Game Faces: Five Early American Champions and the Sports They Changed

2. Fanny Bullock Workman: Mountaineering as Science and News

Mountaineering as Science and News Fanny Bullock Workman 30 At a December 1907 meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (rgs) in London, Dr. William Hunter Workman presented a talk on a climb he had taken with his wife into the Nun Kun area of the Himalayas. Having previously toured numerous countries with her on bicycles and recently completed their fifth Himalayan expedition, he was honored to be addressing this venerable organization, which dated back to 1830 and included among its membership famous adventurers like Charles Darwin, Richard Francis Burton, and David Livingstone. As Americans the Workmans knew that rgs recognition for their achievements would be dif- ficult to obtain, and they had been actively currying it for several years. In his introduction to this address, Sir George D. Taubman Goldie, the current president, observed that to date only three climbers—Workman, his wife, and another rgs member in attendance — had reached elevations beyond 23,000 feet (7,000 meters). “I shall not enter into the dif- ficult question as to what traveler has ascended the greatest height above sea level,” he proclaimed. “But I will remind you that all these explorers are not merely trying how high they can climb. Careful observations are taken of glaciation (Previous page) 7. Fanny Bullock Workman with climbing gear. (Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-70538) fanny bullock workman 31 and in other scientific directions, so that their ascents have real scientific value.”1 Extending his efforts to promote a genial atmosphere, Goldie humorously glossed the conspicuous absence of Fanny Workman by explaining that she was away in Germany doing “something more arduous than climbing 23,000 feet”—giving thirty lectures in thirty-seven days.2 The rgs’s policy of excluding women from membership and allowing them only as invited guests sent Fanny elsewhere to talk about her mountaineering successes. Six years later, the year she completed her seventh and final trip into the Himalayas , the rgs finally eliminated its barrier against women and included her in the first group of women to be awarded membership. These expeditions affirmed Fanny’s ambition and daring , but it was her numerous publications and their attentiveness to “glaciation” and “other scientific directions” that earned her the attention and respect of the rgs. Some members would fault her for flaunting of her limited scienti fic knowledge and her attacks on the inaccuracies of rivals, but she consciously and willfully did so in order to convince the organization of her close adherence to its standards for achievement. President Goldie, as head of this eminent gentleman ’s club, preferred to stand up for the cause of science and to avoid petty technicalities like which climber actually attained the highest elevation. Fanny, on the other hand, was fiercely competitive and intent on records, and she believed that the best way to achieve satisfactory recognition was to treat the rgs as the foremost authority, cue her efforts to its expectations, and win approval. English enthusiasm for mountaineering was one reason that the rgs loomed so large in the sport. Even more fanny bullock workman 32 important was the society’s longstanding commitment to exploring and mapping the unknown. As originally judged by this standard, mountain climbing was vigorous recreation. Several centuries of evolving esthetics had transformed the prevailing view of mountains from that of diabolic wastes to sublime wonders, but most converts to this alternative view preferred admiring them to scaling them. However, the popularity of summer climbs in the Alps among Englishmen led to Edward Whymper’s first summiting of the Matterhorn in 1865, an event that received widespread attention because three members of his party fell to their deaths on the trip down. Over the years that followed, this costly triumph spurred climbers to try more-menacing peaks and new routes up ones that had already been conquered. As the untracked expanses of jungle, desert, and tundra diminished, high peaks in ever more remote locations suddenly loomed larger and more challenging. Two presidential reports in the rgs’s Geographical Journal reveal how these developments altered its view of mountaineering. The first, from 1893, catalogs a broad array of countries with “geographical problems that remain to be solved.” Although this report mentions the mountain ranges of New Zealand, the Andes, and the Himalayas and even remarks that “a glorious field is open to the mountaineer,” its author clearly does not consider the conquest of peaks...