Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
in i in e
The Youngest Land:
California, 1853-1906
Among the visitors to the beautiful coast the earthquake is one of the oldest and
most influential. . . . Had he, the architect of the mountains, not been active, there
would have been no Santa Barbara, no California, indeed.
1
in 1857 the english historian Henry Thomas Buckle described California
as a desert land, “scorched into sterility” and unfit for civilization.
2
Had he
been aware of the region's earthquakes—few were at the time, for reasons
we shall soon see—his judgment would surely have been still worse. For,
as we know, Buckle believed that earthquake-prone lands could support
only barbarians, mystics, and gamblers. Americans, however, were intent
on proving him wrong. California gleamed in the eyes of late nineteenth-
century Americans as “the heritage of the future.”
3
The Harvard geographer
nathaniel Shaler called the influx of migrants into California “the most
rapid movement of population ever known.” “everyone who feels an intel-
ligent interest in the future of our race must be concerned for the prospects
of this region.” “Soil, climate, mineral resources, relation to other great cen-
tres of population”—all promised ideal conditions for “the type of civiliza-
tion” that the “Anglo-Saxon race” was developing. Yet California was also
rumored to be prone to drought, fires, flash floods—and earthquakes. The
question loomed: “whether society can there find a stable footing on a firm-
set earth.”
4
Shaler acknowledged, as Buckle had, that frequent earthquakes
could destroy the possibility of cultural progress:
There can be no question that where a people is exposed to recurrent and
overwhelming danger, such as menace the inhabitants of Peru, Venezuela,
or Calabria, a danger which as yet is not foretold by science or effectively
