THE BOY THE EARTH TALKS TO: GEOLOGY AS DIVINATION IN THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE AMERICAN WEST

The mythology of the American West has always incorporated figures who serve to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown (or unknowable). While the cowboy, rancher, or Native American might be the first archetypal figure that comes to many people’s minds as instrumental in the construction of the American West, the geologist in fact plays a central, although less understood, role. The geologist may be incarnated as a skilled prospector, a palaeontologist working under the auspices of the United States Geological Survey, or any of a myriad of others; no matter, his or her understanding of the world and the secrets it contains looms large in this mythology— as does the way this understanding emerges from geologists’ observation of the land around them. The alien nature of much of the western landscape to the recent arrivals, who were bent on finding fortune and fame in the rock and dirt, made the shaman-like decipherings of period geologists a topic of much discussion and legend in contemporary sources. When the fruits of this knowledge were tangible—in precious metals, fossils, water, oil—the intersecting mythologies of the self-made fortune-hunter, the adventurer, and the bounties of chance found their embodiment in the image of the geologist.

In examining popular accounts of the period—as well as more contemporary portrayals (such as that of George Hearst in HBO’s Deadwood)—I hope to show the creation of an American mythology and iconography of geology and geologist as a necessary component of the West. In particular, I examine period reporting of George Hearst, Edward Drinker Cope, Louis Agassiz, Florence Bascom, James Dwight Dana, George Wheeler, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, Joseph LeConte, Othniel Marsh, Israel C. White, Wesley Powell, as well as others. These period accounts frequently invoke the twin ideas of both the explorer-scientist and the divination of a new land, in which the geologist becomes a prophet for the development of a new America.