Passing Strange (8 page)

 

 

IN THE FALL OF 1866, no other American of King’s generation combined such rigorous scientific training and experience with such sheer brainpower and physical energy. A brilliant future seemed within his grasp, and when King went to Washington a few months later to press his plan for a Fortieth Parallel survey, “senators, representatives and government officials of every grade became at once his admiring friends.”
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But as King stood at the brink of the most creative and ambitious period of his professional life, he felt the painful tug of duty. Returning east, he discovered that his stepfather had died insolvent—his estate mysteriously disappeared—without making any arrangements for his wife or children.
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And at the age of twenty-four, as he later wrote, King suddenly found himself with “eleven people dependent on me alone,” including his maternal grandmother and his mother’s servants.
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He borrowed money from Jim Gardiner to help his family through the crisis at hand.
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But his days of glorious freedom were at an end. A few years later he looked back and recalled his years of mountaineering in California as “the pass which divides youth from manhood.” He had traversed it, he wrote, “and the serious service of science must hereafter claim me.”
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KING BURST ON THE WASHINGTON SCENE IN JANUARY 1867, a boy wonder, scarcely twenty-five. “Small in size,” a colleague called him, “compact, agile, active—all alive.”
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Somehow he had steadied his mother’s household, and now he sought to press his plan to map the West. He wanted the federal government to give him command of an expedition to survey the land and resources along the Fortieth Parallel, some 450 miles from the Sierra to the western slope of the Rockies. Sensing what it would take to win federal support, he proposed to include “sufficient expansion north and south” to embrace the proposed route of the transcontinental railroad.
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The rails would soon open for development vast stretches of the country that many Americans imagined to be a wasteland. But King, like other contemporary geologists, knew the region contained valuable minerals and other natural resources. “All that is needed,” he said, “is to explore and declare the nature of the national domain.”
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He promised science with a practical payoff, detailed knowledge that would enable the federal government to promote the economic development of the far West and weave the region ever tighter into the fabric of the nation. “In these days, when the West is covered by a network of railways,” one colleague later wrote, “it is difficult to conceive the obstacles that had to be encountered at that time in carrying out so ambitious and, as some then thought, so chimerical a plan.”
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With letters from some of the nation’s leading scientists and what even friends called “supreme audacity,” King pitched his plan to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
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He had a “gift of winning men’s feelings,” Gardiner said. King quickly enlisted Stanton’s support and then won the endorsement of Brigadier General Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, chief of the Army Corps of Engineers.
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For backing from Congress, King turned to California’s junior senator, John Conness (for whom King had fortuitously named a peak in the Sierra). Conness introduced legislation authorizing the secretary of war “to direct a geological and topographical exploration of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada,” and the bill authorizing three seasons of fieldwork—later to be renewed—passed on March 2, 1867.
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When Stanton handed King his letter of appointment as U.S. Geologist-in-Charge of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, he reportedly said, “Now, Mr. King, the sooner you get out of Washington, the better—you are too young a man to be seen about town with this appointment in your pocket—there are four major-generals who want your place.”
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The young geologist who less than four years earlier had walked across the continent rather than enlist in the military now found himself a salaried employee of the War Department.

Technically, the survey would be a military operation. But in the field King’s only connection to the army would be with military supply depots and the armed escorts accompanying his crew through Indian country. Humphreys let him write his own orders and select his own staff, and King chose all civilian scientists, mostly young men like himself who had come through Harvard and Yale rather than the topographical engineering program at West Point. He appointed his best friend, Jim Gardiner, as principal topographer, and as geologists hired the Boston-bred brothers James Duncan Hague and Arnold Hague, graduates of the scientific schools at Harvard and Yale, respectively. At Arnold Hague’s suggestion he also took on the geologist Samuel Franklin “Frank” Emmons, a Harvard graduate who—like the Hagues—had studied in Europe. He handpicked a botanist, an ornithologist, and a photographer, the Irish-born Timothy O’Sullivan, whose work during the Civil War had taught him a thing or two about making pictures under difficult field conditions.
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All told, with the camp men and the military escort, the team numbered thirty-five.
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King’s scientific crew remained remarkably stable through an eventual six seasons of fieldwork, a key factor in the survey’s success and a tribute to his considerable talents as a leader.
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THE RELATIVE EASE WITH which King secured funding for his survey reflected not just his own infectious passion for his work but the concurrent ambitions and disorganization of the federal government with regard to western exploration. Clearly, the nation needed more information about the topography and natural resources of its vast western lands. But who should gather it? Federal exploration of the West during the 1860s and ’70s reflected the triumph of ambition over planning, as two military expeditions and two civilian surveys took to the field with competing and sometimes conflicting agendas. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, a geologist, medical doctor, and veteran of several military exploring expeditions of the late 1850s, went west again in 1867, leading the Geological Survey of Nebraska for the General Land Office. In 1869 his project expanded to become the more ambitious U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories under the Department of the Interior. In 1870, the Interior Department also funded John Wesley Powell’s continued exploration of the southwest plateau country, establishing the Geological and Topographical Survey of the Colorado River of the West, a project that encompassed the ethnographic study of local Indian groups and sounded a little-heeded warning about the limits of expansion in an arid climate. In 1872 the War Department (already underwriting King) funded First Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler’s U.S. Geographical Surveys of the Territory West of the One Hundredth Meridian, under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers, to focus on Nevada, Arizona, and the plateau country of southern Utah and western Colorado.
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Inevitably, Hayden, Powell, and Wheeler clashed and sparred for congressional support; King, who twice received multiyear funding for his survey, largely stood apart from the annual scramble for funds. The conflict over funding and turf resolved only in 1879, when the separate surveys were discontinued under the legislation that established the United States Geological Survey, with King as its first director. But singly and collectively, the surveys represented American ambitions for the West writ large. And King’s efficient field organization, emphasis on the practical uses of basic science, and new, more rigorous methods of topographic mapping provided a model and standard for the rest.
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The data he and his fellow survey leaders gathered aided economic development in the post-Civil War West, and the scientific reports, maps, popular literature, and stunning photographic views that flowed forth year after year built broad public support for western exploration as a valuable national enterprise.

At a moment when most Americans conceived of the nation as a country divided between North and South, King broadened the geographical scope of the debate. He not only brought the West firmly within the realm of American science but also helped suggest that in the West lay the future of a newly unified nation.

 

 

NONETHELESS, SURVEY WORK POSED a personal dilemma for King. In his own peculiar way, he was now a family man, with a large household to support. The survey would keep him out west for the better part of three years, and his government paycheck of $250 a month could not compete with the potential, if uncertain, remuneration to be had in the private sector as a mining consultant. The very day Congress authorized the survey, Jim Gardiner reported to his mother that Mrs. Howland was “very, very sad.” Her children were ill and her mind was in “such a condition that it is only with the greatest effort that she can write a letter. . . . She seems perfectly crushed.”
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Family obligations had called King home. But they proved insufficient to keep him there. His mother’s needs and the relatively modest income of a government explorer notwithstanding, he had a calling. He would go west. Following a grand farewell dinner at Yale, most of the Fortieth Parallel party sailed from New York on May 1, 1867. King, recovering from one of his frequent bouts of illness, followed ten days later.
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The trip to California required an eleven-day passage to Panama via steamship, a railroad trip across the isthmus, and a steamer up the Pacific coast to San Francisco, a speedy voyage in comparison to King’s first trip west across the continent. King “hypnotized” his shipmates, wrote one of the younger survey members on the ship. “We were really listening to one of the great raconteurs of the world.”
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The social reformer Charles Loring Brace, traveling west with his wife in search of improved health, found his shipmate King a “truly American phenomenon,” a young man of just twenty-five who had “already proved himself one of the most daring of living explorers” and now had command of “the most important American scientific survey of this generation.”
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Brace thought King an exemplary figure, the living proof of “what a field of manly training and scientific work there is now on the Pacific slope for our
jeunesse dorée,
who have no taste for business or the professions. The civilized man comes down and gathers up the best qualities of the barbarian—quickness of hand and eye, firm nerve, contempt of cold, hunger, and privation, power to use his body to the best advantage, and the ability to front coolly danger and death—and with them he combines all which training and culture have given, to gain new conquests over Nature and to advance the frontiers of knowledge.”
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King seemed an intoxicating blend of manly vigor and cultural refinement, a new sort of frontiersman who could stand up against the debilitating corruptions of urban life.

King reached California in early June and joined his crew at their camp near Sacramento, where they prepared for survey work while waiting for the mountain snows to melt. While King stayed in camp to wait for the government’s shipment of gold coin—the currency of preference in the West—most of his crew headed east to set up a work camp in Truckee Meadows, near present-day Reno.
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By the time King rejoined them in mid-July, they had hired a Jamaican-born cook named Jim Marryatt, who had approached the crew in search of work. Marryatt had run away from home at the age of seven and spent many years at sea before ending up in California. He was “a mulatto-like young man,” James D. Hague wrote, “large, strong, well-built and pleasing in look and manner.”
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And in little time he became not just a valued cook but King’s personal valet, a peculiar job for a camp man on a survey crew. But King was a dandy. And now, in command of his own survey rather than a volunteer geologist in another’s, he dressed the part. Rossiter W. Raymond, a mining commissioner who encountered King later at a field camp in Salt Lake Valley, expressed surprise to find the famous explorer he knew by reputation attired in “immaculate linen, silk stockings, low shoes, and clothing without a wrinkle.” Roughing it might be fine for the man who spent only a few weeks in the field, King explained. “But I, who have been for years constantly in the field, would have lost my good habits altogether if I had not taken every possible opportunity to practice them.”
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King called Marryatt a “servant” in the expense report he filed with the federal government. But a government disbursing agent refused to reimburse King for a purely personal expense, insisting that “the kind of service should be stated so as to show its proper connection with a
public
duty.”
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King figured a way around the regulations, and Marryatt eventually outlasted all the other camp men, remaining through all six seasons of fieldwork and at least once accompanying King back east as “personal servant and office-man.”
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It became “almost invariably his custom,” Raymond later wrote of King, “to have with him a personal attendant, who looked after his clothing, etc.”
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And almost invariably, these servants were black.

Marryatt grew close to his employer in ways that elude easy categorization, much as King’s subsequent African American valet, Alexander Lancaster, would in the 1880s and ’90s. He was at once friend and servant, confidant and social inferior, a man who surely knew much about King’s personal affairs but kept his counsel close. He appears in plain sight on the peripheries of the survey records—King’s companion on the trail, the dark figure standing in the photographs with the survey crew. But he enjoyed privileged access to King, sharing a house with him one winter and spring in Washington, D.C., while the rest of the survey crew bunked elsewhere, an indication of King’s deep trust, if not a friendship between equals.
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After the conclusion of the survey’s fieldwork in 1872, Marryatt moved to San Francisco, where he lived with his Maryland-born wife, Adaline, and, for a time, continued to go back and forth to Nevada, working for other seasonal survey parties.
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What he thought of King and the world to which the geologist introduced him remains unknown. But when his first child was born in 1878, he gave her the same name as King’s mother—Florence.
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