A Crack in the Edge of the World (19 page)

But Hayden had a rival. At the same time as he was pushing out westward from the Missouri River, the man who would in due course
become the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey was leading a group of explorers eastward, out into the unknown from California. The expedition was called the
Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Fortieth Parallel
, and its leader was Clarence King, perhaps one of the truest heroes of the American school of the Old Geology.

King was evidently a strong-willed, imaginative, and impetuous young man. After completing his four-year chemistry course at Yale in only two years, and then going on his own accord to hear Louis Agassiz lecture at Harvard, he decided to ride his horse the entire way to California. He joined the California Geological Survey (where he explored and then named Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower Forty-Eight, after the survey's then director) and promptly became so enthused by the life of western exploration that as soon as was prudent he rode all the way back east to Washington, D.C., with a scheme.

He confronted the secretary of war and insisted that the government finance a survey, just like Hayden's, that would progress eastward across the continent along the line of the 40th parallel, following a swath of territory that lay along the course of the main Central Pacific railroad route. His proposed journey would start where the parallel crosses the Sierra beside Lassen Peak, continue through Nevada in the great desert south of Winnemucca and Elko, run across Utah fifty miles south of the Great Salt Lake, pass on through Provo and across the Green River, and cross the Front Range, where those mountains intersect with the parallel close to Boulder, Colorado. The expedition would then drop down from the high peaks and safely conclude in the settled farmlands of the Great Plains.

The government agreed, offering him a three-year budget of $100,000 for his troubles. King swiftly assembled a team of thirty-five, most of whom were polished European geologists or dapper American scientists of elegance and taste—men who found it mildly amusing to be asked to do such things as carry rifles and put on desert boots. As a result the King survey was at first regarded more for its élan than for its science—though as their results began to flow in, the science began to win respect as well.

The team—together with a large contingent of soldiery designed to protect the scientists against the anticipated anger of disconsolate Indians—embarked on a ship to Panama, then on another up to San Francisco, and finally crossed the Sierra to the starting point in Nevada's Virginia Mountains, just north of present-day Reno. It pushed relentlessly and steadily eastward, triangulating and hammering as it went, producing maps of both the topography and the geology with an accuracy and attention to detail that is impressive still.

But the event for which Clarence King remains best known came as the expedition was winding down, when the team entered northwestern Colorado and heard rumors of an astonishing find of diamonds and rubies and other precious stones around a mesa near a settlement called Browns Park, nowadays between the villages of Hiawatha and Dinosaur. To a geologist like King, this sounded most odd: Despite their meticulous surveying, they had found no diamond-bearing earths. There was a possibility, King concluded, that the story was a hoax.

As indeed it turned out to be. The party found the mesa, and in short order found an extraordinary scattering of gems littering the ground. But the stones were to be found only in disturbed areas, with footprints all around; wherever the soil was undisturbed, digging threw up nothing more than the occasional pebble. Very little geological detective work was required to find out that a pair of clever ne'er-do-wells had in fact salted the mesa with precious stones. They had set up a massive fraud, and convinced a staggering array of believers to invest money in a mining venture, to go after treasure that simply didn't exist.

The size of the swindle was remarkable. Investors from as far away as London had sunk money into some twenty-five companies, and to the tune of $250 million—especially after the pair had somehow managed to borrow and then (as the investment money began to flood in) to buy bags of uncut jewels that they used first to salt the mesa, and then to excavate and show to their growing army of backers. They had persuaded Charles Tiffany, the New York City jeweler, to vouch for their authenticity—though Tiffany later rather weakly confessed that
he knew very little about stones other than about how to market them.

Clarence King, who appears to have been impelled by a sterling sense of propriety—and despite appeals from the villains' associates that he, too, could now make a quick profit from what he knew—went straight to the companies' lawyers and told them of the fraud—prompting the shell-shocked investors to close down the firms. The two confidence tricksters fled; one died as a coffin maker, penniless, the other from shotgun wounds after a fight near his pig farm in Kentucky. The investors spent years licking their wounds and cursing their gullibility.

But Clarence King's reputation soared. “God and Clarence King,” it was said in the San Francisco newspapers, had saved the day. He became, in part because of his soaring reputation as a pillar of moral rectitude, a close friend of the powerful, men like Teddy Roosevelt, John Hay, and Henry Adams; and when the American government decided, somewhat late in the game, to set up its own national Geological Survey, it seemed entirely appropriate that he be installed as its first director.

Few seemed much to care when another, somewhat less acceptable aspect of King's character was revealed. It turned out that King had an unappeasable passion for dark-skinned women, particularly enjoying the delights of the Shawnee, the Comanche, and the Cheyenne while surveying among them. He went on to marry a black nursemaid named Ada Copeland, changing his own name to James Todd for this purpose. And though he fathered five children with Miss Copeland, Clarence King never breathed a word about his circumstances, or about the existence of James Todd, to his closest friends or to his employers in the federal government.

When Henry Adams idolized Clarence King as “the most remarkable man of our time,” he probably had little idea just how remarkable he really was. All that Adams and the legions of King's admirers knew was that the King survey, when it was measured by the number of volumes of reports and the classic books and maps that were to be its
legacy, had been a triumph, and that its leader had in addition performed brilliant service by exposing one of the greatest geological frauds in western American history.

With the surveying along the line of a parallel now accomplished, it must have seemed that for symmetry's sake a meridian should surely be explored as well. Hence the formation in 1872 of what is generally known as the Wheeler survey, with its formal, government-designated title
The Geologic and Geographic Survey West of the 100th Meridian
. It would still be a while before Washington would designate 102°, the Amarillo line, as the formal edge of western settlement. (Back in 1872 hardly anyone lived west of that line, which would pass from Bismarck, North Dakota, all the way down to the Texas town of Abilene.) George Wheeler, a swaggering young lieutenant in the U.S. Army, had a reputation for being able to look after himself in the field and for producing impeccable maps. He was thus given the task of surveying all of this enormous emptiness. It was to all intents and purposes a military expedition—Wheeler saw his role as the leader of one further instrument of the American conquest of the West, and he counted the Indians as though they were wildlife, in the hope that in short order they would all be exterminated. He was not a pleasant man.

But he was a highly competent one, and when the parties under his command ended their seven years of work, there were no fewer than 164 new maps of western America, beautiful, accurate, and of lasting value. He had mapped 327,000 square miles—with the challenge of mapping Death Valley chief among his cartographic successes—and he had spent rather more than 600,000 of the Treasury's dollars doing so. And he had taken along with him—to dilute the overwhelming military appearance of his party—a group of civilians, three of whom were so distinguished and influential that they, like the pair who rode with Ferdinand Hayden, also went on to be founders of the National Geographic Society.

One of this trio was Grove Karl Gilbert, yet again—the Meteor Crater visitor and San Francisco Earthquake witness whose name keeps cropping up in accounts of the American West. He was mild-mannered,
quiet, shabby (because he liked to repair his own clothes), and is still widely regarded as the greatest of all American geologists.
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His most lasting memorial, perhaps, is that it was he who named the Basin and Range Province, and recognized how very different it was, structurally, from the ranges and basins that were so characteristic of the mountains of Appalachia, near where he grew up.

But neither Gilbert nor Wheeler nor Hayden nor even the redoubtable Clarence King has won quite the lasting general repute that has since been enjoyed by the leader of the fourth great federal survey—the magnetically appealing one-armed former soldier who is renowned for first navigating the entire length of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell. This was a man who had lost his arm to a bone-shattering minié ball at the Battle of Shiloh: It did not to any measurable degree inhibit him from undertaking one of the most heroic explorations in American history.

This best-known achievement of the figure whom the writer Wallace Stegner once described as “a one-armed little man with a bristly beard, a homemade education and an intense concentration of purpose,” actually came some while before the creation of the federally funded survey that he would eventually lead, and that was to be called the
Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Rocky Mountain Area, 1870–78
. Immediately after leaving the army (he continued in service after losing his right arm, seeing action at the siege of Vicksburg and the Battle of Nashville), he had gone off to Illinois to teach geology, to establish a small museum of natural history, and to collect specimens.

While pondering where best to get hold of specimens for his museum he conceived the idea that he might profitably explore the uncharted tracts of the West. And so in the summers of 1867 and 1868 he organized two collecting expeditions to the Rockies, returning with wagonloads of specimens and, so far as the geography of the place was concerned, a sorely whetted appetite. In particular he was fascinated
by the enormous rivers that he had encountered on his travels: Where did these mighty rivers go? Where did they reach the sea? Might it be possible for boats, or even for ships, to navigate their waters?

So Powell went back out to the West in 1869, only this time with a party of eleven men, four boats, and a modest subvention from the newly formed Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He had a plan that was both simple and ambitious, but that had less to do with fossil hunting than with conducting exploration simply for the sake of it. He would put his boats into the waters of the especially fascinating-looking Green River in southwestern Wyoming; he would navigate his way down it as best he could to where he knew that it joined up with the Colorado; and he would then navigate his way down the Colorado, regardless of whatever hazards might be in his way, for as far as it might take him.

He had little more than a vague idea, based on a few half-told stories, that there was a canyon somewhere down there: Such reports as existed were hazy and dismissive. So he told his colleagues that he was going into what he called “the Great Unknown,” and, as the party slid their boats into the waters beside a railway crossing close to the settlement of Rock Springs, they must have been more than a little apprehensive. They had no real idea of what they would find.

The canyon had been seen by very few people. The Spaniards, who had first named the Colorado
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in 1540 and who had ventured a hundred miles upstream from where it debouched into the sea, had sent out a gold-hunting expedition across the desert that same year and reached the south rim of the canyon; probably a man named García López de Cárdenas was the first European ever to see it. More than two and a half centuries would pass before another Spanish party spotted it and encountered some of the more accessible of the Havasupai Indian settlements that are so well known and protected today. In the 1830s a fair number of hunters and trappers began to stumble across it: Jedediah Smith, already noted as having been first to cross the Sierra, was one; a soldier named Joseph Ives and the geologist John Newberry descended into its depths, being the first white men ever to stand at the very bottom of this terrifying declivity. “The region,” reported Ives, “is altogether valueless. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality.”

Hardly. A further geological survey was undertaken in 1859—and then, ten years later, the diminutive one-armed major, with his team, his boats, a small amount of army-gifted rations, and a wagonload of nerve, came to Wyoming to shoot their way through the rapids, force a way down the canyon, and establish the region's reputation as one of the greatest natural wonders on the planet.

After three months, 900 miles, and uncountable adventures, Powell and his diminished party—five of his men had deserted, and one of the boats and all of the food aboard had been lost—emerged into the still, wide waters of the lower Colorado, on the far side of the canyon. When word spread, this thirty-five-year-old became a national hero. To the public, he was the epitome of brio and dash and courage and vision. His book,
Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Gorges
, became a bestseller. His collections—for he managed to collect assiduously and intelligently, no matter how harsh the conditions
of his travels—were sought after by researchers across the country. And his reputation within the scientific community entered the stratosphere. Almost overnight he became the natural candidate to lead the fourth and the greatest of all the surveys the government had planned—that of the Rocky Mountains, which then occupied the following eight years of Powell's life.