Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  Such pictures, made in this place, could form a tall stack—scene after scene, no two of them alike. Taken together, of course —set one above another, in order—they would be the rock column for this part of Wyoming. They would correlate with what one would see in the well log of a deep-drilling rig. There would be hiatuses, to be sure. In the rock column, anywhere, more time is missing than is there; so much has been eroded away. Besides, the rock in the column is more apt to commemorate a moment—an eruption, a flood, a fallen drop of rain—than it is to report a millennium. Like a news broadcast, it is more often a montage of disasters than a cumulative record of time.

  I asked Love why so much of the earth’s history happened to be here on the surface in this nondescript part of the state.

  He said, “It just came up in the soup. Why it is out here all by itself is a matter of fierce debate.” The Rawlins Uplift had not accomplished nothing.

  The Precambrian granite on the ridge was from the late Archean Eon and was 2.6 billion years old. It dipped below us. Close to the interstate, the Union Pacific had been blasted through some sandstone that rested on, and was derived from, the granite—littoral sands of Cambrian time, when the American west coast was at Rawlins. Between this Flathead sand and the Madison limestone above it, lying here and there in pockets in an unconformity of a hundred and seventy million years, was the rich-red soil of the Paleozoic plain. A streak of it showed in a low hillside even closer to us than the railroad cut, so we walked over to collect some and put it in a bag. As rock it was so incompetent that it could easily be crushed to powder—a beautiful rose-brick powder with the texture of cocoa. It had been known in the paint business as Rawlins Red, and in the warpaint business as effective medicine, this paleosol (fossil soil) three hundred and fifty million years old. As we returned to the road, a couple of Consolidated Freightways three-unit twenty-six-wheel tractor-trailers went by, imitating thunder. Love said, “First we had the Conestoga, then the big freight wagons with twelve to sixteen oxen. Now we have those things.”

  The spread of time at Rawlins, like the rock column in a great many places in Wyoming, was so impressively detailed that it seemed to suggest that Wyoming, in its one-thirty-seventh of the United States, contains a disproportionate percentage of American geology. Geologists tend to have been strongly influenced by the rocks among which they grew up. The branch of the science called structural geology, for example, has traditionally been dominated by Swiss, who spend their youth hiking and schussing in a national textbook of structure. When a multinational oil company held a conference in Houston that brought together structural geologists from posts all over the world, the coffee breaks were in Schweizerdeutsch. The wizards of sedimentology tend to be Dutch, as one would expect of a people who have figured out a way to borrow against unrecorded deposits. Cincinnati has produced an amazingly long list of American paleontologists—Cincinnati, with profuse exceptional fossils in its Ordovician hills. Houston—the capital city of the oil geologist—is a hundred and fifty miles from the first place where you can hit a hammer on a rock. Houston geologists come from somewhere else.

  Geologists who have grown up on shield rock—Precambrian craton—tend to be interested in copper, diamonds, iron, and gold. Most of the world’s large metal deposits are Precambrian. Diamonds, after starting upward from the mantle, seem to need the thickness of a craton to survive their journey to the surface world.

  Geologists who grow up in California start out with strange complex structures, highly deformed rock—mélanges and turbidites that seem less in need of a G. K. Gilbert than of an Alfred Adler or a Carl Jung. Shell, in its rosters, used to put an asterisk beside the names of geologists from California. The asterisk meant that while they were in, say, Texas they might be quite useful among the Gulf Coast turbidites of the Hackberry Embayment, but assign them with caution almost anywhere else. A former Shell geologist (not David Love) once said to me, “The asterisk also meant ‘Ship them back to California when they’re done.’ Shell considered them a separate race.”

  A geologist who grew up in Wyoming would have something of everything above—with the probable exception of the asterisk. A geologist who grew up in Wyoming could not ignore economic geology, could not ignore vertebrate paleontology, could not ignore the narrative details in any chapter of time (every period in the history of the world was represented in Wyoming). Wyoming geology would above all tend to produce a generalist, with an eye that had seen a lot of rocks, and a four-dimensional gift for fitting them together and arriving at the substance of their story—a scenarist and lithographer of what geologists like to call the Big Picture.

  Wyoming, at first glance, would appear to be an arbitrary segment of the country. Wyoming and Colorado are the only states whose borders consist of four straight lines. That could be looked upon as an affront to nature, an utterly political conception, an ignoring of the outlines of physiographic worlds, in disregard of rivers and divides. Rivers and divides, however, are in some ways unworthy as boundaries, which are meant to imply a durability that is belied by the function of rivers and divides. They move, they change, and they go away. Rivers, almost by definition, are young. The oldest river in the United States is called the New River. It has existed (in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia) for a little more than one and a half per cent of the history of the world. In epochs and eras before there ever was a Colorado River, the formations of the Grand Canyon were crossed and crisscrossed, scoured and dissolved, deposited and moved by innumerable rivers. The Colorado River, which has only recently appeared on earth, has excavated the Grand Canyon in very little time. From its beginning, human beings could have watched the Grand Canyon being made. The Green River has cut down through the Uinta Mountains in the last few million years, the Wind River through the Owl Creek Mountains, the Laramie River through the Laramie Range. The mountains themselves came up and moved. Several thousand feet of basin fill has recently disappeared. As the rock around Rawlins amply shows, the face of the country has frequently changed. Wyoming suggests with emphasis the page-one principle of reading in rock the record of the earth: Surface appearances are only that; topography grows, shrinks, compresses, spreads, disintegrates, and disappears; every scene is temporary, and is composed of fragments from other scenes. Four straight lines—like a plug cut in the side of a watermelon—should do as well as any to frame Wyoming and its former worlds.

  A geologist who grew up in Wyoming has grown up among mountains that in terms of plate-tectonic theory are the least explainable in the world. A geologist who grew up in Wyoming—with its volcanic activity, its mountains eroding, and its basins receiving sediment—would inherently comprehend the cycles of the earth: geology repeating itself as people watch. G. K. Gilbert, the first Chief Geologist of the United States Geological Survey, once remarked that it is “the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake.” A geologist could do all that as a child in Wyoming, and not have to look far for more.

  Miss Waxham’s school was a log cabin on Twin Creek near the mouth of Skull Gulch, a mile from the Mills ranch. Students came from much greater distances, even through deep snow. Many mornings, ink was frozen in the inkwells, and the day began with ink-thawing, followed by reading, spelling, chemistry, and civil government. Sometimes snow blew through the walls, forming drifts in the schoolroom. Water was carried from the creek—drawn from a hole that was chopped in the ice. If the creek was frozen to the bottom, the students melted snow. Their school was fourteen by sixteen feet—smaller than a bathroom at Wellesley. The door was perforated with bullet holes from “some passerby’s six-shooter.” Over the ceiling poles were old gunnysacks and overalls, to prevent the sod roof from shedding sediment on the students. Often, however, the air sparkled with descending dust, struck by sunlight coming in through the windows, which were all in the south wall. There was a table and chair for Miss Waxham, and eight desks for her pupils. Miss Waxham�
��s job was to deliver a hundred per cent of the formal education available in District Eleven, Fremont County, Wyoming.

  The first fifteen minutes or half hour are given to reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or “Kidnapped,” while we all sit about the stove to keep warm. Usually in the middle of a reading the sound of a horse galloping down the frozen road distracts the attention of the boys, until a few moments later six-foot George opens the door, a sack of oats in one hand, his lunch tied up in a dish rag in the other. Cold from his five-mile ride, he sits down on the floor by the stove, unbuckles his spurs, pulls off his leather chaps, drops his hat, unwinds two or three red handkerchiefs from about his neck and ears, takes off one or two coats, according to the temperature, unbuttons his vest and straightens his leather cuffs. At last he is ready for business.

  Sandford is the largest scholar, six feet, big, slow in the school room, careful of every move of his big hands and feet. His voice is subdued and full of awe as he calls me “ma’am.” Outside while we play chickens he is another person—there is room for his bigness. Next largest of the boys is Otto Schlicting, thin and dark, a strange combination of shrewdness and stupidity. His problems always prove, whether they are right or not! He is a boaster, too, tries to make a big impression. But there is something very attractive about him. I was showing his little sister how to add and subtract by making little lines and adding or crossing off others. Later I found on the back of Otto’s papers hundreds and hundreds of little lines—trying to add that way as far as a hundred evidently. He is nearly fifteen and studying division … . Arithmetic is the family failing. “How many eights in ninety-six?” I ask him. He thinks for a long time. Finally he says—with such a winsome smile that I wish with all my heart it were true—“Two.” “What feeds the cells in your body?” I ask him. He thinks. He says, “I guess it’s vinegar.” He has no idea of form. His maps of North America on the board are all like turnips.

  Students’ ages ranged through one and two digits, and their intelligence even more widely. When Miss Waxham called upon Emmons Schlicting, asking, “Where does digestion take place?,” Emmons answered, “In the Erie Canal.” She developed a special interest in George Ehler, whose life at home was troubled.

  He is only thirteen, but taller than Sandford, and fair and handsome. I should like to get him away from his family—kidnap him. To think that it was he who tried to kill his father! His face is good as can be.

  At lunchtime, over beans, everyone traded the news of the country, news of whatever might have stirred in seven thousand square miles: a buffalo wolf trapped by Old Hanley; missing horses and cattle, brand by brand; the sheepherder most recently lost in a storm. If you went up Skull Gulch, behind the school, and climbed to the high ground beyond, you could see seventy, eighty, a hundred miles. You “could see the faint outlines of Crowheart Butte, against the Wind River Range.” There was a Wyoming-history lesson in the naming of Crowheart Butte, which rises a thousand feet above the surrounding landscape and is capped with flat sandstone. To this day, there are tepee rings on Crowheart Butte. One of the more arresting sights in remote parts of the West are rings of stones that once resisted the wind and now recall what blew away. The Crows liked the hunting country in the area of the butte, and so did the Shoshonis. The two tribes fought, and lost a lot of blood, over this ground. Eventually, the chief of the Shoshonis said, in effect, to the chief of the Crows: this is pointless; I will fight you, one against one; the hunting ground goes to the winner. The chief of the Shoshonis was the great Washakie, whose name rests in six places on the map of Wyoming, including a mountain range and a county. Washakie was at least fifty, but fit. The Crow would have been wise to demur. Washakie destroyed him in the hand-to-hand combat, then cut out his heart and ate it.

  Despite her relative disadvantages as a newcomer, an outlander, and an educational ingénue, Miss Waxham was a quick study. Insight was her long suit, and in no time she understood Wyoming. For example, an entry in her journal says of George Ehler’s father, “He came to the country with one mare. The first summer, she had six colts! She must have had calves, too, by the way the Ehlers’ cattle increased.” These remarks were dated October 22, 1905—the day after her stagecoach arrived. In months that followed, she sketched her neighbors (the word applied over many tens of miles). “By the door was Mrs. Frink, about 18, with Frink junior, a large husky baby. Ida Franklin, Mrs. Frink’s sister and almost her double, was beside her, frivolous even in her silence.” There was the story of Dirty Bill Collins, who had died as a result of taking a bath. And she fondly recorded Mrs. Mills’ description of the libertine Guy Signor: “He has a cabbage heart with a leaf for every girl.” She noted that the nearest barber had learned his trade shearing sheep, and a blacksmith doubled as dentist. Old Pelon, a French Canadian, impressed her, because he had refused to ask for money from the government after Indians killed his brother. “Him better dead,” said Old Pelon. Old Pelon was fond of the masculine objective pronoun. Miss Waxham wrote, “Pelon used to have a wife, whom he spoke of always as ‘him.’” Miss Waxham herself became a character in this tableau. People sometimes called her the White-Haired Kid.

  “There’s many a person I should be glad to meet,” read an early entry in her journal. She wanted to meet Indian Dick, who had been raised by Indians and had no idea who he was—probably the orphan of emigrants the Indians killed. She wanted to meet “the woman called Sour Dough; Three Fingered Bill, or Suffering Jim; Sam Omera, Reub Roe … .” (Reub Roe held up wagons and stagecoaches looking for members of the Royal Family.) Meanwhile, there was one flockmaster and itinerant cowboy who seemed more than pleased to meet her.

  In the first reference to him in her journal she calls him “Mr. Love—Johnny Love.” His place was sixty miles away, and he had a good many sheep and cattle to look after, but somehow he managed to be right there when the new young schoolmarm arrived. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, he showed a pronounced tendency to reappear. He came, generally, in the dead of night, unexpected. Quietly he slipped into the corral, fed and watered his horse, slept in the bunkhouse, and was there at the table for breakfast in the morning—this dark-haired, blue-eyed, handsome man with a woolly Midlothian accent.

  Mr. Love is a Scotchman about thirty-five years old. At first sight he made me think of a hired man, as he lounged stiffly on the couch, in overalls, his feet covered with enormous red and black striped stockings that reached to his knees, and were edged with blue around the top. He seemed to wear them instead of house shoes. His face was kindly, with shrewd blue twinkling eyes. A moustache grew over his mouth, like willows bending over a brook. But his voice was most peculiar and characteristic … . A little Scotch dialect, a little slow drawl, a little nasal quality, a bit of falsetto once in a while, and a tone as if he were speaking out of doors. There is a kind of twinkle in his voice as well as his eyes, and he is full of quaint turns of speech, and unusual expressions.

  Mr. Love travelled eleven hours on these journeys, each way. He did not suffer from the tedium, in part because he frequently rode in a little buggy and, after telling his horses his destination, would lie on the seat and sleep. He may have been from Edinburgh, but he had adapted to the range as much as anyone from anywhere. He had slept out, in one stretch, under no shelter for seven years. On horseback, he was fit for his best horses: he had stamina for long distances at sustained high speed. When he used a gun, he hit what he was shooting at. In 1897, he had begun homesteading on Muskrat Creek, quite near the geographical center of Wyoming, and he had since proved up. One way and another, he had acquired a number of thousands of acres, but acreage was not what mattered most in a country of dry and open range. Water rights mattered most, and the area over which John Love controlled the water amounted to a thousand square miles—about one per cent of Wyoming. He had come into the country walking, in 1891, and now, in 1905, he had many horses, a couple of hundred cattle, and several thousand sheep. Miss Waxham, in her journal, called him a “muttonaire.”
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br />   He was a mirthful Scot—in abiding contrast to the more prevalent kind. He was a wicked mimic, a connoisseur of the absurd. If he seemed to know everyone in the high country, he knew even better the conditions it imposed. After one of her conversations with him, Miss Waxham wrote in her journal:

  It is a cruel country as well as beautiful. Men seem here only on sufferance. After every severe storm we hear of people’s being lost. Yesterday it was a sheep camp mover who was lost in the Red Desert. People had hunted for him for a week, and found no trace. Mr. Love—Johnny Love—told of a man who had just been lost up in his country, around the Muskrat. “Stranger?” asked Mr. Mills. “No; born and brought up here.” “Old man?” “No; in the prime of life. Left Lost Cabin sober, too.”

  Mr. Love had been born near Portage, Wisconsin, on the farm of his uncle the environmentalist John Muir. The baby’s mother died that day. His father, a Scottish physician who was also a professional photographer and lecturer on world travel, ended his travels and took his family home. The infant had three older sisters to look after him in Scotland. The doctor died when John was twelve. The sisters emigrated to Broken Bow, Nebraska, where in the eighteen-seventies and eighties they all proved up on homesteads. When John was in his middle teens, he joined them there, in time to experience the Blizzard of ’88—a full week of blowing snow, with visibility so short that guide ropes led from house to barn.

  He was expelled from the University of Nebraska for erecting a sign in a dean’s flower bed, so he went to work as a cowboy, and soon began to think about moving farther west. When he had saved enough money, he bought matching black horses and a buggy, and set out for Wyoming. On his first night there, scarcely over the border, his horses drank from a poison spring and died. What he did next is probably the most encapsulating moment in his story. In Nebraska were three homes he could return to. He left the buggy beside the dead horses, abandoned almost every possession he had in the world, and walked on into Wyoming. He walked about two hundred miles. At Split Rock, on the Oregon Trail—near Crooks Gap, near Independence Rock—he signed on as a cowboy with the 71 Ranch. The year was 1891, and the State of Wyoming was ten months old.