Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  Through the eighteen-nineties, there are various hiatuses in the resume of John Love, but as cowboy and homesteader he very evidently prospered, and he also formed durable friendships—with Chief Washakie, for example, and with the stagecoach driver Peggy Dougherty, and with Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). There came a day when Love could not contain his developed curiosity in the presence of the aging chief. He asked him what truth there was in the story of Crowheart Butte. Had Washakie really eaten his enemy’s heart? The chief said, “Well, Johnny, when you’re young and full of life you do strange things.”

  Robert LeRoy Parker was an occasional visitor at Love’s homestead on Muskrat Creek, which was halfway between Hole-in-the-Wall and the Sweetwater River—that is, between Parker’s hideout and his woman. Love’s descendants sometimes stare bemusedly at a photograph discovered a few years ago in a cabin in Jackson Hole that had belonged to a member of the Wild Bunch. The photograph, made in the middle eighteen-nineties, shows eighteen men with Parker, who is wearing a dark business suit, a tie and a starchy white collar, a bowler hat. Two of the bunch are identified only by question marks. One of these is a jaunty man of middle height and strong frame, his hat at a rakish angle—a man with a kindly face, twinkling shrewd eyes, and a mustache growing over his mouth like willows bending over a brook. It may be doubtful whether John Love would have joined such a group, but when you are young and full of life you do strange things.

  At Red Bluff Ranch, Mrs. Mills once twitted Mr. Love for being Scottish when other Scots were around and American in the presence of Americans. For a split second, Mr. Love thought this over before he said, “That leaves me eligible for the Presidency.” Out of Mr. Love’s buggy came a constant supply of delicacies and exotic gifts—including candy, nuts, apples—which he came by who knows where and liberally distributed to all. Miss Waxham began to look upon him as “a veritable Santa Claus”; and, predictably, at Christmastime Santa appeared.

  And the next day was Christmas … . Just before supper the joyful cry went up that Mr. Love was coming, and actually in time for dinner. He had broken his record and arrived by day!

  A pitch pine had been set up indoors and its boughs painted with dissolved alum to simulate frost. Hanging from the branches were wooden balls covered with tobacco tinfoil. Flakes of mica were glued to paper stars. On Christmas, Mr. Mills and Mr. Love dressed in linen collars and what Miss Waxham called “fried shirts.” When Miss Waxham turned to a package from home that she knew contained pajamas, she went into her bedroom to open it.

  The following day, Miss Waxham was meant to go to something called Institute, in Lander—a convocation of Fremont County schoolteachers for lectures, instruction, and professional review. By phenomenal coincidence, Mr. Love announced that he had business in Lander, too.

  It was decided that I should go with him. I rather dreaded it … . I confess I was somewhat afraid of him … . I was wrapped up in a coat of my own with Mrs. Mills’ sealskin over it, muffler, fur hat, fur gloves, leggings, and overshoes. Then truly I was so bundled up that it was next to impossible to move. “Absolutely helpless,” laughed Mr. Love.

  Whatever business Mr. Love had in Lander did not in any way seem to press him. Miss Waxham stayed with Miss Davis, the county superintendent, and while other people came and went from the premises Mr. Love was inclined to remain.

  Supper time came and Mr. Love remained. We had a miserable canned goods cold supper. Miss MacBride left, Mr. Love remained.

  In the afternoon, Mr. Love called. It certainly was a surprise. I explained why Miss Davis was out, but he didn’t seem to mind. I said that she would be back soon. He asked if I should not like to take a drive and see the suburbs. Of course I would … . We went for a long drive in the reservation, with a box of chocolates between us, and a merry gossip we had … . He was bemoaning the fact that there is no place for a man to spend the evening in Lander except in a saloon. “Come and toast marshmallows,” I said, and he took it as a good suggestion.

  When she went to church on Sunday, Love was there—John Santa Love, who had not been to church in ten years. After the service, it was time to leave Lander.

  There had been snow falling since morning, and the road was barely visible. The light faded to a soft whiteness that hardly grew darker when the sun set and the pale outline of the moon showed through the snow. Everywhere was the soft enveloping snow shutting out all sounds and sights. The horses knew the way and travelled on steadily. Fortunately it was not cold, and the multitudinous rugs and robes with the new footwarmer beneath kept us warm and comfortable. More pleasant it was travelling through the storm than sitting at home by the fire and watching it outside. When the conversation ran low and we travelled on quietly, Mr. Love discovered bags of candy under the robes … and he fed us both, for I was worse than entangled in wraps and the long sleeves of Mrs. Mills’ sealskin. The miles fell away behind us easily and quietly.

  Even as those words were written, the editor and publishers of the Shoshone Pathfinder, in Lander, were completing a special issue urging young people to make their lives in central Wyoming. “We beg leave to extend to each and every one of you a most cordial welcome to come, remain, and help develop a country so rich in natural resources as to be beyond the computation of mortal man,” wrote the publishers. It was a country “clothed in a mantle of the most nutritious grasses and sage brush browse.” In its Wind River Mountains were “thousands of square miles of dense forests, which the foot of man has never invaded, and … as to the supply and quality of timber in this county it will meet the requirements of all demands for all time to come.” Moreover, there was coal: “It has been said of our coal fields that the entire United States would be unable to exhaust them in a century … . It is in excess of the imagination to contemplate the vastness of this tremendous supply of fuel or what would ever transpire to exhaust it.” And there was oil: “It is a recognized fact of long standing that the quantity of oil stored in the natural reservoirs of this county is so great that no estimate can be made.” And there was gold. At the south end of the Wind Rivers, nearly five million dollars had come out of small mines with names like Hard Scrabble, Ground Hog, Hidden Hand, Mormon Crevice, Iron Duke, Midget, Rustler, Cariboo, and Irish Jew. “None of the mines have been exhausted, but merely sunk to a depth where more and better machinery is required.” There was uranium, too, but as yet no compelling need to find it, and as yet no geologist equal to the task.

  As the winter continued, with its apparently inexhaustible resources of biting wind and blinding snow, temperatures now and again approached fifty below zero. Miss Waxham developed such an advanced case of cabin fever that she wrote in her journal, “My spirit has a chair sore.” Even when drifts were at their deepest, though, Mr. Love somehow managed to get through. “Much wrapped up” on one occasion, he rode “all the way from Alkali Butte.” On another, he spent an entire day advancing his education at the Twin Creek school.

  These attentions went on in much the same way for five years. He pursued her to Colorado, and even to Wisconsin. They were married on the twentieth of June, 1910, and drove in a sheep wagon to his ranch, in the Wind River Basin. It was plain country with gently swelling hills. Looking around from almost any one of them, you could see eighty miles to the Wind River Range, thirty to the Owl Creeks, twenty to the Rattlesnake Hills, fifteen to the Beaver Divide, and a hundred into the Bighorns. No buildings were visible in any direction. In this place, they would flourish. Here, too, they would suffer calamitous loss. Here they would raise three children —a pair of sons close in age, and, a dozen years after them, a daughter. The county from time to time would supply a schoolmarm, but basically the children would be educated by their mother. One would become a petroleum chemist, another a design engineer for the New Jersey Turnpike and the New York State Thruway, another the preeminent geologist of the Rocky Mountains.

  Along the Nebraska-Wyoming line, in the region of the forty-first parallel
, is a long lumpy break in the plains, called Pine Bluffs. It is rock of about the same age and story as Scotts Bluff, which is not far away. David Love—standing on top of Pine Bluffs—remarked that for a great many emigrants with their wagons and carts these had been the first breaks in the horizon west of Missouri. From the top of the bluffs, the emigrants had their first view of the front ranges of the Rockies, and the mountains gave them hope and courage. For our part, looking west from the same place, we could not see very far across the spring wildflowers into the swirling snow. The Laramie Range was directly ahead and the Never Summer Mountains off somewhere to the southwest—at ten and nearly thirteen thousand feet indeed a stirring sight, but not today. Love said a spring snowstorm was “sort of like a kiss—it’s temporary, and it will go away.” (That one stopped us for three days.) Meanwhile, there were large roadcuts to examine where Interstate 80 sliced through the bluffs, and scenes to envision that were veiled by more than snow.

  The bluffs stand above the surrounding country because—like other mesas and buttes—they are all that is left of what was the surrounding country. The rock of Pine Bluffs is sedimentary (limestone, sandstone) and seems to lie flat, but in fact it tilts very slightly, and if its bedding planes are projected westward a hundred miles they describe the former landscape, rising about sixty feet a mile to touch the summits of mountains. “There was a continuous surface,” Love said. “It came over the top of the Laramie Range and out here onto the High Plains. Pine Bluffs was part of that surface.”

  In earth history, that was not long ago. He said the best general date for it was ten million years—when the central Rocky Mountains, which had long since taken form as we know them, were buried up to their chins. Only the highest peaks remained uncovered, like nunataks protruding through continental ice, or scattered islands in a sea. The summits of the Wind River Range were hills above that Miocene plain. The highest of the Bighorns stuck out, too—as did the crests of other ranges. Forty million years before that, in Eocene time, most parts of the Rocky Mountains seem to have looked much as they do today, and so did the broad basins among them. The region as a whole was closer to sea level, but its relief was essentially the same.

  It was a bizarre story, full of odd detail. Limestone, for example, is ordinarily a marine rock, derived from corals and shells. What sort of limestone would form on a surface that came sloping down like a tent roof from the ridgelines of buried mountains? The surface had been laced with streams, Love said, and in the rumpled topography east of the buried ranges the streams filled countless lakes. Old carbonates dissolved and were carried by the streams to the lakes. Lime also leached out of the granite in the mountain cores. Freshwater limestones formed in the lakes, self-certified by the fossils of freshwater snails. There were other fossils as well—discovered in dense compilations in confined areas that have been described as concentration camps and fossil graveyards. They suggest a modern plain in south-central Brazil where heavy seasonal rains so elevate the waters of innumerable lakes that animals crowd up on small islands and perish. Limestone, being soluble in water, forms fertile valleys in eastern North America but in the dry West remains largely undissolved. Its inherent ruggedness holds it high, while weaker rock around it falls away. Limestone is the protective caprock of Pine Bluffs. Junipers were flourishing in it, as were ponderosa pines and Spanish bayonets.

  In the Bronco, we moved through the snow toward the mountains, crossing the last of the Great Plains, which had been shaped like ocean swells by eastbound streams. Now and again, a pump jack was visible near the road, sucking up oil from deep Cretaceous sand, bobbing solemnly at its task—a giant grasshopper absorbed in its devotions. As we passed Cheyenne, absolutely all we could see in the whiteout was a raging, wind-whipped flame, two hundred feet in the air, at the top of a refinery tower. “Such a waste,” said Love.

  Had we been moving west across Wyoming about seventy-five million years ago, in the Campanian age of late Cretaceous time, we would, of course, have been at sea level in the most literal sense. The Laramie Range did not exist, nor did the Bighorns, the Bear-tooths, the Wind Rivers. There is no evidence of mountains at that time anywhere in Wyoming. In an oceangoing boat (which the Bronco in some ways resembled), we would have raised the coastline not far east of Rawlins. Beyond the beach and at least as far as Utah was flat marshy terrain.

  Earlier, there had been mountains—a few ranges that were largely in Colorado and poked some miles into Wyoming. They have been called the Ancestral Rockies; but they and the Rockies are scarcely more related than two families who happen at different times to live in the same house. Those Pennsylvanian mountains had worn down flat two hundred and thirty million years before. There had been other mountains as well—in the same region—some hundreds of millions of years before that, in various periods of Precambrian time. The Precambrian evidence, in fact, suggests numerous episodes, across two thousand million years, of the rise of big mountains and their subsequent wearing away—any of them as deserving as others to be called ancestral Rockies.

  In the middle Precambrian, not long after the end of the Archean Eon, lava ran down the sides of big volcanoes and far out onto a seafloor that is now a part of Wyoming. It is impossible to say where the volcanoes stood, but the fact that they existed is stated by the lava. Somewhat later, the lava was folded and faulted, apparently in the making of mountains. Still more Precambrian ranges, of vast dimension, came up in the region, and shed twenty-five thousand feet of sediment into seas that covered parts of Wyoming. After the sediment formed into rock, even more episodes of mountain building heated and changed the rock: the limestone to marble, the sandstone to quartzite, the shale to slate. Meanwhile, coming into the crust at depths on the order of six miles were vast bodies of fiery-hot magma, much of which happened to have the chemistry of granite. Under eastern Wyoming, where Interstate 80 now crosses the Laramie Range, the magma contained enough iron to tint the feldspar and make the granite pink. It is axiomatic that big crystals grow slowly. Slowly, the magma cooled, forming quartz and feldspar crystals of exceptional size.

  All of that occurred in Precambrian time—during the first eighty-eight per cent of the history of the world. Often, Precambrian rock is collectively mentioned as “the basement”—the basement of continents—as if that is all there is to say about it before setting up on top of it the wonders of the world. This scientific metaphor is at best ambiguous—connoting, as it does, in one sense a firm foundation, in another an obscure cellar. In either case, it dismisses four billion years. It attempts to compress the uncompressible. It foreshortens a regional history wherein numerous ancestral mountain ranges developed and were annihilated—where a minor string of Pennsylvanian ridges could scarcely be said to represent the incunabular genealogy of the Rockies.

  In late Cretaceous and early Tertiary time, mountains began to rise beneath the wide seas and marsh flats of Wyoming. The sea-water drained away to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Arctic Ocean. And, in David Love’s summary description, “all hell broke loose.” In westernmost Wyoming, detached crustal sheets came planing eastward —rode fifty, sixty, and seventy-five miles over younger rock—and piled up like shingles, one overlapping another. In the four hundred miles east of these overthrust mountains, other mountains began to appear, and in a very different way. They came right up out of the earth. In Love’s phrase, they simply “pooched out.” Basins flexed between them, filling as they downwarped—folding, too, especially at their edges. These mountains moved, but not much—five miles here, eight miles there. They moved in highly miscellaneous and ultimately perplexing directions. The Wind River Range crept south-west, about five inches every ten years for a million years. The Bighorns split. One part went south, the other east. Similarly, the Beartooths went east and southwest. The Medicine Bows moved east. The Washakies west. The Uintas north. All distances were short, because the mountains were essentially rooted. The Sierra Madre did not move at all. The spines of the ranges trended in as many directions as a
weathervane. The Laramie Range trended north-south. The Wind Rivers and Bighorns northwest-southeast. The spectacularly anomalous Uintas, lining themselves up at right angles to the axis of the Western cordillera, ran east-west, and so did the Owl Creeks. All these mountain ranges were coming up out of the craton—heartland of the continent, the Stable Interior Craton. It was as if mountains had appeared in Ohio, inboard of the Appalachian thrust sheets, like a family of hogs waking up beneath a large blanket. An authentic enigma on a grand scale, this was one of the oddest occurrences in the tectonic history of the world. It would probe anybody’s theories. It happened rapidly. As David Love at one point remarked about the Medicine Bow Mountains, “It didn’t take very long for those mountains to come up, to be deroofed, and to be thrust eastward. Then the motion stopped. That happened in maybe ten million years, and to a geologist that’s really fast.”