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4. A Great Engine of Research
- University of Iowa Press
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4. A Great Engine of Research His first work under the present Survey, the Lake Bonneville monograph, still retains its place as the premier among the more than 1,300 scientific and technical volumes of the United States Geological Survey. -George Otis Smith I have the honor to request, for Mr. Russell's use, a revolving chair . .. -Grove Karl Gilbert The Division of the Great Basin Its first director, Clarence King, fielded the U.S. Geological Survey with the same vigor that, at age twenty-five, he had applied to the Exploration of the 40th Parallel. Graduate of Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, celebrated mountaineer and author, explorer, geologist , and gifted raconteur, King seemed an ideal candidate for the directorship . The exceptional quality of his 40th parallel reports had made good his claim "to give to this work a finish which will place it on an equal footing with the best European publications, and those few which have redeemed the wavering reputation of our American investigators/' Through them, as William Goetzmann has remarked, he "incorporated the West into the realm of academic science." 1 King proposed to extend the same standards to the national survey -as a scientific institution, it would be placed on a par with the new scientific and technological schools mushrooming across the country on the German university model. He hired some of the seasoned professionals he had known on the 40th parallel survey and retained most of the chief geologists who were working on the separate federal surveys; in fact, as in Gilbert's case, they persisted in their old projects. The Division of the Great Basin 109 In many ways the old survey patterns endured, but they lacked the competition which had marred them for a decade. King carved the West up into divisions, each with a chief geologist and his staff. In effect, the national organization sponsored four small surveys with the Washington office acting as a disbursing agent and a congressionalliaison . While King seemed only to project his past field experience into the novel circumstances he found in 1879, he had plenty of new ideas too: he wanted to rationalize and upgrade the whole enterprise. This meant advanced scientific research and its almost inevitable political companion, resource conservation. In contrast to every other "intelligent nation," King wrote, "today no one knows, with the slightest approach to accurac)', the status of the mineral industr)', either technicall)', as regards the progress and development making in methods, or statisticall)', as regards the sources, amounts, and valuations of the various productions." "The epoch of the pioneer is practically passed," he warned; the real problem of the West was "industrial," to bring the population into "equilibrium with local resources." To this end, he concluded that "the intention of Congress was to begin a rigid scientific classification of lands of the national domain" and "to produce a series of land maps" which could serve Congress and the populace as a basis for rational decisions.2 But what really fascinated King was mountains. He had made his reputation, both public and scientific, by climbing, celebrating, and explaining them. The romantic and the scientist in him knotted together in his dramatic account of a first ascent of a High Sierra peak. Ringing his hammer on the topmost rock, before surrendering to the sublimity of its panorama, he proclaimed it Mount Tyndall, after the British physicist. Such exploits, moreover, combined with a prodigious social charm: King moved in clubs as brilliantly as he did along the Sierra crest line. In 1871, he scrambled to the summit of the highest peak in the range and the tallest in the continental United States. The man who scaled Mount Whitney and who subsequently assumed the directorship of the USGS appeared to such contemporaries as Henry Adams to occupy the summit of a civilization.3 Naturally the problems in geology that most fascinated King were those connected with mountains-orogeny and ore formation. While on the summit he might quote Ruskin, in the mine shaft he turned to physics and chemistry. Metallurgy, especiall)', was a source of technical information. As a consequence, he established a chemical laboratory at Denver and another-many of whose instruments he financed out of his own pocket-in New Haven. He hired 110 A GREAT ENGINE OF RESEARCH Carl Barns, a recent Ph.D. from Wiirzburg, and William Hallock, from Columbia, to staff the latter and to conduct experiments on the geophysical properties of rocks. In his traverse of the Great...