Passing Strange (11 page)

Few contemporary readers saw in
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada
a guide to the author’s social thought. Most read it as an adventure book—the thrilling tale of King’s ascent of Mount Tyndall, his flight from some Mexican banditos, his exploration of the Yosemite Valley—a bit of vicarious excitement to be enjoyed from the comfort of home. “Those whose circumstances compel the enjoyment of adventure at second hand, and those whose temperament makes them prefer to contemplate the grand and terrible in nature without risking their necks or breaking their backs with violent exercise, will find a delightful guide in Clarence King,” proclaimed
Scribner’s Monthly.
¹⁰⁰
“In vividness of picturesque description no Alpine writer excels it,” wrote a reviewer in
Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art.
¹⁰¹
With time, however, the book would come to seem more valuable as the vivid record of a particular historical moment. It will remain King’s “monument,” the novelist William Dean Howells wrote in 1904. “He has brilliantly fixed forever a phase of the Great West already vanished from reality.”
¹⁰²
The “prime Ruskinian document of the age,” the historian William Goetzmann later called
Mountaineering.
Others classed it with works by Bret Harte and Mark Twain, John Burroughs and Francis Parkman, crediting King with a place as founder of a California school of literature .
¹⁰³

Curiously, King’s new friend Henry Adams weighed in with the rare negative review. “King is a kind of young hero of the American type,” Adams conceded in an essay in the
North American Review.
But to grasp King’s true genius, one ought to read his amusing book in tandem with the great scientific reports still to come from the Fortieth Parallel survey. “Artistically speaking,” Adams wrote, “Mr. King’s book errs perhaps in carrying sensationalism too far for effect . . . the wonder always is that a day passes without accident. If he is not dragging or riding a mule up or down a perpendicular precipice, he is shooting at bears, getting struck by lightning, or catching rattlesnakes by the tail.” The book displayed only “the superficial qualities of a lively
raconteur.
”
¹⁰⁴

Adams thought the book an incomplete portrait of his complicated friend. He knew the boyish adventurer to be a sober-minded scientist and the man of intuitive thought and action a person of calculating intellect. In
Mountaineering,
King resolved the old pull between Ruskin’s poetic “myth-making” and Tyndall’s more narrative and hard-edged style. He drew successfully from both literary styles. But the deeper conflicting impulses that emerged from his encounters with the natural world seemed harder to reconcile. King felt ineluctably drawn to the immediacy, sensuality, and aesthetic picturesqueness of western frontier life, exemplified particularly by the region’s Spanish and Indian inhabitants. “Among the many serious losses man has suffered in passing from a life of nature to one artificial,” he wrote, “is to be numbered the fatal blunting of all the senses.”
¹⁰⁵
But Newport and Yale, the expectations of his mother, and the conventions of his time held him tight. King felt torn. He could acknowledge the attractions of another, more “natural” life but felt compelled to dismiss them as the humorous musings of a literary man.

 

 

THE FORTIETH PARALLEL CREWS spread out across the West during the summer of 1872, their last season of fieldwork, to gather the final bits of topographical and geological data they would need for their comprehensive reports. King elected to keep the survey’s offices in San Francisco, where he could focus on a study of the ancient glaciers in the High Sierra for his grand synthesis of the region’s geology. But the highlight of the season came from unexpected quarters. By autumn, the nation had proclaimed Clarence King its hero, a dazzling “King of Diamonds” who had saved the country from economic collapse.

San Francisco buzzed with rumors that summer, vague stories of diamond fields richer than the Comstock Lode or any California gold mine, in Arizona perhaps or maybe Nevada. Speculation reached a peak in July when banker William Ralston incorporated a mining company capitalized with $10 million. His board of directors included a former California governor and two Civil War generals. Expectations ran high, fueled by a report from the eminent mining expert Henry Janin, who had reportedly studied the secret gemstone fields and pronounced they would yield “gems worth at least a million dollars a month.” Investors poured money into competing companies, all in search of the fabled fields of riches.
¹⁰⁶

King had fieldwork to attend to. He spent most of September in the Sierra, much of it in the company of the painter Albert Bierstadt. But the diamond story rankled. If by chance the gemstone deposits lay within the territory covered by the Fortieth Parallel survey, their discovery by private parties would cast into doubt the work of the government scientists who had found no trace of such riches. Quite by chance, Emmons and Gardiner found themselves on a westbound train with Janin and several mysterious diamond prospectors as they returned to San Francisco at the conclusion of their survey work in October. They shared with King the intelligence they had gleaned, and the men decided to undertake their own secret investigation of the rumors, not even informing General Humphreys back in Washington of their change of plans. Various clues suggested that the mystery field lay in the mountains of Browns Park in northwestern Colorado, right within the scope of the survey. Traveling with utmost secrecy, speaking in code in case they should be overheard, King and Emmons headed by train to Fort Bridger, Wyoming, with survey topographer Allen David Wilson, then rode some 150 miles to the south. Their intuition proved correct. On a high sandstone mesa they found the gems. In a nearby stream gulch fluttered a note from Henry Janin claiming water rights.

The first afternoon of exploration made the men believers. Rubies, diamonds, garnets, and sapphires abounded for the taking. But a more sober examination the next day revealed the field to be a colossal fraud. The gem-stones, in unnatural mineralogical and stratigraphical associations, lay only in places where the earth had been disturbed; in untrampled ground there lay nothing at all.

King raced back to San Francisco to lay his evidence before Janin and Ralston. When a shaken Ralston sought one more opinion, King volunteered to lead his men back to the site. This time, even Janin could see how he had been duped by the unscrupulous swindlers who had salted the field. The expedition returned to San Francisco in late November and presented its findings to Ralston’s board, which immediately voted to publish King’s report. Instantly, King became a hero, the public servant who had saved prospective investors countless sums of money and helped the nation avoid a disastrous economic bubble. “We have escaped, thanks to God and Clarence King, a great financial calamity,” pronounced the
San Francisco Chronicle.
¹⁰⁷

Humphreys grumbled that the whole affair represented an improper use of King’s time. But in fact the episode demonstrated the real value of government science. As the
Nation
observed, “This single exposure, the work of a few days in appearance, the result of several years in reality, has more than paid for the cost of the [entire] survey.”
¹⁰⁸
Coming as it did at the very end of the survey’s six years of fieldwork, the diamond affair gave the entire Fortieth Parallel survey the glittering aura of triumphant success.

Much of the hard intellectual work of the survey still lay ahead: King would not finish his grand synthetic volume,
Systematic Geology,
until 1878. But with the fieldwork complete, a phase of his life seemed finished. Since 1863, when he walked across the West, King had spent long periods every year in remote mountain and desert field camps, exploring, mapping, and doing the basic science that would help him to develop a comprehensive understanding of the region’s deep geologic structure. Now, weary as he felt, he looked back on those ten years with a deep sense of loss for the freedom, excitement, and clear sense of purpose of the survey years. He was no longer a boy wonder. He turned thirty the year of the diamond hoax; his receding hairline and stout carriage lent him a solid, even portly look.

During the winter of 1872-73, King elected to stay in San Francisco to work on his survey maps, hoping that the mild climate would prove a good antidote for his general exhaustion and rheumatic aches and pains. But there was no escaping the complications of life here, even for a man whose scientific derring-do had made him an American celebrity. He moved his mother and her three children to California for the winter. His stepbrother Snowden was “still in status quo requiring endless care and attention and showing little hope of ultimate recovery,” King wrote to Emmons in late January. “My Mother is extremely delicate and altogether the family gives me pretty constant anxiety.”
¹⁰⁹
He requested a two-month leave of absence from government service in February and March, apologizing to Emmons for leaving his crew on their own. “I have sought to do my duty and hope I have saved my Mother from a decline but the sense of being absent from my post has galled me from morning to night.”
¹¹⁰

Life besieged him from all sides. Jim Gardiner wrote to say that with the Fortieth Parallel fieldwork complete, he intended to go to work for King’s rival, Ferdinand V. Hayden, who was now leading a civilian survey team in the Rockies. “I am shaken to the heart and well nigh crushed,” King wrote his “dear brother.” He thought Hayden “a selfish and Christless man,” and of course he felt betrayed, especially since Gardiner had not yet completed his work for the folio atlas of King’s survey. But mostly, now at a turning point in his own life, King found it hard to fathom that his dearest friend did not see the world as he did. Fieldwork is for “
young
men,” King told Gardiner; “we have already done
more
than our share.” With an uncharacteristic tone of regret, he now wrote of science’s “relentless chill,” which made it all but impossible to find the spiritual calm “which may
alas
only come of a settled mode of life.” “We give ourself to the
Juggernaut
of the intellect,” King wrote his friend. “And in such a life as we have lived and as you propose, the veritable demands are
too
much for the large, sweet, beautiful perfection of the soul.” Nonetheless, he reassured his brother, whatever his final decision, “
our
love will outlive time and circumstance.”
¹¹¹

King could make light of his new worries. To Emmons, who had already headed back east, he wrote, “Now you have only to write me that there are numerous eligible girls to make me feel more keenly my loneliness here.”
¹¹²
But in addition to his anxieties about his mother and his friend, on top of the adjustment from fieldwork to office work, he worried about money. A close friend of his stepfather’s, taking pity on the widowed Mrs. Howland, had put some securities in trust in 1871, directing that the interest be turned over to King to manage for his mother’s benefit.
¹¹³
But that scarcely met the family’s needs. That winter King accepted a job as an expert witness for a California mining company at a fee of $5,000.
¹¹⁴
No regulations prohibited government scientists from accepting outside work. But for the King of Diamonds, who had just made his name by showing how government scientists could put the public good above private gain, the work always made him feel just a bit defensive, even as he won a reputation for incorruptible honesty.

Thus, when King moved back east in late 1873, to set up offices for the survey’s laboratory and related work in New York, he felt a man divided: between public duty and private profit, the intellectual challenges of science and the repose of a simpler life, the pleasures of his true celebrity and the worries of his private world. Looking back at his long years in the West, he could already sense that life would never quite be the same. “My years in the Sierras and the plains of California, Oregon and Nevada,” he told a friend in 1875, “were the happiest I have ever known or ever expect to know.”
¹¹⁵

ADA COPELAND TOLD FOLKS SHE CAME FROM WEST POINT, Georgia.
¹
The small market town along the Chattahoochee River, at the western edge of the state, provided a reference point for residents of the tiny farming hamlets tucked in and around the surrounding pine-covered hills. If you came from Shiloh or Pine Mountain, Long Cane or Milner’s Cross Roads, you might claim to be from West Point; it was big enough to find on a map. In the years just before the Civil War, when it was a thriving cotton town, you could bring your cotton there to put in a warehouse or ship out on the railroads and then stay to shop on two downtown blocks crowded with stores, hotels, and pharmacies.
²
If you lived out in the country, you might consider this the center of your world.

The Chattahoochee River (from the Creek words for “colored stones”) cuts diagonally through northern Georgia to reach its westernmost point at West Point, then bends to the south to form the undulating border between Georgia and Alabama. As it bisects West Point, however, it provides no neat border at all. The town of West Point, Georgia, straddles the river, and the state boundary lies on solid ground, a few blocks west of the downtown on the river’s western shore. It’s “a mere imaginary line,” said a local resident in 1871.
³
Since the metropolitan community also straddled several county lines, one’s precise loyalties could be hard to pin down. A West Point resident might technically reside in either Troup or Harris County, Georgia, or live in Chambers County, Alabama. Ada, however, always told the same tale: she was from West Point, Georgia; if not from the town itself, then from one of the outlying rural communities on the Georgia side of the river.