WHATEVER HAPPENED to the Mariposa Company, Olmsted’s tenure at the Estate was over. Even if the company recovered, it could never again afford a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year manager. Yet he did not pack up and leave. He decided to stay at least until the end of September, which would conclude his second year of service. This was partly a question of pride. He was also being practical. If he stayed, he had a slim chance of being paid—he had telegraphed New York with a request for five thousand dollars. The cost of living in Bear Valley was high; Mary had been obliged to let two of the servants go. Still, he was not unhappy to remain even at his own expense. The children were healthy; he and Mary enjoyed their outdoor life. When it got hot, they planned to return to their idyllic summer camp in the mountains. That would give him time to complete the Yosemite report, which was his personal responsibility.
The long-term future was uncertain. “I wish you could find some commission business in which you and I could engage together,” he wrote Godkin, who was still trying to get “the paper” off the ground. What Olmsted had in mind was something “wherein a little capital would go a good way and be safe.” Alternatively, he thought himself suited to be president of a railroad company, head of a news wire service, or editor of a newspaper. He considered the Foreign Service. “I have had ever since I have been in this burnt country, a real craving for the English climate. Mary has the same and agrees to live on bread and cheese for a year if I will get the consulship to any slushy old town where there are donkeys to let,” he confessed. He was open to almost any career—except landscape architecture. Miller was still in San Francisco working on the cemetery and preparing to survey the College of California site, but Olmsted considered these projects as merely sidelines.
One thing, at least, was sure. He would leave California. It was not only the arid climate. After three months in San Francisco, he had concluded that without more capital his chances of making his fortune in the West were limited. “There are men of high position who would like to make use of me,” he wrote Godkin, “but it is only because they think that I could get capital for them in New York—get up stock companies, of the Mariposa model, for the development of California property of questionable value, which I wouldn’t if I could.” The inference that Mariposa had been “of questionable value” is unmistakable, although Olmsted could not bring himself to admit that the whole Mariposa affair may have been an outright swindle from the start, as many people in New York—including Godkin—believed.
The management of the Estate was now firmly in Dodge Brothers’ hands, and Olmsted found himself with free time. In the afternoons the family would ride to the top of Mount Bullion. There, beside a cool spring and with a magnificent view of the Yosemite Valley, they would have tea. The children would play among the spring flowers while he and Mary worked on a garden plot. Mornings found him at his writing desk. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that he was able to write for several hours a day. As long as he slept well and exercised regularly, the symptoms that had plagued him the previous year did not reappear. He sent an annual report to the Company explaining his handling of the Estate’s debts. He also started to record everyday life in Bear Valley. He wrote about the different sorts of people: the Indians who lived on the edge of town, the Chinese and Mexican workers, and the American miners. Here is his description of a particular Kentucky gambler:
He has a cigar in his mouth, a Colt’s revolver in one pocket, a Geneva watch in another and scores of machines and many hundreds of hands have been employed in preparing his apparel. When freshly and mildly stimulated, he has a very active mind and a ready utterance. It is not unlikely that tomorrow morning, after he has taken a warm bath, his cognac and soda water, coffee and one or two after breakfast drams [I shall] again hear him discoursing, as I did this morning, with indignant eloquence on “the mockery of justice, the debasement of the ermine, the ignorance of law, the degrading of demagogueism, the abominable infidelity by _______!” of a recent decision of a Court with regard to the rights of colored people in public conveyances, reported in a San Francisco newspaper. In twenty minutes he will have made use of words primarily prepared for him by Saxon, Roman, Greek, Sanscrit and I know not what other brains. Then again he will pass under my window humming a hymn of Handel, or I shall find him at the Post Office sitting in an arm chair, made for him in New Hampshire, and reading a novel first written in France, translated in England and printed for him in Boston. He will have been served before the day is over by your work and by mine and by that of thousands of other men, and yet will think of nothing so often or so intensely as the “cursed luck” by which he is served no better. And what will he do for us? Play a game of billiards with you or take a hand at cards if you want amusement, and if he wins money in this or any other way of speculating he will use it “generously.” Within a year by pledging his word to drink no more he induced a poor hard worked widow to become his wife, having been previously the father of several children of different colors for [whose] maintenance or education he has never worked an hour or concerned himself a moment. He is [a] tall and large framed white man of English stock, born in a state of society which he speaks of [as] “the highest reach of civilization.”
Olmsted lived in California at the beginning of the period that Hollywood would represent—and distort—in the motion-picture western. Nothing is remotely glamorous in his description of the indolent Kentuckian. This rugged individualist is portrayed as a social parasite and a bigot; in a subsequent passage he is unfavorably compared to the hardworking Chinese, whom he disdains. (Olmsted was dismayed to find racist prejudice extended to Chinese, Mexicans, and Indians.) Yet the gambler is neither a savage nor a rustic. He is what today would be called a consumer—of ideas as well as goods. Olmsted found life in Bear Valley primitive, but he was aware that the American frontier revealed something else, indeed, a curious paradox.
I was not prepared to find in a region so remote from the great centres of civilization so little of rural or backwoods simplicity. The English speaking people are no more unsophisticated here than in Piccadilly or St. Giles. Even the farmers have more commonly the carriage, style and manners of unfortunate horse jockeys and dissipated market men than of solid, steady and frugal countrymen. Go where you will on the mountains, the hills or the plains, wherever the slightest trail has been formed or the smallest sign of industry—mining, mechanical or agricultural—is to be found, you may also find empty sardine boxes, meat, oyster and fruit cans, wine, ale, olive and sauce bottles, with playing cards and torn leaves of novels, magazines and newspapers, more commonly New York newspapers, but sometimes French, German or English.
Olmsted titled these notes “A Pioneer Community of the Present Day.” They were part of an ambitious project of long duration. Three years earlier he had written to his father: “I have been for some time accumulating notes and materials for a book.” This was immediately after he had returned from his Sanitary Commission tour of the Midwest with Knapp. During that trip he compiled a lengthy travel diary. In it he documented his experiences in a slovenly hotel in Cincinnati, encounters with passengers on Mississippi steamboats, and vignettes of urban life in St. Louis, Chicago, and Cleveland. These travel diaries were part of a “whole caseful of notes” that included newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and background reading that he had been collecting for several years. During that spring in Bear Valley, he started to put these notes into order.
This book would not be a travel account. “I am cogitating a heavy sort of book on Society in the United States—the influence of pioneer-life—& of Democracy,” he wrote to Godkin shortly after arriving in California. Olmsted’s ambition was to write a comprehensive study of the state of civilization in America. Today the word civilization is most commonly used in reference to the distant past, as in “pre-Columbian civilization.” In nineteenth-century America civilization was not an archaeological term; it referred to contemporary society. Moreover, as used by Olmsted, it described an enlightened state of virtuous and intellectual development. “Civilization is, in fact, the best condition of mankind,” he had written in A Journey in the Back Country, “and the steps by which mankind have arrived at civilization do not need to be retraced to find morality, respectability or happiness.”
The opposite of civilization is barbarism. Olmsted was greatly influenced by Horace Bushnell’s famous public lecture “Barbarism the First Danger.” Olmsted was at Sachem’s Head at the time, so he probably didn’t hear it but read it in a pamphlet. “Nothing is more certain,” Bushnell wrote in a passage that Olmsted copied into his notes, “. . . than that emigration or a new settlement of the social state involves a tendency to social decline. There must in every such case be a relapse toward barbarism, more or less protracted, more or less complete.” Bushnell certainly had in mind the Irish and European immigrants who were then arriving in large numbers in the Eastern cities, but he was no nativist. American history had always been a process of accommodating transplanted immigrant races who had left behind “all the old roots of local love and historic feeling, the joints and bands that minister nourishment,” he wrote. Hence the importance of educational, civic, and religious institutions. But the settler on the Western frontier, unlike the uprooted European immigrant in the East, did not have the benefit of civilizing influences.
Bushnell placed his hopes in the power of religion to reform society; Olmsted was less sanguine about the prospects for civilization in the United States. He recognized the fragile situation of American society. He had already observed that one of the chief evils of Southern slavery was that it hindered the development of civilized communities, not only among the slaves but also among the slave owners. His experiences in west Texas had taught him that the conditions of life on the frontier were likewise far from propitious. This perception hardened during his stay in California. Pioneering required self-reliance, yet self-reliance often degenerated into self-indulgence and greed. Self-reliance was also accompanied by an exaggerated sense of personal honor, lawlessness, and profligacy. Bear Valley did not display that sense of solidarity that was engendered by civic institutions. When social and political organizations were formed, their purpose was merely “You stand by me & I will stand by you,” as he put it. Self-interest did not equal community. “You must imagine for yourself what the condition of society is under these circumstances. It is nowhere; there is no society. Any appearance of social convenience that may be found is a mere temporary and temporizing expedient by which men cheat themselves to believe that they are not savages.”
Olmsted planned to expand Bushnell’s thesis. He would examine not only the frontier but also the large Eastern cities, previous immigrants as well as current Western settlers. As in the past, he based himself on personal observation and “facts.” Previously, he had relied on newspapers and government reports; this time he conceived a quantitative analysis. He had always been fascinated by statistics. He required the Central Park police to keep detailed crime records. The first Sanitary Commission report of demoralization among Union troops depended heavily on statistics. He subsequently hired the actuary Ezekiel Eliott and made record-keeping the keystone of the Commission. Supplies were tracked from warehouse to battlefield. Patients were documented as they were admitted into hospitals. The Commission regularly published a hospital directory that eventually listed six hundred thousand names. (The directory kept track of medical histories and enabled families to locate their wounded and dead relatives.) Olmsted established a Bureau of Vital Statistics that tabulated the reports submitted by the sanitary inspectors. These published results “added more new and valuable facts to the science of vital statistics than any other contribution at any time,” according to a contemporary encyclopedia. Olmsted took advantage of the Bureau of Vital Statistics to compile a social survey. At his own expense, he had a questionnaire circulated among more than seven thousand Union wounded. The data described family backgrounds as well as personal habits and attitudes. He hoped to discover how immigrants were altered by living in America, and how they differed from native-born citizens. “What are the habits, & what is the mental & moral condition of men in the United States whose character & habits have been chiefly influenced by European conditions, & what of those whose character & habits have been much affected by American conditions?” It was a grand scheme. He intended nothing less than to find what made Americans American.