A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  I was heading for the small town of Winslow, Arizona, where a terrific meteorite collision had occurred 50,000 years ago, leaving behind a 600-foot-deep hole punched into the desert, 4,000 feet in diameter. I had learned about it as a small boy: My geography teacher in Dorset had given us lectures about the very rare allotropes of quartz known as coesite and stishovite, formed when quartz is suddenly subjected to enormous pressures, as it would be when hit with an immensely heavy and fast-moving body of iron and nickel. Both of these newly named (after their discoverers) quartz minerals can be found at the bottom of the Winslow crater, I remembered him saying. When I got there I found something else, something quite unanticipated, and in truth something rather trivial—but something that added immeasurably to my feelings about western American geology.

  Up on the lip of the crater, I listened as the guide talked about its history: of its discovery in the 1870s by one of General Custer’s scouts; of the visit made twenty years later by the great geologist Grove Karl Gilbert,* who fretted publicly over whether it was a volcano or an impact crater of the kind seen on the surface of the moon; and then of its acquisition by a Philadelphia mining engineer named Barringer, who fancied that he might one day be able to find the buried meteorite and make himself a tidy fortune. In the end he never did find it, but, said the guide, his family still owned the crater. The firm was based in Pennsylvania and was called the Barringer Meteor Company.

  And then I remembered that I had once known a family named Barringer, a fairly well-off and very elderly couple who lived in one of those rather comfortable horse-country neighborhoods close to the Delaware border. My cell phone had good signal, and so I called them. Old Mr. Barringer answered. He was rather deaf and shouted to ask who might be calling. I told him, and explained that I was telephoning from the very lip of the Meteor Crater in eastern Arizona. There was a pause.

  “Bless my soul!” he exclaimed happily. “Our family owns that, you know!” And so I put the phone into speaker mode, and the guide and I listened attentively as Mr. Barringer told us how delighted he was that we were all there and how he hoped that the staff were being as pleasant as possible. Then he thanked everyone for paying up their $20 admission fee, “as it keeps us all in good champagne, and for that we are most grateful.”

  A meteor could have fallen anywhere in America, of course; but it seemed somehow appropriate that the biggest of all should have collided with the earth in one of the most beautiful, unspoiled, and most geologically complex regions of America. And the westerly path that I followed over the next few weeks took me to other, similarly emblematic places, all created by the forces of geology. From the Meteor Crater I went on to the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, and the Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, to Zion and Bryce Canyons in Utah, to Death Valley and the Salton Sea and the southern Sierra Nevadas in California. All are stupendous examples of the geological mayhem that is the American West; all spectacles of ancient topographical miracle work that manage to draw millions from around the world.

  The story of the geological exploration of the American West, which resulted in the discovery of nearly all these marvels, begins in the spring of 1860, when the Geological Survey of California was founded. Untold hundreds of exploring scientists—for who would not want to explore here, where the geology is so spectacularly on view, so seldom covered by such inconveniences as soils and forests?—amassed a wealth of geological information the likes of which few countries have ever known.

  The diligence and derring-do and sheer romance of the geologists who came through here still haunts the territory. And there is a nice symmetry in the fact that their years of pioneering work—which in most cases had the official blessing of the American government—had its origins in the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, California, in 1848. When President Polk announced the importance of the find to the world, he also demanded that a serious and extensive geological survey of the region be undertaken—and, by doing so, he kindled a sudden interest in geology in dozens of other states, where governors and legislative chiefs started to demand that their local scientists investigate what wealth might be in the rocks beneath their feet.

  Up to this point agriculture, rather than industry, was the dominant force in the American economy. Such a mining industry as existed was in poor shape, and in the late 1850s coal production was actually going into decline. But as soon as gold mines started to be sunk in the Californian mountains, everything changed: A realization spread like brushfire that other worthwhile minerals might also be lurking underground, and the mining industry swiftly began to go into overdrive clear across the country.

  It took little more than a decade for the situation to become so changed. In 1848, the year of Sutter’s Mill, agriculture still reigned supreme, industry was primitive, mining in the doldrums. But by 1859—the same year that a new gold strike was made in Colorado, the year that the great silver deposit known as the Comstock Lode was found in Nevada, the year that the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, and just when work on the four great transcontinental railway routes was starting—government figures showed that at last the value of products made in American factories had overtaken the value of produce from the farms and fields. And with America’s transmutation into a fast-growing industrial power, there came a sudden and anxious need for minerals. Such natural resources as the country possessed were all being swallowed up by the furnaces and the foundries, and in 1866 a frankly worried government in Washington decreed that the proper development of the nation’s geological and mineral wealth had to be of “the highest concern of the American people.” It was imperative, the White House said, that the untapped resources of the country be found and wrenched from their hiding places belowground.

  Congress agreed. And so in March 1867 it was decided that the entirety of the West—unsettled, poorly charted, and inhabited, when at all, by understandably unhappy nations of indigenous peoples—had to be properly and methodically explored and mapped. Four great surveying organizations were promptly inaugurated—the Great Western Surveys, history has come to call them—and for the next decade enormous parties of soldiers and scientists, most of them surveyors but many of them geologists, went off under the auspices of one or another of these government-financed surveys, and investigated every nook and cranny of the immense landscape. Eventually they threw up all* the stunning details of the fantastical worlds that lay in the far beyond, in that immense unpeopled wasteland that lay to the west of longitude 102, which the U.S. government had decreed as marking the formal edge of American settlement.†

  Each of them had a grandiose name. The Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Territories was the first of the four to be formed, and it was led by one of geology’s least-favored pioneers: the illegitimate son of a Massachusetts drunk, an explorer named Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. Few have kind words to say about this curious man: The only biography is entitled Strange Genius; one writer denounces him as a vindictive, insecure, manipulative, and self-promoting plagiarist, and even the biographical dictionaries, with their tendency toward detached kindliness, remark on Hayden’s ruthless ambition, impatience, and combative style.

  But Hayden was both a brilliant field geologist and a great popularizer of science—and it is through his efforts and those of his survey colleagues (two of whom went on to help found the National Geographic Society, which was gestating all the while this surveying of the West was unrolling) that the unexplored parts of Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado were properly mapped and the more obvious aspects of their geology recorded. He had a budget of $75,000 from U.S. Treasury funds—more than enough to hire the best surveyors, scientists, and photographers. The legendary landscape photographer William Henry Jackson was a member of the Hayden team, and his stunning images of the mountains and extraordinary scenery around the headwaters of a river in what is now northwestern Wyoming set the capstone on what was Hayden’s greatest achievement: the creation of Amer
ica’s first national park, at Yellowstone. An “unprepossessing man of no outstanding achievements” he may have been, according to some unkind biographers; and a man who became notorious for feathering his own nest and regarding the West as his personal empire; and a man whose personal life was checkered enough to leave him dying of syphilis. But Hayden, with his superbly organized and eloquent 500-page report on what he had found, persuaded President Ulysses S. Grant to create Yellowstone National Park, and few greater memorials to the explorer’s art can there ever be.*

  But Hayden had a rival. At the same time as he was pushing out westward from the Missouri River, the man who would in due course become the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey was leading a group of explorers eastward, out into the unknown from California. The expedition was called the Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, and its leader was Clarence King, perhaps one of the truest heroes of the American school of the Old Geology.

  King was evidently a strong-willed, imaginative, and impetuous young man. After completing his four-year chemistry course at Yale in only two years, and then going on his own accord to hear Louis Agassiz lecture at Harvard, he decided to ride his horse the entire way to California. He joined the California Geological Survey (where he explored and then named Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower Forty-Eight, after the survey’s then director) and promptly became so enthused by the life of western exploration that as soon as was prudent he rode all the way back east to Washington, D.C., with a scheme.

  He confronted the secretary of war and insisted that the government finance a survey, just like Hayden’s, that would progress eastward across the continent along the line of the 40th parallel, following a swath of territory that lay along the course of the main Central Pacific railroad route. His proposed journey would start where the parallel crosses the Sierra beside Lassen Peak, continue through Nevada in the great desert south of Winnemucca and Elko, run across Utah fifty miles south of the Great Salt Lake, pass on through Provo and across the Green River, and cross the Front Range, where those mountains intersect with the parallel close to Boulder, Colorado. The expedition would then drop down from the high peaks and safely conclude in the settled farmlands of the Great Plains.

  The government agreed, offering him a three-year budget of $100,000 for his troubles. King swiftly assembled a team of thirty-five, most of whom were polished European geologists or dapper American scientists of elegance and taste—men who found it mildly amusing to be asked to do such things as carry rifles and put on desert boots. As a result the King survey was at first regarded more for its élan than for its science—though as their results began to flow in, the science began to win respect as well.

  The team—together with a large contingent of soldiery designed to protect the scientists against the anticipated anger of disconsolate Indians—embarked on a ship to Panama, then on another up to San Francisco, and finally crossed the Sierra to the starting point in Nevada’s Virginia Mountains, just north of present-day Reno. It pushed relentlessly and steadily eastward, triangulating and hammering as it went, producing maps of both the topography and the geology with an accuracy and attention to detail that is impressive still.

  But the event for which Clarence King remains best known came as the expedition was winding down, when the team entered northwestern Colorado and heard rumors of an astonishing find of diamonds and rubies and other precious stones around a mesa near a settlement called Browns Park, nowadays between the villages of Hiawatha and Dinosaur. To a geologist like King, this sounded most odd: Despite their meticulous surveying, they had found no diamond-bearing earths. There was a possibility, King concluded, that the story was a hoax.

  As indeed it turned out to be. The party found the mesa, and in short order found an extraordinary scattering of gems littering the ground. But the stones were to be found only in disturbed areas, with footprints all around; wherever the soil was undisturbed, digging threw up nothing more than the occasional pebble. Very little geological detective work was required to find out that a pair of clever ne’er-do-wells had in fact salted the mesa with precious stones. They had set up a massive fraud, and convinced a staggering array of believers to invest money in a mining venture, to go after treasure that simply didn’t exist.

  The size of the swindle was remarkable. Investors from as far away as London had sunk money into some twenty-five companies, and to the tune of $250 million—especially after the pair had somehow managed to borrow and then (as the investment money began to flood in) to buy bags of uncut jewels that they used first to salt the mesa, and then to excavate and show to their growing army of backers. They had persuaded Charles Tiffany, the New York City jeweler, to vouch for their authenticity—though Tiffany later rather weakly confessed that he knew very little about stones other than about how to market them.

  Clarence King, who appears to have been impelled by a sterling sense of propriety—and despite appeals from the villains’ associates that he, too, could now make a quick profit from what he knew—went straight to the companies’ lawyers and told them of the fraud—prompting the shell-shocked investors to close down the firms. The two confidence tricksters fled; one died as a coffin maker, penniless, the other from shotgun wounds after a fight near his pig farm in Kentucky. The investors spent years licking their wounds and cursing their gullibility.

  But Clarence King’s reputation soared. “God and Clarence King,” it was said in the San Francisco newspapers, had saved the day. He became, in part because of his soaring reputation as a pillar of moral rectitude, a close friend of the powerful, men like Teddy Roosevelt, John Hay, and Henry Adams; and when the American government decided, somewhat late in the game, to set up its own national Geological Survey, it seemed entirely appropriate that he be installed as its first director.

  Few seemed much to care when another, somewhat less acceptable aspect of King’s character was revealed. It turned out that King had an unappeasable passion for dark-skinned women, particularly enjoying the delights of the Shawnee, the Comanche, and the Cheyenne while surveying among them. He went on to marry a black nursemaid named Ada Copeland, changing his own name to James Todd for this purpose. And though he fathered five children with Miss Copeland, Clarence King never breathed a word about his circumstances, or about the existence of James Todd, to his closest friends or to his employers in the federal government.

  When Henry Adams idolized Clarence King as “the most remarkable man of our time,” he probably had little idea just how remarkable he really was. All that Adams and the legions of King’s admirers knew was that the King survey, when it was measured by the number of volumes of reports and the classic books and maps that were to be its legacy, had been a triumph, and that its leader had in addition performed brilliant service by exposing one of the greatest geological frauds in western American history.

  With the surveying along the line of a parallel now accomplished, it must have seemed that for symmetry’s sake a meridian should surely be explored as well. Hence the formation in 1872 of what is generally known as the Wheeler survey, with its formal, government-designated title The Geologic and Geographic Survey West of the 100th Meridian. It would still be a while before Washington would designate 102°, the Amarillo line, as the formal edge of western settlement. (Back in 1872 hardly anyone lived west of that line, which would pass from Bismarck, North Dakota, all the way down to the Texas town of Abilene.) George Wheeler, a swaggering young lieutenant in the U.S. Army, had a reputation for being able to look after himself in the field and for producing impeccable maps. He was thus given the task of surveying all of this enormous emptiness. It was to all intents and purposes a military expedition—Wheeler saw his role as the leader of one further instrument of the American conquest of the West, and he counted the Indians as though they were wildlife, in the hope that in short order they would all be exterminated. He was not a pleasant man.

  But he was a highly competent one, and when the parties under his command end
ed their seven years of work, there were no fewer than 164 new maps of western America, beautiful, accurate, and of lasting value. He had mapped 327,000 square miles—with the challenge of mapping Death Valley chief among his cartographic successes—and he had spent rather more than 600,000 of the Treasury’s dollars doing so. And he had taken along with him—to dilute the overwhelming military appearance of his party—a group of civilians, three of whom were so distinguished and influential that they, like the pair who rode with Ferdinand Hayden, also went on to be founders of the National Geographic Society.

  One of this trio was Grove Karl Gilbert, yet again—the Meteor Crater visitor and San Francisco Earthquake witness whose name keeps cropping up in accounts of the American West. He was mild-mannered, quiet, shabby (because he liked to repair his own clothes), and is still widely regarded as the greatest of all American geologists.* His most lasting memorial, perhaps, is that it was he who named the Basin and Range Province, and recognized how very different it was, structurally, from the ranges and basins that were so characteristic of the mountains of Appalachia, near where he grew up.

  But neither Gilbert nor Wheeler nor Hayden nor even the redoubtable Clarence King has won quite the lasting general repute that has since been enjoyed by the leader of the fourth great federal survey—the magnetically appealing one-armed former soldier who is renowned for first navigating the entire length of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell. This was a man who had lost his arm to a bone-shattering minié ball at the Battle of Shiloh: It did not to any measurable degree inhibit him from undertaking one of the most heroic explorations in American history.