A Crack in the Edge of the World (65 page)

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Some delegates to California's first constitutional convention, which met in September 1849 in the then capital of Monterey, wanted the state to extend itself across all of what is Nevada, and to incorporate much of Utah and Arizona, too—making it the biggest state in the Union, and too big, thought Washington, to control. The idea was rejected by the Monterey delegates themselves, avoiding what could have been an unpleasantly divisive argument with the national capital.

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One scientist, named Rufus Porter, planned a steam-powered dirigible service that would speed prospectors west at 100 mph. He floated a company, but never an airship.

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Alonzo Delano, the New York humorist who went out west and wrote some of the most acutely observed essays on the Forty-Niners, observed drily that anyone traveling overland to California positively deserved to find a fortune.

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California, once established, had been admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as free state, meaning in essence that slavery was banned. The first civilian governor, a Tennessee Democrat named Peter Burnett, had resigned a year later because of “certain personal prejudices”—among which was his view that blacks should be barred from entering the state at all.

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The first official state highway was the Lake Tahoe Wagon Road, taken under the wing of the newly created Bureau of Highways just before the turn of the century.

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See the prologue, page 18.

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Or nearly all: In the summer of 2004 a hitherto almost unknown site of an ancient American Indian civilization was unveiled in eastern Utah, with hints that there are more finds yet to come.

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Amarillo, which has come to symbolize the edge of American settlement and the formal beginning of the West, sits almost precisely astride the 102° meridian.

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By chance it happens that Yellowstone, and in particular the behavior of its famous geysers—Old Faithful being the best known—have been shown recently to enjoy a curiously unexpected connection with the earthquakes that occur along the edge of the North American Plate, miles away to the west. I will try to explain the connection and what is known about its causes in a later chapter; but for now this link serves to remind us that Ferdinand Hayden's own connections to this story are rather more intimate than one might initially suppose.

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He was also the subject of many laudatory (and usually pretty dreadful) poems, including one by an Australian fellow geologist declaring that Gilbert's “many faults were mighty ones.”

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The river has had three names: Río de Buena Guía (“River of Good Guidance”), Río del Tizón (“River of Half-burned Wood”), and finally Río Colorado (“Red-colored River”).

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Inevitably, since geologists can be a fractious crowd, there are other contenders, each vocally supported. Their papers, all produced at around the same time—for it was around 1970 when plate tectonic realizations fully dawned in the American West—are noted in the bibliography.

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The
OED
's first citation is from 1426: “my best covered cup of silver and gilt … with one serpentyn in the bottom.” Serpentine, so important in the story of the state's making, has now been formally adopted as the state rock of California.

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One might almost say that the Penrose Conferences, which were established in 1969, and to which any geologist in the world can seek an invitation, came about specifically to discuss the new whole-earth geology that had been born at much the same time. The first conference held in Tucson a year before had more limited ambitions—it discussed copper—but what has come to be known as the Asilomar Penrose was designed as something else: a truly worldwide conference to support the fast-growing idea that geology had truly changed, and would never be the same again.

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The mission's builders created their church of out of adobe bricks, which are typically sun-dried mud mixed with straw. Damaged bricks examined after the quake were found to have ox blood, horse manure, and dead birds stirred into the mix as well.

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The way in which earthquakes are classified is more than a little complex: An explanation more properly belongs in the appendix.

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The fault was first comprehensively delineated in the official Report of the California State Earthquake Commission, established to inquire into the 1906 events. Since the author of the report was a somewhat bumptious geologist named Andrew Lawson, a mischievous canard circulated suggesting that he named the fault after himself.

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One of these is Isla Robinson Crusoe, since a local shipwrecking story is thought to have inspired Daniel Defoe.

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To complicate matters still further the southern part of the Juan de Fuca Plate, at the point where it meets the Pacific and North American Plates, is called the Gorda Plate. Where it connects to the Juan de Fuca there is a spreading zone, making the geology of Northern California and southern Oregon—especially the mysterious and fascinating Klamath Mountains—weirdly complex.

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A diagram of a typical seismographic record of a large earthquake annotated to show the subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions between the various waves used to chart the event's distance, depth and magnitude, can be found in the appendix.

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One other very Big Science experiment that once had geologists excited was the attempt to use a deep-sea research vessel to drill through the seabed to the so-called Mohorovicic discontinuity, the Moho, which marks the division between the earth's crust and mantle. It proved costly and difficult, and was abandoned in 1966. The Japanese drilled close to the Nojima Fault on Awaji Island in 1995, but they stopped also, after less than half a mile down.

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He also took a violin, on which he would play serenades to the coyotes.

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It is in Palmdale that highly contorted strata resulting from the fault's movement are displayed to advantage in one of the most famous and often photographed road cuttings in the world. They are on the east side of California Route 14, and, because there are three top-secret airbases also visible from the site, the local police take a rather dim view of photographers stopping there. An innocent geologist—especially a foreigner—can get into a good deal of trouble, and offering the excuse of merely trying to photograph the San Andreas Fault doesn't cut much ice these days.

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It was a harbor they came upon very late in the day: Scores of seamen sailing the Pacific Coast had managed to pass by the entrance without ever turning inside, and the
Clinopodium-
rich meadowlands were first discovered by a land-based expedition, and not by a sailor at all.

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Dana, who had first come around the Horn from Boston to Yerba Buena in 1835, had forecast, with remarkable prescience, a glittering future for the region. “If California ever becomes a prosperous country,” he wrote in his famous
Two Years Before the Mast
, “this bay will be the centre of its prosperity.”

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As it remains today, in the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown.

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Among the great San Francisco–based photographers was Arnold Genthe, the remarkable German best known for his sensitive and tender portraits of Chinatown; and Eadweard Muybridge—born Edward Muggeridge outside London, he pretentiously amended his name to achieve greater artistic credibility—who made some immense panoramic photographs of the entire city, and was the first to surmount the technical problems of photographing a horse at the gallop, thus settling a bet with Leland Stanford about whether a galloping horse lifts all its hooves off the ground at once. (The pictures proved that it does.)

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More than 12,000 Chinese also worked uncomplainingly—though only for gold, not the distrusted paper money—on the most difficult sections of the Central Pacific Railroad's route east across the mountains to where they would meet up with the Union Pacific's rails heading west from Omaha. Their legendary courage in working on the fantastically dangerous Cape Horn cliff face near Colfax is memorialized in a plaque—as is their involvement with hundreds of Irishmen in laying the final ten miles of track through the Utah desert in twelve hours flat. They were paid at the rate of a dollar a day, slept in the open, and lived with exemplary frugality on fish, seaweed, and dried oysters.

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Well built enough to survive 1906 in near-perfect shape, but demolished in 1958, to make way for a parking lot.

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There was also a domed sixteen-story building at the corner of Market and Third Streets, the tallest building in the American West. It was owned by Claus Spreckels, the sucrose magnate whose fondness for younger women is said by some to have given us the term “sugar daddy.” It housed the offices of the
Call
, one of the more prominent daily newspapers of the time. Under the dome was a celebrated restaurant, with a much-envied view.

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For more on the Slot, see note on page 245.

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And not a few died there. President Warren G. Harding did, under circumstances that some still find mysterious; and King Kalakaua of Hawaii—who of course deemed it entirely appropriate to stay in the Palace—can probably lay claim to being the man with the longest name ever to have passed away there: The register clerk called him “Your Majesty,” but officially he was David Laamea Kamanakapuu Mahinulani Naloiaehuokalani Lumialani Kalakaua.

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Later performances became more inventive. When Miss Stewart performed it back in Sydney—to help a charity to buy radium for a local hospital—she took to selling oranges to audience members during the intermission.

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Animals seem peculiarly sensitive to impending seismic doom. A baby elephant penned into a Batavian hotel room went spectacularly mad a short while before the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883; and just before the Sumatran earthquake and tsunamis of December 2004, reports of animals behaving oddly—monkeys chattering with terror, snakes going rigid, cattle bolting—were legion.

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Because of its double tram tracks Market Street was the widest boulevard in the city. Horse-drawn wagons occupied the outer parts of the street, and the cable cars were confined to a metal channel, which came to be called the Slot. Before long this became an important social demarcation line in the city: Living “south of the Slot” suggested blue-, rather than white-collar.

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This is a near-perfect example of what is known by the very old and now rarely used English word
chance-medley
, in which a casualty occurs as a result of a confusing set of circumstances in which only a small element is accidental. There was once a crime known as “manslaughter-by-chance-medley,” though what took place here was clearly not a crime.

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One supposed rescue did point up the troubles of some asylum patients. Three days after the event rescuers heard a man crying, “Never mind me, get the others first!” and naturally raced to free this heroic victim. But it was no miracle: The man turned out to be a patient who had escaped from his guards and had
buried himself
, the better to win attention.

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I am not including the places where the event was recorded by machines: Plenty of seismographs existed in 1906, and the San Francisco event was recorded by many, some of them—as we shall see—thousands of miles away.

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These figures are computed from the earthquake's newly established true epicenter beside Mussel Rock in the suburb of Daly City. But, generally speaking, because most of the damage occurred in San Francisco, it is simpler to think of this much-better-known city as the practical center point of the event's effects.

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The names were indeed splendid: There were the Repsold-Zöllner Horizontal Pendulums, for example, used at the observatories in Tashkent and Irkutsk; the Stiattesi Vertical Pendulum used in Florence; the Vincenti-Konkoly Vertical Pendulums of Zagreb (where the observatory director was Dr. Mohorovicic, later to give his name to one of the world's major geological features); the Ehlert Triples employed at Kremsmünster in Austria and at the famous Uccle Observatory in Belgium; and Dr. Hecker's magnificently titled Von Rebeur–Paschwitz Horizontal Pendulum, which apparently performed yeoman service in the main physics laboratory in late-nineteenth-century Potsdam.

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An Irish-born engineer named Robert Mallet came up with the term—from the Greek for “earthquake,”
seismos
—in 1854. Mallet was a man of many talents: His legacy includes a steam-powered barrel-washing machine made for Guinness, a pair of powerful siege cannons, critical parts of the Fastnet Lighthouse, and a number of swivel bridges over the river Shannon.

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Thomas Jefferson Jackson See was a brilliant and notoriously ill-tempered astronomer, a maverick who is generally reckoned to have squandered his boundless potential by opposing Einstein's theory of relativity and espousing the so-called wave theory of gravitation.

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This was one of six stations sited precisely on latitude 39° 08' N, designed to measure how much the North Pole wobbled around it axis (which would cause latitude to shift as it did so). The other stations were in Misuzawa, Japan; Tschardjui, Russia; Carloforte, Italy; and near the American cities of Cincinnati and Gaithersburg.

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Because the local damage is so severe the aberrant behavior of a place like this can also make it appear, temptingly, as though it
deserves
to be the epicenter. This is the kind of red herring that modern geologists take care to avoid.

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Among the most poignant images of Stanford's ruin was a marble statue of the great biologist Louis Agassiz, which tumbled from a great height, speared its way, headfirst, into the cement courtyard and stuck there, helplessly pinned. There was much greater damage than this; but somehow a figure of great learning thrust so ignominiously to earth struck a chord. It also prompted the university's then-president to remark that he had always thought more easily of Agassiz in the concrete rather than the abstract.