Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [128]
These fictions would have been pretty much the same, with only a repainting of the background scenery, if she had been writing about Tombstone or Deadwood. She really was protected, somewhat by her husband and just as much by her fastidiousness. The reality in these stories is only decorative.
But a Leadville as authentic as it is unexpected lies buried in the mouse-shredded letters. It is the Leadville that found its way to her fireside.
A camp that strikes it rich in the middle of a depression speaks as urgently to the well-trained as to the untrained. In Leadville, Harvard men mucked in prospect holes, graduates of MIT and Yale Sheffield Scientific School worked as paymasters and clerks and gunguards, every mine office was approached daily by some junior engineer with a diploma and a new mustache. The Clarendon Hotel heard the accents of Boston, New York, and London; Mosquito Pass was a major flyway for migrating mining experts and capitalists.
Leadville roared toward civilization like a runaway train. Amid talk of an opera house, three mine managers, including Oliver’s distant cousin W. S. Ward, were planning houses on Ditch Walk, and hoped to have wives in them before another summer. The principal boardinghouse at its Younger Sons Ball drew social lines as rigid in their way as Newport’s. The best saloons were gorgeous with walnut, crystal, and William Morris wallpapers. All this was just beginning to fall into place, like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, when Susan settled down to pig it in her cabin on the ditch.
One morning a knock came on the door, and Susan opened it to see a stout, bright-eyed, self-assured little lady standing there. Helen Hunt Jackson, sent to her like a valentine by their mutual friend Augusta. As a literary lady married to a mining engineer, and resident in the West, Mrs. Jackson could hardly have been more reassuring to Grandmother. If Helen Hunt of Amherst, Massachusetts, was not lost when she became Helen Hunt Jackson of Denver, then why should Susan Burling of Milton, New York, lose her identity now that she was Susan Burling Ward of Leadville? The two were intimates within fifteen minutes.
Another day several wagons, many mules, and a half dozen men set up a camp higher on the ditch, in the edge of the aspens. This was the new United States Geological Survey party, all veterans of King’s Survey of the Fortieth Parallel. A little while after they arrived, a long, thin, chinless, slouching man who wore his ugliness as elegantly as his snow-white buckskins rode down and made himself known: Samuel Emmons, one of the giants, Leadville’s Homer, one of Oliver’s heroes and an old companion of Prager, Clarence King, and Henry Adams. He had written a book that Oliver looked upon as a bible, and he had helped make the geological maps that he was now charmed to see pinned as decorations on the log walls. It took a woman, he said, to see the aesthetic possibilities of the Silurian.
Within days, Prager and Henry Janin came over the range, and within a week Clarence King himself, a man glitteringly famous, director of the Geological Survey, author of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, climber of Mount Whitney, exposer of the great diamond hoax. Susan didn’t think of him as “the best and brightest man of his generation,” because John Hay hadn’t yet made that remark about him; but she knew him as a literary man and she knew Oliver’s respect for him