Clarence King & His Friends

Clarence King & His Friends: On Mountaineering in the American West

by Matthew J. Green

B.A. in History and Political Science, May 2003, Culver-Stockton College

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

January 19, 2018

Thesis directed by

Richard Stott Professor of History

© Copyright 2018 by Matthew J. Green All rights reserved

ii Table of Contents

Thesis Manuscript………………………………..……………………………………..…1

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..63

iii Thesis Manuscript

Rossiter Raymond retained vivid memories of his visit to Clarence King’s field survey camp in the Wasatch Mountains. It was in the middle of the 1869 summer season, one of many King spent surveying the far west, and Raymond might have expected a dinner of jerky and cowboy coffee around a campfire. Instead, to his utter surprise, King dressed up to the hilt and offered him a seat in a formal dinner setting that, as Raymond recalled, was “served in a style which I had not found west of the Missouri.”1 This was classic King, the type of man who would conjure up the necessary infrastructure to treat a guest to a fine dining experience in a mountain wilderness. Even on the remote frontier of late nineteenth century North America, he would provide the best civilization had to offer. Of course, King had to find the means to transport such amenities, if he and his men were to have any such semblance of the finer things of life during weeks or months in the field. Decades afterwards, his men would fondly recall how well he led their survey teams and how his very appearance could lift their spirits through the worst of times in the remote mountains and barren deserts of the far west. The evidence is strong that his subordinates considered themselves his friends. They carried out extraordinary efforts while serving under him and remained dedicated to him for the rest of their lives.

King gained such confidence and commitment from others by setting the example himself. He dreamed up possibilities and then set to work like few other men to realize his dreams. King presents a remarkable example of what a man or woman can achieve with an unrestrained imagination and irrepressible will. On the other hand, Raymond’s

1 James D. Hague, ed. Clarence King Memoirs: The Helmet of Mambrino. (New York, 1904), 345.

1 simple anecdote of fine dining in a mountain camp is also part and parcel of a body of evidence calling attention to his apparent lack of judgment. In later life, King seemed to become unhinged, a rudderless soul chasing empty pursuits, a man fascinated by fantastically ridiculous figures such as Don Quixote, who he seemed to emulate. It is within this ill-defined structure, somewhere between the limits of the humanly possible and a phantom dreamscape, where we can best explore the meaning and significance of

Clarence King’s mountaineering, for it is here that he leaves the deepest impression.

King’s mountaineering is best understood within four distinct timeframes: his youth through his pioneering trek across the continent in 1863; his early days in

California from 1863-1866; his leadership of the King Survey, principally his years working in the field from 1867-1873; and, finally a mountaineering afterlife from 1874 through his death in December 1901. During his years of active mountaineering from

1863 through 1873, a typical year involved a long “season” of surveying lasting from late

Spring through early winter. Often the surveyors were driven from the mountains by the onset of a year’s first cold snap or a blizzard. Over the winter months, King and his surveyors wrote up extensive reports of their findings, went on leave, and prepared for the next season of field work. Adventure, more than mountaineering, best describes both his mountaineering afterlife and King’s youth.

Born Clarence Rivers King in 1842, he was raised in an old house in downtown

Newport, Rhode Island. Thurman Wilkins, King’s principal biographer, portrays a family environment that seems Old World and aristocratic, where bloodlines mattered and male relatives plied the China trade. Such endeavors kept his father James away—for all but eighteen months of King’s youth—working from a Canton trading house on the far side

2 of the world, where he died on the island of Amoy, or Xiamen, China when Clarence was only six. Therefore, the boy King developed close ties with the strong women in his life, and his mother Florence seems to have played a pivotal role encouraging King’s spirit of exploration and a competence in nature. As a youth, King went on several camping, climbing or river adventures in the Appalachian Mountains, particularly the Green

Mountains rising above Brattleboro, Vermont, often with his life-long friend James

Gardner, who like King left a rich historical record offering substantial journals, letters, or other written materials. Their trek together across the continent to California offers minimal mountaineering but much of the kind of adventuring that would help shape

King’s imagination and character.

King’s early days in California introduced him to big mountain expeditions exploring and surveying the Sierra Nevada range. Right away after reaching California in

1863, King got his first taste of mountaineering in the Northern Sierras on a trip north with William Brewer, the field leader for Josiah Whitney’s California Geological Survey.

They summitted Lassen Peak twice, likely the first summits of that southern Cascade

Range volcano. In 1864 King viewed and first identified the higher southern Sierra from

Mariposa and also charted the high peaks around Lake Tahoe. This was also the year of his epic push to explore the High Sierra crest region and his first two attempts to summit

Mount Whitney while with Brewer’s five-man expedition through the southern Sierra

Nevada range. In fact, it is instructive to note that King fell short of his ultimate goal of summitting Mount Whitney in his most famous feat of mountaineering, the epic five-day push up the Sierra Crest of July 1864, in which he topped out on nearby Mount Tyndall.

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Later that fall, under the orders of President Lincoln, King and Gardner conducted the first survey of Yosemite, where they were nearly trapped deep in the backcountry in the year’s first blizzard while attempting to summit Mount Clark. In 1866, King and

Gardner explored and surveyed the wild desert mountains of Arizona and experienced a close call with Apache Indians. That year the pair finally summitted Mount Clark and later, from a panoramic perch atop the Eastern Sierra escarpment, King and Gardner looked down on the Great Basin and dreamed up plans for a complete geographical and geological survey of the future route of the transcontinental railroad through that barren territory. By the mid-1860s, King already had significant mountaineering experience.

His ambition grew and he found a way to combine his experience with a profession as Director of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, often called the “King Survey,” which was immediately recognized as the major scientific endeavor the US government had ever undertaken. The King Survey involved extensive mountaineering in the rugged, largely mountainous land all along the new continental railway route, which was in the process of being built when he started. He also made the first discovery of glaciers within the United States while climbing Mount Shasta. The King Survey unfolded over a period of approximately thirteen years, but all of the active field work and mountaineering took place in the first seven years from 1867 through 1873. Through the years of King’s most active mountaineering from 1863-1873, several of his friends kept up an active correspondence with him. In particular, William Brewer kept detailed accounts of his experiences with King, and he wrote widely on a range of issues related to mountaineering, environmentalism, and survey work. Also, King’s close friend Gardner along with several other friends including Samuel Emmons, who were there right with

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King for much of these years, left letters and other writings which contribute substantially to our understanding of America’s mountaineering culture, which was only in its infancy during the 1860s and 1870s.

In the late 1870s, King and his survey men published a series of important scientific publications explaining their findings over years of hard labor in the western deserts and mountains. This valuable work catapulted King to his appointment as the first

Director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). However, this latter timeframe, in which he carried out the necessary academic writing to document his field surveying, represents a distinct transition from the mountaineering life he had known into the waning years of his life. His correspondence with non-climber friends like Henry Adams, the preeminent historian and descendant of Presidents, and John Hay, Secretary of State for

Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, offer unique insight into his character during later years.

In those later years, he ventured widely through Europe, the Caribbean, and back in the North American West, including many hundreds of miles by horse or mule through the mountains of Mexico. King’s transition away from mountaineering, then from government scientific work to a long life of wandering and adventure offers unique insights into his worldview and the cultural forces working on him. During these years he married an African American woman and raised five children with her in Brooklyn. One of 19th Century America’s true aristocrats, he lived a double life for decades by keeping this marriage and family a complete secret to all of his friends and family.

It is no small task to reconcile King’s secretive family life against the strength and vitality of friendships King maintained throughout his life. King was a distinct mountain

5 leader and a widely respected, even beloved, correspondent. Upon his death, his many influential friends collaborated to publish The Clarence King Memoirs. According to

James M. Shebl, editor of the most recent edition of King’s classic book Mountaineering the Sierra Nevada, this collaboration represents “one of the most remarkable tributes ever paid to any man living or dead, and an impressive monument to the memory of him who inspired it.”2 King established many of his greatest friendships during his years out west as a surveyor and mountaineer. These friendships were forged through shared hardship and solidified by mutual support in tough conditions. It is clear that King and his friends’ mountaineering produced no simple stories of pure self-reliance. Friendships were vital to

King’s success as a mountaineer, and the web of ties linking this small group of rugged mountaineers with each other and to the broader society offer unique perspectives into nineteenth century American culture.

The influential western historian William Goetzmann offers a definition of exploration which makes the concept accessible to far more than just rugged individuals operating on the edge of the unknown. “The words ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ are most often and most casually linked in the popular imagination simply as interchangeable synonyms for ‘adventure,’” writes Goetzmann. “But exploration is something more than adventure, and something more than discovery. Goetzmann thus makes exploration an extended process of discovery and rediscovery, and he distinguishes between having been somewhere and having explored it. King’s biographer Wilkins portrayed King in the manner of Goetzmann’s explorer: “Brilliant scientist as he was, he had also something of the character of a poet, of the debonair adventurer who goes up and down the world

2 Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (Yosemite, 1997), 274. Unless noted, all future citations of this book derive from this edition of Mountaineering.

6 seeking excitement or beauty, some new and vivid sensation, and, through the good fortune that attends such temperaments, finding what he sought by every roadside.” This openness to the possibilities of the world can produce many discoveries, of course, but often for the seeking to mean anything of substance, it will have to be done well, with skill and for some worthy purpose, and the timing of doing a thing matters, as well.3

As mountaineer, King offers the historian a portrait of a man who, seemingly without restraints on his imagination, expanded the limits of what was possible without ever escaping the certainty of his own limitations. The historical consensus of King is well-established as a kind of romantic but tragic character. The great historian of mountaineering, Francis Farquhar, wrote that “William Brewer, Clarence King, and John

Muir may well be considered the foremost of early explorers of the High Sierra.” In his introduction to King’s “Helmet of Mambrino,” a colorful short story of a trip through

Quixote’s Spanish countryside, Farquhar reels off a long list of evidence demonstrating

King’s unprecedented achievements and sheer force of personality. Then, feeling that

King’s past ought to have served as a guide to his future, or that the momentum of a lifetime of achievement ought to propel one only to greater and greater deeds, Farquhar wonders what had stopped King from doing even more. He mulls over King’s vast, lost potential: “What happened to Clarence King, then, or what impediment came to hinder the expression of his manifest genius?” Farquhar himself only hints at his belief that King had “played for too heavy stakes and had squandered his patrimony on the wrong cause.”

However, Farquhar does not dive into any great speculation as to King’s motivations, or

3 William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (Austin, 1993), xi, and Thurman Wilkins, Clarence King: A Biography (Albuquerque, 1988), 3.

7 what that wrong cause may have been, and settles on the familiar tale of decline and disintegration. 4

Perhaps the man who did more than any other to perpetuate King’s legacy as a man of vision and humility was Henry Adams, who may have met King as early as 1869 but later crossed paths with him in 1871 at Estes Park, Colorado, where they camped together and became close friends. Adams wrote that “Clarence King used to amuse him by mourning the narrow escape that nature had made in attaining perfection,” and Adams penned what is perhaps the most balanced of many memorable recollections of King that his many friends left behind:

(He) saw ahead at least one generation further than the text books. That he saw

right was a different matter. Since the beginning of time no man has lived who is

known to have seen right; the charm of King was that he saw what others did and

a great deal more… He had in him something of the Greek—a touch of

Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King alone existed in the world.

The risk for anyone like King is over-reaching for a vision that is not quite right, but

Adams offers us, from the perspective of a true friend, a full understanding of the brilliant yet deeply flawed individual that we have in Clarence King.5

In a series of pre-Civil letters to his lifelong friend James Gardner, King expresses some of his clearest, most distinctive views on relationships in business and politics. He

4 See Francis Farquhar, History of the Sierra Nevada (Berkeley, 1965), 189 and Clarence King, “The Helmet of Mambrino,” with an introduction by Francis Farquhar (San Francisco, 1938), ix-x. 5 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, Illustrated with Gravures by Samuel Chamberlain and with an Introduction by Henry Seidel Canby (New York, 1942), 251 and 290- 291.

8 placed great faith in individual responsibility and hope in the individual’s capacity for action. Without enough money to attend college, at least until his mother re-married a man of some means who funded King’s Yale education, King went into business in New

York City right out of high school. Anguishing over finding purpose in life, he disparaged those who incessantly pursued wealth, remarking that “I see so many men whose only end in life is to get rich and retire from business.” King brags of easy success in business, though he denies finding satisfaction in it. Like any independent-minded young man, he expresses a strong desire to make it in life on his own and was searching for a meaningful way.

In a letter of March 25, 1860, King offered one his clearest social and political statements, in which he argued in favor of both limited government and strong individual philanthropic radicalism. He voiced strong moral support for Wendell Phillips the abolitionist while simultaneously supporting Stephen Douglas’ states’ rights views. He tried to explain his somewhat contradictory views—powerful opposition to states’ rights combined with his strong abolitionist views—by explaining that he believed the people of the west would ultimately reject the expansion of slavery into the western territories, whereas the federal government would actually do more to protect the expansion of slavery by exerting its control there. He argued to keep the congress out of territorial sovereignty disputes and, summing up his view of the government, King stated that “it is like a firm, the states are the partners and the general government the sign, so to speak.”6

He held strong sympathies for local culture and individuals acting upon the wisdom of

6 See King letter to Gardner, Hartford, Sunday afternoon, Oct. 2nd and Monday the 3rd, 1859; King letter to Gardner, New York, Jan. 4, 1860; and King letter to Gardner, New York, March 25, 1860; Gardiner (James Terry) Papers, New York State Library, Albany.

9 experience, as he was keenly aware of own unassailable attachments to his family and the

New England culture of his upbringing. This led King to speak constantly in terms of pathos and comedy, especially for locals or natives who were often blind to the larger social and cultural forces at work. “What a man is,” wrote King, “is of far less consequence than what he is becoming.”7

A man so orientated on individual responsibility, yet with such a great capacity for friendship, King could imagine great human potential emerging from the relationships between leaders and communities of like-minded individuals. Although King seems to have often felt stifled by the infamous Gilded Age culture greed and corruption, these are exactly the traits that King’s greatest and most important critic Wallace Stegner leveled against him. Stegner considers overcivilized easterners like him to be generally unprepared to face the unique problems of western life. He roundly criticizes King for ultimately choosing personal interest over the public good or science. It is Stegner’s opinion that “science and Reason have always been on the side of Utopia; only the cussedness of the human race has not,” to which King might have replied that “if being diametrically opposed to the United States is to be a Chinese, I am one.” Disillusioned after years of rigorous government scientific work and active mountaineering in the

American West, King’s productive years would come to a close far too early, which led him to pen a devastating critique of an over-worked, over-civilized society in an 1873 letter to Gardner:

I am convinced that science goes on and progresses at the expense of those

absorbed in her pursuit. That men’s souls are burned as fuel for the enginery of

7 King, Mountaineering, 272.

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scientific progress. And that in this busy materialistic age the greatest danger is

that of total absorption in our profession. We defeat our own end by failing to

refresh the mind by other subjects. We give ourselves to the Juggernaut of the

intellect.8

It seems that we do King a disservice if we ignore what he wrote and instead read too much into his decision to leave government science for private business. More than any of his peers, King seems to have been particularly aware of the dual dangers of greed in business and power in government.

King’s biographers have told the story of his wide-ranging adventures—buffalo hunts, repeated epic attempts to climb Mount Whitney, tracking a big grizzly bear into its own lair, or his many travels in exotic places from Panama to Cuba and from Mexico to

Hawaii. Yet it is difficult to find a comprehensive account of King’s mountaineering in the historical record. Although he appears in most histories of American mountaineering or of the Great Western Surveys, his mountaineering usually serves as background to his vital leadership in establishing government science on a strong footing. Of his legacy in that area, King had full confidence, as he put it in a 1901 letter to another of his lifelong friends Samuel Emmons: “What I did in and from Washington had the effect of ending a period of chaos in national geology, of founding a new and higher order of science in

America.”9 Written in 1901, within six months of his death and two decades after he

8 Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, with an Introduction by Bernard De Voto. (New York, 1992), 43, 243-246; King letter to John Hay, Jan. 1887, Hay (John) Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI; see also Wilkins, Clarence King, 351; and King letter to Gardner, February 15, 1873, Gardiner Papers and Wilkins, Clarence King, 187. 9 King to Emmons, August 29, 1901, Box 30, Samuel Franklin Emmons papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. and Wilkins, Clarence King, 242.

11 resigned as the first Director of the USGS, these words capture what King must have considered his legacy.

However, over a century later, it may be possible to offer that here is a case where

King’s imagination failed him, for what he did in and from the mountains of the

American West had a similar effect in American mountaineering. As Maurice Isserman points out in Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering, Josiah

Whitney, Brewer, and King, through their early mountaineering with the California

Geological Survey, clearly established a “strong and ongoing connection between the world of higher education, particularly the sciences, and that of mountaineering.”10 This is an important historical and philosophical connection that links exploration with mountaineering, and despite the well-documented history of King’s life, there is no history focusing in detail on his mountaineering. There are gaps in the narrative of King’s life story, where his mountaineering remains either absent or unexamined. This includes many of his field activities in Nevada and Utah over long survey seasons, but in particular there is little analysis of the latter decades of his life when he frequented mountain ranges across the North American West from Mexico to the Klondike. King’s later life certainly leaves much room for mystery, from his mountaineering to his family life and his cultural mindset. We can improve our understanding of both Clarence King and the nineteenth century culture, politics, and society in which he lived by examining the record of his mountaineering.

King’s interest in nature emerged very early in his youth. When Clarence King was only seven years old, he guided his mother Florence on a mile-long walk over snow-

10 Maurice Isserman, Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering (New York, 2016), 88.

12 covered fields to show her a fossil fern he had discovered. His mother encouraged his curiosity and dedicated herself to his learning and development. She once expressed to

John Hay, one of King’s close friends later in life, that “I am always pleased to write about Clarence. My life, with its variations, has been trained to that one theme.”11

Remarkably, she seems also to have avoided over-protective tendencies, instead trusting him follow his imagination and instincts into uncertain terrain. Her encouragement helped instilled a vital, discovery-oriented outlook in King from a young age, and

Wilkins remarked that the boy King seemed to possess down to his very core “a need for un-restrained activity.”12 As a teen he had formed close friendships with a group of schoolmates and they ventured out on at least two remarkable trips into the Appalachian

Mountains together.

In the summer of 1859 the seventeen-year old King spent a week in the Green

Mountains of Vermont with three friends, Dan Dewey along with James Gardner and his brother Eugene Gardner. Both King and Gardner kept journals recording their trip into the mountains. The four started out on July 27 from the town of Brattleboro, Vermont on a twenty-mile trek, followed the modern-day Route 9 from Brattleboro, situated along the

Connecticut River, to Wilmington at the base of the Green Mountains. King’s mother and her new husband George Howland made the first leg of the trip with them, going as far as

Marlboro carrying their backpacks in a horse-drawn cart. In Marlboro, King remarked that they met a bread man who would be taking his cart along their route and hired him to

11 Florence Howland (nee King) to John Hay, New York, June 11, 1882, John Hay Papers, John Hay Library. 12 Wilkins, Clarence King, 17-19.

13 carry their packs the rest of the day. Saying goodbye to his mother and shouldering their hunting rifles, King and his friends proceeded on their long trek.13

At several high points along the road, King remarked on the scenery, principally picturesque wooded hills. “When we reached the summit of Marlboro hill,” wrote King,

“we sat down under an apple tree and admired the majestic view, a fine mingling of cultivated land and wilderness.” Then, at the last hill before reaching Wilmington around five o’clock that afternoon, King celebrated making his first sight of Haystack Mountain, a prominent peak in the Green Mountains above the town of Wilmington. Gardner frequently commented on the beautiful scenery of their route along brooks and streams, with occasional vistas and sights of wildlife including a “perfectly white hawk sailing near us.” That night in Wilmington, which seemed to be flourishing, the boys stopped at a place called the Patches Tavern. “Here we furnished ourselves with sugar, maple syrup, and supplies,” wrote Gardner, adding that they “rubbed (our) feet with whiskey. Our last sleep in a bed.” The next morning King stated they strapped on their heavy packs, and

“looking with our French caps for all the world like a band of Zouaves, three miles we tracked up the west branch of the Deerfield (River) through lonely wild and picturesque valleys.” They stayed the second night at a place called Green Mountain House. There they made the acquaintance of an old gentleman, who, although he had had his leg amputated only two weeks before, was riding the stagecoach alone to return home.

Early on the third day, July 29, the four boys reconnoitered up the Deerfield River valley and found an ideal location, situated near the junction of trout fishing streams,

13 For the narrative of King and Gardner’s Green Mountain expedition, see “Biographical Papers, Notebooks, Private, Camp Forester, West Brattleboro, Vermont, 1859,” King (Clarence) Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library and “Notes of Green Mountain Expedition, July 27-August 5, 1859, West Brattleboro, Vermont,” Gardner Papers.

14 where they decided to set up their camp. They spent much of that day building a small log cabin for their fishing camp from trees, bark, boughs, and other materials from the forest. Gardner describes the day’s work in fine detail, explaining how they notched the logs for their walls and fitted branches and boughs to secure the roof, leaving a hole to let out smoke from their fire pit. It is remarkable again to consider that they must not have known of camping tents, and also that there simply were no mountain parks or campgrounds or cabins to rent, but that the four youths carved out and built a temporary home in the mountains. According to Gardner, nights in the shelter were chilly but they kept a fire going, with one of the boys invariably getting up to put a log or two on the fire if the flames had died down. They kept a low fire going for much of the time to keep away swarms of mosquitoes, as well.

For the next six days the boys fished up and down the streams, hunted birds, or remained in the cabin eating, reading or singing. One day, August 1, King and Gardner hiked out to the nearest post office and sent letters informing their family where they were staying. On August 2 they visited another party of boys camped a little way up and across the stream and all drank coffee together. Then on August 4, King’s mother showed up at the Green Mountain House with another woman, Anna, and their husbands, and the boys met them there for lunch. “Miss Anna made most delicious coffee in a little stone pitcher called a Dutch maid. It was refreshing to eat good things once more in good style,” remarked Gardner. “Afterwards we took the ladies to our camp, while Dan and

Clare went out to catch some trout. The ladies called it a comfortless hole and were very much astonished to find that we were not in a nicely cleared wood with pretty paths leading to the hut, with a little stream dashing by.”

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That afternoon they started back and were all caught in a light rain. Still, they decided to climb the mountain directly behind the Green Mountain House. Gardner related that “a strong wind was blowing the clouds over the mountain tops, and we ourselves stood at times in the clouds. As we approached the foot of the precipice a few sheep stood on the very brink.” That evening at the bar room of the Green Mountain

House, an old colonel read a story out loud to everyone by the fire, and the boys were glad to again sleep in a bed. The next day they started back on the road to Wilmington but planned to summit Haystack Mountain with the aid of a local guide. Gardner described in detail the last section of their climb from Haystack Pond to the summit:

It was so indistinctly marked that it would have been impossible to find without a

guide. The mountain is several miles long but the peak is on the southern end. I

took charge of Miss A. Clare took care of his mother Mrs. King… one walking

behind each lady to keep her skirts from catching on stones and sticks. Some

places we had to go up perpendicular rocks four and five feet and the greater part

of the way we were obliged to pull them more or less. We reached the summit at

last after half an hour of great labor. The top of the peak is cleared. It is bare rock.

The view is vast, beyond all description, majestic. For miles and miles the green

hills of Vermont roll away into the distance… It is impossible to describe such a

scene. Nothing can surpass in beauty, at least, the Vermont landscape. All green

hills and valleys, no plain; no sluggish streams, but leaping, laughing brooks and

rapid rivers.

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Gardner’s trip report ends at summit, and it is truly a remarkable tale of a week in the mountains, something that now has become for many Americans a rather commonplace kind of summer camping trip. However, this Green Mountain adventure was a new and rare kind of mountain tourism experience, at least for the vast majority of Americans in

1859.

Isserman reported that mountain tourism began in the Catskills of New York State and the White Mountains of Vermont in the 1820s. The Catskill Mountain House opened for visitors in 1824, and Ethan Allen Crawford, arguably the nation’s first mountain guide, cut the Crawford Trail up to the summit of Vermont’s Mount Washington around

1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau climbed mountains in the

Northeast from the 1830s to the 1850s, but aside from these nobles of early American nature literature, few Americans climbed mountains for pleasure in the early nineteenth century. King’s pioneering efforts as a mountaineer may well have begun here.14

The King family vacation required a long trek of well over twenty miles over rough roads and trails just to get into the Green Mountains. Then, probing up the river valley, they cut out a living space, and without any tents the boys built their log cabin from scratch. This was pretty hard work, and as for Haystack Mountain, there was no trail up but the whole party summitted and reveled in the view they gained at the peak. One suspects that King’s mother Florence, who with her friend Ann summited along with the boys, played a big role in nurturing King’s competence in nature. If King had not before developed a true appreciation of the mountains before this trip, he surely gained it here, and in the years ahead Gardner and King would share many more summits far higher and

14 Isserman, Continental Divide, 44-49, 56-65.

17 a long way from the Green Mountains. Later that Fall of 1859, Dewey and King hiked up a small rise they called Pine Hill near Hartford, Connecticut, and King reminisced in a letter to Gardner that “walks on Sunday to Pine Hill are an interesting remembrance of

Brattleboro, and the calm deep enjoyment of them made a beautiful contrast to the more exciting adventure of some of our week-day doings.”15

Two years later in July 1861, Dan Dewey and King made a second trip to

Haystack Mountain. This time King and Dewey climbed up and camped on the ground in a sheltered spot near Haystack Pond, just below the mountain’s summit. Dewey described hunting a wild boar, which King chased into a rocky hold and punched it to get the animal to run out, at which point he also downed it for their meal that evening. King described a beautiful sunset of many colors, from the green valley to the darkening sky, and as the shadows crept up and twilight came on he related that “a strange foreboding feeling seemed to fill all and the perfect silence was very peculiar.”16 In this observation, during the only other recorded trip King made to the mountains before heading west, the nineteen-year old showed that he was beginning to appreciate the way he responded to the beauty and the foreboding of the mountains.

While attending Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, King played numerous sports including track and field, skating, boxing, baseball and rowing. After graduating in 1862, a youth with great intelligence and one of few students in the nation to have earned a practical new scientific degree, he seemed to be casting about looking for a meaningful occupation. With the same core of friends, including Gardner, he made a summer sailing

15 King letter to Gardner, Hartford, November 25, 1859 and Dewey letter to Gardner, Hartford, December 5, 1859, Gardner Papers. 16 Dewey and King letter to Gardner, Camp Ethan Allen, July 28, 1861, Gardner Papers.

18 adventure up Lake Champlain into Canada. While attempting to cross the border, they had to write official statements that they were university students exempt from the draft.

In its second year, the Civil war was ravaging the nation’s psyche with its violence.

King’s close friend Dan Dewey, companion during those two memorable trips up into the

Green Mountains, went along with them on the waterborne trip before joining the army.

Wilkins records King saying that “if he lives, he will make a great man,” but his friend would be killed in battle in Louisiana before King went west in early 1863.17

With the Civil War raging, King would worry over his leadership skills, pondering why leadership is so essential and how he might thrive or wither under pressure. This call to lead in battle went out to all fighting-age men during the war, but

King had been raised according to the pacifist abolitionist sentiments of his female guardians. He doubted the morality of killing even as he bristled at the thought that he lacked the mental fortitude to meet any danger or death. “I would not quail before death for my land but the act would crucify in me many of my noblest impulses. It is like tearing my soul in sunder,” King wrote to Gardner, adding that “Constantly you force it on me that I don’t want to lead men, that mine is not that kind of nature. Now Jim deference to you and your judgment, but I do want to lead men. It will be my life’s object.”18 King told Gardner in the summer of 1862 that he had gone through another internal struggle about joining the army but had finally decided “to keep myself for the future,” and that he was considering going off to Europe. In retrospect, King faced a choice, that he would fight or he would flee from the eastern culture that was warring

17 Grocery receipt to James T. Gardiner, August 1, 1862; Certificate for King, Gardner, et al traveling to Canada, August 11, 1862; Gardiner letter to Mother Anne Gardner, Saint Lawrence River, August 14, 1862; Dewey letter to King July 31, 1862; and Wilkins, Clarence King, 36-39. 18 King letter to Gardner, March 18, 1862, Gardner Papers.

19 with itself. He was far too active of a man, in thought and imagination, to stay in place without doing his part. In the year after he graduated from Yale, King would struggle with a growing tension between duty and his intuition, or more broadly between his understanding of science and art. In his study of John Ruskin and John Tyndall, this tension manifests itself in the theory of the sublime.

King struggled all of his life to reconcile his awareness of the great benefits of modern science with the ancient lessons human beings had learned through imagination and intuition. He became one of the nineteenth century’s keenest observers and interpreters of natural phenomena. “Yet this same Clarence King was a man who had fundamental doubts about the nature of his endeavor,” argued the art historian Roger

Stein, “questioning whether his intellectual effort was not destroying his capacity to see nature with the full emotional and imaginative capacities.”19 As a young Yale student,

King chose to pursue scientific studies, breaking a long family tradition of studying the classics at Yale, because he was repulsed by the tendency of intellectuals of his day to lean heavily on classical ideas to frame their worldview. At the same time, King was an ingenious man who drew deep inspiration from nature and his own intuition. “I think you did not understand my decided radicalism and may have imparted a wrong motive to it,” he wrote Gardner during one intense semester of study in college, adding that “as far as I can tell it was that I had an impossible ideal of attainable right and was outrageous if I did not find it realized.”20 A passionate intellectual, often torn between his rational mind and his imagination, King appreciated Ruskin’s description of the sublime—aware of

19 Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge, 1967), 172-73. 20 King letter to Gardner, Yale, October 10th, 1861, Gardner Papers.

20 limitation and of death yet courageously seeking greatness of thought and feeling. “We cannot reason of these things,” wrote Ruskin. “But this I know—and this may by all men be known—that no good or lovely thing exists in the world without its corresponding darkness.”21

In his “Composition on Clouds and Skies,” King’s friend Gardner wrote a remarkable, simple sketch of the sublime in contrasting a day-to-day thing such as how people react to the weather. A clear blue sky stirs everyone with any semblance of hope to action, but one with few responsibilities will, on the darker days, feel extraordinary despair or lose sight of hope. “Between these two extremes there are an infinite number of varieties. Man stands first amazed at the change, and then abashed that one short day of darkness could have brought down his hopes so low,” wrote Gardner, but he concludes that “hope springs eternal in the human breast.”22 These two young Ruskinians—Gardner and King—took a serious interest in balancing their rational and emotional leanings.

Their growing awareness of the potential to think creatively in new scientific endeavors offered the potential for great responsibilities, and John Tyndall’s writings set an example

King needed to combine a love of the mountains with scientific seeking.

Tyndall was perhaps the first scientist to study alpine glacial phenomena in detail.

Reading the introduction to his classic first book, Glaciers of the Alps & Mountaineering in 1861, one gathers the distinct impression that Tyndall takes pains to justify his rationale for studying alpine glaciers in the first place. He describes the process of scientific discovery quite clearly. After making a series of unexpectedly useful geologic observations at a quarry of how rocks split cleanly into slabs, Tyndall instantly perceived

21 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume IV (New York, 1857), 366. 22 Gardner, “Composition on Clouds and Skies,” Gardner Papers.

21 how ice could affect stone mountains similarly. He wrote that “I quitted the place with that feeling of intellectual discontent which, however unpleasant it may be for a time, is very useful as a stimulant, and perhaps as necessary to the true appreciation of knowledge as a healthy appetite is to the enjoyment of food.” He concluded, “But no man knows when he commences the examination of a physical problem into what new and complicated mental alliances it may lead him.” Here he explains to his reader how, once one begins looking into a problem, he or she might discover far more than ever anticipated, which is his foundational rationale for scientific exploration. King read

Tyndall shortly before he went west and must have begun to see the connection between his scientific and artistic sides, which Tyndall and Ruskin in their own ways made apparent—it is in the seeking.23

Over the winter of 1862-63, King attended a Louis Agassiz lecture at Harvard on glaciology and had decided that he would be a geologist. While still a student at Yale,

King had pored over Yale Professor James Dwight Dana’s reports from the United States

Exploring Expedition of 1838 to the South Seas, the Antarctic, and California. The success of that expedition inspired the formation of numerous state scientific surveys, including Whitney’s Geological Survey of California. As early as the summer of 1862,

King had written one of his old Yale professors, George Brush, requesting his influence in getting him a place on Whitney’s survey. Then, in the fall of 1862, King listened to

Professor Brush read a letter from his future Whitney Survey colleague and friend

William Brewer, who vividly described their first summit of Mount Shasta, which was thought to be the highest mountain in America. Brewer’s Shasta narrative finally lit the

23 Tyndall, Glaciers of the Alps & Mountaineering in 1861 (New York, 1906), 3-9 and Hague, Clarence King Memoirs, 319.

22 spark in King to go west and climb his own mountains—after Brush finished reading,

King simply stated, “That settles it.”24

In the fall of 1862, Gardner and King rented a room together in New York City.

Gardner was pursuing law studies and King considering a career in business. Gardner wrote to his mother how they both dreamed of having a comfortable home life, but

Gardner was growing ill from overwork and suffering from anxiety. King had long been eager for a change of scenery and asked Gardner to go west with him.25 By Spring of

1863 both had had enough of the tensions and strife of eastern wartime society. Dreams of domestic tranquility would be put off for many years while they explored the mountains and deserts of the far west.

King and Gardner set out overland together for California in the spring of 1863.

Both of their journals were lost in a fire within days after they arrived in Gold City,

Nevada. As a result, the only record of their overland journey was transcribed over sixty years later, from an oral interview with J.T. Redman, one of the teamsters on their wagon train. Before even getting out of Kansas, King and Gardner were arrested by surly Kansas pro-slavery militiamen, who accused the young New Yorkers of kidnapping slaves.

Fortunately, the wagon train leader vouched for their good character and gained their release. Redman described passing Indian tribes all along their way, and he recalled one uneasy night he and Gardner spent far away from the main train with Indians, who had guided them and their animals to a much-need watering hole. King later told his friends a dramatic tale of his buffalo hunt on the plains, when he killed a bull, which gored and

24 Samuel Franklin Emmons, Biographical Memoir of Clarence King, 1842-1901 (Washington, 1909), 35 and Wilkins, Clarence King, 40-43. 25 Gardiner letters to mother Anne, New York, October 21 and Dec 21, 1862, also Jan 31, 1863, Gardner Papers.

23 killed his horse in its death throe. The dying horse toppled onto his leg, injuring him slightly, and in one version of the story King related that a huge buffalo herd stampeded around him as he lay trapped under the animal. In Salt Lake City they were lectured by

Brigham Young who asked that his people be left in peace and beseeched the travelers to

“give an Indian a biscuit instead of a bullet.”26

After crossing the Great Basin via the Humboldt River route, King and Gardner soon lost all of their money and belongings in the Gold Hill fire. They worked for a short time in a quartz mill to earn some money for the trip over the Sierra Nevada, which they began on foot before hitching a ride with a friendly teamster. From Placerville on the western slope, the pair decided to head for Sacramento and catch a river ferry to

Sacramento. They stepped onto the ferry in mid-September, when King and Gardner made their fortuitous meeting with William Brewer, who was near the end of a long season surveying up and down California. He had started south that spring and made it as far as Walker Pass without crossing over, then moved steadily up the western slope of the

Sierras and into Yosemite. From the valley he crossed the mountains over Tioga Pass and down to Mono Lake. He inspected the mines at the boomtown of Aurora before returning back over Sonora Pass. He kept north and went over Carson Pass to Lake Tahoe and had then gone on via Squaw Valley to Sacramento where he boarded the ferry.27 Considering his long journey, to have come down from the mountains so as to meet King and Gardner seems a remarkable act of fate. Brewer’s long 1863 trek was quite a feat of mountain

26 J. T. Redman, “Reminiscences and Experiences on My Trip Across the Plains to California Sixty-One Years Ago When I drove Four Mules to a Covered Wagon.” Ayer (Edward E.) Collection, The Newberry Library, 1-6. 27 William Henry Brewer, Such a Landscape! A Narrative of the 1864 California Geological Survey Exploration of Yosemite, Sequoia & King’s Canyon from the Diary, Field Notes, Letters & Reports of William Henry Brewer with an Introduction, Notes & Photographs by William Alsup (Yosemite, 1999), 16.

24 exploration in its own right, but Brewer was not finished for the year. He was only returning for a brief stop in San Francisco to confer with Whitney, gather supplies, and find a new assistant, as his others had all fallen out on the long trail he had followed through the mountains. King eagerly volunteered to work as Brewer’s assistant, a decision that began an epic stretch of mountaineering.28

The record of his mountaineering from 1863 to 1866 represents a significant departure from the past in important ways. Farquhar, the prominent mountaineering historian, wrote that “Clarence King was almost alone among Americans of his day in having the desire to climb remote and difficult peaks. His actual accomplishments in that field entitle him to respect as an eminent pioneer in American mountaineering.”29 King and Brewer did not long delay in getting back into the mountains. After Brewer introduced him and Gardner to Josiah Whitney in San Francisco, King and Brewer started out on a meandering journey into northern California, surveying the mining areas and mapping the region’s topography. The pair started up the Central Valley before ascending the Western slope of the Sierra in the Plumas mining area. They discovered Jurassic Age fossils near Genesee Valley, reported in detail on the mining and agricultural prospects of the northern Sierra, and described river courses, lakes, and springs throughout the area.30

Brewer’s primary objective was to scale Lassen Peak and—carrying barometers, compasses, levels and transits to the summit—to survey the surrounding topography.

This big mountain expedition introduced King to the methods of exploring and surveying

28 See David Dickason, “Clarence King's First Western Journey,” Huntington Library Quarterly 7 (1943), 71-87. 29 Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (New York, 1935), 17. 30 Josiah D. Whitney, Geology. Volume I: Report of Progress and Synopsis of the Field-Work, from 1860 to 1864. Published by Authority of the Legislature of California, 1865. (Philadelphia, 1865), 305-311.

25 western mountain ranges. Brewer and King were also the first men known to summit

Lassen Peak, a prominent volcanic mountain over 10,000 feet high. They first summitted on September 26 but views were obscured by dust and smoke. Then on September 29, they started again for the summit a two o’clock in the morning and reached the peak before sunrise. King describes a “view of unsurpassed grandeur” and gained from the summit his first views of the symmetrical volcanic cone of Mount Shasta, the very mountain that had drawn him west. The two men stayed on the peak for much of the day and made numerous topographical and geological observations of the surrounding landscape. Wilkins reports Brewer’s impressions of that day: “Although I have often reached great altitudes, that day stands out in my memory as one of the most impressive of my life.” King was hooked. While in the area, he drew a sketch of Lassen’s Peak that

Whitney would later publish in his influential report, Geology.31

After a taking a circuitous route north and west to Crescent City on the Pacific

Coast, King caught a stagecoach back to San Francisco, while Brewer remained for a time surveying the mines of that region. Whitney quickly sent King to survey the

Mariposa region just outside of Yosemite. He would spend much of the winter season surveying the area and would also measure altitudes of the high points around Lake

Tahoe, although little details remain of his activities there. In his spare time or on

Sundays, King regularly climbed nearby Mount Bullion, which he called “my Sunday mountain,” and in a December letter to Brewer, he reported that from Bullion’s summit he could identify mountains in the southern Sierra that appeared to be the highest in the

31 Whitney, Geology, 312-317.

26 range. His observations planted the seed that would produce their famous 1864 exploration into the High Sierra.32

Whitney reported to the legislature that the scale of the California survey was so great that it would require many years to complete with their level of manpower and funding. He pointed to the particularly rugged and generally unknown character of the southern portion of the range, remarking that “this fact, coupled with the circumstances that, unless explored during this season by the Geological Survey, this region might long remain a blank on the map of California.” Whitney reported that this “led to the organization of a small party, whose object should be to make as complete a reconnaissance of this portion of the Sierra as their limited time and means would permit.”33 It certainly does seem a daunting task for five men to survey the immense

Sierra Nevada range, and Whitney’s statement contributes in no small measure to an appreciation of the burden of responsibility the survey men carried.

An interesting bit of controversy arose between Brewer and King in later years as to who first sighted the highest peaks in the southern Sierra, and by all accounts Brewer seems to have had the worst of it. In an 1872 letter to King, Brewer reviewed King’s book Mountaineering, where King described getting a first glimpse of the southern peaks.

Brewer commented that for three years he and Whitney had been aware of higher mountains in the southern Sierra and that the idea of going to the southern Sierra in 1864 was not King’s original idea. Brewer points out that all had worked equally hard on the big southern Sierra trip of 1864: “You worked for the love of it, but precisely so did we

32 King letter to Brewer, Bear Valley, December 18, 1863, Brewer (William H.) Correspondence, Manuscripts & Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven; Whitney, Geology, 223-228; and King, Mountaineering,186-190. 33 Whitney, Geology, 364-365.

27 all. Cotter was the only man on salary during the whole latter part of the trip.”34 The reader can sympathize with Brewer’s sensitivity on the matter. Brewer had crisscrossed

California from the Coastal Range to Mount Shasta, up and down the Sierras and the great San Joaquin Valley for nearly four whole seasons before King had arrived, only to have missed seeing the highest mountains in the lower 48 states, indeed in all of North

America with the exception of five volcanic peaks in Mexico and numerous higher peaks far to the north in the Yukon and Alaska. “I have counted up my traveling in the state,”

Brewer stated as he departed California at the end of 1864. “It amounts to: horseback,

7,564 miles; on foot, 3,101 miles; public conveyance, 4,440 miles—total, 15,105 miles.

Surely a long trail!”35

Brewer’s record of exploration was excellent. However, during his Mariposa survey in the late fall of 1864, King was very active in climbing his Sunday Mountain, and with his sharp perception, this allowed him the opportunity to first observe the highest peaks in the Sierra, which he had explicitly described to Brewer in his December

1863 letter, and Whitney specifically credits King: “The glimpses of the high peaks of this portion of the Sierra, obtained during the clear winter weather, from Mount Bullion, on the Mariposa Estate, by Mr. King, had led him to the belief that here were the most elevated summits of the range.” There seems little doubt that King had first identified the highest peaks and urged the survey to go there. Nonetheless, Brewer was the ideal field leader for the difficult 1864 expedition.36

34 Letter from Brewer to King, New Haven, February 25, 1872, Brewer Correspondence. 35 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 99. 36 King letter to Brewer, December 18, 1863, Brewer Papers; Whitney, Geology, 365; and King, Mountaineering, 23.

28

At this point, for a second time in as many years, King essentially saved his great friend Gardner from the ills of a frenetic urban pace of life. In early 1863, he had persuaded Gardner to leave his anxieties behind in New York to go west and now again he helped secure him a place on the 1864 High Sierra expedition. When King had gone north with Brewer to Lassen Peak, Gardner had remained in San Francisco and soon gained employment with the U.S. Topographical Engineers. He seems to have done outstanding work in building up harbor defenses during that time of war, although he also suffered again from the anxieties of overwork. “By the middle of the week I found myself hopelessly engrossed in the cares of work,” Gardner wrote to his mother. “Then Jesus came over the dark waters and stilling the restless brain, He brought me his peace.”

Gardner resigned in Spring 1864 after about six months because he refused to work on the Sabbath and was preparing to return to the east. However, he gladly accepted the invitation to join the survey expedition to the High Sierra and seems to have been uniquely disposed for life in the field.37

In a great treasure of western storytelling, Gardner told his mother Anne of their overland journey, spinning a pioneering yarn of pleasure and gratitude in the face of hardship and uncertainty. “Before we left the Plains we had become so fascinated with the life and so interested in the vast loneliness of those deserts, so at home in the little caravan,” explained Gardner, “that I would gladly have turned around and traveled right back over the same road.” He offers informed commentary on the benefits King and him obtained during their overland trip—growing in their knowledge of nature, broadening

37Gardner letters to mother Anne, San Francisco, September 17 and November 7, 1863, Gardner Papers and James Gregory Moore, King of the 40th Parallel: Discovery in the American West (Stanford, 2006), 56 and 73.

29 their intellect in the wide-open spaces, and feeling new health and vigor in general.

Clearly his whole attitude had improved when outdoors, when compared to his anxiety- drenched letters of New York City and San Francisco. Of the mountains, Gardner offered that “most emigrants draw a sigh of relief when they see the dark peaks of the Sierra

Nevada cutting the evening sky; but to us it was like parting with old friends for new ones.” Here Gardner referred to vast prairie, barren desert, and soaring mountain as friends, though he acknowledged that few overland travelers saw these environmental terrors with his sublime perspective. “From what I saw I should think that most people would not get very much pleasure since they are in a measure dead to the joys of Nature and natural life and very much annoyed by discomforts to which they are not used,”

Gardner observed, and he can only conclude that “There is in this journey a great distinction between Pleasure and Profit.” With that he finished his account of their overland journey, an extraordinary insight into the privileges reserved for those who are competent in nature.38

The 1864 field party of five men included the highly experienced and competent field leader Brewer, Charles F. Hoffman, chief topographer; Gardner as assistant surveyor; King as assistant geologist; and Richard “Dick” Cotter, whom King calls “our man of all work, to whom science already owes its debts” and Whitney described as “an indomitable mountain-climber, whose services were of great value in more than one branch of the work.”39 This would be Brewer’s last expedition as the chief field surveyor for the California Geological Survey, as he would soon accept a professorship at Yale and depart the west by November.

38 Gardner letter to mother Anne, San Francisco, September 11, 1863, Gardner Papers. 39 King, Mountaineering, 23 and Whitney, Geology, 365-366.

30

The party set out from San Francisco on May 24 and, from Visalia, began ascending the western slope of the Sierra Nevada by June 8. Brewer and King both made keen observations of many natural phenomena and of the people they met along the way, including the Big Trees, the Sequoia and Redwood groves, which King describes as

“monuments of living antiquity, trees that begin to grow before the Christian era.” The party also encountered “Digger” Indians, a pair of hunters, four Mexican herders with thousands of cattle in the mountain meadows, and a grizzly cub with a huge mother bear they estimated at 900 pounds, a sight unseen in modern California where grizzlies no longer roam. Brewer had decided not to travel or work on the Sabbath, stating that “I will not use myself up as I did last summer,” a decision which left them some time to read, relax, and ascend additional peaks one day out of each week, and on such days some romantic sensibilities come out in their enjoyment of the rugged, beautiful mountain scenery.40

The party was mule packing, traveling light and sleeping out in the open, which produced some extraordinary discomforts at times, including unexpected cold of sixteen degrees at night and even a snowstorm. “You cannot imagine how uncomfortable it is without any shelter,” observed Brewer after the storm. “The boys got back wet and numb with the cold. I had made a big kettle of soup, which was pronounced an eminent success.” For some weeks, the party had aimed for the prominent peak on the high ridgeline visible ahead of them now known as the Great Western Divide, which they came to believe was the highest point in the range. King even remarked that he took some teasing from the other party members when no higher, snowbound peaks appeared.

40 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 23-26, and King, Mountaineering, 24-43.

31

However, on July 2, Brewer and Hoffman ascended the peak and returned astonished at what they had seen—a far higher ridge still further beyond across a deep canyon. Brewer described the scene beyond the peak, which the party named Mount Brewer in his honor:

The view was yet wilder than we have ever seen before. We were not on the

highest peak, although we were a thousand feet higher than we anticipated any

peaks were… Such a landscape! A hundred peaks in sight over thirteen thousand

feet—many very sharp—deep canyons, cliffs in every direction rivaling

Yosemite, sharp ridges almost inaccessible to man, on which human foot has

never trod—all combined to produce a view the sublimity of which is rarely

equaled, one which few are privileged to behold.41

In his classic book Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, King describes his thoughts and feelings—a combination of fear, oppression, and what can only be called wonder—which came over him upon hearing of the terrain, which he had only glimpsed months earlier from his Sunday mountain but was now just beyond the nearby Divide:

Brewer and Hoffman were old climbers, and their verdict of impossible oppressed

me as I lay awake thinking of it; but early the next morning I made up my mind,

and, taking Cotter aside I asked him an easy manner whether he would like to

penetrate the terra incognita with me at the risk of our necks, provided Brewer

should consent. In a frank, courageous tone he answered after his usual mode,

‘Why not?’42

41 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 30-35 and Whitney, Geology, 371. 42 King, Mountaineering, 46-47.

32

King’s respect for Brewer was such that he would submit to his judgment, yet he had in his mind resolved to try his strength and character against nature and the mountains.

After nearly a month of rough mountain travel already behind them, the five-man team had successfully extended their knowledge of terra incognita well beyond previous limits and had positively identified the 14,000-foot summit ridge of the High Sierra for the first time. Perhaps this was enough success, but King proposed to try to an unprecedented two-man push for the High Sierra. “King insists on footing it and I have consented,” Brewer stated, adding that it was only “against my judgement to let him and

Dick try it. They are preparing to start in the morning. Long and animated has been the discussion, and the matter has been discussed in all its aspects.”43 King attributed

Brewer’s consent to a true love of science. Early on July 4 four men set out for a notch below the summit of newly-christened Mount Brewer where King and Cotter would attempt to pass over the Divide. Gardner started up carrying King’s pack and Brewer carried Cotter’s to ease their burdens for at least this first ascent. King and Cotter carried just one blanket each, minimal food (bread, beans, venison), a cooking pot, canteen, and

Bowie knife, and necessary equipment (compass, pocket level, barometer, wet and dry thermometers, rope, notebooks), approximately 40 pounds each, all rolled up in a manmade pack secured with straps. After reaching the notch, Brewer and Gardner handed over the packs. All of the men were in tears when they shook hands and parted ways, with King and Cotter soon disappearing over the Divide and Brewer and Gardner heading up for the second ascent of Brewer’s summit, which, coincidentally, would not be climbed again before another thirty-two years had passed.44

43 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 47-48. 44 King, Mountaineering, 51.

33

King and Cotter used a rope to climb up and rappel down cliffs, which Farquhar marks as the “earliest record in the Sierra of the practice of roping-down.” Camping the first night on a freezing ledge, they crossed over to the base of the Sierra Crest, and on the third day the pair ascended a 14,000-foot mountain King took to be the highest. From the summit, using the compass and level, King first positively identified and named

Mount Whitney, which was still further off. He then named the peak they had climbed

Mount Tyndall in honor of one of his heroes, the explorer-scientist of the Alps.

King and Cotter descended and returned via a different route over similarly rugged terrain. At one point, the pair found themselves in a tight spot on a cliff—too steep for them to turn back yet terrifying to ascend. Cotter led and disappeared over a ledge, where he encouraged King not to worry and calmly called for him to follow. When

King reached his friend, he saw that Cotter had gone as far as he could on the length of the rope but found no stable belay point to tie his end of the rope. Still, it was securely looped around his chest. If King had fallen, Cotter would have gone down with him. King expressed his shock and awe for such a friend, who would rather have died trying to hold him in a belay than be left alone on the ledge: “In all my experience of mountaineering I have never known an act of such real, profound courage as this of Cotter’s… for he might easily have cast loose the lasso and saved himself—(this) requires as sublime a type of courage as I know.” Continuing on, King remarked that their shoulders and feet suffered badly. The heavy manmade knapsacks cut into their shoulders until they were black and blue, and Cotter’s boots wore completely through so that he walked back into camp barefoot with bloodied feet. The pair rejoined their party in camp after five days, and

Brewer remarked that “they crossed canyons, and climbed tremendous precipices, where

34 they had to let each other down with a rope. It was by far the greatest feat of strength and endurance that has yet been performed on the Survey.”45

A century and a half later, renowned Yosemite rock climber Royal Robbins remarked that King’s Mountaineering had inspired him to climb. However, when he saw

King’s route up Mount Tyndall, a relatively easy hike that the modern mountaineer can access by driving up the Owens Valley and parking close by at Shepherd’s Pass

Trailhead, Robbins wrote that “I lost a climbing hero.” This is one of the more distinct examples of a climber not knowing his history, although Robbins raises a complicated problem. We can admit that King’s active imagination and his penchant for dramatization led him to exaggeration, while at the same time appreciating how King had moved ahead into terra incognita despite his leader and teammates believing that what he wanted to do was impossible. King acknowledges as much in the Preface to his 1875 edition of

Mountaineering when he conditions the reader to consider that “our difficulties and our joys were those of the pioneer.” King and Cotter demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to act and to innovate amidst uncertainty. Farquhar wrote that, with this extraordinary mountain reconnaissance, “Clarence King began a new era in American mountaineering.”46

After their meeting, Brewer turned the expedition back to Visalia for supplies.

King begged Brewer to allow him to make a second try for Mount Whitney. Brewer assented and split the expedition, with King going off alone and the rest of the survey

45 King, Mountaineering, 84 and Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 19. 46 Wilkins, Clarence King, 66-67, 143, and 160; Moore, King of the 40th Parallel, 3, 26-27, 40, 73-75, 89-90, 108, and 202-207; Royal Robbins, Fail Falling (Ojai, CA; 2010), 19; Farquhar, History of the Sierra Nevada, 145; and Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (Boston, 1875), Preface; also see Farquhar’s introduction in King, “The Helmet of Mambrino.”

35 members starting a long journey through the central Sierra. King was turned back on his second attempt to climb Mount Whitney by another summer snowstorm, which enveloped him in clouds only about four hundred feet below the summit. He wrote Josiah

Whitney that

I had been all day alone and the fatigue and excitement exhausted me greatly, so

much that although chilled through and through I could scarcely prevent myself

from lying down and sleeping. A strange carelessness came over me, making me

reckless in the descent. I was obliged to make an effort to keep myself from

running over the most dangerous debris slopes.47

It seems that King was overcome by the euphoria of altitude sickness or by mental exhaustion after suffering through a long solo climb. Having failed in his second attempt to summit the highest peak in America, he returned back west to Visalia and would later meet back up with the expedition far to the north at Clark’s Ranch below Yosemite

Valley.

After finding their way through King’s Canyon and through the Sierra, the party descended to the Owen’s Valley, where a violent Indian war had been fought during the previous years, but the season of 1864 was much quieter so they passed without trouble.

Brewer wanted to summit Mount Goddard, a prominent point from which he could survey a wide area, so he brought the party fifty miles north in the valley, then started up

Rock Creek. Passing up that way and over Mono Pass, Brewer stated on August 2 that they observed signal fires all around. “As soon as we stop, smokes rise, when we start

47 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 57.

36 they appear, and at night their blaze is seen on the heights,” wrote Brewer, adding that

”the Indians know all of our movements.”48

As it turned out, Brewer had underestimated the effort needed to reach and ascend

13,500-foot Mount Goddard. Despite a pre-dawn start on August 10, Brewer and

Hoffman stopped when they realized their error. However, Cotter continued in a monumental effort, stopping after fourteen hours only a few hundred feet from the summit and, with his barometer, measuring the altitude just before darkness fell. Brewer remarked that “Dick is very tough. He had walked thirty-two hours and had been twenty- six entirely without food.” Having already gone too far to make it back to camp, Brewer and Hoffman slept a freezing night without blankets, although they kept a fire going and

Brewer commented they still woke feeling refreshed: “After months of this rough life, sleeping only on the ground, in the open air, the rocky bed is not so hard in reality as it sounds when told.”49

Still, the long trip grew more difficult towards its end, as all of the men suffered from long exposure or fatigue. Brewer downed pills to recover from illness and Hoffman broke down altogether with a pain in his leg so bad that he could no longer walk and could barely ride a horse. Only two weeks after commenting that the reality was not hard as it sounds, Brewer changed his tune, remarking after a freezing overnight rain that

“there is no need of again describing the discomforts and miseries of sleeping on the ground in a cold, rainy night, when the rheumatism creeps into every nook and joint of one’s frame.” As we see with Brewer’s reversal, the burnout mountaineers experience

48 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 72-76. 49 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 77.

37 can come on suddenly and unexpectedly after over-extending one’s self over a long trip or at the onset of bad weather.50

In a worn-out condition, after taking a very long trail through the Sierra, on

August 23 they arrived at Clark’s Ranch where they reunited with King and also met

Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York City’s Central Park and manager of several mines near Mariposa. On August 26, despite having just finished his epic mountain trek, Brewer guided Olmsted on a weeklong tour through the Yosemite backcountry over to Tuolumne Meadows, where they found an indication of some tourism. Brewer and Olmsted rode their horses up Mount Gibbs and were surprised to see another party on the nearby summit of Mount Dana. They also encountered a hunter near

Tuolumne Meadows the next day, when they came upon the party who had climbed

Mount Dana, which included a small child, a little girl only six years old, and a 69-year old man with a limp. The impression one gets is that, as early as 1864, there were already lone individuals and groups exploring the Yosemite region for recreation or sport. Upon returning to Clark’s Ranch, Brewer found Hoffman, suffering from an unknown debilitating condition, had grown much worse. He could no longer walk or ride a horse, so the field party closed their epic 1864 expedition with four of the men—Brewer,

Gardner, Cotter, and King—carrying their fifth man on a litter, an arduous hike many miles down from the mountains to Mariposa, where they caught a carriage ride for San

Francisco.51

The 1864 California Geological Survey field expedition was over, with spectacular results. The team had unlocked the highest, remotest geography of the Sierra,

50 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 89 51 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 91-99.

38 and their efforts signaled a shift in people’s imagination of mountaineering from a necessary activity into an innovative human endeavor. William Alsup, the editor of

William Brewer’s expedition journal and letters, credits “those five explorers who inspired a standard of mountaineering as demanding and as durable as the Sierra itself.”52

Brewer soon sailed for the east, via isthmus of Panama, to teach at Yale. That fall of 1864, the California legislature charged Whitney to survey and produce a map for the original boundary of what was then the world’s first natural public park, Yosemite

Valley. On June 30, 1864, President Lincoln had granted the land within a mile beyond the valley rim to the state of California. Whitney assigned King and Gardner to immediately carry out the work, and that fall King climbed a number of high points along the rim of the valley, including North Dome, immediately across Tenaya Canyon from the sheer granite face of Half Dome. Whitney himself believed Half Dome would never be climbed.53

At the end of the surveying, in mid-November, King and Cotter set out to summit the prominent peak south of the valley, Mount Clark, which King called the Obelisk.

However, a heavy snow began falling, which quickly ended the long field season of 1864 for good. The snow accumulated to a foot overnight, and the pair had burrowed themselves under cover of their blankets overnight at the base of the Mount Clark. At daylight, they were forced to whip their freezing mules into motion and ultimately drag them behind as the two men broke trail through the blinding snow before finally descending to the valley floor. “In anticipation of our return the party had gotten up a capital supper, to which we first administered justice, then punishment, and finally

52 Brewer, Such a Landscape!, 22. 53 Moore, King, 112-113.

39 annihilation,” wrote King, adding that “Brief starvation and a healthy combat for life with the elements lent a most marvelous zest to the appetite.”54

However, the early season blizzard continued unabated all night and the Merced

River rapidly rose and began to flood the valley. With no supplies for them in the valley and fearing that their only trails out of the valley would become unpassable, King decided to end the first Yosemite Survey immediately. They departed the valley the next morning and experienced rough going on their way to Clark’s Ranch. Still breaking trail when night fell, without any light to guide them, King’s friend Cotter laid down in a state of exhaustion. King saved him only by dragging him with a scarf, which also served to revive him, so they arrived together at Clark’s Ranch at two in the morning. The next day, all continued down the western slope, crossing dangerous swollen streams before finally reaching Mariposa then heading straight on to San Francisco. King jotted in his

Yosemite Survey notebook a statement that must have dogged him after the trauma of barely surviving the early-season blizzard: “the relation of God to the Laws of Nature,” as he must have felt very close to death during their difficult wintry flight from Yosemite.

By early December, King and Gardner were on a ship heading back for the east by way of tropical Nicaragua, across to the Gulf Coast, then sailing up the Atlantic Coast.”55

King and Gardner returned to California in late 1865 to work gain for Whitney.

However, he was suffering for funding, as special interests contested the practical aspects of the California Geological Survey. Whitney helped them gain appointment as topographical engineers to accompany General McDowell to survey the mountain ranges

54 King, Mountaineering, 154. 55 Moore, King, 117-122; Wilkins, Clarence King, 77-78; and Clarence King Papers, Biographical Papers, Notebooks, Private: Notes on Yosemite.

40 of Arizona. Riding out to Arizona, and having gotten ahead of the military train, they were captured and nearly tortured by Apache Indians before the troops appeared to rescue them. King had started out optimistically for Arizona, and the pair climbed prominent

Granite Peak, from which they successfully identified and began to chart five distinct

Arizona mountain ranges: the Black, the Cerbat or Hualapais, the Aquarius, the Aztec, and the Sierra Prietta. However, funding for the enlisted soldiers soon ran out and their military protection disbanded. The first of their many seasons in desert environments ended after a just a few short months of work. King and Gardner crossed back over the

Mojave Desert on their own riding mules, a journey King describes in picturesque fashion in Mountaineering. He provides a clear outline of the western geography— coastal abundance split by the towering Sierra from the stark and glaring deserts.56

In a colorful letter to Brewer from the Sierra of July 3, 1866, King starts by telling him how the Arizona work had gone, then continues: “So much for Arizona. That land of cactus and yucca is much connected in my mind with starvation and swindling officers.

Here we are in the glorious, the unequalled, the beloved Sierras.” King and Gardner had accepted Whitney’s offer as assistant geologists to spend the rest of that year carefully surveying the central Sierras. In one section of the letter to Brewer, King elaborated on their evening scene of a meadow along Bridal Veil Creek high above Yosemite Valley, with Sierra peaks towering even higher overhead. “Ladies’ society, a band of music, and the morning paper are the only absolute necessities we are without,” King told Brewer, and he offered a literary description of the various members of their party, assuring

Brewer that he is working hard to lift the men up to his standard of two years before.

56 King, Mountaineering, 11-20; Moore, King, 127-133; and Wilkins, Clarence King, 87-89.

41

King also described in extensive detail the challenges and joys of working with the pack animals. This is a persistent theme of King’s, of the contest between man and beast.

“Whenever there comes to be a clearly defined mental issue between man and a mule, the stubbornness of the latter is the expression of an adamantine moral resolve, founded in eternal right,” offers King. “The man is invariably wrong.”57

During this 1866 season, Gardner recorded a series of field notes that present a marked contrast to his earlier writings. In his Green Mountain journal, he comes across as boyishly enthusiastic. Social anxieties and the struggle with the burdens of an over- civilized society appear in many of his writings throughout the intervening years from

New York to San Francisco. Here in 1866, Gardner seems a man in his element, making keen and descriptive observations on the geography, geology, nature, as wells as human relationships through the summer survey with King and the other members of the field party. By the time King and him survey the central Sierra in 1866Gardner’s progression from boyhood to youth and now to manhood is evident. The effect of field work out of doors has had a great effect.

King and Gardner successfully summitted Mount Clark, and while King offered more colorful exaggeration of leaping across an abyss just below the summit, Gardner provided intricate detail on the characteristics of ridges, soil, numerous California grizzly bears, and what seems like nearly every tree in sight. In a few particularly descriptive lines recalling the view from the summit of Mount Clark, Gardner wrote that,

Through a low place in the ridge we first caught sight of the peaks at the head of

the San Joaquin. The rocky summits and lines of snow grouped themselves about

57 King letter to Brewer, Ostrander’s Ranch, Sierra Nevada, July 3, 1866 and King, Mountaineering, 12-16.

42

a great central peak and the whole was bathed in a color of most exquisite

delicacy—not rose nor purple but something between them and white, a shade too

ethereal for words by forty miles of the crystal air of these high altitudes.

In their writing, one begins to see these two lifelong friends growing up in their own ways, apart perhaps, even with the best days ahead of them with King’s Fortieth Parallel

Survey. King’s imagination seems to leap off the pages of every letter, article, or book he writes whereas Gardner presents a more practical, serious, yet still very persuasive style of writing.58

As the summer of 1866 progressed, the two climbed Black Mountain in the Clark

Range and were turned back only about four hundred feet from gaining the first summit of Mount Ritter when a thunderstorm broke overhead. Its distinctive summit was left to

John Muir, who made a bold first ascent six years later in 1872. The two friends Gardner and King then went on to climb Mount Dana and traversed to Mount Conness, spending a cold night on a ridgeline between the two peaks with a gale force wind blowing. As the legend goes, from these Eastern Sierra summits, the pair looked down on the Great Basin and dreamed up the Fortieth Parallel Survey. Descending to Mono Lake, the pair then crossed back over the range at Sonora Pass before returning to San Francisco, where on

August 19 King penned a letter to Brewer asking “Will you please get me letters of recommendation from Brush, Silliman, Dana, and yourself? I have one from Whitney.”

He was actively generating support for the survey he had imagined from the summits of

58 Gardner Field Notes: Sierra Nevada, 1866; Fourth Mountain, July 17, 1866; Ridge South of the Chiquita Joaquin, July 26, 1866; Black Mountain, July 30, 1866; Mammoth Mountain, undated.

43 the Eastern Sierra, which would become one of the great scientific endeavors of the nineteenth century, and he soon returned east to lobby Congress to make it happen.59

“What surprised Whitney, and everyone else,” observed William Goetzmann,

“was the magnitude and ingenuity of King’s eventual plan.” At just 25 years of age, King submitted to Congress a bold plan to survey a broad swath of land along the planned route of the transcontinental railroad, for which construction was just getting underway.

He was likeable and persuasive, and President Johnson appointed him to take charge of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. It says something about the America of the late 1860s that the President would appoint a youth of only twenty-five to lead what was deemed the most important scientific endeavor the government had ever supported. The physically demanding nature of work in the western mountains and deserts may have demanded the strength of youth. All of the men King hired onto his survey were in their twenties and thirties. During the late 1860s in America, post-war and pioneering conditions demanded competent youth to seize opportunities.60

In 1867, King was already one of the nation’s most experienced surveyor- scientists, and it is probably right to consider him America’s most accomplished mountaineer. Only his friends on the California Geological Survey had his kind of mountaineering experience, and all of them considered him their toughest and most imaginative climber. John Muir would not even arrive in California to begin his long career of mountaineering until 1868, the same year that John Wesley Powell made the first ascent of Long’s Peak in Colorado. By then King’s mountaineering career was already in full swing, or even waning. Farquhar credits King with seven first summits:

59 King letter to Brewer, Camp in Bridal Veil, August 19, 1866 and Moore, King, 134-137. 60 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 431 and Moore, King, 102.

44

Lassen (1863), Tyndall (1864), Clark (1866), Conness (1866), Ruby Range (1868),

Agassiz in the Uinta Mountains (1869), and Mount Langley (1871), which he mistakenly climbed while making his third attempt to gain the first summit of Mount Whitney.

Although, as Wilkins admits, King’s list of first summits is “admittedly an incomplete list because of the ‘vague character’ of the King Survey reports in respect to mountaineering details.”61

One of the big missing links in King’s mountaineering history begins with his appointment to lead the King Survey. Due to their triangulation method of surveying, which often required surveyors to summit the highest points in any given region, it is very likely that King and his team first climbed many mountains throughout California,

Nevada, Utah, northern Colorado, southern Wyoming, and possibly southern Idaho.

However, there are few records of such climbs. King reports logistical concerns, makes a variety of administrative requests, and outlines each season’s survey accomplishments but offers only sparse details of mountaineering to his superior, the Chief of Engineers

General A.A. Humphreys. Neither do King Survey members include many details of mountaineering in their correspondence. The business of the survey seems to have exceeded the pull of mountaineering. While working for Whitney and Brewer, King treated mountaineering more and more as a sport and roamed freely about the Sierra, but climbing lost some of its appeal through the long years he directed western surveys. His position demanded a great deal of administrative work and surveying required more than its share of hardship without adding any unnecessary mountain climb to the list of tasks.62

61 Wilkins, Clarence King, 155 note. 62 King letters to the Chief of Army Engineers, March 28, 1867 through January 18, 1879, Record Group 57, Records of the King Survey, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

45

What is more, King’s tone and disposition shift distinctly soon after taking over the survey. No longer simply the carefree, imaginative mountaineer, King displays a growing frustration with bureaucratic inefficiency. The initial 1867 survey season was repeatedly delayed due to insufficient or inappropriate types of funding, since few frontiersmen accepted notes and preferred specie. In June 1867 Gardner reports their growing concern with money affairs: “The U.S. Treasury insist on sending their drafts by overland mail and some of ours have been lost.” Over the years, this and other administrative duties resurfaced frequently, forcing King to travel or remain away from the field teams. In a June 1868 letter to Brewer, King expresses pride in the survey’s distinct achievements through its first two years, although he adds:

It requires some skill to manage the red tape successfully, but I have a boldness in

the matter which no regular officer has... So far as is possible I obey orders but

whenever a case arises where the work seems to demand it I do as I damn please

and then write a charming letter of explanation with ‘distinguished consideration’

enough at the end to carry the thing through.

Moreover, in an August 1868 letter, King shows a weariness with the nomadic life he had by then lived for more than five years and tells Brewer that to be “kept forever in the society of mule tramps, would be an unbearable inflection were it not for the consciousness of the value and goodness of our work… I incline to be a little severe on

46 any man who is fool enough to leave the milk and honey, the comfort and civilization of the East and be a geologist.”63

For several years King had the good fortune to work within very small teams of two to five members, so his leap towards running a large-scale national enterprise partially explains his frustrations. Nonetheless, despite the inefficiencies, typical of most large organizations, King and his friends accomplished and documented noteworthy mountaineering feats over seven seasons in the field from 1867 through 1873, after which, from 1874 through 1879, King and his assistants largely dedicated themselves to publishing their scientific observations and findings.

Getting started is often the hardest part, and their first field survey season started off slowly and involved a great deal of suffering in the Sierras and down in the Nevada deserts. King assembled a team of enterprising young scientists who also became some of his closest friends. Gardner, Samuel Emmons, Arnold and James Hague, Sereno Watson and short list of others would remain with him for twelve years, and several of the men would carry over to the U.S. Geological Survey and become some of the greatest scientists in the nation. Through the early summer of 1867, King scrambled for funding or supplies, while Gardner marshalled the team and supplies at Sacramento. He started over the mountains on July 7 with ten horsemen, a thorough-brace wagon with a spring system to protect the instruments contained inside, two heavy wagons carrying nearly

6,000 pounds of supplies, each drawn by four mules, and three extra horses. “It seems a long time to be in preparation,” regretted Gardner, “but I never worked harder in my life;

63 Letter from Gardner to Mother Anne, Camp No. 1, Sacramento, June 28, 1867, Gardner Papers; Letters from King to Brewer, Virginia, Nevada, June 10, 1868 and from Camp 21, August 27, 1868, Brewer Correspondence.

47 and if I was to commence again to do the same thing I should not know how to accomplish it in less time.” Nonetheless, he would learn. It is the entire aim of government science to capture lessons learned and spring forward, though the individuals directly involved in the struggle are all too often ground down by the stresses of the machinery and sometimes unable to perceive the progress themselves.64

They followed the route of the Central Pacific and soon passed the actual farthest point of the road. Gardner describes the railroad’s logistical arrangements in great detail along this most difficult stretch going over the Sierra Crest near Donner Pass. He observes how the largely Chinese workforce had worked all through the brutal Sierra winter at elevation, shaping their track route over steep precipices and tunneling in multiple places. He also observes the equipment of one mountaineering activity that would not grow popular for another century: “On the piazza of the engineer’s house we saw their snowshoes ten and twelve feet long. They are made after the Norwegian pattern–a long narrow board turned up at the end.” Gardner remarked that while the

Sierra crossing was a hard effort, he dreaded another desert experience as the memories of his pioneer desert crossing as well as the few short months of 1866 surveying

Arizona’s harsh environment remained with him.65

Life in the deserts and the desert mountains of Nevada’s Great Basin that summer proved a tough proving ground for these seven years of field work. On Job’s Peak in

Nevada, King was struck by lightning while holding survey tools and seriously injured.

James Moore, a late-20th Century USGS geologist and another biographer of King, records that “his right side turned the color of coffee. The skin peeled off, and it took a

64 Gardner letter to Mother Anne, Camp 5, July 7, 1867, Gardner Papers. 65 Gardner letter to Mother Anne, Camp 9, July 12, 1867, Gardner Papers.

48 week for his distress to wear away.” Later King was blinded temporarily by heat and fever. At various points along Nevada’s rank desert sinks, the Survey encountered hordes of locusts or spent sleepless nights fending off clouds of mosquitoes. Enduring extreme heat, dusty or rank climate conditions, and the bugs, many of the men were overcome by fever, which seriously deteriorated the Survey’s efficiency in the first year. Yet field life was not without its benefits, which Gardner always kept in mind. He and King shared a large tent as both office and sleeping quarters, but he related that “unless on damp ground or in storm, we do not sleep under cover; it is much pleasanter to feel the fresh air and see the stars.”66

At the end of the first season, Gardner was feverishly working with Watson from a remote mountaintop to record the last necessary topographical observations to complete their map of the region. Gardner applauds Sereno Watson’s heroic work: “In spite of cold and wind he had stood his ground on a mountain and closed up the last gap in our topographical work.” A big snowstorm hit them that very night, and they were rocked by the blowing storm in their tent, then retreated in bounds down the mountain, moving first early the next morning down to a small farm in the valley below and, after two days waiting out the storm, down to the lower valleys. There they encountered flooding and mud but traveled early in the morning while the ground was still hard before finally returning to Hunter Station and riding as quickly as they could to Virginia City, their winter quarters. It was an act of late-season heroics, which Gardner explains as “a tremendous effort to overcome the natural obstacles in the lateness of the season, and do

66 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 440-441 and Moore, King, 115, 126, and 154-166.

49 at a dash a piece of work which should unite into one whole the scattered fragments which were the results of this summer’s campaign.”

Gardner seems to have been a driving force in a great deal of the first season’s work. He was clearly determined to do all he could to support what is often termed the

King Survey, a project he had helped dream up with his friend in the High Sierra and had set his heart to complete. Gardner concludes the first 1867 season with a heartfelt New

Year’s statement for his family back east and another hint of the old anxiety of over- work: “For a number of years I have bent my energies toward professional progress. I fear it has been at the expense of a broad development of heart. God keep me from making so great a mistake in future.”67 Gardner’s wintry descent from the mountains stands as a dramatic finish to end the 1867 season. There is little doubt that he was passionately devoted to a life in western surveying, which involved a great deal of outdoor activity as well as cutting edge science. We also know from his earlier life in

New York and San Francisco that he could hardly be satisfied with only indoor work, so it is easy to understand how gratified he must have felt to have a life so free, even as he worried after the social isolation of spending much of the year exploring the far western deserts and mountains.

At their winter quarters in Virginia City, King and his assistants busied themselves with drawing up detailed geological and topographical reports as well as surveying the Virginia City mines. That winter the region saw an unusual amount of snowfall, so King and his friend Gardner learned to ski on an early version of telemark skis with a long single pole for balance, steering, and stopping. They had observed the

67 Gardner letters to Mother Anne, Virginia City, December 26 and December 30, 1867, Gardner Papers.

50

Central Pacific railroad engineers traversing the Sierras on such skis and took it up for recreation on the slopes around town.68

During the second King Survey season of 1868, the teams scaled peaks in the

Ruby Range and other mountains in desert ranges all across the Humboldt River through the Great Basin before entering Utah and working around Salt Lake. King also journeyed to inspect the Great Falls of the Snake River. Moore states that “The corps was weary after having spent eighteen months in the field, much of it under primitive camp conditions.” In 1869 King and his men dwelt in the Wasatch Mountains, the Uinta

Mountains and beyond to the Green River Divide in western Colorado. King is known to have summited Mount Agassiz in the Uinta Mountains during this season, but there is little doubt that he and his team members scaled many other peaks in these great ranges over the course of the year.69

In 1870, King’s fourth field year leading the survey, he coordinated a late-season effort to summit and survey three Pacific Coast volcanoes, when he and his team members all simultaneously made the first known discovery of glaciers in the United

States. Emmons went up Mount Rainier, Hague scaled Mount Hood, and King made his long-desired ascent of Mount Shasta. King commits two whole chapters to Shasta in

Mountaineering—“Shasta” where he describes the approach to the mountain, which once first sighted “became the center of our life,” along with a following chapter called

“Shasta Flanks” in which he describes their complete circumnavigation of the mountain to inspect all of its glaciers. King admits the climb was a relatively straightforward walk to the top. From Shasta’s summit at sunset, King observed the volcanic cone’s immense

68 Moore, King, 150 and 176. 69 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 444-449 and Moore, King, 184-198.

51 shadow and offered a distinct portrait of the sublime: “This gigantic spectral volcano rose on the warm sky till its darker form stood huge and terrible over the whole east.” They spent a bitterly cold night camped on the rim of Mount Shastina, the smaller peak below

Shasta. In his retelling of that experience, King recalled the natural desire they all felt to flee down the mountain, while nonetheless remaining huddled all night frozen and unable to sleep: “How natural it is under such circumstances to ‘Rather bear those ills we have then fly to others that we know not of.” Spending the night on peaks is an uncommon practice that several early American mountaineers enjoyed, including Thoreau and a friend, who together in 1842 walked forty miles from Concord to Mount Wachusett and slept on top.70

King records that the living glaciers around Shasta proffered by far the most dangerous alpine travel he had ever done, with crevasses, sinkholes, or even massive unseen caves under thin veneers of ice posing constant danger. He also makes another of his classic observations on the challenges and pleasantries of struggling with the natural world and particularly with mules, an early source of road rage, whose belligerence could cause the mountain traveler some frustration and difficulty:

These animals are always of the opposition party; they reverse your wishes, and

from one year’s end to another defy your best judgment. Yet I love them, and

only in extreme moments ‘go for’ them with a fence-rail or theodolite-tripod.

Nothing can be pleasanter than to ride them through forest roads, chatting in a

bright company, and catching glimpses of far quiet scenery framed by the long,

furry ears.

70 King, Mountaineering, 214-228 and Isserman, Continental Divide, 57.

52

King’s discovery of glaciers ended a long controversy with Josiah Whitney, who theorized that there were no glaciers in the lower forty-eight states, and also John Muir who claimed to have discovered evidence of glaciers forming Yosemite Valley. But beyond the stellar scientific observations King and his team made regarding the nature of glaciers on these Pacific expeditions, he also remarks on the intrinsic value of a big climb up and down a landmark like Shasta:

“I always feel a strange renewal of life when I come down from one of these

climbs; they are with me points of departure more marked and powerful than I can

account for upon any reasonable ground. 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 to 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!”71

King’s fifth field season directing the survey in 1871 was “perhaps the most difficult year of the survey,” wrote Goetzmann. “Forest fires, deserts, drought, and the rugged country between the Green River and the Front Range taxed all of the field parties under Emmons and Hague to the utmost. King himself was peripatetic.” It is again highly likely that a number of untold first ascents were gained in these ranges, but the business of completing the work of the survey prevailed.72

71 King, Mountaineering, 229-241. 72 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 451-452.

53

In 1871 King made a third attempt to summit Mount Whitney and again failed in his endeavor. As King approached the peak from the town of Lone Pine in Owens Valley to the east, Mount Whitney was again suddenly obscured in clouds and storm, which loomed up from the west. King, again solo climbing, lost his way and instead summitted

Mt Langley to the south. In the poor weather, King quickly jotted a note on the summit of

Mount Langley indicating that he had first gained the summit of Mount Whitney, and he recorded this ascent in Mountaineering. The clouds never broke to expose the helmeted summit that was so familiar to him by then, though he had only ever seen from below and none had ever seen from the top. It is not surprising that King did not realize his error.

However, it did come as a surprise to two local stockmen who discovered King’s note on Mount Langley in early 1873. They had read King’s popular book

Mountaineering and knew of his exploits, so they then endeavored successfully to gain the first summit of Mount Whitney. Except for the good fortune of the local community, which King could appreciate, this might be seen as a most unfortunate folly for the man with such a history with the highest mountain in the lower forty-eight states. King had first sighted the mountain in late 1863 from Mount Bullion in Mariposa—which he called

“my Sunday mountain.” King had first attempted to summit Mount Whitney in his epic

1864 push from the Great Western Divide to Mount Tyndall, when he first calculated its elevation and named it. He was denied the summit a second time that same 1864 season.

Approaching from the Kern River to the southwest, he was driven back only four hundred feet from the summit by yet another blinding mid-summer storm. That there are relatively easy routes up Mount Whitney diminishes King’s mountaineering ability to some modern climbers, yet the simple fact remains that no one at the time knew how to

54 get up the peak, as none had ever done so. The mountains create their own weather and serve as formidable barriers to human imagination. King had attacked the mountain from all sides, but Mount Whitney defeated the best efforts of America’s most experienced and imaginative mountaineer. King’s failure to gain the first summit of Mount Whitney serves best as a reminder how thick the fog of uncertainty can be.73

The well-told tale of King’s courage in hunting a big grizzly into its lair to place during the season of 1871, which ended as multiple others had before—with King and the survey members being driven out of the mountains at peril of their lives by a fierce snowstorm. In 1872 King assigned his field teams to operate independently across a wide swath of the fortieth parallel, addressing gaps in map data or key geologic problems he wished to understand more fully. King was primarily interested in conducting extended field observations on the Sierra Nevada range’s current and former glaciers and spent significant time in and around Mount Humphreys, measuring glacial movement or melting processes for a record of the region’s geologic and climate history. If he summited any additional Sierra peaks this year, he offered scant evidence for it. King’s diligence uncovering the infamous diamond hoax during this 1872 season has garnered much attention. Two things stand out most from that event—King’s geologic knowledge clearly served a practical purpose by saving investors from a huge mining swindle; another striking takeaway was how very hard work it was. King and several other of his geologists on the survey journeyed out twice into remote mountain areas, working multiple diggings in Ruby Gulch and enduring days of brutal cold in the northwestern

Colorado winter. They were able to prove to San Francisco investors, who were willing

73 Isserman, Continental Divide, 110-111.

55 to offer immense sums of money to procure land and initiate a major mining venture, that swindlers had fraudulently scattered diamonds across a remote mountainous area. This prime example of hardship that King and his friends endured mountaineering attests to the effort it takes to find truth in nature.74

The seventh year of the Fortieth Parallel Survey was the final season King and his assistants spent in the field. This same year of 1873 would see the last recorded instance of King climbing a mountain, Mount Whitney. Upon hearing of his mistake in climbing the wrong mountain, failing yet a third time to gain the first summit, King rushed all the way across the country on the new railroad network. He finally climbed the peak, only to miss the first summit by a matter of weeks. When back down, he wandered across the

Owens Valley to search for fossils in the White and Inyo Mountains. King tells a mystical tale of meeting an old Indian as he “lay basking on the hot sands of Inyo, realizing fully the geological history and hard materialistic reality of Mount Whitney.” The Indian sighted Mount Whitney with his bow and arrow and told King the mountain was “an old, old man who watched the valley and cared for the Indians, but who shook the country with earthquakes to punish the whites for injustice.” King listened and then reflected:

“As he trudged away across the sands, I could but feel the liberating power of

modern culture which unfetters us from the more than iron bands of self-made

myths. My mood vanished with the savage, and I saw the great peak as it really is,

a splendid mass of granite… ice-chiselled and storm-tinted, a great monolith left

standing amid the ruins of a by-gone geological empire.”75

74 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 452-457; Wilkins, Clarence King, 152 and Moore, King, 3, 213-233. 75 Wilkins, Clarence King, 193.

56

Here is King, ever struggling between the boundaries of ancient archetype and modern intellect. He explained his failure to first summit Mount Whitney with familiar self- deprecating humor in an addendum to the 1875 edition of Mountaineering, which remains a more lasting legacy than a first ascent of the mountain might have done.

Although, this was his last recorded climb.

King spent much of the 1873 season conducting mining inspections and seeking answers to some of his most pressing geologic questions for the book that would be his great scientific publication, Systematic Geology, a work of such “boldness that struck me as audacity,” Brewer wrote to his friend. Soon he would rise to become the nation’s eminent scientist as the first Director of the United States Geological Survey, but after summitting Mount Whitney at last, there is scant evidence that King ever climbed a mountain again. It is somehow appropriate that this famous peak, which he had so long struggled to surmount, would be his last recorded climb, and he said as much in the:

It is thus with me about mountaineering; the pass which divides youth from

manhood is traversed, and the serious service of science must hereafter claim

me… It is the mountaineer’s privilege to carry through life this wealth of

unfading treasure. At his summons the white peaks loom above him as of old; the

camp-fire burns once more for him, his study walls recede in twilight revery, and

around him are gathered again stately columns of pine.76

76 King, Mountaineering (Boston, 1875), Preface.

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Only thirty-two years old, King voices the nostalgic tone of a wise,old man and trivializes his climbing as an unseemly activity for the serious scientist. It is a strange tone from one of America’s original mountaineers. Failing health likely contributed much to the end of his mountaineering. Perhaps he had turned his imagination to focus entirely in other opportunities, which his youthful climbing had helped to open for him, but there is a keen sense also of a change in tone and heart. With the slackening of his imagination and the suppression of his irrepressible will for climbing, it is not surprising to consider in retrospect that he would not remain long in government service, either.

The King Survey catapulted King to success, if only for a short time, but the end of the 1873 field work signaled the end of King and Gardner’s “brother-like relationship” according to Moore. The two men had drifted apart. Gardner left King’s employment to work for F.V. Hayden’s survey, and after several more exciting years exploring the

Rocky Mountains, Gardner settled down with family and an eminent east coast appointment as New York’s state surveyor. He resided for many years on Albany’s downtown square. King spent the next years working to complete the survey’s remaining impressive scientific publications and drafting his brilliant work, Systematic Geology, which would be read as a university geology textbook for years to come. Contrary to

Gardner, King never attained the same kind of personal or familial stability and walked a meandering path, much of which remains little known and not well understood.77

In his introduction to the 1963 edition of Mountaineering, Thurman Wilkins notes all of the missing links in the man’s life. For example, he never wrote his side of the

77 Letter from Brewer to King, S.S.S (Yale, New Haven), December 24, 1878, Brewer Correspondence; Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 458; Wilkins, Clarence King, 193; and Moore, King, 255-260.

58 famous diamond hoax story. Aside from his dry, official reports to General Humphreys, he recorded very little of the mountaineering they must have done throughout Fortieth

Parallel Survey. He left few personal reminiscences of his many travels, including to

Hawaii, Cuba, or to the Yukon, which he visited as late as 1901, the year he died. Nor did he record tales of the thousands of miles he traveled through the mountains of Mexico, and did King pass up the chance climb in the Alps during the years he stayed in Europe?

King’s later life is full of mystery and ambivalence.78

In King’s remarkable memoirs, many who knew him expressed a confused mix of admiration and disappointment for the man who could inspire so many others to push the limits of the possible but who had somehow failed to meet their great expectations. His best friends were stunned by seeming descent to obscurity but always admired his capacity for friendship, as with Hay, who wrote that King

possessed to an extraordinary degree the power of attracting and attaching to

himself friends of every sort and condition. The cowboys and packers of the

plains and the hills; the employees of railroads and hotels; men of science and

men of commerce; the Senate and the clergy—in all these ways of life his friends

were numerous and devoted, bound to him by a singular sympathy and mutual

comprehension.79

Friendship is a vital aspect of King’s life story, and most certainly of his mountaineering.

King climbed most often with friends—Gardner and Dewey, Brewer or Cotter—though

78 Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (Philadelphia, 1963), vii-xiii and Wilkins, Clarence King, 298-302. 79 Hague, Clarence King Memoirs, 122-123.

59 not always, as in the case of his three solo attempts to climb Mount Whitney. Still, he wrote well of those solo climbs, as friendship offers vitality and mutual support between mountaineers and their communities.

King fostered an extraordinary personality by skillfully linking lessons learned from his education and upbringing in the cultured east with long experience earned in the rugged west. As an explorer and author, King was well aware of his place at the tip of the spear in mountaineering history. As a direct consequence of such awareness, King was emboldened to go forward into terra incognita. This is by no means the natural response.

Fear often prevails at such moments, but this is part of what separates King from others.

Having so frequently gone where others had never been, King also developed a reputation as one of the world’s great raconteurs, full of new kinds of tales in human history—that of the mountaineer in the high alpine regions of the world. A new popular activity in nineteenth century America, mountaineering emerged from the imaginations and the actions of King his friends. Prone to exaggeration, he was nonetheless always a great inspiration to others. Having such rare experience and charisma, he created strong bonds of friendship with the cadre of explorer-scientists around him who had planted the seeds of a new culture of mountaineering in the American West. King himself never joined this burgeoning new mountaineering culture that he had personally done much to create. Ever conflicted by the sophisticated and the more primitive elements of his personality, he presents a complicated figure. The range of his character—mountaineer, raconteur, government scientist, author—combined with his withdrawn and ambivalent character later, reflected in his secretive personal life, presents a big challenge for historians trying to evaluate him and to understand the culture in which he helped to

60 change. One element that stands out is friendship, which offers depth and meaning to

King’s character and legacy.

Still, King’s unrestrained imagination offers a caution, even a warning to temper imagination with discipline or wisdom. There is an unsettling pathology in King’s capacity to stray from the truth, whether in exaggeration in story-telling or his lifelong concealment of the secrets of his marriage and family. His irrepressible will drove him to extremes of human capacity, which offered him both rewards and great struggle and stress, often far removed from civilization in the rugged western mountains and deserts.

King may have grown frustrated and embittered in his work as a government scientist.

The problem of overwork, and the dangers of over-civilization, were of great concern to many like him who had wrought the great progress and upheaval of the Gilded Age. “Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow,” wrote American philosopher

William James, “and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us.” King had fled west to avoid Civil War service, but there was a hardness in him. He had always bristled at challenges to his leadership ability and sought personal responsibility. Certainly he was discontent with modernity, once exclaiming “Civilization! Why, it’s a nervous disease!”

Yet King was also ever ambitious for success in his strivings. This conflict of inclinations dogged him. However, one might also consider that there is no place for a mountaineer in utopia—there would be no seemingly impossible problems to overcome. In a sense, the essential locale of the seeking explorer like King is always somewhere between the known and the far reaches of the imagination.80

80 William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War” in The Moral Equivalent of War and Other Essays, ed. John K. Roth (New York ,1971), 5 and King, Mountaineering, 284.

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King boldly led the push into America’s high alpine regions and wrote colorful narratives of his explorations. With an active imagination and irrepressible will, he unlocked doors to greater and sometimes unmanageable new problems, none more profound than the highest summits of the American West. Up there, he discovered new possibilities and perspectives that inspired men and women of an overcivilized culture and still inspire others to seek new modes of exploration. Yet, as is often the case with leaders, you find them born and bred into tightknit communities, which holds true in the history of mountaineering. Clarence King and his friends—their mountaineering adds complexity and far greater meaning to our understanding of the history and culture of the

American West.

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Bibliography

Federal Archives Consulted

National Archives, Washington, D.C. Record Group 57. Records of the U.S. Geological Survey, comprising textual records from King’s tenure as Director and the following reports: First Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, Washington, 1880. Second Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, with the “Report of Mr. Clarence King,” pp. 44-46, and “Production of the Precious Metals in the United States,” pp331-401, with plates xlviii-liii, by Clarence King. Washington, 1881. Third Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, with the “Report of Mr. Clarence King on the Physical Constants of Rocks,” Washington, 1882. Fifth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey to the Secretary of the Interior, 1883-84, with “Glaciers of Mount Shasta” by Clarence King, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1885. pp. 329-332. Record Group 57. Records of the King Survey, comprising letters of King’s communications with General A.A. Humphreys, Samuel Franklin Emmons letters, and Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Samuel Franklin Emmons papers, 1725-1914, comprising diaries and field notes, 1861-1910; correspondence, 1861-1912; financial records, 1867-1911; and photographs of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. United States Geological Survey, Office of Scientific Publications, Reston, VA. “An edition of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada by Clarence King,” by Long, Barbara Messner, thesis. Annual reports of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel: from the Sierra Nevada to the Eastern Slope of the Rocky Mountains. Annual Report of Chief of Engineers to the Secretary of War for the years 1871, 1872, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1877, and 1878. “Catalogue of the art and literary property collected by the late Clarence King and W.H. Fuller.” “Copy of the Official Letter Addressed November 11th, 1872, to the Board of Directors of the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company by Clarence King, Geologist in Charge, Discovering the Diamond Fields to be a Fraud” “Dedication of U.S. Geological Survey Clarence King Library” Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. surveys, 1850-1890 / Kelsey, R., Getty Foundation. Images of the U.S. Geological Survey, 1879-1979, by Yochelson, Ellis Leon, and Nelson, Clifford M., U.S. Geological Survey.

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“Monuments and Markers to the Territorial Survey Leaders,” by Yochelson, Ellis Leon. Records of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel ("King Survey"), 1867-81. Report of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel I. (1878) Systematic Geology, by Clarence King. II. (1877) “Descriptive Geology,” by Arnold Hague and S.F. Emmons. III. (1870) “Mining Industry,” by James D. Hague, with atlas and geological contributions by Clarence King. IV. (1877) pt. I. “Palaeontology,” by F.B. Meek. pt. II. “Palaeontology,” by James Halland and R.P. Whitfield. pt. III. “Ornithology,” by Robert Ridgway. V. (1871) “Botany,” by Sereno Watson, aided by Prof. Daniel C. Eaton, and others. VI. (1876) “Microscopical Petrography,” by Ferdinand Zirkel. VII. (1880) “Odonthornithes: A Monograph on the Extinct Toothed Birds of North America,” by Othniel Charles Marsh. Report of the Public Lands Commission created by the act of March 3, 1879, relating to public lands in the western portion of the United States and to the operation of existing land laws. signed by Clarence King, Director USGS, 1880. Statistics of the production of the precious metals in the United States “T. H. O'Sullivan: photographer” “The Great Surveys in Colorado, 1867-1879,” by Bartlett, Richard A. U.S. Mining Laws and Regulations Thereunder and State and Territorial Mining Laws to which are appended Local Mining Rules, Compiled under the Direction of Hon. Clarence King, Special Agent, Tenth Census, including “Introductory Remarks,” Washington, 1885.

Other Manuscript Collections Consulted

Adams (Charles Francis, Jr.) Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

Adams (Henry) Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

Ayer (Edward E. Collection), “Reminiscences and Experiences on My Trip Across the Plains to California Sixty-One Years Ago When I drove Four Mules to a Covered Wagon.” Marshall, Missouri, June 17th, 1924, 6 pp from original in private ownership, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

Brewer (William H.) Correspondence, 1862-1909; Letters to his family, 1860-1864; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Brewer (William H.) Papers, Manuscripts & Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven.

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Brush (George Jarvis) Papers, Correspondence with Clarence King, Manuscripts & Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven.

Eaton (Daniel Cady) Papers, Correspondence with Clarence King, Manuscripts & Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven.

Gardiner (James Terry) Papers, 1776-1927, New York State Library, Albany.

Gilman (Daniel Coit) Collection, Correspondence with Clarence King, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

Hay (John) Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI.

Hague (James Duncan) Collection, 1836-1908, The American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.

King (Clarence) Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marine, California.

King (Clarence) Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI.

King (Clarence) Papers, The American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.

King (Clarence) Papers, The Century Club, New York City.

Lesley (J.P.) Papers, 1826-1898, The American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.

Powell (John Wesley) Correspondence, 1869-1879, of the Powell Survey, The American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.

Skiddy (W. W.), ed. Sheffield Scientific School: Classes of 1852-1867, Manuscripts & Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, 1909. Clarence King, p 72-76.

The Works of Clarence King

“Active Glaciers Within the United States,” Atlantic Mo., XXVII (March 1871), 371-77.

“The Age of the Earth,” American Journal of Science, XLV (Jan. 1893), 1-20. Reprinted in Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report, 1893 (Washington, 1894), pp. 335-52.

“Artium Magister,” North American Rev., CXLVII (Oct. 1888), 369-84.

“Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific States,” Atlantic Mo, XXVII (July 1871), 64-76.

“The Biographers of Lincoln,” Century Mag., XXXII (Oct. 1886), 861-69.

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“Catastrophism and Evolution,” American Naturalist XI (1877), 449-70. Delivered at the 31st Anniversary of the Sheffield Scientific School, on June 26, 1877, under the title of “Catastrophism and the Evolution of the Environment,” and published the following day in New York Daily Tribune under the same title. It was also issued under this title as a pamphlet of 37 pages.

“A Desert Sport,” Century Mag., LXXVI (June 1908), 286-92.

“The Education of the Future,” Forum, XIII (Mar. 1892), 20-33.

“Fire and Sword in Cuba,” Forum, XXII (Sept. 1896), 31-52.

“A General View of the Prescott Region,” in Report of J. Ross Browne on Mineral Resources of the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains, pp. 467-74. Washington, 1868. Reprinted in the Arizona Miner, Jan. 23, 1869.

“A Great Mining Area [Cordilleran region],” Mining and Scientific Press, LXXX (April 26, 1900), 577-78. Derived from testimony that King gave at Rossland, B.C., in 1899.

“The Helmet of Mambrino,” with introduction by Francis P. Farquhar. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1938. Also the original manuscript held by the Century Club of New York City.

The Iron Mask Gold Mining Company vs. the Centre Star Mining and Smelting Company, Evidence by Clarence King, Waldemar Lindgren and Rossiter Raymond, Taken at Trial at Rossland, Commencing April 17th, 1899. N.p., 1899.

“John Hay,” (unsigned) Scribner’s Mo., VII (April 1874), 736-39.

“Map of the Yosemite Valley from Surveys made by order of the Commissioners to manage the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove by C. King and J. T. Gardner 1865,” New York, n.d. The map also accompanies The Yosemite Book (New York, 1868) and The Yosemite Guide-Book (Cambridge, 1869 and 1870)

Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. London: Samson Low, Marston, Low, & Searle, 1872. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1875. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1882. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1935 London: Adam & Charles Black, 1947. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1963. Yosemite: Yosemite Conservancy, 1997.

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“Note on the Uinta and Wahsatch Ranges,” American Journal of Science, 3rd ser., XI (1876), 494.

“Notes on Observed Glacial Phenomena and the Terminal Moraine of the N.E. Glacier” in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History (1876); King's 'notes..' are part of: Wright, George F. 'Some Remarkable Gravel Ridges in the Merrimack Valley.' Source of Citation: Stewart 1929 #189.

"On the Discovery of Actual Glaciers in the Mountains of the Pacific Slope," American Journal of Science and Arts (1871).

Eureka Consolidated Mining Company vs. Richmond Mining Company, of Eureka, Nevada, See “Testimony of Clarence King at the March Term of the Sixth Judicial District Court, 1873.” Eureka, Eureka Sentinel, 1873.

“The Pacific tourist: Williams' illustrated trans-continental guide of travel, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, containing full descriptions of railroad routes; a complete traveler's guide of the Union and Central Pacific railroads by Henry T. Williams, editor; with special contributions by Prof. F.V. Hayden, Maj. J.W. Powell, Clarence King, Capt. Dutton, A.C. Peale, Joaquin Miller, J.B. Davis, F.E. Shearer ; illustrations by Thomas Moran, A.C. Warren, W. Snyder, F. Schell, H.W. Troy, A. Will ; engravings by Meeder & Chubb.”

“Paleozoic Subdivisions of the Fortieth Parallel” (1876).

“Report of climb to Mount Tyndall as Part of California State Geological Survey,” in Josiah Whitney’s Geology: Volume I (Philadelphia, 1865), p. 384-387.

Reviews of The Andes and the Amazon; or, Across the Continent of South America (New York, 1870) by James Orton; of The Mississippi Valley: Its Physical Geography (Chicago, 1869), by G.W. Foster; and of Sketches of Creation (New York, 1870), by Alexander Winchell. Overland Mo., V (Dec. 1870), 578-83:

“Shall Cuba Be Free,” Forum, XX (Sept. 1895), 50-65.

“Style and the Monument,” (unsigned), North American Rev., CXLI (Nov. 1885), 443- 453.

“Testimony on Rossland Veins and Minerals,” Mining (Mar. 1900), 99-105.

The Three Lakes: Marian, Lall, Jan, and How They Were Named [San Francisco], Christmas 1870, ed. Francis P. Farquhar. Copy consulted in John Hay Library, Brown University.

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Other Books and Articles

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, Illustrated with Gravures by Samuel Chamberlain and with an Introduction by Henry Seidel Canby. New York: The Heritage Press, 1942.

Brewer, William Henry. Up and Down California in 1860-1864: the Journal of William H. Brewer, Professor of Agriculture in the Sheffield Scientific School from 1864 to 1903, ed. Francis P. Farquhar. New Haven, 1930. Also reviewed edition with Francis Farquhar introduction, 1966.

Brewer, William Henry. Such a Landscape! A Narrative of the 1864 California Geological Survey Exploration of Yosemite, Sequoia & Kings Canyon from the Diary, Field Notes, Letters & Reports of William Henry Brewer. Introduction, notes & photography by William Alsup; Foreword by Cathleen Douglas Stone. Yosemite National Park: Yosemite Association, 1999.

Brewer, William Henry. “The Whitney Survey on Mount Shasta, 1862: A Letter from William H. Brewer to Professor Brush.” Ed. by Francis Farquhar, in California Historical Society Quarterly, 1928. Vol. 2., pp. 121-131.

Bronson, Edgar Beecher. “A Man of East and West: Clarence King, Geologist, Savant, Wit,” Century Mag. LXXX, 376-82.

Dickason, David H. “Clarence King’s First Western Journey,” Huntington Lib. Quart., VII (Nov. 1943), 71-87.

Emmons, Samuel Franklin. “Biographical Memoir of Clarence King, 1842-1901,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, VI (1909), 25-55.

Emmons, Samuel Franklin. “Clarence King—A Memorial,” Engineering and Mining Journal, LXXIII (Dec. 28, 1901), 3-5.

Farquhar, Francis P. History of the Sierra Nevada. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965.

Farquhar, Francis P. Letters of Western Authors, No. 10, Oct. 1935, “Clarence King,” Book Club of California. Located at John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI.

Foote, Mary Hallock. A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, ed. Rodman W. Paul. San Marino, 1972. See p. 181 for Clarence King.

Goetzmann, William H. Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West. Austin: University of Texas, 1993.

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Hague, James D., ed. Clarence King Memoirs: The Helmet of Mambrino. New York: The Century Club, 1904.

Howells, William Dean. “Review of Mountaineering.” Atlantic Mo., XXIX (April 1872), 500-501.

Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations & Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

Isserman, Maurice. Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

James, George Wharton. “Clarence King,” Overland Mo., new ser. LXXXI (Oct. 1923), 31-36.

Janin, Henry. “A Brief Statement of My Part in the Unfortunate Diamond Affair.” Pamphlet. San Francisco, 1873.

Moore, James G. King of the 40th Parallel: Discovery in the American West. Stanford: Stanford General Books, 2006.

Nicholson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Seattle: University of Washington Press, revised edition 1997.

Robbins, Royal. Fail Falling. Ojai, CA: Pink Moment Press, 2010.

Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. New York: Lovell, Coryell, & Co., 1857.

Roth, John K., ed. The Moral Equivalent of War and Other Essays & Selections from Some Problems in Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Penguin Books, Reprint edition 1992.

Stein, Roger B. John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Taylor, Joseph. Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Tyndall, John. Glaciers of the Alps & Mountaineering in 1861. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1906.

Whitney, Josiah D. The Yosemite Book: A Description of the Yosemite Valley and the

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Adjacent Region of the Sierra Nevada, and of the Big Trees of California, Illustrated by Maps and Photographs. New York: Julius Bien, 1868.

Whitney, Josiah D. Geology. Volume I.: Report of Progress and Synopsis of the Field Work, from 1860 to 1864. Published by Authority of the Legislature of California, 1865. Philadelphia: Sherman and Co., 1865.

Wilkins, Thurman, with the help of Caroline Lawson Hinkley. Clarence King: A Biography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988, revised and enlarged edition.

Worster, Donald. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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