by David Baron
The women had landed not just in the West but in a cauldron of gender politics. As a Denver correspondent for the New York Sun remarked of the all-female expedition: “This party adds peculiar interest to the work of observing this eclipse, for it is here that woman is making a heroic struggle for equal rights.”
THE PREVIOUS AUTUMN, just a year after achieving statehood, Colorado had considered a radical proposal, something not yet done by any state (although it had been done by the territories of Wyoming and Utah)—granting women the right to vote. The legislature had put the question of female suffrage on the ballot, sparking a fierce battle that attracted national attention. Among the notables who barnstormed Colorado by stagecoach, train, and burro was the indefatigable Susan B. Anthony—a close ally of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and long a leader of women’s rights campaigns—who visited mining camps and saloons in an effort to persuade the state’s men to support the measure. She argued that denying women the vote was un-American, amounting to taxation without representation. Conservative clergy preached the opposing side, claiming that extending this right to women would ruin the family and weaken society. “How absurd and revolting to think of a woman leaving her household duties and abandoning her family to go to the polls, to attend political meetings, to suppose that she can be elected for sheriff or constable!” proclaimed the Right Reverend Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, Denver’s first Roman Catholic bishop, a man greatly respected for bringing churches, schools, hospitals, and religion to the frontier. “But what sort of woman are the leaders of these pretended Woman’s Rights?” he asked rhetorically from the pulpit. “Some old maids disappointed in love; wives of what are called hen-pecked husbands; women separated from their husbands, or divorced by man of a sacred obligation imposed by Almighty God.” The bishop and his ilk predictably won the day—the measure failed by a two-to-one margin—but proponents did not give up. Instead, they braced for a protracted fight. “We must ‘keep pegging away,’ ” declared the president of the Colorado Woman Suffrage Association, Dr. Alida C. Avery.
Avery, the daughter of a New York abolitionist, had long emulated her father’s social activism, and she was an old colleague of Maria Mitchell. At the founding of Vassar Female College, when Mitchell was hired to teach astronomy, Avery came on board as the school’s resident doctor and professor of physiology and hygiene. Avery could be stern—students feeling poorly were said to “fear the physician more than the impending illness”—but she and Mitchell became allies, fighting side by side for women’s rights. Together, they denounced Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s book that claimed higher education was turning American girls sickly and sexless. (“I grind my teeth in despair over it,” Avery wrote.) Together, they served in the leadership of the Woman’s Congress. And, together, they pressed Vassar’s board of trustees to provide equal pay to male and female faculty, even threatening to quit over the matter. Avery did quit, and, in 1874, relocated to Denver, a far remove from the college’s internecine politics. She opened a private medical practice and soon earned a sizeable income—ten thousand dollars a year, by one account—as well as a solid reputation. In 1879, Avery would be called upon to treat Josephine Meeker, daughter of the slain Indian agent Nathan Meeker, after the young woman’s release by Ute captors.
Despite moving to Colorado, Avery remained in close touch with her friend at Vassar. She and Mitchell corresponded by mail and saw each other occasionally at women’s rights meetings. On one of Avery’s visits to the East, Mitchell mentioned the upcoming eclipse and her desire to observe it. Trying not to be presumptuous, Mitchell asked her friend, “Have you a bit of land behind your house in Denver where I could put up a small telescope?” Avery’s reply: “Six hundred miles.” (Denver’s backyard stretched six hundred miles across the open plains to the Missouri River.)
Avery’s personal patch of land was considerably smaller. She lived in a gracious two-story home surrounded by a rose garden, a grape arbor, apple trees, and elms at the corner of Twentieth and Champa Streets, where horse-drawn streetcars rattled past. As Denver’s prosperous lady physician, she often hosted female intellectuals. A frequent visitor was Helen Hunt Jackson, a much-celebrated Colorado essayist and poet—and a childhood friend of Emily Dickinson—who would soon make her cause the rights of Native Americans. (Jackson’s novel Ramona would open America’s eyes to the maltreatment of Indians much as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had awakened the nation to the cruelties of slavery.) Susan B. Anthony, an activist of a different sort, spent three weeks in Avery’s guest room after her pro-suffrage speaking tour of Colorado in 1877. Anthony admired the home’s immaculate Victorian decoration, with china, silver, cut glass, and all manner of vases filled with fresh flowers. “[I]t is just lovely,” she wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton during her relaxing stay. “I have it charmingly free & easy.” The setting inspired Anthony to write a speech called “Homes of Single Women,” which praised the elegant residences of America’s new class of unmarried female professionals.
DR AVERY’S RESIDENCE 20TH ST. DENVER, COL.
Avery now hosted the Vassar eclipse party, and she undoubtedly hoped that her new guests would also serve a political purpose, to show the people of Colorado that women’s-rights women could be intelligent, strong, and—bowing to the conceits of the day—feminine, contrary to the portrayals by Bishop Machebeuf and Dr. Clarke. Her new houseguests, however, would not find their stay as comfortable as Susan B. Anthony’s had been.
Maria Mitchell, before departing Boston, had packed two telescopes. To prepare them for the journey, she had removed the lenses from the tubes and carefully placed everything in her luggage. But once she reached Denver, she discovered that just the trunk containing one telescope tube had arrived with her; the luggage containing the other tube and the lenses had gone astray. The Vassar women spent desperate hours at the Denver & Rio Grande Railway depot, nine blocks from Avery’s house, berating agents and sending telegrams, as they attempted to locate their baggage. With just a few days until the eclipse, they frantically explored whether anyone in Denver had a telescope for sale or for lease.
The moon—an ever-shrinking crescent in the dawn sky—orbited the earth at more than two thousand miles per hour as it inexorably headed toward its rendezvous with the sun. Mitchell’s bags, however, sat immobile 120 miles to the south, in Pueblo, where they had become prisoners of the railroad war, putting the Vassar expedition’s success—both scientific and political—in jeopardy.
CHAPTER 12
NATURE’S EDITOR
JULY 23–28, 1878—
Wyoming Territory
WHILE MARIA MITCHELL SEARCHED FOR HER WAYWARD TELESCOPE parts, the other scientific parties were already rehearsing for the big event. Conducting drills was considered essential to the success of an eclipse expedition, and the Americans were wise to heed the advice of Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, C. Piazzi Smyth. “So many circumstances . . . have to be noted, observed, and measured, within a few seconds,” he wrote, “that it is necessary to adopt some systematic division of labour amongst a number of observers, and for each to be previously practised and expert in his particular part.”
In Wyoming, practice runs were underway at the three observation posts along the line of the Union Pacific Railroad. The farthest west of the camps was at Creston, the remote rail stop in the Great Divide Basin, where William Harkness presided. One of the more senior scientists at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Harkness possessed deep experience with astronomical expeditions, having observed the total solar eclipses of 1869 in Iowa and 1870 in Sicily, and having led a U.S. government party to Tasmania for the 1874 transit of Venus. Now, in Wyoming, he was leading an expedition that comprised two Naval Observatory assistants and several civilians, including Otis H. Robinson, a mathematics professor at the University of Rochester, and Alvan G. Clark, from Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridge, Massachusetts, America’s foremost manufacturer of optical instruments. (The Clarks made telescopes for many of the nation’s top astronomers,
including Maria Mitchell, and had crafted the U.S. Naval Observatory’s enormous Great Equatorial.) Another observer from Cambridge, though not officially a member of Harkness’s party, was also at Creston. Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, an astronomical artist who worked for a time at the Harvard College Observatory, was known for his stylized illustrations of the rings of Saturn, the cloud bands of Jupiter, the Orion Nebula. His pastels drew praise at the Centennial Exhibition—“[T]heir artistic execution is excellent,” wrote James Craig Watson and the judges of Group 25—though today Trouvelot evokes scorn for a different aspect of his professional life. He dabbled in entomology and, while pursuing an ill-advised scheme to breed silkworms, kept some exotic caterpillars netted in his backyard. As he later told Alvan Clark, a gale blew the netting away, scattering the insects. Those caterpillars were gypsy moth larvae, which multiplied into a massive, hungry army that began munching its way across forests of the Northeast, eventually defoliating untold thousands of acres despite costly and futile eradication campaigns. The scale of destruction, constituting one of the most devastating insect invasions in North American history, would not be evident, however, until long after the eclipse of 1878.
At Creston, life for Trouvelot, Clark, and the others hewed to a daily routine. The scientists, who slept in the railroad postal car that had brought the telescopes from Washington, emerged one by one at 6:30 A.M. to wash up at a tin basin using water drawn from a whiskey barrel. Meanwhile, a soldier from Fort Steele cooked the morning meal. “Gentlemen, breakfast is ready,” came the call at seven, triggering a rush to the mess tent for coffee, tea, cold beans, butter cakes, and hard biscuits. By seven-thirty, it was time for work.
Among the first tasks was to recheck the station’s latitude and longitude. Establishing one’s precise location was critical to the usefulness of many eclipse observations; for instance, it enabled one to compare the predicted path of the moon’s shadow to the actual path, and thereby to correct calculations of the moon’s orbit. Harkness took out his sextant, a handheld contrivance used for celestial navigation. It consisted of a wedge-shaped frame—contoured like a generous slice of pie—with a small telescope and a couple of mirrors attached near the pointed end, on top. Along the curved bottom—where the pie crust would be—hung a graduated arc, like a protractor. By sighting through the scope and adjusting the mirrors, Harkness could precisely measure the height of the sun in the sky. At sea, navigators did this by taking readings off the horizon. On land, at Creston, Harkness employed an artificial horizon, a small basin of mercury, under glass, that gravity shaped into a perfectly horizontal reflective surface. By tracking the growing height of the rising sun, Harkness was able—with the aid of tables contained in Simon Newcomb’s Nautical Almanac—to reset the team’s clocks according to Creston’s local time. (In 1878, time zones did not yet exist, and each city ran by its own unique time, set by the sun and stars. The official time in Washington, for instance, lagged one minute, thirty-two seconds behind that of Baltimore.) Around noon Creston time, as the sun reached its zenith, Harkness took more readings with his sextant. He used them to calculate the station’s latitude: 41 degrees, 43 minutes, 34 seconds north of the equator.
U.S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY ECLIPSE CAMP, CRESTON, WYOMING TERRITORY.
Finding longitude—one’s distance east or west on the globe—was a different matter. It required comparing one’s local time to that of a distant location whose coordinates were already established. The earth turns one degree every four minutes, so the difference in time between two places can quickly be converted into the degrees of longitude separating them. In an earlier era, this exercise would have required bringing to Creston a rugged clock that could carry the time from home without varying its rate even after weeks of travel, but by the 1870s, a much easier method could be employed. Tiny Creston had a telegraph station, and at pre-established intervals throughout the day, Harkness and his team received time signals down the wire from observatories in Utah, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. With these signals, the men fixed their longitude: 2 hours, 2 minutes, 40.5 seconds west of the center of the dome at the U.S. Naval Observatory on the left bank of the Potomac.
The scientists withdrew the canvas roof from the crude observatory and rehearsed the activities they would perform during the eclipse. Alvan Clark went through the steps required for photographing the corona—inserting a plate into his camera, exposing it for a fixed period of from three to sixty seconds, then promptly removing it and inserting a new plate. Otis Robinson tested his polariscope, which divided light rays into those oscillating up-down versus left-right, potentially offering clues to whether the corona shone by its own light or merely reflected light from the sun. Harkness practiced using his spectroscope with a fluorescent eyepiece (containing uranium) that enabled him to see the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, which he hoped would reveal new information on the chemical composition of the corona and prominences. After each rehearsal, the men rehearsed again, to make sure they could perform every step efficiently in the 176 seconds that totality would last at Creston. Other than a break for lunch at one o’clock, another for supper at six, and an evening stroll, the men worked until ten. Then they reentered the postal car to doze in the cool night air, on buffalo-robe mattresses beneath army blankets, roused briefly each night by the westbound mail train that thundered past at 2:00 A.M.
FOURTEEN MILES TO THE EAST, a similar routine unfolded at the government eclipse camp overseen by Simon Newcomb. It too sat near a remote rail stop that had no stores, no hotel, no town—just a tiny depot and a water tank for refilling the steam locomotives—and was surrounded by “a barren wilderness of sand, where nothing grows but some low shrubbery,” as Newcomb described it in a letter home. “We sink most ankle deep at every step.” The wife of the stationmaster cooked meals, but the scientists here, unlike at Creston, did not enjoy the relative luxury of a railroad car to serve as a dormitory. Instead, they slept in tents, pitched in a sheltered nook beside the tracks. A sage-covered dune to the south and west helped block the prevailing winds, which often blew ferociously. Though barely a dot on a map, the rail stop had a name: Separation, because it was here that surveyors plotting the transcontinental railroad parted ways.
Still farther east, at Rawlins, Edison and his companions maintained an easier existence, living at the Railroad Hotel and working just across the tracks at the borrowed residence of Union Pacific Master Mechanic Robert Galbraith. As head of the party, Henry Draper selected the site for the observatory. He was concerned about the wind, so he had carpenter William Daley build the structure in the lee of Galbraith’s house. The rough building, sixteen feet long, included a darkroom (supplied with water from a hydrant) and space for various telescopes, spectroscopes, and polariscopes. The tasimeter, given its sensitivity to extraneous sources of heat, required a separate structure. For this purpose, Edison retrofitted the Galbraiths’ chicken coop.
The New York Herald’s Edwin Marshall Fox followed the work closely. “The preparations for observing the forthcoming total eclipse of the sun from this point are almost completed. To-day the last nail was driven in the temporary structure of pine boards which is to serve as an observatory,” he described in a dispatch on Tuesday, July 23. “All [the instruments] are now in readiness, and several preliminary experiments have demonstrated that transportation has not injured them. The main point sought to be determined by Professor Draper is whether the corona or halo surrounding the sun’s disk is only a glowing gas, or whether it contains, in addition, solid or liquid particles that reflect light from the sun to the earth.” Fox wrote that the corona (actually, he meant a layer just below it, called the chromosphere) was thought to consist of hydrogen “together with, in a minor degree, some unknown substance, which to this day continues a mystery. This unknown material is designated by the term ‘helium.’ ”
The following day, the Draper party took time out for an excursion. The team hopped a train to Newcomb’s camp, at Separation. While the astronomers
undoubtedly discussed equipment, preparations, and theories, Edison pursued other activities. He carried his new .44-caliber Winchester rifle and hoped to indulge in a little hunting. Antelope were abundant in the area, but they kept their distance and proved impossible to hit, given their alertness and speed. So Edison introduced himself to the local telegrapher, and after reminiscing about his own days as a lightning jerker and inquiring about shared acquaintances, he asked if there was other game in the vicinity, perhaps jackrabbits. “Oh, yes, plenty of them,” the man said, then shaded his eyes with his hand and scanned for a long-eared hare among the brush and cacti. The animals could be difficult to spot, as their drab coloration blended with the bleak, rocky terrain. Eventually he said, “There’s one, off there.”
Edison unslung his rifle, carefully aimed, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet flew, but the jackrabbit remained immobile. The great inventor crept forward, reloaded, and fired again. Still, the animal sat fixed, failing even to blink. Frustrated, Edison continued to stalk his quarry. After shooting several more rounds, to suppressed laughter from onlookers at the station, he was near enough to identify the source of his trouble. The jackrabbit was inanimate, a stuffed mount that stared with glass eyes. It turned out that the local telegraph operator was also a taxidermist. He had been forewarned that Edison was on his way in search of game and placed the stuffed jackrabbit in the sage as a prank.