Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [124]
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 as a scientist; she had heard of him as the wittiest of talkers and a prince of story tellers. In a tone somewhere between awe and a giggle, she wrote Augusta that in his tent at the Survey camp he was served by a black valet, that he possessed an apparently inexhaustible supply of fine wines, brandy, and cigars, and that his riding clothes, like those of Emmons, were made by London tailors out of snow-white deerskins dressed by Paiute squaws in the Carson Valley of Nevada. Except for her report of one evening, her letters contain no samples of King’s celebrated conversation. Perhaps the mice got them.
With King was a large good-natured man named Thomas Donaldson, chairman of the Public Lands Commission, and in the two months that their camp was pitched there it drew a stream of celebrities. Where did they spend their evenings? Grandmother’s cabin, naturally. She was a lamp for every moth that flew. In her single room whose usable space was hardly fifteen feet square there assembled every evening an extraordinary collection of education, culture, talent, eloquence, reputation, political power, and intellectual force. There was no way to keep the two cots curtained off; they were always being exposed to serve as sofas. I doubt that Grandmother was offended to have her bedroom once again invaded; she was never more stimulated in her life. Braced for dutiful and deprived exile, ready to lie in the rude Western bed she had made, she found herself presiding over a salon that (she told herself more than once) Augusta’s studio itself could hardly have matched for brilliance.
If you do not believe we live gaily in Leadville, let me tell you about our July Fourth. I had Mrs. Abadie and Mrs. Jackson, whose husbands had not returned from inspection trips. Mr. Ward dropped in with his hands full of wildflowers, and then Frank Sargent on his way fishing. He helped me get lunch–Oliver has burned his leg with nitric acid and can’t stoop down as one must do to cook on our open Franklin. We had fish chowder (canned) from Boston, white muscat grapes (canned) from California, tea (English breakfast, contributed by Mr. Ward), tapioca pudding with raisins à la Leadville, contributed by the Geological Survey cook who saw we were having a celebration, and toast, made and burned by Frank. Our table service was somewhat permiscus. Frank sat on a packing box, Mr. Ward rocked in our rocker and pretended he was a bad little boy bent on spilling things (he is always the wag of the party, to his own great amusement), Oliver twirled in an old screw office chair and ate his grapes out of a Budweiser tumbler left over from our last picnic. After lunch an ice cream man came mournfully crying his wares along the ditch. Oliver and Mr. Ward rushed out (or Mr. Ward rushed and Oliver hobbled), and Mr. Ward bought some oranges as well. When we went down to dinner that evening there was a foot race going on, accompanied by a brass band. Nothing can be done here, from a tightrope performance to a show by a lot of short-skirted girls at the Great Western Amphitheater, without a band. After supper Mr. Ward took us to Chittenden