Author: James G. Moore
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Pro:
- Deeply sourced and carefully presented
- Free of historiographical theorizing
- Plenty of period maps, photos and illustrations
- Well produced with full scholarly apparatus
- Geologists will always want more geology
- It helps to know the West intimately
- Biographical account of the West's geological explorer
- Portrait of the opening of the frontier to science and commerce
- Lots of field stories to recall around a campfire
Book Review
During his life, Clarence King (1842-1901) was widely considered one of the most interesting Americans of his time. Today he has the same reputation, but for a few more reasons.
Trained in geology at Yale University, then America's foremost school in science, King traveled to the Pacific coast by wagon train in 1863, explored the Sierra Nevada for three years in Josiah Whitney's geological survey of California, and at the age of 25 secured Congressional backing for a great seven-year survey of the western wildlands.
Starting in 1867, King's Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel mapped a hundred-mile-wide ribbon of land from California to Wyoming, along the route of the first trans-continental railroad. The scientific crew included geologists, botanists, mappers, artists and a photographer. They fought heat, cold, altitude, bad water, illness, injury, criminals, Indians and bureaucrats while producing breakthrough science in a huge virgin field area. The resulting seven volumes of reports and maps put King among the world's top geologists.
In 1879, the 37-year-old King was made the founding director of the U.S. Geological Survey, which gathered under one civilian agency the various exploration projects that were opening up the West. Thus he came to be supervisor of John Wesley Powell and Ferdinand Hayden, who had previously been King's rivals as leaders of their own prestigious Western expeditions. His directorship set the USGS on a course of excellence, and Clarence King's influence survives there today.
Does this kind of thing whet your appetite? Then King of the 40th Parallel will satisfy. Geologists with historical perspective, historians of the frontier, amateurs of these same types and aficionados of the mountain West are well served by the author, USGS geologist emeritus James G. Moore. His insights from a long career in King's agency, personal knowledge of King's field areas, professional understanding of King's ideas and access to a trove of letters from King's lifelong friend give Moore's treatment dimensions not found in other histories.
Moore also touches upon the larger setting of King's times, giving brief accounts of associates and rivals whose lives touched his. Chief among these is King's boyhood friend James Gardiner, the geographer who was responsible for developing the modern topographic contour map during the King and Hayden expeditions. In the age of GPS, it is bracing to read how the first mappers laid out the wild West. Many classic illustrations are reproduced, and photographs by the King expedition's Timothy O'Sullivan bring the pristine lands tantalizingly close.
King's popular writings and voluminous correspondence allow us to assess his mind in some depth. He was an art collector as well as a rockhound. He was a lover of city life who felt it important to dress for dinner in the field, but he never warmed to the Victorian ideal of American white womanhood and was attracted to her opposite in every locality he visited. At the age of 45 he secretly married a young black woman, Ada Copeland, and fathered their five children under an assumed name. He embodied many strands of American culture from a tumultuous period of its history, and beyond the adventures he lived, Clarence King's life provides food for thought.
