Passing Strange (7 page)

King’s field party of five set out from San Francisco in late May, in the midst of a brutal drought. Across desolate dirt trails, through dust storms that obscured their vision, they rode east into the San Joaquin Valley and headed south across land littered with the carcasses of dead cattle. With Brewer, King, and Gardiner rode the topographer Charles Hoffmann and the drover and packer Richard Cotter, whom Gardiner and King had met while crossing the continent the year before. Climbing into the foothills of the Sierra, near the town of Visalia, the exploring party came upon an impressive stand of giant sequoias. They received credit for “discovering” them, but, as King later confessed, a group of Indians directed them there.
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They lingered for some days among the enormous trees, then continued up the divide between the Kings and Kaweah rivers. From the peak of a mountain that they promptly named for the Yale professor Benjamin Silliman Jr., they spotted a ridge that seemed to contain the highest mountains of this vast terrain. With their barometers they measured altitude, and with transit, sextant, and compass they slowly mapped this uncharted part of the High Sierra, using a method of triangulation that let them establish the location of new landmarks by taking sightings from two already known locations. As they rode deeper and deeper into the Sierra, King took note of the “purely Gothic” form of the mountains, resorting to Ruskinian language to describe the scene: “Whole mountains shaped themselves like the ruins of cathedrals,—sharp roof-ridges, pinnacled and statued; buttresses more spired and ornamented than Milan’s . . . with here and there a single cruciform peak, its frozen roof and granite spires so strikingly Gothic I cannot doubt that the Alps furnished the models for early cathedrals of that order.”
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The Gothic spires of the Sierra allowed him to imagine that America could stake claim to a tradition as noble as Europe’s.

The range that from the west seemed to be the “highest land” soon revealed itself to be lower than a range farther east, across the “terribleness and grandeur” of a deep canyon. King had long dreamed of getting to the “top of California,” and he now asked Cotter to head east with him, up the highest peak they could spy. “I felt that Cotter was the one comrade I would choose to face death with,” King later wrote, “for I believed there was in his manhood no room for fear or shirk.” Brewer at first said no to the plan, feeling “a certain fatherly responsibility.” But eventually he gave in.
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Some years later, in 1871, King wrote the story of his epic adventure, mingling a dramatic account of physical trials with descriptions of the geological sublime.
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Scrambling to the top of the westernmost range of the Sierra, beneath the shadow of the peak the surveyors named Mount Brewer, King contemplated the “gigantic mountain-wall” that lay to the east, a “noble pile of Gothic-finished granite and enamel-like snow.” He later wrote, “I looked at it as one contemplating the purpose of his life; and for just one moment I would have rather liked to dodge that purpose, or to have waited, or have found some excellent reason why I might not go; but all this quickly vanished, leaving a cheerful resolve to go ahead.”
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Leaving their comrades behind, Cotter and King walked east, traversing steep granite slopes, debris fields, and bleak stretches of frozen snow. They spent their first night on a small granite ledge near a frozen lake, huddled together under a blanket for warmth. They rose the next morning in “cold, ghastly dimness” and trekked on across the snowfields with their heavy packs, “animated by a faith that the mountains could not defy us.” Later climbers accused King of overly dramatizing a not very difficult climb. But with scant equipment and no maps, King and Cotter had to rely on trial and error. They improvised, using their ropes to toss a lasso around the granite blocks that lay above them, pulling themselves up sheer cliffs, hand over hand; and they again used their ropes to descend, first one then the other, down rock crevices from ledge to ledge. “Our blood was up,” King recalled, “and danger added only an extra thrill to the nerves.” On the third day, they cut steps into a spire of ice that rose toward their long-sought summit, and when the ice spire became too thin and precarious, they wrapped their bodies around it and climbed it like a tree trunk. At last, they stood on the mountain’s peak. But “to our surprise,” King said with muted understatement, they could now see an even higher peak about six miles away to the south. Later they would name it Mount Whitney, in honor of the survey chief. For now, though, they would celebrate their conquest as if their triumph had been complete. At exactly twelve noon, King wrote, “I rang my hammer upon the topmost rock; we grasped hands, and I reverently named the grand peak MOUNT TYNDALL.”
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The exuberant act celebrated their heroic sense of self. By the end of the survey season, there would be not just a Mount Tyndall, a Mount Whitney, and a Mount Brewer, but a Mount Clarence King (carefully named to avoid confusion with other Kings), a Mount Gardiner, and a Mount Cotter.
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Earlier European explorers had marked their new American world with names that honored kings and queens and patron saints. But the men of the California State Geological Survey named their new world after their scientist-mentors, their political patrons, and themselves.

King’s descent from Mount Tyndall proved as difficult as his climb. Later, he recounted Cotter’s painful barefoot hike, their improvised rope climbs, their night in “weird Dantesque surroundings” with a voice that scarcely concealed his manly pride in their triumph over danger. Five days after leaving their companions, King and Cotter walked back into camp. As King later wrote, “Brewer said to me, ‘King, you have relieved me of a dreadful task. For the last three days I have been composing a letter to your family, but somehow I did not get beyond ‘It becomes my painful duty to inform you.’ ”
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King held on to that anecdote like a badge of courage. And in his telling of the tale he minimized all that their small survey crew had accomplished that summer, unable perhaps to shake his disappointment over a failed attempt to scale Mount Whitney later in the season. Their expedition had added to the map of California an area “as large as Massachusetts and as high as Switzerland.”
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And the explorers had proved themselves, in the historian William Goetzmann’s phrase, “Ruskins on a grand scale.”
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King and Gardiner returned to San Francisco in September, but within a week set out for the Yosemite Valley. The United States Congress had set the land aside as a state park just a few months earlier, in June 1864 (it would become part of a larger national park in 1906). Now, as temporary employees of a special commission headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, King and Gardiner had less than three months to survey the park’s boundaries and gather mapmaking data before the state legislature reconvened in December. King found Yosemite a kind of open book, the marks left by glaciers “restoring in imagination pictures of the past.” By the time early winter storms cut their work short, King could see that much more work would be needed to understand the titanic forces that had shaped the deep valley and the granite peaks of the surrounding cliffs.
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Between the weather and Whitney’s perennial funding problems, the winter months promised little work. Whitney had already gone home to Boston for the season and Brewer had returned east to accept a professorship at Yale. So King and Gardiner returned to San Francisco “wet and exhausted,” gave copies of their notes to Olmsted, and caught a steamer for Nicaragua, the first leg of a long trip home that would require them to cross the isthmus by land, then catch another northbound boat. Twelve days after leaving San Francisco, King found himself beneath a palm tree in Nicaragua, watching “a bewitching black-and-tan sister thrumming her guitar while the chocolate for our breakfast boiled.” It made for a sharp contrast to the high windswept mountains of the Sierra. “Warmth, repose, the verdure of eternal spring, the poetical whisper of palms, the heavy odor of the tropical blooms, banished the cold fury of the Sierra, which had left a permanent chill in our bones,” King wrote.
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The Nicaraguan interlude left a permanent impression. For the rest of his life, King would associate tropical warmth with relief, with rest, and with exotic dark-skinned women.

 

 

KING BROUGHT AT LEAST one souvenir from Central America back east with him in January 1865. He spent weeks bedridden at his mother’s house in Irvington, ill with malaria that he blamed on the Nicaraguan swamps. It would become his “usual August illness” anticipated “with the regularity of an astronomical phenomenon.”
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However glad she felt to see him, though, Mrs. Howland had little time for the son she had not seen in nearly two years. She gave birth to a baby boy, named George Snowden after his father, on February 12.
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Clarence slipped out of this awkward situation as soon as he felt well enough—this half brother was twenty-three years younger than he, young enough to be
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son—and went to New Haven to catch up with old friends and sit in on an astronomy course. In late February he and Gardiner went up to Boston to tell Whitney they wanted to stick with the survey for a while longer. Through the spring and summer he worked on his California maps. His mother and stepfather were ill that summer, King told Brewer, and their difficulties felt oppressive. “I long for the old Sierras this housed half smothered existence is damaging alike to mind morals and temper.” When he posed for a formal portrait in October, he dressed the part of the gentleman-scholar in his fashionable muttonchop whiskers, with a dark suit, a gold watch chain, and an open book in his lap. But he fancied himself an adventurer. In November he and Gardiner caught a steamship for California.
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King’s time back east coincided with the truce at Appomattox, the assassination of Lincoln, and the wrenching events of the immediate postwar era that marked the nation’s first tentative efforts at political reconstruction. The end of the Civil War would eventually trigger renewed public interest in the far West: Civil War veterans would head west to fight Indians, mining investors would look westward with renewed interest, the government would help subsidize the construction of a vast infrastructure of roads and rail lines. But in the fall of 1865, the federal government had not yet resumed its support of the sort of western exploration that had marked the antebellum years, and the financial picture for exploration in California remained bleak. Whitney had insufficient funds for his hoped-for survey of the California deserts, so to keep King and Gardiner busy over the winter he sent them to Arizona to help General Irvin McDowell survey the territory for possible military roads. King and Gardiner found the work frustrating, difficult, and dangerous, and when the enlistments of their military escorts expired, they gave it up.

But King took away a story. On a road near Prescott, as they rode out ahead of their cavalry escort, King and Gardiner were ambushed by a group of Hualapai Indians armed with bows and arrows (they became Apache in King’s later telling of the tale). They ordered the two surveyors to disrobe and lit a fire, giving every indication they intended to burn their captives. King stalled for time, using Spanish and sign language to explain that his cistern barometer, in its long cylindrical case, was actually a long-range gun. At the last moment the cavalry appeared, quickly perceived the situation, and charged the gathered crowd. “There is no doubt that King’s presence of mind, coolness and ingenuity saved the lives of his friend and himself,” explained a colleague.
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This account of King’s heroism came straight from the hero himself.

From Arizona, King headed back to California. He hesitated, at first, to rejoin the state survey. Whitney sensed why, writing to Brewer that “King wants to get more glory by doing something on his own hook.”
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But King eventually accepted the position of assistant geologist and he spent most of that summer of 1866 surveying in Yosemite and the surrounding high country of the central Sierra, working with Gardiner to perfect a new method of topographical mapping that would let them chart mountainous terrain with greater facility. This marked the end of their apprenticeship. The two young friends, still in their early twenties, chafed under someone else’s command. They had ambitions of their own.

Sitting on a Sierra peak, looking eastward into Nevada, King and Gardiner hatched the plan that would shape American exploration of the West for the next decade. As Gardiner later recalled, their walk across the continent and their subsequent work in Arizona had persuaded them that “the survey of California and the problems to be solved there were but a part, and possibly a minor part, of the great problems of the structure, topographical and geological, of the whole mountain-system of western America from the plains to the Pacific.” They thus conceived of a great national survey that would proceed along the Fortieth Parallel, examining a continental cross-section of the western United States. The idea was an outgrowth of their experience, wrote Gardiner, “coupled with King’s great aggressive energy and consciousness of power to persuade men to do the thing he thought ought to be done.”
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Returning to San Francisco after his summer in the mountains, King received an urgent telegram from his mother. Her husband, George S. Howland, had died of brain fever on September 21.
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At age forty-one, Florence King Howland was a widow for the second time, now with a year-old son, a four-year-old daughter, and an adolescent stepson with severe physical disabilities. King resigned his commission with the California survey, wrangled support from Whitney for his idea to mount an expedition along the Fortieth Parallel, and headed for home. “Family trouble and misfortune cannot be anticipated or prevented,” he later wrote; “it comes like a shadow and darkens one’s days most painfully.”
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