Passing Strange (9 page)

 

 

DURING THEIR FIRST SEASON in the field, King’s men surveyed roughly twelve thousand square miles in a rectangular block of land that stretched across Nevada and gathered more than three thousand specimens of rocks, minerals, and fossils. In 1867, as King later wrote, “science ceased to be dragged in the dust of rapid exploration and took a commanding position in the professional work of the country.”
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Nonetheless, the fieldwork often proved difficult and dispiriting, “not over encouraging,” as Frank Emmons recalled. Emmons suffered from the recurrent malarial fevers that affected so many nineteenth-century westerners, and he “fully made up my mind before the close of the campaign that once completed I would not undertake another year’s work in such a region.” But at season’s end King provided “comfortable quarters and good food” for everyone at the winter quarters in Virginia City, Nevada. By March they felt ready to soldier on, taking up their survey work in waist-high snows. King’s “enthusiasm was so contagious,” Emmons wrote, “that however we might doubt the possibility of accomplishing a given project, we were always willing to try it after a talk with him. And the very most difficult things he generally undertook to do himself. So that in all his corps every one felt the impulse to make his best efforts if only to please King.”
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King took pride in himself as a leader. “If I succeeded in anything,” he later insisted with a tone of self-reassurance, “it was in personally impressing the whole corps and making it uniformly harmonious and patient; and I think I did that as much as anything else by a sort of natural spirit of command and personal sympathy with all hands and conditions, from geologists to mules.” King thought it notable that he should succeed at such a young age, but “that . . . was not done without some rough and tumble work.” And for the rest of his life, he regaled friends with carefully honed stories of his adventures. He liked to recount how he “forever reduced the soldiers and the working men of the survey to obedience” through his fearless pursuit of a deserter from his military escort: “I captured him in a hand to hand struggle in which I nearly lost my life and only saved myself by dodging his shot and cramming my pistol in his ear in the nick of time.” And he told and retold the story of how he crawled into a cave in pursuit of a grizzly bear and, as soon as his eyes adjusted to darkness, “put a ball into his brain.” With the bravado of a man who felt his place as a scientist firmly secured, King urged James Hague to highlight these incidents in a brief biographical sketch because “I care very little about my reputation as a geologist, but a good deal as being a fellow not easily scared.”
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KING LED HIS MEN into their winter quarters at Virginia City on a cold, wet Christmas Day in 1867. Gardiner later wrote his mother that a fierce snowstorm blew in that night and “I slept in Clare’s arms on luxurious mattresses and between snowy sheets; instead of rolling a blanket on the ground.”
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Such close physical contact seemed to him normal, nothing at all to hide from his mother. Physical intimacy (as distinguished from sexual intimacy) was a normal part of the intense friendships formed between adolescent and young adult men, along with the exchange of confidences about faith or work or women. These close relationships did not preclude marriage, they simply preceded it.
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And indeed, “Jamie” and “Clare” often talked late into the night about their romantic prospects. Gardiner hinted to his mother that he and his old friend sometimes lamented the personal sacrifices they made in the name of science. “Professionally the year is a success. I wish I felt so sure of my heart work as that of the brain. . . . Man must give himself time for loving thoughts and not crowd them out or stifle them by too intense devotion to scientific subjects.”
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Soon enough, though, in Virginia City, both men found time for “loving thoughts.”

Sprawling up the steep slopes of Mount Davidson, Virginia City sat atop the silver-rich Comstock Lode, isolated and remote from other cities but bustling with boomtown energy and vitality. Mark Twain, a correspondent for the city’s
Daily Territorial Enterprise
from 1862 to 1864, joked that his newspaper was little more than “a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation and general destruction.”
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But amid the manufactured accounts of disaster, the paper conveyed a portrait of a lively town “crowded with quartz and lumber teams, freight teams loaded with merchandise, drays, job and express wagons, carriages, buggies, hacks and coaches—not to speak of donkeys, dogs and other small cattle.”
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Jews celebrated their holy days in a local Masonic lodge; Chinese and Mexican workers staged holiday parades through the steep blue clay streets; Irish laborers danced late into the night at gatherings organized by their own fraternal organizations.
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Blacks had their own saloon and a separate, parallel social world. After King’s cook and valet, Jim Marryatt, witnessed a shooting at a “ ‘darkies’ ball” in Carson City on New Year’s Day 1868, he pronounced it the last “nigger ball” he would ever attend.
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In this crowded urban outpost in a remote part of Nevada, King fell in love.

King and Gardiner settled into the Ophir House, the well-appointed home of a mining superintendent, and plunged into the city’s social whirl.
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“Clare and I are having a lovely time together in our little house,” Gardiner wrote to his mother.
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During the days, they snowshoed under the bright winter sun. And in the evenings, King decked himself out in tight doeskin trousers, a vest and coat, pastel-shaded gloves, and a white tie and stepped out with Gardiner into a whirl of dinner parties and social calls, musical entertainments and dancing lessons.
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Soon King took a liking to Ellen Dean, a “school marm” known as “Deany,” and Gardiner began courting her friend Josephine Rogers, a young schoolteacher from Illinois. Frank Emmons, who shared living quarters with King and Gardiner that winter, noted that they often spent their evenings “out calling.”
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On April 12, 1868, King returned to Virginia City from a trip to San Francisco and announced his engagement to Dean. “Gardner’s expected,” Emmons wrote, in anticipation of a similar decision from his other friend.
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That spring, as the weather improved and the surveying parties took to the field, Gardiner and King spent little time in town. But King seemed in ebullient spirits, boasting to William Brewer of his administrative “boldness” in cutting through government red tape and joking that Virginia City so agreed with him that his weight had increased to 153 pounds.
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He sounded confident, if curiously unspecific, about his matrimonial plans. From a field camp in late August, he wrote a cryptic note to Brewer to offer congratulations on the news of his impending marriage. “I can bid you Godspeed in this move with more thankfulness and more hearty good will than I once could, for one of the best of God’s own girls has promised bye and bye to crown my life with the same blessing yours is about to receive.”
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But something went awry. On September 7 Jim Gardiner and Josie Rogers wed in Virginia City in a small ceremony at the home of her father, a mining engineer.
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King was nowhere near. He was away in Bone Valley, in the northeastern part of Nevada, hundreds of miles from Virginia City and the man he called his “brother.”
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When the survey season ended later that fall, Gardiner brought his wife back to Washington to work on the season’s reports with King. On December 4 Frank Emmons went to call on the Gardiners in their Washington lodgings and from there he went to see King. He wrote in his diary: “At room find King very despondent.”
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Concern over the future of the survey seemed just part of it.

Scant clues document the collapse of King’s marriage plans. In a small pocket journal filled with stray notes for the stories he would never write, King penciled in on March 1, 1869, “Novel note—after the breaking of the engagement he dreams he sees her drown and only her hands above water and her cry then wakes on the gray hills.”
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A few months later he scrawled, “The idea of mother and God triumphs over passion.”
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Gardiner had told his mother of King’s impending marriage but now informed her it was off. “Please say nothing to anyone about Clare’s engagement unless to Mrs. Howland,” Gardiner instructed his mother in July 1869. “She feels terribly at its being broken for she admired and loved Ellen’s noble qualities.”
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King must have brought Dean home to Newport and everything fell to pieces. He backed out of his commitment. “I would never marry a woman anyhow,
just because I said I would,
” King later told James Hague. “That is the poorest possible reason men or women can ever have for marrying each other. People who marry without any better reason than that must surely come to grief.”
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Florence Howland had firm ideas about marriage and about daughters-in-law. She offered unsolicited advice to the recently wed “Jamie” Gardiner, urging him to foster a warm relationship between his new wife and his family: “Because of their love for her husband . . . they should be endeared to her.”
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Whatever words passed between her and her own son remain unknown, but she seemed to expect Clarence’s new family to have plenty of room for her.

The twice-widowed Mrs. Howland had reason to fear the presence of another woman in her son’s life; she could ill afford to lose Clarence’s emotional and economic help. In 1869 she was back in Newport, struggling to support her sixty-nine-year-old mother, her eighteen-year-old stepson, her own young children, just seven and four, and two live-in servants, one white, one black.
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Her make-do living arrangements seemed too “uselessly slip shod” for guests, and she confessed to Jim Gardiner in April 1869 that she no longer had “the strength to supplement the very insufficient service of this improvised establishment.”
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King resigned himself to going to Newport that spring, shuttling back and forth between the chaos of his mother’s house and the more peaceful repose of his aunt Caroline King’s.
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“Only a sense of duty keeps me here,” he wrote a colleague. “I have nothing to do but yield gracefully. . . . I shall stay here until I go West.”
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King felt loath to disappoint his mother but tired of always doing the proper thing. He scribbled a note in his pocket journal that spring about “the intense yearning I feel to get through my analytical study of nature and drink in the sympathetic side.”
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Some years later, he remarked to a friend that he had lost the only woman he had ever wanted to marry through “too much attention to duty. Duty has stood between me and almost every good thing.”
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KING HEADED BACK WEST in the spring of 1869, arriving in Salt Lake City on May 15, just days after the golden-spike ceremony at nearby Promontory Point marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad. In this third season of survey work, King and his men mapped the area around the Great Salt Lake and surveyed the coal deposits on either side of the Uinta Mountains, along the route of the Union Pacific. Then King stayed on, beyond his colleagues, to finish up his work on the Comstock Lode. The three seasons of fieldwork for which he had secured appropriations then complete, he speeded back to Washington on an eastbound train.

King took Jim Marryatt east with him that winter. And amid a busy social schedule that involved receptions at the White House, meetings at the Smithsonian, and long horseback rides with friends, King helped his men work to bring to conclusion the formal reports summarizing the findings of the survey.
Mining Industry
(1870), James Hague’s massive volume, with three reports by King, bore the designation “Volume III,” but King pushed to have it appear first, correctly anticipating that it would assuage congressional concerns about the utility of the survey.
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The botany volume soon followed, and King looked forward to having concentrated time to review the survey’s findings and to work on his own geological text. On June 1, 1870, he moved with Marryatt to New Haven, to be closer to the laboratories at Yale, where he could analyze the rock and mineral samples he had brought back east. But almost immediately thereafter he learned from General Humphreys that more funds had been allocated for additional fieldwork. Though King hoped to stay on in New Haven, Humphreys ordered him west in July. Leaving Gardiner behind to supervise the writing of the reports, King headed west with a scaled-back crew to explore the dormant volcanoes of the Pacific coast.
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A short and unanticipated survey season yielded what King characterized for Humphreys as a “somewhat startling discovery.”
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Climbing Mount Shasta from a new approach, King discovered an active glacier, the first to be found in the continental United States. Whitney, Dana, and Agassiz had all declared no such thing could exist. But ever since he observed what looked like a glacial stream on his first visit to Mount Shasta in 1863, King had suspected a glacial ice field might lie concealed high up in the mountain. Now proven right, he named Whitney Glacier in honor of his doubting chief. When Arnold Hague and Frank Emmons soon afterward discovered more glaciers on Mount Hood and Mount Rainier, King asked Humphreys to keep the news quiet until he could return east to announce it himself.
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The glacier stories brought King a new popular acclaim: invitations for public talks, requests for magazine articles, and even an invitation to the Parker House in Boston, where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Emerson and Longfellow.
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King had grown up surrounded by writers— his grandmother Sophia Little and his mother, Florence, a sometime-poet herself.
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Now, besieged by requests for stories of his adventures, he tried his own hand at writing. He gave a piece about Shoshone Falls to his old friend Bret Harte, editor of
Overland Monthly,
who published it in October 1870. Then he agreed to give James T. Fields, of the
Atlantic Monthly,
a series of essays recounting his western adventures and promised publisher James R. Osgood that he could later issue these essays in book form.
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Osgood thought the word “geological” would “be too heavy ballast for my sketches,” King recalled, so he chose a lighter title: “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.”
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And even as he returned to his field journals, gathering ideas for his essays, he dashed off an elaborate little Christmas gift for his half sister Marian and two of her young friends, a slender leather-bound volume with printed pages and twelve mounted photographs,
The Three Lakes: Marian, Lall, Jan, and How They Were Named.
In two brief letters, he described for the girls his climbs to the high mountain lakes he named in their honor, and in the two accompanying poems spun a haze of gentle fantasy about the alpine world, animating the lakes with the spirit of a “kindly Snow Giant” and the legacy of a terrible “ice dragon.”
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