CHAPTER XII 

 THE UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY 



THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE EARLIER SURVEYS 



The rivalry of several national geological surveys in the seventies was not creditable to the 

 departmental organization of our Government. King's Fortieth Parallel survey was for a time 

 one of the competitors, but as its field work was completed in 1873, it did not thereafter duplicate 

 the work of other surveys. There remained the Hayden, the Powell, and the Wheeler surveys, 

 which fought it out to a finish. By good fortune, a brief statement by Gilbert describing the 

 climax reached in 1877 is to be found in an account of the later organized National Survey which 

 he contributed to Appleton's Annual Cyclopedia for 1885: 



The duplication of plans, and the rivalries associated with it, were recognized by Congress as seriously 

 prejudicial to a work which all desired to see carried forward. Various proposals were entertained from time 

 to time to abolish all but one of the organizations, and to give that one exclusive possession of the field, and, 

 though none of these prevailed, the corps were greatly embarrassed by the uncertainty of their tenure. Each 

 was seriously tempted to make haste in publication, at the expense of thoroughness, so as to enable Congress 

 and the public to appreciate that work was actually being performed by it; and each was restrained by similar 

 considerations from 'the formation of far-sighted, economic plans for its future work. 



It was at this stage of the game that the National Academy of Sciences was called upon 

 to suggest a way out: " Congress doubting its own ability to select from the three [surveys] the 

 one best qualified to conduct the entire work finally appealed to the National Academy of 

 Sciences, the official adviser of the Government in scientific matters" ; the academy recommended 

 the abolition of the then existing surveys and the creation of a single United States Geological 

 Survey under the Interior Department. The recommendation was adopted in 1879, and since 

 then the national development of geological science has gone on apace. 



Gilbert was one of six members of the earlier surveys who were appointed to the new one 

 with the title of "geologist"' at a salary of $4,000 a year. It may be added that his salary 

 always remained at that figure, except during the three years, 1SS9-1892, of his service as 

 "chief geologist," when it was raised to $4,250, and except also during certain later years after 

 his health had failed, when he worked intermittently on a $13 per diem basis. For the first 

 two years of the organization, 1879-1881, when Clarence King, previously in charge of the 

 Fortieth Parallel survey, was director, and when the field of work was the "public domain" 

 which lay for the most part beyond the Mississippi, only an administrative office was maintained 

 in Washington, while four field divisions were established elsewhere in charge of Emmons, with 

 headquarters at Denver; Dutton and Gilbert, both at Salt Lake City; and Hague, at San 

 Francisco. Gilbert's division was known as the division of the Great Basin, and Lake Bonne- 

 ville, the abandoned shore fines of which he had come to know in the course of his work in Utah 

 under Wheeler and Powell, was his first subject of special investigation; his work upon it is 

 described in the next chapter. His own explanation of this assignment, made a few years later, 

 was as follows: "At the time of the organization of the survey, it chanced that there was in 

 possession of the writer a considerable body of unpublished material bearing upon Lake Bonne- 

 ville, and that lake was therefore selected as the first individual subject of study" in the Great 

 Basin province, with the expectation that other extinct lakes would be taken up later. But in 

 the spring of 1881-, Powell, succeeding King, abolished the several district divisions and created 

 divisions by subjects, namely, the divisions of topography, general geology and economic 

 geology, coordinate with the divisions of paleontology, physics, and chemistry; thereafter 

 geographical divisions were used only as subordinate to subject divisions. 



This change in organization is also referred to in Gilbert's account of the National Survey 

 mentioned above. After describing the district subdivisions that King introduced, he goes on: 



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