Passing Strange (5 page)

Dan Dewey wrote King that his own Trinity College was “all in a military furor just now. A company is being organized, and everybody expects to join.... I am getting more and more anxious to go to the war.” He anticipated a long struggle and felt “thoroughly convinced that it is my duty to be amongst the defenders of our national principles.”
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Gardiner, too, felt swept up in the fervor of the moment, drilling two hours a day with his fellow students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Instititute.
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King abhorred slavery. But he struggled over how to fight it while remaining true to the religious pacifism he had inherited from his grandmother. During the summer of 1861, he went up to Vermont to hike with Dan Dewey and to visit his mother and her family. He was teaching his stepbrother Snowden “to fish and be manly,” King wrote to Gardiner. But the issue of military service raised questions about his own manliness. He had just endured “another battle with my inclinations about going to war,” King told Gardiner. “Bitter and many were the blows it cost me but now see clearly my duty to keep myself for the future.”
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He wavered, then wavered again. In March 1862 he confessed to Gardiner, “When I said I wanted to ‘push a bayonet’ I was wrong. God knows that for my country I
would
‘push a bayonet’ and that I would not quail before death for my land but the act would crucify in me so many of my noblest impulses. It is like tearing my soul in sunder.” King worried that Gardiner would misread his ambivalence as moral weakness. “I do want to lead men,” he insisted. “It will be my life’s object. Why can I not. Don’t think that because I show you my tender side my weak one if you will, that I have no fire, no firmness, no mental power.” He boasted that at Yale he already led men in his “own humble way”; people thought him a man of some consequence.
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In July 1862, as soon as he received his Ph.B. “with honor” from the Sheffield Scientific School, King headed not south but north.
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For months he had plotted how to ship a Yale boat to Lake Champlain for a rowing expedition from upstate New York into Canada, with Gardiner and Dewey, and two Yale classmates, Samuel Parsons and William Stone. They set off right after commencement. But not even on the open water could the young men escape the widening ripples of war. On August 8 the secretary of war forbade all men of draft age from leaving the Union as long as military quotas remained unfilled.
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As the boys rowed toward Canada, unaware of this recent order, a U.S. Customs inspector stopped them as suspected draft dodgers. They talked themselves out of trouble and continued on, holding tight to the inspector’s official letter that declared they were “not leaving the United States to avoid any military draft.”
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If the incident stirred up any old doubts, King just shrugged them off. Dewey, though, took it as a call to duty, and when he returned home in September he enlisted in the Twenty-fifth Connecticut Volunteers.
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KING DID NOT VOLUNTEER for military service. Nor, after Congress passed draft legislation in March 1863, did he register for possible duty, despite the fact that he could have purchased a substitute with $300 of his stepfather’s money.
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Antiwar feelings ran strong on his father’s side of the family as well as his mother’s. His paternal aunt, Charlotte King, the widow of his father’s brother Charles, refused to let a tombstone acknowledge the military service of her son, William Vernon King, an officer in an all-black regiment, who defied her will to reenlist and died at Petersburg in 1864.
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The novelist Henry James, cousin to Charlotte King, thought that military service gave young Vernon a valuable independence, calling forth “some exhibition of a young character too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to and too much expected of it, and all under too firm a will.”
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But Clarence never saw military service as a way to build character, at least not his. He avoided any situation that might call public attention to his disinclination to fight. In May 1863, when local enrollment officers went door to door recording the names of men to be called up later in a military draft, King was nowhere to be found.
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He was already heading west.

King later described his decision to go west as a kind of epiphany. Back in New Haven in October 1862 to row in a regatta, King stopped by the home of his former professor George J. Brush and listened as Brush read aloud a long letter from his old friend William H. Brewer. Brewer was in California, assisting Josiah D. Whitney (the older brother of King’s German professor) on the California State Geological Survey. His letter recounted his recent ascent of Mount Shasta, the “sublimely desolate” peak he thought the highest in the state, and emphasized not just the scientific features of the volcanic mountain but the tremendous rigors of the high-altitude climb and the awe-inspiring views.
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King later told Brewer, “That settled it.”
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He would go west himself.

That the news from the battlefields might have pushed him west remained unsaid. Just weeks before King sat in that New Haven drawing room to hear stories of Mount Shasta, more than 4,800 Union and Confederate troops had died on the bloody battleground of Antietam, with 18,500 more left wounded and maimed. King’s decision to go west stemmed, in part, from his decision not to pursue the commercial life that his father and stepfather had followed.
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But it also reflected a deliberate choice not to go south with a gun.

In January 1863 King wrote Brush to say that he had been reading geology and “pretty much made up my mind to be a geologist if I can get any work in that direction.”
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That winter, he went to Cambridge to study glaciology for a brief time with the eminent Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz, then moved to New York to continue reading on his own. He shared lodgings in Manhattan with Jim Gardiner, who was now studying the law, and together with a handful of other disciples of the English critic John Ruskin, they formed a group called the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art—the “American Pre-Raphaelites,” one journalist called them. King had been pondering the interconnections between science, art, and religion, and he found validation for his nascent ideas in the society’s motto: “Truth to Nature.”
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By that, its members meant not slavish realism but art grounded in honest observation of the natural world and imbued with spiritual feeling: “The greatest Art includes the widest range, recording, with equal fidelity, the aspirations of the human soul, and the humblest facts of physical nature.”
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King felt restless in New York. He drifted up to the Howlands’ new house in Irvington, along the Hudson River about an hour north of Manhattan, to spend time with his mother and visit with his new half sister, Marian.
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When Gardiner’s health broke down—from overexertion at his legal studies, he claimed—King seized the moment to propose a western trip. Gardiner later thought the invitation proof of his friend’s great prescience about the future of the American nation. “It must have been a sense of the coming development of this continent,” he wrote, “and a desire to be a part of it that led him to plan, when we were twenty-one, our trip to the West across the Plains.”
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In truth, King likely felt less concerned with his historical legacy than with his immediate future and how he would avoid the inevitable questions about military service. When he headed west, a Union victory seemed far from certain.

But if the Civil War provided the backdrop to King’s decision, he nonetheless went west with a genuine scientific curiosity about the region whose complex geological structure remained so little known. Brewer’s letter had fired his imagination, and
John Brent,
a frontier novel by Theodore Winthrop, Yale’s own Civil War martyr, stoked the flames.
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King secured letters of introduction to the scientists working on the California State Geological Survey. And then, with a friend named William Hyde, whose father owned a foundry in Gold Hill, Nevada Territory, King and Gardiner prepared to travel by rail to St. Joseph, Missouri. There they would outfit themselves for the overland journey on horseback.

On April 14, 1863, as the boys prepared for their trip, Dan Dewey fell in battle at Irish Bend, Louisiana, a fatal bullet to his head.
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“He died a hero,” a comrade wrote to his mother; “the best could do no more.”
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Mrs. Howland assured Mrs. Dewey of her son’s deep affection for Dan, “to whom his soul was knit as David unto Jonathan,” and reminded her that the two boys “were one in their keen intellectual zest for the highest mental enjoyment, and one in their fervent desire to become Christlike in heart and life.”
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Months later, on a frosty Sunday morning in the Sierra, King settled into a “sweet sabbath mood,” and thought back to the Sundays he spent with his “brother” Dan in the Green Mountains of Vermont.
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Their separate fates made him feel reflective, stirred him to imagine the far West as a proving ground, akin to what Dan had found on a Civil War killing field. Some years later, in 1877, when he returned to Yale to address the boys of Sheff, King likened a field geologist’s travails to military service, expressing hope “that year by year men might stand here, fresh from the battle-field of life, out of the very heat of the strife, to tell us of their struggles, and hang the shield they have won along the walls of this temple of science.”
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In the West, King became a risk taker; in part for the thrill, in part to prove his manliness. “The possible danger of the trip,” a colleague in the field later wrote, “was an additional temptation to him.”
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KING’S FIRST TRIP WEST provided him with stories he would dine out on for years. In St. Joseph, he and his friends joined up with a St. Louis mule trader named T. M. Speers and his family, agreeing to help with the animals in exchange for board on their overland trek. On May 1 they started west along the Oregon Trail, driving the horses and mules alongside four wagons packed high with supplies. Less than twenty miles out, on the rain-soaked Missouri River bottomlands near Troy, Kansas, King and his friends got hauled into court by a sheriff’s posse and accused of “kidnapping some negroes.” The summer before, on Lake Champlain, King had convinced a federal agent that he was no draft dodger. Now Speers had to testify that the boys were not smuggling free blacks from Kansas into the slave state of Missouri. He won their release, and the travelers hurried on into Nebraska, following the muddy ruts of the overland trails along the Platte River, sometimes passing small bands of Potawatomi, sometimes glimpsing great herds of buffalo stampeding across the plains.
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And always, passing more emigrants. Some 3,600 Mormons traveled west across the trails to Salt Lake City in this season of 1863. Another 16,000 gold-seekers and prospective settlers—some drawn west by the free land promised by the Homestead Act of 1862, some fleeing the chaos of war—walked and rode to California, Oregon, the territories of Nevada and Idaho, and the future territory of Montana. Still more traveled across Nebraska Territory en route to the goldfields of Colorado.
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Gardiner wrote to his mother about quieter moments on the trail: the unnerving sight of a blanket-wrapped corpse on a windswept Indian burial platform and the “vast loneliness of those deserts” that every day helped him feel stronger and healthier.
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King, too, found his spirits improved as he moved farther and farther from his family and the social conventions of his New England world. “In that journey,” Gardiner later wrote, “he showed his wonderful power of entering into the lives and sympathies of every human being on the train, from the half breed Indian hunter to the gaunt and bigoted Southwestern Missouri emigrant. With everyone he made friends.”
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As they neared Fort Kearney, about two hundred miles into their trip, King determined to go on a buffalo hunt. It was sport, not necessity, a boyish act of bravado that distinguished King from the more sober pioneers moving across the prairies that spring. He hired a guide, traded his pony for an experienced horse, and galloped off with his revolver. Later, he described “with thrilling effect” how he spied a large herd of animals—ten thousand, he guessed—and pursued a large bull for two miles before firing as they descended into a shallow depression on the prairie. The wounded bull turned and charged King’s horse, which in turn fell on top of King. And then, “in mortal fear of being trampled to death by the flying herd, King remained conscious while, as he said, a mile and a half of solid buffalo galloped past.”
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King’s adventure became the stuff of hunting lore. Years later, Theodore Roosevelt speculated that King saw a herd “nearly seventy miles by thirty in extent” and offered it as evidence of the bygone days when “seething myriads of shaggy-maned cattle” roamed the American prairies.
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His taste for thrill-seeking indulged, King caught the overland stage to meet up with his traveling companions, dragging his sore leg like a badge of honor.
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The Speers wagon train traveled through South Pass, past Fort Bridger, and across the Wasatch range into Salt Lake City. They camped there on the public square, and the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, came out to greet them and warned them to leave his people alone. Fearful that the emigrants might turn the Indians farther west against his settlements, he urged them to greet the Great Basin tribes with “a biscuit instead of a bullet.”
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Next came the most difficult part of the overland trip. Traveling at night to avoid the punishing heat, the travelers walked and rode for more than a month across the hot sagebrush plains of Nevada Territory. It would have been weeks before they heard news of the costly Union victory at Gettysburg in the early days of July or learned about the bloody New York City draft riots two weeks later. In the streets of Manhattan, in neighborhoods that would have been familiar to King and Gardiner, working-class white men—angered that they could not buy their way out of the draft—rose up in ugly violence against local blacks who seemed an easy target for their political and economic frustrations. On August 6 the Speers party finally reached Carson City, at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada, and here, in a town linked to the world by the recently completed transcontinental telegraph, they likely got word of the world they had left behind.