Geoscience Reference
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presented geology with a rare opportunity. The first directors of the state's
Geological Survey, John Wesley Powell and Clarence King, found in Cali-
fornia a dramatic landscape of cliffs and canyons that set each man imagin-
ing quite different causes. Powell, following Lyell, emphasized the roles of
erosion and sedimentation, while King focused on uplift and subsidence,
in keeping with the contraction hypothesis.
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Both men, however, knew
from long experience in the field that this land would not easily be tamed
for “civilization.”
King helped Americans recognize the role that catastrophic land move-
ments had played in the formation of California's high mountains. His
celebrated
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada
described a terrain that was
profoundly unstable, a “dizzy” landscape. Staring into a chasm at Yosemite,
he described the “titanic power, the awful stress, which has rent this solid
table-land of granite in twain.” Yet in his next breath he assured the reader
of “the magical faculty displayed by vegetation in redeeming the aspect of
wreck and masking a vast geological tragedy behind draperies of fresh and
living green.” He raised this relationship between catastrophe and renewal
to a general principle: “Movements of great catastrophe, thus translated
into the language of life, become moments of creation, when out of plastic
organisms something newer and nobler is called into being.” King's mes-
sage was ambiguous. The vertiginous, precarious landscapes he described
seemed to urge modesty on scientists bent on transforming nature to their
specifications. And yet catastrophe appeared in these landscapes primarily
as an actor already vanished from the scene, having set the stage for the
vitality of California in King's own day.
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Powell's efforts were more explicitly political. He saw from his fieldwork
in this arid state that agricultural development would be perilous without
a rational irrigation system. He railed against the conceit that “rain follows
the plow,” that the very act of agricultural settlement would improve the
climate. He even tried to convince the public that much of the country's
western lands should be protected from settlement. But even Powell said
next to nothing about California's earthquakes.
From time to time, lone voices disturbed this canyon of silence. in 1868,
at the end of his work on the California Geological Survey, the east Coast
geologist Josiah Whitney faced the problem squarely: “The prevailing tone
in that region, at present, is that of assumed indifference to the dangers
of earthquake calamities, the author of a voluminous work on California,
recently published in San Francisco, even going so far as to speak of earth-
quakes as 'harmless disturbances.' But earthquakes are not to be bluffed off.
They will come, and will do a great deal of damage. The question is, How
