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subject, may not enjoy as happy immunity from their worst effects as any
portion of the continent now occupied by our people.” european scientists
were making the same point at the same time, but Shaler spun it into a
racialized vision of environmental destiny. California was exceptional, in
Shaler's view. Looking north, he judged it “probably a fortunate thing that
the inhospitable and unproductive character of the Alaskan region will pre-
vent any extensive settlements of civilized man in the midst of the terrible
convulsions which are there so frequently occurring.” Alaska's destiny was
wilderness, while California's was “Anglo-Saxon” civilization. Shaler thus
placed his faith in the ability of his “race” to engineer a more stable founda-
tion for prosperity in California.
7
California earthquakes were an abstract threat to east Coast naturalists
like Shaler. As Sheila Hones has shown, Shaler's popular writings on earth-
quakes were part of a wider conversation in the
Atlantic Monthly
in the 1880s
about the threat of natural disasters to the nation. The authors focused on
the need to respond to disasters with centralized, expert-led interventions.
Hones suggests that this discourse reflected the perceived fragility of Ameri-
ca's democratic experiment. earthquakes figured in social Darwinian terms
as trials of national fitness, as moments that would define the nation's in-
defatigable spirit.
8
At closer range, this myth was harder to sustain. Praise for California's
“ideal conditions” from east Coast writers could not put locals' worries to
rest. earthquakes understandably made real-estate investors and insurance
companies nervous. Settlers themselves worried that the cumulative physi-
ological effects of mild tremors might be harmful to their health.
9
The his-
tory of California seismology in the nineteenth century is a story of how
citizens were taught to distrust their own senses.
10
in the spirit of the state's
“boosters,” the California press persistently understated the threat from
earthquakes.
11
One San Francisco paper claimed in 1868 that “earthquakes
are trifles as compared with runaway horses, apothecaries' mistakes, acci-
dents with firearms, and a hundred other little contingencies, which we
all face without fear.”
12
With equal confidence, the
Annals of San Francisco
announced in 1855 that earthquakes were “the greatest, if not the only pos-
sible obstacle of consequence to the growing prosperity of the city, though
even such a lamentable event as the total destruction of half the place, like
another Quito or Caracas, would speedily be remedied by the indomitable
energy and persevering industry of the American character.”
13
in this vision of California's destiny, science and engineering held a
privileged place. in the late nineteenth century, geology became “a tool to
recast the West into a region of economic opportunity.”
14
California also
