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From Edinburgh to Salt Lake City: Archibald Geikie’s Travels in the American West in 1879
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In 1875 the British science magazine Nature published a two-part article entitled “American Geological Surveys.”1 Its author, Archibald Geikie, was the director of the Geological Survey of Scotland and a professor of geology at the University of Edinburgh. Geikie briefly reported on the pioneering surveys of Clarence King, John Powell, and Ferdinand Hayden in the Rockies of the “Western Territories,” and remarked that the reports of these surveyors were “full of fresh illustrations of the principles of geology, such as the dependence of scenery upon rocky structure, the order of succession of formations, the plication of mountain chains, the phenomena of volcanic actions, the functions of rivers and glaciers as geological agents.”2
Sir Archibald Geikie’s painting of Smith’s Fork on the northern slope of the Uinta Mountains. The lake and mounds of glacial deposits (moraine) are seen in the painting. Smith’s Fork is today a part of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum, Surrey, UK.
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