Finishing Nature: Harmonizing Bodies and Environments in Late-Nineteenth-Century California

Linda Nash

The climate of a place, considered in relation to its influence on health and disease, may be said to be, the impression produced on the human body by the superincumbent atmosphere, according to the extent to which it is charged with heat, moisture and electricity; its purity, pressure, and the amount of ozone which it may contain; the force and direction of the prevailing winds, and the annual rain fall—all of which circumstances are greatly modified by the physical conformation of the locality, its latitude and longitude, its aspect, the geological formation of the soil, the properties of the waters, the altitude and position of the nearest mountain ranges and its situation in reference to the ocean. California State Board of Health, 1871
THE ENVIRONMENTAL orientation of nineteenth-century medical reports is, at first, jarring to a modern reader. After all, contemporary medicine does not much concern itself with the landscape. Physicians generally confine themselves to the terrain of the human body, while the natural environment is left to a host of other disciplines. Yet this narrowing of professional perspective and the intellectual parsing of environment from human bodies is largely a product of the early twentieth century. In contrast, nineteenth-century understandings of health required physicians to pay close attention to multiple factors that might generate disease, but particularly important was the relationship between an individual's body and the surrounding landscape.	1
For nineteenth-century Americans, bodies were themselves barometers of place. Euro-Americans evaluated new landscapes not only in terms of their resource potential or aesthetic qualities, but through their effect on health. And until the mid-twentieth century, the movement of white Europeans into new areas of the world was accompanied by, in the words of African historian Dane Kennedy, a "real and serious sense of dislocation and vulnerability."1 Whenever Europeans moved into new environments, they perceived the land as threatening to their physical and racial selves, and it is this sense of physical vulnerability that I want to recapture within the history of California and the Far West. The process of adjusting, both psychologically and materially, to a new environment always took time. Of course, unlike Africa, California is located entirely within the "temperate zone" cartographically speaking, a region to which Euro-Americans generally felt themselves well suited. But to speak of the entire continent as a kind of "neo-Europe" can serve both to naturalize Euro-American expansion and to obscure the multiple environments within regions, some of which were decidedly more "temperate" than others. In any more detailed reading of the North American continent, certain regions stood out as places in which neither the climate nor landscape appeared auspicious for white settlement. California's Central Valley was one such place. As one nineteenth-century observer noted, "Few will ever permanently live in the interior of California that can help it."2 And while California may not have raised the same level of fears that southern Africa or the Caribbean did, we should not then assume that mid-nineteenth century migrants from eastern to western North America understood their own relocation in trivial terms. The focus on health thus helps to place the regional history of California within a larger transnational history of European settlement and colonization.3	. . .