"Quicksilver Furnaces, New Almaden, California.—p. 56." From Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, by John Russell Bartlett.
Gold was not the only precious metal that lured hopefuls to California—the New AlmadenQuicksilver Mine, fully operating two years before gold was discovered, offered the same potential for success.
Wallace Stegner shows us in his novel Angle of Repose that despite the hope of quick riches, the hardships of life for both humans and animals in New Almaden were often one and the same.
Bells again, unmistakable. [ . . . ] She could see the path, used only by the Mexican packers who brought wood down from the mountain, curving and disappearing among the red-barked madrones. The bells were plain and coming nearer. [ . . . ] Then from out of the madrones came a mule bearing an immense carga of split wood. His ears were down, his nose was down, he planted his small feet with reluctant, aggrieved deliberation, holding back against the weight and the steepness of the path, sliding a little, humped up behind, braced in front. The bell around his neck clunked and tunkled with every wincing step. Behind him came another, then another, and another, until there were eight in line; and behind them came an old Mexican with a sombrero on his head, a stick in his hand, and a red silk handkerchief around his neck; and behind him a younger Mexican, a Sancho, almost invisible in his nonentity.
Stegner's Pulitzer Prize winning work was based on author and artist Mary Hallock Foote's letters detailing her life in the American West at the turn of the 20th century.
"All The Little Live Things," first edition book jacket, 1967. Larger.
"Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 - April 13, 1993), American historian and novelist. Photograph by Paul Conklin, circa 1969. Larger.
Californians are used to changes, even changes that happen beneath their feet and alter the very ground they stand upon.
In All the Little Live Things, Wallace Stegner tells the story of a retired literary agent living with his wife in the hills above San Francisco Bay, part of a landscape that is constantly, subtly in flux.
So there we went one day last fall. . . . We turned into Ladera Lane under big gum trees whose bark was start ing to peel to reveal the delicate pastels underneath and whose fallen buttons, crushed by passing cars, filled the air with the smell I could never dissociate from the 1918 flu epidemic, during which we went around in gauze masks soaked in that pungent oil. Past the riding stable and down a sudden gully smelling of bay and sage, around the corner of a walnut orchard to Roble Road and along it up a long hogback, until we came out on a windy plateau with puckers of woods below us.
It is a view that has the quality of bigness without actual size, and it used to comfort me to know that these little mountains, like everything else around, are very lively, very Californian. The range grows, they say, a half inch or so a year, and in the same time moves about that distance northward. It is a parable for the retired. Sit still and let the world do the moving.
Wallace Stegner, one of our most celebrated contemporary writers, published All the Little Live Things in 1967.
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