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From Edinburgh to Salt Lake City
Sir Archibald Geikie’s painting of Smith’s Fork on the northern slope of the Uinta Mountains. The lake and mounds of glacial deposits (moraine) are seen in the painting. Smith’s Fork is today a part of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum, Surrey, UK.
From Edinburgh to Salt Lake City: Archibald Geikie’s Travels in the American West in 1879
BY RASOUL SORKHABI
In 1875 the British science magazine Nature published a two-part article entitled “American Geological Surveys.”1 Its author, Archibald Geikie, was the director of the Geological Survey of Scotland and a professor of geology at the University of Edinburgh. Geikie briefly reported on the pioneering surveys of Clarence King, John Powell, and Ferdinand Hayden in the Rockies of the “Western Territories,” and remarked that the reports of these surveyors were “full of fresh illustrations of the principles of geology, such as the dependence of scenery upon rocky structure, the order of succession of formations, the plication of mountain chains, the phenomena of volcanic actions, the functions of rivers and glaciers as geological agents.”2
Why would a Scottish geologist across the Atlantic show so much interest in the geologic mapping of the American West? This question is actually a portal of entry into an important chapter in the natural history of the American West. Indeed, Geikie’s 1875 article was the beginning of his life-long interest in the Rockies, which culminated in his travel to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana in 1879—a fascinating but little-known story. A major motivation for preparing this article is that some of the best books on the geographic and geologic exploration history of the American West— among them works by Wallace Stegner, Richard Bartlett, and William Goetzmann—make no mention of Geikie’s 1879 field trip and related writings.3 Geikie’s travels, given his stature as a preeminent geologist, illustrates not only trans-Atlantic cooperation in the development of geology during the nineteenth century but also the paramount position of the American West in the history of the field.
As a modern science, geology was born in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the UK and Continental Europe—a history well documented. Less examined has been the professional and intellectual relationships between European and American geologists during the nineteenth century. Not all European geologists were then interested in the mapping done in the New World, but some appreciated the significance of such work and the fertile landscape of North America for geologic investigations. During the 1840s, Sir Charles Lyell, arguably the most eminent British geologist of the nineteenth century, made two trips to the United States and wrote Travels in North America (1845) and A Second Visit to the United States (1849). Geikie, who was very much influenced by Lyell, illustrates a prominent bridge between the UK–US geologic communities of his time. Moreover, both Lyell’s and Geikie’s travels to the United States can be viewed as part of what has been called “the gentlemen’s geology,” or science of the elite and romanticist characteristic in the UK and much of Europe in the nineteenth century.4
Beginning in the 1830s and continuing well into the century, the United States government coordinated and funded extensive expeditions and mapping surveys of the region—surveys that not only generated scientific knowledge of the region but were ultimately instrumental in the unification of the United States as a vast continent nation and its rise as a world power.5 Among the pioneering surveyors of the American West working in the last half of the nineteenth century were Clarence Rivers King (1842–1901), John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden (1829–1887), Clarence Edward Dutton (1841–1912), and Grove Karl Gilbert (1843–1918). From 1867 to 1872, King, under the direction of the War Department, mapped a vast area along the fortieth parallel north from northeastern California through Nevada and Utah to eastern Wyoming. Powell, an army officer who had lost most of his right arm in the Civil War, is best known for his explorations on the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869, but he had an influential career, including as director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Hayden, a physician-turned-geologist, conducted several expeditions in the Rockies between 1856 and 1871 under the direction of the Department of the Interior. He was especially known for the mapping of the Yellowstone region and Colorado. Dutton published his surveys of the High Plateaus of Utah in 1880 and the Grand Canyon in 1882. Gilbert reported on the geology of the Henry Mountains of southeastern Utah in 1877 and on Lake Bonneville in 1890. Geikie met or corresponded with all of these great American geologists and had read their reports with a keen interest.6
Archibald Geikie was born into a middle-class family in 1835 Edinburgh, then a thriving city of science and commerce. After finishing the Edinburgh High School, Geikie apprenticed in a law office as a preparation for a banking career, but instead of taking to the law or finance, he read every available geology book and befriended scientists in Edinburgh. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen Geikie, a selftaught geologist, geologically mapped islands off the coast of Scotland, and his reports drew attention and admiration from professional geologists. He entered the University of Edinburgh in 1854 but had to soon leave to support his family. At age 20, Geikie began a career at the Geological Survey of the Great Britain, and in 1858 he published his first book, The Story of a Boulder, which proved to be popular. His work so impressed Sir Roderick Murchison, the Geological Survey’s director-general, that he nominated Geikie as the director of the new Geological Survey of Scotland in 1867 and professor of geology at the University of Edinburgh in 1871.7 By 1879, upon first travelling to the United States, Geikie had developed a wellknown and respected professional reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sir Archibald Geikie (1835–1924) was born and educated in Edinburgh. He rose to be one of the greatest British geologists of his time serving as the director of the Geological Survey of Scotland (1867–1881), professor of geology at Edinburgh University (1871–1881), and director of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom in London (1882–1901). He was also a prolific author and his Textbook of Geology (first published in 1882; fourth edition, 1905) were widely used in the UK and the USA. Cassell’s Universal Portrait Gallery, 1895, London, p. 449.
Geikie had two specific geologic objectives in visiting the American West: first, to observe the erosional power of rivers in shaping landscape, and second, to examine the widespread volcanic activity in the Yellowstone region. Both of these were related to the geologic problems that had occupied his mind for years and were hotly debated by European geologists.
One of the major scientific debates among natural scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries centered on the processes that shaped the irregular surface of the Earth. Various ideas were proposed. Some believed that the present mountains and valleys were primitive features dating back to the time of creation. Some invoked the Biblical story of the Flood. Some advocated the role of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. Others believed that the Earth began initially as a hot ball of rock, but as it gradually cooled the surface shrank and wrinkled. The collapse of blocks of rock created an irregular topography. Still others proposed the idea that marine action had eroded and sculptured the Earth’s topography when land had formerly been inundated. All of these ideas trivialized the role of rivers, glaciers, and winds as important earth-shaping agents.8
One group of geologists, including Geikie, emphasized that flowing water, moving glaciers, and blowing winds in the course of geologic time are powerful enough to erode and shape the Earth’s landforms. This idea, then called “erosionalism,” is consistent with our understanding of how Earth’s topography is shaped by variable erosion. However, to prove “erosionalism” geologists like Geikie had to travel and document the processes of erosion in action. This could be better done in the American West than in the British Isles. In an article entitled “The Cañons of the Far West,” Geikie explained why:
Henry Drummond (1851–1897), Scottish biologist, lecturer, writer, and Evangelist preacher, who was educated at the University of Edinburgh and the Free Church of Scotland. He led an unmarried life devoted to natural science, Christianity, and the reconciliation of the two. Drummond, a former student of Geikie at Edinburgh, accompanied him on the 1879 trip to the American West. Frontispiece of The Life of Henry Drummond by George Adam Smith, 1898.
The second geologic question in Geikie’s mind was related to the origin of widespread volcanic rocks in the British Isles and Iceland where no cone-shape volcanic mountains and craters are present or eroded. How did these volcanic rocks originate? These geologic puzzles spurred Geikie and his companion, Henry Drummond, to the American West on a trip that was not apparently a formal or funded project. Drummond was a former student of Geikie in the Geology Class of 1871 at the University of Edinburgh; in 1877 he became a lecturer in natural science at the New College of the Free Church of Scotland in Glasgow where he was also trained as an evangelist minister. Geikie and Drummond’s 1879 trip to the United States is documented in two articles by Geikie published in the 1881 issues of Macmillan’s Magazine, which were reprinted in his 1882 book Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad. 10 Geikie also briefly wrote about this trip in his autobiography, A Long Life’s Work, published shortly before his death in 1924.11
Geikie and Drummond began sailing to the New World on July 31, 1879. Upon arrival in New York, they were received by Hayden, who arranged recommendations from the secretary of war and the quartermaster general for the resident military officers in the “Far West” to show hospitality and assistance to the Scottish geologists. Geikie had extended similar professional kindness earlier that year when he wrote a letter of recommendation urging the selection of Hayden as director of the newly established U.S. Geological Survey—a position Hayden lost to his rival, Clarence King.12
On August 1, a day after their arrival, Geikie and Drummond were traveling west in a Pullman railroad car, passing the blue waters of the Hudson River toward Chicago. “A project which had been little more than a dream for many years,” Geikie wrote, “was now at least actually realized.”13 As the train was approaching Chicago, they heard a shooting that broke the window glasses of an unoccupied train car. “This was our first experience of ‘Western Life,’” Geikie later wrote. “We looked next morning in the papers for an account of the ‘outrage’ as it would have been termed by our penny-a-liners at home. It was not mentioned at all. We found, however, records of so many successful shootings.” At Chicago they boarded the Union Pacific. After crossing the Mississippi (where a stop in Rockport, Illinois gave them an opportunity to “dip our hands in the great Father of Waters”) and Missouri Rivers, the two men eventually had a view of “the first summits of the Rocky Mountains [rising] like blue islets out of the sea.” They had reached the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado with views of the snow-capped summits of Pikes Peak (4,302 m), Longs Peak (4,346 m), and “a host of other broad-based cones towering far up in to the clean air.”14
A map of the US Rocky Mountain states showing the travel routes of Sir Archibald Geikie in 1879 with major stops. The inset map is for the Yellowstone National Park. Map drawn by the author.
The core of high mountains, if exposed, is made of granite and gneiss, metamorphic rocks deeply rooted in the Earth’s crust. Geikie describes this geologic structure in terms of how it is related to mineral deposits and booming mining towns: “The rise of the granitic axis has brought up with it that incredible mineral wealth which, in a few years, has converted the loneliest mountain solitudes into busy hives of industry.”15 The men made stops in Denver and the gold mining towns of Golden and Boulder in Colorado. Geikie did some landscape paintings of these places. On August 18, according to Drummond, a man came to their hotel at Boulder and asked the hotel manager if there were any ministers in the town, as a miner had died some ten miles away. Drummond volunteered to perform the burial service of the dead miner who happened to be an Englishman. “Before I came home they gave me tea, and loaded me with specimens of gold,” Drummond wrote.16
Moving northward, Geikie and Drummond left Colorado for Wyoming. Traveling along a stretch of the north-south running Rockies convinced Geikie that the range was not continuous but rather broken up with the occasional lowlands. As an example, he mentioned Laramie Plains, to the west of which a dry-desert tract of land “for some 150 miles or more” with localities named “Red Desert, Bitter Creek and Salt Wells, and others sufficiently denot[ing] the sterile character of this region.”17All of these places are located in southern Wyoming, along today’s Interstate 80.
Traveling on the Union Pacific from Cheyenne, they eventually reached Fort Bridger in southwest Wyoming where Drummond sent a letter dated August 21 to his mother: “At last we are in the heart of the mountains, and very comfortably quartered, with a famous man in these parts, Judge Carter, to whom Geikie had introduction. We make this house our home for a couple of nights, and go cruising among the mountains during the day. Then we go off for a few days’ camping, and return here for a night next week on our way further west, and north to the Yellowstone.”18 Judge Carter was William Alexander Carter (1818–1891) who in 1857 moved from his birthplace of Virginia to Fort Bridger, then an important station on the emigrant road to Salt Lake City and the Pacific Coast. At the time of Geikie’s travels the fort was no longer a military post and was “falling into disrepair.” Geikie referred to Carter as “patriarch of the district”—“postmaster, merchant, farmer, cattle-owner, judge, and general benefactor of all who claim his hospitality.”19
Judge Carter took his guests to see the “Bad Lands” of southern Wyoming. Badlands is a translation of the Canadian French term les mauvaises terres and refers to a type of arid, hot terrain shaped by marine sedimentation and the massive erosion by water and wind. Some of the remarkable badlands are in North America. Geikie, coming from the UK, was so impressed by this landscape that he gave a rather detailed definition of these “tracts of irreclaimable barrenness, blasted and left for ever lifeless and hideous.” He described these “unequally eroded” formations of sandstone, clay, marl, or limestone as “strata extend[ing] nearly horizontally for hundreds of square miles. . . . Here and there isolated flat-topped eminences or buttes, as they are styled in the West, rise from the plain.” He reports the temperature at day time to be as high as 90° F in the shade while at night down to 19° F.20
From their base at Fort Bridger, Geikie and Drummond made an excursion into the Uinta Mountains which are “one of the most interesting ranges in North America; for, instead of following the usual north and south direction, it turns nearly east and west, and, in place of a central crystalline wedge driven through the younger formations, it consists of a vast flat arch of nearly horizontal strata that plunge steeply down into the plains on either side. . . . The broad central mass of the range is constructed of a flat arch of dull-red sandstone.”21 In this excursion to the northern slopes of the Uinta Mountains, they were accompanied by a guide named Dan, an old trapper who had long hunted in the mountains.
The northern slopes of the Uinta Mountains are characterized by a series of “forks”—glaciated rivers valleys that originate at the mountain summit and descend into the valleys facing Wyoming. Geikie wrote that as they were riding along one of these streams they observed a deserted site with stakes “as if for low huts and wigwams” apparently “constructed by the Indians for bathing purposes.”22 At one point the party climbed to an elevation of 11,000–12,000 feet. On the way back to camp they lost the trail through the forest. As night was already coming they found an open space where they made a camp fire and went out to look for fresh water. On their return, they were stunned to see that the fire had spread to the surrounding pine trees. Luckily, there was no wind, and by the morning the flames had died down. They returned to Fort Bridger that day.
Their next stop was Utah’s Salt Lake Valley, where “the Mormons have given a look of long-settled comfort” and “have converted the strip of land between the base of the heights [Wasatch] and the edge of the water [Great Salt Lake] into fertile fields and well-kept gardens.”23 They took the Union Pacific train at Ogden Junction to reach Salt Lake City, “where a few days were agreeably spent.”24 At the hotel, Geikie met Captain Clarence Dutton and Major John Powell. They took Geikie and Drummond to visit Fort Douglas, a military post east of Salt Lake City on the Wasatch foothills. In Salt Lake City, Geikie also met a Mormon elder (whose name he does not mention): “It turned out that he had once been Secretary at Edinburgh to the Forth and Clyde Canal Company, before the days of the railways, and had been induced to join the Mormons early in the career of Joseph Smith.”25
In their visit of the Great Salt Lake, Geikie noted that the lake shore was “a level plain of salt-crusted mud,” adding that “the Mormons and the Gentiles of Salt Lake City make good use of their lake for bathing purpose. At convenient points they have thrown out wooden piers provided with dressing-rooms and hot-water apparatus.”26 Geikie and Drummond also joined the swimming party. They felt the heaviness of the salty water, making it possible to float in a sitting posture. They enjoyed their floatation experiments. Geikie pondered: “It was strange to reflect that the varied beauty of the valleys in the neighbouring mountains, with their meadows, clumps of cottonwood trees, and rushing streams, should lead into the lifeless stagnant sea.”27
Geikie’s painting of camping in the Uinta Mountains. Exact location is unknown. Courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum, Surrey, UK.
Geikie refers to a detailed study of the Great Salt Lake by G. K. Gilbert,28 and remarks that the former lake—called Lake Bonneville by Gilbert—was much larger than the present Great Salt Lake; it was filled with fresh water, measuring about 300 miles north-south and 180 miles east-west at its greatest height of 940 feet above the present level. The lake had an outlet into the Snake River in Idaho, draining into the Pacific Ocean. The lake became salty by excessive evaporation of its waters over time. Geikie adds that water level in the Great Salt Lake continued to fluctuate: from 1866 to 1872 it rose eleven feet but had declined by 1879.29
Geikie and Drummond made a field trip to the Wasatch Mountains whose summits, as Geikie observes, were covered with snow in the month of August, consistent with 1869–1871 paintings of the Wasatch Mountains made by Gilbert Munger, the artist at the party of Clarence King’s Fortieth Parallel survey.30 “This range,” Geikie writes, “serves at once as the western boundary of the plateau country and as the eastern rim of the Great Basin, into which it plunges as a colossal rampart from an average height of some 4000 feet above the plain.”31
Geikie made an interesting inference from the moraine sediments in the Wasatch canyons brought down and deposited by glaciers “I further noticed at the Little Cottonwood Cañon that the moraines descend to the edge of the highest terrace, and that the glacial rubbish forms part of the alluvial deposits there. Hence, we may infer that at the time of the greatest extension of the lake the Wahsatch Mountains were a range of snow alps, from which glaciers descended to the edge of the water.”32 This is indeed one of the earliest references to the glacial origin of Little Cottonwood Canyon.
Another important discovery made by Geikie during their field trip to the Wasatch Mountains is related to the age of huge granitic bodies that make up some of the high summits in the Little Cottonwood and Big Cottonwood Canyons. How did this massive granite form? Clarence King (together with his assistant Samuel F. Emmons and the German geologist Ferdinand Zirkel) had opined in his 1878 geologic report that the granitic core of the Rockies belonged to the oldest geologic time—the Archean age (today known to be 4 to 2.4 billion years ago). The Rockies, in his interpretation, were once a very old large island, and during Paleozoic times (540–250 million years ago) sandstone and limestone were deposited on the sea surrounding the island.33 In other words, the granite was older the adjacent Paleozoic sediments.
Geikie investigated this interpretation on his field trip to the Little Cottonwood Canyon. He noticed that no pebbles of the granite were to be found in the Paleozoic sediments, which would be the case had the granite been older and the source of sediment deposits. Geikie also observed that sediments close to the granite slabs had become metamorphosed by the heating effect of the granite; sandstone became quartzite, and limestone became white marble. Moreover, Geikie also observed intrusion (dikes) of granite within the sedimentary rocks. Based on these lines of evidence, Geikie concluded that the white granite in the Wasatch Mountains was younger than the entire Paleozoic sediments. In other words, the igneous rock had intruded the Paleozoic sediments. Geikie published these observations in the American Journal of Science. 34 In his 1882 Textbook of Geology, Geikie also repeated his interpretation, referring to the granite body in Little Cottonwood Canyon as being of “post-Carboniferous age.”35
Clarence King, who served as the first director of the US Geological Survey, ignored Geikie’s paper and interpretation. In 1900, John M. Boutwell, a USGS geologist based in Utah, at the request of S. F. Emmons, examined the granite body in Little Cottonwood Canyon and confirmed that it had, indeed, intruded the Carboniferous sediments as Geikie had suggested. Boutwell reported to Emmons that Geikie’s interpretation appeared to be correct. Wanting to see the evidence for himself, Emmons conducted his own investigation and, in 1903 (two years after King’s death), published an article in the American Journal of Science (the same journal Geikie had published) entitled “The Little Cottonwood Granite Body of the Wasatch Mountains,” accepting King’s and his own mistake. As Emmons wrote, “A reply to Professor Geikie’s criticism, on part of Mr. King and myself, has awaited the opportunity of making a further study of the region,” which were carried out in the “seasons” prior to publication.36 Boutwell’s own report was published in 1912.37 Radiometric dating of the Wasatch granite has since determined it to be of Oligocene age (about 35 million years old), much younger than the Paleozoic sediments. The intrusion of the granite marks the beginning of the Basin-and-Range tectonics in the Great Basin over the past 35 million years.38
Geikie’s painting of the mouth of American Fork Canyon, Wasatch Range. The ridge on the right is the Great Blue Limestone of Mississippian age. The high ridge on the left is the Tintic Quartzite of Cambrian age overlying the Precambrian Mutual Quartzite (front side). Courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum, Surrey, UK.
After “a few days agreeably spent” in the Salt Lake Valley, Geikie and Drummond embarked on the next phase of their travels: north to the Yellowstone region in the northwestern corner of Wyoming bordering Idaho and Montana. Geikie described the method of transport from the Ogden station to Fort Ellis, a U.S. Army post in Montana under the command of Quartermaster Lieutenant Alison who would be their host:
They stopped in the towns of Virginia and Bozeman in Montana (located along today’s Interstate 90) before reaching their destination. Fort Ellis, just to the east of Bozeman and north of Wyoming, was established in 1867 to provide troops in military campaigns against the Indians. It was closed in 1886, seven years after Geikie’s visit. Geikie remarked: “Of Fort Ellis and the officers’ mess there, we shall ever keep the pleasantest memories. No Indians had now to be kept in order. There was indeed nothing to do at the Fort save the daily routine of military duty.” Lieutenant Alison gave two guides to Geikie and Drummond for their travels in Yellowstone Park. The first, Jack, was a trapper and miner who has lived in the wilderness for years; the second, Andy, was a cook and a leader of the mules. Geikie was especially impressed by Andy’s field skills—his cooking, campfire stories and travel experiences: “Andy, in particular, would never be outdone. Nothing marvelous was told that he could not instantly cap with something more wonderful still that had happened in his own experiences.”40
In 1872, the US Congress and President Ulysses Grant designated Yellowstone as the country’s first national park (and probably the first national park in the world as well). Geikie longed to “see the wonders of the Yellowstone—that region of geysers, mud volcanoes, hot springs and sinter-beds, which the United States Congress, with wise forethought, has set apart from settlement and reserved for this instruction of the people.”41 Geikie found night camping at the Yellowstone Park to be delightful: “Wrapping myself in the buffalo-cloak, with which Quartermaster Alison had so kindly provided, I used to lie apart in the open for a while, gazing up at the deep sky, so clear, so sparkling, so utterly and almost incredibly different from the bleared cloudy expanse with which we must usually be content in Britain.”42
However, Geikie’s expedition was of a scientific nature, and in particular he wanted to see the widespread volcanic activity as well as glacial phenomena in Yellowstone. Fortunately, he gives a rather detailed description of his trip to Yellowstone not only in his 1881 articles in Macmillan’s Magazine cited above, but also in a paper in The American Naturalist. 43 Most of Geikie’s landscape paintings during his US trip were also from Yellowstone. Moreover, Drummond’s diary of their field trip to Yellowstone is extant; it begins on September 2, the day the party left Fort Ellis and ends on September 12.44 Drummond’s writing, often in a telegraphic style, is witty and descriptive. For instance, this entry dated Monday, September 8, combines the day’s route and activities with terse scientific and geographic observations:
For Geikie, the Yellowstone River, as a prominent feature, provided a geographic framework of the park, “its head-waters close to the watershed of the continent, among the mountains which, branching out in different directions, include the ranges of the Wind River, Owl Creek, Shoshonee, the Tetons, and other groups that have hardly yet received names.” He traced its course “through a series of remarkable cañons” and eventually “into the Missouri.”46 Geikie described how the long and broad river valleys in Yellowstone were shaped by both forceful fluvial and massive glaciers—the latter leaving their records as moraines and erratic boulders. It is well known that Yellowstone like the Wind River Range in Wyoming and Sierra Nevada in California is home to alpine valley glaciers. But what was the extent of the glaciation in the American West during the Pleistocene Ice Age? From the evidence of eroded valley walls with rocks polished and striated by the former glaciers, Geikie estimated that the thickness of the ice must have been from 800 to 1600 feet above the present river plain.
Volcanic activity also shaped this ancient landscape. Geikie observed that volcanic eruptions were at least of two kinds: The light-colored, silica rich trachyte rocks erupted first, and the dark-colored basalts erupted much later as debris of trachyte were deposited in river beds long before the eruption of basalt: “The oldest lavas were trachytes and their allies, while the youngest were as invariably basalts, the interval between the eruptions of the two kinds having sometimes been long enough to permit the older rocks to be excavated into gorges before the emission of the more recent.”47 Unlike Etna or Vesuvius, which were “emitted from central volcanic cones,” Geikie observed, volcanic eruptions in Yellowstone occurred through “numerous longitudinal fissures in the crust of the earth, many of which are now revealed as dykes of basalt running for miles through the other rocks.” These “fissure eruptions” along the “vast Snake River volcanic plain” answered the puzzle that had long perplexed Geikie “as to the origin of the Tertiary basalt-plateaux of Scotland, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. The problem with which they had puzzled me for many years was here solved. They were now recognized to be an older and more wasted example of the same type of fissure eruptions.48
Along the Gardiner’s River (Gardner River), a tributary of the Yellowstone, Geikie noted the spectacular columns of geysers and hot springs. Desiring to take a hot bath, he found a location where “the water, after quitting its conduit, made a circuit round a basin of sinter, and in so doing cooled down sufficiently to let one sit in it.”49 From the Gardiner’s River, they “made a detour over a long ridge dotted with ice-borne blocks of granite and gneiss, and crossed the shoulder of Mount Washburne by a col 8867 feet above the sea, descending once more the Yellowstone River at the head of the Grand Cañon. The whole of this region consists of volcanic rocks, chiefly trachytes, rhyolites, obsidians, and tuff.” They came upon the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone—“a ravine from 1000 to 1500 feet deep”—where at the head they “stood on the brink of the great chasm silent with amazement” in view of Yellowstone Falls.50
Their next goal was “the Geyser Basin of the Firehole River—a ride of two days, chiefly through forest, but partly over bare volcanic hills.”51 Here Geikie mentions visiting two spectacular geysers, Old Faithful and Castle Geyser, in the Upper Geyser basin, as well as mud volcanoes in the Lower Geyser basin. Many of the mud geysers, Geikie observed, were no more than a foot high. Riding through the upper part of the Firehole River, “a densely-timbered gorge with picturesque volcanic peaks mounting up here and there on either side far above the pines,” they eventually reached “a watershed 7063 feet above the sea, and stood on the ‘Great Divide’ of the Continent.”52 Drummond, who recorded this ascent as taking place on September 12, recorded having taken a trail through “Tangee Pass” (probably Targhee Pass, elevation 7,072 feet). “The ascent is very gentle,” he wrote, “and it is almost inconceivable that this should represent the Divide between the Atlantic and Pacific waters.”53
On the last day of their excursion in Yellowstone Park, they surprisingly encountered a group of Native Americans, who spoke a little English and were armed with rifles, but they were found to be very friendly and were riding to Montana for a council of Indians. Geikie and Drummond said goodbye to Jack and Andy at a railway station in Idaho (Geikie only noted that it was located “in the bare, desolate valley”) that had been opened a week or two before. The train would take them back to Ogden. “Our two companions [Jack and Andy] were now to turn back and take a shorter route to Fort Ellis, but would be at least ten days on march.”54
From Ogden Geikie and Drummond returned east by rail, which Geikie reported as being “tolerably rapid and continuous until we reached Niagara, where we took time to see the Falls.” After a few days in Canada, they went on to Boston where Geikie gave a series of lectures on “Geographical Evolution” at the city’s Lowell Institute, founded in 1839 by an endowment from an American businessman and philanthropist John Lowell, Jr. At the time of Geikie’s visit, the founder’s cousin, John Amory Lowell, was leading the institute. Lowell invited Geikie to “his charming residence at Brooklyn, and gathered there a group of the most notable men of Boston and Cambridge.” “At dinner,” Geikie continues, “he placed me between Longfellow and Oliver W. Holmes. There were present also Charles W. Eliot, the distinguished President of Harvard University, and William Rogers, one of the oldest and most honoured of the geologists of the United States. The poet was quiet at dinner. . . . Mr. Holmes, on the other hand, was full of talk.” Geikie later wrote that two years after his trip to the United States, he had sent two of his articles in Macmillan’s Magazine to Holmes. “I have read your adventures and your scientific experiences in Wyoming which you have kindly sent me,” Holmes replied. “I am all ready to become an ‘Erosionalist’ under your agreeable guidance.”55 While in the east coast and before departing the United States, Geikie also met with James Dwight Dana (1813–1895), probably the most prominent American academic geologist during the nineteenth century.56 A week before the meeting Dana wrote Geikie expressing his “rejoice to know that you will give me the pleasure of an excursion with you on Saturday next,” October 11.57 Geikie and Drummond’s last stop was Philadelphia where they spent a few days with Hayden, the geologist friend who had received them upon their arrival in New York. In his autobiography, Geikie concludes his 1879 overseas travel as follows: “After a journey by sea and land of some 15,500 miles I was back in Edinburgh before the date for the opening of the session at the University. The three months of absence were time profitably spent.”58
On November 10, 1879, according to a report in Nature, “Prof. Geikie reopened the class of geology in the University of Edinburgh by giving an account of his recent exploration of the western territories of North America. There was a large attendance of students and others.” Geikie opened his lecture remarking that “[h] ad geology begun in those western territories, instead of among the old broken, and contorted rocks of Europe and the east of America, its progress, at all events in some departments, would have been far more rapid than it had been.”59
The account of Geikie’s travels in the American West illustrates two important facts. First, the landscape and geology of the American West played an important role in the development of the discipline of geology in the nineteenth century. Second, Geikie, both as an eminent geologist and as a prolific writer, was a bridge between the American and British geological communities. Indeed, Geikie kept an active correspondence with prominent American geologists of his time, including Dana, Gilbert, and especially Hayden, who had arranged Geikie’s 1879 travels in the American West. He wrote several reviews of the USGS and its geologic reports for Nature. He also wrote an obituary of Ferdinand Hayden when the latter passed away in 1887.60
A granite body named Geikie Laccolith in the Henry Mountains of southern Utah in honor of Sir Archibald Geikie. The mapping and naming of this granite intrusion into the surrounding sediments was by the eminent American geologists Grover Karl Gilbert reported in his 1880 report, a year after Geikie’s visit to Utah. Laccolith is a term for a lens-shaped igneous body intruding the overlying rocks and uplifting the area.
As mentioned at the outset of this article, Geikie’s travels to the American West are not usually documented in histories of exploration of the American West. This may be due to two reasons. First, in contrast to the great surveys of the American West organized and funded by the federal government, Geikie’s 1879 travels and field trips were unofficial and not documented in official survey reports. Second, he published the initial reports of his American travels in Macmillan’s Magazine, a British publication targeted to a British audience, not an American one. Macmillan in London was the main publisher of Geikie’s books. Macmillan had been founded in 1843 by the brothers Daniel and Alexander Macmillan from the Isle of Arran (where the young Archibald Geikie had conducted geological field work). The Macmillan and Geikie families enjoyed an intimate relationship. Alexander Macmillan welcomed Geikie to his circle of friends, and it was there that Archibald Geikie had met his wife, Anna Maria Alice Gabrielle Pingatel, in 1871.61
In 1881, two years after his return from the “American Far West,” Geikie moved from Edinburgh to London to serve as the director-general of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom, a position he held until his retirement in 1901. He continued his interest in the surveys and reports of the American West. In later years, both Geikie and Drummond returned separately to the United States. In 1893 Drummond visited Boston to deliver a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute where Geikie had lectured in 1879. In 1897, the year Drummond died of bone cancer bone, Geikie visited Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore to give a series of lectures on “The Founders of Geology,” later published as a popular book, in which he referred to the “various surveys” and “admirable work” of Powell, Newberry, King, and Hayden. Of the USGS Geikie said that the “magnitude and excellence of the work already accomplished by this organisation place it in the fore-front of all national geological enterprises.”62
Geikie was a man of the Victorian Age during which “gentlemen geologists” pioneered mapping and mineral exploration of Earth. Geikie’s engagement with American geology and geologists during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the federal investment in the “Great Surveys,” coincided with major political reconstruction and rapid industrialization in the United States following the Civil War. Geikie’s 1879 travel to the American West epitomized the characteristics of this historical period during which Utah’s landscape was an active scene of mining, mapping, and transformation. Nevertheless, these important field trips by Geikie in 1879 have largely been ignored in the historiography of the America West geology.63 Geikie’s presence is imprinted on the Utah landscape, however. Grove Karl Gilbert honored Geikie by naming a granite body in the Henry Mountains of southern Utah after him.64
Notes
I am grateful to Jonathan Craig who introduced me to this little-researched topic of Geikie’s visits to and writings on the American West. Julia Tanner and John Betterton of the Haslemere Educational Museum in Surrey were hugely cooperative with information about Geikie. Comments by two anonymous reviewers as well as edits by Jedediah Rogers greatly improved the paper. I alone, however, am responsible for the content.
1. Archibald Geikie, “American Geological Surveys,” Nature 12 (August 5, 1875): 265–67, and Nature 13 (November 4, 1875): 1–3.
2. Geikie, “American Geological Surveys,” vol. 12, 265.
3. Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954; New York: Penguin Books, 1992); Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962); William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966). Goetzmann shows that the various apparently unrelated surveys of the West during the second half of the nineteenth century were actually coordinated and funded by the US government with a strategic thinking behind it.
4. Roy Porter, “Gentlemen and geology: The emergence of a scientific career, 1660–1920,” Historical Journal, 21, no. 4 (December), 809–36. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Lyell donated books to help found the Chicago Public Library.
5. See Robert Kaplan, Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World (New York: Random House, 2017).
6. Rasoul Sorkhabi, “Sir Archibald Geikie: the North American connections,” in Aspects of the Life and Works of Archibald Geikie (London: Geological Society Special Publication 480, 2019), 113–38.
7. Rasoul Sorkhai, “Archibald Geikie (1835–1924): A Pioneer Scottish Geologist, Teacher, and Writer,” GSA Today 30 (June 2020): 34–36.
8. The British historian of science Gordon L. Davies, in The Earth in Decay: A History of British Geomorphology, 1578–1878 (New York: American Elsevier, 1969), has discussed the various ideas regarding the irregular Earth’s topography or what he calls the “denudation dilemma.”
9. Archibald Geikie, “The Cañons of the Far West,” Proceedings of Royal Institution of Great Britain (1882–1884), 10, 268–71.
10. Archibald Geikie, “In Wyoming,” Macmillan’s Magazine 144, no. 264 (1881), 229–40; “The Geysirs of the Yellowstone,” Macmillan’s Magazine 144, no. 264 (1881), 421–35; Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad (London: Macmillan, 1882), ch. 9, “In Wyoming,” 205–34, and ch. 10, “The geysers of Yellowstone,” 235–73. I will refer to these two chapters in subsequence citations.
11. Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 177–88.
12. Geikie to Hayden, December 31, 1878, Papers of Sir Archibald Geikie, Coll-74/13/1, University of Edinburgh Library Special Collections, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland. Geikie’s letter was in response to Hayden’s letters dated November 24, 1878, and December 13, 1878, Coll-74/12/1, Geikie Papers.
13. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 205.
14. Geikie, 212, 215.
15. Geikie, 216.
16. George A. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond (New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1898), 170
17. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 220.
18. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 167.
19. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 221. For those interested in research about Judge William Alexander Carter, it should be note that his collection of papers and correspondence (1858–1875) are housed at the Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah: http:// archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv02105.
20. Geikie, 223.
21. Geikie, 226, 228.
22. Geikie, 231. Although the Ute had been forced by the US government onto the Uintah Reservation beginning in the 1860s, at the time of Geikie’s visit some Utes continued to hunt and gather in the Uinta Mountains. For more information, refer to Fred Conetah’s A History of the Northern Ute People (Uintah-Quray Ute Tribe, 1982).
23. Geikie, 235, 236.
24. Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 183.
25. Geikie, 184.
26. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 237. Geikie does not indicate whether his visit to the lake was at Black Rock or Garfield Beach, both located on the lake’s southeastern shore.
27. Geikie, 238.
28. Gilbert’s preliminary results on the survey of Great Salt Lake and its former extent named Lake Bonneville by Gilbert were first published in Exploration and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, vol. 3. Geology, part 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875), 88–104. His full report, Lake Bonneville, was published as the U.S. Geological Survey Monograph 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1890).
29. Geikie, “In Wyoming” (1882), 239–41.
30. Gilbert Davis Munger (1837–1903) was an American landscape painter and worked for geologists. During 1869–71, he was a member of King’s survey and painted the Wasatch Mountains. They were published as part of King’s report in 1878. For more information visit: https://gilbertmunger.org/
31. Geikie, 236.
32. Geikie, 243.
33. Clarence King, Systematic Geology: Report of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, Professional Papers of the Engineer Department, U.S. Army. Volume 1. Descriptive Geology. Volume 2. Systematic Geology (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1878).
34. Archibald Geikie, “On the Archaean Rocks of Wahsatch Mountains,” American Journal of Science (1880), 19, 363–67.
35. Archibald Geikie, Textbook of Geology (London: Macmillan, 1882), 646.
36. S. F. Emmons, “The Little Cottonwood Granite Body of the Wasatch Mountains,” American Journal of Science 16, no. 92 (1903): 139–47, qt. on 142. Emmons was at the time of publication president of the Geological Society of America.
37. John M. Boutwell, Geology and Ore Deposits of the Park City District, Utah (U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 77). Boutwell, who died in 1968 at age 94, donated his papers, letters, maps, field notebooks, and mineral collections to Brigham Young University where they are stored as the J. M. Boutwell Papers, MSS 1647, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library.
38. K. N. Constenius, “Late Paleogene extensional collapse of the Cordilleran foreland fold and thrust belt,” Geological Society of America Bulletin (1996), 108, 20–29.
39. Geikie, “The geysers of Yellowstone” (1882), 244.
40. Geikie, 255.
41. Geikie, 243.
42. Geikie, 255; Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 180.
43. Archibald Geikie, “Ancient Glaciers of Rocky Mountains,” American Naturalist (1881), 15, 1–17.
44. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 170–88.
45. Smith, 175–76.
46. Geikie, “The geysers of Yellowstone” (1882), 248–49.
47. Geikie, 252. Trachyte is a type of volcanic rocks that has more silica than basalt; therefore, it is lighter in color and in weight than basalt.
48. Archibald Geikie, A Long Life’s Work: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1924), 182–83.
49. Geikie, 253.
50. Geikie, 257–58.
51. Geikie, 260.
52. Geikie, 268.
53. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 186.
54. Geikie, “The geysers of Yellowstone” (1882), 273.
55. Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 184–86.
56. Dana and Geikie had much in common: Both were prominent “gentlemen” geologists and highly productive writers in their own countries. Also geology ran in their families: Dana’s son, Edward Salisbury Dana (1849–1935) and Geikie’s younger brother James Murdoch Geikie (1839–1915) were both well-known geologists.
57. D. C. Gilman, The Life of James Dwight Dana (New York: Harper), 334.
58. Geikie, A Long Life’s Work, 187.
59. “Prof. Geikie on the Geology of the Far West,” Nature, November 20, 1879, 67–69.
60. Archibald Geikie, “Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden,” Nature, February 2, 1888, 325.
61. A. J. Sanders, “A Long Life’s Relationship: Archibald Geikie, Alexander Macmillan and his Publishing House,” in Aspects of the Life and Works of Archibald Geikie (London: Geological Society Special Publication 480, 2019), 139–48. The same year that Geikie met his wife, Alexander Macmillan’s wife, Caroline, died of illness. The following year, MacMillan married Jeanne Barbe Emma, the older sister of Alice Gabrielle.
62. Archibald Geikie, Founders of Geology, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1905), 461.
63. For instance, neither of the following works refers to Geikie’s field trips to the American West: George P. Merrill, The First Two Hundred Years of American Geology (New York: Harper, 1969); Cecil J. Schneer, ed., Two Hundred Years of Geology in America (Hanover: University of New Hampshire, 1979).
64. Grove Karl Gilbert, Report on the Geology of the Henry Mountains (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, Government Printing Office), p. 15.
