Passing Strange (6 page)

King, Gardiner, and Hyde left the Speers party in Carson City and continued on their own to Gold Hill, where Hyde’s father owned a foundry. In this boomtown set on top of the great Comstock Lode, King hoped to see firsthand how abstract geological and mineralogical knowledge could be put to practical use.
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But disaster struck their first night in town, when a windswept fire burned through Hyde’s foundry, where the boys had bunked for the evening. They escaped with their lives but lost everything else, including their clothes, guns, money, and the letters of introduction King had to William Brewer of the California State Geological Survey.
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When Hyde decided to stay behind to help his injured father, King and Gardiner resolved to continue west on their own. They worked in town just long enough to earn some money, sold their horses, and started walking to California. A teamster picked them up and gave them a ride to the gold-mining town of Placerville. From there they made their way to Sacramento, where they boarded a steamboat downriver to San Francisco. On the boat, quite by happenstance, they bumped into the man they had come all this way to meet.

Men from the mines packed the steamboat, Gardiner wrote to his mother, “many rough, sunburned men in flannel shirts, high boots, belts and revolvers.” But one man looked more “intellectual” than the rest, despite his old felt hat, heavy revolver belt, and weatherworn face. “Clare walked up to the man, the roughest dressed person on the boat, and deliberately asked him if he was Professor Brewer. He was; and Clare introduced himself as a student from Yale Scientific School and was warmly received.” King introduced Gardiner, the three spent the evening together, and when they reached San Francisco, Brewer took them to his hotel. The next day, after the boys spent their last money for “decent clothes,” Brewer took them to the headquarters of the California State Geological Survey and introduced them to his boss, Josiah Whitney. Gardiner soon found work as resident engineer in charge of mapping and designing the defense batteries on Angel Island in San Francisco Harbor. And within just three days of arriving in the city, Clarence King was assistant geologist, without pay, for the very surveyors whose exploits had first flamed his imagination of the West.
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THE CALIFORNIA STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY heralded a new era in western exploration. Most government surveys of the antebellum period had a more military focus, stressing the topographical knowledge necessary for the construction of transportation routes that could facilitate the flow of people and supplies across the sparsely settled West. But the California survey, authorized by the state legislature in April 1860 and patterned after several similar state-sponsored projects in the East, aspired to a more disinterested scientific description of the state’s “rocks, fossils, soils, and minerals, and of its botanical and zoological productions.” It sought to address fundamental questions about the formation of mountains, the effects of glaciers, and the age of mineral-bearing strata. As the survey’s director, Josiah Whitney, later told the legislators, “it was not the business of a geological surveying corps to act to any considerable extent as a prospecting party.”
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Whitney’s associates found him quick-tempered and stubborn, “troublesome” as a subordinate but a “just and generous superior.” After graduating from Yale in 1839, he had studied chemistry in Europe, conducted fieldwork in the Midwest, and won additional respect as a serious scientist with his 1854 treatise,
The Metallic Wealth of the United States.
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His assistant, William Brewer, was likewise a Yale man who had done postgraduate work in Europe. After a short tenure as a chemistry professor at Washington College, in Pennsylvania, he had come to California to regroup after the recent loss of his young wife and child.
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Brewer thought King a young man of “light and ardent nature,” who seemed even younger than his twenty-one years.
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“Of course, he was not so thoroughly informed or so deeply interested in geological problems as he afterwards became,” Brewer later explained. King’s knowledge came from books, not experience, and Brewer found him “saturated chiefly with Ruskin and Tyndall. The remarks of the latter on the glaciers of the Alps were constantly upon his lips.”
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King had embraced Ruskin’s aesthetic theories about the “truth of earth” in an abstract way before, and in California he intended to see whether the contemplation of mountains really would elevate his mind to higher aesthetic truths. Ruskin believed that the earth’s nobility would reveal itself to those who could look beyond the disguise of vegetation to see “the facts and forms of the bare ground.” And who better than a geologist, especially one standing atop a mountain, to perceive the essential truths of the natural world or the titanic drama of the earth’s creation? “Mountains are, to the rest of the body of the earth,” Ruskin wrote in 1843, “what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with fierce and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion and strength; the plains and lower hills are the repose and effortless motion of the frame.”
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To the perceptive geologist, natural formations could not only narrate some great cosmic drama but speak to the fundamental truths of life. “What would Ruskin have said, if he had seen
this
!” King exclaimed from the summit of Lassen Peak in September 1863.
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After a period of intense scientific work, King always found it a relief to stop “analyzing” and just expose himself to nature, like “a sensitized photographic plate.” “No tongue can tell the relief to simply withdraw scientific observation,” he wrote, “and let Nature impress you in the dear old way with all her mystery and glory, with those vague indescribable emotions which tremble between wonder and sympathy.”
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King’s fascination with the geological sublime struck some of his survey colleagues as decidedly unscientific. The paleontologist William More Gabb grumbled that King “had rather sit on a peak all day and stare at those snow-mountains, than find a fossil in the metamorphic Sierra.”
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But Brewer accepted King’s dreamy introspection as the complement to his remarkable physical vigor. “King is enthusiastic,” he wrote, “is wonderfully tough, has the greatest endurance I have ever seen, and is withal very muscular.”
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The work of the Irish scientist John Tyndall appealed to this more active aspect of King’s character. An expert on glaciers and a seasoned alpine explorer, Tyndall cared less about looking at mountains than climbing them, and his writings balanced scientific observation with narrative adventure. King kept the two ideals in balance: Ruskin’s reverential contemplation and Tyndall’s active mountaineering. From the top of Lassen Peak, King might dream of Ruskin, but Tyndall guided his descent. When King pronounced his intent to slide down the snowslopes on the side of the peak, Brewer objected. “But he had read Tyndall; and what was a mountain climb without a
glissade
? So he had his way, and came out of the adventure with only a few unimportant bruises.”
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KING’S SURVEYING CAREER BEGAN just two days after his arrival in San Francisco, when he headed north with Brewer for the lava fields of Lassen Peak, an active volcano in the southern part of the Cascade range. They passed through Sacramento and the old gold rush country where huge hydraulic operations had replaced the original placer mines, pausing along the way to examine copper deposits and gather fossils. After their ascent of Lassen Peak, where King broke out in his Ruskinian “rhapsodies of admiration,” they explored the east side of Mount Shasta, a place to which King would later return to test his theories about glaciers.
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Their investigations took them north to the Klamath River and then west toward the Pacific, in search of information about mineral deposits that they could incorporate into a comprehensive geologic map of the region. By early November, when King arrived back in San Francisco, he had completed an intense two-month course in geology no Yale classroom could match.

King’s field journals, however, focused less on science than on spiritual matters. Geology required a particular set of technical skills, a knowledge of mineral structure, and an ability to read in the physical landscape a record of deep historical change. But it remained a science intimately connected to more profound questions about the structure and age of the earth and the very nature of life itself. Geologists argued over whether the earth had been shaped through
uniformitarian
forces, the slow, gradual effects of glaciers, erosion, and wind, or through
catastrophic
changes, more sudden and violent upheavals that might explain the uplift, tilting, fracturing, and faulting so easily observed in the mountains of the American West. And as Darwin’s ideas about evolution gained currency, scientists also turned to geology for evidence to prove or disprove the new biological theories. The age of rocks held clues to challenge biblical theories of the earth’s creation, and the fossil record could be used to support Darwin’s theories about the slow, gradual evolutionary changes in the biological realm. Some California clergymen thought Whitney’s state survey nothing less than blasphemy.
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King himself struggled with the tensions between science and religion, wondering how to reconcile the laws of nature with the laws of God. The biblical book of Revelation prophesied a new heavenly kingdom. But if earthly life was transitory, pondered King, “why study so hard into all the intricate sources of fact which will be swept away and known no more. I have looked for lessons. I have believed that God created all with design that with all was a lesson, that lessons were taught in nature which were not elsewhere.”
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He and Brewer “sat up long and talked about morals.”
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And when King returned to San Francisco after his first trip into the Sierra, he seemed newly serious and intent. When he posed that winter for a group portrait with the other members of the survey, he wore his one dress suit and adopted the formal, sober gaze of his older colleagues. Gardiner wrote to his mother about his old friend: “Out in the wilderness away from all outside Christian influences, God is bringing him into the closest communion with the things that are unseen and eternal. He is being cleansed for some great work.”
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Although King recorded his personal struggles with faith in his private journals, much of his writing seems self-consciously literary, as if he imagined a more public audience for his words. “The air has changed,” he wrote late in the season; “a slight frostiness creeps down from the north and the stars as I wake up mornings have a sort of cold brilliancy and frosty sparkle. The little pleiades no longer look down through a soft warm night. They gleam like a setting of cold gems.”
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King seemed to live on a kind of double track. Even as he lived in the present, he liked to step outside of his life to imagine it as a story.

King rested only briefly in San Francisco. He was still there, though, on November 19, 1863, when President Lincoln dedicated the memorial on the battlefield at Gettysburg and delivered the memorable address that recast the war. A war once imagined as a fight to preserve the Union became an epic battle to forge “a new birth of freedom” for all Americans, black and white. There was now a higher cause at stake, but this was still not King’s fight. On November 24 he headed east to survey the famed Mariposa Estate. Once the property of the explorer John C. Frémont, it was now superintended by Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Manhattan’s Central Park and an old friend of King’s from his Hartford days. The mine stood at the southern end of the gold belt that stretched along the Sierra foothills, and in the surrounding countryside King made one of the survey’s key scientific discoveries. With fossils gathered from rocks that contained veins of gold, he conclusively dated California’s gold-bearing slate to the Jurassic period and showed that the auriferous placer deposits had formed during the Pliocene. King’s find would prove useful to geologists and mining engineers alike.
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During the winter and spring of 1864, King made several more short trips for the survey. He saw Yosemite for the first time and went on to Lake Tahoe to take the barometric readings that would establish its altitude. He met up with Whitney in Virginia City, in the Virginia range east of the Sierra, and at his request conducted a trial survey as far east as the Humboldt range, to test the possibility of extending the California survey out across the Great Basin. Later, as the weather improved in late spring, the survey team plotted a return to the high mountains.

When Gardiner quit his job in the spring of 1864 rather than obey orders to work on the sabbath, King recommended him to Whitney as an additional member of the survey crew.
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In May Gardiner joined on as a volunteer assistant topographer, unpaid like King. The two friends anticipated high adventure as they headed out to explore the southern part of the Sierra where, as Gardiner wrote to his mother, there stood “an immense tract . . . as yet unexplored.”
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King had seen the distant peaks of the High Sierra a few months earlier and hypothesized, with a nod to Tyndall, that these would be America’s “new Alps.”
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King posed again for a formal photographic portrait with Gardiner and two of the other members of his field party. The young man so intent upon demonstrating his seriousness in the picture made just a few months before now wore his field clothes to play the part of a swaggering frontiersman. With a mercury barometer slung across his back like a rifle and a geologist’s hammer in his hand, he no longer seeks to disguise his youth. Instead, he revels in it.