CHAPTER V
CIVILIZING THE FRONTIER

From April to June 1864, Olmsted’s letters shift in focus from operations on the Estate to plans to civilize the frontier. His family had arrived, and he set in motion several projects designed to improve the community. He asks Edwin L. Godkin to order a variety of periodicals for a reading room at Princeton Camp, which he hopes will attract the miners away from the saloons. He writes to David Parker, chief manager of a Shaker community in New Hampshire that manufactured laundry machines, for information on the cost and feasibility of installing a steam-powered laundry system on the Estate. In the town of Mariposa he had purchased an existing store, expecting that the Mariposa Company could supply it more cheaply from New York and thus serve the wants of the population better. In a letter to the Mariposa Gazette defending this purchase, he outlines the needs of a civilized community in terms he will develop more fully in “The Pioneer Condition and the Drift of Civilization in America.” From Mason Brothers, a bookstore and publisher in New York, he orders books for his family, now isolated on the frontier with access to neither school nor library.

On April 4, 1864, Olmsted writes Godkin a letter analyzing the businesses in California that will form the backbone of the state’s economic development. Rejecting mining as too risky, he examines four companies upon which many other enterprises will depend: a steamship company, a telegraph company, and the companies that supplied water and gas to San Francisco.

Olmsted’s letter to Friedrich Kapp, a German newspaper editor in New York and influential spokesman for the German community, [213]anticipates the upcoming presidential campaign. Kapp was supporting John C. Frémont for president; Olmsted’s bitter letter attempts to convince him of his mistake.

When Olmsted welcomes Henry Bellows to California on April 28, he warns his friend of the “superficial, unrooted and veneered character of all that which looks like civilization” in the state, and asserts that at the bottom of all civilized communal life lies the comfort, tranquillity, and morality of a permanent home. By contrast, he observes that he knows virtually no one in California who intends to settle where he now resides.

Despite the uncertainty of the future of the Mariposa Estate, however, Olmsted had settled his own family about him and was living in ease and comfort. Perhaps their presence accounts for the positive tone of most of the letters in this chapter, and Olmsted’s hopefulness about improving society on the frontier.