Passing Strange (17 page)

King spent scant time in Washington during his twenty-two months as director of the USGS. As so often seemed to be the case, his life was a balancing act: politicking in Washington conflicted with the work to be done in the far West, and the obligations of a public servant made it hard to pursue his own private business ventures. But during his rare months in Washington, King fell into an enchanted circle of friendship, one he would long cherish but could never re-create.

When John Hay moved to Washington in November 1879 to become assistant secretary of state, he took rooms at the very hotel where King resided, and the two quickly resumed their friendship. Hay’s wife, Clara Stone Hay, daughter of a wealthy Cleveland industrialist, had stayed behind in Cleveland with their young children, and in her absence King and Hay became inseparable dinner partners, bonding even more over their shared antipathy to the political posturing of the Washington social scene. They later rented a house together, where their collective lack of domestic skills made entertaining all but impossible. But in the fall of 1880, Henry Adams returned to Washington from a year abroad with his brilliant, if fragile, wife, Clover. Adams had given up his teaching position at Harvard and his editorship of the
North American Review
to become a historian, and he was now at work on a history of the United States under the Jefferson and Madison administrations. He and Clover rented a house on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. King and Hay began to come to tea almost every day, and when Clara Hay came to Washington that winter she joined the group.

Soon the teatimes stretched into dinner, and the dinners into long evenings of talk. The five took an intense delight in one another’s company, and their exclusivity (one got invited to dinner only if sufficiently amusing) reinforced the sense that they were a rarefied crew. Henry James transformed Clover into a character in his short story “Pandora,” casting her as a lady of “infinite mirth” whose salon “left out, on the whole, more than it took in.”
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The group soon dubbed themselves the “Five of Hearts,” an echo of King’s nickname, the King of Diamonds, and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s old social club known as the “Five of Clubs.”
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They celebrated their little joke with specially printed stationery that sported a small image of a playing card (the five of hearts, of course), and King later gave the Adamses a Five of Hearts tea service, with heart-shaped teacups and a china tray printed with a clock fixed forever at the time for five o’clock tea.
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The Adamses and Hays thought King their favorite Heart: a creature whose energy and wit brought him success in everything he tried—as explorer, writer, scientist, even bureaucrat. Adams later used him as the model for the geologist George Strong in his pseudonymous novel
Esther
(1884): “an intelligent man, with a figure made for action, an eye that hated rest, and a manner naturally sympathetic.”
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John Hay joked about King to Clover Adams, “There ought to be more like him—but I suppose the Almighty could not afford it, at the price.”
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King returned this devoted admiration, envying the Hays and Adamses their cozy domesticity. In Clover Adams, an avid reader and frustrated intellectual, he saw a woman of extraordinary wit and charm. In the more domestic Clara Hay, who preferred ladies’ lunches to long books, he found an admirable quality of solid placid stability.

The deep friendships laid down that winter between the three men endured long after King and the Hays left Washington in the spring of 1881, as James Garfield replaced President Rutherford B. Hayes. In time, Clover Adams’s suicide would send her husband into a deep and enduring depression, John Hay would ascend to the very top of the nation’s diplomatic corps, and Clarence King would enter into a secret double life. But in that winter of 1880-81, their talk sealed the bonds of friendship and devotion that would last their lifetimes.

 

 

EVEN AS A PUBLIC servant, King found it impossible to resist the siren song of money. After becoming director of the USGS he took an interest in the flooded Minas Prietas, a lode of gold and silver in the mountains of Sonora, Mexico (technically outside the scope of the agency’s work in the United States and thus not a legal conflict of interest), and persuaded a group of friends to buy it. He agreed to manage the mine in exchange for a share of the stock. In early 1880 he talked some of his investor friends into purchasing a silver mine in southern Arizona. Since this mine lay within the jurisdiction of the USGS, King flirted with the ethics rules here, and he asked Gardiner to hold his mining shares along with his own. Later in the spring, he brought his pool of investors in on the Yedras mine, a flooded silver mine in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, taking a quarter of the shares of the Yedras Mining Company for himself, largely with money loaned to him by Gardiner and Hay. Then in late 1880, after dashing down to Mexico to look into a problem at the Yedras mine, King set off on horseback to search for treasure in the Sierra Madre, home to the fabled silver mines of Spanish Mexico. And there he found the Sombrerete mine, with a vein the great German explorer Alexander von Humboldt once hailed as the richest in two hemispheres. Dormant for years, the mine had yielded fantastic riches in the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries. Its prospects, King thought, seemed hard to exaggerate.
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With an eye toward the fortunes to be found in private enterprise, he decided to step down from government service. On March 11, 1881, King wrote to President Garfield. “Finding that the administration of my office leaves me no time for more personal geological labors, and believing that I can render more important service to science as an investigator than as the head of an executive bureau, I have the honour herewith to offer my resignation as Director of the Geological Survey.”
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King never again held a government job. Two months after leaving the USGS, he was president of the newly formed Sombrerete Mining Company, one more corporation financed largely by his eastern friends.
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King was playing for high stakes, but the year brought a cascade of ill health and the sorts of engineering difficulties that always make mining a speculative venture. The Minas Prietas proved disappointing, King lost $25,000 in another venture in Chihuahua, and the Yedras investors grew impatient and asked King to negotiate the sale of the company.
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King seemed “as full as a juggler would be with four knives in the air,” Hay wrote to Clover Adams that fall.
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King fantasized about finding buyers in Europe for the mine. But he had money troubles on the home front, too. Before he could leave for Europe he had to go to court to help his mother.

The legal case in January 1882 revolved around the will of John H. Prentice, a real estate partner of George S. Howland, King’s long-deceased stepfather. When Howland’s business affairs “became embarrassed,” he defaulted on his portion of their payments and forfeited his share of their profits. But after Howland died insolvent in 1866, Prentice felt “moved by [his] sympathy” for the widowed Mrs. Howland and her children. In 1871 he delivered some securities in trust to his friend Joshua Van Cott, directing him to collect the interest and turn it over to Clarence King for Mrs. Howland’s benefit. For ten years, Mrs. Howland had enjoyed this secret stream of revenue. But Prentice’s death in 1880 threatened the arrangement. Since Mrs. Howland’s financial calamity would be her son’s as well, it behooved him to come to her aid.

After Prentice died, his executors denied any obligation to continue fulfilling his gift. But Van Cott went to court on Mrs. Howland’s behalf, suing for the principal that Prentice had promised before his death, bonds worth about $60,000 (more than $1.25 million today).
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King testified for his mother in January 1882, but when he sailed for Europe that spring the outcome remained far from certain. Indeed, not until 1887 would the case be resolved, with Mrs. Howland receiving something, but less than she felt her due.
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The proceedings foreshadowed, with uncanny similarity, the legal situation King’s own children would face half a century later, when they went to court to secure a mysterious and long-promised trust fund. King might have taken away a valuable lesson about estate planning, but his mother’s difficulties taught him nothing.

 

 

KING SAILED FOR EUROPE on May 6, 1882. He had been maddeningly vague with his friends about his plans, leaving the Hays with the impression that he would sail with them in July and even suggesting that his mother might come. But as she clarified for the Hays, with a familiar tone of self-sacrifice, although she longed to share her “first impressions of the old World” with her son, she “believed that my child’s rest of mind would be more complete if he knew I held the family helm.”
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Indeed, Mrs. Howland’s peculiar ideas about travel—“Even a too great and too rapid succession of impressions are bad for the brain”—ill suited her for the sorts of adventures King had in mind.
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King’s first trip to Europe promised a break from his mining woes, a respite from his mother, a glorious escape from routine and social expectations as liberating as that first tramp across America almost two decades before. The poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, who knew King only by reputation, met him for the first time on the transatlantic steamer and found him a grave and dignified dinner partner: there was nothing “in this thorough-bred, travel-dressed, cosmopolitan to suggest that he had not spent repeated seasons upon the hemisphere to which we were bound.” But the next morning, King appeared on deck transformed. “He broke out into a thousand pranks and paradoxes,” Stedman recalled. “Freedom was what we both needed, and my own reserve was at an end the moment I saw him changed from the dignitary to a veritable Prince Florizel with the tray of tarts, offering lollipops right and left.” King felt gloriously rich. He showed Stedman a single draft for a thousand pounds, pronouncing it “a very sacred special fund, which was to be piously expended for some one work of art... the most beauteous and essential thing he might come upon in this tour.” His “frolic” was contagious.
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Once the effete easterner roughing it in the Sierra, he now intended to play the robust American in a more staid European world.

 

 

AN IMAGINED TRIP OF two or three months stretched into a stay of more than two years. A quick stop in London, followed by a week in Paris, let King make contact with a few promoters who promised to help him find some mining investors.
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Then he set off to Spain to play. King had long been enamored of Spanish culture, at least as he understood it from Cervantes or his own travels through California and Mexico. And though he visited a few mines, he treated this side trip as a grand jest. He raced about Spain in a special costume of his own devising: a green velvet suit, snugly fit across his waist, with tightly fitting knickers, light-colored stockings, and a jaunty tam that hid his receding hairline. The costume seemed just right for his quixotic mission to find “Mambrino’s golden helmet,” the barber’s basin that Don Quixote wore on his head. King later wrote up the story of his search for the basin’s intended recipient, his old San Francisco friend Don Horacio Cutter.
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It was a lighthearted wisp of an essay, but King’s friends forever after cited it as evidence of his all-too-little-exercised literary talent.

Everywhere he went, King bought art, with what Hay called “unerring judgment and unflinching extravagance.”
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He got laces in Spain, Fortuny watercolors in Paris. He swept up antiques from the Far East wherever he could find them and prowled the picture shops of London buying Italian genre paintings and Dutch landscapes. The highlight of his search came when he got into a discussion of aesthetics with a man in a London dealer’s shop. After a spirited conversation, King learned he was speaking to John Ruskin himself. The great man invited King to his home and offered him a choice of his two greatest watercolors by Turner. “One good Turner deserves another,” King replied, and he took them both.
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IF KING’S FORAYS INTO the world of working-class Manhattan remained a secret from most of his friends, everyone seemed to know what he was up to in London. John Hay ran into his old friend in both Paris and London and made light of King’s rambles across the cities’ class divides. “He was ‘the delight of the nobility and gentry’ and not of them only, but he made friends also in Whitechapel and Soho, and even to some in the submerged fraction, the most wretched derelicts of civilization, he brought the ineffable light of his keen comprehension and generous sympathy.”
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King charmed the Baron Ferdinand James de Rothschild, one of England’s wealthiest men; dined in Scotland with Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, whose scientific paper on the age of the earth had stimulated his own interest in geophysics; and finally met his old hero, the alpinist John Tyndall. He passed his time in London with a continual round of dinner parties with the resident American literary set—William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and Henry James, a distant relative by marriage whom King now met through their mutual friend John Hay—and endless gatherings of minor British nobility.
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But as in New York, King had another world. Sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of a friend, he liked to slip out into the streets of London’s poorest neighborhoods to explore.

The “prince of paradox” delighted in the extremes of London society.
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He told Howells how the city fascinated him, “in the mirky purlieus of the poorest, where you could buy for a penny a slice of wonderful pie which included the courses of a whole dinner in its stratification, not less than in the circles of the Prince of Wales set, where the young archworldlings went ingenuously about showing their vaccinations to one another, and exchanging boyish congratulations and condolences.”
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These rambles through the slums of London evoked pleasurable memories of King’s time in the far West. The English seemed amusing, King told Howells, for “their novelty of type and natural frankness, in the same degree if not the same kind as the wild or wilding children of the Pacific Slope and of the intervening alkaline regions.”
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In London he sought the freedom of the West.