Not everyone who came to California enjoyed the idea, but even the most reluctant pioneer was often captured by the beauty of the state.
Young Mary Hallock was just beginning to enjoy success as an illustrator for Harper's when she met a young mining engineer whom she married and—reluctantly—-followed west, eventually to the New AlmadenQuicksilver Mines, south of San Jose. There she began to develop a feel for the climate and the landscape of the region, which she drew upon for an 1878 sketch which includes this description.
When summer passes into winter a new phase of the climate is experienced. Morning and evening we are wrapped in fog that blows wildly from the sea, fills the valley and rises until we are muffled in its chill whiteness. Going out for a walk after breakfast, I seem to be the only person in the whole world. It is impossible to describe the curious feeling it gives one to walk in this veiled landscape. I pass along the edge of steep ravines and know that on ahead, where the road goes out of sight around a bend of the mountain, lies a great stretch of valley and mountain, but it is all a blank white wall everywhere. It is always very still here (except just in the camps where children are playing in the streets) and the fog seems to deaden what little sound there usually is. The silence then is complete.
Mary Hallock Foote eventually published fifteen books and her life gave Wallace Stegner inspiration for his 1971 novel, Angle of Repose. The New Almaden Quicksilver Mine is now a county park.
In the dark world of hardrock mining, miners certainly depended on each other—and they depended nearly as much upon their machines.
Wed to a mining engineer, writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote knew how mines worked, and she fully appreciated the importance of the throbbing pumps that kept malevolent floods from overcoming the shafts
Nights and Sundays, frost or flood or dry, the pumps never rest. Each lifts his load to the brother above him, sweating cold sweat and smeared in grease and slime, fighting the climbing waters. The stroke of the pump-rod is the pulse of the mine. If the pulse should stop and the waters rise, the pumps, as they go under, are "drowned." In their bitter costliness, in the depths from which they rise, though born in sunlight, the waters of the "sump" might typify the encroaching power of evil in man's nature—a power that springs from good, that yet may be turned to good, but over which conscience, like the pumps, must keep unsleeping watch and ward.
below to hear radio segment.
