Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote

By Megan Riley McGilchrist

This book is about exile and transformation. It is primarily about Mary Hallock Foote, nineteenth-century artist and writer, easterner-turned-westerner, but it is a hybrid work - as well as being about Mary, it is about what it has been like for me, a twenty-first century American expatriate, Californian-turned-Londoner, to find common ground in the life of a nineteenth century woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781647790196

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Exile, Nature, and Transformation in the Life of Mary Hallock Foote

MEGAN RILEY MCGILCHRIST

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

Reno & Las Vegas

University of Nevada Press | Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

www.unpress.nevada.edu

Copyright © 2021 University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Cover photographs © iStock/anela (background, top); iStock/Ron and Patty Thomas (background, bottom).

Cover design by Louise OFarrell

Letters are used with the permission of Ann Gardiner Brillhart, Mary Hallock Foote’s great-granddaughter, the curator of the letters.

Ithaka, as published in C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, rev. ed., translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis. Translation copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Brief portions of chapters 1, 3, and 5 have been previously published in Mary Hallock Foote’s Reimagining of the Woman’s West, in The New American West in Literature and the Arts, edited by Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo, and are used by permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: McGilchrist, Megan Riley, 1955- author.

Title: Exile, nature, and transformation in the life of Mary Hallock Foote / Megan Riley McGilchrist.

Description: First. | Reno : University of Nevada Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: This book is about exile and transformation. It is primarily about Mary Hallock Foote, nineteenth-century artist and writer, easterner-turned-westerner, but it is a hybrid work—as well as being about Mary, it is about what it has been like for me, a twenty-first-century American expatriate, Californian-turned-Londoner, to find common ground in the life of a nineteenth-century woman.—Provided by publisher

Identifiers: LCCN 2021008854 | ISBN 9781647790189 (paperback) | ISBN 9781647790196 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Foote, Mary Hallock, 1847-1938. | Authors, American—Biography. | Illustrators—United States—Biography. | Women pioneers—West (U.S.)—Biography. | West (U.S.)—In literature.

Classification: LCC PS1688 .M35 2021 | DDC 813/.4 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008854

For Kitty, James, and Lucy

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE. In Exile

CHAPTER TWO. New Almaden

CHAPTER THREE. Leadville

CHAPTER FOUR. Mexico

CHAPTER FIVE. Idaho

CHAPTER SIX. Grass Valley

Epilogue

Notes

Works Cited

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

DURING THE TIME I SPENT working on this book, I received much institutional and personal support. I am deeply grateful to the Huntington Library, which gave me a fellowship to study the Mary Hallock Foote materials in the James Hague papers during the summer of 2015. The time I spent as a fellow at the Huntington was invaluable for this project. I am also profoundly grateful to the Lilly Library, at Indiana University in Bloomington, which awarded me an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship, which made it possible for me to spend time examining the Foote and Gilder materials in their collection. I also wish to thank the Lilly for permission to reproduce photographs of Mary Hallock Foote and Agnes Foote. My visits to the Special Collections at Stanford University, though brief, were extremely productive, and I thank staff there for their assistance and for their permission to reproduce photographs from the Foote archives. Finally, I would like to particularly thank Ann Gardiner Brillhart, Mary’s descendant, for her generous permission to quote from her great-grandmother’s letters and for her enthusiasm for this project.

Copies of Mary Hallock Foote’s letters are available in several libraries, among which I have visited the Huntington Library at San Marino, California, Stanford University’s Special Collections at the Green Library, and the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. (Copies are also available on microfilm at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.) In very many cases, the letters are duplicated in all three places. Therefore, rather than list all three locations, I identify the letters by date and recipient. Where a letter exists—as far as I am aware—at only one location, I have indicated that in the notes.

The artist colonies of PLAYA and Hewnoaks generously gave me uninterrupted time, and peace, to work on my project; the proximity to the natural world in both places was a true gift.

Many individuals have given help and encouragement. I am deeply grateful to all of them. Sands Hall’s personal and intellectual generosity and enthusiasm for the project from the very outset has been inspirational. My friendship with Sands is one of the many things for which I have to thank Mary Hallock Foote. Foote scholar and WLA colleague Christine Hill Smith has also been a tireless source of information, good will, and friendship. Ellen Druckenbrod, of the Boise City Library, generously assisted me with research on obscure bits of Foote lore, answered emailed questions cheerfully, and has been an enthusiastic supporter of this project. Along with Ellen, Mary Ann Arnold and Janet Worthington, tireless advocates of the Footes and the force behind the founding of the splendid Foote Park in Boise Canyon, spent a day taking me around Foote sites in and around Boise. Jim and Caryl Tyberg gave me a wonderful place to stay while I was working at the Huntington, and I thank them very much. Chris Duggan gave me invaluable assistance with the illustrations. My friend Steve Coates offered advice and encouragement throughout this project. Two colleagues at the American School in London, Miles Dunmore and Peggy Elhadj, have been unfailingly interested and supportive. I would also like to thank the current and past administration of the American School, which has generously supported my attendance at the Western Literature Association conferences over the years. Invaluable technological assistance was provided by Mariam Matthew, another ASL colleague, and my great-niece Libby Bakke. Their patience with one as technologically illiterate as me has been remarkable. Neil Campbell and Susan Castillo have both kindly written numerous references for fellowships and residencies and have also been good friends. My WLA colleagues, too many to name, have been the source of much support and inspiration, but special mention must go to Melody Graulich, without whose kindness in sharing electronic copies of the Foote letters this project would have been inestimably more difficult and whose scholarly work has been a source of inspiration. David Fenimore has given me much good advice and has become another friend I would never have known had I not met Mary Hallock Foote.

I would also like to thank the University of Nevada Press, and particularly my editor, Margaret Dalrymple, for taking on this project. Margaret’s enthusiasm for the book has been great encouragement to me, and her patience in awaiting final drafts kindness itself. And I would be remiss if I did not express my gratitude to copyeditor John Mulvihill, who made this book better.

Researching Mary has taken me on many journeys, during the first of which my daughter Kitty and I spent nearly a week in Nevada City and Grass Valley. On that trip, thanks to the kindness of Sands Hall, I was able to meet Elisabeth Haskell, one of Mary’s great-granddaughters. I remember the evening I spent with her and her husband with great pleasure. My first trip to Boise, a marathon car journey with my sister-in-law, Maggie Tracey, was full of serendipity: doors opened as if by magic; the people we met could not have been kinder or more helpful; the project, still in its infancy, took its first few steps.

My large extended family and many friends have been hugely supportive. For fear of leaving someone out, I will not try to name everyone, but first always are my children: Kitty, James, and Lucy. My brother and sister-in-law, Brendan Riley and Maggie Tracey; my son-in-law, Jason Gray; Annie and Rob Caliendo; Clare Statham; and Kate Coyne all deserve thanks. They have picked me up at airports, in the Oregon outback, at train and bus depots and ferry terminals; they have driven with me thousands of miles to see sites, look at archives, visit museums, wander round old mines, and take in the view from the tops of mountains. I hope they all had as good a time as I did! Thank you to all, and thank you Mary for giving us a reason to do it.

Introduction

In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.

—DANTE, Inferno

THE BACKSTORY

I WASN’T SURE WHAT I WAS DOING. I had been researching a slightly obscure Victorian writer and illustrator for several years. I probably knew more about her than most people I actually knew in real life. What was I to do with the mass of knowledge I had acquired, and how was I to do justice to a remarkable woman whom I felt deserved more than an academic study?

There was a way of course. The straight way was continuing with perfectly acceptable academic writing that no one much outside of academia would ever read. I have a lot of respect for scholarly endeavor, and have spent a fair amount of my life absorbed in it, but I sensed that my energies might be better used in something that connected to a wider audience than the scholars of western American literature, who, up to that point, had been the tolerant beneficiaries of my somewhat scattershot researches. The dark wood I was in might actually be the path to something vital and important, if I could find my way through it. More personally, I thought that if I found the way I intuitively felt was there, I might get some deeper understanding of my own thinking and of the meaning of my own life and its trajectory.

But there was much more to this than simply a cerebral journey. My life had recently been shaken, very thoroughly and to its foundations; and my sense of a changed world, in which carpe diem was no longer an option but an imperative, was profound. I had been through life-changing events before, but now a near miss with the eternal boatman convinced me that the moment was right to do that which had been asking to be done for some time. The question was, where to begin? I had some bricks and mortar; what kind of building was I going to produce? The rest of my life—my teaching, relationships with my family and friends—would, I hoped, carry on as always. What was going to happen if I wrote this work would happen to me alone, and if I were able to produce something, it would have to stand or fall on its own merits. If I didn’t write it (which more and more did not feel like an option), no one would know or mind very much, but I knew that I would feel its absence like something lost.

So, my bricks and mortar.

I had, at a rather late age, earned a PhD and made myself into a bit of a scholar of some aspects of western American literature. This was surprising in that I had been living in England for many years, and up to about the age of forty had not—despite being American—been particularly interested in American literature. I had read the required texts as a student, but my focus had been on Europe. If anything, I had been an aspiring medievalist. I wrote a master’s thesis on Middle English poetry and considered going further, only to have my dream deflated by an Oxford don who told me that, of course, one really could not be a medievalist without better Latin than I had. I don’t think that particular don meant to drive me from academia, but that was the result, and probably a good thing at the time. I fell into high school teaching when the offer of a job arrived. And so life went along in the way it does, until after a couple of decades and a personal crisis, I rediscovered American literature. That, I guess, was Dark Wood Part I. Doing a PhD and getting back to work led me out of that part of the wood, along with time and the never-to-be-forgotten support of many friends and family members. The way through that dark wood was lighted with love. I was lucky, and I knew it: lucky and blessed.

Dark Wood Part II was perhaps initially less dramatic. After the doctorate, a book, some articles, and enough positive reinforcement to allow me to consider myself a scholar, if a minor one, I began to wonder what the point of continuing with my studies was. I loved doing research and enjoyed writing papers, but I began to question the wider significance of my intellectual life. I would sometimes spend weeks, if not months, researching to produce a paper that might then be heard by thirty people at a conference. It was not that I didn’t value the act of writing itself, and the response of those thirty people; it was just that I felt I had more to say and a larger audience to reach. And a topic beckoned.

I had become interested in Mary Hallock Foote, a Victorian writer and illustrator, for a lot of reasons. Mary was born in 1847, in Milton, New York; she died in 1938, in Hingham, Massachusetts. In between those two dates she became one of the most sought-after women illustrators of the nineteenth century, and one of the preeminent artistic interpreters of the American West from the female perspective. She wrote thirteen novels, a memoir, several collections of short stories, many children’s stories, and articles for Scribner’s, Century Magazine, and the Atlantic. She also maintained a happy and successful marriage and brought up three children. Mary had married a mining engineer, Arthur Foote, and left New York in 1876 when she was twenty-eight years old. Never intending to, she nonetheless spent most of the next fifty years in the American West.

Mary Hallock Foote had been tangential to my PhD work, and cast a new light on one of the authors about whom I had written. Wallace Stegner had used many of Mary’s letters and large excerpts from her (then unpublished) memoirs in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Angle of Repose.¹ This was disturbing because Stegner didn’t identify Mary’s letters and other writings as sources, and the reason Angle of Repose is a great book is arguably because of the depiction of Mary Hallock Foote, created using her own words and thinly disguised as the character called Susan Burling Ward in the novel. I had written a paper on this topic, ruffled a few feathers, and thought I was finished. Except I wasn’t. Writing that paper had led me to some interesting places. But I can see that a bit of background is necessary here.

I first picked up Angle of Repose one rainy homesick morning in 1992 in a bookstore in Baltimore. I was living in Baltimore because my husband, a doctor, was working at Johns Hopkins Hospital for six months. I missed London, where we lived, and where I live today. And I missed California, from where I had been gone for nearly a decade—more if I included graduate school and a couple of years in Spain. I had three small children, one in kindergarten, one in second grade, the youngest still in nappies. I was in the thick of it, left to my own devices most of the time. I was at a turning point in my life, though I didn’t know it then.

My baby sat in her pushchair as I leafed through a book that had attracted my attention. I liked the cover—a picture of the Sierra foothills in California, which I knew well. I didn’t like Baltimore. From the perspectives of London and California, it felt stuffy and small. Used to chatty South Londoners, I found the cliquish parents at the older children’s school unfriendly. I missed my London friends, my house, my garden. I felt like a stranger in the country I had always considered my home. Later things would change, somewhat, but just then I felt lost. It was too wet, too hot; our little apartment, which belonged to two young doctors who were staying in our large, comfortable house in London, had cockroaches. Not unusual, we were told. This was small comfort.

So, I was in a state of double exile, among people who ought to have been compatriots but who were more foreign to me than any European ever had been. Neither of my possible personas seemed to work. California, people seemed to despise; London made them nervous. With all these things on my mind that day, I picked up Angle of Repose. Opening it, I was suddenly in a well-known world: 1970s Northern California, Grass Valley, the Sierras. And the people: there were lots of Californians I recognized, and a woman protagonist, a long way from home, who wrote a lot of letters. Email was just a rumor in those days, and letter writing was one of my passions. This was my kind of story.

My little daughter was getting restless. I bought the book. And so it began, one exile reading about another.

Mary Hallock Foote, the daughter of New York Quaker farmers, never intended to be a western woman. The Hallocks were broad-minded and educated and believed that women had as much right to education as men. As Mary showed a decided talent for drawing, after she left boarding school the family was persuaded to let her go to New York City, to attend the School of Design for Women at Cooper Union. She lived with her brother and sister-in-law and attended classes while beginning to pursue her career as an illustrator. She was remarkably successful, in time one of the most admired and sought-after women illustrators of her generation. During her years at Cooper, she met many talented and promising young artists and thinkers, but by far the most important friendship she made was with Helena de Kay. Mary and Helena were both dedicated to art, and their friendship was based on mutual interests and admiration, but their backgrounds were very different. Helena came from old New York; she was wealthy, well connected, well traveled, multilingual, and beautiful. There is no doubt that Mary, with her Quaker simplicity and natural diffidence, was more than a little in awe of Helena, regarding her as superior in all ways—although history tells a different story. The two had an intense youthful friendship, which settled into a solid and lifelong bond, carried on for over fifty years through their letters across the continent—sometimes across oceans, as Helena traveled extensively, though strangely never to the West.

After completing her studies at Cooper, Mary’s talents began to be recognized, and the commissions came rolling in. It was the age of the illustrated periodical, and Mary was regularly commissioned to draw for Scribner’s, the predecessor to Century, and other notable magazines of the day. She also had commissions for illustrating popular books, including works by Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others. During this heady time, on New Year’s Day 1873, she met Arthur Foote, a young mining engineer. Arthur had studied at Yale and was from a background similar to Mary’s. He was on his way west to work when the two met. Although they saw each other infrequently during the next several years, they wrote regularly—sadly, few of these letters have survived—and in February 1876 they were married in a Quaker ceremony at Mary’s family home. During the same period, Mary’s friend Helena had met and married Richard Gilder, who became the pioneering editor of Century Magazine and who was to become a critically important influence on Mary’s work.

After a few months’ delay, Mary went west in the summer of 1876 to join Arthur, who was working at the New Almaden quicksilver mine, near San Jose, California. The couple initially planned to spend two years in the West while Arthur established himself in his field. However, as with so many well-laid plans, things did not work out quite as anticipated. And although Mary did go back to New York fairly frequently in the early years of their marriage, and spent several extended periods at her family’s farm when Arthur was working in various inhospitable places, they stayed in the West until 1932.

During their western years, Mary and her family lived in New Almaden and Santa Cruz; Leadville, Colorado; Boise City and Boise Canyon; and finally Grass Valley, California, to which they moved in 1895 and remained until 1932, when they went to Massachusetts to live with their daughter, Betty. Arthur Foote, though highly competent and even visionary in his field, did not always make the best choices in business terms, and the Foote’s financial affairs were often precarious. During these years, particularly when they were living in Idaho, they depended financially more and more on the earnings from Mary’s illustrations and writings. She had begun writing sketches of western life during their time at New Almaden and Santa Cruz, and within a very few years became a highly respected novelist and short story writer—in addition to her work as an illustrator, both of her own works and those of other authors.

The Footes had three children, two girls and a boy. Mary was a devoted wife and mother and always considered her children and Arthur her first priorities, but she never believed, as did some of her contemporaries, that marriage and a career as a creative artist could not be happily combined in a woman’s life. When the Footes’ youngest child, Agnes, died in 1904 at the age of seventeen, of complications