Rising From the Plains, John McPhee’s third installment in his multi-volume geological history of the United States Annals of the Former World, tells the story of Wyoming: its birth on the supercontinent Pangea, its arrival in North America, the growth of its mountains, the source of its fossils and oil and jade and uranium, and how it rose from the mid-western plains to its east, swelling up like an air-mattress filled with molten rock. Book one covered tectonics, book two, tectonics and glaciers, book three, tectonics, glaciers, and vulcanism. Wyoming is the most geologically confused state in the country.
However, unlike the first two books in the Annals of the Former World, the star of Rising From the Plains isn’t geology, it’s the geologist David Love and his family. The geologic story of Wyoming is interlaced with a Love family history taken from the remarkable diary of David Love’s mother, Ethel Love, nee Waxham. A decade after writing Rising from the Plains, McPhee said Mrs. Love was “probably the most arresting personality I have encountered in the course of my professional work.” No one who reads Rising From the Plains will find that at all surprising.
Miss Waxham, as she then was, arrived in Rawlins, Wyoming by train, in 1905. She was 23 years old, and a graduate of Wellesley College. She arrived wearing her Phi Beta Kappa Key. Rawlins is in southern Wyoming, west of Cheyenne and halfway to Utah. Miss Waxham was headed north into the state’s wilder parts to teach school: Her schoolhouse, a few dozen miles east of the Grand Tetons, was “fourteen by sixteen feet—smaller than a bathroom at Wellesley.” Its door, adds McPhee, was “perforated with bullet holes.”
Miss Waxham recorded every detail of her Wyoming adventure: her arrival by stage coach through a snow storm, her school room and her pupils, and the area’s idiosyncratic homesteaders. McPhee quotes her quoting a local woman’s description of a libertine named Guy Signor: “He has a cabbage heart with a leaf for every girl.” The local bartender, wrote Miss Waxham, started out shearing sheep, and the blacksmith was also the dentist. There was a local bandit named Reub Roe who held up stagecoaches, hoping to find the British royal family. There was “Indian Dick”, a white man who had been raised by Indians after his parents had been killed, evidently, by different Indians, and “Peggy Dougherty”, a stage coach driver with a peg leg. And there was “Mr. Love—Johnny Love”, a second-generation Scotsman, who Miss Waxham would marry.
Mr. Love was the son of an immigrant Scottish doctor, and the nephew of the naturalist John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club. Love briefly attended the University of Nebraska before deciding to head west to homestead Wyoming and make his fortune. With that in mind, he got a job as a cowboy and began saving money. “When he had saved enough,” writes McPhee,
By the time he met Miss Waxham in 1905, he had made himself into a successful farmer, with several thousand acres and so many sheep that she described him in her diary as a “mutton-aire”. When he met Miss Waxham, he fell in love with her, and would routinely ride to her school house from his ranch to see her, a journey that was 11 hours each way: “He did not suffer from the tedium, in part because he frequently rode in a little buggy and, after telling his horses his destination, would lie on the seat and sleep.”
Not long after they met, a miserable Wyoming winter began, with “inexhaustible resources of biting wing and blinding snow,” and “temperatures now and again approaching fifty below zero.” Miss Waxham developed such an advanced case of cabin fever that she wrote in her journal, “My spirit has a chair sore.” Even so, John Love continued to make the trip to see her, “even when the drifts were at their deepest.” He courted her for five years before they were married.
After they were married, Love took her to his rather eccentric ranch, which he’d built by purchasing ghost towns whole and moving their hotels, saloons, and shops to his land. Hotels became hay-barns and stables, saloons became living and dining rooms. His children—including McPhee’s geologist guide, David Love—were educated by their mother, and did their lessons with a roulette table for a desk. David Love, learning the land from horseback as he helped his father with the ranch, developed a keen instinctive knowledge of Wyoming’s peculiar geology. He figured out what sorts of rocks led to water pooling, which would contain fossils and where to look for coal. He went to the University of Wyoming, and then to Yale, where he got his Ph.D. He delivered his first post-doctoral paper at a meeting of the Geological Society of America, and was met with “hoots of derision”—until one of the country’s preeminent geologists, Taylor Thom, “… stood up and said, ‘This paper is a milestone in Rocky Mountain geology.'” It would be the first of many scientific milestones Love would achieve, most of them in Wyoming.
Though the geology of Wyoming could easily have made an entertaining Annal of the Former World on its own, it can’t hold a candle to the story of the Loves, which makes Rising From the Plains stunningly entertaining.
Joshua Gelernter is a writer in Connecticut.
