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Assembling California
Looking for the geological origins of the great state of California
Assembling California is a journey through the vast expanse of geological time with John McPhee as your tour guide. At the end of the journey the reader arrives in California just as the Loma Prieta Earthquake catapults the Pacific Plate northward relative to the North American Plate.
But to say this book is about the geological history of North America would miss the point. For like most of McPhee’s book, the reader is treated to a beautifully crafted description of people, places, and things. His description of the geologist Eldridge Moores, one of the geologists in the 1960s that advanced the theory of plate tectonics, illustrates his style.
"When I first went into the Sierra with Judy’s husband (Eldridge), in 1978, he had an oyster-gray Volkwagen bus with a sticker on its bumper that said "Stop Continental Drift." I guess he thought it was funny." In other accounts, the reader learns that Moores is an accomplished cellist, is fluent in modern Greek, and the editor of Geology magazine, a publication that flourished under Moores editorship.
In the Gold Country of California, McPhee describes hydraulic mining. It was introduced during the 1850s to mine gold from auriferous gravels found in Eocene river beds that had been lifted up over 40 million years to their location atop the Sierra Nevada. "In five years, they built five thousand miles of ditches and flumes from a ditch about 400 hundred feet above the bed of a fossil river, water would come through a nozzle, from which it emerged as a jet at a hundred and twenty miles and hour…. Turned against the gravel slopes, it brought them down. In a contemporary account, it was described as…’mining the dead rivers of the Sierra Nevada.’ A hundred and six million ounces of gold—a third of all the gold that has ever been mined in the United States—came from the Sierra Nevada.
The reader will learn much of the harsh reality of the California Gold Rush, not only of what the miners did to the land—"thirteen thousand million cubic yards of the Sierra"—displaced by hydraulic mining, but what they did to one another. "In four months in Mokelumne Hill, there is a murder every week. In the absence of law, lynching is common. The camp that will be named Placerville, is earlier called Hangtown."
However, as the name of the book implies Assembling California is the geological history of this great state. The gold mined in the 1850s came from an island arc that would have resembled Japan in what is now the Western Pacific in the middle Jurassic age, one hundred and sixty million years ago. The arc over geologic time slammed into the western edge of what is now the North American Plate and became what geologist have name the Smartville Block. Continued plate tectonics eventually lifted the Smartville Block upward to form the state’s Mother Lode.
The Smartville Block is only part of the geological parts that comprise California. McPhee will describe the others in far greater detail and much more eloquently. This book is the last in a series of four in which McPhee examines the geological history of the United States. The Tetralogy is entitled Annals of the Former World. The other three books include Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, and Rising from the Plains.
Read this book. It will broaden your vision of time and place.
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