Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  In the early days of his marriage, John Love used to ride around his place reciting the verse of William Cowper:

  I am monarch of all I survey,

  My right there is none to dispute.

  As he built up his new home, he did not seem worried that in recent years herders had been killed, wagons had been burned, and sheep had been clubbed to death or driven over cliffs by the thousand. As anyone who has seen three Western movies cannot help but know, there was bloody warfare between cattlemen and sheepmen; and well into the new century the strife continued. According to David, his father stocked the ranch with both cattle and sheep specifically as a way of getting along with both sides. His monarchy would be disputed only by nature and bankers.

  Cowboys, meanwhile, made unlikely paperhangers.

  Rolls of green figured wallpaper had arrived from a mail-order company. What to do with them, no one quite knew, but there were directions. I made dishpans full of paste. In the evening John called in the half dozen cowboys from the bunkhouse. They carried planks and benches. They put all the leaves in the wobbly dinner table. I measured and cut, pasted and trimmed lengths of wallpaper. Then in chaps and jingling spurs the cowpunchers strode along the benches, slapping paste brushes and dangling strips of torn wallpaper over the dining room ceiling. We were all surprised and tremendously pleased with the results and celebrated over a ten-gallon keg of cider.

  John put a roof on the ranch house that was half clay and a foot thick. It consisted of hundreds of two-inch poles covered with burlap covered with canvas covered with rafters embedded in the clay, with corrugated iron above that, coated with black asphaltum. It helped the house be cool in summer, warm in winter—and in the Wind River Basin was unique. But while this durable roof could defend against Wyoming weather the rest of the ranch could not. In the winter of 1912, winds with velocities up to a hundred miles an hour caused sheep to seek haven in dry gulches, where snows soon buried them as if in avalanche. Going without sleep for forty and fifty hours, John Love and his ranch hands struggled to rescue them. They dug some out, but many thousands died. Even on the milder days, when the temperature came up near zero, sheep could not penetrate the wind-crusted drifts and get at the grass below. The crust cut into their legs. Their tracks were reddened with blood. Cattle, lacking the brains even to imagine buried grass, ate their own value in cottonseed cake. John Love had to borrow from his bankers in Lander to pay his ranch hands and buy supplies.

  That spring, a flood such as no one remembered all but destroyed the ranch. The Loves fled into the night, carrying their baby, Allan.

  At daylight we returned to the house. Stench, wreckage and debris met us. The flood had gone. Its force had burst open the front door and swept a tub full of rainwater into the dining room. Chairs and other furniture were overturned in deep mud. Mattresses had floated. Doors and drawers were already too much swollen for us to open or shut. The large wardrobe trunk of baby clothes was upset. Everything in it was soaked and stained. Around all the rooms at the height of the tabletops was a water mark, fringed with dirt, on the new wallpaper.

  Almost immediately, the bankers arrived from Lander. They stayed for several amiable days, looked over the herd tallies, counted surviving animals, checked John Love’s accounts. Then, at dinner one evening, the bank’s vice-president rubbed his hands together and said to his valued customer, his trusted borrower, his first-namebasis longtime friend, “Mr. Love, we need more collateral.” The banker also said that while John Love was a reliable debtor, other ranchers were not, and others’ losses were even greater than Love’s. The bank, to protect its depositors, had to use Love Ranch to cover itself generally. “We are obliged to cash in on your sheep,” the man went on. “We will let you keep your cattle—on one condition.” The condition was a mortgage on the ranch. They were asking for an interest in the land of a homesteader who had proved up.

  John Love shouted, “I’ll have that land when your bones are rotting in the grave!” And he asked the man to step outside, where he could curse him. To the banker’s credit, he got up and went out to be cursed. Buyers came over the hill as if on cue. All surviving sheep were taken, all surviving cattle, all horses—even dogs. The sheep wagons went, and a large amount of equipment and supplies. John Love paid the men in the bunkhouse, and they left. As his wife watched the finish of this scene, standing silent with Allan in her arms, the banker turned to her kindly and said, “What will you do with the baby?”

  She said, “I think I’ll keep him.”

  It was into this situation that John David Love was born—a family that had lost almost everything but itself, yet was not about to lose that. Slowly, his father assembled more modest cavvies and herds, beginning with the capture of wild horses in flat-out all-day rides, maneuvering them in ever tighter circles until they were beguiled into entering the wild-horse corral or—a few miles away—the natural cul-de-sac (a small box canyon) known to the family as the Corral Draw. Watching one day from the granary roof, the boys—four and five—in one moment saw their father on horseback crossing the terrain like the shadow of a cloud and in the next saw his body smash the ground. The horse had stepped in a badger hole. The rider—limp and full of greasewood punctures, covered with blood and grit—was unconscious and appeared to be dead. He was carried into the house. After some hours, he began to stir, and through his pain mumbled, “That damned horse. That damned horse—I never did trust him.” It was the only time in their lives that his sons would hear him swear.

  There were periods of drought, and more floods, and long, killing winters, but John Love never sold out. He contracted and survived Rocky Mountain spotted fever. One year, after he shipped cattle to Omaha he got back a bill for twenty-seven dollars, the amount by which the cost of shipment exceeded the sale price of the cattle. One spring, after a winter that killed many sheep, the boys and their father plucked good wool off the bloated and stinking corpses, sold the wool, and deposited the money in a bank in Shoshoni, where the words “STRENGTH,” “SAFETY,” and “SECURITY” made an arc above the door. The bank failed, and they lost the money. Of many bad winters, the worst began in 1919. Both David and his father nearly died of Spanish influenza, and were slow to recuperate, spending months in bed. There were no ranch hands. At the point when the patients seemed most in danger, his mother in her desperation decided to try to have them moved to a hospital (a hundred miles away), and prepared to ride for help. She had the Hobson’s choice of a large, rebellious horse. She stood on a bench and tried to harness him. He kicked the bench from under her, and stepped on her feet. She gave up her plan.

  The bull broke into the high granary. Our only, and small, supply of horse and chicken feed was there. Foolishly, I went in after him and drove him out down the step. Cows began to die, one here, one there. Every morning some were unable to rise. By day, one walking would fall suddenly, as if it had no more life than a paper animal, blown over by a gust of wind.

  The bull actually charged her in the granary and came close to crushing her against the back wall. She confused it, sweeping its eyes with a broom. It would probably have killed her, though, had it not stepped on a weak plank, which snapped. The animal panicked and turned for the door. (In decades to follow, John Love never fixed the plank.)

  Snow hissed around the buildings, wind blew some snow into every room of the closed house, down the chimney, between window sashes, even in a straight shaft through a keyhole. The wood pile was buried in snow. The small heap of coal was frozen into an almost solid chunk of coal and ice. In the numbing cold, it took me five hours a day to bring in fuel, to carry water and feed to the chickens, to put out hay and cottonseed cake for the cattle and horses.

  John began to complain, a favorable sign. Why was I outside so much? Why didn’t I stay with him? To try to make up to him for being gone so long, I sat on the bed at night, wrapped in a blanket, reading to him by lamplight.

  Somewhere among her possessions was a letter written to her by a Wellesley friend askin
g, “What do you do with your spare time?”

  Where the stage route from Casper to Fort Washakie had crossed a tributary of Muskrat Creek, the banks were so high and the drop to the creekbed so precipitous that the site was littered with split wagon reaches and broken wheels. Allan and David called it Jumping-Off Draw, its name on the map today. Finding numerous large bones in a meadowy bog, they named the place Buffalo Wallows. Indians had apparently driven the bison into the swamp to kill them. One could infer that. One could also see that the swamp was there because water was bleeding from rock outcrops above the meadows. In a youth spent on horseback, there was not a lot to do but look at the landscape. The rock that was bleeding water was not just porous but permeable. It was also strong. It was the same red rock that the granary stood on, and the bunkhouse. Very evidently, it was made of naturally cemented sand. The water could not have come from the creek. The Buffalo Wallows were sixty feet higher than the creek. The sandstone layers tilted north. They therefore reached out to the east and west. There was high ground to the east. The water must be coming down from there. One did not need a Ph.D. from Yale to figure that out—especially if one was growing up in a place where so much rock was exposed. Pending further study, his interpretation of the Buffalo Wallows was just a horseback guess. All through his life, when he would make a shrewd surmise he would call it a horseback guess.

  The water in the sandstone produced not only the bogs but the adjacent meadows as well—in this otherwise desiccated terrain. From the meadows came hay. There was an obvious and close relationship between bedrock geology and ranching. David would not have articulated that in just those words, of course, but he thought about the subject much of the time, and he was drawn to be a geologist in much the way that someone growing up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, would be drawn to be a fisherman. “It was something to think about on long rides day after day when everything was so monotonous,” he once remarked. “Monotony was what we fought out there. Day after day, you had nothing but the terrain around you—you had nothing to think about but why the shale had stripes on it, why the boggy places were boggy, why the vegetation grew where it did, why trees grew only on certain types of rock, why water was good in some places and bad in others, why the meadows were where they were, why some creek crossings were so sandy they were all but impassable. These things were very real, very practical. If you’re in bedrock, caliche, or gumbo, the going is hard. Caliche is lime precipitate at the water table—you learn some geology the hard way. There was nothing else to be interested in. Everything depended on geology. Any damn fool could see that the vegetation was directly responsive to the bedrock. Hence birds and wildlife were responsive to it. We were responsive to it. In winter, our life was governed by where the wind blew, where snow accumulated. We could see that these natural phenomena were not random—that they were controlled, that there was a system. The processes of erosion and deposition were things we grew up with. An insulated society does not see how important terrain is to someone who has to understand it in order to live with it. Much of it meant life or death for the animals, and therefore survival for us. If there was one thing we learned, it was that you don’t fight nature. You live with it. And you make the accommodations—because nature does not accommodate.”

  In the driest months, he saw mud cracks so firm a horse could step on them without breaking their polygonal form. When he saw the same patterns in rock, he had no difficulty discerning that the rock had once been mud and that the cracks within it were the preserved summer of a former world. In the Chalk Hills (multicolored badlands), getting down from his mount, he found the tiny jaws and small black teeth of what he eventually learned were Eocene horses—the first horses on earth, three hands tall.

  Among the figures that appeared on the horizon and slowly approached the ranch—and sometimes stayed indefinitely—were geologists. The first he met were from the United States Geological Survey. Others worked for oil companies. The oilmen were well dressed and had shiny boots that caught his eye. Some of these people were famous in the science—for example, Charles T. Lupton, a structural geologist who had located the wildcats of the Cat Creek Anticline and discovered the oil of Montana. He did something like it in the Bighorn Basin. David particularly remembers him on two counts: first, that he “talked about the outside world,” and, second, that he came in off the range with fragments of huge ammonites—index fossils of the late Cretaceous—and demonstrated by extrapolation that these spiral cephalopods had approached the size of wagon wheels. Lupton’s obituary in the Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists says, “Always he had a word to say to the children of his friends.”

  That was written in 1936, by Charles J. Hares, who had also made frequent stops at Love Ranch. Hares (1881-1970), in the course of a career in the Geological Survey and private business, became “the dean of Rocky Mountain petroleum geologists” and was one of the founders of the Wyoming Geological Association. His work on the anticlines of central Wyoming set up most of the major oil discoveries in the region. He was a celebrated teacher as well, and his roster of youthful field assistants in time became a list of some of the most accomplished geologists in America. Geologists who came to the ranch were reconnaissance geologists of the first rank, who went into unknown country and mapped it with an accuracy that is remarkable to this day. In David’s words: “They raised a magic curtain. They showed us things we’d never seen. There was mother-of-pearl on some of the ammonites. There were Mesozoic oyster shells with both valves intact. You could open them up and see inside. All these things were marine—known only from ocean floors. They also brought in beautiful leaves, fifty million years old, from non-marine rocks of the Eocene. The seas were gone. The mountains had come up. Day after day, we could look around us and see, in the mind’s eye, those things happening.”

  David’s mother owned Joseph LeConte’s Elements of Geology. He read it when he was nine years old. Did he grasp structure and stratigraphy then? Could he have begun to understand faulting? “To some extent, yes,” he says. “After all, we could see it out in front of us.”

  On the southern horizon were the Gas Hills—a line of blue-banded ridges formed in a wedge like the prow of a ship (actually, an arch of shale). David would find uranium there in 1953. Riding over those ridges as a boy, he smelled gas. There were oil seeps as well. (“It was something you could relate to. The Gas Hills weren’t called that for nothing.”)

  Oil and gas had entered the conversation at the ranch when David was four years old. In that summer (1917), derricks suddenly appeared in six different places within twenty miles; and, like other ranchers, the Loves began to muse upon a solvency giddily transcending the wool of frozen sheep. David’s mother referred to all this as the family mirage.

  Oil to us was once just a word recurring through the story of Wyoming. Indians and trappers told of curious oil seeps. Captain Bonneville in 1832 wrote about finding the “great tar springs” near what is now Lander. His party used the oil as a remedy for the cracked hoofs and harness sores of their horses, and as a “balsam” for their own aches and pains. Jim Bridger, scout, Indian fighter, and fort builder, mixed tar with flour and sold it along the Oregon Trail to emigrants, who needed axle grease for their wagons. They found, too, that buffalo chips made a hotter fire when a little tar was added to them.

  And now she told the visiting geologists that if oil was what they were looking for they would surely find it under the ranch, because her younger son’s initials were J.D.

  Such excitement was contagious. Into our repetitive talk of sheep, cattle, horses, weather, and markets, new words appeared: anticline, syncline, red beds, sump, casing, drill stem, bits, crow’s nest, cat walk, headache beam. Almost every herder had his own oil dome. We took up oil claims.

  A range ne’er-do-well, grizzled and tattered, caught a ride to our house. He inquired importantly whether he might stay with us a few days while he did some validating work on his oil claims. Then he asked John if he mig
ht borrow a shovel. But to get to his claims, he said, he needed a team and a wagon. Having succeeded so far, he demanded, “Now, where’s your oil?”

  The boys might be far from sidewalks, but they would not grow up naive.

  A man named Jim Roush had a way of finding oil without a drill bit. Arriving at the ranch, he offered his services. Jim Roush was sort of a Music Man—an itinerant alchemist of structure, a hydrocarbonic dowser. He had a bottle that was wrapped in black friction tape. It dangled from a cord, and contained a secret fluid tomographically syndetic with oil. While David Love looked on—with his brother, his mother, and his father—Roush stood a few feet from their house and suspended the bottle, which began to spin. Light flashed on one hand—from a large apparent diamond. In silent concentration, he counted. Ypresian, Albian, Hauterivian, Valanginian—there was a geologic age in every spin. When the bottle stopped, its aggregate revolutions could be factored as depth to oil. David never saw Jim Roush again, except to the extent that his ghost might haunt the Geological Survey.

  In 1918, a hundred-million-dollar oil-and-gas field was discovered at Big Sand Draw, where John Love gave up his first homestead, in 1897. After the Mineral Lands Leasing Act of 1920, oil companies could obtain leases directly from the government. A rancher’s claims no longer intervened. A rancher needed fifty thousand dollars to drill on his own.