Clarence King & His Friends
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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. 3 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 4 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.