I have recently received your letters of 9th & 10th January, and the map of Brooklyn Park as designed by General Vielé. My heart really bounds (if you don’t mind poetry) to your suggestion that we might work together about it. I can’t tell you & you can’t conceive how I would like to expect it. But I don’t think it’s likely. My health is weak. I get on now from day to day tolerably well, but feel very liable to break down suddenly & finally & therefore am strongly possessed with the duty of laying up something for my family while I can. It is true the Mariposa Company has failed (I suppose) and I am relieved of any obligation to stay here but the chances are that some arrangment will be made and I shall be wanted, or that I shall fall into some other business here that will enable me to save something or at least to maintain my family comfortably and nurse my present investments. I don’t believe I could ever do that on the Brooklyn park, let alone the chance of being turned out or harried out just as I had got settled.

I can’t tell you, I say again, how attractive to me the essential business we had together is; nor how I abhor the squabbles with the Commission & politicians. Both are very deep with me. I feel them deeper every year. It was a passion thwarted & my whole life is really embittered with it very much & I think I shall feel it more as I grow older. I think a good deal how I should like to show you what I really am and could do with a perfectly free & fair understanding from the start, and with moderate degree of freedom from the necessity of accommodating myself to infernal scoundrels. I have a perfect craving for the park, sometimes, and for an exposition from you of what I want.

But, bother!

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Your plans are excellent, of course, you don’t play with it but go at once to the essential starting points, and I hope the Commissioners are wise enough to comprehend it. I think the ground looks attractive, as if you could form a much simpler & grander & more convenient kind of Park than ours on it.

I am getting on with my Cemetery which will be of a very elaborate & complicated pattern. Miller is employed in staking it out. I have also made a preliminary reconnaissance of a large piece of ground held by the College of California which I propose to layout upon the Llewellyn plan. It is an accursed country with no trees & no turf and it’s a hard job to make sure of any beauty.

I have given plans for improvement of a country seat & I will try to send you copies, so you can see how I do it.

I made a journey last week, a hundred miles South, and across the Coast mountains to the seashore to examine some oil springs—with Ashburner—Ashburner is my best friend here, a mining Engineer. Upon our report, capital was immediately obtained & a well will be started within a week. A, & I, get each 1/12 of the stock for our trouble, & the whole business is put into our hands. We have proxies for all the stock except what is held by the contractors for boreing—& so manage it—electing ourselves officers &c. The scenery over the mountains was interesting & I saw several new trees. The marked feature however was the red-woods. They were large trees, 250 ft high, generally in small groups & often very beautiful.

I have got a good deal “in oil”, if it ever comes to anything. At present we know nothing about it of much value. The geological conditions are different from Pennsylvania—the oil oozes in a thick tarry condition from the surface, or has done so, leaving asphaltum, which softens & runs oily sometimes in the sun. But clear oil is sometimes found with this & the presumption is that by boreing, reservoirs of it will be struck as in Penna. But this has not been proved. I am interested a little in one enterprise, in which the borer is now down 80 feet. If there is any oil to be got in this way, there will be enough “to float all the navies of the world” &c. for there are thousands of acres where there are these surface indications. I don’t put much in nor reckon much on success but am a good deal interested.

I have been away from home now more than two months & am tired enough of hotel life. I can form no idea what is before us—the Company’s telegrams being only inquisitive. I think I have managed my part of the business discreetly & successfully. The men are at work again [326]for wages & to pay their own debts, & the other creditors are patient. Mary keeps in pretty good spirits & the housekeeping slides along with no unusual friction. I hope for a visit from her here next week.

When you write again tell us more of the McIntees please.