Mrs Olmsted, who called at our house the other day, gave tolerably good accounts of you to Panama, and we heard incidentally last evening that fresh advices had been received from you from St Francisco, so that you are probably by this time fairly at work in your new vocation. We shall be interested to learn how you succeed in your attempts to get profitable work out of the team you have to drive and I have no doubt that for a time at least you will find ample scope for your faculty.

I hoped to have seen something more of you before you left but had one of my prostrating attacks that only allowed me to reach the Brevoort in time to shake hands with your father before he returned to Hartford. I saw Mrs Perkins at the Choates yesterday & she says that Mrs Olmsted has so much trouble in getting accommodation in the city that she intends staying at Staten Island at Miss Errington’s, till she leaves for the mines. We are at 16 W. 24th St Francisco having taken a house & Mrs Vaux is quite glad to be in a civilised region again.

My special object in writing is to speak of a matter about which, in view of your proposed long absence, something needs to be said. The public has been led to believe from the commencement of the Central [115]Park work to the present time that you are pre-eminently the author of the executed design, and such we all know is the general impression throughout the country today. This has resulted naturally from your lengthened tenure of a title that expresses the idea of superiority in the fewest possible words, and from the partial statements that have appeared from time to time in the public prints. Having accepted your estimate of the necessities of the occasion in the first instance, I have acted throughout consistently with that acceptance, and as it was always evident to me that the successful execution of the plan required that our interests should seem to be identical, I, at no time during the progress of the work, thought it desirable on personal grounds, to hazard a discussion of the subject. Now however that our connection with the park has ceased for the time being, we may as well exchange views on this point.

Our business relation according to my idea has been from first to last a simple partnership on equal terms, incorrectly named from motives of expediency, not of a private character, and I supposed when the work was commenced that an early opportunity would be taken to restore the balance thus disturbed to my disadvantage. That your notions differed from mine is shown by the absence of any apparent desire on your part to alter the existing state of things and by the fact that it was disagreeable to you to give up the name of A in C. when, a few months before our engagement terminated, it became necessary, for your own interest, that a change of title should take place. As I felt that your idea, whatever it might be, must rest on some basis satisfactory to your own sense of propriety, I respected it accordingly, but I find now that an unpleasant impression is left on my mind by such statements as were lately reiterated in the daily papers with regard to your connection with the park plan, and I shall therefore be glad if, when opportunity serves, you will frankly communicate to me your personal feelings in this matter so that I may be able in the future to do your views the fullest justice, and at the same time be at liberty—as I never yet have been—to express my own.

When Minturn settles I will make out a statement of a/c and write you fully on that head, but this will keep for the present.

In the mean time with every good wish, Believe [me]