BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY

Henry Whitney Bellows (1814–1882), president of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and one of the leading Unitarian ministers of his day, was well acquainted with Olmsted as an administrator. Eight years older than Olmsted and the minister of the First Unitarian Church in New York City, Bellows had first recognized Olmsted’s unusual talents at Central Park. In 1861 he had recruited Olmsted as chief staff officer of the Sanitary Commission, and during the first two years of the Civil War the two men had worked together closely. Thus Bellows was particularly qualified to assess Olmsted as a manager—the role Olmsted took upon himself from 1863 to 1865. Furthermore, Bellows was the only one of Olmsted’s close acquaintances from the East who went to California while Olmsted was there and saw him on his own ground as superintendent of the Mariposa Estate.

At the end of the war, when the American Freedmen’s Aid Union was searching for the right person to direct its efforts on behalf of the former slaves, Bellows wrote one of its commissioners: “Mr. F. L. Olmsted is, of all men I know, the most comprehensive, thorough & minutely particular organizer. He is equally wonderful in the management of principles & of details—His mind is patient in meditation, capable & acute, his will inflexible, his devotion to his principles & methods, confident & un-flinching.” Bellows worried, however, about Olmsted’s health. He speculated that Olmsted would have died if he had remained under the strain of his Sanitary Commission position a year longer, and thought that Olmsted had seemed a “decided invalid” in California in 1864. Though Bellows considered Olmsted “always a slight creature (mean & contemptible in his [49]

physique),” he acknowledged that Olmsted had “a wonderful brain & that keeps many such fellows alive without stomachs, liver, muscle or blood.” He advised the Freedmen’s Aid Union, “If he is willing to take hold tho’ only for a year, just long eno’ to plan your campaign, have him at any cost, though you could have any ten others for nothing.” Fifteen years later, Bellows maintained that Olmsted’s “organizing faculty” was “as rare as any it has fallen to our lot to observe in any American of our own times.”

Though Bellows appreciated Olmsted’s gifts as an organizer, he knew his shortcomings as a subordinate. When Olmsted, in justifying his departure for California, cited his inability to persuade the Sanitary Commission Executive Committee to support his ideas, Bellows suggested that the Executive Committee might more reasonably have complained that they never made any impression upon Olmsted. As Bellows stated frankly, “I have long felt that your constitutional qualities, both bodily, mental & moral, make you a difficult subordinate. You ought not to work under anybody.” He doubted that any group of directors “could get along two years” with Olmsted. Given Olmsted’s character, Bellows told him:

My ambition for you, has been to see you in some independent position, the Head of a Bureau, a Department, the Editor of a Great Newspaper. [50]There, I think your temperament & exquisite organization would have their natural field & produce unalloyed good. With subordinates you have, & would have, no difficulties. It is only with peers or superiors (official) that you cannot serve.

Bellows’s views of Olmsted’s deficiencies as a subordinate illuminates Olmsted’s failure to heed the warnings of the Mariposa Company trustees. Olmsted carefully thought out his plan of action for the Estate and presented it in the Manager’s General Report of January 1864; thereafter, despite frequent letters from New York urging him to reduce expences, he failed to change directions until financial collapse forced him to do so in 1865.

Bellows went to California for six months in 1864 because Thomas Starr King, the eloquent young minister he had recruited for the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco, had suddenly died of diphtheria. Under Starr King’s influence California had contributed far more than any other state to the Sanitary Commission, so Bellows took charge of his church until a permanent replacement arrived, and toured the Pacific states to organize continuing support for the Sanitary Commission. During a two-day visit to Bear Valley, he wrote a vivid sketch of Olmsted in his Mariposa domain:

I am sitting in Olmsted’s office writing at his table, while he with cap on, is this moment examining various specimens of gold-bearing quartz, with true official expertness. The Map of the Mariposa estate hangs in large proportions on the wall; also a naval & military map of the United States &Bancroft’s Pacific states; a table covered with charts of the mines; a long American Flag is folded on the floor (it was flying yesterday in honor of my arrival.) The office is carpeted with brussels. It is one of a long suite of rooms, built over the Company Store, giving 8 or 10 large apartments-which Mr. o. has fitted up in the most comfortable & tasty manner for the accommodation of his family.

Bellows described the workings of the mines and mills, the population of the estate, and portrayed Olmsted as “a kind of little monarch here.” He saw Olmsted at the peak of his development of the Estate, virtually unhampered by his board of directors, six months before they withheld operating funds and proved that ultimate control lay with them.

During the first two years of the Civil War, Olmsted and Bellows had worked together to promote good works on a national scale. After Bellows left California, and the collapse of the Mariposa Company gave Olmsted leisure to think again along national lines, he sent Bellows a plan of organization like those he had devised for the Sanitary Commission and the Union League Club. This time his plan was for a book-buying association that would disseminate books, selected by the likes of the Sanitary Commission’s Executive Committee, throughout the country.

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Although Olmsted avoided religious affiliation, he and Bellows shared common values of civilization and community which stemmed from the New England tradition they received by familial and intellectual descent. In 1863 Bellows had protested Olmsted’s departure for California, arguing that “we are just beginning the education of a nation.” He believed the country needed to be trained in a new philosophy:

Our people don’t know what it costs to keep an old country a-going; what society is worth, & by what care & sacrifices it is to be maintained . . . . The great Christian idea of solidarity, mutual membership, and of the gain made by community over the half-savage individualism, which constitutes an American’s idea of liberty,—has got into only a score of heads in the whole country.

Olmsted expressed this idea in a more secular form. When he analyzed society on the frontier in “The Pioneer Condition and the Drift of Civilization in America,” he concluded that an instinct he termed “communitiveness” was the essential germ of civilization.

Edwin Lawrence Godkin (1831–1902) was to become one of the leaders in American journalism in the decades after the Civil War, first as editor of the Nation from 1865 to 1881, then as editor of the New York Evening Post until 1900. During the period when Olmsted was in California, Godkin was a gifted young writer in his early thirties seeking to establish his place in the intellectual life of America.

Godkin, born in northern Ireland of English parents, had established a friendship with Olmsted shortly after moving to New York in 1856. Godkin admired Olmsted’s accounts of the slaveholding states and visited him on Staten Island before beginning his own trip through the [52]

South later that year as a correspondent for the London Daily News. From the time of Godkin’s return from the South in early 1857 until his departure for a two-year stay in Europe in the summer of 1860, Godkin lived in the New York City area. During that time Olmsted and Charles Loring Brace introduced the young journalist to their social and intellectual acquaintances in New York and New Haven. In 1859 Godkin married the elegant Frances Elizabeth Foote of New Haven, a member of a prominent Connecticut family. The marriage gave Godkin social standing and some degree of financial security. He studied in the New York law office of David Dudley Field and was admitted to the bar, but did not like the practice of law with its long hours of office work. By 1863 he was writing articles for the New-York Times and had become the regular New York correspondent for the London Daily News. That June, Olmsted enlisted Godkin’s help in starting a weekly journal of politics, science, literature, and the arts. In August, when Olmsted abruptly accepted the Mariposa Company’s offer to manage its California mines, he left the journal project in Godkin’s hands. Godkin’s efforts to raise capital for the venture faltered when Olmsted departed and came to a standstill when another weekly with similar aims, the Round Table, began publication late in 1863. By the end of the Civil War, however, Godkin had raised the necessary capital from George Luther Stearns and other abolitionists who expected the new journal to advance the interests of the freedmen. On July 6, 1865, Godkin published the first issue of the Nation.

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Olmsted and Godkin felt a warm intellectual companionship. “Give my dearest love to Godkin,” Olmsted had written Brace in 1862. “I would limp ten miles to talk an hour with him.” After Olmsted left for California, Godkin confessed to him:

I have met no one in America who has the same hold on me & with whom I sympathize so strongly, and certainly I should always feel amply compensated by your friendship alone for having come here. Leading the unsettled life that I have led since I was twenty two, & leaving my own country at twenty five, my intimate friends are few in number, & I value those I have all the more for that reason. Your quitting the east was therefore a great blow to me, greater than I cared to say when you were going. I looked forward to your settling down somewhere within my reach so that we could grow old, and grumble over the ways of the world together.

Olmsted’s correspondence with Godkin sustained him intellectually in the isolation of the frontier. Olmsted craved Godkin’s articles in Bear Valley, explaining that they “supply a little what I most suffer for want of, here. There’s nobody to talk to on what I am most interested in & I feel the intellectual solitude.”

During his years in California, Olmsted relied on Godkin in a variety of ways. “I love him and lean upon him strongly,” Olmsted wrote in his letter introducing Godkin to Charles Eliot Norton, who helped raise money for the weekly journal. Olmsted sought Godkin’s help in practical affairs, and trusted his judgment in legal and financial matters. When Olmsted needed someone in New York to subscribe to periodicals for his miners’ reading room or to order a custom boot for his short left leg (the result of a poorly knitted break in 1860), he called on Godkin. In January 1865, when the Mariposa Company refused to pay the debts of the Estate, Olmsted reviewed for Godkin the events leading to the collapse and justified his expenditures on the Estate; Godkin circulated this account among their friends in New York. At Olmsted’s request, Godkin also met with Mariposa Company counsel David Dudley Field.

More than any of Olmsted’s other acquaintances, Godkin understood his desire to go to California to make his fortune. Godkin, in fact, considered going to California for the same reason. When Olmsted proposed in 1865 that they acquire a San Francisco newspaper together, Godkin replied, “My main object in going-apart from the desire of doing something with you, which would influence me strongly—would be to make money, so as to secure me at an early period, what I have always longed for—leisure & liberty to choose my own work.” He wanted to be able to produce his best writing for reviews, and until the Nation was founded, assumed that he could earn the leisure to do so only by becoming wealthy first.

Both Godkin and Olmsted hoped that investments would increase [54]their income. Godkin asked Olmsted to suggest safe California investments for $200–$300; Olmsted responded with a long description of California’s economy and the apparently sound businesses in which he himself had invested. He also frequently reported to Godkin about the petroleum companies then being established in California.

Godkin also understood Olmsted’s health problems, but was exasperated with his friend for retaining the habit of working late at night, which he believed induced Olmsted’s symptoms. Expecting sympathy, Olmsted described his “pen-sickness” to Godkin: “You will understand better than anybody else when I tell you that to write a single sheet entirely interrupts my digestion, sets my brain throbbing, my ears singing and half suffocates me—also my eyes twitch.” Godkin, who had suffered from similar problems before settling into a lifelong habit of writing four hours a day, replied impatiently: “I know to my sorrow all about those symptoms. I have felt satisfied for years that you would at last suffer from your insane way of living. I have always wondered how a man of your intelligence could go on acting on that theory of yours about night work.” He advised Olmsted to do all his work in the morning, to stop working whenever he felt the symptoms, to ride horseback as much as possible, and never to work after dinner. In 1865 he berated Olmsted for considering the purchase of a morning paper, which would also tempt him to work at night:

I don’t think, too, that you are sufficiently conscientious or shrewd about your health. At least you used not to be. Now that you are embarked, or are embarking in commercial enterprizes that have to be made to pay, I think you ought as a matter of common honesty, consider yourself as an animal in which money is invested, like the horses, or cattle on a farm, and take care of your physical and mental condition accordingly. For a man who has great interests depending on him, to allow himself to break down from preventable causes is a piece of rascality.

It was the continuing discussion of public affairs that gave the correspondence between Olmsted and Godkin its breadth and distinction. Godkin, who had been a war correspondent for the London Daily News during the Crimean War, kept Olmsted informed about the military progress of the Civil War and weighed the comparative merits of the Union generals. In turn, Olmsted outlined to Godkin a system of military education to be implemented after the war. They disagreed over federal fiscal policy and the government’s wisdom in printing greenbacks. Olmsted was incensed when Godkin proposed that the New York City government should add a second chamber based on ownership of property.

Godkin and Olmsted’s most striking discussion was about the influence of the frontier on American civilization. In January 1865 Godkin [55]published an article, “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy,” in the North American Review. As he told Olmsted, “It discusses a subject on which we have often talked, on a theory which I think you hold yourself.” In the article, Godkin sketched the decline of civilization in America since the early days of the republic, and noted the tendency of travelers from aristocratic nations to attribute this decline to the spread of democracy. Godkin contended that the fault lay elsewhere: in the great change in the distribution of population, the scattering of American people over sparsely settled areas, and the social results of life on the frontier. Godkin treated themes that Olmsted had considered both in his books on the antebellum South and in unpublished writings, including “Journey in the West” (a travel account of the Midwest and South) and material presented in this volume as “The Pioneer Condition and the Drift of Civilization in America.” After reading Godkin’s article, Olmsted responded, “It is particularly agreeable to me to find my crude unassorted knowledge neatly and snugly built into clear propositions and logical statements, as you can and I can’t do it.”

After the Civil War, Olmsted and Godkin worked together briefly on the Nation. In May 1865, as soon as Godkin was assured of the money to begin publishing, he asked Olmsted to contribute articles about California. Two months later, on learning of Olmsted’s imminent return to New York, Godkin made a more specific offer: “I will pay you handsomely immediately on your arrival for some letters about California—society, resources and what not. . . . Why won’t you prepare to do for the Nation about the Pacific Coast what you did for the Times about the Seaboard States?” Olmsted declined Godkin’s offer on the grounds of poor health, saying that the strain of writing would risk his life, and that he must look instead to Central Park and other outdoor work. He claimed he was only fit “for selection and adaptation now, a sort of memorandic compilation, that is, special editorial business.” Accepting this, Godkin relinquished the writer but gained an editor, at least for a time. One month after Olmsted arrived in New York, Godkin persuaded him to share the editorial duties and responsibilities of the Nation. In January 1866 Godkin reported: “Olmsted’s coming in relieves my mind a good deal, particularly in ridding me of the hateful burden of overcaution. We go over all the editorial matter together, so that he is in fact, as well as in name, responsible for all it contains.” Olmsted actively edited the Nation until the summer of 1866. He saw the journal through a process of reorganization and joined Godkin and James Miller McKim as one of three co-owners of E. L. Godkin and Company, the new firm that published the Nation. The Nation included occasional reviews and pieces by Olmsted after 1866, but he appears to have contributed to the journal infrequently. When Godkin went on vacation in 1868, he asked Olmsted [56]to advise the junior editors “in difficult or doubtful cases.” otherwise Olmsted’s role seems to have been largely confined financial aspects of the journal.

Remaining a lifelong friend of Olmsted, Godkin continued to consult him about major decisions. After President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard offered Godkin a professorship of history in 1870, Olmsted suggested a plan that would allow Godkin to continue to control the Nation more as a proprietor than a managing editor. But Olmsted cautioned, “If you can’t write fully half the week and half the leaders and control the drift and tone of the whole while living at Cambridge, give up the professorship, for the Nation is worth many professorships.” When the Harvard corporation refused to approve such an arrangement, Olmsted’s advice helped convince Godkin to decline the post. In his reply, Godkin alluded to Olmsted’s “arguments which are very powerful, and indeed have strengthened Fanny’s mind and affected my own so powerfully against Harvard.” Similarly, Godkin sought Olmsted’s opinion before purchasing the New York Evening Post in 1881. Though their mutual esteem continued to be strong, the number of letters exchanged by Olmsted and Godkin declined after their richest period, Olmsted’s California years.

Morris Ketchum (1796–1880), the principal investor in the Mariposa Company, was the millionaire senior partner of the private banking firm of Ketchum, Son & Company. A New York Republican and a founding member of the Loyal National League of Union Citizens, he was one of the men to whom Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase had turned in 1861 to purchase the first wartime issue of government loans.

In September 1862 Ketchum began the negotiations that led to the eventual purchase of the Mariposa Estate by the Mariposa Company. These negotiations were complicated by the fact that the Estate had three owners: John C. Frémont, who owned six-eighths; and Frederick Billings and Abia Selover, who each owned one-eighth. Furthermore, Frémont owed almost $1.5 million to Californians who had loaned him their money on the security of the Estate. On January 12, 1863, Ketchum bought Frémont’s share of the Estate and with his brother-in-law issued a $1.5 million mortgage to payoff the California creditors. When the Mariposa Company was formed the following June, Ketchum became its treasurer, a trustee, and the largest stockholder, owning one-third of the shares.

In a mutually beneficial relationship, Olmsted served as Ketchum’s confidential informant on the affairs of the Mariposa Estate. Ketchum first proposed such a relationship in New York, shortly after Olmsted’s appointment as manager of the Estate. His request led to a double series of letters: an official one between Olmsted as manager of the Mariposa Estate and Ketchum as treasurer of the Mariposa Company, and a private one with Olmsted as informant to Ketchum, who could buy and sell stock in New York. Soon after arriving in California, Olmsted pointed out to Ketchum that the Mariposa Estate had not even been paying expenses at a time when the trustees had assured him it was paying profits of $60,000 a month. Since Olmsted had based his decision to go to California on that assurance, Ketchum expressed his sympathy and tried to compensate for Olmsted’s disappointment by offering to trade in stock for him. Mariposa stock, he explained,

is very sensitive, and in the hands of speculators will become extensively dealt in, it will fluctuate greatly, at times it may be very low and again at others very high. Now as you are far removed from these transactions you [58]cannot avail yourself of any of the advantages, while at the same time you will possess information which you probably would make available were you here, and as I was mainly instrumental in selecting you as manager of the Co. I propose, should you at any time think it judicious to purchase the stock, to make such purchases for you and if necessary to furnish the means for your benefit.

Olmsted gratefully accepted this arrangement. He sent Ketchum his private views of affairs on the Estate in a dozen letters and telegrams recorded in his private letterbook during his first year in California. In May 1864 Olmsted informed Ketchum, Son & Company that he was about to send East a favorable report on the Estate by the noted mining engineer Benjamin Silliman, Jr. On the strength of this advance notice Ketchum, Son & Company bought 200 shares of Mariposa stock for Olmsted and later sold it for a profit of nearly fifteen hundred dollars.

This special relationship between Olmsted and Olmsted and Ketchum lasted less than a year. When Ketchum resigned as treasurer and trustee of the Company in the summer of 1864, President James Hoy instructed Olmsted to refrain from corresponding with Ketchum about the Estate. Olmsted then directed Ketchum, Son & Company to sell his remaining Mariposa stock “as soon as you can find an opportunity to do so favorably to my interests,” and predicted when he thought the value of the stock might rise. The Ketchum firm sold his 100 shares of Mariposa stock for $3,600 in November 1864, a month before the price of the stock began to decline. Olmsted continued to correspond with the Ketchum firm, primarily about his personal finances. In November 1864, at the firm’s request, he investigated a manganese mine on Red Rock Island (near Richmond) in San Francisco Bay, and the following month he sent the firm his assessment of the prospects of the California petroleum industry, which is presented in this volume.

On August 15, 1865, the firm of Ketchum, Son & Company suddenly closed its doors and suspended payments. Edward B. Ketchum, son of Morris Ketchum and junior partner in the firm, had forged checks to pay for his gold-market speculations and had absconded with over two million dollars of the firm’s securities. Detectives found Edward Ketchum in New York two weeks later and charged him with forgery and embezzlement; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four and one-half years in prison. The firm was dissolved; Morris Ketchum called a meeting of the firm’s creditors and agreed to liquidate their claims at sixty cents on the dollar. Olmsted was fortunate. Shortly before this, the Ketchum firm had sold twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of government bonds it had bought for him the previous year, and had transferred all the profits, more than sixty-four hundred dollars, to his father.

Ketchum was a shrewd businessman and not easily approachable. A reporter in 1865 sketched him as “a short thick-set man, with silvery [59]hair, a very keen, quick-rolling, restless eye of gray, a big nose, thin lips, hard and relentless in expression of face, a man whose countenance would not encourage familiarity.” John T. Doyle, who negotiated with him on behalf of Abia Selover and Frederick Billings, noted Ketchum’s shrewdness. When Ketchum persisted in offering greenbacks to Frémont’s California creditors who had made their loans in gold, Doyle concluded about Ketchum, “At times I supposed him dull but I rather think his dullness was pretended rather than real and put on to blind me.”

Ketchum seems to have been truly helpful to Olmsted, perhaps because of the benefit he received from Olmsted’s inside information. Ketchum used his own capital to buy and sell Mariposa Company stock and U.S. government bonds in Olmsted’s name; he charged no interest and sent Olmsted all the profits—over fourteen hundred dollars from the Mariposa stock transaction and over sixty-four hundred dollars from the government bonds. Olmsted invested this money in California businesses, along with the $3,600 he gained from Ketchum’s timely sale of the Mariposa stock in November 1864. Thanks to Morris Ketchum, the collapse of the Mariposa Company did not spell financial disaster for Olmsted, who sailed for New York with over ten thousand dollars invested in California stocks.

It is unclear whether Olmsted ever saw Ketchum after he returned to the East. In 1867, two years after the financial collapse of his firm, friends helped Ketchum reestablish himself in Georgia, where he founded the Savannah Bank and Trust Company. Although Ketchum later returned to New York, he retained a directorship of the bank until his death in 1880.

Trenor William Park (1823–1882) was a lawyer, politician, and financier. He grew up in poverty near Bennington, Vermont, but after a series of business ventures in which he shrewdly combined management, salesmanship, and stock speculation, he died a multimillionaire. Olmsted encountered him during the first of these ventures, the Mariposa Estate. Park managed the Estate from 1860 to 1863 and in June 1863 became a director of the Mariposa Company for its first year. He had informants on the Estate throughout Olmsted’s tenure, and he was closely connected with the men who took over the Company after its financial collapse in 1865. Park visited Olmsted during his first week on the Mariposa Estate, and then returned with his family to Vermont. Although there is no indication that Olmsted ever met or communicated with Park again, the former manager remained an éminence grise on the Mariposa Estate. Olmsted inherited the painful consequences of Park’s policies, and was watched closely by Park’s friends.

Park arrived in California in 1852, after his father-in-law, Hiland Hall, a former Vermont Supreme Court judge and U.S. Treasury official, was appointed chairman of the federal commission to settle land claims in California. Settling Mexican land titles in the new American state created a large volume of legal business, and Park joined the law firm of Halleck, Peachy and Billings, which handled a considerable share of this litigation. He made enough money to invest extensively in real estate and mining, and in 1857 received one-half of the Mariposa Estate as security for a debt owed him by John C. Frémont’s bankers in San Francisco. In 1860 he took possession of the Estate and managed it until it was sold to the newly organized Mariposa Company in June 1863. At that time Park received 12,500 shares—one-eighth of the total stock of the new company—and a seat on the board of directors. After visiting Olmsted on the Estate, Park returned to the East, where he sold all but five shares of his stock by April 1864 and built a “princely residence” in North Bennington.

Park had been active in politics during his California years. A member of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee in the 1850s, he became a member of the Republican state committee in 1856 and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1862. Olmsted believed that Park’s political “intrigues” had complicated his management of the Mariposa [61]

Estate. In return for political favors Park had given special privileges to Jewett Adams, whose vote-buying practices Olmsted described in “The Pioneer Condition and the Drift of Civilization in America,” presented below. Olmsted concluded that Park “intended to make the estate pay for his Senator’s seat in addition to all the other advantages he got from it.”

Park had developed many loyal partisans. As California Supreme Court justice Stephen Johnson Field explained: “Like all strong & decisive characters he has made many enemies in California & also troops of friends. . . . To those who are willing to trust him he is frank, open & generous. To those who will not trust him but on the contrary will act with suspicion he is a man to be avoided.” Before leaving California, Park established a network of friends who wrote to him regularly about developments on the Mariposa Estate. Silas Williams, the manager of the Princeton Mine, the accountant Robert S. Miller, and Jewett Adams all reported to Park about operations on the Estate. Henry Lee Dodge, the San Francisco provisioner who managed the Estate for the benefit of its creditors after April 1865, notified Park as the production of the mines [62]gradually reduced the debt. Nor was Park’s network confined to California. Edward Dugdale, elected president of the Mariposa Company in the summer of 1865, told Park about stock transactions in New York and forwarded Olmsted’s reports of mine yields to him in Vermont.

With all these sources of inside information, Park was in an excellent position to profit from trading in Mariposa stock. All the details of his transactions are not known, but a number of comments from his correspondents indicate he was manipulating the market. In December 1863 he proposed to Company president James Hoy “a combination to put up the stock.” Park had sold almost all his Mariposa stock by early 1864, but appears to have bought more when its price was very low in 1865. He was still holding stock in 1866 when Henry Dodge wrote him: “If I telegraph you by & by to ’Sell Short’ know I mean Mariposa & consider me in. Watch it a little, it may bust by & by—tho. don’t let on that you have been in correspondence with Dodge or his brother.”

How much money Park made from his multiple connections with the Mariposa Estate is unclear. In 1864 Henry W. Bellows gave an estimate of Park’s profits as superintendent which probably reflected Olmsted’s views:

Mr. Parke, the last Superintendent, a shrewd, quick, driving fellow, pursued the policy of getting the most out of the mines immediately without any reference to their development & yield from year to year. And he did a good thing for himself I can assure you. He had 5 per cent the gross proceeds. It mattered not of course what it cost to get the gold out—besides, a large salary and a 2½ per cent a month, on all moneys borrowed or advanced! No wonder he went off with it is said $700,000!

In addition, Park must have made between $300,000 and $600,000 when he sold his 12,500 shares of Mariposa stock, since the price per share fluctuated between $25 and $51 during the six-month period when he sold it. It is likely that he sold early, when the price of the stock was high. At the time of Park’s death, the New-York Times described his technique as a speculator: “He was known as a sharp, active, and acute buyer and manipulator, whose operations were so cleverly and quickly made that he was generally out of the market before the operators knew he was in it.”

Park’s success with the sale of the Mariposa Estate may have encouraged him to repeat his technique in the notorious sale of the Emma silver mine in Utah in 1871. This sale to British investors caused an international scandal and led to a congressional investigation and a suit against Park for fraud. It demonstrated striking parallels to the sale of the Mariposa Estate. Park bought the Emma Mine in April 1871, after former Mariposa employee James Selover brought it to his attention. Silas Williams worked the Emma Mine until its production increased to $75,000 per month, almost as much as the Princeton Mine, which he had managed [63]at Mariposa. Park then offered the mine to buyers in London who, like the New York founders of the Mariposa Company, were too far away to monitor its production consistently. Park hired Benjamin Silliman, Jr., the mining expert who had written a favorable report on the Mariposa Estate in 1864, to inspect the Emma and produce another glowing endorsement. When the sale of the Emma Mine was concluded in November 1871, Park received one-half million dollars in cash, one-half million dollars in shares, plus a seat on the board of the new company. Thereupon he proceeded to sell out his stock within six months for a large profit, while in Utah the production of the Emma Mine dropped as dramatically as that of the Mariposa Estate in 1863. In 1877 a court declared Park innocent of fraudulent sale but noted that “the evidence discloses many circumstances connected with the sale of the Emma Mine which strongly impeach the honor and morality of the transaction.”

By that time Park had become involved with the Panama Railroad. He bought a controlling interest in it, administered its affairs, and traded its stock. In 1881, the year before his death, he sold out to the De Lesseps Canal Company; his 15,000 shares of stock brought him nearly four million dollars.

Calvert Vaux (1824–1895) collaborated with Olmsted on the design of Central Park in 1858, and the two worked together for five years to implement their plan. However, on the day Olmsted sailed for California, two articles appeared in New York newspapers giving Olmsted virtually exclusive credit for the park and its success. These pieces by two of Olmsted’s friends struck a chord that was all too familiar to Vaux. As he pointed out to Olmsted, “The public has been led to believe from the commencement of the Central Park work to the present time that you are pre-eminently the author of the executed design.” Vaux had avoided discussing the subject while they were working on the park because “the successful execution of the plan required that our interests should seem to be identical.” Stung by the articles and anticipating that he might be called upon to speak for them both in Olmsted’s absence, Vaux initiated an exchange of views on their professional relationship.

Their equal partnership as designers of the Greensward plan for Central Park had been complicated by their separate relationships to the Central Park commission. Olmsted had been employed by the commission first; he was appointed superintendent of the park in 1857. At that time Vaux was a young English architect who had come to America in 1850 to work for Andrew Jackson Downing, then the nation’s preeminent landscape designer and a leader in the campaign to establish Central Park in New York City. After Downing’s death in 1852, Vaux maintained his interest in landscape and promoted the design contest for Central Park; [65]once the competition was announced, he persuaded Olmsted to join him in submitting an entry. But the outcome benefited Olmsted far more than Vaux. Olmsted received the title of architect-in-chief, while Vaux was employed first as his assistant at $5 a day and then, from 1859 to 1862, as consulting architect. As Olmsted’s responsibilities at the U.S. Sanitary Commission consumed more of his time in 1862 and 1863, Vaux increasingly had to cope with the park and its problems by himself. He confided his frustrations to Olmsted, who responded unsympathetically with statements of the depth of his own commitment to the park.

In a long response to Vaux written on Thanksgiving Day, 1863, Olmsted set up a distinction between what he called X, his joint relationship with Vaux as designer of the Greensward plan, and X’, his prior relationship to Central Park as its superintendent or administrator. The letters between the two men throughout Olmsted’s stay in California frequently refer back to this distinction between administration and design. Vaux summed up their different approaches to the park as follows: “I believed that this work was chiefly an example of the art of design, incidentally of the art of administration. You thought the administration all inclusive and the design secondary.” Throughout the correspondence Vaux insisted that the art or design element should predominate. Over Olmsted’s objections, Vaux maintained that Olmsted’s greatest contribution to the park was as an artist. He also insisted that their administrative abilities must serve the artistic end they both had in mind, the establishment of Central Park as “the big art work of the Republic.”

Vaux defended and promoted his and Olmsted’s joint professional interests even though they were not partners while Olmsted was in California. In 1864 Vaux contested the claims of Egbert L. Viele, the former chief engineer of Central Park, that Olmsted and Vaux’s Green-sward plan was merely a copy of Viele’s original plan for the park. Vaux testified against Viele in court and urged Henry Bellows to bring the matter before their peers at the Century, an association of artists and patrons of the arts to which all four men belonged.

Vaux kept Olmsted informed of Central Park developments and solicited new park business. In 1863 he visited a proposed park site in New Haven, Connecticut, and in late 1864 he began discussions with James S. T. Stranahan, president of the Prospect Park Board of Commissioners in Brooklyn. Vaux suggested a change in the original boundaries of Prospect Park so that Flatbush Avenue would no longer bisect the park. The commissioners and the state legislature acted on Vaux’s suggestions and in June 1865, after a series of negotiations in which Vaux carefully laid out his professional requirements, the Prospect Park commissioners asked him to design the new park. Vaux urged Olmsted to return to New York and share the work with him.

Meanwhile Vaux was also campaigning for his and Olmsted’s [66]reinstatement as landscape architects to the Central Park commission. In April 1865 the exhibition of designs for four elaborate new Central Park gates by the architect Richard Morris Hunt gave Vaux a chance to fight for the integrity of the Greensward plan and maneuver the Central Park commission into rehiring him and Olmsted. Hunt’s formal gates at the southern end of the park would have replaced Olmsted and Vaux’s existing entrances, which were intentionally modest and designed to allow a swift transition from the city streets into the naturalistic scenery of the park. The commission had authorized the construction of Hunt’s gates, but its comptroller and treasurer, Andrew Haswell Green, delayed the work. In April 1865 Hunt attempted to marshal public support for his gates by exhibiting his striking drawings of them at the opening of the National Academy of Design. Vaux welcomed this attempt to involve the public. In an open letter to the president of the Central Park commission, he explained how the gates-especially the one at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street-violated the spirit of the Olmsted and Vaux plan. This letter, which Vaux referred to as “Campaign Document Number One,” was printed on the front page of the New York Evening Post on May 9, 1865. Two days later the Central Park commission voted to defer construction of Hunt’s gates. Vaux wrote two more “campaign documents,” a letter to Green that was never published, and a letter to Clarence Cook, art critic of the New-York Daily Tribune, which formed the basis of Cook’s scathing attack on the gates in the Tribune on August 2, 1865. By then Vaux had won his campaign. Not only had the commission stopped the construction of the gates and upheld the Olmsted and Vaux plan, but on July 19 it reappointed Olmsted and Vaux as landscape architects to the Central Park commission, with power to review architectural proposals for the park.

As Vaux’s maneuvers brought him closer to employment in both Prospect and Central parks, he became increasingly impatient with Olmsted. He was offering Olmsted work “of vital importance to the progress of the Republic” and saw Olmsted as a “stubborn cemetery maker in California” who was unwilling or unable to make up his mind. Although Olmsted’s delay could be excused because he did not learn of the Prospect Park contract until late July and the Central Park contract until late August 1865, Vaux’s acerbic comments have a ring of truth. He suspected egotism in Olmsted’s reluctance to collaborate with him on Prospect Park: “Your objection to the plan is I believe at heart because it involves the idea of a common fraternal effort. It is too republican an idea for you, you must have a thick line drawn all around your sixpen’ worth of individuality.” In the end, however, Olmsted agreed to collaborate with Vaux in working on Prospect Park and Central Park, and took his three California landscape commissions back to New York, where they were completed by the firm of Olmsted, Vaux & Company. In so [67]doing, Olmsted also began to accept the place in the profession of landscape architecture which Calvert Vaux defined for him in their remarkable correspondence from 1863 to 1865.