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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Rhode Island
Men are born either catastrophists or uniformitarians. You may
divide the human race into imaginative people who believe in all sorts of impending crises ... and others who anchor their very souls to the status quo. Clarence King, "Catastrophism and Evolution" 1877
Henry Adams believed that his friend Clarence King was the "best and brightest man of his generation" (The Education 416). When Adams met King in 1871 the young man had seemed destined for greatness as "King had moulded and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought American life should be directed" (312). Having begun his career with Josiah Dwight Whitney's geological survey of California, by the time he met Adams at the age of twenty-nine he was himself heading the Geological Survey of the 40th Parallel. At thirty-seven King became the first director of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey only to resign after two years to follow his fortune in the mines of the Southwest. His friends recognized his merit not only as a scientist, but as a man of letters, praising equally his Systematic Geology (1878) and his collection of popular adventure essays, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872). Although Adams speculated that "With ordinary luck [King] would die at eighty the richest and most many-sided genius of his day" (313), King would not be so fortunate. After several financial failures and a bout in a mental hospital, King died of tuberculosis, bankrupt and alone in a "California tavern" at the age of fifty-nine (416).
Where Adams, in an oblique criticism of the values of the Gilded Age, attributed King's failure to the pursuit of money, more recently critics like John O'Grady have located King's difficulty in the divided psyche they see reflected in his prose. I suggest, in turn, that King's conflicted selfhood emerges from inconsistencies within the broader cultural narratives he employs in his attempt to construct a coherent identity for both self and nation.
King came into his own both as a writer and as one of the nation's preeminent geologists in an America changed not only by the violence of the Civil War, but also by an ever-increasing influx of immigrants to an increasingly urban and industrialized America. As Gail Bederman and others have noted, in the late nineteenth century the values of the middle class, and the ideas of race and gender through which that class maintained its power, were in a period of transition. This instability, in turn, led to a quest to reaffirm "traditional" notions of American Identity. Many authors, including King, chose to draw upon the myth of the frontier, wherein the western wilderness serves as the crucible of American character. As Richard Slotkin notes in his classic work The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, "The Myth of the Frontier is the American version of the larger myth-ideological system generated by the social conflicts that attended the 'modernization' of the Western nations, the emergence of capitalist economies and nation-states" (33). Although on the surface level of this myth the frontier hero escapes the corrupting influence of the urban east by heading out to the territories, Slotkin argues that the Frontier Myth and its ideology were constructed to feed both the psychological and economic needs of the Metropolis, and that finally they "represent a displacement or deflection of social conflict into the world of myth" (47). Slotkin, in turn, seeks to re-historicize and thereby understand the broader implications of this myth.
In the wake of Slotkin's work, more attention has been focused upon the ways in which nineteenth-century explorers (many of them engaged in scientific surveys of the western territories or other colonial spaces) took on the ethos of the frontier hero. With this critical attention has come an increased recognition of how the exploration of the West facilitated the growth of the American Empire by mapping out and thus making available the resources required by the expanding nation. Writing of John Fremont, the archetypal western explorer, Michael Bryson suggests that "His narratives devise a heroic persona for the scientist-explorer that is rational and unabashedly masculine, a western hero set in opposition to an explicitly feminized, passive nature" (xiii); accordingly, "Fremont objectifies nature as female, a passive space to be conquered by science" (5). Bryson goes on to note that Clarence King adopts Fremont's heroic model "[playing] the danger theme to the hilt" particularly when describing his mountaineering adventures (19). Like Fremont, King represents the land in predominantly feminine terms which both enable and trouble his conquest of western spaces (27-28). Reuben Ellis and Peter Bayers, in their respective works on mountaineering literature, have in turn sought to reveal the imperialist motives and effects of the oft-idealized and pointedly masculine pursuit of mountain climbing. This imperialist ideology has either been veiled, as Bayers argues, by a metaphysical construct of spiritual ascendancy, itself founded upon the Romantic ideology of the sublime, or dissolved, as Ellis suggests, in the stoic silences of the mountaineer who says he climbs merely "because it's there." These critical assessments of frontier and mountaineering literature offer productive insight into the ramifications of the identity King constructs, but our assessment is incomplete without an understanding of the way in which King's geologic theories work within their historical context to authorize the myth of conquest.
In his mountaineering essays, Clarence King, scientist, explorer, and frontier hero, confronts what he perceives as a geologic wilderness, epic not only in spatial scale, but in terms of the geological processes still at work shaping it. This scientifically constructed understanding of wilderness in turn forms the bedrock of his identity-a bedrock not nearly so stable as he would have his readers believe. The rapid social changes, to which the frontier myth was a response, were accompanied by significant shifts in scientific paradigms. The relatively new science of geology had revealed the insignificance of the human race In the grand scheme of earth history. Theories of evolution, postulated by Lamarck, Darwin, and others, raised concerns about the origin and ends of both species in general and human races in particular. All species, including human races (as they were then understood) were bound for eventual extinction-a suggestion which reflected fears related to identity present in other realms of nineteenth-century culture. Paradoxically, even as the biologic and geologic sciences disrupted humanity's comfortable place at the center of time and nature, by the end of the nineteenth century, geology-in concert with biology and a "scientific" anthropology that neatly classified races according to the developmental stages savage, barbarian, and civilized-had become an authoritative means of constructing new models of personal, racial, and national identity. King's writings reflect the inherent instability of a science which both works to produce and seeks to suppress the anxieties of his era. This instability emerges as he employs theories of geologic and human origins in concourse with the myth of the frontier hero to reconstruct American identity in the face of those forces of socio-cultural change with which Henry Adams felt he himself could not cope.
In order to comprehend the conflicted nature of the identity King constructs, we must begin in 1873, when King's geological theories converge with his self-representation on the summit of Mount Whitney, the last Sierran peak he would ever climb. It was ten years after he had first ventured into the Sierra Nevada with Whitney's geologic survey that King at last reached the summit of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States. Although as part of the Whitney survey King had discovered and named the mountain in 1864, naming had not amounted to knowing it. Nor would coming to know the mountain be an easy or straightforward task. The first of his two summit attempts in 1864 failed en route to the mountain; the second ended in impasse at a sheer granite wall. His next attempt, in 1871, seemed at first to culminate in triumph-a triumph recorded in the first edition of King's Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in 1872. However, other climbers soon discovered that King, climbing in heavy weather, had summited and described the wrong mountain. When King finally ascended the actual Mount Whitney in 1873, he at last gained what he felt was the physical and intellectual conquest of the mountain. Accordingly, the second account of Mount Whitney, published in the 1874 edition of Mountaineering as an addendum to the original text, attempts to define the mountain "as it really is" by describing the scene that meets his gaze. (1) For King, what distinguishes Whitney from other mountains he has climbed is that
the sensations of power and tragedy I had invariably felt before on high peaks, were forgotten. It was the absolute reverse of the effect on Mount Tyndall, where an unrelenting dearness discovered every object in all its power and reality. Then we saw only unburied wreck of geologic struggles, black with sudden shadow or white under searching focus, as if the sun were a great burning-glass, gathering light from all space and hurling its fierce shafts upon spire and wall. (303)
In contrast to Mount Tyndall where distinctions seemed black and white and his scientific focus had been on the mountain's geologic history, the view from Whitney is "like an opal world, submerged in a sea of dreamy light" (303).
If Tyndall represents the power and reality of objects as seen through a magnifying lens, Whitney is the mountain of the imagination's coloring where light, rather than distinguishing details, submerges the landscape in atmospheric effect. Despite his delight in his own emotional and aesthetic responses, King moves easily to explaining the visual effect scientifically. Whitney's "atmospheric effect is to be accounted for by supposing a lower stratum of pure transparent air overlaid by an upper air so charged with moisture ... as to intercept the blue rays of sunlight and admit only softened yellow ones" (304). This scientific explanation proves that the appearance is not a dream, but as real as the atmospheric effect which caused it. When King asserts in the following paragraph that "[t]his is the true Mount Whitney, the one we named in 1864," he makes no distinction between the opal world and his...
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