Customer Reviews

The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax--Clarence King in the Old West

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As a geographer with an interest in the opening of the west I looked forward the this book. Unfortunately it is poorly written and repetitious, and half-way through King's life the author appears to lose interest in the subject. There is nothing about the rivalry between King's Survey and the other great surveys led by Powell, Hayden and Wheeler that lead to the establishment of the U. S. Geological Survey. Nor is there any mention of the political fighting between King and Ferdinand Hayden that led to King's selection as the first director of that agency. A major disappointment.

This book caught my attention from the very beginning, first linking King with the 19th century Washington DC social and political establishment and then telling how he made his way out West in a time when that journey was an adventure in itself. It was fascinating to learn how King, whom I'd never heard of, was the first to scale and then name many of California's highest peaks. Having grown up in California, hiking, camping and skiing in the Sierras, I loved reading about the familiar towns and geography and learning how Clarence King was such a factor in that area's history. Some great accounts. A shame that King had so much going for him and then gave in to temptation in the end.

This book seemed to end at least 50 pages too soon in the sense that there are only tantalizing glimpses of the last 25 years of geologist, author, would-be mining baron Clarence King's life (1842-1901). "Where's the rest?", I thought. Then I looked again at the front of the book and parsed the full title, "The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax--Clarence King in the Old West". Oh, it wasn't supposed to be a full biography of the pioneering geologist who became nationally known through his colorful writing about travels, adventures and mountaineering exploits that mostly occurred before he tuned thirty. Rather it focuses just on King's adventures (exploring previously undocumented mountain ranges, making first ascents of high peaks, violent encounters with Indians and outlaws), science (education with leading geologists at Yale, field work with the California Geologic Survey, leading, at age 25, his own multi-year pioneering exploration/survey of the Great Basin and publishing several books that were scientific standards of the era) and the Great Diamond Hoax (exposing a huge financial fraud that made worldwide news in the early 1870s).

But if it's not supposed to be a biography why did the author devote almost a third of the book to King's childhood and college years as well as sketches of King's upper strata social life that had little or nothing to do with the themes promised in the subtitle? It's especially perplexing because some of the "exploration" begs for more detail since large swaths of the country that King explored are barely mentioned.

Today King is best known for his once-bestseller Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, and anyone who has read that book - excerpted and described at some length in Explorer King - will find nothing new here. Likewise there are entire books devoted to the Great Diamond Hoax, and although King played the pivotal in exposing the hoax (and reaped scads of publicity for himself in the process), this episode consumes an inordinate amount of space to set up the story before King (alerted by members of his survey staff) rushes in to save the day. As for the science and King's 40th Parallel Survey's position relative to the other large scale geologic surveys that overlapped his work, I highly recommend Great Surveys of the American West by Bartlett. Apparently the best biographies of King, which author Wilson refers to several times are an unpublished 1953 PhD dissertation, So Deep a Trail, by Crosby and a 1988 work by Wilkins, Clarence King a Biography. These books and others are listed in a three-page bibliography.

I reluctantly concur with another reviewer that this book is something like a college term paper that draws together material from its bibliography but contributes nothing original to the subject. There are 18 pages of term paper style, chapter-by-chapter footnotes at the end of the book but, oddly, the text itself doesn't contain any superscript footnote numbers so it's hard to connect the text to the notes (I didn't even realize they existed until I got to the end of the book). The author pieces together material from his sources in an almost novelistic style and the story skips around chronologically in places, a practice I found confusing.

Recommended to anyone wants to read just a single account of the career and adventure highlights of a leading 19th Century American scientist/explorer/adventurer to learn a bit about the era and its interests and accomplishments. Readers who want to study the era and it's leading figures comprehensively would do well to look elsewhere. Numerous period b&w photos, mostly widely reproduced elsewhere, are scattered through the book but many are too small to see clearly. Two large scale sketch maps cover the regions most prominent in the book but they don't have enough detail to locate all the major events mentioned.

This book does not discuss in much detail the USGS and the second half of Clarence's life but it places you in the times of King and during some of the most interesting parts of his adventures in the West. I really enjoyed the book and found that the author created an interesting angle by carefully reviewing King's upbringing, religious beliefs and how he squared his religious convictions with an education and career in science during the mid 1800s.
This is not a historical tome but a fairly light read where the author keeps the material interesting. It is like a rock skipping over the surface of his life. A good read that leaves me hoping others will write additional books to tell other parts of his story.

An absorbing biography of famed geologist Clarence King.
I must admit that while not totally ignorant in the sciences, I had never heard of the man.

In his early twenties he accomplished many outstanding feats while climbing, mapping and geologizing in California's high Sierra Nevada mountains. Then, at the age of twenty-five he was placed in charge of the fortieth parallel scientific expedition across the western U. S. The culmination of his career was uncovering the great diamond hoax in northwestern Colorado.

All this field work and close observation of the natural and physical world lead King to his own geological theories of time, space and evolution. For the first half of his life the man was highly regarded and respected for both his demeanor and scientific contributions. Sadly, the second half of his life he basically "fell off the planet ".

For me, this book was an introduction to the daring and storied adventurer scientists of the mid-nineteenth century. I bought it with great anticipation and, after reading the dust jacket, I began with a novice's eagerness on a journey of which I knew little. The first chapter was set in Washington D.C., after all of King's great adventures had been accomplished, in the parlor of Henry and Clover Adams accompanied by their usual guests and friends, Clarence King and John and Clara Hay. These five were such fast friends that they were referred to in the inner circles of Washington as the Five of Hearts. And the glue that held them together was King himself, with his great raconteur tales and his abundant charm. Adams called him the most remarkable man in their circle--tremendous praise considering Adam's circle of friends.

What a unique way to establish your protagonist and to whet the reader's appetite for the adventure to come.

Unfortunately the first chapter is as good as this book gets. It is not that the story is not worth reading. For the most part it is. One learns a great deal about geology, surveying, the geography and topology of the West, and the sense of adventure that any white explorer felt in going into these new, wild and dangerous territories. It is that the telling of the story turns flat--never matching, or coming close, to the rip-roaring story telling, charismatic, fast living, adventure filled life of Clarence King. The book is a polite scholastic treatment, if you will. It reminds the reader not of a book, but rather, of a dissertation.

If this were not enough, the author devotes only three pages of the last chapter to the surreptitious last half of King's life and his marriage to a black woman who bore him five children. This relationship he kept secret to the world, with only his most devoted friends having an awareness. This would have been fertile ground to develop even more the complex character and turmoiled person that was King. The author, however chooses to pass by this last 29 years of King's life; instead retreating into the scholastic realm with which the author is most comfortable--the retelling and analysis of a speech that King made at Yale, his alma mater. With this, the book abruptly ends.

It is like a Doctoral student who doesn't quite know how to end his thesis and submits it to the jury of peers hoping that it will be enough. I don't think that it would have earned the degree.