"I hear the musketry of the falls": Systematic Geology, the Civil War, and nation building. From: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly) | Date: December 1, 2004| Author: Cohen, Geoff | COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Rhode Island. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

Four years after the Civil War, Clarence King and other members of the Fortieth Parallel Survey deviated from the prescribed one-hundred-mile swath enclosing the parallel in order to investigate the geology of Shoshone Fails on the Snake River. King, the future first director of the U.S. Geological Survey and former member of the California Geological Survey, led a group of handpicked scientists and artists along a strip of land which extended from Wyoming to California. Two years ...