Passing Strange (10 page)

King wrote quickly that winter and spring of 1871, racing to have five essays done by April so he could look at proofs before he headed back west for another season of work for which he now had funding to extend the survey eastward to the eastern edge of the Front range. When the first of the essays appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
in May 1871, a wide reading audience discovered what King’s intimates had long known: he was a born storyteller. And if some readers found it difficult to distinguish literal fact from a more exaggerated version of King’s mountaineering adventures, the long descriptions of the scenery and the underlying topography of the country gave it all the ring of glorious, exciting truth.

Now survey leader, scientist, and popular writer, too, King became increasingly peripatetic, his travel enabled by the railroads that shuttled him in mere days between East and West. In June and July 1871 he supervised his survey crews in Wyoming and stole time away to climb Mount Whitney in ill-fated pursuit of his long-held ambition to be the first white man to stand on the highest point in the United States.
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He returned east in July to help shepherd through work on the contour maps for his geologic atlas, raced up to Newport to see his mother, and was back in Colorado in early August.

And there, in Estes Park, King met the man whose words would later keep his name and memory alive long after the stories of the West’s exploration faded from public memory. In his own day, King won acclaim as a geologist and an explorer, a writer and an administrator. But he would live on in popular memory chiefly as a spectacular friend.

 

 

RIDING THROUGH THE PARK in search of his crew, King had paused for the night in a cabin with “a room and one bed for guests” when a small, frail, mustached Harvard history professor rode into camp on a mule, lost after a day of fishing. It was Henry Adams. “As with most friendships,” Adams later wrote, “it was never a matter of growth or doubt. . . . They shared the room and the bed, and talked till far towards dawn.”
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The grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, Adams had gone west that summer at the suggestion of his boyhood friend Frank Emmons, in search of adventure in the “land of the future” and a temporary respite from the weighty world of Brahmin Boston. “The West was still fresh,” Adams wrote, “and the Union Pacific was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the atmosphere of Indians and buffaloes.”
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He brimmed with abstract admiration for the hearty western field scientists who “felt the future in their hands,” and in Clarence King he met his ideal. “A new friend is always a miracle,” Adams reflected, “but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar.”
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Years later, in his memoir
The Education of Henry Adams
(1907), Adams wrote of King in his own peculiar, third-person narrative voice. But neither literary style nor the passage of years could mute the intensity of the author’s attraction to the man who seemed everything he was not. “The one, coming from the west, saturated with the sunshine of the Sierras, met the other, drifting from the east, drenched in the fogs of London.” In King’s vibrant presence, Adams felt small and diminished. How could he compete with King’s unrivaled charm? “Adams was never guilty of a witticism, unless by accident.”
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But the professor found himself entranced. “King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. He even knew women; even the American woman; even the New York woman, which is saying much.”
⁷³

Trained in one world, Adams felt adrift in another, where technology and biology challenged old truisms, and a classical education no longer assured success. King, by comparison, seemed exquisitely poised to seize the moment. “King had moulded and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought American life should be directed. He had given himself education all of a piece, yet broad.” Adams wrote with hindsight, years after King’s death and with a keen sense that his own could not be far off. But he could still capture his young man’s sense of wonder at King’s extraordinary talent. “Whatever prize he wanted lay ready for him—scientific, social, literary, political—and he knew how to take them in turn. With ordinary luck he would die at eighty the richest and most many-sided genius of his day.”
⁷⁴

Adams and King talked “till the frost became sharp in the mountains”; then Adams headed back to Cambridge to “take up again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor” and King continued on, triangulating his way across the West.
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THE SEASON’S WORK AND travel left King worn. After leaving Adams he headed to Cheyenne to invest in a ranching operation. Nothing about his employment with the survey prohibited a little speculation of his own, and the ranching, ironically, proved a much sounder investment than any of King’s later mining ventures.
⁷⁶
He worked in the Uinta and Escalante ranges in late 1871, then retreated to San Francisco for the winter, ill and exhausted. Across the bay in Oakland, Jim Gardiner’s wife, Josie, died of tuberculosis that January, and Gardiner soon left to take his young daughter back east to be raised by his mother.
⁷⁷
A dispirited King requested a brief leave of his own from survey duty, and in early February set sail with Arnold Hague for several weeks in the Hawaiian Islands. The “old-gold girls that tumble down water-falls” entranced; the warm tropical air and swaying palms seduced. King garlanded himself in flowers to attend “a merry Kalakauan fête” and rode the “breasting breakers on a Hawaiian beach, himself daring and swift in the water as the lithest brown maid.” King and Hague investigated some volcanoes, but in memory, at least, the physics of lava flows proved less engaging than the real or imagined pleasures of Hawaiian women. “I came perilously near falling in love with the Princess,” King joked.
⁷⁸

He liked to jest this way, suggesting an idea so preposterous his listeners could only smile. But his remark contained more than a kernel of truth. As Henry Adams often observed, “it was not the modern woman that interested him; it was the archaic female, with instincts and without intellect.”
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WHEN MOUNTAINEERING IN THE SIERRA NEVADA first appeared in February 1872, King was en route to Hawaii, far beyond reach of the first reviews that heralded him as a remarkable, fresh literary voice. “A more varied or entertaining book than this of Mr. King’s we have not met for a long time,” wrote a critic for the
New York Times.
⁸⁰
A quick commercial success,
Mountaineering
went through nine printings in its first two years, with an expanded edition released in 1874. King had aimed for a broad audience—once telling Emmons that he wrote
Mountaineering
“as an experiment to see if a piece of writing description of scenery could be made popular literature”—and he found it.
⁸¹
Emmons recalled hiking in 1874 “to a little inn in a remote valley of the Austrian Tyrol, and finding the only other guest a very cultivated Englishman, whose first question as soon as he learned I was an American was ‘Do you know Clarence King?’ ”
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Part popular science, part cultural commentary, the collected essays narrate King’s adventures in California and position him as a virile young hero of this new American place. But the book also provides a window into King’s interior life. King keeps a light touch, builds narrative suspense, splashes the world with a colorful wash of descriptive prose. Yet beneath the surface gloss one senses a divided man—tempted by risk and attracted to the exotic but fearful of losing the social prerogatives that defined his place in the world.

King counted among the explorer’s greatest pleasures “the frequent passages he makes between city life and home; by that I mean his true home, where the flames of his bivouac fire light up trunks of sheltering pine and make an island of light in the silent darkness of the primeval forest. The crushing juggernaut-car of modern life and the smothering struggles of civilization are so far off that the wail of suffering comes not, nor the din and dust of it all.”
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The explorer could find true repose only in the wilds, and yet there he could never remain for long. Duty compelled him to return to the “heat and pressure” and “huddled complexity” of town, leaving behind the liberating freedom of the out-of-doors. “As often as one makes this transit between civilization and the wilds,” King wrote, “one prizes most the pure, simple strengthening joy of nature.”
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Even in the field, however, King could never quite surrender his social privileges or abandon the idea that he had a particularly superior appreciation of nature. He was no tourist; he was a pathfinder. He thus had scant regard for those western travelers “ ‘doing America,’ ” who with hired guides would “cause themselves to be honorably dragged up and down our Sierras, with perennial yellow gaiter, and ostentation of bath-tub.”
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He conceived of himself as different, nothing like those other visitors to Yosemite’s Inspiration Point whom he disparaged as “that army of literary travellers who have here planted themselves and burst into rhetoric.”
⁸⁶

Much as he thought himself superior to the average tourist, he also considered himself a notch or two above the average frontiersman. King wrote elsewhere of his admiration for those Americans who showed “a determination to grapple with the continental
terra incognita,
to wrest it from barbarism, to dare its solitudes, to search in the great vacant spaces between the eastern fringe of civilization and the far Pacific for whatever of goodly land or other lure lay therein.”
⁸⁷
But King had in mind pioneers like himself, men of refinement who could find spiritual renewal in nature’s wilds. For the less savory frontiersmen he described in
Mountaineering,
the wilderness represented not spiritual touchstone but social disintegration.

Looking around at the West’s recent immigrants, King saw the very worst of human nature. The brave spirit of “Westward Ho!” might inspire an explorer like himself, “but when, instead of urging on to wresting from new lands something better than old can give, it degenerates into mere weak-minded restlessness, killing the power of growth, the ideal of home, the faculty of repose, it results in that race of perpetual emigrants who roam as dreary waifs over the West, losing possessions, love of life, love of God, slowly dragging from valley to valley till they fall by the wayside.”
⁸⁸
It was the classic dilemma of the American frontier: did it call forth the very best in the pioneers by compelling them to develop a new sense of hearty self-reliance, or did it destroy the very moral underpinnings of American life?

In a family he dubbed the “Newtys of Pike,” King found proof of a common western story that never failed to startle him “with its horrible lesson of social disintegration, of human retrograde.”
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The popular interpretation of Darwin presumed a steady improvement of the human race, but King wondered whether the laws of evolution might also countenance social decline: “Are not these chronic emigrants whose broken-down wagons and weary faces greet you along the dusty highways of the far West melancholy examples of beings who have forever lost the conservatism of home and the power of improvement?”
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He doubted whether a vibrant American culture could ever thrive in the West. Californians might have a cheerfulness, physical vigor, and “glorious audacity” King found lacking in the East. But he counseled that “we must admit the facts. California people are not living in a tranquil, healthy, social
régime
. . . . Aspirations for wealth and ease rise conspicuously above any thirst for intellectual culture and moral peace.”
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Despite his scorn for the West’s new American immigrants, King found the region’s Hispanic and Indian inhabitants curiously alluring, their poverty less a sign of social decline than picturesque appeal. “The American residents of Lone Pine outskirts live in a homeless fashion; sullen, almost arrogant neglect stares out from the open doors,” he wrote. “There is no attempt at grace, no memory of comfort, no suggested hope for improvement. Not so the Spanish homes; their low, adobe, wide-roofed cabins neatly enclosed with even basket-work fence, and lining hedge of blooming hollyhock.”
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Likewise, while the disorderly American ranches “send a stab of horror through one,” the Indian rancheros had a “quaint indolence and picturesque neglect” that conveyed “a sort of aesthetic satisfaction.”
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Women presented similar aesthetic distinctions. The “heavy ample” Spanish “donna” [
sic
] offered “a study of order and true womanly repose.”
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An Anglo-American woman, by contrast, seemed “a bony sister, in the yellow, shrunken, of sharp visage, in which were prominent two cold eyes and a positively poisonous mouth; her hair, the color of faded hay, tangled in a jungle around her head.”
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She had a “hard, thin nature, all angles and stings.”
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King preferred more voluptuous types. As Henry Adams observed, “King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more robust.”
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He loved types more dark-complected, too. For King, the Chinese workers’ “fresh white clothes and bright olive-buff skin made a contrast of color which was always chief among my yearning for the Nile.”
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And no sallow-complected immigrant from Missouri could compare to the middle-aged Spanish woman of whom King observed that “in her smile, in her large soft eyes, and that tinge of Castilian blood which shone red-warm through olive cheek, I saw the signs of a race blessed with sturdier health than ours.”
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