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Sources William Morris Davis' massive memoir of Gilbert is still the largest single repository of basic Gilbert materials. Unfortunatel)j Davis did not have future generations of scholars in mind when he wrote it; he considered that his biography would be the last. In addition to the collections gathered by W. C. Mendenhall, Davis tool< considerable pains to gather his own materials prior to writing the memoir, but he tool< few pains to identify or save his sources. As a result, the Gilbert papers he collected have scattered, and it is almost impossible to separate many of Davis' original passages from those he quotes by paraphrase. Whenever I had recovered the original document and compared it to Davis' quotation or paraphrase, however, I discovered that Davis had quoted accurately. Hence, I had few misgivings about using Davis as a source for Gilbert anecdotes. Some of the correspondence relating to the development of the Davis memoir is housed in the archives of the National Academy of Sciences. Of the papers which Davis gathered, those I have been able to recover belong in three groups. One cache is in the hands of the family of Gilbert's grandson, Karl Gilbert Palmer. I have referred to these documents as the Palmer Collection. They include primarily papers dealing with the very early and the very late years of GK's life, with some items on his tour of duty with the Wheeler Survey. The second cache belongs to Donald Coates, and I have referred to it as the Coates Collection. It includes more than two hundred letters, mostly to Gilbert's son, Arch, spanning about a five-year period, 1910 through 1914. Arch had originally collected the correspondence for Davis, and some of his typed explanations of events mentioned in the letters are still paper-clipped to them. A third source of Gilbert manuscripts is contained in the U.S. Geological Survey Field Records at the Denver, Colorado, office. The papers include 292 Sources letters between Gilbert and both Joseph Barrell and Bailey Willis. There are also unpublished manuscripts on ripple marks and on the geothermal gradient as well as Gilbert's draft of Studies of BasinRange Structure. Other primary sources are Gilbert's field notebool

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