Hayden, Ferdinand Vandiveer

(b. Westfield, Massachusetts, 7 September 1829; d. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 22 December 1887)

geology.

Hayden was the son of Asa and Melinda Hawley Hayden. His father died when the boy was ten, and at the age of twelve Hayden went to live with his uncle on a farm near Rochester, Ohio. In 1847, completely without funds, he walked to Oberlin College and worked his way through, receiving his degree in 1850. Hayden then attended Albany Medical College in New York and received the M.D. in 1853. From October 1862 to June 1865 he served as a surgeon in the Union Army, assigned mostly to supervisory duties. The University of Pennsylvania appointed him professor of geology from 1865 to 1872. He married Emma C. Woodruff, daughter of a Philadelphia merchant, on 9 November 1871; they had no children. Hayden was an active member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1873, and received honorary memberships in several foreign geological societies. He remained in excellent health until 1882, when locomotor ataxia forced him gradually to abandon fieldwork and writing.

While in medical school Hayden also studied with New York state paleontologist James Hall, who sent him and Fielding Bradford Meek to collect fossils in the Badlands of the Dakotas in 1853. In 1854–1855 Hayden explored the geology of the Missouri-Yellowstone rivers area, guided occasionally by traders of the American Fur Company. He spent the 1856 and 1857 field seasons as geologist with army engineer Gouverneur Warren’s expeditions to the Dakotas and the Black Hills. Hayden visited Kansas Territory with Meek in 1858 to establish the age of the lowest Cretaceous stratum in the area covered by Warren. Hayden also accompanied Captain William F. Raynolds in his exploration of the northern Rocky Mountains in 1859–1860.

Since specialization was required to handle the great numbers of fossils collected on these expeditions, Hayden sent the invertebrates to Meek, the vertebrates to Joseph Leidy of Philadelphia, and the plants to John Strong Newberry, whom Hayden had met while at Oberlin. Generally, Hayden interpreted the geology of the region himself, although he usually published in conjunction with Meek. By the Civil War these scientists had discovered a Silurian formation in the West equivalent to the Potsdam Sandstone of New York, a Permian stratum, and a group of estuary and lake deposits postdating the Cretaceous beds. Hayden presented a clear picture of the geological history of the West based on a uniformitarian premise of gradual changes analogous to modern processes: as the land rose in the vicinity of the Rockies, the Cretaceous sea drained off, leaving lakes of brackish and fresh water which received the eroded material from the new highlands during the Tertiary period. Most important, Hayden and Meek created a detailed stratigraphic column for the Cretaceous and Tertiary formations of the West; some of the names they assigned are still used by American geologists.

From 1867 to 1879 Hayden headed the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories and indirectly benefited American science by providing employment and experience for more than fifty scientists, including Edward Drinker Cope, Leo Lesquereux, and William Henry Holmes, as well as Meek, Leidy, and Newberry. Starting in 1872, Hayden’s topographers drew contour (instead of hachured) base maps, from which quantitative, accurate cross sections and long-distance extrapolations of formations could be made by geologists. The economic importance of the Hayden survey for railroads and mining was balanced by Hayden’s successful campaign (1871–1872) to set aside Yellowstone Park for the people.

Hayden spent the 1867, 1868, and 1870 field seasons refining the stratigraphic sequence for Nebraska and Wyoming, and in 1869 he made a rapid reconnaissance through the Salt Lake Basin and south along the eastern edge of the Rockies, during which he named several local formations. He studied the Yellowstone Park region in 1871 and 1872, which led him to identify two additional factors in the geological history of the West—volcanic activity in recent times and horizontal forces during the mountain-building episodes. In the reports on his fieldwork in Colorado (1873–1874) Hayden further increased the role of horizontal stresses, particularly as they related to the fault systems in the Rockies. He also expanded the role of glaciation from local influence to a major part in shaping the topography of the West. In writing about the central Rockies, Hayden presented his fullest exposition of Western stratigraphy, from Precambrian granites to Quaternary silts. As usual, he gave scant attention to metamorphic rocks in his work. Other than discovering active glaciers in the Wind River Range in 1878, Hayden produced little of direct benefit to science during the rest of his survey or during his years with the U.S. Geological Survey (1879–1886). His place in the history of American geology is, however, assured by his stratigraphic work in the 1850’s and early 1870’s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. No unified bibliography of Hayden’s publications exists, but one can be created quickly from Charles A. White, “Memoir of Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden. 1839 [sic]–1887,” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 3 (1895), 409–413; Lawrence Schmeckebier, Catalogue and Index of the Hayden, King, Powell, and Wheeler Surveys, U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin no. 222 (1904), 1–37; and Max Meisel, A Bibliography of American Natural History: The Pioneer Century, 1769–1865, 3 vols. (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1924–1929), passim. of Hayden’s writings in the 1850’s and early 1860’s, his articles in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia are more useful to historians of science than are his official reports published as government documents. Hayden’s annual reports for the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories must be read for the late 1860’s and the 1870’s, despite their travelogue style, and may be supplemented with his brief, occasional pieces in the American Journal of Science.

The largest collection of Hayden MSS is in the records of the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, in Record Group 57, National Archives. In addition, relevant material can be found in the Joseph Leidy papers, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; the George Merrill collection, Library of Congress; the Fielding Bradford Meek diaries and Spencer Fullerton Baird correspondence, Smithsonian Institution; the Edward Drinker Cope papers, American Museum of Natural History; the James Hall papers, New York State Museum, Albany; the William Raynolds diaries, Beinecke Library, Yale; and the collections of the American Philosophical Society. Other collections are listed in the U.S. Library of Congress, National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (1962– ).

II. Secondary Literature. In addition to the biographies listed in Meisel, see the articles in the Dictionary of American Biography and the National Cyclopedia of American Biography. Three interpretations of Hayden and his work have appeared recently. Richard Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1962), and Thomas Manning, Government in Science; The United States Geological Survey, 1867–1894 (Lexington, Ky., 1967), concentrate on the second half of his career. William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York, 1966), analyzes Hayden’s entire career, including his scientific work with Army expeditions during the 1850’s.

Michele L. Aldrich