Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  King stayed in the field for three years. By the time he was twenty-five, in 1867, with his flair for getting people to believe in him, he had gone to Washington, D.C., with an inventive idea for a wide-ranging scientific survey of the West, and he managed to convince Secretary of War Stanton that one was needed. It had to be conducted by civilians, too; West Pointers were just not trained to carry out what he had in mind: a survey of the 800-mile stretch of land, from eastern Wyoming to the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada along the 40th parallel, which would include the route of the Central and Union Pacific railroads, soon to be merged. King proposed to map out this area, fundamentally unknown terrain to anyone but the native population, but he wanted to do more than that. He also proposed that he and a corps of scientists take samples of plants and animals, and study and describe rock formations, mountain ranges, plains, saline and alkaline deposits, coal deposits (an important resource for fuel for railroads), and minerals. Of course, he would prepare maps of the chief mining districts and a topographical map of the whole region.

  King was a practical man. Beyond the sound scientific justification for the survey were political and commercial interests, and he understood that to tease funding out of the government he would have to prove the survey would be as profitable in financial as in quantitative terms. He would ascertain whether the Comstock Lode mines could or would yield more silver. And he later made sure that the book he wrote, Mining Industry, appeared first in the series of seven volumes published from the survey’s results so as to keep his backers economically motivated.

  Recognizing the value of King’s proposal—and fully aware that only surveyed land could be homesteaded—Stanton signed on. King also lobbied Senator John Conness of California, who introduced legislation authorizing the survey. Henry Adams called the bill the first modern act of legislation. Modern it was, for the survey came under federal, not state or purely military, jurisdiction. Appointed head of the newly formed U.S. Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel, King would have to report to General Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, the chief of army engineers, but King’s appointment as a civilian represented a major shift toward the formation of such national institutions as the National Park Service, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the Weather Bureau. (After the bill passed, Stanton reportedly said to King, “Now, Mr. King, the sooner you get out of Washington, the better—you are too young a man to be seen about town with this appointment in your pocket—there are four major-generals who want your place.”) Actually, the timing couldn’t have been better, for this federally authorized, centralized mapping of a national domain would bring together East and West geologically and symbolically, with word of the country’s natural resources and prospects for settlement replacing news of the Ku Klux Klan or presidential impeachment.

  Though capable of surveying the West in both scientific and commercial terms, King was pleased just to marvel at its raw beauty. “What would Ruskin have said,” King exclaimed after climbing Lassen Peak, “if he had seen this!” (Years later, at a picture dealer’s, King accidentally met Ruskin and so impressed the art critic that he later gave King the choice of the two best Turner watercolors in the collection he was selling. “One good Turner,” replied King, “deserves another.” King bought both of them.) King’s mission, as he saw it, was to link science and the sublime and bring together the objective fact-gathering mission to which he was committed with his romantic response to nature—or with those emotions he ambivalently called indescribable. “Am I really fallen to the level of a mere nature-lover?” he once chided himself. Yet in writing about his adventures, which he did in a series of essays for The Atlantic Monthly, he best reconciled the mission of the scrupulous geologist with that of the impressionable nature lover who climbed to a mountaintop to breathe clean, free air—and to be alone.

  King too was a man of his time and of his country, which meant that he shared its longing for land, for expansion and exploration, for revitalization and profit. And, like his country, King was created in conflict: between discovery and acquisition, between pure science and applied or moneymaking science, between the study of minerals and the development of means for their extraction, between the rough-and-tumble West and the clubby East, where King’s charming presence was frequently sought. He was a man of eminently mixed motives in a nation of the same. Something of a dandy, he pulled on his doeskin trousers and lemon-colored gloves for dinner in the wilderness. His bright gold watch chain glimmered on his natty vest, and he sported a cane, which, as an agile mountain climber, he didn’t need. He loved the figurative no less than the scientific, the transcendent no less than the factual, the glorious no less than the mundane, the romantic past no less than the practical present. In the Sierra Nevada, he observed Mount Whitney “as it really is—a splendid mass of granite 14,887 feet high, ice-chiseled and storm-tinted” and at the same time saw it as “a great monolith left standing amid the ruins of a bygone geological empire.”

  King was also of two minds about the indigenous or native populations, the Indians, though, like Parkman, he became convinced that they would, one way or another, inevitably disappear. (The 40th parallel survey ignored ethnology and did not include native populations in its studies.) “However complex and subtle the cause of this strange, swift extinction, however guilty enlightened society may be, the fact remains,” he wrote in 1875, “civilization, flashing around the world like the advancing sun, discovers a savage tribe, only that we may see it stagger under the blinding focus, fall to the earth, and perish.” Just a few years earlier, he had witnessed the funeral of an old Indian woman, mourned by her despairing husband of many years, and he’d been deeply moved when, racked by grief, the husband had tried to throw himself onto the pyre. Two old women had to drag him back to his children. “Didn’t I tell you Injuns has feelings inside of ’em?” King’s guide chastised him. The next day King couldn’t find the husband. When he asked where he was, King was told that the man was “whiskey drunk”—and that he’d spent the night with his “new squaw.” King abruptly changed the subject. No more softheartedness or Indian question for him. “The Quakers will have to work a great reformation in the Indian,” he condescendingly said, “before he is really fit to be exterminated.”

  THE 40TH PARALLEL survey was carried out by a corps of men that included topographers and geologists as well as a botanist and an ornithologist. King hired men like himself, confident men, well trained and committed to science and hard work, who met together in Sacramento in the spring of 1867 to break in the mules. “I take a little ride every day on mule back,” wrote the botanist in the group, “and am at present afflicted with a most grievous tail.” That July, the caravan of eleven explorer-scientists, two freight wagons, an instrument cart, and extra mules and horses set off.

  The days and months ahead were not easy; several of the men came down with malaria, and King himself was struck by lightning atop a mountain named Job’s Peak. Yet, despite illnesses, the hazards of the great outdoors, the sore backsides, and the stifling weather, the expedition overall was an epic feat, as one historian called it. Its rigorous execution and precise results surpassed everything—in scope, result, clarity, and rigor—previously accomplished, and after its first two-year term, King managed to get Congress to renew the appropriations. His standards for fieldwork were high, his reputation for integrity spotless, particularly after he prevented the swindle famously known as the “Diamond Hoax” from wiping out many an investor. In 1872, a mysterious field, its whereabouts vague, was reputedly saturated with gemstones. That was geologically impossible. Determined to get to the bottom of it, King put together a series of tips and rumors, and, ascertaining that the diamond field probably fell under his jurisdiction—within the 40th parallel in northwest Colorado—he secretly rode out to the area and pried loose a couple of stones that clearly had been recently planted. He didn’t hesitate to let everyone know about the scam to head off the ruination of the newly formed San Francisco and New York Mining and C
ommercial Company. One of its investigators, who went out to the diamond field in King’s wake, admitted, “It would have been as impossible for Nature to have deposited them [the diamonds] as for a person standing in San Francisco to toss a marble in the air and have it fall on Bunker Hill Monument.”

  A celebrity for having exposed the hoax, King the geologist and raconteur was soon an estimable man of letters whose popular essays about the West were collected in 1872 in the volume Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. (William Dean Howells, then the assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly, later remembered that King read the proofs with a pith helmet at his side.) A latter-day explorer like John Frémont but with a more literary bent, or at least more talent, King represented a new Californian type of writing: graphic and, well, exhilarating, said Howells. King’s tale of mountain climbing in the West is the story of a man reaching beyond where it’s safe for him to go, rising to a physical and spiritual summit where silence and solitude reign. “I have lain and listened through the heavy calm of a tropical voyage, hour after hour, longing for a sound,” he wrote, “and in desert nights the dead stillness has many a time awakened me from sleep. For moments, too, in my forest life, the groves made absolutely no breath of movement; but there is around these summits the soundlessness of a vacuum. The sea stillness is that of sleep; the desert, of death—this silence is like the waveless calm of space.”

  That waveless calm of space had nonetheless betrayed many a traveler, and King was not naive. “The brave spirit of Westward Ho!” he wrote, “the weary march of progress over stretches of desert, lining the way with graves of strong men; of new-born lives; of sad, patient mothers, whose pathetic longing for the new home died with them; of the thousand old and young whose last agony came to them as they marched with eyes strained on after the sunken sun, and whose shallow barrows scarcely lift over the drifting dust of the desert; . . . but when urging on to wresting from new lands something better than old can give, it [the brave spirit of Westward Ho] degenerates into mere weak-minded restlessness . . . it results in that race of perpetual emigrants who roam as dreary waifs over the West, losing possessions, love of life, love of God, slowly dragging from valley to valley, till they fall by the wayside, happy if some chance stranger performs for them the last rites,—often less fortunate, as blanched bones and fluttering rags upon too many hillsides plainly tell.”

  Bones on the hillside: beware the race of the perpetual emigrant. Beware the romance of Westward Ho and of the writers who sentimentalize it. “Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier,” wrote the ever-optimistic Emerson. “You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar.” Bret Harte, the author of “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” gently laughed. There were pianos in the saloon, he said, not in the parlor, and the owner of the log cabin, by the way, won’t be wanting any Latin grammar.

  “Romance like this would undoubtedly provoke the applause of lyceum-halls in the wild fastnesses of Roxbury (Mass.), or on the savage frontiers of Brooklyn (NY),” Harte teased, “but a philosopher ought to know that, usually, only civilization begets civilization, and that the pioneer is apt to be always the pioneer.”

  Emerson’s was the sweetened romance of a bygone era. Younger writers saluted Harte’s unfrilly point of view as realism.

  FOR THE 40TH parallel survey, Clarence King had also hired the Irish-born photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, who had gotten his start at the tender age of eighteen with Mathew Brady before he joined Alexander Gardner in Washington. Though very little is known about O’Sullivan’s life, he was considered one of most prolific photographers at the front during the war, and afterward he worked for a while with the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, which certainly helped bring him to King’s attention.

  For King, O’Sullivan produced a series of landscape photographs utterly unlike his dramatic pictures of war. Perhaps he intended as much. He talked about the war compulsively, reminisced one of the men on the 40th parallel survey. “One would think he had slept with Grant and Meade, and was the direct confidant of Stanton.” But instead of generals, soldiers, and corpses, O’Sullivan’s landscapes hovered just beyond articulate meaning and seem to capture silence, solitude, and space. Therein lies their aesthetic power, and because of that, they seem to wriggle free of the context in which they were made. Yet context there was. King had commissioned O’Sullivan to describe the area. And because the survey was a declaration of American natural resources and American hardiness, O’Sullivan’s pictures of the land present a rugged and purportedly untouched, natural environment worthy of preservation and of conquest: the pursuit of a truly geological history of the earth’s origins and development, and the stalking of mammon in the hills and mines of America.

  Setting out with the King expedition with two mules and a packer, O’Sullivan photographed the huge volcanic tufa rock formations at Pyramid Lake in Nevada that seemed to change color, depending on one’s perspective. This unsigned picture was included, in lithograph form, with an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1869, evidently by O’Sullivan himself, about the surveyors’ adventures among rattlesnakes, disease-carrying mosquitoes, and white pelicans beating their wings so hard that the men couldn’t hear one another.

  Also reproduced in the magazine were O’Sullivan’s photographs of the almost abstract geometrics of the canyon in the Ruby Range. And after he rode in an ambulance wagon drawn by a team of four mules to the Great Basin, where the mounds of sparkling sands, as tall as 500 feet, looked to him like undulating snowdrifts, he made the now-famous picture Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada, 1867. The photograph, spare and elegant, radiates with a light that seems to come from the dunes themselves. Against them, the ambulance wagon that O’Sullivan used to cart around his photographic supplies looks dark, small, and almost inconsequential. So does his mule team. Nature dwarfs the human, but the human is decidedly there, if only passing through.

  Though he mainly ignored people—except members of the survey—O’Sullivan also descended deep into the Comstock Lode mines sunk several hundred feet into the earth, a burning magnesium wire lighting his way. His was dangerous work, as hazardous as what the miners faced as they worked below ground in cramped space, breathing poisoned air. Those mute and hallucinatory photographs do show people, miners in small, dark spaces, but they were not used in any of the published volumes produced by the survey.

  Except when they were reproduced as lithographs for those volumes, O’Sullivan’s photographs were not widely distributed. King had commissioned them only for internal use and put them into three volumes of his reports; they were not, it seems, offered independently for sale. But O’Sullivan may have given a set to the French Geographical Society, and he sent a set to the 1873 World’s Fair in Vienna. And at the nation’s Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, several editions of O’Sullivan’s photographs were displayed, as if to celebrate the reunited United States, and when King’s own volume from the survey, Systematic Geology, appeared in 1878, it contained monochromes of O’Sullivan photographs, hailed as classics in their field.

  “IT IS ONLY lesser men who bang all the doors, shout out all doubts,” said Clarence King. Suspicious of received wisdom, whether from the scientific or the religious community, he hoped to square Darwinism with the religious beliefs he refused to abandon. That is, though the scientists of his day—Louis Agassiz being the great exception—were looking to geology to confirm Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, King was not marching to that particular drummer. Rather, he had not entirely relinquished the theory of catastrophism, the pre-Darwinian notion that cataclysmic events (floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) had created the features of the earth’s surface and not the slow, gradual evolution, or uniformitarianism, theorized by Sir Charles Lyell.

  To catastrophists such as Agassiz, cataclysmic events do occur, they destroy life, and the Creator then starts all over again. But neither was that quite what King
had in mind. For though he disagreed with Lyell that natural causes operated through time and that first causes, divine or otherwise, lay beyond the reach of geological inquiry, he wasn’t entirely abandoning Darwin or the idea of evolution and natural selection. Rather, he was saying that the uniformitarians ignored the geological record—the physical, inorganic conditions of the environment—in their calculations. “Has environment, with all the catastrophic changes, been merely passive as regards life?” he asked. Not at all, he answered. Evolution might occur for a while, but “then,” he continued, “all at once a part of the earth suffered short, sharp, destructive revolution unheralded as an earthquake or volcanic eruptions.”

  Delivering a well-publicized speech at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School in 1877, he suggested that evolution be understood in a context that included rapid acceleration and sudden climactic changes. For instance, huge volcanic eruptions and glacial floods had helped create the American West, he said, in a far faster manner than could be explained by a strict belief in gradual evolution. Uniformitarians failed to see that because they drew conclusions from Europe, with its “poor, puny little Vesuvius” and “the feeble energy of a Lisbon earthquake.” Europe couldn’t provide the dramatic geological data that was, of course, uniquely and exceptionally American.

  “In the dominant philosophy of the modern biologist,” King lamented, “there is no admission of a middle ground between these two theories.” Even Darwin’s theories, he pointed out, include the possibility of sudden great changes in the earth’s history; the rate of biological adaptation was not uniform.