Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [123]
She guided her horse through willows and alders and runted birches, leaned and weaved until the brush ended and she broke into the open. She was at the edge of a meadow miles long, not a tree in it except for the wiggling line that marked the course of the Lake Fork. Stirrup-high grass flowed and flawed in the wind, and its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks and splashes of flowers–rust of paintbrush, blue of pentsternon, yellow of buttercups, scarlet of gilia, blue-tinged white of columbines. All around, rimming the valley, bare peaks patched with snow looked down from above the scalloped curve of timberline.
All but holding her breath, she pushed into the field of grass. The pony’s legs disappeared, his shoulders forced a passage, grass heads and flowers snagged in her stirrup and saddle skirts. The movement around and beneath her was as dizzying as the fast current of the creek had been a moment before. The air was that high blue mountain kind that fizzes in the lungs. Rising in her stirrup to get her face and chest full of it, she gave, as it were, a standing ovation to the rim cut out against the blue. From a thousand places in the grass little gerns of unevaporated water winked back the sun.
She heard Pricey come up and stop just behind her. His horse blew. But she was filling her eyes, and did not turn. Then she heard Pricey say, in his fine cultivated Oxonian voice, strongly, without the trace of a stammer,
Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire.
Who but Pricey? Where but Leadville?
Mice have gnawed Grandmother’s Leadville letters and created some historical lacunae. The packet is thin, moreover. That much time in New Almaden and Santa Cruz produced a bale of correspondence. Leadville’s letters number only thirty.
The reminiscences don’t help much, and neither do the three novels that deal with the Leadville experience, sympathetically misunderstood from the fireside. Real people and real actions may be traced in them, but they operate within plots full of the scruples of attenuated virgins of a kind that Grandmother certainly never found in Leadville. Their heroes are young engineers like Oliver Ward reduced to pasteboard, their villains are claim jumpers and crooked managers. Once the heroine is the daughter of the villain, a device that Grandmother used again in a later story. The villain has to die repentant before the young lady can marry the upright engineer.
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.