ability, and remarkable administrative faculty.”

Olmsted’s reputation as an administrator of large public programs had been further enhanced during the Civil War when he became general secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. For two years he was the chief executive officer of the largest charitable organization in the history of the country. Privately managed and funded but officially recognized by the federal government, the Sanitary Commission began as a board of scientific inquiry and advice to the federal government on the health of Union soldiers. It gradually evolved into a central clearinghouse through which private aid collected from across the North was dispatched to relieve the sick and wounded soldiers of the Union army. The Commission inspected the sanitary conditions of military camps, designed field hospitals, published a directory of sick and wounded soldiers, arranged for soldiers to send their salaries home, and operated hospital ships on the rivers of Virginia during the Peninsula campaign of 1862.

Olmsted was a talented administrator, but at both Central Park and the Sanitary Commission he became dissatisfied with the boards of directors for whom he worked. As a result, he began searching for a position where he would be more independent. Since 1855 he had dreamed of founding a national weekly journal that might influence public opinion. In June 1863 he and Godkin, then a journalist for the London Daily News and the New-York Daily Times, wrote a prospectus for a weekly paper and enlisted the support of a group of influential friends who agreed to recruit stockholders. Prominent Republicans were each asked to contribute at least five hundred dollars to provide working capital for the paper.

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At this point a quirk of fate intervened. In Washington on August 1, 1863, Olmsted met with his old friend Charles A. Dana, then an assistant secretary of war, and discussed the paper project, which was languishing for lack of funds. Dana was the former managing editor of the New-York Daily Tribune and had edited Putnam’s Monthly Magazine with Olmsted in 1855. Though he supported the idea of a new weekly, he doubted that it could succeed. One week later he gave Olmsted an alternative. Mayor George Opdyke of New York, an investor in the Mariposa Company, was seeking a manager for the Mariposa Estate. Dana had declined the position and recommended Olmsted.

At Dana’s request, Olmsted went immediately to New York. The Mariposa Company trustees asked him to become general superintendent of the Mariposa Estate, which they had recently purchased from John Charles Fremont and its other owners. It was a famous property—“perhaps the finest mining property in the world,” Horace Greeley of the New-York Daily Tribune had declared when he visited it in 1859. Located in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the Mariposa Estate lay two hundred miles east of San Francisco across the wide San Joaquin Valley. Originally a Mexican land grant of ten square leagues, Mariposa covered almost seventy square miles. It included seven gold mines, four mills for crushing ore, two company stores, a railroad, and a tenant population estimated at seven thousand.

The Mariposa Company trustees offered Olmsted a salary of $10,000 a year in gold for five years. This was nominally twice what he had received as superintendent of Central Park and at the Sanitary Commission. But it was computed in gold, which in August 1863 was worth at least 20 percent more than greenbacks, the federal paper money in use in the East. He would also receive 100 shares of company stock per year; if these sold at face value, they would bring another $10,000 each year. The trustees promised him “complete, entire, uncontrolled management” of the Estate. They wanted him to decide immediately and to depart for California within a month.

From August 10 to August 20, 1863, Olmsted weighed his prospects with the Mariposa Company. He enlisted his friend Howard Potter to help him assess the Company. Potter, a lawyer and a director of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, was familiar with California affairs. Even at this early juncture, Olmsted discovered disquieting omens. Some “sound California men” were surprised at the claims put forward for the Estate, and Olmsted himself felt some doubts about his future employers. Although he asserted in a note to his wife that “the company is controlled by respectable, steady, careful capitalists,” he admitted, “It is this point only that I am not yet satisfied about.”

Control of the Company lay in the hands of five trustees: Morris Ketchum, George Opdyke, James Hoy, John C. Fremont, and Trenor W. [7]

Park. Ketchum, Opdyke, and Hoy were New York investors; Fremont and Park had each managed the Estate and had been prominent in California politics—though, like many successful Californians, their residence there was temporary. Park would return to build a mansion in his native Vermont after briefing Olmsted on the Estate in October. Fremont had left California at the beginning of the Civil War and was living in New York during the summer of 1863. There is no evidence that Fremont attended the negotiations with Olmsted, whose information apparently came only from Ketchum, Opdyke, and Hoy.

Sixty-seven-year-old Morris Ketchum was the principal investor in the Mariposa Company and its treasurer. He was also head of the private banking firm of Ketchum, Son & Company, which had sold much of the first issue of government bonds for Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase in 1861. His solid reputation in financial circles was one of the chief assets of the Mariposa Company. In January 1863, Ketchum had purchased Fremont’s six-eighths interest in the Mariposa Estate for the $1.5 million necessary to retire the Estate’s debts. Ketchum then sold his interest in the Estate to the Mariposa Company when it was organized that June, and the Company issued $1.5 million in mortgage bonds to repay Ketchum. Olmsted was already well acquainted with George Op-dyke, the wealthy Republican clothing manufacturer who had been mayor of New York since 1862. Opdyke had served on the Sanitary Commission’s [8]central finance committee and twice in 1862 had tried to appoint Olmsted street commissioner for New York. Olmsted was grateful for the mayor’s efforts, even though the city’s aldermen had not confirmed his selection. James Hoy was a New York banker who had traveled to California in the spring of 1863 to negotiate with Fremont’s creditors in California and to inspect the Estate. He saw the mills at the peak of their production; on his return the Mariposa Company was incorporated and he became its president.

Olmsted also knew the legal counsel to the Mariposa Company, David Dudley Field. In 1856 Field had contributed money to Olmsted’s campaign to arm the free-soil settlers in Kansas. The following year Field had signed the petition that led to Olmsted’s appointment as superintendent of Central Park. Field had connections with California through his brother Stephen Johnson Field, a former chief justice of the California Supreme Court and recent appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court. David Dudley Field headed a prominent New York law firm, and his clients included both Ketchum and Fremont. For his services in the incorporation of the Mariposa Company he had received 2,000 shares of stock. Field advised Olmsted that the trustees’ resolution to hire him was the only contract he would find necessary. An uneasy Olmsted reluctantly yielded to Field’s judgment.

Olmsted soon accepted the optimistic view of the Mariposa Estate held by the New Yorkers, and with apparent good reason. In the five months before the sale of the Estate, the mines had produced an average of seventy-five thousand dollars in gold a month, with production exceeding one hundred thousand dollars in May. Reliable experts such as California state geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney and consulting engineer William Ashburner had vouched for the Estate’s potential. James Hoy himself had seen the Princeton Mill produce one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold in May.

Olmsted’s deepest deliberations about the Mariposa job centered on money and power. In August 1863 he claimed that if he died, his wife and four children would be impoverished, and that he owed about twelve thousand dollars to his father and the backers of a failed publishing venture in the 1850s. But this concern for financial gain did not ring true to Olmsted’s friends. It puzzled George Templeton Strong, a member of the Executive Committee of the Sanitary Commission, who recorded in his diary,“Olmsted has not a mercenary nerve in his moral organization, but he has a wife & children to provide for—and he wants the luxury of paying certain debts of the old Putnam’s Magazine concern with which he was connected, for which debts he was never legally liable nor morally liable, so far as I can make out.”Henry W. Bellows considered Olmsted to be one of the very few people “superior to money attractions,” and [9]exhorted him to put “pecuniary temptation” behind him. When he added “You never will be rich, and I am inclined to think you never ought to be,” Olmsted responded with his underlying reasons far wanting financial success:

Suppose I went to California and succeeded as I think I should, and came back in five years with $50,000, well invested. I think there would be two results: first: I should not be under temptation to work for purposes which my own convictions did not approve, as I am now, second: people—capitalists & men controlling capital—would have some real confidence in my practical sagacity, in my judgment of matters of business . . . . The grand inducement to me to go to California is that when I shall have returned, I may not be wholly dependent for the means of making my abilities for patriotic and philanthropic labor, available, on completely satisfying and conquering the judgment of a number of other men.

Olmsted wanted his ideas to prevail and wanted full power to implement them. At Central Park, Comptroller Andrew Haswell Green had thwarted many of his plans, and at the Sanitary Commission he felt that the Executive Committee hampered his work by excessive oversight. He challenged Bellows to provide the proposed weekly paper as an alternative: “Give me the newspaper, untrammelled by obligations to yield my judgement to that of others, in matters in which I think I am wisest, or best informed, and I am content to stay.” Not only did Olmsted demand control of the newspaper; he demanded that Bellows pledge to raise $40,000 to start the enterprise and made it clear that he, Olmsted, should not be expected to repay this sum. Bellows, who had suffered from making similar pledges in the past, understandably refused. He could not compete with the Mariposa Company’s offer of both money and power: $10,000 a year plus “absolute, unqualified control of the whole estate.”

With money and power, Olmsted thought that he might, at least in a small way, bring civilization to the frontier. He was apprehensive about his destination, admitting that “I hate the wilderness & wild, tempestuous, gambling men, such as I shall have to master, & shrink from undertaking to encounter them, as few men would.” Nonetheless, he saw that the Mariposa post would give him an opportunity to wield in California “a powerful & within certain limits controlling influence favorable to religion, good order & civilization.”

The autonomy that the Mariposa trustees conferred on their superintendent was necessary, given the tremendous difficulties of communication between California and New Y ark. At the outbreak of the Civil War, only two states lay west of Texas: California, which had joined the Union in 1850, and Oregon, which had joined in 1859. Between them and the Midwest, an immense area—including most of the Great Plains, [10]all of the Rocky Mountains, and the southwestern deserts—was crossed by only four major trails. Along the edges of this vast unsettled region, pioneers advanced from both east and west.

For Californians the frontier lay to the east because settlement had spread inland from the Pacific coast since the days of Spanish rule. Many Spanish speaking Californians were cattle ranchers who sold hides in coastal towns but grazed their cattle inland. The Mariposa Estate began as “Las Mariposas,” a huge ranch on the eastern frontier granted to former Mexican governor Juan B. Alvarado in 1844. In 1849, two years after John C. Fremont bought the grant, gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Miners flooded the area during the next decade, and in 1859 the discovery of silver in the Comstock Lode caused them to surge farther east into Nevada. When Olmsted arrived, he found pioneer settlers in the California mountains east of the Estate, and referred in his writings to the advanced line of settlement in the Owens River Valley at the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada.

East of that line of settlement, the great uninhabited center of the West hampered communication and made travel arduous. Although the transcontinental railroad had been authorized by Congress in 1862, it would not be completed until 1869; the first rail line eastward from Sacramento was laid two weeks after Olmsted arrived in California in October 1863. The United States mail from San Francisco to New York went by sea via Panama or overland; Olmsted would send important documents in duplicate, one by sea and one by land. The Panama route normally took a month, and was subject to the perils of the sea. The overland mail also took about a month and was often delayed by storms or hostile Indians. In 1861 the completion of a telegraph line from New York to San Francisco made the Pony Express obsolete after eighteen months of operation, by relaying messages across the country in one or two days. But Olmsted in California could not depend upon the telegraph; it was too expensive for ordinary use, and Indians or snowstorms could break the wires. Furthermore, no line ran to Mariposa, isolated at the southern tip of the Mother Lode region. Though Olmsted ordered a line to the Estate as soon as he arrived, the telegraph company required an advance of $2,500, and the line was not built during his tenure. When financial crisis threatened the Mariposa Company in 1865, Olmsted had no choice but to visit San Francisco to meet the Company’s bankers and telegraph New York from there. At this crucial point the line was down for nearly three weeks.

Given the difficulties of overland travel in 1863, Olmsted sailed to California via Panama. Leaving his wife Mary and four children to follow once he was settled, he sailed from New York on the Champion, a dirty, unsafe side-wheel steamer owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose [11]disdain for passenger safety and convenience was notorious. The Panama Canal would not be built for another four decades; Olmsted crossed the isthmus in the open cars of the Panama Railroad. The luxuriant tropical vegetation captivated him. “I have never had a more complete satisfaction and delight of my love of nature,” he exclaimed. Seldom in his writing was Olmsted so openly lyrical and emotional as in his letters from Panama. To his wife he wrote: “The passing veils of the showers and the outbursting sun-shafts add to the dizzy gorgeousness of the foliage. It has excited me very much.” Reaching the Pacific Ocean, he boarded the Constitution, a cleaner and more spacious side-wheeler owned by the reputable Pacific Mail Steamship Company, for the trip up the coast to San Francisco. As on his journeys through the Southern states and an earlier walking tour through England, he carefully recorded his observations of society. He noted a neighborly informality in the community of his fellow passengers and thought it compared favorably with the class-conscious behavior of passengers on a British steamer. The good nature of the women and the absence of scandal and gossip helped him to “better understand the attractiveness of California.” To him it was “an ideal Democracy.”

As Olmsted landed in San Francisco and was fighting his way through the crowd on the wharf, a horse kicked his lame left leg, which had been badly broken in 1860. The injury, which was not serious, was the least of several shocks that Olmsted sustained upon arriving in California. Even the landscape on first view seemed ominous. With the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics fresh in his mind, Olmsted sailed through the Golden Gate—the entrance to San Francisco Bay named by John Fremont—and noted the mountainous hills on each side “perfectly bare of trees or shrubs—and almost awfully bleak.” In 1863 the town of San Francisco straggled over a range of sand hills. Though legally it covered the whole tip of the peninsula, only the northeast quarter had been built up. The streets ran straight up and down the hills; the rectangular grid pattern made no provision for the steep grades or for shelter from the wind. The wind blew dust and sand wherever there was no pavement or building. Except for the flowers that grew profusely in dooryards where homeowners watered them, the landscape was devoid of vegetation. Adding to the starkness of the landscape was the fact that California was in the midst of a devastating drought, the most severe in thirteen years..

Upon his arrival, Olmsted met with Frederick Billings, a San Francisco lawyer who had received one-eighth of the Mariposa Company’s stock in exchange for the one-eighth part of the Mariposa Estate he had previously owned. Billings informed Olmsted that the monthly production of the mines, which had exceeded one hundred thousand dollars per month before the sale, had dropped to twenty-five thousand dollars. Together Olmsted and Billings traveled to the Estate, sailing by [12]steamer to Stockton and driving a rented carriage across the parched San Joaquin Valley to the headquarters of the Estate at Bear Valley. The trip left Olmsted with a powerful impression of California’s semiarid climate at its worst. The fertile San Joaquin Valley, which irrigation has now transformed into one of the leading agricultural regions of the world, was in 1863 a “dead flat, dead brown prairie,” and Olmsted compared the trip to “the most desolate dreary, tiresome journey I ever made.” When he reached the Mariposa Estate, barren outcroppings of slate confronted him and heaps of tailings reminded him of children’s graves. He cautioned his wife that “a region possessing less of fertility—less of living nature—you scarce ever saw.”

The condition of the Mariposa Estate was equally a shock to Olmsted. The Company trustees had assured Olmsted when he accepted their position in August that the Estate was producing a profit of $60,000 per month over current expenses. He soon discovered from the account books that it had not even been paying expenses at the time.

Had the sale been fraudulent? Olmsted checked the bank receipts and found that the high yields of the Estate in the six months before the sale had in no way been exaggerated. Trenor Park, who visited the Estate for a few days before departing for Vermont, explained the drop in production. He admitted that he had managed the mines in order to recover the money he had loaned to Fremont. He had concentrated on working proven veins, and had been fortunate in discovering rich ore at the Princeton Mine, which accounted for 90 percent of the high yields in the first half of 1863. He had neglected or deferred all expenses related to the long-term development of the Estate.

Yet another ominous event occurred two weeks after Olmsted’s arrival, when he received legal notice that Cornelius K. Garrison was suing to gain possession of seven-eighths of the Estate. This was probably the first hint given to Olmsted of the lien on the Mariposa Company’s title to the Estate which would drain the Company’s finances and bring it close to bankruptcy in 1865. Garrison’s claim stemmed from an old debt of $7,847 which John C. Fremont had failed to pay to a Los Angeles cattle rancher named Francisco Ocampo in the 1850s. In settlement of the debt, title to the Estate had passed to Ocampo at a sheriffs sale in November 1858. Mark Brumagim, a San Francisco banker and another of Fremont’s creditors, later bought the title from Ocampo and sold one-eighth of it. Fremont had negotiated a right to repurchase Brumagim’s seven-eighths of the title by paying his debt to Brumagim at an interest of 2 percent a month, but he had not paid the debt. Both the debt and the right to redeem the title had passed to the Mariposa Company. By November 1863 the high rate of interest had increased the amount owed to Brumagim to $308,000 in gold. Moreover, since gold had greatly increased in value compared to greenbacks, Brumagim, like most California [13]businessmen, refused to accept the paper currency. Although the Mariposa Company had sold $1.5 million in bonds to payoff its California creditors, the rise in the value of gold meant that the capital, collected in greenbacks, fell short of the need.

Mark Brumagim assigned his claim to his creditor Cornelius K. Garrison, a New York financier and associate of Cornelius Vanderbilt in the shipping trade between New York and San Francisco. Garrison had made an agreement with Brumagim to collect the $308,000 from the Mariposa Company trustees or to eject the Company from the Estate and sell it; in either case he would divide the proceeds with Brumagim. The Mariposa Company tried to stop Garrison’s maneuver with an injunction, but the injunction was dissolved in February 1864. The Company must have decided that the Garrison-Brumagim claim to its title was well founded, for it settled with Garrison at a high price. On June 22, 1864, it paid him $100,000 in gold, a sum worth twice that amount in greenbacks. The Company also promised Garrison an additional $200,000 in gold in installments over the next four years. Only the final delivery of that gold would clear the Company’s title to the Estate.

The costly settlement with Garrison had serious consequences for Olmsted. In New York the directors had assured him that $300,000 out of the $1.5 million from the bonds would be available to him as working capital. In December 1863 Morris Ketchum broke the news that the payment of debts would absorb the entire $1.5 million. As a result, the Company was depending on the output of the mines to develop the Estate. Thus Olmsted’s two sources of operating revenue—the production of the mines and the bonds in New York—had dwindled to virtually nothing.

Undeterred by the lack of funds, or perhaps unwilling to believe it to be permanent, Olmsted began developing the Estate. In a detailed general report, dated January 1, 1864, he explained the low current production and outlined his plan of action. In contrast to Park, who had operated the Estate merely to seize immediate profits, Olmsted proposed to operate it in the permanent interests of the Company. He would distribute its investment over a number of mines and mills instead of concentrating on the Princeton Mine. Whether he would be able to regain Park’s level of production depended on how much gold remained underground; to determine that, he would have to undertake previously deferred maintenance and explore new veins. Naturally, this would cost money. Concluding his report, he noted that the value of the Estate “must depend in a great measure upon the amount of capital which can be commanded for its development and exploitation.”

Olmsted’s call for large expenditures echoed the proverb that“takes a mine to run a mine.” But he was also adopting the advice of some of California’s leading mining experts. Josiah Dwight Whitney, Yale [14]professor and California state geologist, had declared that the gold production of the Estate would be limited only by the capital spent to build mills, roads, and mines. Beginning in November 1863, William Ashburner, confidential mining engineer of the leading bankers of San Francisco and former member of the California Geological Survey, advised Olmsted on the operation of the Estate. Ashburner fully approved of the Manager’s General Report and urged Olmsted to build a large new stamp mill near the town of Mariposa. Benjamin Silliman, Jr., nationally known mining expert and professor at Yale, visited the Mariposa Estate in May 1864. He stressed the need to keep exploration in advance of extraction. Silliman’s highly encouraging report to the Mariposa trustees emphasized the vast potential of the Estate and the corresponding amount of active capital its development would demand. “Your manager fully appreciates these views,” added Silliman, “and his plans now in progress of development, will not fail to secure the early and permanent prosperity of the Mariposa Estate.”

Olmsted’s first project for developing the Estate was to bring water to it by a canal. The only sources of water were the Merced River, at the northern tip of the Estate, and a few nearly dry creeks. A canal route had once been surveyed from the South Fork of the Merced River in the mountains to the east. Within a month of his arrival at Mariposa, Olmsted led an expedition to the South Fork to reassess the route. With a canal from the South Fork, timber from the Sierra forests could be floated down to fuel the stamp mills and reinforce the mine shafts. Surface (or placer) miners who used that water for their pans and sluice boxes would pay license fees for mining on the Estate’s land. An ample water supply would allow agricultural ventures to supplement mining and provide an additional source of income for the Estate. Olmsted predicted that the Estate would double in population and become the “business emporium of a very large agricultural district.” Perhaps he even considered hydraulic mining with giant hoses, for the day after he arrived he wrote, “I am germinating great plans of washing all the gold out of the surface of the valley and then, making a garden of the debris.” The cost of a canal to the Estate, he estimated, would be at least one million dollars.

Olmsted proceeded to reform the management of the Estate according to what he viewed as sound business principles. He began extensive tunneling and exploration, studied new mining and milling techniques, and sent his chief engineer, John H. Pieper, to Grass Valley, the most important center of gold mining in California, to learn amalgamation techniques that might improve the Estate’s inefficient process of separating gold from ore. He created a central staff that was responsible for Estate-wide bookkeeping and administration. Members of this staff, such as John Pieper and the chief accountant, Howard A. Martin, had no [15]experience in mining, but they had been Olmsted’s trusted subordinates at Central Park or the Sanitary Commission.

Olmsted also confronted the problems of labor on the Estate. He studied labor costs and discovered that the Mariposa Company paid its miners higher wages than any other mining company in the state. On March 1, 1864, he lowered miners’ wages by 2 percent, to a maximum of $3.15 per day; other laborers underground would receive a maximum of $2.40. Although he did not announce it, Olmsted planned to reduce the proportion of miners by increasing the number of laborers. Some of these laborers would be Chinese, whom he intended to pay only $1.75 per day. To his surprise, the men organized a strike. Strikers beat some of the men who remained at work, and threatened others. When the strikers met with Olmsted, they demanded a return to the old rates. Olmsted refused to compromise, asserting that to establish a sound working community he had to change the habits of labor established in the years under Fremont and Park.

The local miners had profoundly mistrusted Frémont, and for good reason. Mariposa had been a financial windfall for the young army explorer who bought it for $3,000 during the last months of Mexican rule in 1847. The original Las Mariposas grant was a, “floating grant” of ten square leagues, to be located anywhere between the San Joaquin, Merced, and Chowchilla rivers and the Sierra Nevada. After gold was discovered on Mariposa Creek in 1849, many miners, operating on their own or on shares with Frémont, received rich rewards from placer or quartz mining in the area. Frémont’s title was not clear until 1856, for, like all those who had owned land under Mexican rule, he was required by the treaty that ended the Mexican War to prove his title before the U.S. Land Commission. In 1856, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally confirmed Frémont’s title and his right to set the boundaries of the floating grant, Frémont shifted his boundaries to include the valuable Pine Tree, Josephine, and Princeton mines, and several others that had been in the undisputed possession of other miners. The new boundaries aroused much bitterness and a dispute over whether Frémont owned the mineral rights to his land at all. Under Mexican law, ownership of land did not confer legal rights to any minerals found on that land; the same held true for public land under U.S. law. Since most of the gold in California was located on public land, miners were accustomed to staking legitimate claims on land they did not own. But in 1859 the California Supreme Court confirmed Frémont’s right to the minerals on his private estate. When Frémont attempted to oust the miners, armed violence broke out. Mines were fortified, tunnels barricaded, and several men killed before Frémont, with the courts on his side, prevailed.

Olmsted did not perceive the striking miners as victims of the law when he confronted them at the doors of the Princeton Mine in [16] 1864. He considered the strike to be an illegal proceeding, and felt he was combatting the violent, extravagant, undisciplined habits fostered by the frontier. Since his arrival in Bear Valley he had been observing the traits of men attracted to the frontier. He regarded the ringleaders of this strike as habitually undisciplined workers who had gravitated to Mariposa because they were unfit for mare settled communities. As he told the president of the Mariposa Company:

There is a considerable body of men here—“old Californians” who have once been paid five to ten dollars per day and, when they came here received from Fremont $4 or $4.50 per day, and did much as they pleased about work. These men are by habit discontented and unwilling workers. They hate regularity, order and discipline, and they influence the whole body of our hands. They have never done with their recollections of the days when the working miners governed matters as they wished, with revolvers in their belts as they worked. We have got to get the better of these traditions of the Estate and to get rid of the men who sustain them before we can have even the beginning of a sound working community.

Olmsted ended the strike by paying off in full all workers who were unwilling to remain at the new rates and by advertising for new employees in the San Francisco newspapers. He procured warrants against four leaders of the strike and sent deputy sheriffs after them, while warning the county magistrates and justices that he would hold them liable for any damage done to the Estate by mobs. He kept firearms ready but out of sight. Almost half the miners quit; slowly the others went back to work.

Although he reduced wages, Olmsted introduced a number of measures to improve the living conditions of the miners. He lowered the rates at the Company boarding houses and promised that they would no longer be operated for profit. He purchased a well-stocked general store in the town of Mariposa, bringing the number of Company stores on the Estate to three. When he was criticized for attempting to create a monopoly, he explained in the Mariposa Gazette that since the Company could make large wholesale purchases in New Yark, its stores would be able to offer better goods at lower prices. To demonstrate his good faith, he announced that the Company would sell its goods at wholesale prices to independent storekeepers. Olmsted even concerned himself with the miners’ cleanliness. He wrote to a Shaker community in New Hampshire, an early manufacturer of laundry machines, asking them to suggest a system of washing and ironing equipment that might be operated from the steam mills on the Estate. Olmsted also undertook measures he thought would produce a better-educated and disciplined work force at Mariposa. He commissioned his friend Godkin in New York to subscribe to a variety of English and American periodicals for a reading room in [17]the town of Princeton, which he hoped might draw some miners away from the saloons.

The prospect of developing a community intrigued Olmsted, and he wanted his old friends and associates to join him. To Godkin he spoke of establishing a “decent little community of good fellows & their wives & children here.” He promised to invite Frederick Knapp, his good friend from the Sanitary Commission, if the trustees would let him build a canal. “I think it will come, and with it you & civilization,” he wrote Knapp in November 1863. He asked Ignaz Pilat, chief gardener at Central Park, to recruit someone to start a nursery on the Estate. He guaranteed a Sanitary Commission doctor $2,000 a year to establish a practice on the Estate. He also hoped to offer an alternative to the hastily built towns, camps, and “squatterations” that existed on the Estate. He planned to locate a new house for himself and his family outside the existing settlements, so that a new and healthier community might crystallize around it.

Although Olmsted never built a house on the Estate, the arrival of his wife and children in March 1864 brought him the domestic life he considered to be the foundation of community. Mary Cleveland Perkins Olmsted brought with her a sizable entourage. Thirty-four years old, she had been married to Olmsted’s younger brother John Hull Olmsted until he died of tuberculosis in 1857. Her three children by that marriage were John Charles, age eleven, Charlotte, age nine, and Owen Frederick, age six. Olmsted was the father of Marion, a little girl of two. Also in the party that arrived by steamer from Panama were Mary’s seventeen-year-old cousin Henry Cleveland Perkins, who was to be Olmsted’s private secretary; a maid named Bridget; and Harriet Errington, a fifty-two-year-old Englishwoman who had run a school on Staten Island. Miss Erring-ton, a science teacher and amateur botanist and paleontologist, had agreed to serve as governess to the Olmsted children in California.

Arriving on the Estate with the spring rains, the family set up housekeeping in Bear Valley. They lived across from the Oso House hotel in eight or ten large rooms over the Company store. Their needs were well supplied. They had purchased black walnut furniture in San Francisco, and Olmsted’s office at the end of their suite was large and carpeted. They ate excellent meals at the Oso House, or Olmsted’s French servant, Charles, prepared meals for them at home. Olmsted’s health began to improve. While writing his extensive report to the Mariposa trustees, he had frequently felt “pen-sick,” and a San Francisco doctor had diagnosed his problem as an enlarged heart. But the family brought domestic comfort. Soon after they arrived, Mary wrote Olmsted’s father that “Fred is lying on his office sofa and Henry P and I are arranged in a row at the office table performing the duties of private secretaries.” [18]Harriet Errington supervised the children’s daily lessons, and every day the family rode or drove on an excursion. The children enjoyed the outdoor freedom; Mary described the youngest ones “coming down the mountain all three on the donkey last evening singing and shouting with their hands full of flowers.” Charlotte took piano lessons, John sketched, and all the children sang together on Saturdays. Their friends at the Sanitary Commission had sent them books; the children read Quentin Durward and The Swiss Family Robinson, while the adults enjoyed Dickens and tackled Buckle’s History of Civilization.

Despite Olmsted’s emphasis on the virtues of domesticity, his marriage was a practical relationship, begun out of responsibility to his brother. Just before dying in 1857, John Hull Olmsted had written him, “I never have known a better friendship than ours has been,” and added, “Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive.” Six months later Olmsted married his brother’s widow, but during the first five years of their marriage he was constantly preoccupied with developing Central Park and managing the Sanitary Commission. Isolated together in California, however, the family seemed to thrive. The outdoor life and relative luxury improved their spirits. After ten months Olmsted told Mary, “We have lived so very happily of late, & you & the children are doing so well, I shall be disposed to stay as long as possible at Bear Valley.” Late in 1865 he was called upon to plan a college campus and residential neighborhood in Berkeley. Perhaps reflecting on his Bear Valley experience, he declared in his report for that project that scholars should be surrounded by “manifestations of refined domestic life, these being unquestionably the ripest and best fruits of civilization.”

Occasionally visitors arrived in Bear Valley from the outside world. When Thomas Starr King died suddenly of diphtheria in March 1864, Henry Bellows, president of the Sanitary Commission, traveled to California to take King’s pulpit at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco until a replacement arrived. King had been the mainstay of the Sanitary Commission on the West Coast, so Bellows toured the Pacific states to encourage continued contributions. On his way from the Yosemite Valley to San Francisco, Bellows stopped to visit Olmsted in Bear Valley. In a long letter to their friends on the Executive Committee of the Sanitary Commission, Bellows summed up his view of the manager of the Mariposa Estate:

Of course the undeveloped State of Society grieves & annoys him—but he is master of his time, sees his family comfortable, & altho engaged in a kind of work very foreign to his refined tastes & humane social tendencies, & which is sadly disconnected with his past history, he yet has a great field of executive & administrative duty & of general usefulness. He is a kind of little monarch here; has his own horses & servants at command, is universally well-spoken of & respected—conquered in that strike business, has [19]reduced wages, improved comfort among the men, retains the best workmen,. . . & on the whole is much better situated than I feared to find him.

Although Bellows thought that Olmsted was “universally well-spoken of,” some local residents saw him in a different light. Before leaving for the East, Trenor Park had arranged with a number of his Mariposa friends to send him regular reports about progress on the Estate. The letters that have survived confirm many of Olmsted’s own statements about his management of the Estate, but the writers judged his management by different standards. Park’s informants were mine and store managers who disliked being subordinate to Olmsted’s central staff. Jewett Adams, former manager of the Bear Valley store, reported to Park in February 1864 that

. . . there is a wide difference between the present and past management of this estate. The present managers appear to be very distrustful of any person who enjoyed any of your confidence or esteem. If they desire any information their actions show they prefer to gain it at a costly experience to the estate than solicit or receive the advice of experienced & competent persons.

Adams conversed with several of the mine managers, including Silas Williams, whom Olmsted considered the best superintendent on the Estate. Contrary to Bellows’s belief that Olmsted was retaining the most experienced men, Adams found that none planned to remain longer than July 1864. Silas Williams, in fact, left soon after the strike in March.

Park’s correspondents regarded Olmsted’s development of the Estate as foolish and extravagant “devil-up-ment.” Adams gave an illustration to Park:

Another of Mr Olmsted, Martin & Piepers’ enterprises is the tunnell they are running at the Mariposa Mine, it will cost between twenty and thirty thousand dollars and will only open about one hundred and ten feet new ground, which ground could be opened by sinking a shaft at an expense of two thousand dollars. Their argument is that with the tunnell which will connect the mill and the mine they will be able to deliver the rock at the mill at much less expense than to hoist it up a shaft and then haul it to the mill, which argument is good to the extent of about eight thousand dollars but it is usually considered a poor trade to purchase 8000$ economy at an expense of 30,000$. I can see nothing that they have done since they have come here, but what has been done on the same principles.

A new mill that was completed at Mariposa in August 1864 came in for special ridicule, despite the fact that Olmsted had acted on expert advice in constructing it. That May, Professor Silliman had called the Mariposa vein “on the whole, the most remarkable auriferous vein yet developed on the Mariposa estate”; William Ashburner had recommended [20]building a mill with fifty stamps in order to work the vein on a larger scale. “Everything is to be gotten up in the grandest style imaginable without regard to expense,” wrote Silas Williams’s son Hannibal to Trenor Park. “As a money making speculation it cannot fail to turn out poorly.” The completed building was large and well arranged, with white-painted wood and glass windows. Jewett Adams observed that “many speak of it as surpassing any mill in the state, but many question the mine warranting such an expenditure.”

The skeptical miners were right. The new Mariposa mine and mill did very poorly compared to the expectations of Olmsted and his advisers, and their poor production that fall brought Olmsted’s development of the Estate to a close. The new mine and mill cost the Company $150,000, less than the amount Olmsted had budgeted in his January general report, but they produced only a small amount of gold. For some time the trustees had been insisting that Olmsted retrench. Early in 1864 they had deferred the canal project indefinitely. They considered his purchase of the Mariposa store to be unnecessary, and refused to buy stock for it in New York.

In the summer of 1864 heat and drought encouraged the Olmsted family to explore the Sierra Nevada. The drought of 1862–64 proved to be the most disastrous in California’s first forty years of statehood. Crops failed over vast areas, and hundreds of thousands of cattle died of starvation or had to be slaughtered. In Mariposa the heat and the dust deepened. On Sundays the Olmsted family climbed up to a camp just over the crest of Mount Bullion, where they read or wrote letters by a cool spring and surveyed the Sierra Nevada spread out before them to the east. When the heat on the Estate became insufferable in July, they escaped by moving eastward into the cool Sierra forests. They left Mariposa on July 14 with a party of eleven people, including the geologist William Ashburner and his wife, Emilia, the governess Harriet Errington, and Bell, a black cook, groom, and guide. After a two-day journey their train of twenty-one horses and baggage mules arrived at Galen Clark’s ranch on the South Fork of the Merced River (now Wawona in Yosemite National Park). Near the cabin of Galen Clark, an amiable and industrious frontiersman from New England, the Olmsteds set up their base camp. Although Olmsted returned several times to the Estate, the family remained in the mountains for seven weeks.

Clark’s Ranch on the South Fork was a rendezvous for frontier travelers. While the Olmsteds were there, some sixty Indians arrived for an annual tribal gathering. Several members of the California Geological Survey’s field parties also appeared at Clark’s Ranch that summer. The survey, which had been funded by the California legislature since 1860, was in the process of mapping the state and reporting on its mineral and [21]natural resources. Its leader, state geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney, was a man of eminent scientific qualifications, and many of his staff members were or became important in American science and exploration. In the summer of 1864 Whitney had gone east to oversee publication of the survey’s work. He left the field parties under the direction of the thirty-five-year-old botanist William Brewer, who had recently been appointed to the Chair of Agriculture at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School. Working for Brewer as volunteers were James Terry Gardner and Clarence King, twenty-two-year-old former students at the Sheffield Scientific School who had traveled overland to California the previous summer. King had worked on the Mariposa Estate and would later found the Fortieth Parallel Survey and become the first head of the U.S. Geological Survey.

From Clark’s Ranch, Olmsted and his family visited the Mariposa Big Tree Grove and the Yosemite Valley, two of the most famous natural wonders of the Pacific slope. In 1851 white men had entered the Yosemite Valley for the first time when a company of militia had pursued some Indians into their mountain stronghold. In 1852 a party of prospectors had discovered the Mariposa Grove of 600 giant sequoias near the South Fork of the Merced. The Olmsted party explored the grove in 1864, measuring cones and trunks, and Olmsted and his wife rode with Clark to the larger Fresno Grove to the southeast. There, Olmsted declared, “the night scene-those noble shafts lighted dimly by our camp-fire, was one of the most sublime I have seen.”

In mid-August the Olmsteds reached the Yosemite Valley for the first time. Looking down into this massive cleft in the Sierra Nevada, they could see the Merced River winding through level meadows on the valley floor. The softness and delicacy of the valley in the late summer took Olmsted by surprise. The smoky atmosphere, the “softly tinted chalky quality” of the great cliff El Capitan, the green tracery and shelter of the trees, the meadows and placid stream—all made the valley seem ethereal and translucent, “the awfulness of the chasm forgotten in the tender beauty with which it is clothed.” The Olmsteds pitched their camp opposite the Yosemite Falls and stayed for three weeks. Here, for the first time in California, Olmsted found the green and pastoral landscape he loved.

At the end of August, Olmsted took a week’s expedition into the High Sierra with William Brewer and twelve-year-old John Charles Olmsted. They rode above and east of the Yosemite Valley through the Tuolumne Meadows toward what is now Mono Pass on the eastern border of Yosemite National Park. North of the pass they climbed a mountain that Olmsted named for his friend Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, a scientist and member of the Sanitary Commission. This region of bare, glaciated rocks and arctic vegetation differed greatly from the pastoral valley below. The scenery was grand, or sublime—not in human scale, [22]not to be molded or imitated by man, but simply to be viewed with awe.

On June 30, 1864, the U.S. Congress had deeded the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California. The two sites were granted to the state on the express condition that they be held inalienable for all time “for public use, resort and recreation.” This legislation was the first to reserve one of America’s future national parks for public use. It has been assumed that Olmsted actively participated in the movement to secure the legislation, but there is no evidence of this in his papers, and he made no such claim at any time. Moreover, he did not visit the valley until after the bill had been passed.

Though Olmsted was not involved in the passage of the Yosemite legislation, he did become head of the first Yosemite Commission. On September 28, 1864, Gov. Frederick F. Low appointed him and seven others to serve on a commission to manage the valley and the grove. No official document naming Olmsted chairman has come to light, perhaps because the federal grant made the governor a member of the commission and he was considered its official head. But Low clearly asked Olmsted to act as chairman. In Low’s proclamation about the commission, Olmsted’s name led the list of members, and Olmsted was to receive all correspondence. He arranged the meetings and wrote the commission’s first report in 1865. On October 16, 1864, Olmsted wrote his father, “You will see the Governor has made me head of the Yo Semite Commission,” and thereafter he consistently referred to himself as its chairman.

Olmsted’s first duty as chairman was to oversee a survey of the boundaries of the land grant. James Terry Gardner, the young California Geological Survey volunteer, now a U.S. deputy surveyor, was put in charge of a small survey party, assisted by Clarence King. They started from Mariposa on September 28 and worked until winter storms drove them out of the mountains in November. They laid the boundaries according to the federal grant: the Yosemite Valley border was fixed one mile back from the edges of the gorge, and a tract of four square miles was drawn to contain the Mariposa Grove. Olmsted was particularly concerned about the roads by which the public would approach the reserve and travel the fifteen-mile distance between its two sections. He directed Clarence King to work outside the boundaries of the grant and survey the best stagecoach route from the town of Mariposa to Galen Clark’s ranch and from the Big Trees to the Yosemite Valley. Olmsted planned to ask Congress to cede more land for these routes, and in the 1865 report of the Yosemite Commission to the California legislature he proposed that the state spend $25,000 of a $37,000 budget to construct these roads. He envisioned a system of connected scenic reserves, but such a wilderness park system was too expensive, and Olmsted would be too far away to fight for it. In November 1865, within a week of Olmsted’s [23]return to New York, three members of the Yosemite Commission—Josiah Whitney, Israel Raymond, and William Ashburner—met informally in San Francisco. They decided unanimously, as they reported to the governor, “that it was not expedient, at present, to lay the report before the legislature, or to call for an appropriation so large as $37.000, the sum demanded by Mr Olmsted.” Olmsted’s report was thus suppressed by a minority of the commission, and he had no effective opportunity to revive it thereafter. The reserve came to be managed according to different principles than those he had proposed, and the scenic road into Yosemite Valley that he had envisioned was never constructed.

In addition to launching the Yosemite Commission in the fall of 1864, Olmsted was caught up in the nation’s presidential campaign. In his letters from California, he commented on several of the candidates. He wrote favorably of Abraham Lincoln, and reserved his most scathing remarks for John C. Frémont. In a letter to his friend Friedrich Kapp, an influential member of the German community who was backing Frémont, he summarized Frémont’s reputation in California: “Of his character there is only one opinion; that is, that he is a selfish, treacherous, unmitigated scoundrel. He is credited with but one manly virtue, courage or audacity; with but one talent, persuasiveness. Since I have been in California I have not found a man to speak well of him.”

Although California had joined the Union as a free state, many vocal Southerners lived in Mariposa and the surrounding counties. As the election approached, Olmsted, California’s governor, and the state’s attorney general were on their guard against violence. Prompt mobilization of the U.S. Army in California following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter had discouraged attempts at rebellion in the state, but secret disloyal organizations persisted. The Confederate sympathizers-called “Secesh” or “Copperheads” by their opponents—joined the Democratic party and campaigned for George McClellan. Those who supported the Union war effort—both Republicans and Democrats—joined the California Union party and campaigned for Lincoln.

Returning from the High Sierra in September, Olmsted heard rumors of an insurrectionary movement that might be used for robbery on a large scale. The threat of robbery was serious enough that Wells, Fargo & Company refused to transport Mariposa Company bullion to the U.S. Mint in San Francisco, forcing Olmsted and William Brewer to carry $28,000 in gold to Stockton in Olmsted’s private carriage. On reaching San Francisco, Olmsted presented Gov. Frederick F. Low and Gen. Irwin McDowell, commander of the Army of the Pacific, a petition from Mariposa County authorities for military protection. Their request was granted; a company of cavalry was stationed near Olmsted’s headquarters at Bear Valley for five weeks.

[24]

As the election neared, Olmsted took part in the campaign in characteristic ways. Both parties staged mass rallies; the night of the Union party meeting in Bear Valley, the Olmsted residence on the main street was brightly lit. Olmsted declined to speak publicly, but he wrote to Charles James of the Union party central committee urging him to send a strong speaker to the Estate. When James Lawrence, editor of the Democratic Mariposa Free Press accused the Mariposa Company of hiring only Lincoln men, Olmsted responded with a letter to the editor of the Union Mariposa Gazette. Though he supported Lincoln, Olmsted made it clear that he would “exercise no influence upon any voter except such as may be addressed to his self respect and his understanding.” He exhorted Company employees to compare the claims of the candidates and study the party platforms in perfect freedom, “let the result be what it may.”

The effectiveness of this stance was a matter of local debate. The attorney general of the state, John McCullough, who had lived in Mariposa, offered this wry reaction:

I read your communication to the Gazette replying to some charges of Lawrence—& only think that he is entirely incapable of in the least appreciating the sentiments expressed, or the motives that actuated them, & were it in his power to lift himself to that eminence he lacks the manliness & political honesty, to express his real thoughts. Kid gloves are lost in dealing with his race . . . . Your communication doubtless did good in the county, beside setting yourself right, but was lost on Lawrence as most likely you knew.

Olmsted’s stand against political patronage also mystified the local members of his own party. It was the opposite of that of Trenor Park, who had run for the U.S. Senate while managing the Estate. Robert Miller, former accountant of the Estate, wrote Park in exasperation, confirming that Olmsted and his central staff were indeed practicing what Olmsted preached in the Gazette:

The manager and those directly connected with the office: Arm-stead, Martin, Peiper & Petra ski do not have anything to do with politics, as I suppose it is too dirty work for them to meddle with, and are really so reserved that the Copperheads claim them to belong to their party, which is not the case. They are Union men at least they told me so, and have a vote the same as any other man that is a citizen but do not have the least particle of influence with any of the employees, if he is a Union man all well if he is a traitor all right. It is a burning shame that with the patronage of the Estate the County could be strong Union but it is right the reverse, the strongest Copperhead per cent in the County is on the Estate Princeton & Bear Valley. They are going to beat us bad this fall I should not be surprised if 200.

[25]

Lincoln did lose to McClellan in Mariposa County, but Olmsted felt he had done his best. As he exulted to Godkin:

The election here was really sublime. I went in actively at last, writing for the papers, &c—and am told I helped. We lost the county by 75. I have put myself at swords’ points with the secessionists. There was no bloodshed, because each party was too well prepared for thorough work if it began. I had a good supply of arms ready & let them know it.

Later he was less impressed with his own effectiveness. To his friend Frederick Knapp, who was in the East with the Sanitary Commission, he reflected:

To me living here among the snarling traitors—out & out—your atmosphere is sunshine and I get warm in looking into it.

Our little county—little in citizens, great in space—went for McClellan . . . & would have equally for the devil if Jeff Davis would have been better served so.

In the final weeks of 1864 all the problems of the Mariposa Company converged, leading to financial crisis and the end of Olmsted’s hopes for the Estate. First, the production of the mines fell off sharply. Not only did the Mariposa Mine fail to meet expectations, but in December the Princeton Mine, which had once produced more than any other mine in California, dropped to the very low yield of $10 per ton. The Estate had not run out of gold—it produced $480,000 in bullion in the course of 1864—but the year’s expenses totaled $831,000.

Olmsted was not apologetic. He had budgeted $897,760 for expenses in 1864, and had spent about $66,000 less than that. He was counting on the promises that Ketchum, Opdyke, and Hoy had made to him before he accepted the position as manager. They had assured him that “if the mines should fail to meet expectations (a contingency which I had very distinctly in view), that no undertakings in which I might engage should be dropped prematurely from want of capital or for other reasons . . . .“ He believed that this promise had never been rescinded. Yet he had been warned about the Company’s finances numerous times in 1864. In January he received Morris Ketchum’s first private letters, which told him to retrench. In February the trustees postponed the canal project indefinitely. When Olmsted bought the Mariposa Company store and its stock in June, Hoy complained that “your drafts deplete our finances terribly,” and Farlee suggested that Olmsted discontinue storekeeping altogether.

Moreover, expenses in 1864 had continued to rise. In August the Mariposa County supervisors, with a Democratic majority, nearly doubled the tax assessment of the Estate. Olmsted appeared before the supervisors to protest the increase, but met with only partial success. “The taxes [26]this year will be $13,000—quite an item with a losing concern,” Robert Miller reported to Trenor Park. Miller, a former bookkeeper for the Estate, suggested bribery: “There is policy if not patriotism in expending a few hundred dollars to be in with the party from whom you can get justice.” Olmsted, however, simply sent the high tax bill to New York. In addition, supplies for the second half of the year cost much more than expected. The long drought had caused a shortage of provisions and produced a panic demand at the Company stores. Olmsted held back on purchases, waiting for the mines to improve. Then he was forced to buy supplies at a 100 percent markup over New York prices. Lacking sufficient income from the mines, he called on New York to pay the Bank of California the $60,000 in gold that he owed for supplies.

In New York the Company had its own problems. In June 1864 the trustees had been forced to produce $100,000 in gold in order to make the first payment in the settlement of the Brumagim-Garrison claim. In January 1865, $75,000 in interest payments on their bonds would fall due. Furthermore, they had announced that in January they would begin redeeming selected bonds in gold.

To make matters worse, a celebrated libel suit threatened public confidence in the Mariposa Company. George Opdyke had been accused of swindling the public while he was mayor in 1862 and 1863. Thurlow Weed, former editor of the Albany Evening Journal and a rival power in the New York Republican party, had made the allegations in the Journal in June 1864; beginning on December 13, Opdyke retaliated with a libel suit, which the New York Supreme Court heard for a month. The case attracted a blaze of publicity. The New York papers printed detailed testimony from Mariposa Company principals David Dudley Field, James Hoy, George W. Farlee, and John C. Frémont.

Weed’s accusations against Opdyke were amplified during the trial. Opdyke had invested in a factory that supplied carbines to the army; his son-in-law George Farlee, vice-president of the Mariposa Company, had been the factory’s manager and part-owner. During the draft riots of July 1863, the gun factory burned to the ground and Farlee collected $190,000 in damages from the city. Mayor Opdyke sat on the city’s board of supervisors, and Weed stated that he had concealed his interest in the gun factory when Farlee came before the board with his claim. Weed’s lawyer further charged that Opdyke and Farlee had invited the destruction of the factory by removing a large police guard. Weed wrote that Opdyke cheated the taxpayers by selling shoddy blankets and clothing to the government, and that he sold the office of Surveyor of the Port of New York for $10,000. Finally, Weed charged that in 1863 Opdyke, Hoy, and Ketchum had wrested $2.5 million in Mariposa Company stock from John C. Frémont, who needed the money for his upcoming presidential campaign.

[27]

Though Opdyke’s witnesses refuted many of these charges, the public impression they made must have been negative. The jury failed to agree whether Weed was guilty of libel. Perhaps they shared the conclusion of Godkin, who wrote on December 25: “There is a tremendous libel suit going on here between Weed (Thurlow) & Opdyke, from which it plainly appears that one is as great a scoundrel as the other. . . . Opdyke is, I consider, a consummate rascal, to whom politics is a branch of his trade, and nothing more.” Weed’s legal counsel painted Opdyke and Farlee as dishonest, Frémont as a naive explorer-politician, and the founders of the Mariposa Company as sharks who had taken advantage of Frémont. Anyone following the fortunes of the Company could not have felt much confidence in its soundness. The most damaging testimony came from Frémont himself, for under cross-examination on December 21 he admitted that the Estate’s indebtedness went far beyond what he had led the Company trustees to believe in 1863.

The day before Frémont testified, Olmsted telegraphed that the Princeton vein was contracting in size and the Estate would soon owe its bankers $60,000 for supplies he had purchased. Disclosure of this telegram was carefully managed, according to gossip on Wall Street. The directors of the Company received it on December 23, but kept it confidential until after Christmas. Meanwhile, between December 24 and December 28, thousands of Mariposa shares were sold. Then Olmsted’s dispatch was circulated, and an emergency stockholders’ meeting was called for January 2, 1865. This caused a precipitous decline in the value of Mariposa stocks and bonds. The stock price plunged from $30 per share on December 28 to $19 on January 2.

The stockholders attempted to recover their losses, but with little effect. A reporter at the meeting, noting that the directors seemed cheerful in the face of the collapse, implied that they had exaggerated the solvency of the Company and then withheld Olmsted’s news until after they sold their own stock. When George Opdyke laughed during the meeting, he was told it was no laughing matter. The stockholders called on the directors to resign and appointed a committee to investigate. On January 23 their committee reported that the embarrassments of the Company had resulted from “defective organization and want of working capital.” They recommended assessments or loans to raise money for the most pressing debts, but very little was raised. Except for one payment of $7,500 in April, the Company sent no funds to California in 1865.

Olmsted learned of the crisis indirectly, for the New York newspapers did not reach California for a month. His first hint of a crisis came from the Bank of California, the Mariposa Company’s bank in San Francisco. When the trustees in New York refused to pay the bank $60,000 for supplies, the bank took quick action. It stopped payment on Mariposa Company checks and on January 3 sent a messenger to the Estate to ask [28]Olmsted to sign an agreement that the Company would pay its debts in gold. Then another agent arrived with the sheriff to attach the property of the Estate as security for the debt. Olmsted persuaded him to wait until he could go to San Francisco, talk with the bank directors, and telegraph the Company in New York. Realizing that the Mariposa Company might not be able to pay all its debts, Olmsted looked to his own interests. The trustees had promised him $10,000 for each year of management he completed, regardless of the condition of the mines. However, he had no written contract. To secure at least part of his pay, he quietly collected over four thousand dollars in rough bullion and gave himself a bill of sale. When he arrived in San Francisco on January 9, he was dismayed to learn that the bankers regarded the Mariposa Company as bankrupt and a “Great Wall Street swindle.”

From January to April 1865, Olmsted stayed in San Francisco, waiting for money and instructions from New York and negotiating the Company’s debts. It was a lonely vigil, during which he tried to balance the interests of the Company, the employees, and the creditors with a fairness that would satisfy them all. As he worked out agreements with the creditors and miners, his skill as a negotiator came to the fore. First he obtained an agreement that the Estate would not be sold at a sheriffs sale for a hundred days. Then, while waiting for money from the East, he arranged to pay the principal creditors from the proceeds of the mines. The Bank of California, the employees, and the merchants who supplied the Estate had claims on the earnings of the mines. The Bank of California had stopped payment on Mariposa Company checks, and its agent seized and closed the Company stores. Without payor provisions, the miners stopped working and threatened to pillage the stores. Olmsted persuaded the men to go back to work and arranged for the bank to supply them from the stores. By the end of January, the bank had been paid $37,000 under this arrangement. Then in February the miners received the proceeds of the mines, and in April the trustees sent a final payment of $7,500 to the bank.

By this time the hundred days had elapsed, and the Mariposa Company still owed its suppliers over fifty-eight thousand dollars. To avoid a sheriffs sale of the Estate, Olmsted, with the trustees’ approval, made an arrangement with Dodge Brothers, the Estate’s principal wholesale supplier. On April 27 Henry Lee and Luther C. Dodge took control and management of the Estate in order to work it and pay their own and other debts. They succeeded in paying off the Mariposa Company’s California debts by the end of 1865. In October, Henry Lee Dodge wrote Trenor Park that “Mariposa so far is nothing to brag of,” but “we have made it pay largely over expenses & who but Park ever did as much . . . .“ In December, Dodge Brothers paid off the last $20,000 due the miners [29]for back wages and collected $2,000 for itself. On December 18, 1865, the new president of the Mariposa Company in New York, Edward Dugdale, exulted to Park: “Our debts are paid. We have $50,000 in the treasury, we are Hunkee Doree.” Looking to continue a most rewarding association in Mariposa Company matters with Park, whose advice he had followed during the previous months of crisis, Dugdale now invited his friend in Vermont to “come down and let us reason together.”

The management of the Mariposa Company came under serious criticism because of the financial collapse of 1865. Olmsted never admitted any blame for it, however, maintaining that the trustees had never withdrawn their promise to support his expenditures whether or not the mines made a profit. To emphasize this, he cited the Company president’s letter approving his policies, a letter which arrived in Bear Valley in January 1865, after the collapse. He also stressed to his friends and family that although the officers of the Bank of California considered the Mariposa Company a swindle, they trusted him personally. Summing up the crisis in a letter to his father on May 27, 1865, he wrote: “The disaster is all the fault of the Trustees, and not mine.”

Despite Olmsted’s assertions, some responsible observers assessed his contribution to the Company’s collapse differently. In 1868 two federal commissioners, appointed to examine the mineral resources of the West, reviewed the management of the Mariposa Company. J. Ross Browne concluded that the Estate under Olmsted “was not managed properly, and the result was a failure, which is the more remarkable because it followed immediately upon the heels of the most brilliant success.” Browne’s successor, Rossiter Raymond, spent nearly a week on the Estate and studied the records more carefully. He concluded that “the administration of Mr. Olmsted . . . has been much blamed, and not without reason, but we are convinced that the New York management was quite as responsible themselves as the conductor of the mines, for the disaster which overtook the enterprise.” Raymond felt that Olmsted’s decision to explore and work as many veins as possible had been a fundamental mistake. However, he emphasized that

the plan of the company’s organization, and the scale of its projected operations, were such as to invite every chance of ruin. In spite of the huge nominal capital, and the large amount of bonds, a little study will suffice to convince anyone that the estate was virtually expected to pay its own way from the start.

Raymond reserved his most serious criticism for Olmsted’s lease of the Estate to Dodge Brothers. Although Olmsted’s letters to the trustees show that he had virtually no other choice, Raymond claimed that this had been “stupendous folly,” for Dodge Brothers later abused the position [30]and probably overpaid itself threefold. It stayed in possession of the Estate until 1867, when it was sued for mismanagement by the Mariposa Company and removed.

Released from his duties as superintendent of the Mariposa Estate when Dodge Brothers assumed control in April 1865, Olmsted turned to writing a book that had been on his mind for several years. The previous fall he had told E. L. Godkin, “I am cogitating a heavy sort of book on Society in the United States—the influence of pioneer-life-& of Democracy.” As he began to write in the spring of 1865, he summarized the more recent sources for his study, saying: “During the last year and a half I have been living among the California Sierras and as circumstances have brought them to my mind have written many suggestions which, in a period of comparative liberty from other duties now before me, I propose to collate, embody and extend into a book.” During his remaining months in California, Olmsted worked on his study of the influence of immigration and the frontier on American society; he would continue to organize and expand on it for several years to come. In his writing he utilized not only his experiences in California but also the observations of the American South he had made in the 1850s and the analysis he had made of Civil War events prior to the fall of 1863.

At the same time, Olmsted looked for new employment. He wrote Godkin that he would prefer to start the weekly journal they had planned in 1863. He contemplated buying a San Francisco newspaper, and asked Godkin to join him as editor. When Calvert Vaux wrote that he was negotiating for the job of designing Prospect Park in Brooklyn and wanted Olmsted to return as his partner, Olmsted replied on March 12, “My heart really bounds (if you don’t mind poetry) to your suggestion that we might work together about it.” Yet he doubted that he could support his family on the income he would earn from Prospect Park. Until he learned definitively in the summer of 1865 that the Mariposa Company would not pay his salary, he searched for work in California.

His close association with the Bank of California put him in a good position to find job opportunities. Founded the previous year with an amount of capital that was unprecedented in the state, the bank spurred the development of numerous ventures on the Pacific coast. William Chapman Ralston and Darius Ogden Mills, the cashier and president of the bank, mistrusted the Mariposa Company in New York, but did respect Olmsted. Furthermore, Olmsted had made himself knowledgeable about California business. In April 1864 he had written Godkin what he called a “treatise” on sound opportunities for investment in the state. As a private consultant for Morris Ketchum, he had investigated a manganese mine on an island near Richmond in San Francisco Bay, and in December 1864 he reported to Ketchum on the emerging oil industry [31]in the state. William Ralston took advantage of Olmsted’s knowledge and availability while he waited in San Francisco for news from New York, engaging him to investigate several business ventures that Ralston was financing.

In 1865 a debate was raging over the future of California petroleum. For Ralston, Olmsted investigated oil properties on the ocean cliffs near Santa Cruz and at Sargent’s Ranch, about twenty-five miles to the east. Olmsted himself invested in several properties, including one in what is now the McKittrick-Reward oil field west of Bakersfield. Although Californians had long known of the many asphaltum or tar springs in their state, the Pennsylvania oil boom of 1859 had nurtured hopes that the California oil seeps might become another major source of lighting and lubricating oil. But experts differed sharply on the quality and potential of California oil. Josiah Whitney and William Brewer of the California Geological Survey were skeptical and determined not to raise unfounded expectations that might encourage swindling companies. Benjamin Silliman, Jr., however, visited and promoted numerous oil properties, including several near Santa Barbara whose later production made them famous. But the technology and transportation system that would eventually make California the second-largest oil-producing state in the nation was not developed until the 1890s. In 1865 Olmsted could only state that “Brewer was unquestionably wrong about Petroleum in California. Whether Silliman was right is another question.”

In another venture with Ralston, Olmsted visited the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society near Sonoma, the largest wine-growing enterprise in California. Ralston asked Olmsted to write a report on the Society and its vineyards in an effort to attract new investors. The Society’s superintendent, a former Hungarian nobleman named Agoston Haraszthy, was the founder and leading promoter of the wine industry in California. He operated on a large scale and had just constructed a number of solid buildings of stone for the winery. He also cultivated his vines without irrigation and employed Chinese labor. Though the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society never succeeded financially, the wine industry later developed on the scale that Haraszthy, Ralston, and Olmsted foresaw in 1865.

On both sides of San Francisco Bay, Olmsted found opportunities for landscape work. In 1864 the completion of the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad had opened up the San Francisco peninsula for the development of country estates. In February 1865 D. O. Mills took Olmsted to see his property eighteen miles south of the city. Olmsted made “some suggestions for its improvement,” but no commission seems to have followed, and Mills did not build his residence on the estate until after Olmsted left California. Olmsted did, however, name the Mills estate and adjacent town. Mills wrote Olmsted, “Out of all the names you send I like the sound of ’Millbrae’ rather the best.” Olmsted also [32]

[33]visited George H. Howard, a trustee of the bank, on his San Mateo Rancho, the earliest of the great peninsula estates. With his wife’s help, Olmsted prepared a landscape plan and report for the residence and the distinctive mound or little hill nearby. Their plan was delivered, and Howard later asked Olmsted to send him plant materials from New York. However, the plan no longer survives; the estate has been subdivided, and an apartment house now stands on Howard’s Mound.

Across the bay in Oakland, Olmsted was already at work on two landscape design projects he had begun in 1864. The directors of the Mountain View Cemetery Association had asked him to make their 200 acres of land in the hills northeast of Oakland into the finest cemetery in the state. In early January 1865 Olmsted sent them a manuscript—probably the recommendations that he later presented to the board and that were published in the 1865 Mountain View Cemetery report as “Preface to the Plan.” In February, Olmsted reported that Edward C. Miller, a civil engineer he had recruited from Central Park, was “at work putting my Cemetery plan upon the ground at Oakland.” Miller and several assistants staked out and improved part of the site, probably the twenty or thirty acres for which the directors had requested improvements in December 1864. Dedication of the cemetery took place in May 1865 and Miller finished his work by the end of August. On July 11, 1866, Olmsted, Miller, and Vaux completed the plan for the whole site and sent it from their offices in New York City to the trustees in Oakland.

Mountain View Cemetery was the only one of Olmsted’s California designs from the 1860s that he could have seen even partially realized on the ground. The payment of the first $1,000 of his fee came promptly, too, in August 1865; but he did not receive payment in full for his services for several years. The Association’s only income came from the sale of cemetery lots, and by law 60 percent of the receipts went to redeem its bonds. The population of the area was small and sales were moderate. It was not until 1874 that Olmsted received the final payment of $1,030 in gold for his plan.

Olmsted’s second landscape commission near Oakland was for the College of California, forerunner of the University of California at Berkeley. The college, a small and struggling liberal arts school located in Oakland, had been founded by Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1855. The acting president of the college, Samuel Hopkins Willey, was developing a new campus five miles north of Oakland—a site that in May 1866 the college trustees named Berkeley.

The new college grounds overlooked San Francisco Bay from hills that were almost completely bare of trees. The heart of the property was a tract of 124 acres between the branches of Strawberry Creek. This area—called the “college site” or “college park”—remains the core of the Berkeley campus today. Its value at that time lay in the shrubbery and [34] “fine old forest trees” that grew along the two ravines. In 1860 Willey had stood on a large rock between the ravines and described the view west toward the bay:

From this elevated spot the grounds were all before us, covered with a crop of growing grain, and bordered with such noble trees as were nowhere else to be seen.

The whole plain, indeed, was a grainfield from the Bay back to the hills, and not a house that could properly be called a dwelling was in sight.

In August 1864 the trustees of the college added to their property. They bought more than one hundred twenty-five acres south of the college site and laid out a village with a rectangular grid of house lots and streets. (This “College Homestead Tract” is now the commercial area south of Bancroft Way.) Also, to ensure an adequate water supply, they bought a ranch owned by Orrin Simmons in the hills east of the college site. With this purchase the college property extended up the ravine into the hills and included the entire watershed of Strawberry Creek.

It was at this point that the trustees consulted Olmsted. They wished to attract neighbors of means and taste for the college, and hoped to raise money by selling house lots. Olmsted first mentioned that he had been approached about “a park” in Oakland in October 1864. In November he advised Samuel Willey about appropriate trees for the college grounds, and he examined the site in heavy squalls of rain and snow in February 1865. That June, Willey asked him for a general survey and map and “your ideas as to the general outlay.” In August the trustees approved a contract under which Olmsted would make the survey and map, receiving as payment $1,000 in gold and $1,500 worth of land in the surveyed tract. Olmsted returned to the college grounds on August 29, and on September 4 he proposed his plan to a group of trustees. Only on June 29, 1866, long after Olmsted had returned to New York, did he and Calvert Vaux complete their Report Upon a Projected Improvement of the Estate of the College of California, at Berkeley, near Oakland. With the report they sent the trustees “a very large map some nine feet by five” on which the “entire ground-plan was shown in detail,” plus “engineer’s plans for road-ways, avenues, stairs, drains, etc., etc., also the location and most effective grouping of the buildings that would most likely in time be needed.” The Olmsted and Vaux report was printed and the nine-by-five-foot map was photographed; however, the original map and the engineer’s plans were soon lost.

The fate of Olmsted’s plan for the Berkeley campus and neighborhood was bound up with that of the College of California. Despite all his efforts, Willey was unable to raise much money for a denominational liberal arts college. The college’s debts, including what it owed Olmsted, could not be paid. Ample public funds were available, however, for agricultural [35]and mining education through the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. In March 1866 the state of California established an agricultural, mining, and mechanical arts college to take advantage of this source of funds. When Gov. Frederick Low proposed that the two institutions merge, the trustees of the College of California regretfully agreed. On October 9, 1867, they offered to the agricultural, mining, and mechanical arts college their “choice property foundation for future use,” the 160 acres between the branches of Strawberry Creek that had been improved by Olmsted’s “elaborate plan.” In exchange, in the new university the college was to become the “academical college” of equal standing with the colleges of mining and agriculture; furthermore, its bills would be paid. The University of California was established in March 1868, and in June 1870 Olmsted received a check for $2,832 for his plan.

However, the university’s board of regents did not favor Olmsted’s plan. In October 1868 a committee on grounds and buildings had recommended against paying his bill. Though the regents were eventually forced to pay for the plan, they were not obliged to follow it. In 1872 President Daniel Coit Gilman wrote that he was trying to locate the large map that Olmsted had made “but which nobody can or will produce.” He also reported that the sale of private house lots within the college grounds, a major feature of the Olmsted plan, had been set aside to save the land for future college use. Of the features that appear on Olmsted’s plan, only the branches of Strawberry Creek and a few blocks of a pleasure drive to Oakland are recognizable today.

Before he left for New York in October 1865, Olmsted laid the groundwork for his final California landscape commission of the 1860s. At that time the city of San Francisco had no large public park, and Olmsted turned journalist to encourage public support for the idea. On August 4, 1865, he published an anonymous article in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, pointing out the city’s urgent need for a park. Mayor Henry P. Coon asked him for preliminary suggestions, and he responded during his voyage to the East with a three-year schedule for acquiring land, preparing plans, and executing a design. In San Francisco, William Ashburner and Frederick Billings kept up public pressure by circulating a petition proposing that the city’s board of supervisors hire Olmsted to plan a public park. The campaign succeeded. On November 17 the supervisors offered Olmsted $500 for a preliminary plan.

Now Olmsted suffered the last of the delays in communication that plagued his years in California. The supervisors’ contract, sent by Wells, Fargo & Company in November, did not reach Olmsted for three months. It was not until March 31, 1866, that Olmsted and Vaux completed the report. They immediately sent the manuscript of the report and the plans to Mayor Coon. Then they had the report printed at their own expense and dispatched copies of it to San Francisco by both steamer [36]and overland express. The printing was done so quickly that copies of the published report, entitled Preliminary Report in Regard to a Plan of Public Pleasure Grounds for the City of San Francisco, reached the mayor before May 9. However, the city had failed to secure enabling legislation for a park before the state legislature adjourned. In June, Mayor Coon sent Olmsted his payment of $500 with bad news: the plan had met with opposition and was regarded as more expensive than the city could afford for some time. In the end it was not carried out.

Olmsted’s work on the Yosemite Commission was as important to him as his landscape designs. His chairmanship of the Commission called for the kind of far-sighted development of public policy that he most enjoyed. In July he told his father, “I am preparing a scheme of management for the Yosemite, which is far the noblest public park, or pleasure ground in the world.” On August 9 he read his “Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove” to the commissioners camped in the valley. This report laid out a philosophy for reserving scenic areas in a democracy and provided guidelines for their use. Though it was suppressed after he left California, its importance was not lost on a party of journalists and politicians who were in the valley with the commissioners. This party, led by Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, included Albert D. Richardson of the New-York Daily Tribune and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts. They had traveled overland together and returned to publicize the new Yosemite reserve.

Since January 1865 Calvert Vaux had been urging Olmsted to return to his true calling as a park designer. In May, June, and July, Vaux sent Olmsted a series of letters about his negotiations with the Prospect Park commissioners in Brooklyn and the Central Park commissioners in New York. When in May the architect Richard Morris Hunt exhibited his drawings for elaborate new formal entrances to Central Park, Vaux waged a campaign to defend the integrity of his and Olmsted’s Greensward plan. His efforts not only forestalled the construction of Hunt’s entrance gates; they also led to the reappointment of Olmsted and Vaux as landscape architects to the Central Park commission. By late August, when Olmsted learned definitively that the Mariposa Company would not pay his salary, Vaux was offering him two paying propositions—the design of the new Prospect Park and the completion of their great unfinished project, Central Park. To both men Central Park was of great national importance, “the big art work of the Republic.” Vaux argued that it required not only Olmsted’s genius for administration but his artistic ability as well.

Olmsted’s uncertain health encouraged his choice of a career in landscape design. During most of his stay at Mariposa, he found writing physically painful, and his landscape commissions in 1865 provided him the alternative of healthy and challenging outdoor work. Before he left [37]California he declined three opportunities on the grounds of health. These were requests to write for the Nation and the North American Review, and an appointment as general secretary of the American Freed-men’s Aid Union. Although he did serve as co-editor of the Nation for much of the year after he returned to New York, landscape commissions increasingly absorbed his time and energy.

Olmsted’s isolation on the California frontier, and his separation for two years from the institutions, people, and scenery that he knew well, caused him to create his first designs for a college campus, an urban park system, and a scenic reservation. For the rest of his long career, Olmsted continued to develop the forms of landscape architecture he pioneered in California.