Josiah Whitney

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Josiah Dwight Whitney (November 23,1819 – August 15,1896) was a professor of geology at Harvard University (from 1865), and was chief of the California Geological Survey (1860-1874).

In 1847 he and John Wells Foster assisted Charles T. Jackson in making a federal survey of the Lake Superior land district of northern Michigan, which was about to become a major copper and iron mining region. When Jackson was dismissed from the survey, Foster and Whitney completed it in 1850 and the final report was published under their names. Later, while chief of the California Geological Survey, he organized an eminent team of geologists and geographers to survey the entire state of California, including the first scientific survey of the Sierra Nevada. Whitney left the fieldwork to his team, while publishing their results as the Geological Survey of California. He also published The Yosemite Book, which advocated protecting Yosemite Valley as a national park.

Whitney is probably best known for his scientific feud with John Muir. Whitney concluded that Yosemite Valley was a graben, a downdropped block of land. In 1871, Muir concluded (from his fieldwork) that it was a glacial valley. Muir was correct. Whitney mocked Muir and tried to suppress any evidence of glaciation in Yosemite. Whitney never admitted that he was wrong.

Whitney is also famous for being duped by the Calaveras Skull.

Mount Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States, and the first confirmed glacier in the United States, on Mount Shasta, were both named after him by members of the Survey.

He was the brother of grammarian and lexicographer William Dwight Whitney.

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Best known writings

The Mineral Wealth of the United States (1854)
A Report on the Upper Mississippi Land Region (1862)
The Geological Survey of California (1864-70)
The Yosemite Book (1869). Later reprinted without photographs as The Yosemite Guide-Book
with J. W. Foster, Report on the Geology of the Lake superior Land District (1851-52)
with James Hall, Geological Report on Ohio (1858)