More than a century ago, John James Terrell of Austin, Texas, sent a letter across the sea to his cousin Noah Fields Drake. "Now Fields write us a good long letter, telling us in general about China. How long do you expect to stay away from God's Country? How do you like China and have you not made considerable money?"
Drake was nearing the end of his second sojourn in Tientsin, a port city opened for trade during the second Opium War. He was 46 in 1910, in the middle of a life that began about seven months after Gettysburg and ended four days before V-E Day: he was born near Summers, Ark., on Jan. 30, 1864, and died in Fayetteville on May 4, 1945.
Drake enrolled at Arkansas Industrial University (now the University of Arkansas) around 1884; in June 1885 his math professor wrote a letter to certify that he was "a regular member of the sophomore class" and to testify "that his moral character is above reproach; that his scholarship is of such a nature that I cheerfully recommend him to the favorable consideration of those who may need or desire his services as teacher in the schools of our country."
(I cheerfully recommend that we replace teacher licensure with testimonials from math professors--maybe that would fix the schools.)
After Drake took a degree in civil engineering in 1888, the president of the university recommended him as "a young man of excellent character and good scholarship." While working at the Arkansas Geological Survey, Drake came under the influence of John Casper Branner, the distinguished geologist who was later burned in effigy for reporting that the gold mines of Arkansas contained no gold.
In 1889, Drake joined the Texas Geological Survey and worked under Edwin T. Dumble, who wrote in another glowing recommendation that Drake "ran transit lines and lines of levels across the Carboniferous and Permian areas [of Texas] for the purpose of getting details for an exact section of these beds." He later "made a careful study of the stratigraphy of the Triassic formation of Northwest Texas" and mapped the geology of the Colorado coal field of Texas.
In 1893, Drake enrolled at Stanford to study under John Casper Branner, earning an A.B. (1894), an A.M. (1895) and a Ph.D. (1897). His doctoral field work consisted of a survey of "the coal-bearing rocks from Kansas across the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw nations to the Arkansas coal field," according to his memorial in the 1947 annual report of the Geological Society of America.
While at Stanford, Drake also produced a relief map of California on a scale of one inch to 12 miles. No general topographic map of the state existed, so using information from maps of smaller areas, Drake cut out shapes from cardboard (one piece of cardboard for each 1,000-foot contour), then filled in the steps or terraces with wax. From the original, he cast a negative in plaster of Paris, then cast a few copies from that.
In the field season of 1897, Drake joined Dr. Waldemar Lindgren of the U.S. Geological Survey to map two quadrangles covering parts of Owyhee and Ada counties in Idaho. "The mapping of those quadrangles," according to Drake's memorial, "showed how old granitic ranges of the region were flooded by lavas and then partly submerged by the waters of great fresh-water lakes at two different times during the Tertiary period."
In 1898, Drake accepted an appointment to teach geology and mining at Imperial Pei Yang University in Tientsin. In her M.A. thesis, "Noah Fields Drake and the Modernization of China," April Brown notes the inauspicious timing of Drake's arrival: A solar eclipse had just fallen on the Chinese New Year, causing, in the words of the American consul in Tientsin, "the most disastrous effect on the Chinese mind." The people of China were "filled with great dread" by any eclipse, but for an eclipse to fall on the New Year caused the anticipation of "war, famine, and untold miseries."
Imperial Pei Yang University itself was the product of efforts to modernize China; the 1,200-year old system of higher education consisted of preparation for the civil service exam and was, as Brown explains, "entirely classical and literary." Classic Confucian texts were the entire curriculum. Only after the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 were the advocates of progress able to establish Pei Yang, with its four departments of Mining, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Law.
A little over a year after Drake's arrival in Tientsin, another alum of the Stanford geology department arrived: Herbert Clark Hoover. Hoover had worked for the Arkansas Geological Survey in the summer of 1892 (he mapped the quadrangle that includes Cane Hill), so Drake and Hoover might already have been acquainted.
Hoover went to China as a mining engineer--to survey gold mines in Chihli Province and southeastern Mongolia--and as a representative of the British firm Beiwick, Moreing and Co., which had made loans to the Chinese government for infrastructure and mining projects. Hoover's dual roles later led to what Drake regarded as double-dealing, to the extent that he refused to vote for him when he ran for president decades later.
Drake began teaching at Pei Yang on March 17, 1898. He lectured in English on highly technical subjects to students trained only in classical Chinese; meanwhile, Japanese and Western imperialism as well as Chinese-initiated efforts at modernization continued to inspire fear, resentment, and disgust among Chinese reactionaries.
Drake was soon to encounter a Chinese secret society called the I Ho-chuan ("The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists"), who hated foreigners and the Christian religion. They were trained in a combination of magic and martial arts called kung-fu, and were known as Boxers. In the summer of 1900, the Boxers lay siege to Peking and Tientsin.
"The burning of Chinese Christian churches and the killing of Chinese Christians continues daily," Drake wrote to his cousin on June 14, 1900. "Some six or seven foreigners have been killed ... I shall likely have to stay in Tientsin all summer." The Boxers attacked Tientsin the next day, taking aim at foreign concessions. (Pei Yang University was located within the German concession.)
Herbert Hoover helped to defend the foreign concessions, and Drake helped to defend the buildings of the university. A foreign expeditionary force ended the siege of Tientsin on July 14, 1900, but the university was unable to resume operations because a German force occupied its buildings.
When Noah Fields Drake came to Imperial Pei Yang University, he brought the original relief map of California that he had made as a graduate student. He also brought its plaster cast. German soldiers used the map materials to build a latrine for German officers.
The staff of Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Library have met all of my requests for appointments and materials from the Noah Fields Drake collection promptly and with good cheer. Thank you!