Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  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.”79

  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?’ ”82

  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.”83 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.”84

  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.”85 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.”89 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?”90 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.”91

  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.”92 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.”93

  Women presented similar aesthetic distinctions. The “heavy ample” Spanish “donna” [sic] offered “a study of order and true womanly repose.”94 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.”95 She had a “hard, thin nature, all angles and stings.”96 King preferred more voluptuous types. As Henry Adams observed, “King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more robust.”97

  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.”98 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.”99

  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 t
he 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