_My Experiments With_
Volcanoes
[Illustration: THOMAS A. JAGGAR
_January 24, 1871--January 17, 1953_]
_My Experiments With_
Volcanoes
THOMAS A. JAGGAR
“_Through faith we understand
That the worlds were formed
By the word of God,
So that things which are seen
Were not made of things which do appear._”
MCMLVI
HAWAIIAN VOLCANO RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
HONOLULU
Copyright, 1956, by the
Hawaiian Volcano Research Association
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE COMMERCIAL PRINTING DIVISION OF THE
ADVERTISER PUBLISHING CO., LTD., HONOLULU
_Thomas Augustus Jaggar, Jr._
_January 24, 1871_
_January 17, 1953_
_It is the wish of the members of the Hawaiian Volcano Research
Association to share with others the experiences they have enjoyed in
their association with a truly great man._
_On October 5, 1911, through the efforts of Thomas Augustus Jaggar,
Jr., the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association was organized to assist
in the support of the newly created Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
at Kilauea, Hawaii. Accepting Dr. Jaggar’s sincere belief that a
systematic and continuous study of volcanoes would result in the
protection of life and property, the motto the Hawaiian Volcano
Research Association adopted was “Ne plus haustae aut obrutae
urbes.”_
_Dr. Jaggar arrived in Hawaii to take up his work at the Observatory
on January 17, 1912--exactly forty-one years before the day of his
death on January 17, 1953._
_Dr. Jaggar spent the last years of his life writing the history
of his sixty years of intensive, rugged, and hazardous scientific
achievements. During many of these years, and up to the completion
of his life’s history, it has been well stated that one of his most
valuable co-workers was his wife, Isabel, who shared with him the
disappointments, the joys of discovery, and much of the physical work.
It is the privilege of the officers, directors and members of the
Hawaiian Volcano Research Association to present in book form this
story of Dr. Jaggar’s life._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. YOUNG SCIENTIST 3
II. IMITATING RIPPLEMARKS 32
III. EXPEDITION DECADE 55
IV. LIVING WITH VOLCANOES 85
V. EXPANSION DECADE 114
VI. PROPHECY AND HOPE 151
VII. ENVOI 177
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Thomas A. Jaggar _Frontis_
1. Experimental Geology Laboratory, Harvard
University, 1900 40
2. Fountain at edge of lava lake, May 17, 1917 41
3. Explosion cloud rising from Halemaumau, May 13, 1924 56
4. Crag in lava lake, January 23, 1918 57
5. Scientists of Technical Expedition to Aleutians, 1907 72
6. Captain George Seeley of the _Lydia_, 1907 73
7. Volcano House from Observatory, 1913 88
8. Island in Halemaumau lava lake, 1911 88
9. Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, 1912 89
10. Jaggar in seismograph vault beneath Observatory, 1916 89
11. Lava lake, showing bench, March 30, 1917 92
12. Halemaumau, showing lava lake and crags,
December 8, 1916 92
13. Jaggar holding pipe for sounding lava lake, 1917 93
14. River of Alika flow, Mauna Loa, October 6, 1917 100
15. Lava streaming into a sinkhole in Halemaumau lava
lake, July 7, 1917 100
16. Sakurajima Volcano, Japan, 1914 101
17. Fountain in lava lake, March 19, 1921 101
18. Isabel and Tom Jaggar in woods on Kilauea Volcano,
1923 120
19. Lava lake, fountains, and crags, March 20, 1921 121
20. Footprints in ash west of Mauna Iki 121
21. The _Honukai_ on Alaska beach, 1928 136
22. The _Ohiki_, first amphibian truck, 1928 136
23. Lava flow entering village of Hoopuloa, 1926 137
24. Lava flow of 1926 Mauna Loa eruption approaching
Hoopuloa 137
25. Jaggar in office of Observatory in “Tin House,” 1937 152
26. Bomb bursting on lava flow, December 27, 1935 153
27. Fountain in Halemaumau lava lake, May 23, 1917 168
28. Rare dome fountain, Kilauea Crater, March 20, 1921 169
29. Lava stream near rim of Halemaumau, February 9, 1921 169
CHARTS
Fluctuations of Halemaumau 113
Diagram of hypothetical globe section 179
PREFACE
This, my latest book, is another experiment. After sixty years of
volcanoes I have learned reversal of preconceived notions. Gradually I
have learned a totally different approach.
Shaler of Harvard was my inspirer, worker in the wonders of swamp and
ice and sea beaches. He set me to work and turned me loose; among books
and storm waves and men; especially among men, young men, ever reaping
something new. When I chose volcanoes for my field Shaler said, “You
have certainly selected the hardest.” It was a missionary field, for in
it people were being killed. But the products of internal earth fluids,
lava sea bottom, and vast Canadian ancient meltings, seemed to promise
real natural history. Volcanoes squirt up the very ancient stuff of the
solar system. Therein, I knew, must be something for future discovery.
The investigation of it was a clear field, if action was the goal.
My field education in geology was by Hague, the friend of Archibald
Geikie. By Emmons, skilled in ore deposits, and like Hague, trained by
Clarence King. By Bailey Willis, son of a poet, a superlative draftsman
and field man, and a brilliant experimenter. I went into the American
West with these men.
But this story of a volcano experimenter’s life would have reached
nowhere without Frank Alvord Perret, whom I first met on the slope
of Vesuvius in 1906. I knew at once that he was the world’s greatest
volcanologist. His skill was taking pictures. Mine was making
experiments. We agreed that these two skills in action would accomplish
what theories never could approach.
Perret was an inventor. He was an artist. He was a poet. He was a lover
of little children, and a worshiper of the music of the stars. Always
in delicate health, he circled the world. I was with him on Sakurajima,
on Kilauea, and on Montserrat. We did not agree. He had a vast love of
the romantic and bizarre. I was always a sceptic. But I thank Heaven
that his posthumous and nobly illustrated book reached magnificent
publication. His other books set a standard for all time for what the
field science of volcanoes shall be.
Perret and his camera were my models. He gave me all of his pictures
to use as I chose, and he and Tempest Anderson taught me volcano
photography. The latter, a Yorkshireman, was a British geographer and
we met on many volcanoes.
The purpose of this book is to tell what one man saw. I was actuated
by the will to learn. I wanted to copy ripplemarks on the bottom of
the sea, to understand what force pushed up Harney Peak as coarse
granite in the Black Hills, and to imitate Yellowstone geysers spouting
rhythmically. I wanted to know how cracks made the Cascade Mountains
pile up in a line.
Finally, I studied the San Francisco earthquake rift, sliding open
parallel to the shore for hundreds of miles. How thick was the crust
of the globe? Then I was called to Hawaii, islands on a ridge 1,700
miles long with volcanoes at one end, coral atolls at the other. And I
started a volcano experiment station at a very lucky time. Volcanoes
proved surprisingly amenable to experiment.
Forty years of this lead far away from Lyell’s geology--the geology
of uniform processes past and present--and from brachiopods and
trilobites. It lead to the ancestor of volcanoes. It lead to ancestral
gas. It lead back 10 billion years. A lava splash might be a live
souvenir of that age. More than anything else, this belief pointed our
instruments down, to the inside of the globe.
Six decades of a man’s life. Decades of geology, exploration,
foundation, outspreading, prediction, and fruition. The fact of
fruition makes the telling worth while. Geological education was
unbelief. Fruition was belief, verified by growth of unified science.
Culmination was not geology but science. Uniformity, evolution, and
symmetry are in nature. Value and number are human. I have been called
geologist and seismologist, volcanologist and geophysicist. I am none
of these. I am interested in the evolution of what Hoyle calls “This
quite incredible universe.” I am just as interested in Bergson’s
“Creative evolution” as in Hoyle and Lyttleton’s “New cosmology.”
And more interested in life than in either. The elements of fruition
are a thick earth crust, a comparable pattern for earth and moon,
and a mechanism for earth core. This is the story of sixty years of
volcaneering.
_My Experiments With_
Volcanoes
CHAPTER I
Young Scientist
“_The gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the
onyx stone._”
It was the training of my youth under a father who loved God’s
out-of-doors that led me to Audubon’s birds; to tramping miles over
carries in Maine, Labrador, and Nova Scotia; and to fishing with
another eight year old, named Willie Grant.
When I was fourteen my father the Reverend Thomas Augustus Jaggar, took
our family to Europe, where botany and bird life were as much a part
of my education as geography, French, and Italian. And it was during
our visit in Italy that I made my first trip up Vesuvius. All of these
early interests convinced me that I wanted to be a naturalist.
It was Nathaniel Shaler at Harvard who told me to go and study the
beaches at Lynn and Nahant. So I walked and photographed, and measured
ripplemarks. I found a headland and a longshore accumulation with
scallops dwindling regularly along the high-tide level. I found swash
marks a foot across forming as the tide went out. On the dunes were
other sand waves beautifully regular.
Try it. Lie on your stomach and watch them. They are at right angles to
the wind. Smooth them out and see what the wind does. It piles little
flocculent heaps of course grains, each with an eddy downwind. The fine
stuff migrates up the slopes forward with the wind, backward on the
leeward side. The powder streams meet and lengthen the hills right and
left.
I watched the swash marks. The swash of the surf full of sand rushed up
the beach, cleared suddenly, and retreated, leaving a ridge along the
beach. This elevation became the tide limit, and a new series started
lower down. The swashes couldn’t climb over the ridge because the tide
was going out. And so for hours ridge after ridge was built.
I watched high-tide scallops, six feet apart, forming heaps at the
top of the beach. The swash waves ran into the bays between the heaps
during the flood hours, making a rush up and a suck down. The rush up
was muddy, the suck down was clear. Pebbles and sand were building up
on the sides of the small promontories. Each heap was horseshoe-shaped,
with the toe seaward. Forty or fifty crescents got smaller and more
sandy toward the middle of the beach. Here was rhythmic force making
repetition. The ripples and swash marks were repeated seaward. Clearly
the headland of rock was making pebbles and sand, sending pulsations
along the beach, instead of across it.
The ripplemarks were packed sand of the low-tide flat, formed totally
under water parallel to the waves. The back-and-forth motion of waves
made a pattern of sweep and eddy on the bottom. Were beaches, then,
things of habit like birds? Here were four kinds of sand waves, all
on one beach, all of them complicated by wind and water and tide; big
and little; shapely and regular. The beach was alive. It was building
from the end, it was rippling under wave action. It fed the wind as
it dried, and the wind made an exquisite dune pattern of the grains.
Perhaps beaches might be natural history, just as much as the birds
that inspired my interest in nature when I was eight years old.
The mystery of the beaches drove me to a new discovery; to the
university library, where I found French and English references to
ripplemarks. I found experiments, soundings, fossil sandstone ripples.
I learned that such great authors as the botanist De Candolle and Sir
George Darwin had interested themselves profoundly in what happened to
the sand grains. From the library I went to mud puddles in a tank and
to experimentation. Thus I found my way from beach to books and from
books to the making of baby beaches.
Later, at Harvard, zoology and botany were all cells and embryos
and the microscope. The habits of animals scarcely entered into our
studies. The natural history of Audubon and my boyhood had vanished.
The new words were phylogeny and cytology, development of the
individual, and cell development.
So in mineralogy the microscope and the tiny crystal governed; the
molecules of the crystal, and the chemical atoms of the molecule.
Science was headed toward the infinitely little, though later, by
way of the spectroscope, it was to leap to the infinitely big of the
heavens. I never learned to think the universe finite.
Professor Shaler wrote in 1893, “In the next century there will be a
state of science in which the unknown will be conceived as peopled with
powers whose existence is justly and necessarily inferred from the
knowledge which has been obtained from their manifestations. In other
words, it seems to me that the naturalist is most likely to approach
the position of the philosophical theologian by paths which at first
seemed to lie far apart from his domain.” Just this has happened in the
world of galaxies and electrons, producing Einstein and Planck, Jeans
and Eddington, Hubble and Hoyle. And I suspect that sea bottoms and
volcanoes are “peopled with powers” yet to be inferred.
Through Josiah Cooke and his wonders of projection apparatus; through
Cook’s nephew Oliver Huntington and his mineral crystals; through John
Eliot Wolff, whose assistant in optical microscopy I became; through
Robert Jackson with his museum collection technique and the hexagon
plates on fossil sea urchins; through all these I was introduced to the
laboratory collections and instruments. I found a fascinating world.
The theater, too, furthered my education. Like many Harvard students,
I “suped” for several great actors and actresses, among them Julia
Marlowe and Sarah Bernhardt. And in one play I even had a speaking
part: “My lord, Posthumus is without.” I also practiced legerdemain
as amateur assistant to Kellar and Hermann, who called me out of the
audience and pulled rabbits out of my coat and eggs out of my mouth.
Thus I learned of the psychology of audiences, how to experiment in
public, and how easily deluded is the average mind. Just so nature
may delude, if the scientist doesn’t keep his wits about him. But
I also learned the value of vivid demonstration before students. A
great exponent of this method of teaching is Professor Hubert Alyea of
Princeton. His chemical experimentation is marvellous. His chemistry
textbook is modern physical chemistry at its best. He demonstrates that
the art of the magician has come down to the twentieth century and that
even mathematical science may pass over to the layman. I suspect that
geophysics does not need to be buried under differential equations as
it is today. Certainly experimental volcanology made exciting at the
lecture table could work wonders in getting the globe explored.
At Harvard we were taught that geology was a detective history.
Vaguely, the same fossils were the same age. Vaguely, man had come from
a fish which climbed up on the land. It was much later that radio
activity of rocks was accepted as setting ages in millions of years.
King and Kelvin taught us that the age of the earth was 24 million
years and the sun was dying. A half century later, 2,000 million years
was the figure and the sun was heating up. Now cosmogonists talk easily
of 10,000 million years as an item in star history. I have learned that
one can have any theory he chooses, and that some new discovery will
probably reverse it. A discovery is the uncovering of an appealing,
bright idea.
The idea of geology as history based on Darwin’s evolution never took
root in my consciousness. Geology to me is the science of the globe.
Science studies how things work, how things change, how they accomplish
what they do, how they grow, and how they compare. It does not study
the “why,” or the necessity for an origin of anything. Originating is
eternally in progress. Astronomy today is giving up origins. History
based on a few relics seems futile. Relics, or specimens, must be
compared with action.
Guessing that we must have come from a fish, with no evolution sequence
in successive strata and no mammals whatever in very ancient strata
and no preservation of soft creatures possible, seems a contradiction
of Darwin’s own testimony. He insisted on “the imperfection of the
geological record.” But he had no conception that the Cambrian was
500 million years B.C., nor that the fiery Keewatin of Lake Superior
was 1,800 million years B.C. Darwin knew that the bivalve brachiopod
_Lingula_, now alive in quiet seas, is exactly the same today as
it was then.
_Lingula_ is found fossilized in the intermediate geologic
eras. We have no proof that intelligent beings in ships from unknown
lands did not dredge him up in Cambrian time. Five hundred million
years is so absurdly long that there may have been at least twenty
different flowerings of intelligence on the earth, having no relation
to us. Continents are places of catastrophe. Sea bottoms are places
of constancy. Man lives on continents, and his fossilized bones are
short-lived.
If each Adam preceded a new humankind of 100,000 years, the time since
the Cambrian allows for 5,000 deluges, or eruptive conflagrations.
Each one would exterminate that particular Adam’s descendants. If
glacial periods are deluges, we know their scratched boulders back to
400 million years before _Lingula_. These older ice sheets were
in Canada. But we know fiery floods of lava 1,300 million years before
_Lingula_, on the north shore of Lake Superior.
We have not one particle of evidence that before the race was killed
off primordial volcanologists, who were very queer looking chaps, might
have studied those eruptions with expensive instruments. Certainly they
had a lot of copper at their disposal. Perhaps the great lakes were a
continental sea, and some ancestor of _Lingula_ was scooped up for
food by those doomed beings.
But geology at Harvard was not all history. When R. A. Daly and I
were graduate students, we worked on Ascutney Mountain, studying
ancient fire-made granites. The hills were lumps of the ancient
pastes crystallized. The crystals were feldspars, mica, quartz, and
iron oxides. Oldest prisms were lime phosphate, the mineral apatite
containing imprisoned brown glass. How did the several kinds of red
hot paste invade the altered sedimentary slates? Was brown glass the
ancestor? Lava is brown glass. Some of the phosphate crystals contain
gas bubbles and liquids. Daly, who published the work, found that
ancient lava pushed up while deep in the claystones, and shattered a
hole by heat and cracking. The pieces sank and the paste or gas foam
was injected in successive lumps. Each new lump had more silica.
Apparently the fragments melted--some of the old sediments of Lower
Silurian age were silica--and the invading magma was contaminated with
more and more molten sand. So basalt turned into granite. Thus Ascutney
Mountain in Vermont became a classic place for hot fluids squirting up
and recrystallizing the under rock of New England. It made eventually,
by erosion, the Connecticut River landscape.
Daly became a specialist on granites, I became a specialist on lavas.
We became professors at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Something new came into world geology when Wheeler, Hayden, King,
Powell, Gilbert, and Dutton surveyed the Utah block fault mountains and
the Rockies. They revealed the globe with a crust of gigantic cracked
deep prisms, and an eroding surface. Davis of Harvard, the physical
geographer, was at his zenith, and from Powell’s and Gilbert’s example
came his classified river valleys. He devised systems of splendid
topographic maps and models, and demonstrations of glacier steam beds
and deltas. He made surface wear and dumping debris a living thing, and
the land forms a record of it.
Thus I was overjoyed when, in 1893, I received the summons to go with
Arnold Hague to the land of geysers, colorful canyon, old volcanoes,
and the source rivers of the Mississippi. My job was to take pictures
with a huge camera, but I posed as microscope man, too. I climbed the
highest peaks of the Absaroka Range, and I traveled with Hague and a
mule packtrain back and forth across the range, collecting specimens.
Hague had been with Clarence King during the 40th Parallel Survey for
the Union Pacific railroads.
Hague’s field method was to climb a peak, study the view, and ponder
the visible strata, dikes, valleys, escarpments, and pinnacles for
miles around, thus formulating each problem. Then we moved camp to a
new place to solve the problem.
We sought the ancient craters. The volcanic tuffs and agglomerates
covered thousands of square miles, dating from 30 million years ago
and continuing outpourings until 2 million years ago, and there were
lava flows, ropy or bouldery. Here were petrified trees; there could
be found fossil leaves. The tree species told the formation ages of
Tertiary time. Many peaks appeared but no volcano cones. The craters
had been over what now were eroded dikes, or fissure fillings of lava,
which stood out in crisscrossing walls. Where they clustered, ores
were found: the Sunlight, Crandall Creek, and Stinking Water mining
claims. These were the roots of lost volcanoes, lost by decay, tumble,
rainfall, glaciers, and rivers. Underneath the mountainous lavas,
appeared white marine limestone cliffs, and still lower appeared
ancient granite gneiss.
The geology of ancient seabeds, fossils, eruptions, and glaciers was
painted on a whole panorama of mountains and river basins. From a
mountain top silently gazing through field glasses--which he was always
losing and recovering--Hague would look around for hours. “That ledge
is the Madison limestone, those are the Red Beds, those pink, rounded
hills are Archean granites.”
After a day of packtrain travel I was free to fish or hunt. It was a
privilege to hunt with Anderson, the old negro cook, whose gray beard
and bushy white wool belied his keen eyes. He had been a slave, later
a soldier in General Custer’s Big Horn expedition, and a pioneer and
hunter. His father had been massacred by Indians, and Anderson swore he
would kill any Indian on sight.
One of our hunting trips near Crandall Creek was especially memorable.
“Mr. Jaggar, I smell sheep up on that shelf!”, said Anderson. And he
climbed up a pine tree growing at the bottom against the limestone
cliff. He laid his Winchester rifle on top of the steep slide rock
slope at the foot of the tree, muzzle upward, butt end downhill. “You
mind my gun, I’ll climb out on a limb against the cliff and get on
the shelf, and yo’ all hand the gun up to me.” He reached the shelf,
made of Cambrian limestone of trilobite fame, and sitting over on it
immediately knocked down slabs of rock. They fell on the gun which
started to slide down the slope. I grabbed for the muzzle pointed
toward my throat, the stock wiggling right and left. The gun went
off and I felt a nick in my ankle. Anderson had left a cartridge in
the barrel with the hammer resting on it, but my nick was made by a
pebble ploughed up by the bullet. So the trilobites took a shot at me.
“Well, this is natural history,” I murmured. Old Anderson was less
philosophical. He cussed me for letting the rifle kick itself far down
among the trees.
Elk, grouse, blacktail deer, antelope, rattlesnakes, prairie dogs,
skunks, badgers, owls, whistling martens, wild sheep, and the grizzlies
we never saw alive were all part of the great West. So were the bucking
cayuses and kicking mules with which we lived, numerous ranchers,
prospectors, soldiers, sportsmen, and guides. Once we were joined by a
sheriff looking for an escaped desperado from Red Lodge Prison.
Just before I left the Yellowstone, I visited the hot springs and
geysers. With more than 4,000 vents, the geyser basins are steaming
areas in the forest. At Mammoth, the carbonate terraces show exquisite
ripples and sculptured cups in steps. One hotter group of waters,
through the igneous lavas and granites, becomes full of silica and
deposits sinter. The other, through limestones, deposits travertine.
The alkaline siliceous waters deposit such strong silica edifices
as to hold the explosive steam boilers of the geysers. Both silica
and lime deposits are led to gorgeous sculpturing and to brilliant
colors at their borders caused by the blue-green algae, which live at
temperatures up to 150° Fahrenheit.
The boiling waters have been superheated volcanically since Tertiary
volcano times, when first dark magnesian, and afterwards siliceous,
lavas were ejected. Here is the same order Daly and I found in Vermont;
the dark rocks first, rifting through slate, the granites last, with
quartz cutting the dark rocks. The cavities among the Yellowstone
geysers show quartz.
The surprise to me was that the geyser basins were eternally breaking
down, cracking, dissolving, making new geysers in the forest. Instead
of being chiefly deposition, the hot spring action is chiefly erosion.
It is a vast cycle of hot magma gases and rainwaters from Tertiary
times to now; from 20 million years ago to now. A long time.
Remember that the last retreat of the glacier-period ice was only
20,000 years ago. That ice found the geyser basins in full swing. A
thousand times farther back were the Yellowstone volcanoes in full
activity, and they kept going while the continent lifted and pushed
the Gulf of Mexico from the Great Plains to where it is now. And yet
that 20 million years was only a twenty-fifth of the time back to the
trilobites, and a Yellowstone seabottom bed of that age is under all
the lavas. Our schoolbook history is pretty small.
In all directions the ground of Norris Geyser Basin is cracking and
changing. The geysers are utterly unreliable, here today and mere hot
springs or empty cracks tomorrow. Old Faithful intervals range from
thirty-eight to eighty-one minutes, quite irregular. The New Crater
was a squirting, scalding jet which killed the trees and vegetation
all about. Its seemingly regular, twenty-five foot jets shot up at
forty-five degrees inclination about every three minutes. Later, in
1922, I was to find this geyser totally different. Careful studies
have shown that water of this elevation boils at 199° Fahrenheit; one
geyser gave off 253° Fahrenheit, or fifty-four degrees of superheat,
seventy-two feet down its shaft. This is the only place of superheated
waters known on earth. The roaring steam of the Black Growler has
eighty-one degrees of superheat. The quantity of carbon, sulfur, and
chlorine in the waters is so excessive, though it is very small in the
rock, that a source of heat from volcanic gas is certain.
The net result is thousands of boiling springs of rainwater, soaking a
sponge of rhyolite rock over hundreds of square miles, erupting over a
remnant volcanic furnace beneath, and eroding and dissolving out basins
at the headwaters of the Mississippi.
Here is an object lesson in volcanic erosion. Here is a perpetual
eruption of volcanic gases which has dwindled after millions of years
of melting siliceous and carbonaceous rocks. It recrystallizes them
as andesites, rhyolites, and obsidians, and mixes deep steam with
rainwater to do the work of erosion and water solution and of deposits,
over a vent at the heart of the Rocky Mountains. As usual, this vent
has cluttered itself from age to age with the melt of the deep earth
crust, namely basalt, which Yellowstone’s lavas show repeatedly from
bottom to top of its accumulations. And as usual, the vents themselves
are hard to recognize, buried as they are under heapings.
In 1897 I returned to the Yellowstone, where I visited Death Gulch,
a dismal solfataric gully with a trickle of cold, acid water near
Cache Creek. Accompanied by Dr. F. P. King, I climbed up this gorge,
where there was a bad smell and burning oppression of the lungs from
hydrogen sulfide. It was a V-shaped trench 50 feet deep in volcanic
puddingstones, whitened with alum and epsom salts. Bubbles rose through
the water in many places.
The remains of eight big bears were found in the gorge, clustered in
one place. The latest victim was a young grizzly with a clot of blood
staining his nostrils from his last hemorrhage. Poison gas had killed
him. Earlier visitors had found squirrels, hares, and butterflies and
other insects killed by gas. Probably both sulfuretted hydrogen and
carbonic acid gas do murder in still weather. However, we had the wind
blowing up the gulch. We lit matches in hollows and carbon dioxide did
not extinguish them. The same thing had happened when Mr. Weed in 1888
tested for carbon dioxide at Death Gulch.
Now, knowing the case of Mr. Clive, the Englishman, and his guide,
Wylie, who were overwhelmed by hydrogen sulfide while photographing
Boiling Lake on December 10, 1901, it looks to me as though the
rotten-egg smell may play a large part in the killings at Death
Gulch, as well as in some poison tragedies of Java. Boiling Lake is
at the south end of Dominica Island north of Martinique. There are
four solfataras and the scalding lake, the latter near the interior
village of Laudat, at the head of a volcanic valley, and four miles
on horseback from Roseau, a shore town southwest. When Mr. Clive,
Wylie, and Matson--another native guide--looked down at the hot pool,
Matson noticed it boiling without vapor, and called attention to the
danger. However, they went on to the lake. Matson later reported, “I
inhaled something offensive and felt as if I was dying. I ran, and lost
consciousness. I came to in a ravine and found Wylie lying where I had
left him.” Clive, refusing to leave Wylie, sent Matson for help, but
when rescue parties arrived, both men were dead.
At Boiling Lake there was no eruption, no vapor, only the very bad
smell. All the symptoms indicated a sudden change in the pool from
steam to excessive hydrogen sulfide. And five months later, at Pelée
across the channel from Dominica, excessive hydrogen sulfide set off
the great explosions.
In view of these phenomena it seems likely that Death Gulch in the
Yellowstone also kills with sulfur gas, the odor of which is so strong
there. Day and Allen associate hydrogen sulfide with the limited
Yellowstone sulfate areas, of small water discharged, and such is
Death Gulch. One part hydrogen sulfide in 200 parts of air is fatal to
mammals, and it may come up in gushes. Carbonic acid asphyxiates, but
it is not a poison and when it is free is so heavy as to mix with air
very little. Death Gulch is not a place of lime deposition like Mammoth
Hot Springs, where carbonated water decomposes underlying limestone.
Europe was to be the next step in my education. As assistant in
petrography and graduate student at Harvard, I was encouraged by
Wolff to plan for Heidelberg. There I was to find H. Rosenbusch, who
had put system into the infinite series of minerals in rocks. But my
journey to Heidelberg began with a geography congress in London and
a geology congress in Zurich. These meetings were with such bigwigs
as Lord Curzon, Henry M. Stanley, and famous arctic explorers, and I
was surprised to find that all these VIP’s looked like ordinary men.
Unfortunately for me, this realization came a little late.
Looking for a luncheon beer garden in Zurich, I picked up a small
side-whiskered Englishman, and suggested we join a group of foreign
geologists in a buffet. “Oh no,” he replied, “no beer. I only want a
cup of tea and a biscuit.” So I left him and crudely and youthfully
joined the younger men in the beer parlor for sauerkraut and wienies
and Munich beer. Later at the opening meeting, the Geological Congress
was addressed in French by the famous Sir Archibald Geikie, Director
General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland, and the
author of “The textbook of geology,” the greatest of geology manuals.
He was my pickup, whom I had deserted at lunch time. I had lost the
opportunity of a lifetime, for a tête-a-tête with the world’s most
famous geologist.
Before going to Munich, Harry Gummeré of Haverford and I trekked
through Denmark in a third class carriage amid peasants smoking
fearful-smelling tobacco in long china-bowl pipes. Then we crossed to
Christiansand in Norway. We traversed the fjords north to Trondhjem
by rowboat, in “stoolcars” with little girl drivers. Then we traveled
on foot, and everywhere in rain. Waterfalls were so numerous we never
wanted to hear of another one. We climbed up to Stalheim from Bergen,
saw the Jordalsknut, a magnificent half dome in a vast granite canyon
like Yosemite. We rowed around the Kaiser’s yacht in the Nordfjord,
and tried to pick him out on deck. We got soaked with days of rain in
a backcountry village, and went to the inn, got into bed, and sent our
clothing to dry in the kitchen.
The local Norwegian bank looked at our Brown Brothers letter of credit
and said, “Nothing doing,” which inspired us to compose a poem:
We’re so happy we don’t know what to do.
We haven’t any clothes to wear,
We’re wet all through and through.
We haven’t any money and we ought to feel quite blue
But we don’t, we feel so happy, we don’t know what to do.
Fortunately, the innkeeper was amused by our poem and sympathetic
toward our plight. He took our IOU’s and told us we could have all the
money we wanted and to send it back when we reached Trondhjem.
From Trondhjem we crossed Scandinavia by rail to Stockholm, like Venice
a city of canals. Delightful maiden ladies kept the breakfast place
and served us with many queer breads, goats’-milk cheese, and sublime
cleanliness. The canal boat took us across Sweden to Göteborg. It was
a little steamer, from the porthole of which we saw a cow comfortably
grazing a few feet away. And we saw and were impressed by the superb
landscaping of lawns, by tree horticulture, and by lock masonry. In
both Norway and Sweden the people talked English, the national costumes
were delightful, the girls were pretty, and everybody was clean and
democratic.
The winter semester of 1894–1895 was spent in Munich, where Groth’s
mineral and crystal collections were the main attraction, and where I
heard the lectures of Sir Doktor Privy-Councillor Knight Karl A. von
Zittel, author of six huge volumes on fossil shells, fossil horses,
fossil dragons, and fossil trees, and a history of geology. We once saw
him rigged out in gold braid and an admiral’s fore-and-aft cocked hat
for some imperial function.
He was a forceful lecturer. The assistant arranged diagrams on the
rack, the students gathered, and then his majesty entered. Everyone
rose and Zittel held forth with a rattan pointer: “Es gibt, meine
Herren, ein ganze anzahl von ausgezeichnete beobachten über” and so
forth. Then he whacked the drawings, and made graceful allusion to
American investigators as he explained a giant stegosaurus.
In the “Heidelberger Geologischer Panoptikum,” as an attic room on the
Neckar was called, I afterwards posted a ditty based on “Ole Uncle Ned”:
There was an Orthopod
Stegosaurus Marshii
Laid him down on his Jurassic bed.
He had a row of shovels down the middle of his back
But he didn’t have a very big head.
_Chorus_:
Hammer, hammer, hammer on the stone
Chisel, chisel, chisel on the bone
There’s no more rest for poor old Steg
For Zittel couldn’t leave him alone.
Heidelberg days were memorable for the lectures of Rosenbusch,
Goldschmidt, and Osann; for laboratory system; and for long collection
trips. With specimen bag and hammer, we went to Saxony, Bohemia and
the Vosges Mountains, the Black Forest, and the Oberwald. I had a
large, pointed hammer named Umslopagaas, after Rider Haggard’s hero who
wielded such a weapon. When Palache and Brock and I were in a quarry
and an unwieldy boulder had to be broken, the yell arose, “Umslopagaas
come quick!” The collection of rock specimens at “classical”
localities, meant the textbook rocks of Rosenbusch, or of Zirkel of
Leipzig. Every student dreamed of having a private collection.
After the Ascutney experience, I was impressed by Schneeberg granite
in Saxony. At the border of the granite are slates, baked in zones
back from the granite edge: hard horn rock, spotted rock, mica rock,
then claystone. The colored geological map of Saxony was superb. This
includes the mining district of the birthplace of geology in Europe,
where in Freiberg, A. G. Werner had founded an arbitrary science in
the eighteenth century, imagining granites to be crystallized from a
world-wide ocean.
In one place I found a hand specimen with tiny granite tongues which
had split their way, as liquid as alcohol, between the blackened folia
of slate. The granite itself was all crystals, but here was proof of
a fluid when the granite penetrated. What was it, how hot was it, a
gas, a foam, a paste, or a liquid? The time this occurred was millions
of years before Kaiser Wilhelm. I had found something similar in
the Yellowstone, the little dikes of sylvan intrusives in Absaroka
Mountains. The smallest tongues showed the most perfect granite in the
microscope, of Tertiary intrusive stocks. It was as though in these
siliceous invasions of basaltic agglomerate, nature made its best
experimental granitization on a very small scale.
We soaked up the surprises of European scholarship. We pored over books
in the bookshops, loaded ourselves with microscopes, goniometers, and
four-volume textbooks. We found all the science of Europe in attractive
unbound form and had it bound in half morocco. Mineral dealers were
everywhere, offering beautifully labeled specimens. All things in
Europe seemed inexpensive.
Rosenbusch, who had big brown eyes and a gray beard, came to look over
my work on feldspar, in his laboratory. When I asked enthusiastically
what make and model of German microscope I ought to buy, he turned me
around and looked deep into my eyes: “Herr Jaggar,” he said, “Es is
nicht das Mikroskop, es ist der Mensch.”
Another time he produced a dense black rock and said to Matteucci of
Vesuvius, to Palache, and to me, “You are geologists. What for a rock
is that?” We, of course, got it wrong, thinking it must be a lava. It
turned out to be a black limestone, easily identified, had we scratched
it instead of putting our lenses on it. He chuckled at the gullibility
of geologists.
Osann gave a course on petrographic chemistry which met at 7
A.M.! We usually got there, but once or twice the teacher
himself was late. We would gather around Osann, who was fat and genial,
and say “Herr Professor, how about some sausages and beer and a little
breakfast?” He always replied “Why not? There is plenty of time,” and
we sought the nearest cafe.
Some professors got up at two o’clock in the morning and wrote, taking
advantage of the quiet hours. Rosenbusch had a high desk and wrote
standing up. Their objectives were to produce enormous tomes listing
all crystals and all rocks and all publications, in all languages. This
is German science. Its password is “thoroughness.”
The net effect of German scholarship on me was a feeling of irksomeness
and resentment, but what I learned of thoroughness and of mechanisms
I value extremely. I honor the memory of those teachers, and I
honor their pupils, who by specialism have penetrated deeper and
deeper into the smaller and smaller things of matter. The ultimate
is the background material between the galaxies of the universe and
the unknown background particles of life. But for me, the middle
field--the development of mountains, rivers and sea bottoms, continents
and volcanoes, earthquakes and depressions of land, the sky, clouds,
and waters--all the outside world, needed experimental engineers.
Intermediate bigger things like the crust of the earth and moon, within
the time that is measured in human years, seemed to be neglected by
science, and yet to be accessible to the giant power of engineering.
Rosenbusch set me at one feldspar specimen for an entire summer. I
wanted things moving, changing, and evolving. I wanted a narrative of
that tabular feldspar crystallizing, or better, a dish wherein to watch
it crystallize. To me it seemed that Faraday or Pasteur would have
described the quality of a moving feldspar medium in pressure, heat,
gas, liquid, or changing particles. The qualitative investigator would
have a furnace and make many trials and produce synthetic feldspar, and
he would write a narrative approximating what the under earth must do.
He would make melt or froth conditions successful in imitating such
rocks as basalt or granite, using hot gases.
The problem of basalt and granite began to be recognized in the
eighteenth century. Werner guessed, and taught his pupils, that
these rocks were sea bottom deposits. A few determined Europeans
in the nineteenth century--Fouqué and Michel-Lévy, Doelter, and
Morozewicz--melted mineral mixtures and made igneous rocks by cooling
them. The motive was approximation; the result was good and useful.
No one reached melting by hot gases and absorption of hot gases. No
one made granite. Volcanic rocks were imitated approximately as to
crystals, but not as to gases. And the whole of volcanism was later
proved to be gases, as is the whole of physics and astronomy and
biology. Man is largely a puff of hydrogen.
These visions were what I brought back from Europe, along with much
pondering of such experimenters as Daubrée, Lacroix, Stanislas
Meunier, Reyer, and my teacher Goldschmidt, all brilliant imitators
of the earth. Goldschmidt gave a course in blowpipe analysis which
was completely original. His methods went far beyond those of his
predecessors.
Meanwhile, W. M. Davis had written me to come home to Harvard and give
the course in field geological surveying. This was in 1895–1896.
My teaching was devised to cut up the map of Boston. I pasted the
pieces in notebooks and sent out students in pairs, equipped with
map books. They were to keep pencils sharp, use a uniform system, and
hammer off specimens from ledges. They were to examine the rock under
a magnifying glass, then name it; but I cautioned them, “If you don’t
know the rock, call it ‘FRDK, funny rock don’t know.’” Students marked
the page opposite each map with symbols for the rocks on that map. Then
they came together in seminar, and we made a colored map of the geology
of Boston. Laurence La Forge, now professor at Tufts College, was my
student and later my assistant. He published the results of our work
many years after the study was made.
When teaching was extended into experimental geology and geology of
the United States, laboratories were set up in the basement of Agassiz
Museum and I was given carte blanche to furnish them. I equipped them
with a water tank, a gas furnace for melting and recrystallizing
minerals, pressure machines, an air compressor, and motors. Students
were assigned experiments with wax, plaster, cement, sands, coal dust,
and marble dust. They imitated strata, rivers, deltas, intrusions, and
mountain folds, and familiarized themselves with the way solids break.
Each man took a special arbeit for his final thesis, and worked by
himself with clock or metronome, thermometer or pressure gauge,
spring balance or centimeter scale, and he reviewed the experiments
of the past. Prominent among my students were Ralph Stone, afterwards
state geologist for Pennsylvania; Vernon Marsters of Indiana; Julius
Eggleston of Riverside, California; and Ernest Howe of Yale.
In the course on United States geology were such students as Amadeus
Grabau who became leading paleontologist of China; Stefansson the
arctic explorer; Ellsworth Huntington, afterwards the distinguished
Yale author and geographer; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With so
many Roosevelts at Harvard, I quite forgot my famous student until
his first visit to Hawaii, in 1934. Mr. Roosevelt had remembered his
geology professor, though, and an aide phoned the Volcano headquarters
to request that I be at Hilo when the President’s ship arrived.
The United States geology course was the product of my two seasons in
the Yellowstone and my interest in the great Hayden, King, and Powell
surveys. The youthful geologists needed to know the continent and its
details.
The big Washington monographs and folios have made a gallery of
underground pictures of one of the greatest continents, and these are
supplemented by the work of the Canadian geologists. America shows
Appalachian folds and thrusts, fault blocks of the Utah plateaus, and
eruptives of the Rockies. It contains the amazing metamorphism of very
recently upheaved sea beds along the Pacific shore. It records the
remnant sea bottoms and dust-storm deposits of the vast plains, bearing
beside the obvious buffalo skulls, the old bones of whales, reptiles,
and rhinos.
Superposed on all this is so-called physiography, the science of
falling materials and water, the rotting of the lands, and the
accumulation of debris. A net of rivers over ground and under ground is
what stands out, and the living river pattern has changed incessantly
through the ages. But through and over it is a moving process of the
ages, kinetic, alive with glaciers, hot springs, underground heat or
surface cold, soaking rains and rushing storms, earthquake and uplift,
fault motions and sinkings. Everything is in motion to one who senses
slow motion, occasionally breaking down resistance and charging ahead.
And geology is a sense of slow motion and its jumps for 5 million
years, with this human year, here and now, of great importance.
Geology, like humanity, is not just history.
Under all are gas and heat; Saratoga Springs, Yellowstone, the Comstock
Lode, and Mount Shasta. The series gets hotter from New York to
California. And out at sea the refuse of the continent is dumping all
day long. And science is anxiously waiting to learn how hot sea bottom
is.
In addition to laboratory work, I wanted to conduct cross-country hikes
for such subjects as botany, geology, and zoology in the forests and
swamps and hills of Massachusetts. And it was in connection with these
plans that I learned a lesson in simplicity. I went to President Eliot,
remembering the high sounding “Pierian Sodality” name for the college
orchestra, to get a classical calendar name for my cross-country
tramps. He said, “What, in brief, is your idea?” I replied, “In
ordinary language they will be natural history walks.” He took a pen
and said, “Why not this for a name?” On the paper was written “Natural
History Walks.”
An important part of our curriculum was the Tuesday evening geological
conference, during which any graduate worker could give a paper. To
these conferences came, at different times, Brooks, Spurr, Schrader,
Goodrich, Mendenhall, P. S. Smith, Mansfield, Matthes, Lane, Crosby,
Barton, Douglas Johnson, Daly, and all the Harvard staff. The men
got confidence in public speaking and exhibiting, and the professors
commented in kindly fashion. Topics ranged from summer work in the far
west and current studies in meteorology under Ward to petrographic or
experimental work with projection apparatus under Wolff and me. Jackson
and Hyatt brought in fossils, and the Geological Survey was always in
evidence as a goal for young men, or a subject for review. Shaler’s
comments were accompanied by a string of good stories. The conferences
taught students how to teach by making them speak in public. It was one
of Shaler’s most productive inventions, and has been copied far and
wide.
Walcott in the Survey looked to Harvard to produce field mappers of
rocks. Graduate students had the choice between process and history,
geography linked to school teaching, microscopical petrography and
crystallography linked to the minerals and rock collections, or
evolution linked to museums and fossils. Beecher of Yale had found
hairs on the legs of fossil trilobites. Someone else had found fossil
bacteria. A group of petrographers got together and founded an
artificial classification of fire-made rocks based on chemistry--no
use at all to the field man with a rock specimen. Agassiz had built a
magnificent museum. The research motive was based on collections; the
public exhibit motive was based on evolution and big, rare things.
The publication motive imitated Europe; “be as technical as possible,
detest reporters and newspapers, and never be popular.”
In 1897 Harvard University gave me a Ph.D. degree, after a double
thesis and an oral examination. I passed the examination very
awkwardly, as my capacity for remembering text book information is nil.
My theses were (1) on an invention, a mineral hardness instrument; and
(2) on the included fragments found in Boston dikes.
The microsclerometer, as the instrument was called (that is, a
microscope scratcher), was designed to diamond drill a mineral to a
fixed depth. The hardness was measured by the time consumed, on the
theory that the energy required for the standard hole varied with the
time, and the time with the hardness. The number of rotations with a
constant speed motor is a measure of the time.
The paper was published in America and Germany, and elaborately
reviewed by a microscopical society in England. The instrument was
borrowed by H. C. Boynton, a graduate student in metallurgy, and he
got good results on the microscopic crystals that constitute steel.
The inventing and constructing with the aid of Sven Nelson, a Swedish
mechanician of ability, were to me an education in themselves. For one
thing, I learned how enthusiastically science feeds on ultra-little
things.
My petrography of included quartz fragments in basalt dikes was partly
published, but made no hit at all. It was outdoor work, it concerned
the granite problem, it revealed the “fluid” of granite minerals as
“waters or vapors” having no effect on augite, the green fusible
mineral of basalt. But the same fluid was revealed as corroding quartz
inclusions, harder and supposedly more infusible.
If temperature had anything to do with it, the granite fluid could melt
holes in quartz inclusions, but the mantle of augite dark crystals
which the basalt had plastered on the outside of the quartz fragments
remained unmelted. This was my first adventure with the ancient problem
of fusion, or melting. I became convinced that granite fluids, like
the makers of gold quartz veins, are low temperature vapors or gasses.
This agrees with what is now well known, that silica has a low melting
point. But melting and temperature are not the whole story.
To me, the spreading of one’s fame by scientific papers was
commercialization. “You must make your name known” and “what have
you published?” rang through the scientific halls of learning. No
suggestion of art, literature, drama, beauty, or philosophy ever came
to me from my scientific colleagues. Some literary friends, like
William Garrott Brown and my classmate William Vaughn Moody, thought
readability important. Brown warned me against the dullness of small
papers in scientific writing. Agassiz warned me against exactly the
opposite, namely, against popularizing or being interesting. This
antithesis between science journals and art probably never comes
into the field of vision of many young scientific writers. They see
only “Write for your scientific peers and for no one else, that is
your world.” All my life I have been plagued by “be as technical as
possible” versus “tell the public what it all means.”
I suspect that our system is producing diagrams and statistics in
geology (and perhaps in science generally) and no longer produces works
of art. I know few geologists who are fine draftsmen. They accept
photography instead. I know none who is a literary stylist. They write
for ultra conciseness and tabulations. The nineteenth century taught
classical English and drawing.
Geology is a science of the dreamland of the earth’s interior and
of millennia of the ages and of the overwhelming expanse of rich,
productive, unknown ores under ocean bottoms. It is a field for men of
letters, and for new Magellans, Humboldts, and Darwins bursting with
imagination and the will to explore.
This seeming digression is really germane to the purport of this book.
It is one man’s review of a half century of evolving discovery. Also
a half century of evolving error and departure from the ways of the
leaders. The leaders, from William Smith’s thoroughness with strata
in England, to Clarence King’s summary of a thousand miles across the
Cordillera, explored upward and outward. It persuaded governments.
Persuasion before the court of public opinion no longer uses and
employs explorer men of letters. The United Nations is not employing
Clarence Kings on the world geology of the remaining three quarters of
the earth.
The confusion, the secrecy, and the loss of art are occasioned by
vulgarization. In 1875 real men of distinction explored the earth.
Now that is left to incorporated establishments, teaching trusts, and
calculating machines. Clarence King was a linguist and was the son of a
trader in China. His Yale training under Dana and Brush gave him real
culture. His founding of the United States Geological Survey was the
evolution of a genius who disliked politics and whose friends rejoiced
with him in great prose, good pictures, and fine sculpture. Then he was
wrecked by a false ambition and the decadence of the very thing which
made him great, the simplicity of high thinking, noble writing, and
cultivated friends. Lacking today are cultivated boys with an ambition
to explore the globe, both under the sea and in the wilderness.
Geology in 1897 was a jigsaw puzzle, with a choice between the museum
and the field, between the easy thing of collections, fine microscopes,
and the scientific societies, and the hard thing of exploring the
globe. Collections and instruments were an overpowering attraction,
particularly when photography and experiment were involved. But
roughing it in the wilderness has made some of the finest characters I
ever knew.
Geological surveys of the west continued to occupy me during the
summers. I worked in the Black Hills of South Dakota under Samuel
Franklin Emmons, and my associates included John Mason Boutwell, John
Duer Irving, Philip Sidney Smith, Bailey Willis, and N. H. Darton.
Boutwell was to become a copper geologist and copper magnate in the
mines of Utah; Irving, Professor of Economic Geology at Lehigh and
Yale; and Smith, head of the Alaskan branch of the U. S. Geological
Survey.
Being with Emmons, Willis, and Darton in the Black Hills field was to
learn variously how geologists work in the field and how their minds
work. Emmons was of the Boston Brahmins, a Harvard man, mining geology
his specialty, with the Clarence King tradition of the Great West, the
40th Parallel Survey.
Bailey Willis as Chief Geologist spent a week with us in camp, and I
saw his genius for drawing in line, and he explained the four-step
pacing method. Willis mapped distances by pacing across mountains,
counting in his head, while talking at the same time. He compiled in
color a geologic map of the United States. His marvellous experiments
on mountain folding, his explorations in all the continents and his
poetic faith in hydrogen and crystallization as internal forces made
his name immortal.
N. H. Darton mapped the Great Plains; and his genius was for hard work,
long field hours, color photography at its very beginning, and an
extraordinary eye for detail in the field.
Darton showed me how to find the Chadron Formation on the divides,
white clays easily overlooked. Darton’s many years, traversing the
entire West, and publishing superb monographs of artesian waters and
of immense fossil sea bottoms, summarizing the geology of whole states
from Texas to Canada, ranks him among the great geologists. I learned
from him detail of infinite discovery possible in every rock ledge. He
found tiny fossil shells everyone else had missed. Powell and King had
painted impressionistic geology. Darton followed and painted thousands
of miniatures, but also combined these into large books.
Charles Doolittle Walcott was Director of the U. S. Geological Survey
at that time, and no greater geologist ever lived. His Cambrian
fossils, those of the first great fossil-making “Mediterranean Sea” of
North America, lay buried in the United States from shore to shore.
Unswervingly he followed every inland sea of 531 million years ago and
thereafter, through advances three times across the continent. Lands
were of moderate relief and climates were mild. Marine animals and
sea weeds, large and small, were abundant for 80 million years. And
remember that a million years is a thousand times the interval since
William the Conqueror.
The continent Walcott mapped of that ancient time was the North
America of today, with sags that let in shallow sea strips and
pools where the Cambrian shales and limestones now lie. He wrote a
description of that vast history, and all his later summers were spent
in the Canadian Rockies, where fossil-bearing strata make the most
startling mountain peaks on earth.
My Black Hills surveys of 1898 and 1899 were near Deadwood and
Spearfish and Mato Tepee, the Devil’s Tower National Monument. In
those badlands with weird desert gorges, appear the bones of ancient
rhinoceroses and many grotesque animals, huge and tiny, of 40 to 60
million years ago. We found little bones in white earth on the divides
still preserved against erosion.
Our big job was to map the laccoliths near Deadwood. A laccolith, or
rock cistern, is a lava body which in very ancient times squirted into
the cracks of the strata. The lava had penetrated between the strata of
the northern cover of the Black Hills, swelled to lenses between the
strata; and, particularly, it selected and penetrated the soft shale
beds which grow thicker and more numerous upward among the formations.
Thus after erosion of the present landscape, both large and small lava
lenses were revealed as resistant hills, the largest toward the bottom
of the pile of strata and the smallest and steepest toward the top in
thick, black ancient mud deposits.
Mostly, the laccoliths were injections of volcanic fluid up a crack,
which met a hard bed and bent to squeeze the paste or lava into a soft
layer. The result was an underground lava flow which ruptured the beds.
Apparently the first rush brought up fragments of the rocks below. This
fragmentary stuff of mud and gravel was overridden by the lava, until
the latter penetrated horizontally a mile or two between strata, arched
the layers above, and solidified at the Devil’s Tower with vertical
columns like the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.
This group of subterranean volcanic eruptions between strata probably
came under sea bottom at the same time that the Yellowstone upland
began its open-air outpourings farther west. But in the Black Hills
there is no sign the laccolith lavas ever broke up to the top country.
The Black Hills, like the Rocky Mountains, were a long time rising in
waves of action, whereas the lava intrusion was a relatively short
episode of one of the latest of these spasms. However, that episode
entails a long story of numerous injections. It takes us down into
crust and along through the millennia.
Always think in millions of years. It is wise also to think in millions
of miles and to remember that the sun and the Milky Way are parts of
the same system as the earth. And remember that a ledge or a boulder
doesn’t worry about living 20 million or 100 million years. A skull
is a boulder. That old brontotherium rhinoceros with a forked horn,
standing eight feet high and fifteen feet long, lived in the upper
Oligocene, when clay and volcanic ash were being deposited in the Bad
Lands of South Dakota. Probably vast flood plains of rivers were his
habitat, swamp reeds and leaves were his food, and floods washed his
bones and buried his skull where we find them today. The country of
open glades was probably like the safari land of central Africa.
Brontotherium’s skull in Chicago Natural History Museum dates from
about 30 million years ago. The bones are scattered, and few complete
skeletons have been found. Man’s ancestor may have started 10 million
years ago, but the nearest approach to an ape who lived in the trees of
old Bronto’s forests was an opossum. Furthermore, nothing like flint
tools have been found in the rhino strata. The apes started in Europe
and Asia in the next geologic period, and some fossilized monkeys have
been found in South America. But men and monkeys are too soft. They
don’t make good fossils.
The bones we found were of turtles, in clays upheaved on the top of the
Black Hills uplift. These clays were afterwards eroded into the present
valleys, and probably were contemporaneous with the riverbed silts,
where the rhinoceros skulls were found. So our turtles and rhinos were
no doubt neighbors in 29,998,000 B.C.
Our sojourn in the Black Hills was not without adventure. One evening
when Boutwell and I were riding home to Deadwood, I dismounted and
jumped into the shrubs of a gully to knock a rock specimen off a ledge.
From beneath my feet came a buz-z-z like a swarm of bees. I had jumped
right on a rattlesnake and could feel his coils against my ankle, and
no leggings that day. Boutwell called out, “Oh let me see him! I’ve
never seen a rattlesnake.” I made a suitable reply and, somehow, leapt
clear before the snake had a chance to strike.
Another adventure concerned my gold watch, a gift from my dad on my
twenty-first birthday. I lost it from a chain which broke against
the saddle pommel at some dismounting point. I advertised for it by
placards at railway stations and, amazingly, it was returned. A
Salvation Army man found the watch, badly trampled by my horse, at a
back country place, brought it to me in Deadwood, and received the
reward. I took it to the maker in Waltham, where it was restored; and I
am wearing it fifty-four years later, converted from a hunting case to
a stemwinder.
John Irving of Yale, whose father had been a mining geologist in the
Great Lakes district, was one of the most lovable companions I ever
camped and tramped with. We were together in the Black Hills, where
we hired a wagon outfit to cross the Hills to the Devil’s Tower. The
personnel was a masterpiece of improvisation. The cook was a fat boy
who told marvellous tales of adventures. Among other things, he had
been a human ostrich in the circus, and he assured us that chewing up
glass and swallowing it did no harm if you knew how. So elaborate was
his cooking that again and again we ran out of grub. Furthermore, meals
were generally late, but we knew better than to hurry the supper and
his finishing touches. When finally a meal was ready, he advanced to
our tent, bowed, and called out, “Gentlemen, you will now proceed to
sagastuate.”
Johnston the teamster was an ambitious South Dakota high school
graduate and farm boy who wanted to learn all he could from geological
surveyors. A few years ago, in the nineteen forties, I received a
letter from him in southwest Africa saying that he had been successful
in placer mining for gold and diamonds and that he was writing a book
about it.
Arizona was my fourth field of fire-made irruptions; after New England,
the Black Hills, and the Yellowstone (old, middle-aged, and young). To
the Bradshaw Mountains between Prescott and Phoenix and lying south
of the Grand Canyon, I was sent with Palache to make the Bradshaw
Mountains folio.
At Prescott we had the rare privilege of talks with Clarence King. An
aged bachelor dying of tuberculosis, he was living in a cottage with
an old negro servant. King was a fascinating talker and writer. He had
been the first director of the Geological Survey and was the author
of “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.” His great summary volume
of the 40th Parallel, the survey along the Union Pacific, is one of
the classics in literature and in geology. His model, unhappily for
him, was Alexander Agassiz, who made a great fortune out of Calumet
and Hecla copper. When King went into mining to make a fortune he
contracted tuberculosis. He died soon after we saw him.
The problem of what makes granite was never better illustrated than
in the Bradshaws. One formation, in upright bands for miles across
country, showed dark schist, diorite, granite, diabase, granite, light
schist, quartzite, granite, gabbro, and schist again, like a succession
of dikes, slabs, and veins side by side. A mountain spur, like a
bookshelf with colored books on edge, is called Crooks Complex, and was
named after Crooks Canyon. The trend was with the pinched strata but
the stuff was mostly igneous.
It was as though a mechanism of melting-up was mixed with intrusion
of fluid, but what fluid? A glass? or a gas? There was no smearing,
but clean-cut dikes and schist slabs on edge. In the big granite hills
there were contact breakups with fragments of schist imprisoned in
granite, but not smeared or streaked. The impression was of millions
of years and thousands of episodes, all dike-making and guided by the
upright lamination or vertical structure of the ancient altered tightly
folded clay and sand strata, squeezed together by horizontal pressure.
Since learning of the million-year periods taught by radioactivity, and
of the many million years within a single era of geology, I have begun
to wonder whether these very old formations may represent hundreds of
millennia, with granitization happening over and over again, in each
geological revolution of upheaval and mountain building above.
Granitization, then, is a process of heat pressure, gases, melting,
and crystal making, of which the ancient words magma or emulsion or
paste give no conception. And volcanism, up through the deep crust, is
the mystery devil. May it not be nucleonics and melting of deep crust,
rather than chemistry? And is not the mystery devil always hydrogen gas?
At the beginning of the twentieth century I visited two places which
are close together and related to the Bradshaw Mountains. One was
Searchlight in the southern tip of Nevada, the other was the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado River.
I shall never forget my arrival in Searchlight. A strike of miners was
going on, and Stanford geology students had been sent in as strike
breakers. Big Bill, the sheriff, brought the boys across the desert
from the railway. His buckboard was in front and the Stanforders
followed in a wagon. The strikers lined the road out from Searchlight,
intent on loosing the horses. But when they saw Bill’s star and his
notched six-shooter, they dropped their hands to their sides and stood
like a row of tin soldiers, while Big Bill led the way through at a
gallop, cursing them roundly.
When I got off the train at Ivanpah, a small place with only a few
houses, I spoke to a young station agent where the ancient Wells Fargo
sign hung. He told me that the Quartette Mine team would meet me soon,
and shortly a cloud of dust on the desert proclaimed the vehicle which
came dashing up, a phaeton rig with two big horses. The five men inside
were armed, with rifles and pump shotguns protruding. One man pulled
out a heavy leathern pouch, and another stood over it with his rifle.
“Come on, Jack, lets go over to Wolf Saloon.” “No,” said Jack, “not
till I get my receipt.” The mild station man yanked out a receipt
book, filled the blank acknowledging $20,000 in bullion from the mine,
threw the pouch into an open safe, and Jack with his receipt departed,
leaving the gold brick to the mystic protection of that sign, “Wells
Fargo and Co.” Two ablebodied bandits could easily have held up the
whole rail terminus.
When I started for the mine, accompanied by detectives and guards, we
all carried pistols in holsters strapped under our arms. En route, we
spent Christmas amid the smell of sagebrush and the glorious sunset
lights of a purple desert. Once more I murmured, “So this is natural
history.”
I was employed to examine the Quartette Gold Mine, and the geologic
mystery of the origin of a million dollars in dirt between a level
200 feet down and another at a depth of 500 feet. The million dollars
was along a crushed, slipped, so-called vein, where a fault followed
the upright bedding of just such gneisses, granite dikes, and schists
as had made Crooks Complex in the Bradshaws. Where gold was richest,
minerals were richest--beautiful orange-colored wulfenite, green
chrysocolla, blue azurite, onyx, quartz, and calcite. Everywhere were
quantities of gouge, or crushed clays, from grinding walls. Native gold
particles were distributed through all this.
The schists were filled with lava fissure fillings, and the mine
was where this pattern of bands was interrupted by a very ancient
greenstone or basalt body. Hot fluids of the volcanic period, deep
underground, had accompanied fault slipping or fracture where the ore
was, the vertical fault parallel to the upright layers and across the
greenstone contact.
Ore and gold particles were directly related to fracture, to the fault
slipping on an upright crack of one mountain block against another,
to the hot vapors depositing the mineral collection, and to renewed
crushing and sliding on the mountain blocks. This was during or
following some part of the volcanic period when all the cracks were
injected with andesite lavas, or what the miners call porphyry. The
origin of the minerals was in lead and copper sulfides which lie deeper
down.
A hundred miles to the northeast is the Grand Canyon, and all around
are granite mountains, just as in Arizona. These Searchlight schists
are the same Algonkian ancient strata, recrystallized and granitized,
that make the inner gorge of the canyon, and are traversed up cracks
by volcano-making lavas, such as dot the north bank of the canyon
with crater cones. Above in the canyon are the horizontal strata from
Cambrian up to the Coal Measures and beyond. The vast maze of castles
and turrets is a net of branch valleys of the Colorado, trenching
through these old seabed deposits.
Including Searchlight ore, the whole history going backward is top
country desert, deep trench, strata piled in rivers and sea bottoms for
500 million years, and lastly faulting and cracking that squirted steam
and made gold minerals over and over again during the last 100 million
years. There were at least a dozen revolutions that lifted and lowered
mountain ranges and continents for 2,000 million years, and the remains
of iron-eating bacteria and of seaweeds and other living things that
go back for 1,500 million years. Through it all are granite injections
as a process, as a mystery, going over the whole range of years in
different ages, and meaning what?
One of the puzzles of Grand Canyon, Bradshaw Mountains, and
Searchlight--if not also of New England, the Black Hills, and the
Yellowstone--is faulting. A fault is what a geologist means by a crack
down deep where the country rock has dropped down on one side so as to
make a discordance across country. Earthquake faults make a visible
bank or step or sidewise slip, changing the surface after an earthquake.
The northwestern states are partly mapped as fault block mountains. The
island of Hawaii has a series of fault step blocks southeast, slipping
toward the ocean. The steep east face of the Sierra Nevada is a fault
fracture.
Professor Shaler once stopped me on the street and said of my field
work, “Jaggar, you don’t teach faulting enough.” Faults were shown
along straight lines on the color maps of formation in the old Boston
books, and were located by guesswork if glacier deposits covered up
the ledges. It seemed to me that faults ought to be proved or else
omitted from the maps. Probably I too was wrong, for faults or cracks
completely concealed by soil and strata are tremendous unknown lines on
the globe.
The Searchlight ore body is certainly a fault fracture, and so are
those of Tonopah and hundreds of mines. It was digging that proved it.
The cracking and slipping and steaming and mud-making on the fissure
are what brought up the minerals.
A question arises as to how much the Grand Canyon itself and its
tributaries are guided by fault fractures under valleys. My impression
was in 1901, and it still is, that “Jaggar ought to teach faulting”
more than he then did.
The primitive ocean blocks of earth crust sank, while continents
remained high, leaving the earth crust a mosaic of blocks large and
small, high and low. Between the blocks spout the volcanoes. I have
never agreed with C. E. Dutton that volcanic heat energy could come
from shallow pockets under those fault blocks. Even he acknowledged the
weakness of the argument. If the earth crust broke up and the blocks
variously sank in the core matter, leaving continents as a complex
of high blocks, then the blocks are deep and are still moving. The
movements are in years, year-thousands and year-millions. Volcanism up
the cracks releases core energy. So does much of fault movement, namely
earthquakes. And these facts geologists do not appreciate.
So we get faulted river courses and fault cracks up which came fluids
that transformed sediments of rivers, lakes, deserts, and seas into
granite, felsite, and greenstone. These are the ancient names. There
are hundreds of other, geology names. But geology produced no Faraday.
I disliked geology in 1902. And I disliked mining because of its
secrecy and its devotion to profits. Geology failed to tell businessmen
the mystery of granite, of felsite, and of greenstone. Astronomers told
the same men of mysteries, and they were fascinated. Physiology led
them to cells, plants, animals, and chemicals in the blood, solving
mystery after mystery. Men, money, inventions, engineers, buildings,
and staffs grew by leaps and bounds in those sciences. The best geology
could do was guesswork--a mastodon, a big reptile skeleton, a guesswork
color map--while seventy percent of the earth was seabottom rock,
unmapped, and twenty percent more consisted of fractures covered with
soil.
Seeing the Carnegie and Rockefeller laboratories and observatories, I
grieved for field geology. The public did not even know that granite,
the mystery, is the commonest rock and that quartz, the gold maker, is
the commonest mineral. Nor did they know that both are almost absent
from the whole Pacific. Nor that geology is almost ignorant of their
origin and injection, if it is injection. Here was the globe, the
end product of astronomy, the most fascinating research in the whole
range of science. The source of all raw materials of commerce, yet its
fire-made rocks and its seabottom rocks remained a mystery.
Before leaving the Grand Canyon, let me record my impressions of the
erosion. It is a gorge a mile deep usually described as “cut” by the
Colorado River. As I shall show in discussion of experiments with the
Grand Canyon model, it is possible, in stratified layers yielding grit
to flowing rainwater, to cut a deep canyon by surface runoff. It is
possible for underground water and tributaries from side rainfalls
to increase the volume of such a stream greatly in a hundred miles.
But Dutton’s showing of upheaved and downdropped big blocks of broken
mountains, and such obvious breaks as the Tonto and Bright Angel faults
shown to tourists as traced out by Bright Angel Canyon, prove that the
earth crust is broken. And Searchlight showed a fault to be a water
supply.
The enormous canyon appeared to me to be a million-year break system
of earth-crust rotting. The water is a giant modern grinding mill of
rainfall, underground accumulation, and transport. But with five great
erosion surfaces shown in the discordances, from 2,000 million years
ago to the present day; and with upheaval of the high plateaus in block
faults, and bent strata age after age; and farther north with recent
volcanoes that spouted up the cracks, it seems more vivid to think
the valleys at least partly water-filled cracks and chasms. Volcanoes
cannot be shallow. The canyons and the great bend are different from
the Green River source, because of upward push in waves. The up-push
of the Uinta Mountains is well known to have been slow. It kept pace
with the ruptures followed by the river. Going back to Daubrée, rivers
follow cracks much more than do the textbooks.
In 1899 two things happened which affected the rest of my life. First,
Director Walcott asked me to furnish estimates for a Hawaii geologic
survey, a request which eventually led me to Hawaii. Second, the
Yakutat Bay earthquake snapped on an astonished world, though most of
the world didn’t know it.
The Yakutat Bay earthquakes in Alaska, in September 1899, were
accompanied by the pushing up of the bedrock shoreline by forty-seven
feet. Lowered beneath the sea were whole forests, on glacial deposits
pulled down by submarine landslips. It was an uninhabited region at
the foot of Mount St. Elias, along a fjord penetrating far into the
mountains. It came in line with the Aleutian trench, under the Pacific,
4,000 fathoms deep. The earthquakes lasted two weeks.
This colossal movement of blocks of the earth’s crust hundreds of miles
across gave one the impression that we knew little of what was going
on. Remembering that seventy-two percent of the earth’s surface is
covered by oceans and that less than ten percent is really inhabited, I
awoke to how much there was to learn. If whole forests and their roots
could float away into the Pacific currents, with all their plants and
animals and seeds and bacteria, what might not have occurred in past
ages, when such jostling of crust blocks was common.
But before I was to experiment with live volcanoes came a decade of
laboratory experiment.