Johnson, Willard Drake

(b. Brooklyn, New York, 1859; d. Washington, D.C., 13 February 1917)

geomorphology.

When Johnson was two years old, his family moved to Washington, D.C. After graduating from the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale, Johnson joined the topographical division of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, receiving a permanent appointment as topographer in 1883. During his probationary period he was fortunate to work with G. K. Gilbert, surveying the abandoned shorelines of Lake Bonneville and the ancient delta of the Logan River, and then with Israel C. Russell on a geological reconnaissance of southern Oregon, where he carried out soundings of Silver Lake and recognized that Guano Valley had contained a shallow Quaternary lake. The detailed maps which he prepared for both the publications reporting on these surveys marked Johnson as a master of the then artistic science of topographical surveying. In 1883 he mapped the Mono Basin for Russell; in the course of this mapping he occupied a survey point on the summit of Mt. Dana in the Sierras, transporting his instruments there on muleback. The results of his survey, notably maps of the Mono Basin and Mono Lake on scales of 1:250,000 and 1:125,000, respectively, appeared in Russell’s “Quaternary History of Mono Valley, California.” In view of his later contribution to glacial geomorphology, it is interesting that at this time Johnson explored the existing snowfields and glaciers on Mt. Couness, Mt. McClure, and Mt. Ritter, providing information which later appeared in Russell’s Glaciers of North America (1897). In 1884 Johnson completed the survey of the shorelines of ancient Lake Lahontan in western Nevada. He was then assigned to Massachusetts and remained in the East for the next three years. During this time he was in charge of a number of survey parties mapping chiefly in western Massachusetts (notably the Becket, Sandesfield, Chesterfield, and Glanville quadrangles) and in one season surveyed fully 460 square miles with the aid of two assistants.

After a short period of surveying in the vicinity of the Delaware Water Gap, Johnson was sent to Colorado in 1888 in charge of a large party to survey some 1,500 square miles in the valley of the Arkansas River near Pueblo, with a view to assessing the possibilities for irrigation. At this time J. W. Powell personally obtained a significant promotion for him from the secretary of the interior by pointing out that Johnson was in charge of five or six independent survey parties. This survey was completed at the end of 1889, and Johnson was then transferred to the Irrigation Survey, which was responsible for mapping in Colorado, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. In 1891 Johnson was ordered to California to set up an office of the U.S. Geological Survey in the Gold Belt section of the central part of the state. Shortly after his arrival he became a charter member and a director of the Sierra Club. Although the mountain named after him by the Geological Survey in 1917 (12,250 feet on the crest of the Sierras, 1.5 miles northeast of Parker Pass) was subsequently renamed Mt. Lewis, after a former Yosemite Park superintendent, the peak recommended by the Sierra Club in 1926 to commemorate him still bears his name (12,850 feet on the crest of the Sierras, between Mt. Gilbert and Mt. Goode).

Johnson was granted a year’s leave of absence in 1895 to accompany W J McGee, whom he had met in 1883 when the latter was a geological assistant to Russell, on a hazardous expedition for the Bureau of Ethnology to Tiburon Island in the Gulf of California, in order to study the Seri Indians. He produced a fine map on a scale of 1:380,160 for McGee’s report and joined McGee in producing a general article on Seriland (1896). On his return Johnson was appointed hydrographer and was assigned to the division of hydrography, continuing in this capacity until 1913. Between 1897 and 1900 he worked in the high plains on water supply problems, becoming increasingly concerned with geological investigation. His most extensive publication, “The High Plains and Their Utilization” (1901- 1902), contains the definitive description of the origin and structure of the depositional surface of the plains, emphasizing the preponderance of silt content and the occurrence of depressions, as well as a survey of groundwater occurrence, with special reference to underflow in the river valleys, and a description of water utilization in the region.

Between 1900 and 1904 Johnson worked as a topographer and geologist under Gilbert, mapping the Wasatch, Fish Spring, and Swasey ranges and studying the Pleistocene glacial features west of the Wasatch Range. In 1904 he returned to the Sierras and published “The Profile of Maturity in Alpine Glacial Erosion,” which was to become his most enduring scholarly legacy. Drawing on observations he had made in 1883 north of Mt. Lyell, Johnson formally presented his theory of cirque backcutting by nivation along the bergschrund; it had been foreshadowed by three previously published abstracts (1896- 1899). Johnson’s outstanding contribution to glacial geomorphology rested on his association of cirque- floor truncation with processes going on at the base of the curving ice crevasse occurring at the head of a cirque. He wrote: “. . . my instant surmise, therefore, was that this curving great schrund penetrated to the foot of the [cirque head] wall, or precipitous rock- slope, and that a causal relation determined the coincidence in position of the line of deep crevassing and the line of assumed basal undercutting” ( “The Profile of Maturity in Alpine Glacial Erosion,” p.573). Johnson had had himself lowered 150 feet into a bergschrund and had found that the lower twenty to thirty feet coincided with the base of the cirque headwall which was riven by freeze and thaw. It seemed clear that erosion is concentrated in this zone and that the glacier removes the resulting debris, so that the cirque floor is constantly extended backward and downward into the range, giving a “down- at- feel” effect. “The ultimate effect, upon a range of high- altitude glaciation, would be rude truncation. The crest would be channeled away, down to what might be termed the base- level of glacial generation” (ibid., p. 577). It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of this ten- page paper.

Johnson later investigated the effects of the earthquake of 1872 in the Owens Valley with W. H. Hobbs (1908, 1910), but he began to be dogged by ill health, which eventually forced him to become a part- time employee of the U. S. Geological Survey on a per diem basis. His remaining professional life was a series of tragedies. His transfer to Portland, Oregon, in 1913 to take charge of the geography section of the U. S. Forest Service was not a success; the following year he was confined to a private sanatorium, suffering from “colitis and paranoia with suicidal tendencies,” His friend Gilbert assumed the expenses. Johnson’s slow recovery was hampered by an appendectomy, although he did carry out triangulation work in the Cascade Range. In 1915 he suddenly returned to Washington, dispirited and mentally and physically ill, and again entered a sanatorium. After discharge he worked part- time classifying the photograph collection of the Survey. He took his own life, according to Gilbert, after having “. . . learned of the collapse of an enterprise by which he hoped to reestablish himself.”

Johnson possessed above all “an eye for country.” His survey method was to use a plane table for trial sketching and correction by intersection, and his maps show that he was an artistic genius of landscape. He was an untiring surveyor and teacher of surveying, doing much to improve mapmaking procedures. In 1887 he patented the Johnson tripod head, waiving all royalties, and established the design still used today. An impoverished, lonely, and sensitive man, “he seemed to have no thought for anything but the advancement of scientific work of the Geological Survey, sacrificing his health, pleasures, and means to the end” (Geographical Review [1917], p.330). Shortly after his death, Gilbert wrote to the U. S. Forest Service in Portland, asking if any notebooks or other records of Johnson’s geologic work remained there. The assistant district forester replied: “He had accumulated throughout his life a vast store of information which was carried in his mind and never reduced to writing. . . the great store of his learning is forever lost.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Johnson’s publications include “An Early Date for Glaciation in the Sierra Nevada,” in American Geologist, 18 (1896), 61- 62, also in Science, n. s. 3 (1896), 823, an abstract; “Seriland,” in National Geographic Magazine, 7 (1896), 125- 133, written with W J McGee; “An Unrecognized Process in Glacial Erosion,” in American Geologist, 23 (1899), 99- 100, also in Science, n. s. 9 (1899), 106, an abstract; “The Work of Glaciers in High Mountains,” in Science, n. s. 9 (1899), 112- 113, an abstract; “Subsidence Basins of the High Plains,” ibid., pp. 152- 153, an abstract; “The High Plains and Their Utilization,” in Report of the United States Geological Survey, 21 , pt.4 (1901), 601- 741, and 22 , pt.4 (1902), 631- 669; “The Profile of Maturity in Alpine Glacial Erosion,” in Journal of Geology, 12 (19040, 569- 578; 578; “The Grade Profile in Alpine Glacial Erosion (Sierra Nevada, California),” in Sierra Club Bulletin, 5 (1905), 271- 278; “The Earthquake of 1872 in the Owens Valley, California,” in Science, n. s. 27 (1908), 723, an abstract written with W. H. Hobbs; and “Recent Faulting in Owens Valley, California,” in Science, n. s. 32 (1910), 31, also in Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 21 (1910), 792, an abstract.

II. Secondary Literature. Biographical sources are his service record at the U. S. Geological Survey; the unsigned “Willard D. Johnson,” in Geographical Review, 3 (1917). 329- 330; and “W. D. Johnson Dies by His Own Hand,” in Washington Evening Star (13 Feb. 1917).

R. J. Chorley