The Silent Multitude of Voices in the Reading Room
The Bancroft Library is full of voices. Many are on paper, parchment or papyrus, speaking from the past, and many are in the minds of those using the Heller Reading Room today. From that dialogue between the past and the present will come voices that speak to those in the future, and so on, as long as documents are collected, organized, and preserved.
I was given a study carrel upstairs when I received a Bancroft Fellowship in 1996, but I seldom used it because that would have deprived me of the pleasure of watching, as well as partaking, in this process of synthesis. One becomes, in a reading room, a member of a community of scholars each silently listening to voices from the past to create their own. Each researcher approaches the material at hand with the skills gained from long practice. Isolated in my cubicle, I could not have watched Arthur Verhoogt reading Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Tebtunis papyri, while I, at an adjacent table, read the letters of the remarkable Phoebe Hearst who acquired them for the university.
Occasionally, a burble or squeal erupts from a researcher who cannot contain his or her excitement at a discovery or connection. One makes allowances; it comes with the dialogue.
Researchers have a dialogue with the often brilliant and outspoken characters of the past in the Heller Reading Room. |
In the Bancroft, it's all there, and scrupulously cross-referenced by generations of librarians. The Francis Griffith Newlands and James Duval Phelan papers, for example, reveal the motivations of those who sought to promote vast hydraulic schemes, while the memoirs of engineers who worked for those promoters or observed them offer additional perspectives on the rationale for projects that have transformed the West. As the Bancroft's archivists organize raw data such as the Spring Valley Water Company and the Michael O'Shaughnessy papers, the story of water and land development will only be made richer for and by succeeding scholars. The resources available at the Water Resources Archives a few hundred yards from the Bancroft, and the ongoing work of Willa Baum's staff in collecting oral histories from the living, do much to tame any researcher's hubris; the story is never ending because the materials needed to tell it are constantly growing.
Yet one must try to make sense of what is there. So many voices at first make a cacophony. Gradually, one sorts them out, recognizes the names dropped, or goes in search of more background to understand what is being told.
One listens to the dead; strong personalities emerge from letters, diaries, and interviews. I followed, for example, the voracious curiosity and physical exploits that drove pioneer scientist George Davidson, whose last years were progressively darkened by failing heart and eyesight and the loss of his beloved son and wife. For a man who had observed so acutely and read so much, the increasing illegibility of his diary entries spoke as painfully of blindness as did his words.
How human, too, was the brilliant and outspoken engineer William Hammond Hall, whose inability to suffer fools prevented him from attaining the success that he felt his due. Or Phoebe Hearst, who was relentlessly driven to improve herself and humanity with the fortune inherited from her husband despite the disappointments inflicted by an equally willful son. I came to like these ghosts for their foibles as well as their virtues, and to feel as if they were standing behind me in the reading room, watching as their voices and mine took shape on my laptop monitor. Is everyone there attended by such specters?
I encountered voices through the serendipity of browsing, too. Bancroft Fellows are given stack privileges, and mine allowed me access to entire runs of magazines that once stood on the shelves of the main library but now repose in off-site storage. Since there is no better way to know a period than by reading its magazines and newspapers, having all of Sunset and Overland Monthly at hand was essential, as was the chance discovery of lesser known periodicals and books of which I was unaware. I discovered an early index to the Overland Monthly, written in a spidery Victorian hand that led me to an 1871 article I had earlier overlooked. In it, John Muir paid a descriptive visit to Hetch Hetchy Valley. He returned home, "rejoicing in having added to my net wealth one more Yosemite Valley." He could not know that forty years later, the effort to save that valley from a reservoir would hasten his death.
For the late nineteenth century, the Overland was the West's leading intellectual and literary magazine. Since its motto was "Devoted to the Development of the Country," I expected to find it rich in promotional articles, and was not disappointed. But it also included the eloquent voice of a Ukiah woman named Helen Carpenter, outraged by the kidnapping and enslavement of Pomo Indian children she had witnessed, and that of a timber locator named C.B. Watson. Towards the end of his life, Watson grew ashamed of the role he had played in the destruction of magnificent forests. He concluded a 1920 article called "War on the Forest Primeval" by reflecting on the ruin left in the wake of the pioneer and the rhetoric so often used to glorify it. "'Westward the star of empire takes its way,' is a phrase that has been made to do duty on many occasions," he concluded. "Animals great and small have become or are rapidly becoming extinct, in the gratification of man's avarice or amusement. Whole tribes and nations of picturesque men and women have vanished before this great 'star of empire.'"
It was just such minor voices, as well as the major ones, that I sought among the bound volumes and acid-free boxes stored in Bancroft. I can't remember whether I let out a burble or a squeal when I encountered Watson's remorse. His was voice so minor for the time that he wrote, however, that I could never find him again. I can only hope that by republishing his reflection, a reader will put me back on his trail. That, after all, is part of the dialogue eternally taking place in a great research library such as Bancroft.
Gray Brechin
Ciriacy Wantrup Post-doctoral Fellow
Department of Geography
Volume 116
Spring 2000
Table of Contents
The Silent Multitude of Voices in the Reading Room
From the Director: Bancroft Goes Digital
Highlights from Bancroft's Web Resources
Paramount Theatre Archives at The Bancroft Library
Three Monuments in the History of Science Arrive at Bancroft
Ancient Lives: The Tebtunis Papyri in Context
From Mine to Natural Reserve: ROHO records the transition
Chemistry Symposium in Honor of Kenneth S. Pitzer Held January 9 to 13, 2000: Oral History Presented
