"My Mount Rushmore"
Oct. 15th, 2018 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonreirYour Legacy
My father was famous. Perhaps you've heard of him -- he made something of a name for himself, in certain circles, about twenty years ago. Maxwell Brown, famed parlor magician.
I didn't know him, except what I read in the newspapers I would sneak out of his study. We didn't talk. If he thought of me, it was only the way that any man thinks about a show horse: can it perform all the neat tricks he needs it to, on command? How much does the boarding and care for it cost?
I can count the number of times I ever talked to him on one hand.
At seventeen, he began talking about marrying me off. It was, after all, what I'd been raised for.
I told him I understood. I went to all the fittings for the gowns, what I was supposed to wear in society, stood quietly while the dressmakers he'd hired pinned the swathes of fabric around my body, mourned my lack of a figure.
He didn't ask what I wanted. He never asked if I had any magic of my own. I suppose it never occurred to him.
I waited. I bided my time.
The night I was supposed to dress for my debut, I hacked off my hair with a kitchen knife, dressed in clothes I'd stolen from one of the serving-boys, and hopped a train bound west instead.
The West had been won, when I made it out to San Francisco. The gold rush days were over; the days of settlement were upon us.
I apprenticed myself to a cartographer, back when there were still maps to be made. I could read, and I could draw, and that was enough, for him.
"Girl or a boy?" asked the man I studied under, when I walked into his office and demanded a job.
"Girl,” I said, daring him to turn me away. "My name’s Katherine. Call me Kit."
There was a pause, then: "Fine. Can you read a map? Do you know how to draw?"
"Yes," I said.
His name was Bradford Harney. He fixed my raggedy haircut and taught me everything he knew about cartography and magic, how to pin down the magic of the land and tame it.
I stayed with him as long as I could. I would have stayed longer, if I hadn't heard him tell someone I was his daughter; that I belonged to him.
I penned a note: "I don't belong to anyone," and left.
None of the history books mention the real dangers out west. Maybe the east was dangerous, too, before it was settled, but out there, magic was quiet. The ley lines had been mapped, and mapped meant tamed. Things stayed where they were put, and if men got lost in what little patches of forest remained, it was their own fault and no one else's. I'd heard stories, as a child, about the dangerous spots in Maine, New Hampshire -- mountains where storms could blow up overnight and bury an entire expedition, forests where men would enter and never leave, where nothing would be found of them except their bones, later, and few enough of those.
The magic I was used to, in New York, was all civilized. There were stories, but none of them were true. Magic was something that men studied, that they performed as a parlor-trick. Everything was bloodless, sanitized. You could talk of magic, in high society.
Out west was not like that at all.
After I left Harney's, I headed back east, toward Wyoming Territory. That was still uncharted, I was told. Large swathes of Utah Territory were mapped; had been when they built the railroad. Wyoming Territory was not mapped. Colorado, despite its statehood, was not mapped either, or at least not mapped in a way the lines would respect.
I found a company setting out for the southern parts of Colorado. They had need of a cartographer. I joined them in Salt Lake, after telling them I had trained for a year under Harney.
"Are you gifted?" asked the man who did the hiring.
"Yes," I said.
He looked me up and down, and if he had any questions, he didn't ask them. He handed me a typeset sheet outlining what I'd be paid and when, and after I signed it, we shook hands. I was hired.
It was a week-long wagon ride to the blank spot on the map. When we reached it, I could feel the change.
We pitched our tents at the foot of the mountain range that ran from east to west. There was a big ley line that ran there, along the heart of the range. I could feel it. It pulled at me, made me uneasy.
"The land isn't settled here," said Wallace Shannon, the company leader, when he saw my face. "You're sensitive to it, aren't you?"
"Have to be," I said.
"Mm."
Shannon was a big man, six-four, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with black hair and beard and solemn dark eyes. He was friendly enough, but in the week I'd known him, I'd yet to hear him laugh. I wasn't sure he knew how. He was stoic and serious, and looked as though he'd never been afraid of anything in his life.
"The lines scare me senseless,” he said.
"They don’t scare me," I said. "It's more -- I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight."
"You will be," he said. "You won't be able to help it. It doesn't -- it doesn't want you to know, when it moves things."
"Moves things?"
"You're from settled parts, aren't you?" asked Shannon. "You'll see."
When I woke up in the morning, the mountains, which had been behind my tent, were in front of it, running north to south.
"The lines," said Shannon, satisfied. "They shifted. Things'll stay fixed as soon as you get 'em on the map."
I shivered, looking at them.
"Well?" said Shannon, after a moment. "What are you waiting for?"
I scrabbled for my tools and began feeling for the ley lines while the rest of the camp ate breakfast.
I stayed on, past that first expedition. It paid well, and this was the west I'd wanted to see. The big cities were too settled, and the towns didn't have room for a woman like me. I kept my hair short, learned to like the taste of tobacco, of whisky, and cussed as much as the men did.
I kept working under Shannon. He knew I was a woman -- I'd never bothered to hide it -- but he respected me for my talent, for what I brought to the little expeditions that we set out on.
"You're taming the land," he said. "We need you."
I thought I understood what he meant. There were horrible things lurking out there. Fey things that clustered close to the ley lines. Beautiful and fierce, looking perfectly safe. Stacks of rocks that would suddenly rise up and cover a man whole, rivers that would leap out of their beds. Clusters of trees that would close in around you until you were caged and pull the flesh from your body, leaving only the bones, and not all of those. Gorgeous and deadly.
When the lines lay quiet, the magic was biddable, controllable. Mapping them did that -- made settlement possible.
All of Colorado, up through Wyoming and Idaho Territories, Montana Territory, over to Washington and the parts of Oregon that hadn't been settled. I drew the maps, labeled where the lines were, pinned them down and tamed the land.
"You're doing good work," said the men who doled out my pay.
Over time, there was less and less that needed mapping, fewer and fewer empty spots on the map. I'd done my job too well.
The last company to hire me was headed for Dakota Territory.
"We're mapping the Black Hills," said the expedition leader. "Mining claims, mostly, but we have need of a good cartographer."
I was in San Francisco then, looking for leads and trying to determine what came next. I was 24 and lean as a whip, burned dark by the sun, with hair I still kept short as a boy's. I had no prospects, and my father had disowned me. My money hadn't run out -- yet -- but it felt like only a matter of time. I had no skills, nothing I could fall back on except cartography, and most of the west had been tamed. I'd thought about going south, down to Mexico or perhaps Brazil, but I hadn't the money for passage.
"Wallace Shannon recommended you," the expedition lead said. "He says the lines lay quiet after you touch them; that they don't have to be redone, and that's valuable to us. We've lost three men already, including our cartographer."
I grinned. "That's what happens if you're not good at your job."
"Will you take it? We're offering double your previous wages."
"Gentlemen," I said, rising to my feet. "I believe I will."
We set out for a little town called Keystone -- a mining settlement, and not an impressive one.
The uncharted land was beautiful. The company didn't take me to the mines -- those that had already been mapped; there was simply no point. They dragged me into the hills.
"This was Lakota territory," they explained, when I asked. "It's never been mapped."
There was a hesitation. It was beyond my pay to ask, whether or not this was really our land, so I didn't.
The hills -- mountains, really -- were beautiful, so densely covered in timber that they looked almost black.
There was nothing deadly in them, that I could feel. The ley lines were untamed, had, as far as I could tell, never been touched.
"Your last cartographer didn't know what they were doing," I said, the first morning they led me out. "This will take me, oh, six months, perhaps. I want to map everything carefully -- no more deaths."
They didn’t push back.
When I mapped the land, things stayed put. I was my father's daughter in the sense that I was able to control and remap the magic, make the lines go where I wanted them to go.
I mapped the hills. I pinned the ley lines down, left them unable to move. They were wrestled into place, mercilessly, by me. I didn't ask, what am I doing, or what will the consequences of this be, because I wasn't paid to ask questions. I was all too aware of my place.
There were mountains. I mapped them. They named them. I thought they would have named them after the presidents, maybe, or after famous figures of myths and legends, but I was only the cartographer. They named them after men they knew out east.
I drew things on the map and they told me what to name them later.
Within six months, my work was done. I had all the magic in the hills, all the lines, pinned to the map.
I thought about staying. There were jobs, I had been told, in the town of Lead. They did not need cartographers, but there was a call for women who could sew, to make clothes for the miners.
I passed through Lead.
The mine there was an open pit, a gash in the side of the mountain. All the trees had been removed. The hills, instead of black, were starkly gray.
"Progress," they bragged. "It's not the most productive mine, but the vein goes deep -- we've been mining here for near ten years already!"
I felt the lines in that place. They'd had all the magic drained out of them.
Look at what you made possible, the feeble remainder of the lines seemed to taunt me.
I recognized what I'd done, and I fled.
I went back to California, and when the opportunity to go north arose, I went up to Alaska Territory. I mapped there, but I didn't map as well, and the magic -- the maps I made -- faded after a few years. They were never able to settle it, begin farming and mining. They attribute it to the harsh weather, the remote location, but I knew better.
South Dakota became a state in '89. They began looking for things to draw people in, besides the mines, starting in the '10s.
They found me, somehow, up near Juneau.
"Are you the same Kit Brown whose name is on the initial maps made of the Black Hills? The Kit Brown who mapped the Needles and Mount Rushmore?" asked the young man I found at my doorstep one day in mid-June.
Magic handling keeps you young. I was pushing 63 and could have passed for 40.
"Yes," I said. "I didn't name them, though."
"We need your help," he said. "The maps you made, the ley lines...we're doing more work in the area and need to have them updated."
"Mining?"
"No, no," he said quickly. "Tourism. We'll be sculpting images of famous Americans into the Black Hills to draw visitors to the region."
I thought of the Needles, the strange jutting rock formations that made them, and of the mountain, what the Lakota had called the Six Grandfathers before I mapped it and it was renamed.
"Tell me," I said. "Is the mine near Lead still open?"
Your doing, I could almost hear the ley lines. Your legacy.
"The Homestake mine?" he asked, and his chest puffed out with pride. "Why, it's on the New York Stock Exchange!"
"Then no," I said, and gently shut the door in his face.
~*~*~
Normally I don't include notes, but I feel it's worth sharing here: this was inspired directly by, of all things, an episode of Radiolab I managed to catch part of at work: Xenon. It's an episode about how the Homestead Mine is the "quietest place on Earth", and how that's useful for monitoring something unusual: sub-atomic particles called neutrinos.
That phrase, "the quietest place on Earth" stuck with me. Doing reading about Mount Rushmore, I realized that it was in the Black Hills, too, along with the old mine, and one thing led to another...before I knew it, Kit was in my head, telling me her story, what she remembered Mount Rushmore as.
There are images of the mine online, most notably on Wikipedia.
Thanks for taking the time to read!
My father was famous. Perhaps you've heard of him -- he made something of a name for himself, in certain circles, about twenty years ago. Maxwell Brown, famed parlor magician.
I didn't know him, except what I read in the newspapers I would sneak out of his study. We didn't talk. If he thought of me, it was only the way that any man thinks about a show horse: can it perform all the neat tricks he needs it to, on command? How much does the boarding and care for it cost?
I can count the number of times I ever talked to him on one hand.
At seventeen, he began talking about marrying me off. It was, after all, what I'd been raised for.
I told him I understood. I went to all the fittings for the gowns, what I was supposed to wear in society, stood quietly while the dressmakers he'd hired pinned the swathes of fabric around my body, mourned my lack of a figure.
He didn't ask what I wanted. He never asked if I had any magic of my own. I suppose it never occurred to him.
I waited. I bided my time.
The night I was supposed to dress for my debut, I hacked off my hair with a kitchen knife, dressed in clothes I'd stolen from one of the serving-boys, and hopped a train bound west instead.
The West had been won, when I made it out to San Francisco. The gold rush days were over; the days of settlement were upon us.
I apprenticed myself to a cartographer, back when there were still maps to be made. I could read, and I could draw, and that was enough, for him.
"Girl or a boy?" asked the man I studied under, when I walked into his office and demanded a job.
"Girl,” I said, daring him to turn me away. "My name’s Katherine. Call me Kit."
There was a pause, then: "Fine. Can you read a map? Do you know how to draw?"
"Yes," I said.
His name was Bradford Harney. He fixed my raggedy haircut and taught me everything he knew about cartography and magic, how to pin down the magic of the land and tame it.
I stayed with him as long as I could. I would have stayed longer, if I hadn't heard him tell someone I was his daughter; that I belonged to him.
I penned a note: "I don't belong to anyone," and left.
None of the history books mention the real dangers out west. Maybe the east was dangerous, too, before it was settled, but out there, magic was quiet. The ley lines had been mapped, and mapped meant tamed. Things stayed where they were put, and if men got lost in what little patches of forest remained, it was their own fault and no one else's. I'd heard stories, as a child, about the dangerous spots in Maine, New Hampshire -- mountains where storms could blow up overnight and bury an entire expedition, forests where men would enter and never leave, where nothing would be found of them except their bones, later, and few enough of those.
The magic I was used to, in New York, was all civilized. There were stories, but none of them were true. Magic was something that men studied, that they performed as a parlor-trick. Everything was bloodless, sanitized. You could talk of magic, in high society.
Out west was not like that at all.
After I left Harney's, I headed back east, toward Wyoming Territory. That was still uncharted, I was told. Large swathes of Utah Territory were mapped; had been when they built the railroad. Wyoming Territory was not mapped. Colorado, despite its statehood, was not mapped either, or at least not mapped in a way the lines would respect.
I found a company setting out for the southern parts of Colorado. They had need of a cartographer. I joined them in Salt Lake, after telling them I had trained for a year under Harney.
"Are you gifted?" asked the man who did the hiring.
"Yes," I said.
He looked me up and down, and if he had any questions, he didn't ask them. He handed me a typeset sheet outlining what I'd be paid and when, and after I signed it, we shook hands. I was hired.
It was a week-long wagon ride to the blank spot on the map. When we reached it, I could feel the change.
We pitched our tents at the foot of the mountain range that ran from east to west. There was a big ley line that ran there, along the heart of the range. I could feel it. It pulled at me, made me uneasy.
"The land isn't settled here," said Wallace Shannon, the company leader, when he saw my face. "You're sensitive to it, aren't you?"
"Have to be," I said.
"Mm."
Shannon was a big man, six-four, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with black hair and beard and solemn dark eyes. He was friendly enough, but in the week I'd known him, I'd yet to hear him laugh. I wasn't sure he knew how. He was stoic and serious, and looked as though he'd never been afraid of anything in his life.
"The lines scare me senseless,” he said.
"They don’t scare me," I said. "It's more -- I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight."
"You will be," he said. "You won't be able to help it. It doesn't -- it doesn't want you to know, when it moves things."
"Moves things?"
"You're from settled parts, aren't you?" asked Shannon. "You'll see."
When I woke up in the morning, the mountains, which had been behind my tent, were in front of it, running north to south.
"The lines," said Shannon, satisfied. "They shifted. Things'll stay fixed as soon as you get 'em on the map."
I shivered, looking at them.
"Well?" said Shannon, after a moment. "What are you waiting for?"
I scrabbled for my tools and began feeling for the ley lines while the rest of the camp ate breakfast.
I stayed on, past that first expedition. It paid well, and this was the west I'd wanted to see. The big cities were too settled, and the towns didn't have room for a woman like me. I kept my hair short, learned to like the taste of tobacco, of whisky, and cussed as much as the men did.
I kept working under Shannon. He knew I was a woman -- I'd never bothered to hide it -- but he respected me for my talent, for what I brought to the little expeditions that we set out on.
"You're taming the land," he said. "We need you."
I thought I understood what he meant. There were horrible things lurking out there. Fey things that clustered close to the ley lines. Beautiful and fierce, looking perfectly safe. Stacks of rocks that would suddenly rise up and cover a man whole, rivers that would leap out of their beds. Clusters of trees that would close in around you until you were caged and pull the flesh from your body, leaving only the bones, and not all of those. Gorgeous and deadly.
When the lines lay quiet, the magic was biddable, controllable. Mapping them did that -- made settlement possible.
All of Colorado, up through Wyoming and Idaho Territories, Montana Territory, over to Washington and the parts of Oregon that hadn't been settled. I drew the maps, labeled where the lines were, pinned them down and tamed the land.
"You're doing good work," said the men who doled out my pay.
Over time, there was less and less that needed mapping, fewer and fewer empty spots on the map. I'd done my job too well.
The last company to hire me was headed for Dakota Territory.
"We're mapping the Black Hills," said the expedition leader. "Mining claims, mostly, but we have need of a good cartographer."
I was in San Francisco then, looking for leads and trying to determine what came next. I was 24 and lean as a whip, burned dark by the sun, with hair I still kept short as a boy's. I had no prospects, and my father had disowned me. My money hadn't run out -- yet -- but it felt like only a matter of time. I had no skills, nothing I could fall back on except cartography, and most of the west had been tamed. I'd thought about going south, down to Mexico or perhaps Brazil, but I hadn't the money for passage.
"Wallace Shannon recommended you," the expedition lead said. "He says the lines lay quiet after you touch them; that they don't have to be redone, and that's valuable to us. We've lost three men already, including our cartographer."
I grinned. "That's what happens if you're not good at your job."
"Will you take it? We're offering double your previous wages."
"Gentlemen," I said, rising to my feet. "I believe I will."
We set out for a little town called Keystone -- a mining settlement, and not an impressive one.
The uncharted land was beautiful. The company didn't take me to the mines -- those that had already been mapped; there was simply no point. They dragged me into the hills.
"This was Lakota territory," they explained, when I asked. "It's never been mapped."
There was a hesitation. It was beyond my pay to ask, whether or not this was really our land, so I didn't.
The hills -- mountains, really -- were beautiful, so densely covered in timber that they looked almost black.
There was nothing deadly in them, that I could feel. The ley lines were untamed, had, as far as I could tell, never been touched.
"Your last cartographer didn't know what they were doing," I said, the first morning they led me out. "This will take me, oh, six months, perhaps. I want to map everything carefully -- no more deaths."
They didn’t push back.
When I mapped the land, things stayed put. I was my father's daughter in the sense that I was able to control and remap the magic, make the lines go where I wanted them to go.
I mapped the hills. I pinned the ley lines down, left them unable to move. They were wrestled into place, mercilessly, by me. I didn't ask, what am I doing, or what will the consequences of this be, because I wasn't paid to ask questions. I was all too aware of my place.
There were mountains. I mapped them. They named them. I thought they would have named them after the presidents, maybe, or after famous figures of myths and legends, but I was only the cartographer. They named them after men they knew out east.
I drew things on the map and they told me what to name them later.
Within six months, my work was done. I had all the magic in the hills, all the lines, pinned to the map.
I thought about staying. There were jobs, I had been told, in the town of Lead. They did not need cartographers, but there was a call for women who could sew, to make clothes for the miners.
I passed through Lead.
The mine there was an open pit, a gash in the side of the mountain. All the trees had been removed. The hills, instead of black, were starkly gray.
"Progress," they bragged. "It's not the most productive mine, but the vein goes deep -- we've been mining here for near ten years already!"
I felt the lines in that place. They'd had all the magic drained out of them.
Look at what you made possible, the feeble remainder of the lines seemed to taunt me.
I recognized what I'd done, and I fled.
I went back to California, and when the opportunity to go north arose, I went up to Alaska Territory. I mapped there, but I didn't map as well, and the magic -- the maps I made -- faded after a few years. They were never able to settle it, begin farming and mining. They attribute it to the harsh weather, the remote location, but I knew better.
South Dakota became a state in '89. They began looking for things to draw people in, besides the mines, starting in the '10s.
They found me, somehow, up near Juneau.
"Are you the same Kit Brown whose name is on the initial maps made of the Black Hills? The Kit Brown who mapped the Needles and Mount Rushmore?" asked the young man I found at my doorstep one day in mid-June.
Magic handling keeps you young. I was pushing 63 and could have passed for 40.
"Yes," I said. "I didn't name them, though."
"We need your help," he said. "The maps you made, the ley lines...we're doing more work in the area and need to have them updated."
"Mining?"
"No, no," he said quickly. "Tourism. We'll be sculpting images of famous Americans into the Black Hills to draw visitors to the region."
I thought of the Needles, the strange jutting rock formations that made them, and of the mountain, what the Lakota had called the Six Grandfathers before I mapped it and it was renamed.
"Tell me," I said. "Is the mine near Lead still open?"
Your doing, I could almost hear the ley lines. Your legacy.
"The Homestake mine?" he asked, and his chest puffed out with pride. "Why, it's on the New York Stock Exchange!"
"Then no," I said, and gently shut the door in his face.
~*~*~
Normally I don't include notes, but I feel it's worth sharing here: this was inspired directly by, of all things, an episode of Radiolab I managed to catch part of at work: Xenon. It's an episode about how the Homestead Mine is the "quietest place on Earth", and how that's useful for monitoring something unusual: sub-atomic particles called neutrinos.
That phrase, "the quietest place on Earth" stuck with me. Doing reading about Mount Rushmore, I realized that it was in the Black Hills, too, along with the old mine, and one thing led to another...before I knew it, Kit was in my head, telling me her story, what she remembered Mount Rushmore as.
There are images of the mine online, most notably on Wikipedia.
Thanks for taking the time to read!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2018-10-15 11:25 pm (UTC)“I didn't ask, what am I doing, or what will the consequences of this be, because I wasn't paid to ask questions. I was all too aware of my place. “
Bravo!
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Date: 2018-10-16 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-10-16 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-17 09:03 am (UTC)Very well done! Kudos!
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Date: 2018-10-17 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-18 06:41 am (UTC)I love this whole idea of the weird kind of magic cartographers put into the world, and tame the land, and the regret of the consequences of those actions. It's just such an interesting concept!
Very cool!! Great work!!! I really enjoy your writing.
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Date: 2018-10-18 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-10-19 06:36 am (UTC)I really enjoyed this!
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Date: 2018-10-19 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-10-19 10:15 pm (UTC)