Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
he offered only this image of lazy domesticity.
28
For Rowlandson intended
to go one better than the boosters. instead of denying that California was
seismically active, he would prove the beneficence of earthquakes. First, he
argued that the seismic threat in San Francisco was mitigated, “if not wholly
obviate[d],” by the city's geography, with a shallow bay to protect against
landslips and a coast set back far enough to protect against tsunamis. next,
he furnished a scientific account of earthquakes, in the hope that the phe-
nomenon would “cease to trouble timid minds. Timidity has certainly been
carried to excess by those who have left or expressed a purpose of leav-
ing this State on account of earthquakes.”
29
But Rowlandson did not stop
at demystiication. Here, in the heart of the topic, his argument became
quite literally nebulous. Starting from the Laplacean principle “that univer-
sal matter . . . was originally in a gaseous condition,” Rowlandson argued
that earthquakes somehow brought precious metals trapped in the earth's
“molten center” to the surface. “i have long held and still adhere to the
opinion, that human access to these valuable metaliferous [
sic
] accessories
to the luxuries, comforts, and necessaries of human life has resulted from
earthquake influences. The earthquake, in fact, being one of the cosmical
agents employed by the great DESIGNER OF ALL, for contribution to HIS final
aims.” evidence for this startling claim came from the stratigraphical loca-
tion of precious metals, which pointed to their having reached the earth's
surface no earlier than the appearance of man. “They were not required by
the wants of the then animal creation, and they were not needed until MAN
made his appearance on the surface of the earth, endowed with faculties to
extract, reduce and utilize them.”
30
Rowlandson had found an ingenious
way to reconcile California's earthquakes with the myth that America was
destined by providence to bear wealth for white settlers: earthquakes were
California's secret source of
gold.
Remote Sensing
While Trask and Rowlandson were sweeping California's seismic rubble
under a carpet of gold, interest in seismology was growing in more qui-
escent parts of the country. Local volunteer observing networks for both
weather and earthquakes flourished in many states in the 1870s. These ef-
forts demonstrated what scientists and citizens could accomplish when not
encumbered by the denial of seismic hazard. The emergence of earthquakes
as scientific objects elsewhere in the United States underscores the work
necessary to produce seismic ignorance in California. it also points to the
tensions between local and federal initiatives that would plague American
