The Mountains That Remade America: How Sierra Nevada Geology Impacts Modern Life

The Mountains That Remade America

The Mountains That Remade America

HOW SIERRA NEVADA GEOLOGY IMPACTS MODERN LIFE

Craig H. Jones

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by Craig H. Jones

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jones, Craig H., author.

Title: The mountains that remade America : how Sierra Nevada geology impacts modern life / Craig H. Jones.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017008994 (print) | LCCN 2017012544 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520964235 (epub and eDPF) | ISBN 9780520289642 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Geology—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.)—History. | Human geography—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.) | Mountains—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.)—History. | Gold mines and mining—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.) | Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.)

Classification: LCC QE90.S5 (ebook) | LCC QE90.S5 J66 2017 (print) | DDC 304.209794/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008994

Manufactured in the United States of America

25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For my daughters, Megan and Kathryn

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction

1 • An Asymmetric Barrier

2 • A Golden Trinity

3 • A Placer for Everyone

4 • Fossil Rivers, Modern Water

5 • Lode Gold

6 • A Property of No Value

7 • Granite, Guardian of Wilderness

8 • Big Trees, Big Battles

9 • Mountains Adrift

10 • What Lies Beneath

11 • Paradoxes and Proxy Wars

Notes

References

Illustration Sources

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. U.S. money supply, wholesale prices, and California gold, 1820–1860.

2. The steps in creating Sierran gold deposits.

3. Evolution of Sierran landscapes as envisioned by Matthes.

4. Cross sections of Yosemite Valley and Kings Canyon.

5. The creation of metamorphic roof pendants.

6. Isostasy as illustrated by an analogy with a boat and an example with a lake.

7. Distinguishing a thick crust from a low-seismic-velocity mantle.

MAPS

1. The northern Sierra Nevada.

2. The southern Sierra Nevada.

3. The southwestern United States.

4. Early crossings of the Sierra Nevada.

5. Exposures of the Auriferous Gravels.

6. Virginia City waterworks.

7. Geologic terranes, mines, and boundaries of Las Mariposas grant area.

8. Geologic terranes of the northern Sierra Nevada.

9. Underground gold mines and distribution of metamorphic rocks of the northern Sierra Nevada.

10. Geology of Yosemite Valley.

11. Geology of Kings Canyon.

12. Extent of granitic rocks in the Sierra Nevada and vicinity.

13. Geology of eastern Yosemite National Park and vicinity.

14. Topography of the Sierra Nevada and the Swiss Alps.

15. Simplified geology and Big Trees of the Mineral King area.

16. Boundaries of Sequoia National Park over time.

17. Geophysical signals suggesting magmatic activity, Long Valley, 1975–1982.

18. 1872 Owens Valley earthquake fault and surroundings.

19. Shaded relief of the upper Kern River drainage and route of the 1903 Sierra Club High Trip.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I must thank all the gifted and tenacious historians who have assembled such a rich body of work related to the topics covered in this book. I only hope I have not grossly misrepresented that work and regret omissions that were necessary to get the book completed. I hope offering them some access to the geological literature can partially repay my debt.

Conversations over my career with numerous colleagues have shaped my views. While it is impossible to name them all, those involved with the several Sierra Continental Dynamics Program projects and the Sierra Nevada Earthscope Project made observations, arguments, and discussions over the years that helped to give me enough understanding of the range and its evolution that I could represent it to others, such as readers here. I do have to single out those involved in getting my first experiment in 1988 off the ground, as without a successful conclusion to that experiment this book would not exist: Hiroo Kanamori, who graciously made funds materialize and provided a scientific sounding board; Kaye Shedlock, Steve Park, John Evans, Kei Aki, Leigh House, Marianne Walck, and Randy Keller for sharing equipment gratis; Steve Roecker and Tom Fairbanks for not giving up when all looked bleak in the backcountry; the staff in the Caltech Seismo Lab for support and for letting me take brand-new toys away from them into the field; and the Weizmann Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Division of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Caltech.

Sara Neustadtl graciously read some early chapters when I wasn’t sure this book was worth writing. Her praise kept me moving and her criticism helped me see some big narrative weaknesses.

Several individuals took the time to look over early drafts of some parts of this book and offered advice (occasionally not taken but greatly appreciated nonetheless). Rich Goldfarb help me avoid great errors in understanding the origins of gold in the Sierra. Allen Glazner kept me honest in discussing the evolution of the granitic rocks of the Sierra. Lon Abbott read over the prologue and helped it be more accessible. David Hill graciously shared his insights and recollections of how events at Long Valley and Mammoth evolved in the 1980s.

Several professionals helped me in my attempts to play historian. Patty Limerick and Houston Kempton were kind enough to point me to several important sources of information and in particular suggested I look into the Penn Mine case. The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, consented to allow me to paw through Andrew Lawson’s papers for insights used in chapter 10. Katie Lage in the University of Colorado Earth Sciences Library and Mike Swartz in the Materials Management part of the library dug out numerous old newspaper microfiches to fill out the adventures of the 1903 High Trip. Tom Burge and Ward Eldredge at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park were gracious enough to chat with me about the old camps and Native American sites within the parks.

I have to give credit to Google for scanning many fairly rare books that might have taken me months to find, and Amazon for putting enough text of some books online that I could decide whether or not to request the full text. The online congressional archives of the Library of Congress were a godsend in finding the original discussions associated with some of the events described here. Similarly, the U.S. Government Printing Office’s online materials allowed me to track down the changes in the USGS volcanic advisory system.

At UC Press, I owe much to the relay team that got me to the finish line; they all suffered from a first-time book author’s angst. Blake Edgar didn’t discourage me when I first approached him nearly ten years ago about a book like this; he was the one who picked out a title from a group of rather facetious titles I sent him when he questioned my original title. Merrik Bush-Pirkle then took up the reins and guided me to Eric Engles of EditCraft Editorial. Eric saved me and the reader from many tortured sentences, twisted lines of logic, unfortunate phrases, and lengthy digressions (though I do sometimes regret losing beeves and onion harvesting in the high country). If this book is readable, it is because of his efforts. Jeff Wyneken suffered the miserable task of taking a chaotic mass of citations and references and forcing some rules on it; beyond fixing my occasionally imaginative punctuation, he also pointed out logical gaps that could have tripped up some readers. Merrik, Kate Marshall, Maeve Cornell-Taylor, and Bradley Depew all took turns answering questions and prompting me to stay on course through the publication process. The last laps in production were handled by project editor Kate Hoffman, while Alex Dahne, Tom Sullivan, and Peter Perez undertook the task of trying to promote such an unholy marriage of history and geology to the wider world. Thérèse Shere made all the asides discoverable through the index.

All this was possible because the University of Colorado generously gave me time on two sabbaticals (eight years apart) to try to write this book. And although no National Science Foundation money was spent on my time in writing the book, its support for the scientific work I and others have done over the years provided the whole motivation for putting this together.

Finally, my wife, Anne, and my two daughters were kind enough not to ridicule me as I toted piles of books upstairs and down in our house and cluttered up counters and desks with books and papers.

MAP 1. The northern Sierra Nevada.

MAP 2. The southern Sierra Nevada.

PROLOGUE

We rose as in a dream, the curtain of rock before us dropping to reveal the bright white peaks of the crest of the high Sierra rising across the canyon of the Kern River. My inexperience with helicopters had led me to expect a turbulent ride, bouncing in the early summer thermals rising off of the mountains below us. Instead our ride over the Great Western Divide was smooth as could be, only the change in pitch of the thwok-thwok-thwok of the helicopter blades hinting at a change in the wind speed around us.

Upon this stage a geological mystery has played out: the highest peaks in the lower forty-eight United States have risen up with a puzzling lack of geologic fanfare. Unlike many other high places, the rocks over which I flew displayed no evidence of recent trauma, no massive earthquakes launching the crust upward. We had come here to see what we could learn of this mystery.

The peaks we had just surmounted are the ones thousands of tourists peer at from Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park, awed at their steep rise from the canyon of the Middle Fork of the Kaweah. These mountains would seem likely to include Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48, but as we could now see clearly, Mt. Whitney lay much farther east, across the gash of the Kern Canyon, itself a narrow trench carved into a broader upland cradled between the high peaks of the Great Western Divide and the higher peaks of the main Sierra crest. The tourists snap pictures of the lesser peaks, unaware for the most part of the main mass of the range hiding behind the western rampart.

It was into the gash of the Kern that we now descended. Our task was to deliver about 100 pounds of seismological equipment to each of two sites in the canyon, the first near the ranger station at the south edge of the park, the second at a remote spot farther north called Junction Meadow.

We spiraled down into the canyon, avoiding the small meadow near the ranger station, instead swerving away from the station to a larger meadow a little north, where we quickly put down. Now it was my job to remove the pieces of a seismometer to leave behind for a later day: a deep cycle battery, solar panels, a digital acquisition system, a computer hard drive, a pile of cables, a box to hold it all, and of course the ground-motion sensor itself. We also left a length of low-flow irrigation pipe that, to this point, I had had to put my legs through.

Before we left I had carefully checked the latches on the cargo doors of the chopper. Some years previous, an eminent colleague had failed to do so on a similar mission and found shortly thereafter that the seismometers he was in charge of were incapable of being deployed from a thousand feet above the ground.

We rose again and turned up the Kern River, and I could now peer down through the cockpit bubble as we started to race over meadows and forests. I was treated to a ride like those in IMAX movies, loops of river sliding swiftly beneath me, then bright green meadows, then dark green trees reaching up toward us. We rode for 18 miles between the 3,000-foot walls of the Kern Canyon, so low that only the peaks directly ahead of us hinted of the landscape outside the canyon.

As we flew, the pilot regaled me with tales of hair-raising encounters with military jets in this canyon. Fighter pilots from bases like Lemoore and China Lake and Nellis liked to play high-speed hide-and-seek in the canyon, perhaps reliving battle scenes from the first released Star Wars movie (A New Hope), as the trench of the Kern is long, straight, and narrow, much like the trench on the Death Star where the climax of that movie plays out. Were the few hikers and rangers in the canyon armed with laser cannons, there is little doubt those pilots would face as harrowing a ride as Luke Skywalker did. Logs kept by the Kern Canyon ranger recorded, with scorching invective, numerous low-flying encounters, and hikers in this backcountry often wrote down whatever identification they could of the aircraft to accompany later complaints. The park does not control the airspace, however, and so any punishment was at the whim of a military commander, who demanded firm identification.

The Park Service does control where you can land an aircraft, and our flight had their blessing as the most environmentally benign way of bringing our equipment into this remote area. We circled the Junction Meadow area for a few minutes, trying to spot the undergraduate field assistants who had hiked in over the previous days. Finally the pilot chose a spot and we settled down—geophysically speaking, it was 8,000 feet higher than we had any right to be: according to conventional notions, the crust below us was too thin to support elevations this high.

As I helped unload our cargo, I recalled a conversation I had with a supermarket checker while purchasing supplies years before for the trip that first placed a seismometer here at Junction Meadow. For that trip, the Park Service had preferred the use of mules, and our six backcountry seismometers required visits every few weeks by backpackers. As the loop would take no less than a week and we had to haul out heavy reel-to-reel tapes, we placed a cache of food near Kern Hot Springs, a day’s hike from Junction Meadow. The food in the cache had to be nonperishable, so at the supermarket we were buying a huge pile of canned and other long-lasting provisions. The checker looked at all this and asked if we were going backpacking.

Well, not exactly, I replied. We are placing a stash of food in the backcountry to help us maintain some seismometers.

Oh, said the checker, why are you putting seismometers up in the mountains?

We want to know why the mountains are there.

This was greeted with a quizzical look. What do you mean?

Well, why are there mountains in that part of California and not, say, in Kansas?

The checker’s puzzlement reminded me how different doing science is from viewing science. Most of us learn about the earth by asking how something works, or how something came to be. We are told something like, Scientists tell us that these mountains were created as the Pacific Plate ground against the North American Plate. The explanation seems kind of sensible, and we’ve probably heard of these plates moving around the surface of the earth. Most of us are pretty trusting of these unnamed scientists, and it seems like most everything has some explanation. Since everything is as it is, we might not appreciate the possibility of such explanations being oversimple, misleading, or just plain wrong.

Making explanations can be a dangerous game for a scientist, as most scientists are imaginative enough to suggest some way of explaining a phenomenon within the confines of current theory. Indeed most scientists are perfectly capable of arguing both sides of a question, though they usually only succeed comfortably from one side. In a field like earth science, a lot of elements contribute to how the earth deforms: variations in its composition, variations in physical parameters like temperature and pressure, preexisting weaknesses like faults. It is easy to add some hypothetical complications to make some piece of geology fit a theory. When asked, How did these mountains come to be? a scientist prefaces the answer, as often as not, with, They could have been built . . .

One of the most amazing achievements of geoscience is the prediction of many of Earth’s features from a few simple concepts. The idea that ocean floor originates at midocean ridges and then cools as it moves away from the ridge predicts the topography of most of the ocean floor, more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface. This prediction, derived from some very simple physics, does exceptionally well.

To improve and advance such rules for the earth, scientists seek out failures of the existing rules. So, for instance, plate tectonics tells us that where ocean floor dives under (or subducts under) continents, there will be a line of active and dormant volcanoes. If we find a place where the ocean floor is descending but there is no line of volcanoes, we can better understand exactly what happens as ocean floor goes under continents. Comparing the volcano-free area with a similar volcanic area can provide insight into the origin of volcanoes at subduction zones. It is not what the rules explain that is interesting; it is what goes unexplained. The Sierra Nevada, as we understood it then, was a range whose height was young but whose geologic evolution was much older—a high-standing range with a thin crust. So the Sierra falling into the unexplained category made it a ripe candidate for scientific inquiry. I had returned to Junction Meadow to try to answer the question: Just what are these mountains doing here?

In hearing me ask, Why isn’t the Sierra in Kansas? the supermarket checker might have retorted, So what if the mountains had been in Kansas? Would it really matter? In our modern landscape of franchised uniformity, where a developer can label a subdivision Forest Hills in the arid wastes around Las Vegas, or Mountain Ridge Estates in mountain-deprived Dallas, does the actual geography of a place really have any meaning at all?

My answer is yes, geography does matter and, therefore, so does geology. The Sierra being where it is and what it is made a huge difference in American history and continues to influence life today. If there had been no Sierra in California, America today would be a very different place. In writing this book, I seek to explore the many ways in which the Sierra Nevada and its unusual geology have in fact mattered. And underlying it all is the fundamental question we were trying to answer with our seismometers: Why are these mountains here?

Introduction

SIERRAN SHADOWS

HARDLY AN AMERICAN SOUL has been untouched by the Sierra Nevada. You need only to have consumed a fruit cup or a handful of almonds, to count among your ancestors a former slave, or to benefit from living in the world’s number-one economy to cite an example of how a mountain range you may never have seen has altered your life. Even more directly, sitting in a cool movie theater on a hot summer day, visiting a national park, gambling in Las Vegas, or skiing down a mountain in the West, you owe your experience in no small part to the Sierra Nevada and the way it has shaped our nation’s historical development.

Certainly the Sierra Nevada is not alone among geographic features in influencing the course of American history. The same could be said for the Appalachian Mountains, the Mississippi River, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, or any number of other landscape icons. What’s special about the Sierra? For one thing, the Sierra’s existence and characteristics have impacted our lives and our history in ways that are startlingly diverse, manifestly consequential, and often unexpected. Further, while other mountains and some large rivers arguably helped define America—the British prohibition on moving past the Appalachians, for example, energized colonial revolutionaries—the Sierra emerged on the national stage quite unexpectedly and in the process redefined the country. Of particular interest from my standpoint as a geologist, the enormous impact of the Sierra was far more tied to the peculiarities of the geologic history of the range than was the case with the Appalachians. Change any of a number of aspects of the deep-time history of the Sierra—move erosion back a few million years, shift a major fault a few miles east or west—and American history would have followed a dramatically different path.

For evidence of the Sierra Nevada’s imprint on our lives, consider the theatergoers I mentioned above. Aside from making appearances in movies—the Sierra has stood in for the Yukon’s Chilgoot Pass in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and for Afghanistan in Iron Man, to name just two of several hundred guest shots—the Sierra has played a significant role in the development of Hollywood. The capital of the film industry has been in the greater Los Angeles area for about a century. While the locale’s appeal was mainly climatic, for the industry to grow there needed to be a vibrant city. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this was far from guaranteed. Los Angeles had pretty nearly exhausted its local water resources. City officials and leading businessmen in the region arranged for water to be brought from the Sierra, a process later memorialized (or vilified) in the movie Chinatown. This water would fuel the growth of the region and with it the film industry through a good part of the twentieth century. Not only was the water Sierran, but the development of the laws, culture, and infrastructure allowing the water to move over such distances owed a great deal to events in the range.

The film industry and the water that made Hollywood possible come together in and around Lone Pine, a modest town of fewer than three thousand people at the base of the Sierra Nevada’s steep eastern escarpment, near the bottom of a valley deeper than the Grand Canyon. To the west, Sierran peaks tower 10,000 feet over the valley floor, and to the east those of the Inyo Mountains rise more than 6,000 feet above town.

To advance from Lone Pine toward the granite wall of the Sierra to the west, you first have to traverse what almost appears to be a giant’s rubble pile. These picturesque rocks comprise the Alabama Hills and are the same granites as in the Sierran wall to the west; their curious erosion into lumpy boulders is a reflection of the different climate far below those peaks. By 1920 the area had been frequented by at least one of Hollywood’s earliest movers and shakers, leading several production companies to drive the few hours from Hollywood to use the combination of the rugged peaks and peek-a-boo views through and around the piles of boulders as backdrops for their growing catalog of movies. Although the Alabama Hills would over the years stand in for many Old World localities in movies like Gunga Din and Charge of the Light Brigade and out-of-this-world locations in two Star Trek movies, the bread-and-butter of the local film economy was the Western, starting with the very first film made here, The Roundup, starring Fatty Arbuckle. For the next forty years the hills echoed with stage directions as the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy and others created the mythic West for America and the world.¹

All this activity was enabled by a very different invasion from the south some years earlier. Drought just after the turn of the twentieth century had made it clear that Los Angeles could grow only with more water. The superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had decided in 1904 that the Owens River, then watering some 40,000 acres of crops north from Lone Pine, would satisfy the emerging metropolis. By hijacking the nascent Bureau of Reclamation’s plans to irrigate even more of the valley, Los Angeles acquired rights to most of the Owens River’s water (and most of the valley). Less than a decade later, Owens River water poured down into the San Fernando Valley through the L.A. Aqueduct, ending plans for growth in Owens Valley as it made land speculators in Los Angeles wealthy.² Even as moviemakers came to Lone Pine, an end to a string of wet years led to physical conflicts as the remaining irrigation districts fought Water and Power for control of Owens River water. This reached an improbable turn in November 1924, when residents seized an aqueduct gatehouse outside of Lone Pine and turned the L.A. Aqueduct’s water back into Owens Lake. This act of sabotage was followed not by gunfire but by a picnic, enlivened by the orchestra of Tom Mix, who sent the musicians over when he learned of the event from his nearby movie set. Subsequent confrontations were more cinematic, as the aqueduct was dynamited repeatedly in 1927 and shoot-to-kill orders emanated from Water and Power’s headquarters. The collapse of the main banking establishments in Owens Valley only a few months later ended resistance to Los Angeles, and over the following twenty to thirty years, agriculture in the valley faded away, replaced entirely by the tourist and movie-making service industry.³

Among the attractions of the modern tourist industry are the views the moviemakers had coveted. Loiter outdoors in Lone Pine awhile, and you will almost certainly see arms pointing westward or overhear someone asking, Which one is Whitney? The highest peak of the Sierra Nevada—of California, of the contiguous United States—is in plain view, but nearly every first-time visitor will pick bulky Lone Pine Peak as the highest. The mistake is understandable; Lone Pine Peak rises farther above the horizon when viewed from Lone Pine than does Whitney. The reason is simple perspective: at the foot of the Sierra, you are too close for an undistorted vista.

For a better introductory view of the Sierra, you might head north out of Lone Pine, drive a few miles to Independence, and turn east on a dusty road that crosses the fault scarp of what was probably the strongest earthquake in California history before it winds up into the Inyo Mountains toward Mazourka Peak. From a vantage point up in the Inyo Mountains, you now can really grasp, across the Owens Valley, the extent of the wall of rock that is the Sierra. The lowest point on the crest in view is Sawmill Pass, over 11,000 feet above sea level and more than 6,000 feet higher than the valley below you. The wall of rock that you can see extends from well south of Lone Pine to near Bishop, a distance of about 100 miles. But this is only the range’s southern portion. The Sierra crest continues, unbreached by a river, until some 400 miles farther north, well north of Lake Tahoe. To cross the range by car in the winter, the traveler would need to drive some 95 miles south of Independence to Walker Pass or more than 220 miles north to Carson Pass. It is hardly less daunting in the summer: once the snow melts, you can turn west 70 miles south of Independence to cross on the little-used Sherman Pass road or go 105 miles north to head west over Tioga Pass. Between these two roads there is no automobile crossing of the range—you can drive 175 miles along US Highway 395 knowing that any road heading toward the range is a dead end (Map 3).

MAP 3. Locations of the southwestern United States, with federal highways. Sierran national parks indicated by shading: Yosemite (Y), Kings Canyon (K), and Sequoia (S).

Looking at the Sierra from your perch in the Inyo Mountains, you are peering at the edge of two great national parks: Sequoia and Kings Canyon. Below that skyline ridge, the John Muir Wilderness within Inyo National Forest encompasses the slopes that buffer the parks from the desert below. Yosemite’s famous cliffs and waterfalls are somewhere well behind the crest of the massive wall of rock you are looking at. Although the eastern side of the Sierra is lightly clothed in a pine forest, the western slope is generously draped in one of the better coniferous forests in the world, one endowed with the largest of trees by volume, the giant sequoia. Your view from the east easily captures views of the divide between waters heading to the Pacific and those doomed to evaporate in the Great Basin (or flow through canals and tunnels to water the greater Los Angeles area). Those examining the range from a typical vantage point on its west slope—gaping at views from Moro Rock in Sequoia, for example, or from Glacier Point in Yosemite—are unable to see this divide because they are so far from the crest.

Your edge of the Sierra is brutally ragged and easily drawn; the western edge, a sinuous and ill-defined boundary. This eastern edge is raw from recent geological insult, whether it be from the glaciers that sharpened the peaks, the earthquakes that dropped the valley, or the volcanoes that simply obliterated the old edge of the range. That western edge, in contrast, is probably the most stable part of California, its only real geologic violence the occasional wash of rivers flooding over lands near their usual banks. Those used to viewing the range from the west—seeing from most vantage points low hills gradually emerging from under the rich loam of the Central Valley and higher hills some distance away—would find the abrupt appearance of the mountains above Lone Pine and Independence utterly unfamiliar.

Just as the range is clearly a huge barrier to travel, it is also a barrier to moisture, and in this aspect we encounter another important way—both literal and figurative—in which the Sierra casts its shadow. The Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow effect is certainly evident from the skimpy vegetation around your viewpoint, but it is more thoroughly demonstrated by the landscape around the town of Tonopah, just over 100 air miles to the northeast in the state of Nevada. To get to Tonopah, you drive north out of Independence and join US 6 in Bishop. The drive has long straight stretches of road unimpeded by forest or town or river; only the need to climb over the hills at the north edge of the White Mountains causes the road to curve. Dropping down to the east, you see such shrubs as make their home here crouch close to the ground, ready to nip your ankles should you venture too close, but otherwise cowering beneath a dome of dry air attempting to suck the plants dry. Gentle slopes seemingly bleached of color rise to rocks dyed from a strange palette of reds, blacks, and light tans. As these rocky summits recede into the distance, tints from the sky seep down to soften the land and shade it toward grays, blues, and purples. Into this landscape you venture to find Tonopah, huddled between some pointed hills atop a narrow mountain range, the most bustling community for hundreds of miles—which, in rural Nevada, isn’t saying much.

Here you stand 5,394 feet above sea level—as high as some of the highest peaks in the Appalachians—and so you might expect Tonopah to be clothed in a cool forest. Instead the landscape is parched. A few junipers huddle in the more sheltered sides of some of the peaks but for the most part there are just scattered hardy shrubs in the few places where miners didn’t burrow into the ground or deposit their tailings. Although the Sierra is a distant smudge on the horizon only seen from certain favored spots, its shadow over the physical and historical reality of Tonopah is unmistakable. It has exacted a toll on the storms that pass from west to east at this latitude, and in demanding the moisture from these storms, it has left Tonopah a high desert.

A comparison of statistics underscores the severity of the climatic effect. Grant Grove on the west side of the Sierra gets an average of about 42 inches of precipitation (mostly as over 190 inches of snow) each year. In January the average low is 25°F; in July the average high is 75°F.⁴ Tonopah, a bit lower but not so much that it should make much of a difference, gets only 5 inches of precipitation a year, mostly in the form of rain. Even without the snow, Tonopah in winter is colder than Grant Grove, and in summer sees high temperatures hotter by 13°F. Thus Grant Grove hosts a thick forest of pines, firs, and sequoias—not to mention lots of park visitors—while Tonopah struggles to prevent buildings from collapsing into the street. Push the Sierra out of the way and Tonopah becomes a garden spot.

The climatic effects observed in Tonopah are widespread. In California, the west slope of the Sierra Nevada drains into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Although the flows of these streams have been altered by engineering longer than their flows have been directly measured, geologic evidence suggests that something like 1,100 cubic meters of water (more than 290,000 gallons) have entered San Francisco Bay each second of the past many thousands of years. This is water collected from about 43,200 square miles of California and is equal to the wonky waterworks measure of 28 million acre-feet of water per year (an acre-foot is the amount of water needed to drown an acre under a foot of water). The 172,000 square miles of land just east of the Sierra, the Great Basin—four times the area draining to the Pacific on the west—gets so little water and has so much evaporate that no river reaches an ocean. Even the Colorado drainage farther east is starved for moisture: despite draining an area more than twice as large as that draining into San Francisco Bay, the Upper Colorado only has about half of the flow of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.⁵

Even the name of Tonopah’s state is in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada, for when the territory was first blocked out, the original name was to be Sierra Nevada Territory. Congress, ignorant of either Spanish or the territorial geography, or simply in a jovial mood, dropped the Sierra and left the Nevada, which in Spanish means snowy.⁶ Although snow is not a particularly defining characteristic of the region, a one-word name was simpler and Nevada, perhaps, a less generic name than Sierra. Only a few short years later, driven by the need for a few more electoral votes to assist Abraham Lincoln in his 1864 reelection bid, the state convention in Carson City sent the longest telegram in history to Washington D.C. on the 31st of October 1864: a message containing the constitution for the new state to be made from Nevada Territory.⁷ Despite misgivings in the convention on the naming of the state, the constitution was for a new state of Nevada.⁸ And so we find one unusual outcome of the Sierra Nevada’s presence just in the name of the state that includes no more than a narrow sliver of the range.

As America approached the beginning of the twentieth century, desiccated Nevada seemed destined to revert to the fate early emigrants imagined for it: a desolate land with few people and no reason for others to stop. The massive Comstock Lode justifying the Silver State’s nickname was more than twenty years past its richest days. Unlike California, where agriculture overtook mining while mining was still strong, Nevada’s climate, victim of its namesake range, precluded riches from farming. Newer mining booms across the state seemed to be smaller and smaller as, it seemed, the riches in the rocks were nearing exhaustion. The state, brought into the Union on the back of its mineral wealth, was now the target of suggestions that it join its numerous ghost towns and be demoted from statehood.⁹

A new silver strike near Tonopah in 1900, and then a gold find a bit farther south in Goldfield, retired talk of demoting the state. The finds were the stuff of legend: miners from around the state descended on Tonopah, and Goldfield grew so fast that it captured the title of Nevada’s largest city in 1906. But although this mining activity produced some great bonanzas, it proved to be short-lived and the last of the old-time mineral rushes.¹⁰ As these finds faded away, Nevada leaders recognized that they needed to supplement mining to ensure the viability of the state.

Nevada politicians became inventive. As there wasn’t the water or the climate for intense and successful agriculture, the state sought to attract visitors. The first great enticement was a very liberal divorce law. Unlike the rest of the country, Nevada would grant a divorce to those who resided in the state for a short time without any need for proof of irreconcilable differences or extensive litigation. State legislators even reduced the minimum length of residence from six months to three months in 1927 and then to six weeks in 1931 to increase visitation and stave off competition from other states. A booming business developed in divorce ranches, places for soon-to-be divorcees to enjoy themselves while waiting out the last days of their marriages.¹¹

That same desire to entice visitors and new residents led Nevada in 1931 to remove restrictions on gambling previously put in place in 1910.¹² One notable beneficiary was a small town in southern Nevada on the railroad line from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City.¹³ It originally handled shipments of ore from mines near Goldfield, but its position on a main route out from Los Angeles enabled Las Vegas to become the primary gambling destination for the population of Southern California. The relaxation on gaming, as Nevadans put it, in 1931 couldn’t have been better timed to take advantage of the influx of workers building Hoover Dam nearby. And so the harsh Nevada climate, imposed by the range of granite to the west, produced modern Las Vegas—Everyman’s cut-rate Babylon, in the words of Alistair Cooke.¹⁴

In focusing on the Sierra’s impact on the physical geography of the West, I have made no mention of its better-known historical impact: gold. Although the discovery of Sierran gold in 1848, the subsequent rush, and the pulse of its economic stimulus are common knowledge, the many ways that the effects of the Gold Rush reverberated through society are less well known. One interesting thread of causality passes, coincidentally enough, through Las Vegas.

The original settlers of Las Vegas were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), commonly known as the Mormon Church. When they built a small adobe fort in what is now Las Vegas in 1855, the Mormon missionaries intended their settlement to be a way station along a year-round route that foreign converts could use to reach the church’s homeland in the Salt Lake Valley.¹⁵ Although the settlers were recalled by the church in 1857 in response to a threat on Salt Lake City from federal troops, these missionaries might never have arrived in southern Nevada to establish a settlement had the LDS church not survived an earlier crisis.

Brigham Young had chosen Salt Lake Valley as the church’s home in 1847 largely because of its isolation from the rest of American society. After forcible evictions in Missouri and Illinois, Young and the Mormon brethren wanted above all else to be left in peace. Occupying one of the few watered niches in the deserts of the West ensured an absence of American company, and so Young had resisted the pleas of another church elder, Samuel Brannan, who had brought part of the church to San Francisco Bay, for the church to continue its westward travels to California.¹⁶

Although Young had found his church a refuge, he had also placed it in rather grave poverty. Lacking even a real wagon road to the industrial world, church members needed basic products like stoves, plows, fabric, and clothing and were running perilously low on food. Even were such items available, the brethren had little hard cash with which to buy them, as their efforts were focused on making their community self-sufficient, not growing cash crops suitable for trade. In the grip of despair in the winter of 1849, Young’s right-hand man, Heber C. Kimball, made one of the more famous prophecies in the Mormon Church’s history: In less than one year there will be plenty of clothes and everything that we shall want sold at less than St. Louis prices.¹⁷ Sierran gold—discovered the previous year—made Kimball’s prophecy stand, as a few months later, gold seekers flooded through Salt Lake City, willing to sell at low, low prices their excess material goods and to trade their exhausted stock for horses or oxen that could survive the brutal trek across the deserts to the west. Perhaps the LDS church would have survived without that boon of merchandise brought to its doorstep, but the Mormon faithful would have faced more hard years and could have easily suffered the fate of other idealistic colonies of midnineteenth century America and faded from view.

Others even more persecuted than the Mormons would benefit from that gold find, too, though not in nearly as obvious and direct a manner, for the gold would trigger a number of events that climaxed in the Civil War and the associated abolition of chattel slavery.¹⁸ Although one main line of consequences was political—the request of California to be admitted as a free state triggered political chaos—arguably the more forceful effect was economic. Prior to 1849, the national economy rested on agriculture: it represented 70 percent of national production in 1839; manufacturing, only 17 percent. The 1840s had seen only about a 4 percent yearly increase in national product in constant dollars. The infusion of capital represented by Sierran gold spurred the process of industrialization, expanding annual growth to more than 5 percent and nearly doubling the share of income from manufacturing by 1860.¹⁹ With the bulk of that industrialization focused in northern states, California gold helped tilt the balance of resources northward, making defeat of the Confederacy—and the abolition of slavery—that much more likely.

Even as Sierran gold flowed into the banks and businesses of the eastern part of the United States, Sierran gold miners flooded much of the western part. Lured by the never-dying hope of finding a big strike, miners redefined the way America settled the West. Previously, Native Americans could