Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  After a period of intense scientific work, King always found it a relief to stop “analyzing” and just expose himself to nature, like “a sensitized photographic plate.” “No tongue can tell the relief to simply withdraw scientific observation,” he wrote, “and let Nature impress you in the dear old way with all her mystery and glory, with those vague indescribable emotions which tremble between wonder and sympathy.”137 King’s fascination with the geological sublime struck some of his survey colleagues as decidedly unscientific. The paleontologist William More Gabb grumbled that King “had rather sit on a peak all day and stare at those snow-mountains, than find a fossil in the metamorphic Sierra.”138 But Brewer accepted King’s dreamy introspection as the complement to his remarkable physical vigor. “King is enthusiastic,” he wrote, “is wonderfully tough, has the greatest endurance I have ever seen, and is withal very muscular.”139

  The work of the Irish scientist John Tyndall appealed to this more active aspect of King’s character. An expert on glaciers and a seasoned alpine explorer, Tyndall cared less about looking at mountains than climbing them, and his writings balanced scientific observation with narrative adventure. King kept the two ideals in balance: Ruskin’s reverential contemplation and Tyndall’s active mountaineering. From the top of Lassen Peak, King might dream of Ruskin, but Tyndall guided his descent. When King pronounced his intent to slide down the snowslopes on the side of the peak, Brewer objected. “But he had read Tyndall; and what was a mountain climb without a glissade? So he had his way, and came out of the adventure with only a few unimportant bruises.”140

  KING’S SURVEYING CAREER BEGAN just two days after his arrival in San Francisco, when he headed north with Brewer for the lava fields of Lassen Peak, an active volcano in the southern part of the Cascade range. They passed through Sacramento and the old gold rush country where huge hydraulic operations had replaced the original placer mines, pausing along the way to examine copper deposits and gather fossils. After their ascent of Lassen Peak, where King broke out in his Ruskinian “rhapsodies of admiration,” they explored the east side of Mount Shasta, a place to which King would later return to test his theories about glaciers.141 Their investigations took them north to the Klamath River and then west toward the Pacific, in search of information about mineral deposits that they could incorporate into a comprehensive geologic map of the region. By early November, when King arrived back in San Francisco, he had completed an intense two-month course in geology no Yale classroom could match.

  King’s field journals, however, focused less on science than on spiritual matters. Geology required a particular set of technical skills, a knowledge of mineral structure, and an ability to read in the physical landscape a record of deep historical change. But it remained a science intimately connected to more profound questions about the structure and age of the earth and the very nature of life itself. Geologists argued over whether the earth had been shaped through uniformitarian forces, the slow, gradual effects of glaciers, erosion, and wind, or through catastrophic changes, more sudden and violent upheavals that might explain the uplift, tilting, fracturing, and faulting so easily observed in the mountains of the American West. And as Darwin’s ideas about evolution gained currency, scientists also turned to geology for evidence to prove or disprove the new biological theories. The age of rocks held clues to challenge biblical theories of the earth’s creation, and the fossil record could be used to support Darwin’s theories about the slow, gradual evolutionary changes in the biological realm. Some California clergymen thought Whitney’s state survey nothing less than blasphemy.142

  King himself struggled with the tensions between science and religion, wondering how to reconcile the laws of nature with the laws of God. The biblical book of Revelation prophesied a new heavenly kingdom. But if earthly life was transitory, pondered King, “why study so hard into all the intricate sources of fact which will be swept away and known no more. I have looked for lessons. I have believed that God created all with design that with all was a lesson, that lessons were taught in nature which were not elsewhere.”143 He and Brewer “sat up long and talked about morals.”144 And when King returned to San Francisco after his first trip into the Sierra, he seemed newly serious and intent. When he posed that winter for a group portrait with the other members of the survey, he wore his one dress suit and adopted the formal, sober gaze of his older colleagues. Gardiner wrote to his mother about his old friend: “Out in the wilderness away from all outside Christian influences, God is bringing him into the closest communion with the things that are unseen and eternal. He is being cleansed for some great work.”145

  Although King recorded his personal struggles with faith in his private journals, much of his writing seems self-consciously literary, as if he imagined a more public audience for his words. “The air has changed,” he wrote late in the season; “a slight frostiness creeps down from the north and the stars as I wake up mornings have a sort of cold brilliancy and frosty sparkle. The little pleiades no longer look down through a soft warm night. They gleam like a setting of cold gems.”146 King seemed to live on a kind of double track. Even as he lived in the present, he liked to step outside of his life to imagine it as a story.

  King rested only briefly in San Francisco. He was still there, though, on November 19, 1863, when President Lincoln dedicated the memorial on the battlefield at Gettysburg and delivered the memorable address that recast the war. A war once imagined as a fight to preserve the Union became an epic battle to forge “a new birth of freedom” for all Americans, black and white. There was now a higher cause at stake, but this was still not King’s fight. On November 24 he headed east to survey the famed Mariposa Estate. Once the property of the explorer John C. Frémont, it was now superintended by Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Manhattan’s Central Park and an old friend of King’s from his Hartford days. The mine stood at the southern end of the gold belt that stretched along the Sierra foothills, and in the surrounding countryside King made one of the survey’s key scientific discoveries. With fossils gathered from rocks that contained veins of gold, he conclusively dated California’s gold-bearing slate to the Jurassic period and showed that the auriferous placer deposits had formed during the Pliocene. King’s find would prove useful to geologists and mining engineers alike.147

  During the winter and spring of 1864, King made several more short trips for the survey. He saw Yosemite for the first time and went on to Lake Tahoe to take the barometric readings that would establish its altitude. He met up with Whitney in Virginia City, in the Virginia range east of the Sierra, and at his request conducted a trial survey as far east as the Humboldt range, to test the possibility of extending the California survey out across the Great Basin. Later, as the weather improved in late spring, the survey team plotted a return to the high mountains.

  When Gardiner quit his job in the spring of 1864 rather than obey orders to work on the sabbath, King recommended him to Whitney as an additional member of the survey crew.148 In May Gardiner joined on as a volunteer assistant topographer, unpaid like King. The two friends anticipated high adventure as they headed out to explore the southern part of the Sierra where, as Gardiner wrote to his mother, there stood “an immense tract . . . as yet unexplored.”149 King had seen the distant peaks of the High Sierra a few months earlier and hypothesized, with a nod to Tyndall, that these would be America’s “new Alps.”150

  King posed again for a formal photographic portrait with Gardiner and two of the other members of his field party. The young man so intent upon demonstrating his seriousness in the picture made just a few months before now wore his field clothes to play the part of a swaggering frontiersman. With a mercury barometer slung across his back like a rifle and a geologist’s hammer in his hand, he no longer seeks to disguise his youth. Instead, he revels in it.

  King’s field party of five set out from San Francisco in late May, in the midst of a brutal drought. Across desolate dirt trails, through dust storms that obscured their vi
sion, they rode east into the San Joaquin Valley and headed south across land littered with the carcasses of dead cattle. With Brewer, King, and Gardiner rode the topographer Charles Hoffmann and the drover and packer Richard Cotter, whom Gardiner and King had met while crossing the continent the year before. Climbing into the foothills of the Sierra, near the town of Visalia, the exploring party came upon an impressive stand of giant sequoias. They received credit for “discovering” them, but, as King later confessed, a group of Indians directed them there.151 They lingered for some days among the enormous trees, then continued up the divide between the Kings and Kaweah rivers. From the peak of a mountain that they promptly named for the Yale professor Benjamin Silliman Jr., they spotted a ridge that seemed to contain the highest mountains of this vast terrain. With their barometers they measured altitude, and with transit, sextant, and compass they slowly mapped this uncharted part of the High Sierra, using a method of triangulation that let them establish the location of new landmarks by taking sightings from two already known locations. As they rode deeper and deeper into the Sierra, King took note of the “purely Gothic” form of the mountains, resorting to Ruskinian language to describe the scene: “Whole mountains shaped themselves like the ruins of cathedrals,—sharp roof-ridges, pinnacled and statued; buttresses more spired and ornamented than Milan’s . . . with here and there a single cruciform peak, its frozen roof and granite spires so strikingly Gothic I cannot doubt that the Alps furnished the models for early cathedrals of that order.”152 The Gothic spires of the Sierra allowed him to imagine that America could stake claim to a tradition as noble as Europe’s.

  The range that from the west seemed to be the “highest land” soon revealed itself to be lower than a range farther east, across the “terribleness and grandeur” of a deep canyon. King had long dreamed of getting to the “top of California,” and he now asked Cotter to head east with him, up the highest peak they could spy. “I felt that Cotter was the one comrade I would choose to face death with,” King later wrote, “for I believed there was in his manhood no room for fear or shirk.” Brewer at first said no to the plan, feeling “a certain fatherly responsibility.” But eventually he gave in.153

  Some years later, in 1871, King wrote the story of his epic adventure, mingling a dramatic account of physical trials with descriptions of the geological sublime.154 Scrambling to the top of the westernmost range of the Sierra, beneath the shadow of the peak the surveyors named Mount Brewer, King contemplated the “gigantic mountain-wall” that lay to the east, a “noble pile of Gothic-finished granite and enamel-like snow.” He later wrote, “I looked at it as one contemplating the purpose of his life; and for just one moment I would have rather liked to dodge that purpose, or to have waited, or have found some excellent reason why I might not go; but all this quickly vanished, leaving a cheerful resolve to go ahead.”155 Leaving their comrades behind, Cotter and King walked east, traversing steep granite slopes, debris fields, and bleak stretches of frozen snow. They spent their first night on a small granite ledge near a frozen lake, huddled together under a blanket for warmth. They rose the next morning in “cold, ghastly dimness” and trekked on across the snowfields with their heavy packs, “animated by a faith that the mountains could not defy us.” Later climbers accused King of overly dramatizing a not very difficult climb. But with scant equipment and no maps, King and Cotter had to rely on trial and error. They improvised, using their ropes to toss a lasso around the granite blocks that lay above them, pulling themselves up sheer cliffs, hand over hand; and they again used their ropes to descend, first one then the other, down rock crevices from ledge to ledge. “Our blood was up,” King recalled, “and danger added only an extra thrill to the nerves.” On the third day, they cut steps into a spire of ice that rose toward their long-sought summit, and when the ice spire became too thin and precarious, they wrapped their bodies around it and climbed it like a tree trunk. At last, they stood on the mountain’s peak. But “to our surprise,” King said with muted understatement, they could now see an even higher peak about six miles away to the south. Later they would name it Mount Whitney, in honor of the survey chief. For now, though, they would celebrate their conquest as if their triumph had been complete. At exactly twelve noon, King wrote, “I rang my hammer upon the topmost rock; we grasped hands, and I reverently named the grand peak MOUNT TYNDALL.”156

  The exuberant act celebrated their heroic sense of self. By the end of the survey season, there would be not just a Mount Tyndall, a Mount Whitney, and a Mount Brewer, but a Mount Clarence King (carefully named to avoid confusion with other Kings), a Mount Gardiner, and a Mount Cotter. 157 Earlier European explorers had marked their new American world with names that honored kings and queens and patron saints. But the men of the California State Geological Survey named their new world after their scientist-mentors, their political patrons, and themselves.

  King’s descent from Mount Tyndall proved as difficult as his climb. Later, he recounted Cotter’s painful barefoot hike, their improvised rope climbs, their night in “weird Dantesque surroundings” with a voice that scarcely concealed his manly pride in their triumph over danger. Five days after leaving their companions, King and Cotter walked back into camp. As King later wrote, “Brewer said to me, ‘King, you have relieved me of a dreadful task. For the last three days I have been composing a letter to your family, but somehow I did not get beyond ‘It becomes my painful duty to inform you.’ ”158 King held on to that anecdote like a badge of courage. And in his telling of the tale he minimized all that their small survey crew had accomplished that summer, unable perhaps to shake his disappointment over a failed attempt to scale Mount Whitney later in the season. Their expedition had added to the map of California an area “as large as Massachusetts and as high as Switzerland.”159 And the explorers had proved themselves, in the historian William Goetzmann’s phrase, “Ruskins on a grand scale.”160

  King and Gardiner returned to San Francisco in September, but within a week set out for the Yosemite Valley. The United States Congress had set the land aside as a state park just a few months earlier, in June 1864 (it would become part of a larger national park in 1906). Now, as temporary employees of a special commission headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, King and Gardiner had less than three months to survey the park’s boundaries and gather mapmaking data before the state legislature reconvened in December. King found Yosemite a kind of open book, the marks left by glaciers “restoring in imagination pictures of the past.” By the time early winter storms cut their work short, King could see that much more work would be needed to understand the titanic forces that had shaped the deep valley and the granite peaks of the surrounding cliffs.161

  Between the weather and Whitney’s perennial funding problems, the winter months promised little work. Whitney had already gone home to Boston for the season and Brewer had returned east to accept a professorship at Yale. So King and Gardiner returned to San Francisco “wet and exhausted,” gave copies of their notes to Olmsted, and caught a steamer for Nicaragua, the first leg of a long trip home that would require them to cross the isthmus by land, then catch another northbound boat. Twelve days after leaving San Francisco, King found himself beneath a palm tree in Nicaragua, watching “a bewitching black-and-tan sister thrumming her guitar while the chocolate for our breakfast boiled.” It made for a sharp contrast to the high windswept mountains of the Sierra. “Warmth, repose, the verdure of eternal spring, the poetical whisper of palms, the heavy odor of the tropical blooms, banished the cold fury of the Sierra, which had left a permanent chill in our bones,” King wrote.162 The Nicaraguan interlude left a permanent impression. For the rest of his life, King would associate tropical warmth with relief, with rest, and with exotic dark-skinned women.

  KING BROUGHT AT LEAST one souvenir from Central America back east with him in January 1865. He spent weeks bedridden at his mother’s house in Irvington, ill with malaria that he blamed on the Nicaraguan swamps. It would become his “usual August illness”
anticipated “with the regularity of an astronomical phenomenon.”163 However glad she felt to see him, though, Mrs. Howland had little time for the son she had not seen in nearly two years. She gave birth to a baby boy, named George Snowden after his father, on February 12.164 Clarence slipped out of this awkward situation as soon as he felt well enough—this half brother was twenty-three years younger than he, young enough to be his son—and went to New Haven to catch up with old friends and sit in on an astronomy course. In late February he and Gardiner went up to Boston to tell Whitney they wanted to stick with the survey for a while longer. Through the spring and summer he worked on his California maps. His mother and stepfather were ill that summer, King told Brewer, and their difficulties felt oppressive. “I long for the old Sierras this housed half smothered existence is damaging alike to mind morals and temper.” When he posed for a formal portrait in October, he dressed the part of the gentleman-scholar in his fashionable muttonchop whiskers, with a dark suit, a gold watch chain, and an open book in his lap. But he fancied himself an adventurer. In November he and Gardiner caught a steamship for California.165

  King’s time back east coincided with the truce at Appomattox, the assassination of Lincoln, and the wrenching events of the immediate postwar era that marked the nation’s first tentative efforts at political reconstruction. The end of the Civil War would eventually trigger renewed public interest in the far West: Civil War veterans would head west to fight Indians, mining investors would look westward with renewed interest, the government would help subsidize the construction of a vast infrastructure of roads and rail lines. But in the fall of 1865, the federal government had not yet resumed its support of the sort of western exploration that had marked the antebellum years, and the financial picture for exploration in California remained bleak. Whitney had insufficient funds for his hoped-for survey of the California deserts, so to keep King and Gardiner busy over the winter he sent them to Arizona to help General Irvin McDowell survey the territory for possible military roads. King and Gardiner found the work frustrating, difficult, and dangerous, and when the enlistments of their military escorts expired, they gave it up.