"I like geology better than war even when other people do the fighting," Noah Fields Drake wrote to John Casper Branner on July 22, 1900. Drake had just endured the siege of Tientsin by Boxer forces, and the city's occupation by foreign expeditionary forces was only a little less chaotic. "The German soldiers are quartered in our University buildings and they have made a perfect wreck of my chemical and assay laboratories and supplies," not to mention his original relief map of California.
"We civilians have found the military men in general (not all) to be arrogant and often unjust in their dealings with innocent Chinese and with foreign civilians," he wrote. He anticipated that "the starvation and pestilence that shall likely follow the war will likely be more horrible than the war, as great as that is. The drouth of last year and greater drouth of this year would have caused considerable starvation among the Chinese without a war."
The Hoovers (future president Herbert and his wife, Lou) were still in Tientsin but likely to go to Japan or London, Drake reported to Branner. The Imperial Pei Yang University had no prospect of re-opening for at least a year, so Drake himself was looking for options in the United States or Japan in the summer of 1900.
As it turned out, he remained in China for over a decade. As an engineer for the Public Works Department of the Tientsin Provisional Government, Drake mapped the city; his tools included a bicycle and string. (Herbert Hoover got him the job.) From 1904 through 1911, he served as chairman of the board of the Tientsin Land and Investment Company Ltd.
From 1902 through 1904, he worked as a consulting geologist for the American China Development Company, studying coal and mineral deposits in the corridor of the Canton-Hantow railway.
In 1904, Drake and his crew began to dig two coal prospecting pits five to eight miles north of Canton. According to his memorial in the Proceedings of the Geological Society of America, "he was compelled to stop because of the ill temper of the villagers and elders." When he asked the local residents why they objected to his digging the pits, they explained that the work would disturb graves (the nearest were 25 feet away) and that digging would "rupture the veins of the dragon that lay in the hill."
Drake did not report the villagers' resistance with intellectual condescension. That was not his way. By further questioning, he quickly understood that they understood that the discovery of sizable coal deposits would mean permanent coal mines, which would mean traffic and destruction.
Drake returned to his position as professor of geology and mining at Imperial Pei Yang University in 1905, but he continued field work during vacations. Most of his research dealt with coal, but he also conducted a major study of dust storms, collecting samples from Tientsin from 1891 to 1911.
With the help of professor of Chinese literature Yen Ch'eng Chueh, Drake produced "Destructive Earthquakes in China," a comprehensive study ranging from 1831 B.C. to A.D. 1911; his memorial calls it "a simply told story of earth and human drama." The worst earthquake, he found, occurred in 1556 in Shensi, Shansi, and Hunan provinces, killing 830,000 people.
Drake's paper "The Coal Resources of China" was published in volume I of "The Coal Resources of the World" in 1913; he estimated that Chinese coal reserves amounted to 996,612,700,000 metric tons, with an additional 3,645,000,000 metric tons in Manchuria.
Drake's work was so respected that during World War II, intelligence officers of the U.S. Navy spent a week going through and copying his manuscripts, maps, and correspondence related to China.
. . .
Mary Eleanor Shockley arrived in Shanghai in 1895 and Tientsin in 1897, a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and a missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She and Noah Fields Drake married on Aug. 30, 1904. Mary Drake gave birth to Doris Drake on July 22, 1906, and to Vera Marie Drake on Feb. 19, 1909. The family had a fine house in Tientsin, though it was without electricity or running water. Receipts for their orders from the Foreign Division of Montgomery Ward include household goods from garden rakes to trouser hangers to razor strops.
By 1909, even Americans abroad were consuming industrially processed foods: The Drakes ordered packages of Grape Nuts, Cream of Wheat, and Malta Vita. Their sugar consumption was impressive: One order calls for a gallon each of rock candy syrup, New Orleans molasses syrup, and maple syrup, as well as honey, Paris corn sugar, and horehound drops.
I have not yet read the correspondence relating to Drake's appointment as an associate professor of geology at Stanford, so do not know if intimations of the Chinese revolution of 1911 hastened his return with his family to the United States. John Casper Branner surely had something to do with his appointment. The Drakes left Tientsin at the end of May 1911, and Noah Fields Drake taught at Stanford during the 1911-1912 school year.
Meanwhile, A.H. Perdue served as professor of geology at the University of Arkansas as well as the acting state geologist (the Legislature had dissolved the Arkansas Geological Survey in 1893; it would not be reconstituted until 1923). Perdue received an offer from the University of Tennessee and began to recruit Drake to take over his position here. After some negotiations over salary and title, Drake accepted an offer from the Board of Trustees. During the late summer of 1912, Drake, with his family, returned to Fayetteville.