Last weekend, a friend and I took a quick backpack trip up Bishop Creek to Bishop Pass and back. It was a first for me with this trail, although I have been up the canyon immediately to the south (well, east actually, but south down the range.) The Sierra Nevada are my happy place, and I was thrilled to do an east Sierra hike for the first time in years.
Bishop pass is located in a relatively low spot in the Sierra crest - at 11,792 feet. (As I said, relatively low.) It is situated between two giant mountains. Mt. Goode (13,085) to the west, and Mt. Agassiz (13,893) to the east. And those are not as tall as the several 14,000+ foot mountains just southeast of Agassiz.
This hike was in part inspired by me and my friend’s mutual love of Kim Stanley Robinson’s book, The High Sierra. In that delightful collection of random yet connected episodes and essays are a series of writings about the names in the Sierra. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good ones really are great - one of the peaks this hike went past is called “Cloudripper” for example. The bad ones are mostly boring - how many “Gem Lakes” do you really need?
But the ugly ones are named after people who are problematic in some way.
Locally, the worst of these is Breckenridge Mountain (I have hiked on its slopes many times), which is named after Confederate traitor John Breckinridge (yes, the name is misspelled) and is listed as a remaining Confederate monument. I very much hope that this is renamed as part of California’s push to remove racial slurs and monuments to horrid people from its official records. I propose naming it after local writer, teacher, and conservationist Ardis Walker.
Part of the problem with these names is that they are often people who never saw the Sierra, or never had any significant connection to it. They were just famous or rich fucks and thus get their names on things. Think about naming a mountain after the Elongated Muskmelon, for example. Just gross.
Some of the names, though, are more complicated.
Louis Agassiz is definitely one of these.
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Back when I was a kid, our family had a bunch of “christian” biographies for kids, the Sower series. While they were generally interesting to me, I later realized that they were definitely hagiographies, not accurate and nuanced biographies. The point was to highlight “heroes who were Christians!” for kids.
What was missing fell into two categories. First, a lot of these Christians weren’t exactly the Evangelical sort that the biographies strongly implied. Sir Isaac Newton comes to mind as one with some rather unusual religious views. I kind of get this - kids probably don’t understand all the theological nuance, and since the point of the books was in part to insist that one could be both a Christian and believe in science, I can understand the decision.
The other, though, is indefensible.
Humans are complex and flawed. All of us. Leaving the flaws out of a biography is deeply problematic for various reasons. Making god-like heroes of the great people of the past tends to lead to disillusionment when the feet of clay are discovered.
But more than that, the flaws are often the most important thing to know about a person, because those flaws often remain hugely influential long after the person passes.
Louis Agassiz perhaps illustrates this more than any other person.
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First, the good. Agassiz was a hugely important scientist, and is responsible for a lot of what we now know about geological time. His first work alone, on fossil fishes, greatly expanded our knowledge of evolutionary history, and would have established his legacy.
It is his second project that made his fame, however. As a Swiss citizen, he grew up around glaciers and mountains. While he did not come up with the idea of an ice age - that was two Frenchmen of his era - he was the one who carefully examined and documented evidence of glaciation around the world, and put together the evidence of past ice ages.
He spent his later life teaching, and the list of students is a “who’s who” of scientists and conservationists of the next generation. (And also William James.)
So, that’s the good. If we just look at his accomplishments, then he is deserving of a peak in his honor, in California’s most glaciated region.
Unfortunately, he also has a profoundly negative aspect of his legacy, one which is completely ignored in the Sower biography.
Agassiz was a proponent of “scientific racism” - the belief that humans are essentially different species separated by skin color. This was very popular in the 19th Century, and remains unfortunately popular today in right wing circles. (I won’t link it, but you still see people citing the thoroughly discredited 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which literally argues that black people are genetically inferior and intelligent, and thus attempting to better their lives and eliminate systemic racism is futile.)
Since Agassiz was a Christian, and believed that humans were specially created (unlike Darwin, who argued that we evolved, and that all humans were the same species regardless of pigment), he decided that the different races were actually created separately. God made black people, white people, “red” people (indigenous Americans), and “yellow” people (south and east Asians) as separate species. And no bonus points for guessing which ones he considered the most intelligent and advanced.
After Agassiz, some of his students embraced evolution, and decided that the real difference between the races was the level of evolution. Black people were still closely related to apes, and white people were the most highly evolved. That’s the “scientific racism” argument in a nutshell.
Both Agassiz’ original idea of separate species and the later evolutionary theory were used to justify all kinds of injustice, from slavery to Jim Crow. And now, as an argument why government should favor the white “haves” and let the black and brown “have nots” starve.
The rebuttal to this disproven idea is beyond the scope of this post, but I encourage reading Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You by Agustin Fuentes for an excellent rebuttal.
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You can see the problem though. Agassiz was both a giant in the history of science AND responsible for an evil doctrine that has caused untold suffering not merely in the United States but around the world.
That’s a problematic legacy, but also emblematic of the complexity of humanity. All of our heroes have flaws.
Kim Stanley Robinson argues that Agassiz should be replaced, but that Muir (who has his own issues) should stay. I agree on the second - no one figure is more important to the Sierra Nevada and its preservation as wilderness as Muir - but have mixed feelings on the second.
While I thoroughly loathe “scientific racism” as an idea and justification for injustice, I also feel that Agassiz is too important to be “canceled” in that way. Particularly given his importance in the field of glaciation and geological history.
Breckinridge, on the other hand….dude probably never even visited California and is famous only because he turned traitor in the service of expanding enslavement around the world. Cancel and replace him already.
Our route from South Lake to the pass.
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