Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [183]
I must end this. Ollie has just come out and asked if he can go up to the post, where a sergeant–one of the men who hunted down Chief Joseph–has promised to teach him and some of his playmates to ride like cavalrymen. I suppose it is safe, but at least I must go up and take a look at this sergeant. At five, to ride like a cavalryman!
Good-bye, dear Augusta. It eases me to talk to you through half an afternoon this way. You will have many miles of my illegible hand to decipher, I fear, before we have brought this valley into the civilized world.
Your own
S.B.W.
2
I have heard publishers, lamenting their hard life over Scotch and soda, complain that they must read a hundred bad manuscripts to find one good one. Having practiced the trade of history, I feel no stir of sympathy. A historian scans a thousand documents to find one fact that he can use. If he is working with correspondence, as I am, and with the correspondence of a woman to boot, he will wade toward his little islands of information through a dismal swamp of recipes, housekeeping details, children’s diseases, insignificant visitors, inconclusive conversations with people unknown to the historian, and recitations of what the writer did yesterday.
Susan Ward, a devoted correspondent and sometimes a very interesting one, had her dry spells like other mortals. She also had her reticences and her pride: having made up her mind to follow her husband into that sagebrush desert, she would not complain more than humorously; she would have to adopt the attitudes of a tourist confronted by the picturesque. Result: she chatters a good deal during her first year or so in Boise. Her only companions are Army wives who never come back into her life–are transferred away, or dropped, or forgotten about.
Nothing there that I want to know about, neither events nor feelings. I have to keep turning the pages of those chatty, empty letters for a long time before I find any that are worth stopping at. The first of these comes eleven months, one novel, one miscarriage, some anxious cases of measles and whooping cough, and some miles of her hasty illegible scrawl after the one I have just quoted.
P.O. Box 311
Boise City
May 17, 1883
Dearest Augusta–
Please note the change of address, which was effected last week. For the summer, we shall get our mail only when someone rides into town, ten miles. We have given up Father Mespie’s house and moved bag and baggage into the canyon. Pope and Cole, our Eastern backers, have suffered reverses, and tell General Tompkins that they are unable to go on with us.
Oliver takes the blow with a lightness I could never manage. He says he never did expect to sail right through without delays and troubles, but I am sure it must be maddening to him to have to stop, for he drove himself very hard through the winter to complete the topographical work, and had just arranged with a contractor for the digging of the first eight miles of ditch–a unit which will be called (it makes me want to laugh at the intended compliment and shed a tear for the bad luck!) the Susan Canal. Now we must postpone everything while General Tompkins finds new backers. The likeliest prospects seem to be the Keysers of Baltimore, who are connected with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
In the circumstances, the canyon camp is a godsend. Oliver is on standby salary. Frank and Wiley are sticking with us on no salary at all beyond the privilege of putting their legs under our camp table. We shall keep John, the handyman, to do the minimal work required to keep our claims and permits clear, and the Chinese cook, named Charley Wan–doesn’t he sound faded? He isn’t at all. He is a little grinning idol of old ivory, and a great dandy. On Saturday he rode into Boise, spent the night, and came back barbered and shining and smelling of lotions, in time to get Sunday breakfast. Betsy calls him the