The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America
to use the community as a base to preach the benefits of science and science education—and most especially the value of geology, the science that had first anchored him to America.
And in that sole regard, New Harmony was to become in this fresh incarnation something of a success. Maclure saw to it that the leaders of the more quarrelsome factions were persuaded to leave, that houses were now bought and sold and rents were expected and paid, that new shops were opened, and that the vigor of commercial life replaced the rigor of communal life. A printing shop was set up, and produce from the gardens was sent down to be sold in New Orleans.
Most of all, Maclure began to plan and finance his revolutionary education system, preaching and then practicing in town his long-held beliefs in the gift of free education for the American working youth. He gave his superb personal library to the town and opened it for the benefit of all. The young scientists—botanists, physicians, geologists—who had come down with him on the Boatload of Knowledge were to be the first teachers in the schools that were opened, and soon students came from towns and villages both nearby and far away. The town began to flourish again, and soon began to win a reputation—which spread nationwide—as a center of educational excellence.
Members of the community began to write books: there would soon be definitive multivolume works on fish, insects, the shells of mollusks, and the trees of North America. There was a resident engraver and color printer in New Harmony, too—and finely wrought monographs soon began to appear for sale at nearby fairs and bookstalls.
But William Maclure was beginning to feel his age. The Indiana winters were settling their cold deep into his bones. He started to take off on southerly explorations, finding himself eventually in Mexico, declaring a liking for it and settling on a new ambition to create progressive schools there. By 1830, when he was sixty-seven, he decided finally to cut loose from the winter cold of Indiana and stay put in the soothing balms of Mexico. He would for a while continue to finance New Harmony, but now only from afar.
The presiding intellectual genius who then ran New Harmony in his place was Robert Owen’s youngest son, David Dale Owen. who would become one of America’s leading geologists and a key player in the surveying of the nation as it expanded all the way westward across to the Pacific. William Maclure certainly started it all and is revered as the father of American geology in consequence. David Dale Owen, apprenticed in New Harmony, set in train the practical tasks that proved necessary for finding out what America was made of. Maclure had the vision and led the way; Robert Owen’s son went the distance and did the work.
When David Dale Owen was born, in 1807, there had been almost no geological maps made of anywhere. That soon began to change very rapidly, in response partly to Maclure’s American map of 1809 but more to William Smith’s map of England and Wales published in London in 1815, which demonstrated decisively how a proper stratigraphic map should be made. Not for nothing is Smith’s cartographic achievement still regarded as “the map that changed the world.” His revolutionary idea of illustrating the rocks according to their relative ages allowed for extrapolation and prediction: armed with a Smith map one could forecast with some certainty where a plunging coal seam might lead or where iron or copper—or one day, oil—could be found deep below the surface. By the time David Dale Owen assumed control of New Harmony, such mapping was standard practice in Europe, and both the federal government and state governments soon saw a pressing need to bring America similarly into order.
The first regions to be properly and systematically examined were in the Eastern states. The capital of New York State, Albany, was mapped in 1820 by Amos Eaton, a blacksmith’s son who two years earlier had published a cross section of America from the Catskill Mountains through Massachusetts to Boston and the Atlantic Ocean—a thing of sinuous curves and colors, showing the rock layers rising and falling in great subterranean swoops of blue and yellow that perhaps owe more to art than to science.
The practical demands of commerce soon introduced more scientific rigor to the mapmakers’ efforts: in 1832, Massachusetts became the first state to be systematically surveyed for its invisible underneath. The driving force behind the design was nakedly mercantile, the state’s governor demanding that the survey show “valuable ores … quarries … coal and lime formations … for the advancement of domestic prosperity.” Such imperatives would soon produce a torrent of new surveys and maps, invaluable guides to an America that was by now quickly evolving into an overwhelmingly industrialized nation.
The country’s mills, smelters, and forges were demanding iron and coal and copper—while wealthy city dwellers were demanding other precious metals and stones to be brought out from underground, too. Agriculture was expanding westward with the settlers: fertilizers were needed, and beds of phosphate and marl needed to be identified by a cadre of elite scientists who were now all of a sudden being seen as ever more vital to the national interest. The maps they made—not entirely comprehensible to most, true—were becoming popular items, in vogue at least among those eager to be able to forecast where needed treasures might be found.
David Dale Owen was a key player during this ebullient period in America’s expansionist history. His first duties involved helping with the geological survey of the state of Tennessee, which was begun in 1833. He was appointed assistant to a Dutchman, Gerard Troost, whom Tennessee had appointed to be its first-ever state geologist and who, as a passenger on the Boatload of Knowledge, had been a keen member of the utopian community. The men knew each other: both were legatees of Maclure’s ever-spreading influence, both were graduates of the New Harmony schools.
But there were to be many more. The United States Congress was at the time making certain that all American public land that held proven or suspected reserves of minerals—lead, iron, and coal in particular—be sold in an organized manner, without either favoritism or fraud. Owen, his skills honed in Tennessee, was next appointed an official in the General Land Office, the body that made both the rules and the sale, and in 1840 the agency demanded that he survey eleven thousand square miles of the ore-rich corners of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
He achieved this survey with remarkable dispatch. Within two years, he had finished and had turned in to his superiors a report that encompassed “161 printed octavo pages, 25 plates and maps, including a colored geological map and several colored sections.” He had had help—no fewer than 139 assistants, every last one of them drawn from the schools in New Harmony, all of the young men trained by him and Maclure. According to an official history, Owen’s organization of the survey “was a feat of generalship which has never been equaled in American geological history … one more illustration of the energy, persistence, and virility of the Scotch emigrants and their descendants in America.” It was a testament also to the enduring role of New Harmony in the making of early America.
By the time Owen died, in 1860, at least twenty-eight states had organized well-established geological surveys. Scores of maps were being published from all sides. Moreover, geologists who had arrived by sea on the West Coast had looked carefully at California and Oregon and had declared that it was likely that great mineral wealth existed there, and that discoveries of great value, such as the one made at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, were likely to be repeated.
All of the land between the coasts was also soon about to yield to squadrons of men who were equipped just as Owen and the Eastern, Midwestern, Californian, and Oregonian explorers had been. American scientists would in short order offer up thousands of detailed and very beautiful cartographic images of how the entire country had been constructed. So the knowing of the country was now well under way, and with this knowledge came the pressing urge to settle those places now being revealed map by map, survey by survey. To settle places deemed suitable for living, for farming, for mining, or for the birth and nurturing of an unbridled frontier optimism—a territory that was fast being fashioned and united into something that for millions of settlers could soon be called a homeland.