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"The arrangements for our expedition go
on handsomely; I am having excellent
instruments made, and [am] myself
engaged in hard study, among other things,
descriptive botany. We must have the
geologic formation, geographical position,
and elevation above the sea for all our
plants." Frémont to
botanist John Torry Frémont had apparently gained
his geological knowledge (a competent
observer) from his association with Joseph
N. Nicollet. Nicollet, a student of
LaPlace, had been chief astronomer at the
Paris Observatory before coming to the
United States. Frémont had served
as Nicollet's assistant on two mapping
surveys of the upper Missouri and
Mississippi Rivers. Martha Coleman Bray, in her Joseph
Nicollet and His Map, writes of
Nicollet that as a pioneer in the field of
modern geology, Throughout the narrative portion of the
Frémont Report are detailed
geological descriptions. In addition,
there is an appendix of Geological
Formations with comments by James
Hall. Hall, palaeontologist for the State
of New York, was the conceiver of the
Geosynclinal Cycle, putting in
place the system of geology that prevailed
until the 1960s and plate
tectonics. The appendix also contains
five plates of the collected fossil plants
and animals. A few examples of the many hundreds
of Frémont's recorded geological
observations from the narrative of The
Report: We had a day of disagreeable and
cold rain and, late in the afternoon,
began to approach the rapids of the
cascades. There is here a high timbered
island on the left shore, below which, in
descending, I had remarked, in a bluff of
the river, the extremities of trunks of
trees, appearing to be imbedded in the
rock. Landing here this afternoon, I
found, in the lower part of the
escarpment, a stratum of coal and forest-
trees, imbedded between strata of altered
clay, containing the remains of
vegetables, the leaves of which indicate
that the plants wore dicotyledonous. Among
these, the stems of some of the ferns are
not mineralized, but merely charred,
retaining still their vegetable structure
and substance; and in this condition a
portion of the trees remain. The indurated
appearance and compactness of the strata,
as well, perhaps, as the mineralized
condition of the coal, are probably due to
igneous action. Some portions of the coal
precisely resemble in aspect the canal
coal of England, and, with the
accompanying fossils, have been referred
to the tertiary formation. These strata
appear to rest upon a mass of agglomerated
rock, being but a few feet above the water
of the river; and over them is the
escarpment of perhaps 80 feet, rising
gradually in the rear towards the
mountains. The wet and cold evening, and
near approach of night, prevented me from
making any other than a slight
examination. The red sandstone is argillaceous,
with compact white gypsum or alabaster,
very beautiful. The other sandstones are
gray, yellow, and ferruginous, sometimes
very coarse. The apparent sterility of the
country must therefore be sought for in
other causes than the nature of the
soil.
This was a scientific
observation, but the expedition
carried the salt with them for
use. And read
Salt:
A World
History
by Mark Kurlansky.
Fascinating! Even with
the above mentioned problems, I have
always found his geology to be a great
help in locating the sites where he made
his observations. Those on January 22,
1844 are a good example--the only
locations that matches his description is
"Fremont Ridge" south of Wilson Peak.
Other such examples were given in the
article on his route from Pyramid Lake to
Bridgeport. Sometimes his descriptions go
opposite to where I would have wanted him
have gone--like having Preuss and him only
climbing to Red Lake Shoulder for their
It must be
kept in mind that geology was in its bare
infancy in 1844. Most people at that time
thought the world was only a few thousand
years old. So geological terms and
concepts were not yet
solidified. Peter
A short bibliography: Bray, Edmond C., and Martha
Coleman Bray, Joseph N.
Nicollet on the Plains and
Prairies, Minnesota
Historical Society Press, St.
Paul, 1976. Bray, Martha Coleman, The
Journals of Joseph N.
Nicollet, Minnesota
Historical Society, St. Paul,
1970. Bray, Martha Coleman,
Joseph Nicollet and His
Map, The American
Philosophical Society,
Philadelphia, 1980. Frémont, Brevet Captain
J. C., Report of The Exploring
Expedition to the Rocky Mountains
in the Year 1842, and to Oregon
and North California in the Years
1843-'44, Printed by order of
the Senate of the United States
(Senate Document No. 174), Gales
and Seaton, Washington, 1845.
Contains the 1845
Frémont/Preuss map. Hill, Mary, California
Landscape: Origin and
Evolution, University of
California Press, Berkeley,
1984. Hill, Mary, Geology of the
Sierra Nevada, University of
California Press, Berkeley,
1975. McPhee, John, Assembling
California, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, New York, 1993. Schumann, Walter, Handbook
of Rocks, Minerals, and
Gemstones, Houghton Mifflin
Co., Boston/New York, 1993. Winchester, Simon, The Map
That changed the World,
HarperCollins Publishers, New
York, 2001. Note: Alan H. Hartley,
a researcher for the Oxford
English Dictionary, from
Duluth, Minnesota, tells us at
longcamp.com that Frémont's
Reports (The Expeditions
of John Charles
Frémont, Jackson &
Spence edition), Geographical
Memoir upon Upper California,
and Memoirs of My Life,
and Torry's Plantae
Frémontianae have
yielded nearly 600 citations for
possible inclusion in the
OED.
In
addition to leading his exploratory
expeditions, John Charles Frémont
was not only the astronomer (determining
mapping coordinates) but also botanist,
geologist, and meteorologist/barometerist.
The very definition of the renaissance
man. The adventures made him a world
celebrity, but also gained him
international recognition by scientists.
The Prussian Orden Pour le
Mérite
für Wissenschaften und
Künste was personally presented
to Frémont by Baron Alexander
von
Humboldt in 1850, and also the Gold
Medal of the 
Royal
Geographical Society--still today the
most prestigious award in the field--and
the Gold Medal of the
Société de
Géographia, Paris.
The
celebrated American portraitist G. P. A.
Healy painted the 29 year old
Frémont against the backdrop of the
Wind River Range as rendered onsite by
Frémont's expedition artist and
cartographer Charles Preuss.
Frémont wrote in his expedition
Report that "The summit rock [Fremont
Peak, 13,745'] was gneiss, succeeded
by sienitic gneiss. Sienite and feldspar
succeeded in our descent to the snow line,
where we found feldspathic granite."
Geology
and paleontology were rapidly emerging
sciences at a time only a few years after
the publication of James Hutton's
Theory of the Earth; or an
Investigation of the Laws Observable in
the Composition, Dissolution, and
Restoration of Land Upon the Globe,
and William Smith's revolutionary A
Geological Map of England and Wales and
Part of Scotland.
"though
he fell into the trap of
oversimplification in the case of the Old
Red [Devonian] Sandstone, he was
free from the common prejudice that
blocked the acceptance of geological fact.
The loudest critics of uniformitarianism
were the upholders of the literal truth of
the book of Genesis."
The
walls, which were perfectly vertical, and
disposed like masonry in a very regular
manner, were composed of a brown-colored
scoriaceous lava, similar to the light
scoriaceous lava of Mt. Etna, Vesuvius,
and other volcanoes. The faces of the
walls were reddened and glazed by the
fire, in which they had been melted, and
which had left them contorted and twisted
by its violent action.
At our encampment on the evening of the
28th, near the head of one of the branches
we had ascended, strata of bituminous
limestone were displayed in an escarpment
on the river bluffs, in which were
contained a variety of fossil shells of
new species. It will be remembered, that
in crossing this ridge about 120 miles to
the northward in August last, strata of
fossiliferous rock were discovered, which
have been referred to the oolitic period;
it is probable that these rocks also
belong to the same formation.
The rock is fossiliferous, and, so far as
I was able to determine the character of
the fossils, belongs to the carboniferous
limestone of the Missouri river, and is
probably the western limit of that
formation.
The top of a flat ridge near was bare of
snow, and very well sprinkled with
bunch-grass, sufficient to pasture the
animals two or three days; and this was to
be their main point of support. This ridge
is composed of a compact trap, or basalt
of a columnar structure; over the surface
are scattered large boulders of porous
trap. The hills are in many places
entirely covered with small fragments of
volcanic rock.
The
mountains here [Faith
Valley, 1844] consisted wholly
of a white micaceous granite. The day was
perfectly clear, and, while the sun was in
the sky, warm and pleasant.
The rock composing the summit
[Red
Lake Peak, 1844] consists of a
very coarse, dark, volcanic conglomerate;
the lower parts appeared to be of a
slaty
structure.
I found the thin and stony soil of the
plain entirely underlaid by the basalt
which forms the river walls; and when I
reached the neighborhood of the hill, the
surface of the plain was rent into
frequent fissures and chasms of the same
scoriated volcanic rock, from 40 to 60
feet deep.
The
summit [Fremont
Peak, 1842] rock was gneiss,
succeeded by sienitic gneiss. Sienite and
feldspar succeeded in our descent to the
snow line, where we found feldspathic
granite.
We had no thermometer to ascertain the
temperature, but I could hold my hand in
the water just long enough to count two
seconds. There are eight or ten of these
springs discharging themselves by streams
large enough to be called runs. A loud
hollow noise was heard from the rock,
which I supposed to be produced by the
fall of water. The strata immediately
where they issue is a fine white and
calcareous sandstone, covered with an
incrustation of common salt.
Roughly evaporated over
the fire, the five gallons of water
yielded fourteen pints of very
fine-grained and very white salt, of which
the whole lake [Great Salt
Lake] may be regarded as a
saturated solution. A portion of the salt
thus obtained has been subjected to
analysis, giving, in 100 parts, the
following proportions.
Chloride of sodium, 97.80
Chloride of calcium, 0.61
Chloride of magnesium, 0.24
Sulphate of soda, 0.23
Sulphate of lime, 1.12
For more about
salt as a very necessary item, go
to the 2nd expedition on the
winter crossing of the Sierra
Nevada.
Nevada Cowboy Poet
and songwriter
Richard
Elloyan sings of
Frémont facing the
granite wall of the
snow covered Sierra Nevada.
A
sound sample.
I
asked science teacher and
Frémont tracker
Peter
Lathrop of Minden, Nevada, who
has a strong background in Geology, to
comment.
Frémont
liked big words like: argillaceous
and ferruginous. I was surprised to
find that they really do exist, although I
knew of the ferruginous hawk, named
for its color. Some of his descriptions do
rather mix up rock types. Sandstone has
relatively large grain size, whereas
argillaceous indicates that the rock
contains much smaller silt or
clay
sized particles, and with sufficient
amounts of organic matter, which is rarely
found in sandstone. Limestone is also
seldom bituminous. As per the
January 22, 1844 journal entry--granite
never contains obsidian, but then he often
had trouble differentiating volcanic lava
from intrusive granite. As per the January
24, 1844 entry--sandstone does not contain
mica and should be easy to distinquish
from stratified lava.
view
of Lake Tahoe on February 14, 1844.
However Brittney and I found an outcrop
that matches his "the
lower parts appear to be of a slaty
structure"
at N38° 2.424'--W199° 59.222',
which is not on the way to the Shoulder.
In fact the rocks, metamorphic rocks of
Jurassic or Triassic age, being part of a
roof pendant, the type being calcareous
siltstone, were flat enough that we had
fun throwing them like Frisbees! We
haven't as yet found this type of rock
anywhere else on Red Lake Peak.
In
1650 Irish archbishop James
Ussher (or Usher), counting
backwards through the
begots in the Book of
Genesis, determined the date
of the creation of the earth to
have been in 4004 B.C., upon
the entrance of the night
preceding the twenty-third day of
October.
Since the breaking of the human
genetic code, we now know that
there have been approximately
2000 generations just since
modern man (probably excepting
Ussher's ancestors) left the
continent of Africa to populate
the planet, and that the time
span covered by those 2000
generations is but a short
sentence in the history of the
Earth's 4,560,000,000 years. The
first eleven verses of Genesis
must be s t r e t c h e d
out to cover over 4 billion of
those years.
But, as with Darwin's theory of
evolution, the battle between
Creationists and Geologists has
persisted into the 21st
Century.
"He
who rejects with scorn the belief
that the shape of his own canines
are due to our early forefathers
having been provided with these
formidable weapons, will probably
reveal, by sneering, the line of
descent. For though he no longer
intends, or has the power, to use
these teeth as weapons, he will
unconsciously retract his
snarling muscles
[the
ringentes], so as to
expose them ready for action,
like a dog prepared to fight.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of
Man, 1871.
Note Aug. 2011: Scott
Stine, a geomorphologist and
paleoclimateologist at California
State University East Bay in
Hayward uses his expert knowledge
of the geology of the Great Basin
and Sierra Nevada to trace the
1833 crossing of the Sierra by
Joseph Walker.
Frémont's contributions to
Botany
Mapping coordinates: Longitude
and the Buenaventura River
Frémont's determination of
elevations.
and Meteorology.
Fremont Peak, WY: Previous to the
commencement of the nineteenth
century, not a single altitude
had been barometrically taken in
the whole of New Spain...Our
knowledge of the configuration
[of the Great Basin] is
one of the chief points of
Frémont's great
hypsometrical investigations in
the years 1842 and
1844.Baron
Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von
Humboldt, Kosmos,
1845-62.
Frémont's Report
©1999, 2007
Bob
Graham
