On August 20, 1853, future Civil War general George McClellan camped along Wenas (or Wee_Nass, as he wrote it) Creek, about 15 miles northwest of Yakima. It was his 22nd night out as part of a multi-month exploration of the Cascade Range. His task: finding the best route for a train over the mountains. (No secret, he failed.) That day, he and his survey team had crossed Cowiche Creek and Naches (Nah_Chess) Creek and several low ridges before entering the Wenas Creek valley. The land was “extremely barren,” wrote Lt. McClellan, with nothing but sagebrush and “almost literally, no grass.” He did though see a small cactus, apparently his first, but he reserved his main excitement for geology: “the volcanic formation still prevails—lava, lava, lava!”
(Because he was not specific, McClellan could have been referring to one of two lavas in the area. The younger is the Tieton Andesite, a circa 1.6-million-year-old volcanic flow that came from the Goat Rocks area. The older lava is the 16-million-year-old Grande Ronde Basalt, one of the many basalt flows that originated on the Columbia Plateau. The two layers look quite similar, dark and cliff forming with hexagonal columns.)
This was neither the first nor the last time George would note the geology during his time in the PNW. (If you are interested, I have written about McClellan twice before: McClellan of the Cascades and McClellan in the PNW.) Throughout his writings he peppers his observations with descriptions of a plate tectonic range of rocks: basaltic columns, veins of quartz, milky quartz, transparent quartz, epidote, trachyte, chalcedony, granite, porphyry, syenite, and scoria. He described clay slate “apparently acted upon by heat,” which “bore a close resemblance to mica slate.” He noted a petrified tree and how the stones in one river were more angular than “they were yesterday.” He also saw a small eruption of Mount St. Helens. Lucky fellow!
This is not the vocabulary of a someone who failed Rocks for Jocks 101; this is the vocabulary of someone who ranked first in his class for Mineralogy and Geology when he graduated from West Point in 1846. (His classmate, George Pickett, in contrast, graduated 57th out of 59 cadets, which could help explain his later failures in life!)
At West Point, McClellan used two classic textbooks: Edward Hitchcock’s Elementary Geology (1844) and James Dwight Dana’s System of Mineralogy (1837). (Still influential a 140-plus years later, Dana’s book was still being referenced—After James D. Dana—in my college mineralogy course book.) Thick, well-illustrated, and detailed, the books would have provided curious George a good introduction to the nascent field of geology, which was still trying to flesh out the differences between what was seen and what was described in the Bible.
Part of what fascinates me about McClellan is that in the 1840s, few geologists had been to the western US and seen its complex and dynamic and, often, young geology, which makes his use of the terms he did even more impressive. For instance, Hitchcock wrote that trachyte and young basalt were not known in the US and he had no clue about our region’s volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens. (Hitchcock also added this lovely phrase that pumice was “light enough to swim on water.”)
Geology was not George’s lone field of observation. His plant list is as remarkable as his list of rocks. “Immense quantities of black-berries, raspberries, thimbleberries, red huckleberries, Oregon grape, salal berry,” reads one journal entry. Others mention wild cherry, hazel, oak, large sorrel, cedar, Douglas fir (“these celebrated giants of our western forests” and “still gigantic—about 6 ft diameter and 300 ft. high,”) maple, blue bunch grass, strawberries (“their flavor was excellent,”) various grasses, sunflower, and wild sage. He also noted what many modern travelers observe when crossing the Cascade crest, that “since passing to the E side of the mountains the fir has disappeared and the pine taken its place.”
Little Mac had the bad fortune to experience other natural phenomena still common around Mt. Adams in late July and August. Mosquitoes (spelled musquitoes) were “very annoying” and “disposed to be intimate,” he wrote. He and his men also met with yellowjackets, which “give rise to very graceful capers on the part of our animals,” and horseflies, which were “similar to but a great deal larger than the Jersey sandflies.”
Even though McClellan didn’t always write sympathetically about Indigenous people, he carefully described how Native fishers had built a fish weir to harvest salmon and trout near Kechelus Lake. “The fish dam we passed this morning is formed by setting up at intervals across the stream tripods of timber, about 20 feet high. One big down stream, and the other two in the direction of the dam. Horizontal logs are tied from one frame to the next and vertical ones (with the slope of a plane of the two upper logs of the tripod) lashed to these. A wattling laid against these closed the passage to the fish: and from stands below the salmon are speared by men standing ready for them.” Unfortunately, for George, he was not successful himself. “Tried fishing but the wretches would not rise to the fly.”
Perhaps surprisingly to modern readers, McClellan commented regularly on fire. Of particular interest was smoke, which “interferes greatly with the view, and will be a source of great inconvenience to us in the mountains.” The expedition also passed through great burns with huge, blackened trees and scores of area of downed timber. And, impressively he recorded how the forest changes post fire. “We observed today that in many places when the timber had been destroyed by fire it was replaced by growth of a different kind.” His comments confirm what fire ecologists have begun to understand over the past few decades, that fires, even on the west side of the Cascades burned far more regularly than they do now.
I think that I have about tapped out the vein of McClellan’s natural history observations in the PNW. Although his military and surveying careers are suspect and often criticized, I still find him fascinating and someone who might have been fun to travel with. But then again, I am biased toward anyone who takes the time to notice the rocks around them. Perhaps he should have devoted his life to the wonderful field of studying geology and not to the military.
Word of the Week - Chalcedony - The broad name for a group of cryptocrystalline forms of quartz, which includes chert, jasper, flint (silex), and agate. In college, I learned that you cannot tell them apart without a microscope. Chalcedony comes from Latin through Greek via the Book of Revelation, which has perhaps the most detailed list of minerals in the New Testament. George would have learned from Dana’s book that rocks, such as chalcedony, “whose structure appears the most purely impalpable, and the most destitute internally of any similarity to crystallization, are probably composed of crystalline grains.”
September 6 - Waterfront Park - Opening Day Celebration - I’ll be down at the Waterfront, at the south end (east side of Alaskan Way S, between Yesler Way & S. Washington St.) at 3:00 and 5:00 P.M. giving short talks about the history of this area.
