The Last Volcano Read online

  Jaggar’s first assignment was to find a horse. He chose a stallion. When he tried to get on and take his first ride, the stallion bucked so hard that Jaggar fell head first onto a folded tent. Hague now intervened and found a horse more suited to the Harvard student, a bay mare named Bessy, which Jaggar later admitted was “slow and harmless.” For the first few days of travel, Jaggar rode sideways with one leg hung over the pommel until his body adjusted “to the vagaries of the saddle.”

  Hague put his field assistant in charge of compiling an inventory of the expedition’s equipment. Tents, saddles, spurs, blankets and an assortment of field instruments were set out. The list included thermometers, a surveyor’s level and a compass. In a small personal bag, Jaggar stored soap and a flask of brandy. He was making good headway packing the expedition’s equipment, delayed only once when “a small boy came around and asked twelve thousand seven hundred and thirty questions.”

  The expedition departed Bozeman on July 15. The five men rode east, covering fifty miles the first day, following the route that I-90 takes today. The first night they camped near the opening to Boulder Canyon. Along the way, Jaggar noted there was a log cabin every few miles, most with a sign that said “Saloon.”

  Turning south, the men left forested land and entered barren, rolling country. Here Jaggar saw thousands of prairie dogs “and their owl boarders.” By the third day, the expedition was winding its way slowly through a glacial moraine piled high with boulders. That night Jaggar heard his first coyote.

  It was another week of travel before the expedition reached the area where Hague planned to begin the geologic work. The objective was the Absaroka Range that forms the mountain barrier east of Yellowstone National Park. This mountain mass covers two thousand square miles, almost the size of the park, and was one of the last areas of the American West to be explored, bypassed by earlier explorers and mountain men because of the rugged terrain. Those few who had entered the region reported that only two trails ran through it and that those were covered by snow most of the year, which made them impassable except during a few weeks during summer months.

  Once in the Absaroka Mountains, the expedition advanced only a few miles a day. A new camp was made almost every night. Here were elk, grouse, blackmail deer, antelope, rattlesnakes, prairie dogs, whistling martens, owls and badgers. Jaggar learned to live with kicking mules. He recorded seeing “colorful canyons and towering stocks of old volcanoes.” Within some of the rock layers, he found fragments of petrified trees and imprints of fossil leaves. Most of the surrounding peaks rose higher than 10,000 feet; some were higher than 13,000 feet. He scaled several of them. Almost everywhere he looked he saw millions of years of earth history exposed in the sides of mountains. In comparison, he wrote, “Our schoolbook history is pretty small.”

  A typical day began when Hague and Jaggar climbed a nearby peak. From there, they would study the rock layers that were visible for miles. For an hour or more, Hague would sit and gaze through his field glasses—which he was always losing, sending Jaggar back to recover them. When he was satisfied with what he had seen, Hague would turn to his field assistant and tell him what questions they would address that day. Was a line of hills the former root that once fed lava to a now dead volcano? Did a nearby valley contain rocks of an ancient seabed that might be filled with fossils?

  Each day passed with the two of them riding together, far ahead of the others. “We rarely exchanged a word,” Jaggar noted, “using every minute to observe the details of the rocks above and on the ground, topography and scenery in general.” Occasionally, they stopped and Hague asked Jaggar to dismount and take a hammer and knock out a rock sample or use a barometer or a compass and take a reading. At times, Jaggar rode ahead, other times, Hague did. “The advantage of this trip as a geological education cannot be overestimated,” Jaggar wrote one night in camp midway through the expedition. “The dike formations of these canyons are as fine for study as any that can be imagined.”

  In addition to being Hague’s field assistant, Jaggar also served as the expedition’s photographer. In the evening, for a darkroom, he dug a shallow trench in a nearby stream. He set poles over it and covered the poles with horse blankets. He then crawled inside, carrying bottles filled with chemicals and the glass plates he had exposed that day. After the plates were developed, he placed them in the trench to be rinsed thoroughly all night by flowing water.

  As a bonus, after a day’s work, Jaggar was free to fish and hunt. Once, about two weeks after leaving Bozeman, he “fished afternoon and evening,” catching eighteen fish, averaging half-a-pound each. Another time, he hunted “a great flock of grouse” and “shot two with rifle.”

  After one day of geologizing, the men were camped at the base of a cliff when Anderson, the camp cook, called out, “Mr. Jaggar, I smell sheep up on that shelf.” Anderson leaned his rifle against a steep slope of loose rocks, muzzle upward. He then proceeded to climb up to get a better look, knocking down rocks as he went. Unable to shake a geologic instinct, Jaggar began to examine the rocks as they tumbled down toward him. He saw that they were a Cambrian limestone that contained trilobites, an extinct animal that once crawled on the floor of an ancient sea. As he began to sort through the rocks, looking for the best specimens, he noticed, too late, that some rocks were falling and hitting the rifle, causing it to slide. As he later told the story:

  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. The cook had left a cartridge in the barrel with the hammer resting on it, but the nick was made by a pebble ploughed up by the bullet. So the trilobites took a shot at me!

  During the last two weeks of the expedition, Hague led the party through Yellowstone National Park. Here Jaggar rode through geyser fields and saw colorful mineral-encrusted streams. It was among such fantastic sights, surrounded by the ever-present grandeur of mountains, that Hague became introspective. Often, when they were camped, Jaggar would watch Hague walk off by himself to look at a waterfall or to peer into a canyon. And, whenever he did, Jaggar noticed that Hague always removed his hat. Afterward, the expedition’s leader would return and take his assistant aside and direct his attention not only to the natural wonders all around them, but tell him of the intangibles, such as the instinctive movement of elk through a forest or the grandeur of a winter storm. Hague said it was such things that had sustained him during a lifetime of living on a frontier. And he had stories to tell.

  Born in Boston in 1840, Hague had attended Yale University where he had been influenced by two popular books, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Humbolt’s Cosmos. They had infused him with a sense of wanderlust. And so, when given the chance, he joined one of the geologic parties then surveying the American West.

  The party he joined was the Fortieth Parallel Exploring Expedition led by Clarence King, himself a notable character in the history of American science and culture. King was the friend of presidents and a member of a tight little social group that called itself the Five of Hearts that met in a three-story mansion on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., across from the White House.

  Hague joined King’s expedition in the winter of 1867, spending his first months at the Comstock Lode near Virginia City, Nevada, the site of the richest gold and silver deposits on the continent. Though he began by exploring the mines and describing the surrounding geology, he soon turned to improving what was known as the Washoe process, a method that was used to increase the recovery of gold and silver from material discarded by the mines. In that, he succeeded, showing miners how to increase their yields by half, earning himself the gratitude of the owners of the Comstock Lode. For Hague, who was indifferent to riches—his father was a Baptist minister who extolled the virtue of hard work over the sin of greed—it was enough to solve a practical problem. For Jaggar, it was an example of a problem that could only be solved by someone who was living on a frontier.

  After working for five years on
a geologic survey of the American West, Hague and King sailed for the Hawaiian Islands, staying in Honolulu only long enough to catch the next ship for Hilo on the island of Hawaii. Once there, they hired horses and spent an entire day riding a difficult trail, mostly through dense forest, to the summit of Kilauea volcano. As Hague described the adventure, he recounted how at the summit they found “a molten lake ringed by fire” that occasionally sent streams of lava in the direction of their campsite. Once, to Hague’s obvious delight, a jet of gas and molten rock shot into the air right in front of him, a whirling tower of red incandescent rock that “licked across the surface” of the lake.

  To Jaggar, this was live geology. He could only imagine what it must feel like to stand near to such excitement.

  The story of travel to the Hawaiian islands and of standing at the top of an erupting volcano, as well as Hague’s later adventures as a government geologist in Guatemala studying that country’s mines and volcanic districts, as a mine assayer in China where he was once caught in a dust storm so thick that it completely blocked out the sun, and as a mountaineer who climbed several prominent peaks in the northwestern United States, including the volcano Mount Hood, stirred Jaggar’s imagination all the more. Which may be why, when the expedition completed its work and returned to Bozeman, Jaggar wrote that he was disappointed “to come out of the back wood to this tourist place.”

  In the official report of the 1893 expedition, Hague recorded that he had been accompanied by “Mr. T.A. Jaggar, jr.,” who “came highly recommended” and “rendered efficient aid.” In recognition of his assistant’s work, Hague named a peak in the Absaroka Range “Jaggar Peak.” A stream leading north of the mountain is known today as Jaggar Creek.

  Jaggar returned to Harvard and took a fifth year of classes, earning a master’s degree in geology. Instead of returning to the American West, he decided to spend the next year in Europe studying at German universities, well aware that Hague had done the same after his graduation from Yale.

  With introductory letters from his Harvard professors, Jaggar enrolled for the 1894 fall semester at the University of Munich. Here the main attractions were a magnificent mineral collection and a forceful lecturer, Karl Alfred von Zittel.

  An authority on fossils, von Zittel was the embodiment of German pride. Before each lecture, the professor’s assistant came into the room and arranged diagrams on a rack. Then the students stood and, as Jaggar remembered it, “his majesty entered.”

  Von Zittel grabbed a long rattan pointer and commanded the students’ attention, calling for recitations. He walked around the room whacking the diagrams for emphasis, all the while making allusions to the inadequacies of American science and its scientists.

  There were other Americans in the class. One was Charles Palache, a recent graduate of the University of California. On weekends, Jaggar and Palache traveled together across the German countryside looking for quarries where they might collect rocks. Jaggar carried a miner’s hammer that he had named “Umslopagass,” a reference to the Zulu chief in Rider Haggard’s Allen Quatermain, a recently published novel with suggestive sex scenes. Whenever either of the young men encountered a rock outcrop that would not easily yield a sample, he would call out to the other, “Umslopagass, come quick!”

  Jaggar and Palache spent the next semester at the university in Heidelberg where the star professor was Karl Rosenbusch, a man who could chat endlessly with students while dropping cigar ashes on their clothing. On the first day of class, Rosenbusch assigned each student a single mineral to examine the entire semester. Palache delved into the work, fascinated by every new aspect and nuance he could discover. For Jaggar, however, the work was tedious. He wanted things that were “moving, changing, evolving.” He had hoped to have access to a high-temperature oven that he could use to melt the sample, then watch it reform. Instead, he spent two months peering through a microscope, trying to imagine what every minute feature might mean.

  Fortunately, as his year in Germany was ending, a telegram arrived from Cambridge asking Jaggar if he was interested in returning to Harvard as an instructor of geology. He jumped at the chance.

  He and Palache sailed back to the United States with Jaggar returning to Harvard and Palache to California. Of the voyage, Palache would recall “little of the crossing save that Jaggar proved a poor sailor and that we met a jolly party of American girls.” Their time in Germany had cemented a friendship. When Palache was unable to find a position at the University of California, Jaggar recommended him to the curator of Harvard’s mineralogical collection who hired Palache as an assistant. For the next year, the Californian studied and arranged the collection by day and, armed with a rifle, guarded it by night.

  Meanwhile, Jaggar began teaching classes at Harvard. The first semester he taught one about the geology near Boston, taking students on walking trips to see outcrops and to collect fossils. The second semester the Harvard faculty allowed him to develop a new course, one of his own design. “Experimental and Dynamical Geology” was a series of simple experiments that demonstrated geologic processes in action. The first time he offered the course, one student enrolled. During the next ten years he improved the experiments, though the enrollment never exceeded eleven students.

  Besides showing how ripple marks could be reproduced in a water tank, Jaggar built another large wooden box and filled this one with layers of different materials—sand, marble dust, coal dust. He then set the box at an angle and sprayed water over it to show how the Grand Canyon may have formed. He filled yet another box with alternating layers of plaster of Paris and coal dust, then squeezed beeswax between layers to show how magma might intrude into the earth’s crust and cause the surface to dome upward. Occasionally, the beeswax broke through the topmost layer and a tiny volcano formed.

  His grandest and most popular demonstration was that of a geyser. Jaggar assembled a maze of water-filled flasks connected by glass tubes, all the while telling students of his own experiences at Yellowstone. He lit a burner beneath one of the flasks. Within minutes, water shot up from a vertical pipette at one end of the tubing, the spouting water rising as high as four feet, pulses coming at regular intervals of ninety seconds.

  One spring, he took his portable geyser on a tour of local museums and colleges. A reporter for the Washington Post saw one demonstration and was so impressed that he pronounced Jaggar “a new type of geologist” one who could show “in miniature, by means of specially contrived apparatus, the great geologic processes of nature.” The reporter ended his praise of Jaggar and his performance as being “like that of a magician.”

  While continuing to work as a Harvard instructor, Jaggar also pursued a doctorate degree. To fulfill the degree requirements, he submitted the invention of a machine that measured the hardness of minerals while pulling a diamond-tipped needle across a small mineral sample. It was an ingenious machine, yet, some members of the Harvard faculty questioned whether the invention of “a mere instrument” was sufficient for Harvard’s highest degree. And so Jaggar worked another year and added a second part, a description of a rock outcrop near Boston. Years later, when reflecting on the additional requirement, he would write, it was “university teachers, in my own experiences at Munich, Heidelberg and Harvard, [that] defeated their own sciences for me as a budding scientist.”

  Someday, as he was coming to realize, he would have to choose between two worlds, “between museums and field, between the easy thing of collections, fine microscopes and scientific societies, and the hard thing of exploring the globe.”

  But, for now, the decision could be delayed because Hague had invited him to work again in Yellowstone.

  On July 5, 1897, he was back in Bozeman, Montana. This time, Hague asked him to purchase the horses they would need for the expedition. It was “a nasty business,” he would recall, to “have to deal with a wild class of men and they all lie.” In the end, after an entire day of intense dealing, he bought six riding horses and seven pack mules, two of
the latter ones wild, knowing, from his experience four years earlier, that “Mr. Hague was strongly in favor of using mules.”

  The two men worked again in the Absaroka Mountains, then Yellowstone National Park, this time, Hague treating him more like a colleague than an assistant. They enjoyed late nights around a campfire, exchanging opinions about politics and religion and discussing such lofty topics as the philosophy of happiness. Hague also encouraged Jaggar to explore the terrain on his own.

  One day, while in the national park, Jaggar was directed toward a forbidding place known as Death Gulch. It began with a long climb up a steep slope and through thick timber. At the end of the timber was the entrance to a barren ravine, its walls stained white and yellow with salts leached from the ground. Jaggar labored up the ravine, his breathing heavy because the air was filled the smell of sulfur, though, when he later wrote of the experience, he introduced his adventure in a light-hearted, if slightly vulgar manner.

  Cases of asphyxiation by gas have been very frequently reported of late years, and we commonly associate with such reports the idea of a second-rate hotel and an unsophisticated gentleman who blows out the gas. Such incidents we connect with the supercivilisation of the nineteenth century, but it is none the less true that Nature furnishes similar accidents, and that in regions far remote from the haunts of men.

  The ravine was about fifty feet deep and a hundred or so feet wide. Death Gulch had a stream of cold clear water running down its center. Jaggar bent to taste the water. It was soured by sulfur.

  He continued to climb through this “frightfully weird and dismal place,” finally stopping when, a short distance ahead, he saw the latest victims.