And yet he does remain today firmly annealed into the history books—and for a reason that can be summed up with a single word, recognizable around America and the world: Yellowstone.
Ferdinand Hayden was the first man on government business to survey and record the full majesty of what is now the government-run Yellowstone National Park. He came across its astonishing wonders through a cascade of unanticipated circumstances—and having done so, he then swiftly helped bring the place to the nation’s attention. By his fierce advocacy in his writings and speeches, he also helped to unite the country around what he and others saw as the vital need to protect and preserve its dazzling treasures, as well as those of so much else of America’s natural heritage.
Yellowstone is a hymn to active geology, created on a thunderously unprecedented scale. It is a uniquely concentrated tincture of seismic, thermal, and volcanic activity that—despite all the escaping steam, endless shudderings, and gouts of flame, mud, and smoke that could be seen and heard and felt and smelled for miles—had nevertheless managed to keep itself private, secret, hidden from the world for a very long time.
If geology was what made it so remarkable, geography is what kept it so little known. It is topographically as separate as a Vatican, walled off from the world. The peaks of the Absaroka Range stand to Yellowstone’s east, together with the Shoshones and the Snowy Mountains. The Wind River Range, the Gros Ventres, and the Teton Range lie to the south, and ranges that include the Centennials, the Crazy Mountains, the Big Belt, and the Pioneers all protect its acres far off to the west and the north.
A number of great rivers rise here among the peaks and lakes of what many like to call “the summit of the world.” The Green River comes from Yellowstone and flows to the Colorado. The Snake River comes from near Yellowstone and flows into the Columbia. The Gallatin, the Madison, and the Yellowstone Rivers come from Yellowstone, joining to form the Missouri and thence flowing into the Mississippi. There is a plain within Yellowstone called Two Oceans Plateau, from which creeks trickle into streams that eventually pass into both the Atlantic and the Pacific. It must have seemed that the melting snows of Yellowstone’s peaks eventually watered most of America.
Yet none of those passing on the Oregon Trail came close enough to see it. Nor did the hardy Mormon pioneers who were heading, not too many miles away, for the valley where they would build Salt Lake City. California-bound migrants also hurried on by, well to the south.
Even those who were heading for the Montana goldfields or had joined the railroad surveying parties turned away at the sight of the ranges of high and impenetrable-looking mountains. All of them seemed to balk at high passes that were still choked with snow even late in June. They swiveled themselves well away from whatever lay beyond. So all maps of the time marked Yellowstone as Unexplored or terra incognita, or else made no mention of it at all. It was probably, in 1869, the final important place in America to be so little known.
However, by 1870, Montana Territory, so long a wilderness, was becoming populated. Gold and silver had been discovered, and towns like Helena and Virginia City had been settled and were on their way to becoming substantial. Men who lived there and who by now had a little leisure, a measure of money, and a lot of curiosity soon began ferreting around the unknown corners of the territory, the better to know their homeland—and with luck to persuade the railroad barons back east to link it with a train service.
It was a group of such men who first offered a hint, a frisson of intelligence of the wonders to come. They were all swells: a local banker, a partner in a firm of Helena freight merchants, the president of a local hide-and-fur company, a lawyer, and a former tax collector. They had an army general as leader and surveyor, together with an escort for him from the Second Cavalry and two African American cooks, named Nute and Johnny. They set out in the summer of 1870, heading up the Yellowstone River for whatever might lie in its upper reaches, beyond the deep and forbidding passes of its canyons. What they witnessed over the next six weeks quite beggared belief.
One of their party, a man named Nathaniel Pitt Langford from Minnesota, who had hitherto been best-known as a notoriously tough vigilante, brutally protecting the Montana gold fields in which he had invested, then wrote of his experiences. Two essays under his byline appeared the following year, 1871, in two early summer issues of the newborn Scribner’s Monthly magazine.
They told of amazing things: of a geyser a hundred feet high erupting with such regularity that they named it Old Faithful, of impossibly deep canyons and enormous waterfalls, of boiling hot springs, of wildflower-filled meadowlands as green and fragrant as any in Switzerland, of towering snowcapped volcanoes, of immense pools of burping mud—such wonders in such numbers as had never been witnessed before by man or beast. The essays, moreover, were illustrated with woodcuts that made it all look stupendous, with peaks and waterfalls and declivities all constructed on the grandest scale imaginable.
In Washington, Ferdinand Hayden was just back from surveying Nebraska and was preparing himself to continue his push westward that summer into the Rocky Mountains in Nebraska’s neighbor territory of Wyoming. He read Langford’s pieces in Scribner’s and was promptly captivated. The accompanying woodcut illustrations, however, were so wildly romantic and dramatic that Hayden, though intrigued, thought they looked quite absurdly contrived. Still, he could not so easily dismiss them, and after consulting with colleagues, who thought Langford’s images equally fanciful, he made a fateful decision: that he had to go out and see for himself the formations they depicted.
So rather than mounting his next expedition of 1871 into southern Wyoming, he decided he would pitch his men up northward instead and use the exploring season to determine the full and unvarnished truth about this little-seen gathering of geological curiosities at Yellowstone. Moreover, and to make certain he would get the best out of what he saw, he would take along the very artist who had drawn the magnificently imagined Scribner’s pictures.
The artist was Thomas Moran, who, along with Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, is now seen as one of the nation’s greatest illustrators and colorists, a master of what would come to be called the Rocky Mountain School of artists. What he drew and painted that year, and what Ferdinand Hayden found on his expedition, would have lasting consequences for America’s perception of the glories of her countryside.
The new survey was a monster affair, its organization creating quite a stir within government, and persuading much pitching in. Washington agreed to finance the expedition to the tune of $40,000—fully eight times the allotment it had given to Nebraska—and furthermore Washington gave Hayden permission to draw such supplies as he thought necessary from any one of the convenient army forts nearby. The directors of two of the country’s young railroads also agreed to carry the forty members of the team without charge to their base camp in Utah.
The eventual result of all this largesse was plain to see. Photographs from the time show an almost endless line of horses, mules, mule wagons, cooking vans, and ambulances passing eastward along the valley that would lead them into Yellowstone, with muscled cavalrymen protecting them all from any wayward behavior. Moreover, an army expedition of topographical engineers had been sent out separately and joined forces with the Hayden team for much of the trip: at times it must have looked as though Yellowstone was being invaded by a fair-sized punitive force.
The expedition, which would become best-known for the beauty of the imagery it produced, was initially intended to be heavily scientific. There were two geologists—Hayden one of them—two botanists, a zoologist, an entomologist (who doubled as an agricultural statistician), an ornithologist, and two topographers, and the maps they produced and the reports they wrote remain classics still, though gathering dust today in government archives and seldom consulted.
Yet it was the nonscientists who captured the Wow! factor of the place. William Henry Jackson took photographs like never before; Thomas Moran painted and sketched as if he wer
e on fire. The results were stunning, and all America was enthralled.
For what sights they saw! What terrific geological violence was on display! It began almost as soon as they started southward up the Yellowstone River. There were indeed bubbling mud pools steaming up from the ground, just as Langford had written. There were limestone bands in some cliffs that had been squeezed by some cosmological vise into accordionlike folds; elsewhere they had been tipped almost vertical, bands of sandstone and quartzite alternating, and had quite weathered away, giving the appearance of a stairway reaching hundreds of feet into the air.
From one crag the explorers looked down on a gigantic mound, hissing and roiling with endless cascades of boiling water that bubbled from its summit, yet somehow looking frozen, with immense semicircular terraces of bright ceramiclike chemical deposits, seemingly stopped and stilled as they flowed down its flanks. At the top of the hill was a hot-water spring with water that, according to the official report, was “so perfectly transparent that one could look down into the beautiful ultramarine depth to the bottom of the basin . . . ornamented with coral-like forms . . . from pure white to a bright cream yellow.” The water was hot—160 degrees—and the men cooked with it and drank it, and Jackson found his photographic plates would dry beside it in half the usual time, making the task of recording the thrilling sight all the easier.
There was more, much more, to come. Once the team had climbed high enough, they could see the backs of the ranges that formed the protective stockade that had kept Yellowstone secret for so long. And from the same vantage point, Hayden saw and wrote about the great lake that is the centerpiece, “a gem amid the high mountains, which are literally bristling with peaks.” Down beside it the sight was even more marvelous, of “a vast sheet of quiet water, of a most delicate ultramarine hue, one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever beheld.”
The grandeur of what they saw was soon being matched by what they heard—a roar, like thunder, which grew louder and louder as their horses loped steadily through the meadows and along the riverbanks. And then, the climax of the expedition—the river which had hitherto been heading westward without warning turned itself sharply south, and as it did so, it suddenly plunged over the lip of a vastly long canyon, and shot down once, and then a second time, hundreds of feet down toward the lake that glittered in the distance.
The roar of its waters was furious and quite filled the air; the mass of snow-white spray and spume and foam was overwhelming in its sublimity, terrifying the men and their horses, enthralling the photographers and, above all, the painters. Thomas Moran realized that the woodcut fantasies he had created for Scribner’s the year before hardly did justice to the monumental sights before him. Poor Hayden, armed with only the words of a geologist, could hardly hope to do justice either, but he did his best:
The very nearly vertical walls, slightly sloping down to the water’s edge on either side, so that from the summit the River appears like a thread of silver foaming over its rocky bottom; the variegated color of the sides, yellow, red, brown, white, all intermixed and shading into each other; the Gothic columns of every form standing out from the sides of the walls with greater variety and more striking colors than ever adorned a work of human art.
The artists had to linger here for days, easels and brushes and crayons and cameras and assistants stirring chemicals in the developing tents all going full tilt. The scientists were happily making their measurements, too, filling their notebooks with sketches and diagrams and pages of observations. But time was starting to press. It was late July before they reached the shores of the lake itself, and they began to notice a certain crispness in the morning air. They launched a small boat and mapped the lake, performed soundings down to some three hundred feet, cataloged the fish and bird life, the nematodes and the lilies. And then they pressed on, their horses clip-clopping now in a more westerly direction, back toward Idaho and to their base camp down by the railhead in Utah.
It was here that the vast powers of the magma chamber below them started to display themselves to the full. The mud chambers burped and bubbled all around, and so much steam was hissing out of ruptures in the ground that the scene looked positively industrial, like the factories along the Ohio River back in Pennsylvania. The fissures became ever more numerous and ever larger, until at the head of the valley they came across one geyser that was far larger than the rest, which from the center of a fragile disk of chemical-infused mud shot a fountain of boiling water and steam more than a hundred feet into the air—and, moreover, did so with just the regularity that Langford had noted the year before, which had prompted him so properly to name it Old Faithful.
It was the culminating triumph of their visit. The men then trekked away westward, being startled on more than one night by frequent small earthquakes, valedictory reminders of the violent processes that they suspected had created all the stupendous scenery behind them. There was ice on the streams each morning now, and the days were getting shorter; they had perforce now to hurry away down from the mile-high plateau, down to the railhead, and get themselves and their gear and their papers and plates and paintings back east. For they had to publish, to tell America of all the marvels that they had seen and heard and experienced.
In later years, Hayden liked to tell all who would listen that he alone was responsible for creating Yellowstone as a national park. But technically the distinction goes to a little-remembered Republican congressman named William Kelley, who late in the same year that Hayden had visited the region wrote, “Let Congress pass a bill reserving the Great Geyser Basin as a public park forever.”
The plan was also supported by the very vocal members of the expedition of the year earlier, from which Langford had written his Scribner’s essays. One can fairly say that a move to do something special to protect Yellowstone’s seismic marvels had been gathering steam, as it were, even before Hayden went there.
Hayden’s support proved crucial, however. His initial report, adding official grace notes to the more raucous timbre of popular journalism, was widely circulated to congressmen. Moran’s brilliant watercolors and Jackson’s stunning photographs were pored over, and evidently convinced some of the wavering members. The Department of the Interior, for whom Hayden worked, agreed that it would happily supervise the new entity. Congress duly passed the bill, both houses voting their support unanimously; and on March 1, 1872, President Ulysses Grant signed into law the Yellowstone Park Act.
A month later, Thomas Moran completed his massive work of art, the eight-foot-by-fourteen-foot Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and Congress duly bought it to hang in the Capitol—at the time, the grandest and, by the account of at least one art critic, the very best of all the paintings hung there. It sat for a while in the entrance hall of the Department of the Interior, symbolic of the National Park Service, which was founded in 1916 to administer and protect all of America’s greatest treasures—of which Yellowstone was the first and, to many, the finest. Later, to win as wide an audience as possible, the department lent it to the Smithsonian, where it hangs now, seen over the years by millions.
Thomas Moran’s immense oil painting The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was commissioned by the US government on his return after he served as official artist of the 1871 survey expedition of the region. The painting, now in the Smithsonian, is generally credited with persuading President Ulysses S. Grant to declare Yellowstone a national park.
And so far as geology and geography were concerned, there was a pleasing coda to the story. The very same Congress that had passed the Yellowstone Bill then went on in short order to appropriate a further $75,000 for Ferdinand Hayden and the work of his survey. The view was that, given the value that his activity had brought already to the country, Hayden’s work could continue officially blessed for many more seasons to come. If ever a scientific endeavor needed further validation, the revelations of Hayden from Yellowstone had amply provided it.
DIAMONDS, SEX, AND RACE
It
was a briskly cold day in late spring in southwestern Wyoming. Dark clouds were racing across the sky and setting down short, exhilarating squalls of snow. I had set off south from the old mining town of Rock Springs to drive down through the rock scrublands of Sweetwater County and across into the remote border country of northern Colorado. The plan was simple: I was to walk in the footsteps of a pair of swindlers who once committed the greatest diamond fraud in American history.
It was a spectacular episode of classic Wild West chicanery that began in early 1872 when a pair of strange-looking men paid an unanticipated visit to a bank in downtown San Francisco. When the subsequent cascade of bizarre occurrences ended, in the autumn of that same year at a lonely prairie railroad station on the Union Pacific line a thousand miles to the east, it made an immediate hero of the man who had cleverly uncovered the fraud—a thirty-year-old Yale-educated and Harvard-polished geologist and mountaineer named Clarence Rivers King, who would before long be appointed the first-ever director of the United States Geological Survey.
Not that King was by any account a man wanting in heroic qualities. He was exceptionally well born, mingled enthusiastically with the best of East Coast society, and was a clubbable, courageous, fearless explorer who had hordes of friends. Henry Adams* was one of the closest, and he wrote of King, after traveling with him on a climbing holiday in the Rockies, that he possessed “that combination of physical energy, social standing, mental scope and training, wit, geniality and science, that seemed superlatively American and irresistibly strong.”
By the time of the events that made him famous beyond the world of science, King had already achieved much. At just twenty-two, he had joined as a volunteer geologist the great 1864 Survey of California, having crossed the country by horse and wagon with a party of pioneers, from Saint Joseph on the Missouri to the Sierra Nevada and thence by paddle steamer down the Sacramento River to the coast. He had seen all the famous sights—South Pass, Salt Lake City (where he saw, and wrote admiringly of, Brigham Young himself), and the Great Basin—just as all the homesteaders had done.