Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater brings sunny skies and a high of twenty-eight. We’ll have 11h 19m of sunlight, 12h 16m of daylight, and tomorrow will bring an additional two minutes.
In Friday’s Catblogging post, one saw a video of a backyard bobcat. If one, then perhaps two – here are two pugnacious urban bobcats, in someone’s yard. I’ll leave it to others to decide if the homeowner is lucky or unlucky for his feline visitors:
On this day in 1879, the U.S. Geological Survey is born:
Congress establishes the United States Geological Survey, an organization that played a pivotal role in the exploration and development of the West.
Although the rough geographical outlines of much of the American West were known by 1879, the government still had astonishingly little detailed knowledge of the land. Earlier federal exploratory missions under men like Ferdinand Hayden and John Wesley Powell had begun to fill in the map, yet much remained to be done. Congress decided to transform the earlier system of sporadic federal geological explorations into a permanent government agency, the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
From the beginning, the USGS focused its efforts on practical geographical and geological investigations that might spur western economic development. Since the vast majority of the nation’s public land was in the West, the USGS became one of the federal government’s most important tools for encouraging the exploitation of western natural resources. Congress appointed Clarence King, a brilliant young mining engineer and geologist, as the first director. King, who had previously done considerable work for western mining companies, viewed the USGS as a tool for aiding further mineral exploitation. As a result, the first major reports produced under King’s tenure concerned the economic geology of two important mining districts, Nevada‘s Comstock Lode and Colorado‘s Leadville silver district.