Matthes resolved a dispute about formation of the Yosemite Valley and his findings on glaciers introduced the terms nivation and Little Ice Age.
[1]: 104 He was also a director of Natura Artis Magistra, president of Felix Meritis, founder of a riding academy and Lieutenant Colonel for the National Guard artillery unit in Amsterdam.
[3] At a young age, both boys were instructed in technical drawing with pencil, charcoal and ink on tracing linen with T-square and triangle.
The art of Frederic Remington was a drawing inspiration to François, as his surviving sketch books attest with pages of animals, in particular horses.
When their entrance exam scores indicated the brothers were only deficient in American history, President Francis Walker intervened on their behalf and entered them into a civil engineering curriculum.
field school in the Adirondack Mountains learning to map with an alidade and plane table and to measure stream flow of the Ausable River with various current meters.
On June 1, 1895, Matthes started his first job as an instrument man and draftsman for the city engineer's office of Rutland, Vermont.
The Geological Survey had determined to map little known remote areas of the western United States and Matthes' assignments over the next years were: As party chief at the Wyoming quadrangle, Matthes' effectively organized his crew and equipment for long pack trips through remote areas, physically strenuous to access and traverse.
His techniques in working the alidade and plane table "contributed notably to the effectiveness of mapping rugged mountain areas".
[15] Matthes believed topographers should not merely draw lines but also study the geology of the land forms to produce relevant maps.
[16] His geologic writing was not a customary effort for topographers and his descriptive style was critiqued by the USGS but the popularity of his narratives continues today.
Edith's schooling and European travels with her aunt, Sophie Radford de Meissner, allowed conversations with Matthes in German and French as well as English.
Reverend George Freeland Peter performed a small ceremony at the Washington, D.C., home of Stephen Kearny Radford, uncle to Edith.
[3]: 29–34 His first assignment and main focus over the next sixteen years was to determine the origin of the Yosemite Valley, a specific request to the USGS from the Sierra Club.
A formation controversy raged over Josiah Whitney’s block-fault hypothesis and John Muir’s belief that glaciers were largely responsible.
In the fall of 1930, Matthes' report Geologic History of the Yosemite Valley (USGS Professional Paper 160) resolved the debate.
Professor Kirk Bryan wrote "Occasionally in the history of science there appears a work so excellent, so comprehensive, that it becomes immediately a classic".
His data was urgently needed, so pending a later detailed formal report, Matthes summarized his findings in three volumes with his annotated photographs.
The Sequoia Albums proved invaluable to the park service but The Geologic History of Mount Whitney was the only other publication he completed from his investigation.
There, he determined the eastern escarpment had been formed during early Pleistocene faulting, placing the origin more recent than had been previously calculated.
In July 1939 as part of the meeting of the Cordilleran Section of the Geological Society of America, Matthes led an excursion party into the Yosemite Valley and out to the eastern escarpment.
His text was cited in the June 1949 edition of the Quarterly Journal by the Royal Meteorological Society as "a masterly summary of the characteristics and behavior of glaciers".
From 1942 through 1947, Matthes tasks were determined by the Military Geology Unit effort and his English translation skills for European languages.
[3]: 34–35 François and Edith remained in Washington, D.C., a few more months before traveling by automobile to their new home in El Cerrito, California, high on the Berkeley Hills facing the Golden Gate Bridge.
There, Matthes began organizing his works until, in February 1948, he accepted the role of planner for the Committee on Snow and Glaciers sessions to be held as part of the International Scientific Congress scheduled to meet in Ohio in August.
The citation reached Matthes a month before his death but his gold medal, with a bison standing before a range of mountain peaks, did not arrive in time.
[28] The Cryosphere Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) sponsors the François Émile Matthes Award.
In 1950, Edith Matthes presented the busts to Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, where they remain in the collection of the Teaching Museum of Art.