Heroic, beautiful, and bold, the West conjured up images of landscape: open plains, empty deserts, and rugged mountains that renew the sorry soul. In the West, Parkman managed to recover from too much study, too many migraines, and a bad case of nerves. Amid buffalo and antelope, hawk and rattlesnake, and the grayish green sagebrush that sprouts up in barren rock, where nothing else will grow, the easterner is reborn, redeemed, and revived by strapping scouts and natives, gamblers, trappers, miners, derringers, and derring-do, for the westerner is that “solid personality,” cried Whitman, “with blood and brawn, and the deep quality of all-accepting fusion.” As another of the West’s propagandists, Joaquin Miller, put it, the West is a land of space and dreams.
And boodle. “The West is the place for a young fellow of spirit to pick up a fortune, simply pick it up; it’s laying around loose there,” Twain slyly noted in The Gilded Age. So too natural resources: in 1853, several Americans cut down a three-thousand-year-old sequoia in California, a magnificent tree that measured ninety-six feet in circumference; then they polished the stump, turned it into a dance floor, and hollowed out the trunk for a two-lane bowling alley. The next year, in the Calaveras Grove, an enterprising miner named George Gale took twenty-two days and four men to cut down another giant sequoia, called the “Mother of the Forest.” They shaved its bark to a height of 116 feet to ship it to New York, where it was reassembled and paraded, for a price, before the public. “This is what the scamps did in California,” said Thoreau in disgust. “The trees were so grand and venerable, that they could not afford to let them grow a hair’s breadth bigger, or live a moment longer, to reproach themselves.”
James Mason Hutchings, an English gold miner turned publisher and western promoter, was enamored of the trees and not the tree cutters. Hoping to share one of the most beautiful places on the planet, Hutchings advertised Yosemite as a hot spot for tourists in his eponymous magazine, Hutchings’ Illustrated California Magazine, which he founded in 1856. He also hired a San Francisco photographer, Carleton Watkins, to take pictures of Yosemite that he then transformed into wood-engraved illustrations to show what he was talking about, and he purchased the valley’s first hotel so that pilgrims, as visitors were called, might have a place to stay when they came to call. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of them. In 1871 he stayed at Hutchings’s hotel. “These trees,” commented the transcendentalist, “have a monstrous talent for being tall.”
Almost a decade before Emerson saw the ancient sequoia, the renowned preacher Thomas Starr King had come from Boston to San Francisco and applied the full force of his Unitarian energy to saving the trees from the fate of their Calaveras siblings. Cutting, carving, or boring holes into those trees was sacrilege, he said; it defiled something fundamentally American, he wrote to the widely circulated Boston Evening Transcript. At the same time, Watkins, another eastern transplant, was again hired to photograph Yosemite, perhaps by Trenor Park, who owned mines nearby. For Watkins the job would be more difficult this time; he wanted to capture the physical magnitude described by King. He commissioned a cabinetmaker to fashion a huge camera for his oversized huge negatives, and with those large glass plates, lenses, tripods, and chemicals in tow, he headed out from the village of Mariposa, hauling his equipment up and down the steep trails.
The results were spectacular. Half Dome, Cathedral Rocks, Grizzly Giant, and El Capitan: even the names of the pictures were larger than life. The giant photographs, shown at the Goupil Gallery on Broadway in New York the next year, 1862, were such a hit that Watkins subsequently sent several to Emerson and twelve of them to Oliver Wendell Holmes, who marveled over them in The Atlantic, hailing them as art, though he seemed more stunned by the trees themselves.
In the same essay, Holmes also praised, if praise be the correct word, the photographs taken at Antietam as “terrible mementoes of one of the most sanguinary conflicts of the war.” Yet photography was not just cultural documentation now; more and more, its purpose was to preserve America. With Watkins’s Yosemite photographs of an idealized and undisturbed landscape—set against the unseen, unspoken backdrop of war—Yosemite represented an America unscathed by battles. It was that America that the Union had been fighting to save.
Watkins’s pictures of Yosemite presumably helped persuade California’s senator, John Conness—and then President Abraham Lincoln—to protect the now iconic Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove from further desecration. In 1864 Lincoln signed the bill that converted Yosemite and the Mariposa grove into a national park “for public use, resort and recreation.” Josiah Whitney, the state geologist, breathed a sigh of relief. Yosemite would not become, like Niagara Falls, “a gigantic institution for fleecing the public,” he said. No, this was a national park and, like the nation, “inalienable for all time!”
Whitney had long been trying to protect the trees. A Yankee graduate of Yale University and well trained in America, France, and Germany as a chemist, he had worked on a survey in Michigan before publishing a highly regarded book on what he called the country’s metallic wealth in 1854. Long intrigued by California, where a sister had settled, Whitney presumably wrote the bill that appointed him state geologist. And so dedicated was he to surveying California land that even when the state ran out of cash, he continued to work without pay and took out personal loans to keep going. After the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had recently resigned as head of the Sanitary Commission, was stymied in his plans for New York City’s Central Park, he went out to California to manage the Mariposa mines and make a little money. As chairman of the commission in charge of Yosemite and the Big Trees, he was able to loan Whitney twelve mules so that he could extend his geological survey into the valley.
Whitney took Carleton Watkins with him. In 1869, to “give satisfaction to those who are themselves unable to visit the scenes which they represent,” Whitney and Watkins together produced the handsome Yosemite Book: A Description of the Yosemite Valley and the Adjacent Region of the Sierra Nevada, and of the Big Trees of California, illustrated by maps and twenty-four of Watkins’s panoramic photographs. The result was dramatic, visually precise, spellbinding. Whitney also understood the value of publicity. He named a mountain after Watkins, and as for the trees, they too were named: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Thomas Starr King, and General Sherman. For Whitney hoped that the photographs would help create a passion for American art and the vastness of the American landscape, which was not just mammoth in the size of its trees, mountains, and deserts but also, more implicitly, gigantic in opportunities for greatness.
Watkins had arrived in San Francisco in 1851, long before photographers such as Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan, who had gone west after the war as if fleeing the corpse-studded battlefields they’d painstakingly photographed. But all of them were part of the national postwar need to celebrate a transnational America. They were converting the anguish of war and Reconstruction into something that symbolized hope, unity, and progress—a renewed country. Gardner did so by tying his fortunes to the railroad, photographing the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and in 1867 he published an album of more than a hundred photos, Across the Continent with the Kansas Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division. One of Gardner’s photographs, aptly called “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (after the mural by Emanuel Leutze, which had been painted during the war and was hanging in the Capitol), showed railroad workers laying track for the line and standing against an open sky. That empty foreground, symbolizing promise, is not far from the locomotive, which will bring them to a new age.
Images of the West also filled the pages of the colorful new dime novels published by Erastus Beadle and the travelogue of the newspaper editor Samuel Bowles, who recounted his trip West in The Switzerland of America: A Summer Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado. Traveling in style in the new Pullman cars hired for the occasion, he and fellow Liberal Republicans could sit and smoke in their parlor and then enjoy a good meal in
the dining room before retiring comfortably for the night. During the day, they watched the waving cornfields, and in makeshift towns of tents and shanties, such as the one called “Hell on Wheels,” they could see bustling desperadoes, outcasts, immigrants, and speculators. This was a brand-new world, raw, and with its own problems, one of them (the biggest) being the indigenous people already living there. Learning that the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux were raiding the makeshift towns, Bowles assumed nonchalance. “The earth is the Lord’s; it is given by Him to the Saints for its improvement and development,” he told his readers, “and we are the Saints. . . . Let us hesitate no longer to avow it and act it to the Indian. Let us say to him, you are our ward, our child, the victim of our destiny, ours to displace, ours to protect. We want your hunting-grounds to dig gold from, to raise grain on, and you must ‘move on.’ ” Bowles’s book was a best seller.
The great showman P. T. Barnum, an expert in marketing the unknown and the exotic, also knew where the next nickel lay. Since the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, men and women were pouring into the West, Barnum included. In September 1872 he rode out to Kansas by railroad for a grand buffalo hunt. His sponsor was none other than the yellow-haired, dashing Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who was the commanding officer at Fort Hays, on the Smoky Hill River in Kansas. “He received us like princes,” Barnum later recollected. The gallant Custer supplied Barnum and his party with horses, guns, and fifty men from his 7th Cavalry Regiment. Barnum managed to kill at least two buffalo among the twenty or so that were slaughtered by his party on the open plain. They might have killed even more, he admitted, “had we not considered it wanton butchery.”
ALMOST A DECADE before Barnum went west to shoot buffalo, another eccentric Yankee, named Clarence King, neared the Platte River not far from Fort Kearny in Nebraska and hired a local settler to ride with him in the direction of a large herd not far away. It was the summer of 1863, and King, a young scientist, was hunting for meat. After two weeks of hard travel, King and his classmate from Yale, James Terry Gardiner, wanted to eat something more appetizing than beans and corn bread.
King rode after a bull for about two miles until, close enough, he raised his Colt revolver, took aim, and fired, and though his aim was pretty good, he only hit the bull near the shoulder. The bull swerved, lowered his head, and charged at the terrified King, smashing into King’s horse, which fell on top of King’s leg. Somersaulting over the downed horse and rider, the buffalo then lay dead. King killed his injured horse with a single bullet to the head, but the herd of which the young bull was a part now charged toward him. The earth rumbled under the hooves of the stampeding buffalo while he lay as still as possible. The buffalo stormed past. King was a lucky man, said the plainsman who found him.
King did seem to live a charmed life. After the army doctor at the fort treated his leg, he was able to rejoin Gardiner, and the two youths continued on their journey to California. Like many travelers to the golden land, the twenty-one-year-old King was in search of something ineffable, something different from politics and certainly different from war, and something that might be found in nature, which to him meant the West. “It must have been a sense of the coming development of this continent,” Gardiner later wrote, “and a desire to be part of it that led him to plan, when we were twenty-one, our trip to the West across the Plains.”
King was not a settler. Nor was he, at the time, a gold digger. He was a trained scientist with a passion for the writings of John Ruskin and a weakness for mountain climbing and the study of rocks. Standing about five foot six, he was thickly built, athletic, and good-looking. His complexion was ruddy, his hair light. He was keen and genial, and he possessed a talent for drawing people to him and keeping them close although he revealed very little about himself. Henry Adams, who met him in 1871, adored him. John Hay, once Lincoln’s secretary and a future secretary of state, thought King simply the “best and brightest man of his generation.”
Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1842, King was the son of an affluent China trader who had died when King was just six; his mother, a teenage bride, eventually remarried but for the rest of her life depended on Clarence for emotional and material support, which he unstintingly provided. In 1860, just before the start of the war, King had entered the fairly new Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and in just two years had graduated from its three-year program. One of his biographers said that King had subsequently dodged the war, but it’s also true that he’d been profoundly influenced by his abolitionist grandmother, a pacifist. In any event, King told a friend that he could not bring himself to killing, buffaloes excepted.
After leaving Yale, King briefly attended Louis Agassiz’s lectures in glaciology at Harvard. No wonder: the foremost zoologist and geologist of his time, a world expert on fossil fishes, this Swiss-born naturalist had mapped out the Ice Age and scaled the Jungfrau before arriving in America in 1846 to deliver the prestigious Lowell Lectures in Boston. He was then appointed to Harvard’s new Lawrence Scientific School, funded by the textile industrialist Abbott Lawrence. Beloved as a transcendentalist who could find God in every pebble, Agassiz told his eager students that “facts are stupid things unless brought in conjunction with some general law.” A theatrical and popular lecturer, part serious scientist and, to his detractors, part plagiarizing confidence man, the ambidextrous Agassiz entertained his standing-room-only audiences with tales of the wonders of the natural world, while writing with both hands on the chalkboard or pulling a little specimen out of his pocket. The slightly dyspeptic chronicler of New England, Van Wyck Brooks, would call Agassiz the Johnny Appleseed of American science.
Broad and square, his hands large, his dark chestnut hair falling back from his forehead but long on the sides and the back, Agassiz was debonair, charismatic, irresistible. A prolific writer, he was also a Barnum-like collector of the zoological specimens that became the basis of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which he helped fund with the proceeds of the school for young women run in his Cambridge home by Elizabeth Cabot Cary, his second wife, his first having died of tuberculosis shortly after she left him. (Elizabeth Agassiz’s school was a forerunner of the Harvard Annex, which became Radcliffe; Elizabeth Agassiz was its first president.)
By the time King went to hear him lecture, however, Agassiz had become a rather dogmatic proponent of inferior and superior races. Caucasians were decidedly superior; “the brain of the Negro,” he said, “is that of the imperfect brain of a 7 month’s infant in the womb of a White.” Agassiz’s confirmed prejudice did not endear him to abolitionists (whom he considered misguided philanthropists); they accused him of supporting slavery. (After Fort Sumter had been fired upon, Agassiz wept. “They will Mexicanize the country,” he cried. “They” were the abolitionists, who were bound to destroy “our civilization” with the “effeminate progeny of mixed races, half indian, half negro, sprinkled with white blood. . . . I shudder at the consequences.”) Agassiz’s racial theories were bound to comfort slaveholders, Charles Darwin noted.
Agassiz was a frank and unqualified disbeliever in Darwin’s theories of evolution, which to him ranged much too far from the handiwork of God. To Agassiz, species did not mutate or adapt or change, not ever; every now and then, a catastrophe extinguished life as it then existed, which God replaced with a new and better version. Thus the naturalist’s job was but to uncover what was already there. Agassiz’s student William James (the brother of Henry, Wilkie, Robertson, and Alice) admired Agassiz but said he was also a great deal of claptrap.
No doubt Agassiz greatly influenced King. Self-assured, self-regarding, stubborn, larger than life, and with unbounded enthusiasm, Agassiz planned enormous works, monuments, collections; he loved an audience, he loved good living, he relished and cultivated his celebrity. So would King. Science could be grand, it could be made popular, and the scientist could be an athletic, even heroic, man of the world, a friend, as Agassiz was, of both Emerson and fossil fishes.
As for Darwinism, while extreme, it was not to be completely ignored by men such as King, who hoped to bridge the widening gulf between empirical science and faith that had been pried open by On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, when King was seventeen.
Like many men of his generation, King hoped to yoke his belief in God to his belief in science and rid science of the pessimistic implications of Darwinian thought, particularly as articulated by Darwin’s defender, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, the man known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” who coined the term “agnostic” and during a well-publicized debate on evolution said, “I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.” King hoped to replace Huxley’s more materialist world of chance by searching for the underlying laws of nature. And what better place than the grand West to look for the spiritual in the empirical? Of course, the romance of the wide-open West had also motivated King’s journey. “Better far that he should be a cowboy, with the Bible and Shakespeare in his saddle-bags, the constellations his tent, the horse his brother, than to have life, originality, and the bounding spirit of youthful imagination stamped out of him,” he rhapsodized in later years. So when one of his Yale professors read aloud a letter from William Brewer, the field director of the California Geological Survey, in which Brewer fervently described Mount Shasta, “that settled it,” King said: he was going to California.
After their long cross-country trek, King and Gardiner had boarded a paddleboat chugging from Sacramento down the Sacramento River toward San Francisco when King took notice of a sunburned fellow wearing an old felt hat, a gray flannel shirt, and a heavy revolver belt. King guessed that the man was Brewer, and it was. King introduced himself, and after they talked together, Brewer was so impressed with King that once in San Francisco he introduced King to Josiah Whitney. So irresistible, apparently, were King’s intelligence, ebullience, eagerness to work, and scientific background and contacts—even though King’s letters of introduction, along with his clothes, had gone up in smoke in a fire near Virginia City, where he’d stayed en route—Brewer and Whitney invited King to join the Survey as an unpaid volunteer. (Gardiner worked for the U.S. Engineer Corps until he too joined the California Geological Survey as assistant topographer.)
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