At Pyramid Lake

Six: Pyramid Lake Observed

147 s i x � � Add to the survivors, squatters, and sportsmen at Pyramid Lake the sojourners —visitors who do not remain long, but who are more than casual tourists on fishing or camping trips. Whether they are drawn back to the lake or visit only once, the sojourners preserve their impressions in words and pictures. Their purpose may be capricious or sagacious. Sojourners are often scientists , artists, or writers, or some combination of these. It may seem odd that it took twenty-three years for the federal government to follow up on the observation of the lake by Frémont in 1844, until we remember that the federal government first had to fight a war against Mexico in order to claim the land on which the lake was located and then fight a civil war to determine , in part, how the newly acquired land would be settled. Pyramid Lake was just far enough off the overland gold rush routes and the immigrant trails to be bypassed in the 1850s. But the Comstock silver mining rush of 1859 hastened the end of the lake’s privacy. Pyramid Lake was espied, beheld, and scrutinized, observation’s menacing synonyms. The result was usually useful knowledge, sometimes even deep understanding. It took a century, but the lake became a place in the American consciousness. The process began with a photograph. timothy o’sullivan In 1867, twenty-three years after Frémont’s arrival at the lake, the flamboyant twenty-five-year-old geologist Clarence King began a survey of the fortieth parallel . Whether King knew that Frémont’s pyramid is just over a mile south of that line of latitude is unknown, but the pyramid came to be a kind of benchmark , a point from which both physical and psychological landscapes could be mapped. What King, whom Henry Adams considered his best friend, would have thought about the pyramid if he had seen it can be only speculation, but a passage in his 1872 book, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, provides a clue. Standing on the eastern slope of Mount Whitney, above Owens Lake, King praised the sublime snow-covered peaks behind him, but: Pyramid Lake Observed 148 a t p y r a m i d l a k e Upon the other hand, reaching out to horizons faint and remote, lay plains clouded with the ashen hues of death; stark, wind-swept floors of white, and hillranges , rigidly formal, monotonously low, all lying under an unfeeling brilliance of light, which for all its strange, unclouded clearness, has yet a vague half-darkness , a suggestion of black and shade more truly pathetic than fading twilight. No greenness soothes, no shadow cools the glare. Owen’s [sic] Lake, an oval of acrid water, lies dense blue upon the brown sage-plain, looking like a plate of hot metal. Traced in ancient beach-lines, here and there upon hill and plain, relics of ancient lakeshore outline the memory of a cooler past,—a period of life and verdure when the stony chains were green islands among basins of wide, watery expanse. . . . [L]ooking from this summit with all desire to see everything, the one overmastering feeling is desolation, desolation! Desolation? Maybe King glimpsed the future. The environmental similarities between Owens Lake, “a plate of hot metal” to King, and Pyramid Lake, “a sea of molten silver” to an anonymous reporter in 1860, are striking. Within sixty years, Owens was dust and Pyramid Lake was sinking. King may have confused topographic elevation with mental loftiness, but for him altitude mattered; water did not. To secure his place in history, King was compelled to climb the peaks that Frémont had hurried past. The fortieth parallel survey had been conceived by King as a civilian enterprise on the scale of the Lewis and Clark expedition, but it was financed by the secretary of war. Clearly, the work King planned—a topographical , geological, biological, and ornithological survey of the Great Basin from the Sierra Nevada to the Wasatch in Utah—benefited both military and civilian interests. In July 1867 King set up a base camp at Glendale, southeast of what would become Reno. Directing members of his party to survey in all directions, he moved down the Truckee, camping near Wadsworth and sending a geologist, an ornithologist, and the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan on to Pyramid Lake, where O’Sullivan took photographs of some of the Paiutes living there (see the first figure in chapter 1) and...