CHAPTER VII
VIGIL IN SAN FRANCISCO

In this chapter the collapse of the Mariposa Company unfolds, and on February 11 Olmsted admits to his father that he does not think the Company can possibly recover. While he waits in San Francisco for instructions and funding from New York, Olmsted tries to minimize the effects of the Company’s failure and to find alternative employment for himself and others. He explores long-term possibilities in journalism with Edwin L. Godkin, discussing in four letters the possibility of acquiring a San Francisco morning newspaper with him. Calvert Vaux’s letters of January 9 and March 12 tell of recent developments concerning a possible commission to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

At this time Olmsted attempted to supplement his income with landscape commissions. The letter of March 1 contains the only surviving description of his landscape plan for a private estate in California, George Howard’s Rancho San Mateo on the San Francisco peninsula.

Other documents in this chapter describe activities that Olmsted undertook for William C. Ralston of the Bank of California. To his father on February 12 and to Calvert Vaux on March 25 Olmsted relates his cautious enthusiasm for the oil business he has been investigating for Ralston in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. Olmsted also reports to Ralston on the future of the California wine industry, particularly at Agoston Haraszthy’s Buena Vista Vinicultural Society in Sonoma.

Several letters indicate that Olmsted’s stay in San Francisco gave him leisure to participate in the cultural life of the city, to read, and to think about national issues. On January 18 he lays out an organizational plan for a book club that would distribute important works to members [291]across the country on a monthly basis. In his letter to Godkin dated January 26, Olmsted describes the "intellectual treat" of watching the actor Charles Kean perform, and analyzes the art of acting. He presents Kean as a civilized man who laboriously trains himself for the place in society he is best fitted to fill. By contrast, in a letter to his father on March 16, Olmsted disapproves of the proposal of his twenty-two-year-old half-brother, Albert Henry Olmsted, to abandon his previous training and enter scientific school. Olmsted reveals his desire to suppress in Ally the “truant disposition” he himself had exhibited in his earlier years; he also provides a sobering picture of the hardships experienced at that time by committed and well-trained scientists such as William Ashburner and Clarence King.