Johnston the teamster was an ambitious South Dakota high school graduate and farm boy who wanted to learn all he could from geological surveyors. A few years ago, in the nineteen forties, I received a letter from him in southwest Africa saying that he had been successful in placer mining for gold and diamonds and that he was writing a book about it. Arizona was my fourth field of fire-made irruptions; after New England, the Black Hills, and the Yellowstone (old, middle-aged, and young). To the Bradshaw Mountains between Prescott and Phoenix and lying south of the Grand Canyon, I was sent with Palache to make the Bradshaw Mountains folio. At Prescott we had the rare privilege of talks with Clarence King. An aged bachelor dying of tuberculosis, he was living in a cottage with an old negro servant. King was a fascinating talker and writer. He had been the first director of the Geological Survey and was the author of “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.” His great summary volume of the 40th Parallel, the survey along the Union Pacific, is one of the classics in literature and in geology. His model, unhappily for him, was Alexander Agassiz, who made a great fortune out of Calumet and Hecla copper. When King went into mining to make a fortune he contracted tuberculosis. He died soon after we saw him. The problem of what makes granite was never better illustrated than in the Bradshaws. One formation, in upright bands for miles across country, showed dark schist, diorite, granite, diabase, granite, light schist, quartzite, granite, gabbro, and schist again, like a succession of dikes, slabs, and veins side by side. A mountain spur, like a bookshelf with colored books on edge, is called Crooks Complex, and was named after Crooks Canyon. The trend was with the pinched strata but the stuff was mostly igneous. It was as though a mechanism of melting-up was mixed with intrusion of fluid, but what fluid? A glass? or a gas? There was no smearing, but clean-cut dikes and schist slabs on edge. In the big granite hills there were contact breakups with fragments of schist imprisoned in granite, but not smeared or streaked. The impression was of millions of years and thousands of episodes, all dike-making and guided by the upright lamination or vertical structure of the ancient altered tightly folded clay and sand strata, squeezed together by horizontal pressure. Since learning of the million-year periods taught by radioactivity, and of the many million years within a single era of geology, I have begun to wonder whether these very old formations may represent hundreds of millennia, with granitization happening over and over again, in each geological revolution of upheaval and mountain building above.