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The range and distribution of western arid-land trees
(Above: In the mysterious and trackless Ralston Desert)
When I first started working on the Joshua tree book — when I first started delving into the subject matter that has occupied much of my mind for the last ten years — I logged on to the pre-Web library catalog of the University of California, Berkeley to search on the tree’s Latinate binomial, Yucca brevifolia. I found citations for a couple of doctoral theses, by Peter Rowlands and Philip Simpson, that I’ve since read a couple dozen times each. There were a couple of other citations in books and journal articles.
And there was a map, entitled “Forests of Yucca brevifolia: Scattered trees of Yucca brevifolia,” that was listed as residing in the archives of the Bancroft Library. The Bancroft is UC Berkeley’s restricted reference library, a reliquary of documents from the early history of California. Many of the items in the Bancroft’s collection are unique and irreplaceable. This map, listed in the MELVYL catalog as dating from, verbatim, “190-(?),” was obviously just such an item. I filed the information away for future use.
Not long afterward my friend Nelia White and I went into the Bancroft. We showed the required two forms of ID, put our briefcases and backpacks in lockers in the lobby, and if I remember right submitted to full-body MRI before being granted admittance to the little reading room. I wrote the map’s accession number on a slip, handed it to a librarian, and we waited.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later the librarian brought the map out from the back rooms. We spread it out on a large table. It was a chart-sized commercial map from some stationer, engraved and showing the western states, copyrighted some time in the 1890s. In the lower left hand section of the map, known populations of Joshua trees were drawn on the map in bright green ink. It was intriguingly amateurish in execution, something I might have done on the tailgate of my pickup with a wind blowing, and I liked the map immensely at once.
I spent some time comparing the mapmaker’s inventory of Joshua trees with my own, which itself was far less extensive in those days than it is now. The map showed large stands in Kern and Los Angeles counties along the bases of the mountains, scattered groves along the Mormon trail from Saint George through Las Vegas and into the vicinity of Cima Dome — though I don’t recall if the dome itself was represented. There were green marks near Wickenberg, as I recall, and a few toward the north end of Death Valley. I remember finding a couple notable omissions, places where the artist had missed large stands I’d visited myself. I don’t remember for sure just where those stands were. The Bancroft has a rather arduous procedure by which users gain permission to reproduce its collected material, and I wasn’t about to go through it then. I will have to soon. It is ten years since, and my memory of the map’s exact appearance has shifted a bit.
It was looking at the stands north of Death Valley that I first noticed the map contained reference to a natural feature I hadn’t heard of. Across the Funeral Range from the Valley, where Beatty is today and stretching for some hundred miles both north and south, was a featureless plain labeled the “Ralston Desert.” The map had been published before C. Hart Merriam’s Death Valley Expedition in 1891, in which much of the terrain of southwest Nevada was first mapped for science.
Merriam is best known for his “life zones,” the now deprecated but still useful recognition that mountain biomes change as you change elevation much as they do if you change latitude. If you walk from the 12,663-foot summit of Mount Humphries, north of Flagstaff, to Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Merriam pointed out, the environments through which you hike change as markedly in less than sixty air miles as they would in a sea-level journey from the Arctic Ocean to Hermosillo, Sonora.
But though the life-zones concept is the first thing to come to a bio undergrad’s mind when you mention Merriam, he made his mark on the west in other ways as well. He was the first chief of the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy under the auspices of the USDA, an agency which later became the Fish and Wildlife Service. He led a group of biologists in a survey of the Mojave that became known as the Death Valley Expedition, which populated the featureless plains of the Ralston Desert with ranges and basins, and with evocative names such as Sarcobatus Flat and Disappointment Spring. He explored the West for most of a century, dying in Berkeley in 1942.
Aide from omissions dating from its pre-Merriam printing, I noticed that map in the Bancroft Library had a number of other odd features. The city of Barstow, for instance, just wasn’t there. In its place, a locality named “Fish Ponds.” I traced a line south from there. There was no Salton Sea. The massive engineering failure that diverted the entire flow of the Colorado into the desiccated Salton Sink had not yet happened. How odd it must have been, I thought, not to have had that body of water on the flyway. And then I remembered, and looked northward to the Tulare Basin. There it was, northwest of Bakersfield: an ovoid set of concentric lines in the bottom of the Basin, near Corcoran: Tulare Lake. It was the largest freshwater lake in the West in those days, and now it is gone. There it was on the map, no one in those days likely suspecting just how ephemeral a thing it was. South of it, Buena Vista and Kern lakes, the latter not even a memory these days. And another realization came, and my gaze crossed the Sierra Nevada. At the range’s east base, Owens Lake was labeled with the word “Dry” nowhere near it. Mono Lake looked half again as broad as it is today.
I nudged Nelia, pointed at Tulare Lake on the map with a shaking forefinger. A look of hopeless melancholy flitted across her face.
“Birds” was all she said.
I studied the inked-in areas of Joshua tree stands a bit longer. Where they grew thick, the field scientist had colored in solid blocks of green. Scattered stands were dotted, or fields of hachure. I took a few notes, tried to get a sense of specific stands I knew despite the inaccuracies in the map. A few by St. George must have been on Beaver Dam Wash, I decided, and the few farther down the Virgin River? The Pakoon stand was on the wrong side of the mountains — I’d nearly gotten stranded two dozen miles from nowhere getting there the month before. If Mesquite was there, and Bunkerville there, then those trees must be…
...under the waters of Lake Mead.
It was a map of what was, and a map of what might have been. It had only been a generation since the fabled Buenaventura, the longed-for river passage through the intermountain west, had been proven not to exist. The locations of the mountains were not yet quite fixed. John Wesley Powell’s voyages down the Green and Colorado were only as far in this mapmakers past as the Talking Heads’ first album is in ours.
And much of what was known for certain on this map, mundane and plotted and railroads routed around it, exists no longer. I can no more cast a hook into Tulare Lake than I can kayak on the Buenaventura or the Timpanogos, or plan to retire in Quivira or Cibola. There are myths that concern things that never existed. There are myths about things that exist no longer.
And some things that have gone left little trace in myth or memory, the endemic butterflies locked to plant species whose habitat was plowed under for cotton, the salmon that swam up the San Joaquin River toward the Sierran Crest, the pronghorn in the Central Valley. The Grizzly. Condors hang on still, though a stray virus could doom them. Tule elk are multiplying, and yet their genome has almost no diversity, springing from one relict population. Birds on the flyway risk botulism in the Salton Sea, or selenium poisoning where Tulare Lake used to be, as they alight in the wastewater ponds of J. G. Boswell’s cotton fields. They used to darken the sky for hours as they passed.
From time to time they still do.
I started to roll up the map. I would come back to it. I needed to shake this pang, this nostalgia for a place I never saw. Another glint of bright green ink caught my eye, up there in the upper right corner. Odd place for a Joshua tree grove, I thought, way up there in the vicinity of Elko! But it was merely a few marginal notes written in the same hand that had sketched out the Joshua tree groves. A bit of a legend, explaining what the different cross-hatching patterns signified, and signed with a name it took me a moment to make out, as the man’s hand had slipped just slightly when writing it.
His name was Clinton Hart Merriam.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
Chris,
Hand-drawn maps, as you’ve shown, potentially reflect an immensely interesting deeper story, as you’ve keenly demonstrated.
Thanks.
BB
By: By Bill on 2006 03 06
Odd that you mention Merriam’s line about the zones between Humphries and Phantom Ranch. I have two very good friends who have actually made that hike, in both directions, more than once, as vision quests. Now that they are older, they make the hike to the summit and then drive to the rim to hike to Phantom Ranch each equinox. It has become their ritual, and is always something they come back from with amazing stories. mmmmm nice reminder for me to call them today.
By: By spyder on 2006 03 06
from one of my friends, to whom i sent the passage regarding the hike to Phantom Ranch:
The cerulean blue saltwater slurring through
the travertine around the Sipapu in the LCR
to the 1500yr old bristlecones forming the
Hopi shrine area on Core Ridge inside the cone
of the San Francisco Peaks…
yes, a most lovely step through the transitional zones
Alpine tundra to sonoran desert…
Merriam Peak in the Sierra’s offers some lovely views, as do Royce and also Humphrey’s across the basin; a mile long shallow Desolation lake hidden deep in that basin. Some of my most favorite areas really of the high country.
By: By spyder on 2006 03 08
