Angle of Repose (57 page)

The Canyon
Jan. 8, 1884

Dear Thomas–

I send you with this the first two blocks in the “Far Western Life” series, together with a thousand-word sketch to accompany each. Please,
please
throw these last away if they fail to come up to your standards, and have some competent writer do something in substitution. The pictures I am surer of-at the very least they are authentic. “The Last Trip In” I was fortunate to catch just as that great double freight wagon drawn by ten mules passed along the bench above us on its way to a mountain ranche where we spent two days last summer fishing. You may recognize members of our little band: Frank Sargent is the man in gaiters who stands by the stirrup in “Cinching Up.” I have drawn him many times-indeed, if it were not for my family and our little group of last-ditchers I should be starved for models. He is a hard person to change or disguise, being proudly and rather fiercely himself. I hope it will not be construed as a weakness that he has already appeared in
Century
as a Leadville engineer, a ne’er-do-well, a packer, a stage driver, and a mucker in a mine, and that Osgood and Company have known him as the young man next door in a Louisa Alcott novel.

Mr. Wiley I find harder to draw, though he patiently submits himself to whatever I demand. He is constantly cheerful, endlessly kind. He reads to the children by the hour. And all three of my engineers are so clever with their hands that I have only to express a wish and some invention is created to make it come true.

As I write you, I am sitting in the very prow of our latest accomplishinent. It is a house, but from a little distance could hardly be told from a ledge of rock. Our joint hands, brains, and enthusiasm built it. Oliver designed it and supervised its construction, I made certain suggestions from the point of view of the housewife, all of us helped build it, even Wan and Nellie, even the children. It is made of rock hauled by stoneboat from the rockslide just back of us, held together with cement that Oliver made of the earth beneath our feet-that experiment with cement in Santa Cruz has finally proved useful after all. The word was throw in the rock and spare the hammer. Mud was cheaper than labor, and time was short.

Have you ever built a house with your own hands, out of the materials that Nature left lying around? Everyone should have that experience once. It is the most satisfying experience I know. We have been as fascinated as children who build forts or snowhouses, and it has made us the tightest little society in all the West. We are not the kind of ideal society that gathers around you and Augusta in the studio, yet we are not without our ideal aspects. A Brook Farm without a social theory, and a melting pot Brook Farm at that: a Chinese cook, a Swedish handyman, an English governess, three Eastern-American engineers, two children, and a lady artist. I have watched with admiration how you two first created a place for yourselves in New York and then molded and shaped it within a world of art and ideas. Let me tell you how it is done in primitive Idaho.

Having determined the proportions of your temple, which Oliver said should be 21 by 35 feet–multiples of seven, the proportions of the Parthenon!–and your site, which we agreed should be the knoll behind the cooktent, you dig a trench three feet deep and nearly as wide all around the circumference of your foundations. Into this you pour wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of cement, or “mud” as Oliver calls it, and tons and tons and tons of rocks. When the walls have reached ground level you erect forms on top of them, between four and five feet high and sloping inward at the top to a width of 18 inches. Then, standing on stagings and running your wheelbarrow up and down planks, you pour in more mud and more rocks, “puddling” as you go. I forgot to say that you frame off openings for doors and windows.

It was a scene of the most fascinating activity-Oliver and Frank and John wheeling and hauling, Wiley mixing cement, Wan puddling, all of us throwing in such rocks as we could lift, even little toddler Betsy contributing her pebbles. Ollie had a heavenly time and worked like a stevedore, “proving” himself to the men. He is like his father in that. I tried to draw all this, but could not find a focus. It was like trying to draw a colony of ants.

While the walls “cured,” the men hauled lumber, windows, etc., from town, and also scooped out the whole interior down to the base of the walls, using John’s scraper when they could, and picks and shovels when they had to. Then they built a great central chimney with four flues, and fireplaces on all four sides, and laid on a low-browed roof, and installed windows, and built a door out of planks like the door on our Leadville cabin, with a buckskin thong for a latchstring which we have sworn will never be pulled in. Oh, for the day when you and Augusta pull that thong! It is a low door, at which both Oliver and Frank must stoop. They say it teaches them humility.

By frantic effort, we were able to move in for Christmas Eve, and oh, the snugness, despite the unfinished nature of everything, and what a chimney for the children to hang their stockings by! Our great window looks out at ground level into trampled snow, but inside it is snug as a bear’s den. The windowsills are deep, as I love them-even near the top our walls are two feet thick. The woodwork is unpainted, the walls are the natural warm tan of the cement. The chimney spreads its warmth in every direction, and even the three small bedrooms all along one side benefit from it. Nellie’s is at one end, ours at the other; the children’s, with a fireplace of its own, in between. The chimney partly divides the long narrow main room so that we can separate if we wish, I to work, the men to study or read, Nellie to teach the children. Or we can gather together in commons. We have no kitchen-that has been left in the tent.

In summer, the men assure me, we shall be as cool as in winter we are warm. You never saw such a trio. They work hard and long and enjoy it all. They cackle like geese over every completed job and solved problem. Their ingenuity is now exercising itself in creating a multitude of little cupboards and storage nooks and seats, and in the rehabilitation of the shack as winter quarters for Frank, Mr. Wiley, and Wan. The shack’s loft is already designated the drafting room.

The shut-in time of winter does not dismay us. The engineers have laid in books, reports, journals, and much else. Oliver has in mind a couple of little inventions and has already started on an automatic waste-weir that he calls the “flop-gate.” And thanks to you and Augusta there is that whole Christmas box of books-in our canyon, such riches! They are already going from hand to hand through our little community of saints. Moreover, Nellie, who is constantly astonishing me with the way she adapts herself to our crude border life, turns out to have studied bookbinding under her father, and to have brought her presses, stamps, and other tools along. She has offered to teach us all, and Frank and Mr. Wiley have already set up her machinery in the drafting room. Oliver understands tanning–the children still use between their beds a rug of wildcat skins that he tanned and sewed in New Almaden–and with plenty of cattle and sheep hides available for a song, he promises that our entire library will be in leather by spring.

Did you ever see an engineering report in limp leather with gold stamping? I believe you will. My engineers are capable of panning the gold dust and making their own gold leaf, if necessary.

As if these projects were not enough to occupy them, along with constant wood chopping, water hauling, care of the animals, trips to town, and all the chores of a frontier ranche, they plan to swing a cable footbridge across the river, between the cliffs where we dare hope that one day a dam will back up the waters. On this side a horse trail goes upriver along the foot of the cliff, but the wagon road to the mountains must go around, over the bluffs where I drew the freight wagon of “The Last Trip In.” We must haul our supplies roundabout and bring them down into our gulch by a steep trail, or haul them on the shorter road across the river and trans-ship them by the Parson, which is so lopsided it can hardly be rowed in calm water, much less when the river is high or clogged with ice. It is too cold and dangerous to try anchoring cables to the cliffs now, but at the first sign of spring I expect to see my men crawling around there like spiders.

Isn’t life strange? Where it takes us? As you know, I didn’t come out here with entire willingness, and I can’t be anything but anxious over the delays and uncertainties that we face now. And yet of all our wild nesting places this is the wildest and sweetest, and made up of the most extravagant incongruities.

Above our lava rock mantel hangs a print of Titian’s virgin, alone in the clouds in her amazement and wonder. On the walls, besides one or two watercolors of mine that the men insisted must be hung, are a half dozen watercolors contributed by Nellie, who has more of her father’s paintings and more of his lithographs of English wildflowers than her own walls will hold. And so she enriches us all with the delicacy of her father’s art, here where every other impression is of strong, rough Nature. From my desk, now that the working light has begun to fail, I can look into the other end of the room and see the children at tea and Nellie finishing, aloud, something she has been reading to them. Her voice is sweet and soft, but can ring on the sterner passages. Her English profile is sharp against the deep-toned West. The long window behind the three heads gives the whole of the canyon, like those detailed backgrounds in miniature which the early Italian painters liked to put in behind their saints and virgins. There comes a moment in these short winter days-it is at hand just now–when the light suddenly changes and becomes like the light during an eclipse. It is very strange-a pause before the passionate moment of the afterglow which will follow.

Wan, having prepared the children’s tea, is out in the cooktent preparing supper, probably singing through his nose some outlandish Chinese tune. When I was first at New Almaden the sight of a Chinese made me positively shudder, and yet I think we all love this smiling little ivory man. He is one of us; I believe he looks upon us as his family. Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.

I shall be as quiet this winter as my men are active. I am expecting again, as Augusta must have told you-a consequence of the optimism that flooded us all when it seemed that young Mr. Keyser took such a glowing report eastward. After my bad luck last winter in Boise, the doctor says that this baby will make me or break me. I am forbidden to take more than the most gentle exercise, and in particular am forbidden to ride any conveyance, either wheeled or footed, that we possess. You can imagine how much this house means to me. We call it The House That Century Built, for it was your check for
The Witness
that made it possible.

Our Christmas to you two was small and mean by necessity, not through any lessening of our love. Yours to us was rich and warm, and will touch our minds and hearts through the whole winter. God bless you, Thomas Hudson, and your lovely wife. Think of us-continue to think of us–in this far canyon. But do not think of us as unhappy. Do you remember Bishop Ripley, or whoever it was–“By God’s grace, we shall light such a fire. . . ?”

Your own
SBW