An adventurer’s journey from adoration to obscurity

HAD the second half of his life turned out otherwise, the brilliant American explorer, writer and scientist Clarence King might have found an enduring place in history alongside, say, Bret Harte or Lewis and Clark. But as Robert Wilson’s engaging biography reveals, King led himself into obscurity.

“The Explorer King” focuses on King’s many achievements rather than on his transformation into a 19th century Howard Hughes undone by paranoia, obsession and scandal. Still, Wilson doesn’t let his subject off easy, tracing both the personal and cultural factors that led to King’s spectacular downfall.

Born in 1842 to a prosperous Rhode Island family, King lived in an age when, as Wilson writes, “the field of geology had a glamour quotient that might be compared to that of space exploration in our own time.” Geology would fascinate King throughout his life, and his contributions to it would outlast his death in 1901.

Before he reached 40, King “had already done enough living to fill several lifetimes.” Contemporaries declared him “the ideal American” and “the best and brightest man of his generation.” He was charming and handsome, with hazel eyes that “held the liveliness and confidence of one who had always been adored by those around him.” At Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, he was “admired by his fellow scientifics as an athlete who could excel at almost any sport he attempted, and he was prized as a companion for his wit and high spirits.”

After graduation, he and a friend headed West in 1863, joining a major geological survey of California. During that trip, he was the first man to ascend some of the Sierra Nevada’s highest peaks and distinguished himself as a true pioneer and adventurer. He was a real-life action hero. “On these climbs,” Wilson writes, “King and a companion would scale sheer cliffs of rock or ice, leap across precipices, lower one another down level by level with ropes, sleep through freezing nights without so much as a blanket.... King also crossed deserts, survived a killer snowstorm, swam a raging, rain-swollen river, and viewed stupendous sites of natural beauty, from Yosemite, which he was the first person to survey, to the Shoshone Falls of the Snake River, to the Pacific as seen from mountaintops a hundred miles inland.”

In 1867, at age 25, King embarked on “one of the great scientific projects of the nineteenth century,” leading a team on a five-year survey of the 40th Parallel to investigate the geography, geology, paleontology, meteorology and biology of the Great Basin over an area of more than 80,000 square miles. This project eventually resulted in King’s “Systematic Geology,” a work that, Wilson writes, ushered in “a new paradigm of the western adventurer in the second half of the nineteenth century -- the scientist-explorer, who seeks knowledge rather than territory or riches,” a model in stark contrast to the mad Gold Rushers, who had headed west in search of wealth.

Five years later, King would publish “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada,” a popular narrative of adventure and exploration, based on his experiences, that remains a classic of its genre. What sealed King’s international celebrity was his exposure of the so-called Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, whose perpetrators claimed to have discovered a field of diamonds in northwest Colorado. He thus saved potential investors millions of dollars. In 1879, President Hayes appointed King first director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

The ignominious second act of King’s life ended in his dying “alone and in debt.” After years as the living representative of “the objective man of science standing up against the forces of greed,” King fell prey to the hubris of the Gilded Age, convinced that he hadn’t obtained the fortune he deserved. Though he still spoke of scientific and writing endeavors, nothing much came of it, and his attempted exploitation of his scientific achievements began to alienate many of his friends.

It’s clear that Wilson is sympathetic to his subject, as unable to resist King’s fiery intellect and charisma as anyone who ever stood in his presence. He emphatically argues that King’s obscurity is “undeserved” and posits another reason for it: his common-law marriage in 1888, under an assumed name, to an African American named Ada Copeland. For years, King kept the union hidden from all but his closest friends, and Ada didn’t even know her husband’s real name until he was on his deathbed.

Wilson acknowledges that King lived “the better half of his life first ... what came later was a disappointment if not an outright failure.” Still, the author generously notes, King’s friends “forgave him the sins of his later years by remembering the accomplishments that came before them. More than a century later, that still seems to be a good way to think about him.” If he was an embarrassment in his later years -- greedy, secretive, unproductive -- he had accomplished more in his youth than most people would in a lifetime. The one thing Wilson finds “inexcusable,” however, is Wilson’s empty promise to provide financially for Ada and their children after his death. He didn’t, and they suffered for it.

Nevertheless, Wilson makes King, flaws and all, into an irresistible protagonist. In our current, shameful Us Weekly-driven culture, it’s celebrity dirt and gossip we want. Wilson won’t provide that. He has written a fair and comprehensive biography, to be sure, but he also presents King as an inspiring and heroic figure, according him the dignity and forgiveness he forfeited in life.

Carmela Ciuraru, a regular contributor to Book Review, is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Beat Poets” and “Solitude.”