The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  Disturbed by these inflammations and depressed by the invasion of George Howland, young Clare tried unsuccessfully to control his feelings. Self-government and self-discipline were not enough, he explained to Gardiner. They had placed his will “on a kind of throne,” and pride in his will ground him down “into a low slavery.” Only by wearing God’s yoke did he expect to find real freedom. He longed for another life, one in which all his yearnings would be satisfied by Christ’s acceptance of his adoration.

  Perhaps sensing that he would feel less turbulence if he left New York, Clare agreed to let Howland underwrite a course of study at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College. He entered in the autumn of 1860 and left in the spring of 1862 with a degree, cum laude, in applied chemistry. No surer of his future than John Hay and Henry Adams had been of theirs, he knew only that he did not want to fight in the Civil War. Abolitionist convictions ran strong in his family, and he boasted that his grandmother had long boycotted Southern oranges because of her belief that they contained “the blood of slaves,” but he could not bear the thought of killing another human being. “God knows that for my country I would ‘push a bayonet’ and that I would not quail before death for my land, but the act would crucify in me many of my noblest impulses,” he told Gardiner. Gardiner’s suspicions to the contrary, it was not a matter of cowardice. “Constantly you force it on me that I don’t want to lead men, that mine is not that kind of nature,” he said. Insisting that leadership would be his “life’s object,” he begged Gardiner not to misjudge him: “Don’t think that because I show you my tender side, my weak one if you will, that I have no fire, no firmness, no mental power.”

  In the spring of 1863, after a year of studying geology on his own, King was persuaded that he found a profession with a shining future. As Henry Adams noted, the geologist’s hammer was the key to El Dorado in nineteenth-century America—the only scientific means of unlocking the earth’s treasure chests of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal. At Yale, King had been enthralled by discussions of a pioneering geological survey in California, and he convinced Jim Gardiner that they should be a part of it. In April they boarded a train for Missouri, where they joined a wagon train to Virginia City, Nevada. By September, after trekking westward on foot through the Sierra Nevada range, they reached Sacramento and boarded a riverboat for San Francisco. When they discovered that one of their fellow passengers was a member of the California survey, the young men introduced themselves and asked for work.

  None was available. Chronically short of funds, wholly dependent on the largess of the legislature, the California State Geological Survey proceeded by fits and starts. Gardiner decided to look for paid employment in San Francisco. With no hesitation, King put himself forward as a survey volunteer, an offer that was immediately accepted.

  For the next three years King scrambled the Sierra Nevada in perfect happiness, his spirit enlarged by the “vastness of prospect” atop the mountain peaks and experiencing “a strange renewal of life” as he made each descent. These returns were “points of departure more marked and powerful than I can account for upon any reasonable ground,” he wrote. “In spite of any scientific labor or presence of fatigue, the lifeless region, with its savage elements of sky, ice and rock, grasps one’s nature, and, whether he will or no, compels it into a stern, strong accord. Then, as you come again into softer air, and enter the comforting presence of trees, and feel the grass under your feet, one fetter after another seems to unbind from your soul, leaving it free, joyous, grateful!”

  Clarence King in his early twenties, fresh from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale.HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA

  In his knapsack he carried a Bible and a book of sermons, and the grandeur of the Sierra strengthened his reverence for the works of God. He viewed Nature as “the key to Art and Science, God the key to Nature.” The beauties and mysteries of Nature were “a veil which He has drawn before us,” to be looked at “with gentleness and humble admiration.” Reluctant to share this fervor with his rough-and-ready companions, King hid it in a small volume that he titled Notes on Yosemite on the cover and Notes on the life of Our Savior on the flyleaf. In these private pages he summarized his Bible readings, meditated on the relation of God and Nature, and said nothing of Yosemite.

  Still troubled by his sexual urges, King also concealed his attraction to the Indian women of the California mountains. It would be years before he could voice his sensuous memories of seeing a native woman “of splendid mould, soundly sleeping upon her back, a blanket covering her from the waist down, her bare body and large full breasts kindled into bronze under streaming light.” Whenever he saw an Indian woman in her tent, he felt an overpowering desire to join her and talk about “Creation.” Hearing of these impulses decades later, King’s California colleagues finally understood his occasional disappearances from camp.

  The Sierra idyll ended abruptly in the spring of 1866. George Howland died, and King hastened to his mother in New York. Howland’s businesses had fallen into disarray, leaving King at the age of twenty-four with eleven dependents: his mother, a half brother, an infant half-sister, his maternal grandmother, assorted impecunious female relatives, and several servants. As soon as King grasped the hopelessness of Howland’s affairs, he thought he should head for Colorado and a mining career. But his heart pulled him in another direction. Josiah Dwight Whitney, leader of the California survey, had suggested that the United States government would profit handsomely from a geological survey along the route of the transcontinental railroad. Once completed, the railroad would open vast Western territories for settlement, but no one knew what these lands contained. Compelled by the idea of finding out, King discussed the project with his old professors at Yale and, in January 1867, shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, went to Washington to propose the survey to the secretary of war.

  King was more qualified for this great task than his youth suggested. As a geologist, he had determined the age of California’s gold-bearing deposits, a major advance for the mining industry. As an explorer and mountain climber, he held the record for the number of first ascents of Sierra Nevada peaks. And he had mastered an essential lesson of leadership. The state of California funded Whitney’s work in hopes of gaining information that could be turned to practical use in mining and agriculture, but Whitney, more interested in pure science, had concentrated his first efforts on a study of fossils. When the initial appropriation ran out, Whitney had few admirers in the statehouse at Sacramento. Determined not to repeat Whitney’s mistakes, King stressed the economic value of his survey. He and his party would pave the way for settlement by discovering where water could be had for irrigation, where cattle would thrive, and what the earth promised in the way of coal, metals, and other resources. Their focus would be the Fortieth Parallel, and they would survey a hundred-mile-wide swath stretching from the western slope of the Rockies to the eastern slope of the Sierra.

  Impressed, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton persuaded a senator to add the survey to a pending appropriations bill, and in March 1867 Congress authorized the expenditure of $100,000 for the survey’s first year. Handing King the letter that named him U.S. Geologist in charge of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, Stanton offered a word of advice: “the sooner you get out of town, the better—you are too young a man to be seen about Washington with this appointment in your pocket—there are four major-generals who want your place.”

  King dashed off a letter inviting his friend Jim Gardiner to join the survey and sped to Newport to share his elation with his mother. Their financial worries were over. As U.S. Geologist, King would draw a monthly salary of $250 and a per diem allowance in the field; he could get by on the allowance, and his salary would suffice for Florence Howland’s ménage.

  Beginning on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and moving east along the Fortieth Parallel, the survey marched to the cadence of the calendar—fieldwork in the warm months, paperwork in the
winter. King elected to spend the first winter in Virginia City, Nevada, where he wanted to study the played-out Comstock silver mine as well as help with the writing of the survey’s first reports. With its plenitude of gaming tables, saloons, and bawdy houses, Virginia City did not measure up to its chaste name, but most men who had been long in the mountains were disinclined to hold the town to higher standards. Nonetheless, King and Gardiner passed up the fleshpots in favor of ice-cream sociables, prayer meetings, skating parties, and quiet gatherings in the parlor of a local judge. By winter’s end, both young men had fallen in love with schoolteachers—King with a Miss Dean and Gardiner with a Miss Rogers.

  In one of his private notebooks, King pondered the love between man and woman and decided that a satisfying marriage was built upon “physical mergence.” Besides being a biological imperative and a divine good, physical union was the wellspring of intellectual companionship and an equality that allowed both parties to express their softer feelings. On Easter Sunday of 1868, just before leaving for the Fortieth Parallel, King presented a diamond ring to Miss Dean.

  Deeply in love, King overflowed with tenderness when he learned that one of his old colleagues would soon marry: “My pleasure in thinking of you as loved and cherished by a good woman amounts to solid comfort. God grant that your new life may be hallowed and blessed by all the wealth of love and all the sweet comfort of domestic tranquility. I can bid you God speed in this move with more earnest thankfulness and more hearty good will than I once could for one of the best of God’s own girls has promised bye and bye to crown my life with the same blessing.”

  In the autumn of 1868, King took Miss Dean to Newport to meet his mother. For reasons that one can only guess—jealousy, snobbery, financial fears—Florence Howland vehemently disapproved, and Miss Dean disappeared from King’s life. The wound hurt for years. In an 1880 letter about the engagement of a friend, King bitterly remarked that he had lost the only woman he had ever wanted to marry through “too much attention to duty. Duty has stood between me and almost every good thing.”

  Clarence King mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in 1870, when he was twenty-eight.NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, RARE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS DIVISION, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

  By 1872, the thirty-five men of the Fortieth Parallel survey had made the first accurate maps of thousands of square miles of Western terrain, catalogued hundreds of plant and animal specimens, discovered glaciers, and charted the region’s mineral resources. Studying the supposedly exhausted Comstock lode, King concluded that its day had not yet passed. In a few years the Big Bonanza would prove him right. The party’s official photographer and a succession of guest artists, including landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, added pictures to the record.

  As director of the Fortieth Parallel survey, Clarence King, at left, believed in dressing for dinner. Adams, who spent a summer with the survey, saw him as “a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush.”NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, RARE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS DIVISION, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

  Gardiner, who worked for the survey from the beginning, had ample opportunity to revise his opinion of his friend’s cowardice. He saw King scorched by lightning, and he had waited in suspense while King hunted down a deserter from the survey’s cavalry escort. The soldier, who had stolen away in the night, was miles ahead of him, but since the survey party was about to enter territory ruled by hostile Indians, King felt obliged to teach a lesson that would stave off further defections. With the sergeant in charge of the escort, King set off at a gallop. Near sundown, at the end of a hard ride through a hundred miles of desert and mountains, King spotted a trail leading to a mountain pass. Reasoning that the runaway would choose that route, King and his sergeant spent the night in the saddle, riding over the mountain to the far end of the pass. They reached their destination at sunrise and saw the fugitive calmly cooking breakfast near a spring in a willow grove. King left his horse in care of the sergeant, drew his revolver, and crept forward. The deserter saw him and fired. King charged and captured his quarry in a hand-to-hand struggle. Depositing the renegade in the nearest jail, King returned to camp with his point persuasively made.

  From time to time, King wrote about his adventures for William Dean Howells of the Atlantic, giving many Easterners their first glimpse of the Far West. Through Clarence King they came to know glaciers, waterfalls, the furies of a mountain storm, Indian funeral customs, hard-bitten pioneers, and the deficiencies of frontier justice. In a tale of a barroom trial of an accused horse thief, King described the jury’s deliberations and their verdict of innocent. “You’ll have to do better than that!” they were told. Half an hour later, they supplied a verdict of guilty. “Correct!” said the court official. “You can come out. We hung him an hour ago.” Before the day ended, the barkeep found the allegedly stolen animals behind the saloon, placidly chewing up decks of playing cards.

  In 1872, when a collection of King’s sketches appeared under the title Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, one of the few critics immune to the charms of the book was the author’s new friend, Henry Adams. After a few brushes with rattlesnakes and hostile Indians, Adams complained in the North American Review, the reader grew “distinctly sleepy.” Assuring his subscribers that King had more substance than his “trifle” suggested, Adams urged them to read the scientific tomes of the Fortieth Parallel survey. It was a dreary antidote, however kindly intended. Adams sounded more like his father than himself when he worried that King’s literary dabbling would cost him influence with the congressmen who held the purse strings of the survey.

  In the fall of 1872, King and his crew wrapped up the year’s fieldwork and settled down for their customary winter of writing reports and preparing the survey’s next volumes for publication. Sometimes they came East, but this year they were putting up in San Francisco, and when they arrived in October, they found the town buzzing with rumors of a fabulous diamond mine. From Rothschilds to Tiffanys, the mine was backed by all the right people. It had also passed the scrutiny of Henry Janin, a mining engineer well known for his professional skepticism. Though King knew of no spot in the West capable of yielding such riches, he joined the crowds gawking at a jewelry-store window aglow with diamonds, sapphires, and rubies said to have come from the mine.

  As a frequent guest at the Union Club, gathering place of San Francisco’s bankers and entrepreneurs, King heard every bonanza rumor wafting through the West, and he considered himself a shrewd judge of the men who peddled them. (No admirer of George Hearst, the mining baron, King remarked that when Hearst was stung in the privates by a scorpion, it was the scorpion that died.)

  Neither King nor Gardiner believed the glittering evidence in the jeweler’s showcase, but they could not guess how the swindlers, whoever they were, had managed to gull Janin, a diamond merchant of Charles Tiffany’s renown, and a corps of sharp-witted financiers. The question nagged more than it might have since the geologists were about to write a report ruling out the possibility of precious gems along the Fortieth Parallel. Years before, after Josiah Whitney had flatly declared that petroleum would never be found in a certain part of California, a major oil discovery had cast doubt on all of his other “scientific” findings. King did not want to leave his work open to the same sort of attack.

  King knew Henry Janin, and the next time they met, he casually asked where Janin liked to dine. King and Gardiner began posting themselves there in the evenings. A few nights later, when Janin turned up, King persuaded him to join their table. The surveyors had worried about how to bring up the diamond mine without arousing Janin’s suspicions, but the engineer was bursting to tell them all he knew. He bragged that his thousand shares in the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company had quadrupled in value. Predicting that the mine would yield a million dollars’ worth of gems a day, he urged King and Gardiner to invest before production began.

  King coolly launched his interrogation. “Of course, you now know exactly where
the place is?”

  Janin did not. He had made the journey blindfolded, reaching the diamond mine only after a thirty-six-hour train trip and two days on horseback. The site was “a curious place,” he said—“a level desert with a conical but flat-topped mountain rising right out of it, and on the mountain you find everything from garnets to diamonds!” He had turned up gem after gem merely by poking the surface with a pocket knife.

  In his most offhanded manner, King remarked that it was a shame Janin had had such bad weather for the trip.

  When Janin replied that the weather had been “splendid,” King and Gardiner had the clue they needed. During the time of Janin’s trip, the only dry mountainous area in the West was a patch near the convergence of the borders of Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado—approximately thirty-six hours by train from San Francisco. Back in their rooms, the two geologists pulled out topographical maps made by the Fortieth Parallel survey and quickly located a mesa fitting Janin’s description in northwestern Colorado.

  The next morning King and two other trusted survey members crossed San Francisco Bay on a ferry and boarded the Central Pacific at Oakland. Taking care not to tip their hand to fellow passengers, they referred to the diamonds as “carboniferous fossils.” Thirty-six hours later, in subzero temperatures, they disembarked at Fort Bridger, Wyoming. The blindfolded Janin had been led in circles for two days after his train ride, but King and his team headed straight for the sawed-off cone. Each time they forded a stream, the water dripping down the legs of their mules hardened into balls of ice that clacked like castanets in the bitter wind. They reached the mesa in the afternoon and by nightfall gathered a hundred rubies and four small diamonds. They also made a curious discovery: the gems were found in crevices and anthills marred by small scratches, suggesting that some sort of tool had been used to shove the stones into place. For three bone-chilling days they poked and probed until King was satisfied that the fraud was beyond question.