Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [96]
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 from Santa Cruz cement. If Grandfather had got his backing, neither he nor Grandmother would have become the people I knew. I can’t imagine him a small-town millionaire, or Grandmother a prettier and more snobbish Mrs. Elliott, a local intellectual remembering her great days of contact with some equivalent of Margaret Fuller.
It makes me restless, too, to see Oliver Ward going off to Deadwood, a raw Black Hills gulch lately stolen from the Sioux. When he started for there, Custer’s cavalry had been two years dead, and the Sioux were either behind reservation fences or gnawing the bones of exile in the Wood Mountain and Cypress Hills country beyond the Canadian line. So I don’t fear for his scalp. I fear for his soul. His employer was to be George Hearst, then building the sort of empire that Grandfather might have built if he had been another sort of man–George Hearst who, according to Clarence King, was once bitten on the privates by a scorpion, which fell dead.
Clarence King himself, Conrad Prager’s friend and superior on the Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, and later on a friend of my grandparents, would turn out to be not untroubled by the temptations of a George Hearst. There was no reason Oliver Ward should not have been, except character. Pioneer or not, resource-raider or not, afflicted or not with the frontier faith that exploitation is development, and development is good, he was simply an honest man. His gift was not for money making and the main chance. He was a builder, not a raider. He trusted people (Grandmother thought too much), he was loved by animals and children and liked by men, he had an uncomplicated ambition to leave the world a little better for his passage through it, and his notion of how to better it was to develop it for human use. I feel like telling him to forget Deadwood. There never was anything there for a man like him.