Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  On October 20, 1905, the two-horse stage left Rawlins soon after dawn—not a lot of time for stretching out the comforts of the wonderful Ferris Hotel. Eggs were packed under the seats, also grapes and oysters. There were so many boxes and mailbags that they were piled up beside the driver. On the waybill, the passengers were given exactly the same status as the oysters and the grapes. The young woman from Wellesley, running her eye down the list of merchandise, encountered her own name: Miss Ethel Waxham.

  The passenger compartment had a canvas roof, and canvas curtains at the front and sides.

  The driver, Bill Collins, a young fellow with a four days beard, untied the bow-knot of the reins around the wheel, and swung up on the seat, where he ensconced himself with one leg over the mail bags as high as his head and one arm over the back of his seat, putting up the curtain between. “Kind o’ lonesome out here,” he gave as his excuse.

  There were two passengers. The other’s name was Alice Amoss Welty, and she was the postmistress of Dubois, two hundred miles northwest. Her post office was unique, in that it was farther from a railroad than any other in the United States; but this did not inconvenience the style of Mrs. Welty. Not for her some false-fronted dress shop with a name like Tinnie Mercantile. She bought her clothes by mail from B. Altman & Co., Manhattan. Mrs. Welty was of upper middle age, and—“bless her white hairs”—her gossip range appeared to cover every living soul within thirty thousand square miles, an interesting handful of people. The remark about the white hairs—like the description of Bill Collins and the estimated radius of Mrs. Welty’s gossip—is from a journal that Ethel Waxham had begun writing the day before.

  The stage moved through town past houses built of railroad ties, past sheepfolds, past the cemetery and the state penitentiary, and was soon in the dust of open country, rounding a couple of hills before assuming a northwesterly course. There were limestone outcrops in the sides of the hills, and small ancient quarries at the base of the limestone. Indians had begun the quarries, removing an iron oxide—three hundred and fifty million years old—that made fierce and lasting warpaint. More recently, it had been used on Union Pacific railroad cars and, around 1880, on the Brooklyn Bridge. The hills above were the modest high points in a landscape that lacked exceptional relief. Here in the middle of the Rocky Mountains were no mountains worthy of the name.

  Mountains were far away ahead of us, a range rising from the plains and sinking down again into them. Almost all the first day they were in sight.

  As Wyoming ranges go, these distant summits were unprepossessing ridges, with altitudes of nine and ten thousand feet. In one sentence, though, Miss Waxham had intuitively written their geologic history, for they had indeed come out of the plains, and into the plains had in various ways returned.

  Among rolling sweeps of prairie … we met two sheep herders with thousands of sheep each. “See them talking to their dogs,” said the driver.

  They raised their arms and made strange gestures, while the dogs, at the opposite sides of the flock, stood on their hind legs to watch for orders.

  In Wyoming in 1905, three million sheep competed for range grass with eight hundred thousand cattle. Big winter winds, squeezed and therefore racing fast between the high ground and the stratosphere, blew the snow off the grass and favored the sheep. They were hardier, and their wool contended with the temperature and the velocity of the wind. Winter wind. There was a saying among homesteaders in Wyoming: “If summer falls on a weekend, let’s have a picnic.”

  Twelve miles from Rawlins, the horses were changed at Bell Spring, where, in a kind of topographical staircase—consisting of the protruding edges of sediments that dipped away to the east—the Mesozoic era rose to view: the top step Cretaceous, the next Jurassic, at the bottom a low red Triassic bluff, against which was clustered a compound of buildings roofed with cool red mud. Miss Waxham had no idea then that she was looking at a hundred and seventy-five million years, let alone which hundred and seventy-five million years. She had no idea that those sediments had broken off just here, and that the other side of the break, two and three thousand feet below, contained prolific traps of gas and oil. Actually, no one knew that. Discovery was twenty years away.

  The stage rolled onto Separation Flats—altitude seven thousand feet—still pursuing the chimeric mountains. One of them, she learned, was called Whiskey Peak. Collins looked around from the driver’s seat and said a passenger had once asked him the name of the mountain, “and I told him that it was in this coach where I could put my hand on it—but he could not guess.” In the far distance also appeared a “white speck”—a roadhouse—which they watched impatiently for hours.

  It did not look larger when we reached it … . Mrs. Welty and I hurried in to get warm, for we were chilled through. Outside, hung from the roof, was half a carcass of a steer … . In a cluttered kitchen, a fat forlorn silent woman served us wearily with a plentiful but plain meal, and sat with her arms folded watching us eat … . We ate our baked potatoes and giant biscuits, onions and carrots and canned-apple pie in half silence, glad to be through. The stage horses were changed and we started on toward Lost Soldier.

  Lost Soldier was another sixteen miles and thus would take three hours. Already, Mrs. Welty was talking about the Hog Back, more than twenty hours up the road—a steep descent from a high divide, where Wyoming’s storied winds had helped many a stagecoach get to the bottom in seconds. Wreckage was strewn all over the ground there, among the bones of horses. A driver had been known to chain a coach to a tree to keep the coach from blowing away. Like the sails of boats and ships, the canvas sides of stagecoaches were often furled as they approached the Hog Back, to let the wind blow through. No one relied on brakes.

  Always, going down, the wheels are rough-locked by a chain so that they slip along instead of turning … . A freight team went over the side a little while ago about Thanksgiving time. The load was partly supplies for Thanksgiving dinner, turkeys, oysters, fruit, etc. The driver called to the team behind for help. When it came, he was calmly seated on a stump peeling an orange while the wagon and debris were scattered below.

  Oil would be discovered under Lost Soldier in 1916. It would yield the highest recovery per acre of any oil field that has ever been discovered in the Rocky Mountains. From level to level in a drill hole there—a hole about a mile deep—oil could be found in an amazing spectrum of host rocks: in the Cambrian Flathead sandstone, in the Mississippian Madison limestone, in the Tensleep sands of Pennsylvanian time. Oil was in the Chugwater (red sands of the Triassic), and in the Morrison, Sundance, Nugget (celebrated formations of the Jurassic), and, of course, in the Cretaceous Frontier. A well at Lost Soldier was like grafted ornamental citrus—oranges, lemons, tangerines, grapefruit, all on a single tree. The discoverer of the oil-bearing structure was a young geologist from Princeton University, who not only found the structure but also helped to place the term “sheepherder anticline” in the geologic lexicon. A sheepherder anticline is one that is particularly obvious, one that could be mapped by a Princeton geologist dressed as a shepherd and moving around with a flock of sheep—which is how he avoided attention as he studied the rock of Lost Soldier.

  We rattled into the place at last, and were glad to get in to the fire to warm ourselves while the driver changed the load from one coach to another. With every change of drivers the coach is changed, making each man responsible for repairs on his own coach. The Kirks keep Lost Soldier. Mrs. Kirk is a short stocky figureless woman with untidy hair. She furnished me with an old soldier’s overcoat to wear during the night to come … . Before long, we were started again, with Peggy Dougherty for driver. He is tall and grizzled. They say that when he goes to dances they make him take the spike out of the bottom of his wooden leg.

  There were four horses now—“a wicked little team”—and immediately they kicked over the traces, tried to run away, became tangled like sled dogs twisting in harness, and set Peggy Dougherty to swearing.

  Ye gods,
how he could swear.

  Mrs. Welty diverted him with questions about travellers marooned in snowdrifts. Mrs. Welty was aware that Mr. Dougherty—who was missing six fingers, one leg, and half of his remaining foot —was an authority on this topic. In 1883, a blizzard had overtaken him and his one passenger, a young woman comparable in age to Miss Waxham. When the snow became so deep that the coach ceased to move, he unhitched a horse. Already stiff with frostbite, he hung on to the harness while the animal hauled him through drifts. The horse dragged Dougherty for hours, until he finally lost his grip and let go, having nearly reached a stage-line station. Into the wind, he shouted successfully for help. When rescuers reached the stagecoach, the passenger was dead.

  Dougherty remarked to Mrs. Welty that winters lately had not been so severe.

  “No,” she agreed. “And we haven’t had a blizzard this summer.”

  The sun set, and the stars rose, and the cold grew more intense … . About half past nine, we reached the supper station, stiff with cold.

  This was Rongis, a community of a few dozen people just south of Crooks Gap. “Rongis” was an ananym—so named by an employee of the stagecoach company whose own name was Eli Signor. Lost Soldier, Rongis—such names are absent now among the Zip Codes of Wyoming, but the ruins of the stations remain.

  Supper was soon ready, a canned supper, with the usual dried-apple pie and monstrous biscuits and black coffee. About ten we started out again, with a new relay of horses. More wrapped up than ever, we sat close to each other to keep warm, and leaned against the sacks of mail behind us.

  The night before, at Rongis, the temperature had gone to zero. As the stage moved into Crooks Gap, the bright starlight fell on fields of giant boulders black-and-silver in relief. Some were as large as houses. In time, it would be determined that they had come down off high mountains farther north that were no longer high—mountains that had somehow sunk into the plain. Meanwhile, anyone connecting the boulders to their source bedrock might wonder how they had made their way uphill. The big boulders were granite, and smaller ones among them—recognized by no one then—were jade: float boulders of gem jade, nephrite jade (green as emerald), rounded in streambeds and polished by weather. As she watched them in the moonlight from the stage, they must have seemed just rubble on the ground. There was uranium in Crooks Gap in great quantity—in pods and lenses for a thousand feet up either side. It would be discovered in 1955. There was petroleum under Crooks Gap, too. The year of discovery would be 1925. Crooks Creek flowed through Crooks Gap—straight through the highlands, from one side to the other. Above the gap was Crooks Mountain. Miss Waxham might well have wondered who the eponymous crook was. The possibilities in that country were bewilderingly numerous, but the honor belonged to Brigadier General George Crook, West Point’52, known among the Indians as the Gray Fox. General Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, was at least a century ahead of his time in the integrity with which he dealt with aboriginal people, and deserved having his name writ in land if for no other reason than his reply when someone asked him if the campaigns of the Indian wars were difficult work. He said, “Yes, they are hard. But the hardest thing is to go out and fight against those who you know are in the right.”

  I watched for hours the shadow of the suitcase handle against the canvas to see the moon’s change of position. The hours dragged by, and the cold grew worse … . Between three and four we reached Myersville.

  They had come to the Sweetwater River, which they forded, with still another driver, who had a remarkably delicate cast of tongue. “Oh, good gracious!” he shouted at the team.

  The driver had been on the road only once, did not know his horses, and had no whip. The Hog Back was ahead … . There was no more sleep for us then, not an eye wink.

  The Hog Back was a knife-edged spur plunging off the Beaver Divide, which separates waters that flow east into the Platte from waters that flow north into the Wind, Bighorn, and Yellowstone rivers. The Hog Back was Frontier sandstone and Mowry shale, which had accumulated flat in the Cretaceous sea, and here, in subsequent time, had been bent upward sharply to make the jagged edge the travellers descended. Its shales were slick with bentonitic gumbo.

  At the top of Beaver Mountain we saw the Wind River Range stretching white in the distance. The driver rough-locked the back wheels and we started down. It was a scramble for the horses to keep out of the way. There were sudden turns in the road and furrows cut by the freight wagons that almost threw the careening stage on its side. One of the horses fell, but was dragged along by the others until it finally regained its feet. We finally reached a place where the slope was less steep, the rough lock was taken off, and the driver began again to try to make time down the hills. The little leaders ran like rats and the heavier wheelers were carried along while the coach swung from side to side in the gullies.

  Twenty-six hours out of Rawlins, the stage reached Hailey. Breakfast was waiting, and in Miss Waxham’s opinion could have gone on waiting—“the same monstrous biscuits and black coffee.” A rancher named Gardiner Mills arrived—“short, dark, of caustic speech”—and handed her a big fur overcoat to top her own and keep her warm in his springy buckboard. He had come to take the new schoolmarm the remaining ten miles to his Red Bluff Ranch, and into the afternoon they travelled northwest under six-hundredfoot walls of rose, vermilion, brick, and carmine—red Triassic rock. Near a big spring under the red bluff were the low buildings of the ranch.

  The corral and bunkhouse, grain and milk house were log structures off to one side. When we drove up to the gate, and two little narrow-chested large-pompadoured girls came out the walk to meet us, all my fears as to obstreperous pupils were at an end.

  The “chiffonier” in her room was a stack of boxes covered with muslin curtains. There was “a washstand for private individual use.” There was a mirror a foot square. On her walls were Sargent and Gainsborough prints, and pictures of Ethel Barrymore and Psyche.

  In the western outskirts of Rawlins, David Love pulled over onto the shoulder of the interstate, the better to fix the scene, although his purpose in doing so was not at all apparent. Rawlins reposed among low hills and prairie flats, and nothing in its setting would ever lift the stock of Eastman Kodak. In those western outskirts, we may have been scarcely a mile from the county courthouse, but we were very much back on the range—a dispassionate world of bare rock, brown grass, drab green patches of greasewood, and scattered colonies of sage. The interstate had lithified in 1965 as white concrete but was now dark with the remains of ocean algae, cremated and sprayed on the road. To the south were badlands—gullies and gulches, erosional debris. To the north were some ridgelines that ended sharply, like breaking waves, but the Rawlins Uplift had miserably fallen short in its bid to be counted among the Rocky Mountains. So why was David Love, who had the geologic map of Wyoming in his head, stopping here?

  The rock that outcropped around Rawlins, he said, contained a greater spread of time than any other suite of exposed rocks along Interstate 80 between New York and San Francisco. We were looking at many moments in well over half the existence of the earth, and we were seeing—as it happened—a good deal more time than one sees in the walls of the Grand Canyon, where the clock stops at the rimrock, aged two hundred and fifty million years. The rock before us here at Rawlins reached back into the Archean Eon and up to the Miocene epoch. Any spendthrift with a camera could aim it into that scene and—in a two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a second at f/16—capture twenty-six hundred million years. The most arresting thing in the picture, however, would be Rawlins’ municipal standpipe—that white, squat water-storage tank over there on the hill.

  The hill, though, was Archean granite and Cambrian sandstone and Mississippian limestone. If you could have taken pictures when they were forming, the collection would be something to see. There would be a deep and uncontinented ocean sluggish with amorphous scums (above cooling invisible magmas). There would be a risen continent reaching its coast, with r
ivers running over bare rock past not so much as a lichen. There would be rich-red soil on a broad lowland plain resembling Alabama (but near the equator). There would be clear, warm shelf seas.

  There would also be a picture of dry hot dunes, all of them facing the morning sun—the rising Miocene sun. Other—and much older—dunes would settle a great question, for it is impossible to tell now whether they were just under or just out of water. They covered all of Wyoming and a great deal more, and may have been very much like the Libyan Desert: the Tensleep-Casper-Fountain Pennsylvanian sands. There would be a picture, too, of a meandering stream, with overbank deposits, natural levees, cycads growing by the stream. Footprints the size of washtubs. A head above the trees. In the background, swamp tussocks by the shore of an oxbow lake. What was left of that picture was the Morrison formation—the Jurassic landscape of particularly dramatic dinosaurs—outcropping just up the road. There would be various views of the great Cretaceous seaway, with its plesiosaurs, its giant turtles, its crocodiles. There would be a picture from the Paleocene of a humid subtropical swamp, and a picture from the Eocene of gravel bars in a fast river running off a mountain onto lush subtropical plains, where puppy-size horses were hiding for their lives.