182 GROVE KAEL GILBERT— DAVIS [Memoirs National 



the base of the Wasatch Range to see a small alluvial fan in which a little gravel scarp, perhaps 

 10 feet high, was pointed out as indicating a very modern renewal of the great fracture on 

 which the mass of the range had been upheaved. The foreign members promptly and almost 

 unanimously refused to accept a trifling gravel bank as evidence of any such geological phe- 

 nomenon. Gilbert placidly pointed out that the face of the little scarp ran like a chord across 

 the curved front of the fan on the line of the foothill base, and added that other fans showed 

 similar scarps in similar positions; but while the American members of the party, even to the 

 youngest, felt no hesitation in accepting the explanation of their leader — for it illustrated what 

 was to them a simple and familiar physiographic problem — the foreigners still remained incred- 

 ulous. One of them, more outspoken than the rest, expressed the general dissent by saying 

 that they were not used to such evidence for faults, and asked if they could not be shown an 

 instance of displaced strata, such as they were accustomed to accept as proof of faulting. GUbert 

 answered that one such example was known to him, but it was inaccessible; and without trying 

 to press his point further conducted the party to the city. But the "foreign contingent" 

 did not let the matter drop there; they were openly incredulous in talking with each other 

 through the evening, and said in effect: "Is this a sample of the sort of evidence on which 

 Gilbert has based the theories in his great Bonneville monograph!" In the meanwhile Gil- 

 bert remained imperturbable, giving no sign of impatience, making no attempt whatever to 

 help the visitors out of their difficulty; he simply bided his time, for he had something more 

 than faulted fans in store. 



The next day was given to a visit by train southwestward to the imposing Bonneville em- 

 bankment known as the Stockton bar, illustrated in Plate IX of the Bonneville volume. It 

 swings in a long curve, concave to the north, from the lake bluffs on the west side of the Oquirrh 

 Range westward across the intermont depression known as Rush Valley; and here Gilbert's 

 views were accepted without hesitation, if exception be made of the opinion expressed by an 

 enthusiastic German glacialist, who was inclined to believe that the great embankment was 

 the terminal moraine of a glacier that had come across the desert from the north. 



The third day was spent south of Salt Lake City at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, 

 one of the most interesting localities of the Wasatch front, as it exhibits, in addition to a whole 

 series of faulted piedmont fans, the only moraines that descend from the mountains to the level 

 of the Bonneville shore lines; and there, looking up from the line of fan scarps, the nearer one 

 of the paired moraines was pointed out as having a narrow down-faulted notch in its crest. Even 

 then the reluctant visitors demurred, saying that moraines were well known to have uneven 

 profiles, and that a mere notch in a moraine crest would prove nothing. Not until the nearer 

 moraine was ascended to the point on the upper side of its notch, whence the scarped fans to the 

 north and south, a notch in the other moraine, and a little depression in the trough floor between 

 the two moraines were all seen to be systematically aligned, was incredulity changed to belief. 

 Then, to their credit be it said, the visitors' conversion was so complete that one of them ex- 

 claimed: "We must look for this sort of thing in the Alps." 



This story, which has been called "the mutiny of the congress excursion" by some of the 

 American members, is good enough without a moral, but the moral must not be overlooked. 

 The story teaches that, even so late as 1891, the value of small surface forms, as analyzed by 

 American geologists experienced in western exploration and applied by them to the interpreta- 

 tion of underground structures, was not known to their European colleagues. Since then prog- 

 ress in this physiograpliic branch of geology has been rapid; when the transcontinental excur- 

 sion of the American Geographical Society crossed the United States to the Pacific coast in 

 1912 and visited Little Cottonwood Canyon on the return trip, the European geographers in 

 the party betrayed no incredulity on hearing the explanation of fan scarps and moraine notches 

 which Gilbert had given in 1891 repeated by an American who had then heard him; the skepticism 

 shown by the geological party was not repeated. 



