Clarence King's First Western Journey

Abstract

A LTHOUGH familiar with works of Tyndall, Ruskin, and 1A7 Muir, Professor William H. Brewer, Yale's noted geologist of last generation, once chose to call Clarence King's Mountaineering in Sierra Nevada the most brilliant and fascinating of books on mountain-climbing which he had encountered.' Among discriminating enthusiasts of western Americana this narrative of open-air adventure in high places definitely ranks with, and complements, more familiar panorama of prairies, The Oregon Trail, and celebration of life at sea and ashore in California, Two Years Before Mast.2 For King, with an eye sensitive to color and scene, and an imagination not servile to recording of mere fact, produced some inemorable, charming, and lively sketches of views and events among sky peaks of Sierras. How and why Clarence King left calm halls of Yale's Sheffield Scientific School to cross continent by horseback and find a position on California Geological Survey under Josiah Dwight Whitney, should, then, be of some interest. And, since his experience led directly to appointment at age of twenty-five to directorship of ambitious Survey of Fortieth Parallel, and that in turn to organization in I879 of first centralized United States Geological Survey (with King as its chief), these early details acquire added significance. A Yale classmate of pioneer paleontologist, 0. C. Marsh,3 and of his own later geological assistant, Arnold Hague, King was there enveloped in an atmosphere of brilliant scientific investiga-