Susan Burling Ward

Mary Hallock Foote

Born on a farm in upstate New York, Susan Burling Ward, the protagonist of Angle of Repose [1971] by Wallace Stegner, was sent to art school. She became an accomplished illustrator in her early 20’s and made a great friend of her colleague Augusta. Together with Thomas Hudson, the two made a productive, artistic trio. Augusta married Hudson and Susan met a young engineer, Oliver Ward.

Ward left for the West, determined to become an engineer. He stayed away for five years, while Susan wrote to him. When he came back, they made an agreement between them to marry. Oliver went to California for another year, but they were married in a quiet Quaker ceremony in 1876. Augusta told Susan she was throwing herself and her career away. Susan was already doing illustrations for well-known writers. 

But Susan took the train to California, to a mine near San Jose where Oliver had a job. He had spent everything he had building a house for them, with verandahs on three sides. Sage, bay and manzanita surrounded the house, which looked down on the hurly-burley of the mine. Susan took up her pencils, continuing to make sketches and wood-block illustrations. Their first child was born the next year.

Nevertheless, Susan felt isolated. She wanted to talk about books, art and music with someone. She dressed like a lady and was stand-offish, Oliver her only consolation. She wrote letters to Augusta and sent sketches of “local color” to magazines in New York. When Oliver quarreled with the mine manager over how he treated people, Susan stood behind him. “Don’t compromise your principles,” she told him.

Oliver quit the job and they spent a couple of months in Santa Cruz. Susan had grandiose plans for Oliver’s success with his invention of cement composition, but he didn't find backers. Instead he took a job in North Dakota and Susan took her baby home to her parents’ farm. She hoped to see Augusta, but she and her husband had gone to Europe.

After a year apart, Oliver sent for Susan to come to Leadville, Colorado, high in the mountains. There they lived in a log cabin, but Leadville was full of educated men. Civilization was roaring to life. Men from the newly created U.S. Geological Survey and others gathered at Susan’s house for conversation. She was secure and loved. She wrote, made drawings and did some traveling while Oliver ran the Adelaide mine. One spring she came back to find that the men were carrying guns, however. 

The Adelaide lost its backing and Oliver took Susan to Mexico with him to inspect a mine. Susan loved the stately gentility of the rancheros and hoped to settle in Michoacán. She found everything picturesque and sent illustrated articles back to New York. But Oliver reported honestly that the mine wasn’t worth much and he and Susan were again without a home. Susan went back to her New York farm and there had her second child. 

Rifts in Oliver and Susan’s communication began to show when Susan didn’t tell him about their coming child, and he didn’t tell her he was working on a speculative irrigation scheme. Nevertheless Susan once again left her friends, family and safety, and went out to Boise, a drab, new town without stimulus. The canyon was beautiful, however, with sage plains and a magic wind. The Wards, their children and Oliver’s assistants built a rock house with four fireplaces when winter was coming, using money from Susan’s publications, and Oliver’s concrete.

In 1887, Susan had her third baby. Life was uncertain and one of Oliver’s assistants, Frank, came to feel he was in love with Susan. She loved talking to him, but it was an honorable, Victorian, platonic relationship. “Oliver is the best man in the state,” Frank told Susan. Oliver was a brilliant engineer, but stubborn and taciturn. 

The irrigation project went badly and Susan took the children to Vancouver island. She was desperate to expose them to culture, conversation, theatre, not wanting them to grow up to be “savages.” She drove herself to work, while the children were educated by an English governess.

Two years later Susan returned to the demonstration ranch Oliver had built with renewed interest in the irrigation scheme. Susan was angry at the time it would take to make the place civilized. Oliver had planted trees, roses, a small lawn. He was terribly excited about how the “big ditch” would be able to irrigate 500 square miles. But dust was everywhere, Susan could not bring herself to go into Boise and she and Oliver existed in a “bruised and careful truce.” Little Ollie, 12 years old, was sent on the train to school in the East.

In 1890, part of the canal opened with festivities. But later that year the syndicate cut off funds, people went unpaid, and worst of all, a lawyer took the claim Oliver had set aside for Susan’s sister. “You haven’t had faith in me,” Oliver told Susan. “Not that I’ve deserved much faith.”

And here is where the story takes a turn. Stegner, as he often did, took his story from the real life of Mary Hallock Foote, a writer and illustrator, married to a mining engineer. Stegner had permission from the family to use her letters, but he may have used them too exactly. And then he changed her story.

In Stegner’s novel, Frank begs Susan to go away with him. Susan resists, but while talking to him one day, her little daughter Agnes, a five-year-old sprite, wanders away, slips into the canal and drowns. None of them recover from this tragedy. Frank commits suicide. Susan at first takes her children back east, but then returns to the ranch until Oliver sends for her. He has taken a job at the Zodiac mine in California near Grass Valley. Here they lived together for almost fifty years, treating each other “with grave, infallible kindness,” though Oliver never forgives Susan and their grandson never sees them kiss or touch each other.

In the real life story of Mary Hallock Foote, which the family documents Here, the Footes lived in contentment and Arthur contributed many innovations to the Northstar mine near Grass Valley, California. Agnes, their youngest daughter, died at 17 after surgery for appendicitis. Mary did not get over the loss of her youngest daughter and was buried in Grass Valley beside her.

I do not have access to the memoir written by Mary Hallock Foote and published long after her death [A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, 1972]. However, Stegner’s telling of her life, which he arguably twists to his own purpose, fleshes out the complex stresses of living between the civilized world of New York and that of the burgeoning West. Having staked my own claim on the West, I am susceptible to its beauties, which Stegner has done his part to describe, and also to conserve. The story as he tells it is well worth reading, but it also helps to have an awareness of its origins.

Note: Sands Hall gives a further opinion on Stegner’s use of Mary Hallock Foote’s life Here.