A Crack in the Edge of the World (18 page)

In short, the state was in exceptionally good shape, and Governor Pardee had merely to tinker, to tune, and to tread water. The statistics of the time underpin the notion of comfort and prosperity. There were a million and a half citizens in a state that, just fifty years before, had comprised an indolent handful of Mexicans clinging to a thin strip of land along the fogbound coast. Come the new century and the state's mines were still producing precious metals of considerable worth; exports of wheat, barley, wool, milk, butter, cheese were being loaded onto ships in the great ports of the Bay and down at Long Beach; freight trains on the three great lines that now linked California with the Mississippi Valley were hauling away cars loaded with oranges and lemons, prunes, sugar, wines, brandies, beans, raisins, and oil. And Stanford University had just been founded: $20 million of private money had been slapped down for the foundation and endowment—a gift “unparallelled in magnitude,” said the
Daily Telegraph
across in London, “in the history of mankind.”

All was, in other words, set fair for California, and for its principal
city of San Francisco, as Governor Pardee and his team commenced their gentle program of governance and supervision. The first two of his four years in office went as smoothly as might be expected, with a host of unanticipated challenges but not a single problem that even approached the level of a crisis.

And then came the spring of 1906—when, almost halfway through the governor's elected term, everything suddenly went spectacularly and memorably wrong.

          
The West I liked best. The people are stronger,
          
fresher, saner than the rest. They are ready to be
          
taught. The surroundings of nature have instilled in
          
them a love of the beautiful, which but needs
          
development and direction. The East I found a
          
feeble reflex of Europe; in fact, I may say that I was
          
in America for a month before I saw an American.

O
SCAR
W
ILDE
, quoted in the
St. Louis Daily Globe,
February 26, 1882

O
N GOING WEST, EVERYTHING CHANGES ON THE FAR
side of Amarillo. The word means “yellow,” presumably from the dun-colored dust of this parched part of Texas—and the town was set up first as a railway-construction camp. Now it is a thoroughly up-to-date place, with tall buildings that house banks and the headquarters of large cattle ranches and small private oil companies, and there are lines of strip malls ringing the town just as the Conestoga wagons used to ring the campfires.

The town ends suddenly, with neither sprawl nor suburb to extend its reach. And, as it does so, the road ahead empties and the horizon becomes quite flat, with just the faintest line of settled cloud in the distance hinting at a chain of mountains somewhere far away. The gas stations are fewer here, the radio signals fade away into static—except for the evangelical preachers, who rant on endlessly into the otherwise unpopulated ether. Ed Ruscha, an Oklahoman contemporary artist who became fascinated by the lonely majesty of this part of America,
wrote in an essay that he had discovered here the importance of gas stations. They are like trees, he said, but really only
because they are there
, and there is not much else besides—nothing but the bleached jawbones of cattle, old wind pumps creaking with rust, broken-backed barns and barbed-wire fences that provide a barrier against the bundles of tumbleweed that bounce casually past in the ceaseless hot wind.

The landscape is dominated by sagebrush and chaparral; it is a place of mesas and buttes, of canyons and arroyos, of lodgepole pine and saguaro cactus and rattlesnakes and golden eagles and museums of wagon trains—and all underpinned by a geology, moreover, that is nothing at all like the geology back in the East. For a start, it is all so very much on display: The ribs of the land show through, landscape laid out as textbook.

I drove across the slowly ascending flatlands of far-west Texas, up and over the low hills of what is called the Front Range—the gradient of the highway ticked upward a few miles outside the junction town of Tucumcari. Then, near Albuquerque and Santa Fe, the road passed through into the southern Rocky Mountains, with the Sangre de Cristos to the right, the Sacramentos off to the left, and the Black Range and the San Andreas Mountains directly ahead. The flanks of the hills were covered with pine trees, and on the late-January day I was there, fresh snow glistened from their summits. After that I endured some hours of driving over the open deserts and sharp-edged ranks of peaks in the region that is formally known as the Basin and Range Province, 500 miles of wide-open land that has been favored for its emptiness and romantic beauty by writers and filmmakers for years past.

I was heading for the small town of Winslow, Arizona, where a terrific meteorite collision had occurred 50,000 years ago, leaving behind a 600-foot-deep hole punched into the desert, 4,000 feet in diameter. I had learned about it as a small boy: My geography teacher in Dorset had given us lectures about the very rare allotropes of quartz known as coesite and stishovite, formed when quartz is suddenly subjected to enormous pressures, as it would be when hit with an immensely heavy
and fast-moving body of iron and nickel. Both of these newly named (after their discoverers) quartz minerals can be found at the bottom of the Winslow crater, I remembered him saying. When I got there I found something else, something quite unanticipated, and in truth something rather trivial—but something that added immeasurably to my feelings about western American geology.

Up on the lip of the crater, I listened as the guide talked about its history: of its discovery in the 1870s by one of General Custer's scouts; of the visit made twenty years later by the great geologist Grove Karl Gilbert,
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who fretted publicly over whether it was a volcano or an impact crater of the kind seen on the surface of the moon; and then of
its acquisition by a Philadelphia mining engineer named Barringer, who fancied that he might one day be able to find the buried meteorite and make himself a tidy fortune. In the end he never did find it, but, said the guide, his family still owned the crater. The firm was based in Pennsylvania and was called the Barringer Meteor Company.

And then I remembered that I had once known a family named Barringer, a fairly well-off and very elderly couple who lived in one of those rather comfortable horse-country neighborhoods close to the Delaware border. My cell phone had good signal, and so I called them. Old Mr. Barringer answered. He was rather deaf and shouted to ask who might be calling. I told him, and explained that I was telephoning from the very lip of the Meteor Crater in eastern Arizona. There was a pause.

“Bless my soul!” he exclaimed happily. “Our family owns that, you know!” And so I put the phone into speaker mode, and the guide and I listened attentively as Mr. Barringer told us how delighted he was that we were all there and how he hoped that the staff were being as pleasant as possible. Then he thanked everyone for paying up their $20 admission fee, “as it keeps us all in good champagne, and for that we are most grateful.”

A meteor could have fallen anywhere in America, of course; but it seemed somehow appropriate that the biggest of all should have collided with the earth in one of the most beautiful, unspoiled, and most geologically complex regions of America. And the westerly path that I followed over the next few weeks took me to other, similarly emblematic places, all created by the forces of geology. From the Meteor Crater I went on to the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, and the Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, to Zion and Bryce Canyons in Utah, to Death Valley and the Salton Sea and the southern Sierra Nevadas in California. All are stupendous examples of the geological mayhem that is the American West; all spectacles of ancient topographical miracle work that manage to draw millions from around the world.

The story of the geological exploration of the American West, which resulted in the discovery of nearly all these marvels, begins in
the spring of 1860, when the Geological Survey of California was founded. Untold hundreds of exploring scientists—for who would not want to explore here, where the geology is so spectacularly
on view
, so seldom covered by such inconveniences as soils and forests?—amassed a wealth of geological information the likes of which few countries have ever known.

The diligence and derring-do and sheer romance of the geologists who came through here still haunts the territory. And there is a nice symmetry in the fact that their years of pioneering work—which in most cases had the official blessing of the American government—had its origins in the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, California, in 1848. When President Polk announced the importance of the find to the world, he also demanded that a serious and extensive geological survey of the region be undertaken—and, by doing so, he kindled a sudden interest in geology in dozens of other states, where governors and legislative chiefs started to demand that their local scientists investigate what wealth might be in the rocks beneath their feet.

Up to this point agriculture, rather than industry, was the dominant force in the American economy. Such a mining industry as existed was in poor shape, and in the late 1850s coal production was actually going into decline. But as soon as gold mines started to be sunk in the Californian mountains, everything changed: A realization spread like brushfire that other worthwhile minerals might also be lurking underground, and the mining industry swiftly began to go into overdrive clear across the country.

It took little more than a decade for the situation to become so changed. In 1848, the year of Sutter's Mill, agriculture still reigned supreme, industry was primitive, mining in the doldrums. But by 1859—the same year that a new gold strike was made in Colorado, the year that the great silver deposit known as the Comstock Lode was found in Nevada, the year that the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, and just when work on the four great transcontinental railway routes was starting—government figures showed that at last the value of products made in American factories had overtaken the value of produce from the farms and fields. And with America's transmutation
into a fast-growing industrial power, there came a sudden and anxious need for minerals. Such natural resources as the country possessed were all being swallowed up by the furnaces and the foundries, and in 1866 a frankly worried government in Washington decreed that the proper development of the nation's geological and mineral wealth had to be of “the highest concern of the American people.” It was imperative, the White House said, that the untapped resources of the country be found and wrenched from their hiding places belowground.

Congress agreed. And so in March 1867 it was decided that the entirety of the West—unsettled, poorly charted, and inhabited, when at all, by understandably unhappy nations of indigenous peoples—had to be properly and methodically explored and mapped. Four great surveying organizations were promptly inaugurated—the Great Western Surveys, history has come to call them—and for the next decade enormous parties of soldiers and scientists, most of them surveyors but many of them geologists, went off under the auspices of one or another of these government-financed surveys, and investigated every nook and cranny of the immense landscape. Eventually they threw up all
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the stunning details of the fantastical worlds that lay in the far beyond, in that immense unpeopled wasteland that lay to the west of longitude 102, which the U.S. government had decreed as marking the formal edge of American settlement.
^†

Each of them had a grandiose name.
The Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Territories
was the first of the four to be formed, and it was led by one of geology's least-favored pioneers: the illegitimate son of a Massachusetts drunk, an explorer named Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. Few have kind words to say about this curious man: The only biography is entitled
Strange Genius;
one writer denounces him as a vindictive, insecure, manipulative, and self-promoting plagiarist, and even
the biographical dictionaries, with their tendency toward detached kindliness, remark on Hayden's ruthless ambition, impatience, and combative style.

But Hayden was both a brilliant field geologist and a great popularizer of science—and it is through his efforts and those of his survey colleagues (two of whom went on to help found the National Geographic Society, which was gestating all the while this surveying of the West was unrolling) that the unexplored parts of Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado were properly mapped and the more obvious aspects of their geology recorded. He had a budget of $75,000 from U.S. Treasury funds—more than enough to hire the best surveyors, scientists, and photographers. The legendary landscape photographer William Henry Jackson was a member of the Hayden team, and his stunning images of the mountains and extraordinary scenery around the headwaters of a river in what is now northwestern Wyoming set the capstone on what was Hayden's greatest achievement: the creation of America's first national park, at Yellowstone. An “unprepossessing man of no outstanding achievements” he may have been, according to some unkind biographers; and a man who became notorious for feathering his own nest and regarding the West as his personal empire; and a man whose personal life was checkered enough to leave him dying of syphilis. But Hayden, with his superbly organized and eloquent 500-page report on what he had found, persuaded President Ulysses S. Grant to create Yellowstone National Park, and few greater memorials to the explorer's art can there ever be.
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