Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [99]
February 15, 1878
Dear Thomas–
I sent you yesterday the large block and the vignette for my Santa Cruz article. Others will come shortly. I am working on them as hard as I can, for the immediate future seems more and more uncertain. Things are so crazy out here–the madman Denis Kearny is shouting that the Chinese must go, and many workingmen are unemployed and surly, so that men with capital, fearing the disaster that may occur to their existing plants if a full-scale anti-Chinese riot breaks out, hesitate to erect anything new. For of course the erection of anything new would involve Chinese labor. It is cheaper.
You should be scolded for working so hard. Augusta writes that between converting old lovely Scribby into the new Century, and sitting on commissions, and fighting Tammany, you are seldom in your bed before two or three. You must stop this, sir. You are too valuable a citizen to be allowed to destroy your health in however good a cause.
March 4, 1878
Darling Augusta–
If nothing happens, I shall spend the apple blossom time in Milton, and the summer around generally, and not rejoin Oliver until at least the fall.
We shall have to postpone cement, and with it our lighthouse on that windy point. It is such a hard year and they all say Oliver looks so young–and when they ask him how much it will cost to make cement he hasn’t the cheek to show a balance sheet with startling immediate profits, but says the plain truth, that he don’t know. However, there are men who say they will go in on it next year. Meantime we must live. So Oliver takes up the shovel and the hoe and tells me privately that he is glad enough to lay down the fiddle and the bow. He enjoyed the wrestle with rock and clay and the triumph of finally uniting them in an insoluble marriage, but he has hated the tedious and humiliating waiting on rich men, and all the talk.
Mr. Prager has been appointed one of the commissioners to the Paris Exposition. My journey East will probably be made with them. If Oliver can only come part of the way with us it will not seem so cruel. He is at present negotiating about a place in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, the wildest of the wilds, where I cannot possibly take Ollie. But if he can come with us as far as Cheyenne, that will be four days together. I never thought that when I came back to you I would come hesitantly, but you will forgive me if I admit that coming back without Oliver will not be an unmixed blessing. But then I think of seeing you, and the long nights of talk. I am so restless with it all that I cannot write a decent letter. And I daren’t take a walk, I dare hardly look out the window, for fear of being reminded of that windy point overlooking the sweep of the Pacific. Who would have thought that the prospect of leaving this place could make me want to weep! Oliver takes it far better than I, though the hard work and the disappointment were mainly his.
6
End of dream number one, which was her dream, not his. It came and went within six months. Others, better at the talkee-talkee, would later take his formula, which he characteristically had not patented or kept to himself, and tear down the mountains of limestone and the cliffs of clay, grind them and burn them to clinker, add gypsum, and grind and roll clinker and gypsum together into the finest powder for the making of bridges, piers, dams, highways, and all the works of Roman America that my grandfather’s generation thought a part of Progress. The West would be in good part built and some think ruined by that cement. Many would grow rich out of it. Decades later, over the mountain at Permanente, not too far from New Almaden, Henry Kaiser would make a very good thing indeed out of the argillaceous and calcareous that Oliver Ward forced into an insoluble marriage in the winter of 1877.
My feelings about this are mixed, for it would have made me uneasy to be descended