Transcontinental Shifts

This chapter explores the impact of European mountaineering discourses on Clarence King. It recounts how King, like some of his European counterparts, came to the mountains to escape the confines of a Victorian society. It also examines King's representations of risks taken in the mountains that helped create a distinctly American image of the explorer. The chapter describes King's mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in 1872 that mythologized the exploration of the West during a period in which some Americans began to worry that the frontier would disappear. It also reveals some of the continuities and differences in the transnational evolution of climbing in North America.

From the archive: Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1871 and 1902)

Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, based on exploration and mountaineering exploits undertaken in the 1860s and 1870s, is a somewhat forgotten piece of literature that is worthy of rediscovery. The book provides still-accurate general descriptions of the physical geography of the Sierra Nevada as well as Mount Shasta in the US state of California. This “from the archive” piece examines this book as well as the life and career of its author, Clarence King.

Spires and Cathedrals

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially between 1859 and 1872, Union officers and enlisted men, scientists and explorers, artists and writers traveled westward. Surveyors appraised and mapped; expeditionary members explored and then wrote, hoping to convey the wonders they had witnessed. The western wilderness was an enormous expanse, one that as easily represented commercial possibilities as it did a new ideal. Nevertheless, the western wilderness also mesmerized and inspired, provoking a type of awe and wonderment in its languorous canyons, exploding fumaroles, bubbling hot springs, and soaring granite spires. From the Rockies to the Sawtooths, from the Cascades to the Tetons, the mountains of the American West mystified and hypnotized those who saw them. The Sierra Nevadas, in particular, became the locus for artists and writers. Their paintings and publications, in turn, inspired entire groups to travel to the Yosemite Valley in order to ponder the sublime beauties of Nature found there. Through the paintings and sketches of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, and through the meticulous journal entries and travel narratives of Clarence King and John Muir—whose work as a Naturalist eventually helped establish the Valley as a National Park—Yosemite captured the imagination of the American people, as its spires, cliffs, and waterfalls had been artistically transformed from mere tourist destinations into sites of divine revelation.

American Scientists and Their Fictions: Professional Authorship and Intellectual Identity, 1870–1900

Writers and critics in the Gilded Age United States frequently debated the relations between literature and science. A common contemporary interpretation of this relationship held that these two ways of knowing and writing were fundamentally opposed and that the advancement of science in American culture came at the expense of literary sensibilities. Nevertheless, and often as an effort to challenge this supposed opposition, many scientists also cultivated reputations as literary figures, and produced or planned diverse works ranging from travel writing and novels to verse drama. Such authors as Clarence King, J. Peter Lesley, Simon Newcomb and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler sustained a hybrid literary–scientific culture in the late nineteenth century. This interdisciplinary cultural zone was fragile and increasingly fractured by around 1900, as the emergence and consolidation of new categories of intellectual labour became increasingly wedded to the images of the “professional author” and the “scientist” as mutually exclusive identities. This article seeks to contribute to recurrent debates about the “two cultures” of literature and science by foregrounding the differentiation of these new forms of professional and intellectual identity as a decisive factor which constrained the possibility of a shared literary–scientific culture by the turn of the twentieth century.