SOURCE: Mazel, David. “Four Views of Yosemite.” In American Literary Environmentalism, pp. 93‐156. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Mazel examines Clarence King's Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in order to explore the connections between early environmentalism, literary realism, and corporate capitalism.]

Clarence King, geologist and writer, founder of the United States Geological Survey and author of the best‐seller Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), arrived in California in 1863, the same year as Frederick Law Olmsted. King had gone west to join the newly formed California Geological Survey, which he felt would offer him field experience to supplement the classroom training he had just completed at Yale's new Sheffield Scientific School. He and Olmsted had been friends back east, and when Olmsted took over the management of the old Mariposa estate, he asked King to help inventory the property's mineral resources. With the geological survey in hiatus, King agreed.

The Mariposa needed the attention of someone like King. The huge, gold‐rich estate had been owned since 1847 by the explorer John Frémont, the fomenter of the Bear Flag Revolt that wrested California from Mexico. In spite of Frémont's haphazard management, the Mariposa's mining operations had at first been profitable enough. But by the time Olmsted took over as its superintendent in 1863, both the estate and the general had seen better days. General Frémont had lost effective control of the grant and gone heavily into debt; to make good on the estate's many encumbrances, his creditors joined together as the Mariposa Mining Company and began floating its stock.¹ In less than fifteen years, that is, the Mariposa had slipped from the grasp of the archetypal rugged individualist into the control of Wall Street. It was in this respect the West in microcosm. The events at Mariposa presaged and typified the economic transformations that would occur with greater and greater rapidity in the West of the latter nineteenth century, events widely perceived in terms both mythic and economic as the inexorable passage from a heroic to a prosaic age, from the bold enterprise of the hero to the colorless and systematic exploitation of a northeastern capitalist technocracy.²

These events also heralded a revision of masculinity. As Gail Bederman has shown, this was the beginning of a period in which “a number of social, economic, and cultural changes were converging to make the ongoing gender process especially active for the American middle class”: “By the last decades of the nineteenth century, middle‐class power and authority were being challenged in a variety of ways which middle‐class men interpreted—plausibly—as a challenge to their manhood. Ever since the middle class had begun to define itself as a class in the early nineteenth century, ideals of gender and of ‘manliness’ had been central to middle‐class consciousness” (11). Bederman adds that “between 1873 and 1896,” years that encompass much of King's career, “severe economic depressions resulted in tens of thousands of bankruptcies and drove home the reality that even a successful, self‐denying small businessman might lose everything, unexpectedly and through no fault of his own. Under these conditions, the sons of the middle class faced the real possibility that traditional sources of male power and status would remain closed to them forever—that they would become failures instead of self‐made men” (12). In response, American men of the middle class adopted “a new sense of primal manhood very different from Victorian manliness.” They came to believe “that true manhood involved a primal virility,” and “men who saw themselves in terms of this masculine primitive ethos were drawn to a variety of ‘savage’ activities” (22)—among which we may surely include “roughing it” generally and King's blustering style of mountaineering in particular. King's multifaceted career was intimately bound up with the complex social and economic changes of his time. In his adventure writing, as William Howarth puts it, he exemplified the “romantic ideal of self‐reliant heroism” (King, Mountaineering xii) called for by the new masculinity, while his professional activities, by bringing western resources more and more under the sway of corporate investors, just as consistently functioned to foreclose on such heroic, individualistic enterprise.

In 1864, King was already thinking ahead to his greatest professional triumph, the ambitious Fortieth Parallel Survey, which would map and inventory a vast swath of the West and lay out the path for a transcontinental railroad. But his first survey was far more modest: after the creation of the Yosemite park, Olmsted appointed King to determine the boundary of the new grant and produce a map. Amid what he described as the “prosaic labor of running the boundary line” (Mountaineering 120), King had plenty of time to admire the scenery, which for him was a mythic western narrative, the visible record of an older and more heroic order. The boundary line ran through the High Sierra country above the valley walls, from which it seemed that the Ice Age glaciers had only recently retreated, leaving behind bare expanses where “[n]ot a tree nor a vestige of life was in sight.” It seemed a place where life was just beginning, offering to King a vision of the bleak Eden of the Darwinists he so much admired. Peering down into the valley, now verdant but once filled with primal rivers of ice, he found it impossible “not to imagine a picture of the glacial period” when erosion sculpted Yosemite into its present shape. His description in Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada depicts the scene as it must have appeared in the Pleistocene era:

Granite and ice and snow, silence broken only by the howling tempest and the crash of falling ice or splintered rock, and a sky deep freighted with cloud and storm,—these were the elements of a period which lasted immeasurably long, and only in comparatively the most recent geological times have given way to the present marvellously changed condition. Nature in her present aspects, as well as in the records of her past, here constantly offers the most vivid and terrible contrasts. Can anything be more wonderfully opposite than that period of leaden sky, gray granite, and desolate stretches of white, and the present, when of the old order we have only left the solid framework of granite, and the indelible inscriptions of glacierwork? To‐day their burnished pathways are legibly traced with the history of the past.

(130‐31)

Nature for King is, first, an “indelible inscription,” a readable landscape, and, second, “her,” the feminine object of the male gaze. “She” is also a mythic history, the record of tumultuous passages, from storm to calm, from savagery to civilization, from wilderness to metropolis—most generally from a primitive but admirably heroic past to a civilized but lamentably prosaic present. Throughout the book, King is most particularly struck by the contrasts between the naked granite expanses of the heights and the luxuriant forest growths below, where “richness of soil and perfection of condition” sometimes actually “prove fatal through overcrowding.” The Sierra landscape for King is a map of the human world, a Malthusian narrative full of proto‐ecological warnings for the future, its forests “wonderfully like human communities” where “[o]ne may trace in an hour's walk nearly all the laws which govern the physical life of men” (119).

A REALIST AESTHETIC

In 1870, during a respite from the fieldwork of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, King reviewed a pseudoscientific travel narrative, James Orton's The Andes and the Amazon, for the Overland Monthly. Though his friendship with Overland editor Bret Harte had everything to do with King's receiving this assignment, he was nonetheless an appropriate choice for the job, for two reasons. As a working geologist, he was familiar with the new ideas then being introduced by science into the popular imagination. And as a developing writer who had already published a travel piece of his own in the Overland and was at work on several more (which would be collected in 1872 in Mountaineering), King was grappling with the special problems inherent in writing about little‐known lands. These two facets of King's career—the literary and the scientific—were not as disparate as they might at first seem, for both involved the same challenge: writing western landscapes in a manner comprehensible to a largely eastern audience. As both reader and writer, King thought of himself as a “realist”—as a sensitive observer capable of perceiving the way things “really” are and an objective writer whose words faithfully mirrored that reality. I want now to read King—the geologist as well as the adventure writer—as he reads the landscape, and to problematize the seemingly straightforward conception of realistic representation. In particular, I want to show the close relationship between King's realist texts, his work as a scientist, and the ongoing commodification of the landscape itself.

King's critique of The Andes and the Amazon focuses on the book's departure from what appears in retrospect to have been a key part of his developing literary aesthetic. In particular, he faults Orton for failing to convey anything new, for occupying “that uninteresting middle condition where he has neither the naive sensitiveness of a new traveler, nor the penetration of the practiced observer. No sooner is he mounted upon a mule than he begins to recognize things with a reckless freedom. The ghosts of Humboldt and Darwin flank him upon either side. What they had seen, he sees. Not once does he lift his eyes from the dusty trail, but confines himself to the role of a corroborator” (King, “Current” 578). Orton, that is, has failed to elicit any genuinely new sensations in the reader, for whom the book is a mere “corroboration” offering only the chance to “recognize” what has been encountered before—in this case, in the travelogues of Humboldt and Darwin.

King's emphasis on the desensitizing effect of repetition, and especially of “recognition,” would seem to make him an early exponent of the sort of formalism later codified by Viktor Shklovsky, for whom “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,” “to make objects ‘unfamiliar’” (58). But for Shklovsky, making the reader “see” rather than merely “recognize” is a matter of effort, of “art as technique”; the object must be “defamiliarized” in order to remove it from the domain of automatized perception. King is suggesting another means of attaining the same end, a means implicit in his specific concern with narratives of travel and exploration—a genre characterized by special limitations but also special opportunities. In the words of Mary Fuller, such narratives “document a situation of enunciation in which the matter of speech, the topic, the referent, physically existed but was always going to be physically absent from the place of speaking and listening” (46). This conception suggests special problems I will address later; what is important here is that in the genuine exploration narrative, the “matter of speech” begins as something unfamiliar to the reader. To represent such material using the technique of some preceding travel writer hardly makes it any newer; if anything, this begins the process of familiarizing it. The travel writer thus seems to be particularly susceptible to illusions of mimesis, for the obvious way out of the dilemma is to avoid any evident technique at all, to reproduce the object unadorned in its already unfamiliar reality. For King, this crude realism is the “technique,” suggested in his critique of Orton, of the naive traveler who need only read the landscape sensitively and then mirror it faithfully for the reader.

King's account in Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada of a ride to a remote camp suggests that he thought of his own descriptive nature writing as just such a mimetic reproduction, the unforced result of encountering the world as if he were Emerson's “transparent eye‐ball”: “I was delighted to … expose myself, as one uncovers a sensitized photographic plate, to be influenced; for this is a respite from scientific work, when through months you hold yourself accountable for seeing everything, for analyzing, for instituting perpetual comparison. … No tongue can tell the relief to simply withdraw scientific observation, and let Nature impress you” (108). The movement from science to literature is for King a shift from the active to the passive, from the masculine to the feminine, from analysis to impression—from the production of knowledge about the landscape to the mimetic reproduction of the landscape. Though this movement takes him into a literary mode, it is paradoxically a movement away from language (it is something about which “no tongue can tell”). What King sees himself moving toward is not words about things, but things themselves—particularly, as the reader of Mountaineering quickly realizes, things in their most basic and immutable manifestations. This tendency certainly reflects King's concern with what, as a geologist, he viewed as the “hard, materialistic reality” of nature (253). But it is also consonant with a peculiarly American conception of the “real,” in which, as Lionel Trilling puts it, “reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant” (qtd. in Sundquist 16). This conception of a rock‐solid reality appealed not only to the geologist in King, but to the writer as well, for “that mind alone is felt to be trustworthy which most resembles this reality by most nearly reproducing the sensations it affords” (17). If mimesis is the key to representing landscape memorably, then mimesis that somehow does justice to a landscape's most fundamental and enduring phenomena is the key to representing it truthfully and convincingly.

Thus it is hardly surprising to find in King's nature writing the recurring tendency, as Ernest Fontana puts it, “to reduce things to their bare essentials, to strip away the superficies of vegetation, animal life … and human culture”; in doing so, he seeks in stone a foundation for a more trustworthy language. He seeks “not only … accurate knowledge of the unexplored mountains of California, but direct unmediated experience of the absolute, primal world of matter. … King's descriptions of the Sierra mountainscapes are attempts to recreate in language an unmediated experience” (25). Certainly King's writing is most energetic in those mountaineering episodes that take place above timberline, above the last settlements and the last vegetation, where he is left alone to contend with the primal simplicity of rock and ice. But the fact that his attempt to reproduce “unmediated experience” has resulted in some highly energetic stories hardly validates their underlying aesthetic. Such an attempt is complicated, for one thing, by conflicting assignments of gender. King sees scientific work as masculine, literary work as feminine; to passively let nature impress one may be a “relief,” but it conflicts with the demands of both the new masculinity and the structure of the literary‐environmental narrative. As the nature writer becomes feminized (soft, passive, and impressionable), nature becomes masculinized (hard, active, and impenetrable). This queering of the sexual‐environmental matrix does not disqualify it as a site for constituting a masculine subject, but it does produce a palpable tension that, as we shall see in the case of King's adventures with Dick Cotter, cannot be completely avoided.

King's attempt to reproduce “unmediated experience” is also, of course, linguistically untenable. The fundamental claim underlying his aesthetic—that matter and experience can pass into language with the same directness and fidelity with which landscape passes into image in photography—would almost immediately be called into question by a series of bizarre events in his own career.

Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada appeared the same year as Mark Twain's Roughing It, in 1872, but it was Mountaineering that was hailed by the Overland Monthly as “the book of the season.” The book was well received elsewhere as well, and within two years would sell out five printings (Wilkins, Mountaineering v). Its popularity may have owed something to King's involvement in the Great Diamond Swindle of 1872, a scam that had begun two years earlier when two men posing as miners appeared in San Francisco carrying a sack of rough diamonds. The two men—Philip Arnold and John Slack—were secretive at first, dropping just enough hints to start the entire city speculating about their cargo and the mine from which it must have come. The diamonds were appraised, first in San Francisco and later by the Tiffany establishment in New York, and valued at ＄100,000. Slack allowed San Francisco banker William Ralston to talk him into selling his share of the putative mine—whose whereabouts were still kept secret—for just that amount. Arnold did not sell out until later, when what had turned into a speculative frenzy hit its peak; he received half a million dollars for his share (Wilkins, Clarence King 171‐82).

In July 1872, Ralston filed incorporation papers for the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company, which was promptly capitalized at ＄10 million. To verify the mine's authenticity, Arnold and Slack allowed a visit by company officials and the expert Henry Janin, who was regarded as one of the most competent and incorruptible mining engineers in the country. Janin liked what he saw. “I consider this a wonderful discovery,” he wrote in a report that appeared August 10, “and one that will prove extremely profitable. … I do not doubt that further prospecting will result in finding diamonds over a greater area than is yet proved to be diamondiferous” (“Diamond Bubble” 379). Janin speculated that the diamond fields, if worked by just twenty miners, could yield as much as ＄1 million worth of gems per month. This in turn generated widespread speculation that the mine might severely depress the international diamond market, and even shift the center of the gemstone industry from Amsterdam to San Francisco. Janin's pronouncements circulated widely in the newspapers, and by the end of the summer, investors had formed at least twenty‐five “wildcat” companies, capitalized at more than ＄200 million in total, in hopes of cashing in on the boom as soon as the location of the fields should be made public (Wilkins, Clarence King 173, 182‐83).

Everything was in place for a major rush, which undoubtedly would have taken place had it not been for the intervention of Clarence King. Whenever their survey work brought them into contact with civilization, King and his crew had sought out the latest diamond news, and by the end of the summer they had pieced together enough clues to locate the purported diamond field in a remote, potentially diamondiferous region of eastern Utah within the confines of King's survey. Clearly such a major find in his own bailiwick could not be ignored, and when the summer's fieldwork was completed, King set out quietly to inspect the claim himself, arriving at the site in November. There he found footprints; following them to where they converged with other tracks, he found mining notices posted on trees. A quick search of the area turned up several rubies and a few diamonds, and at first he was as much a believer as Janin. Further inspection, however, began to reveal disturbing evidence, and by the end of the second day King was convinced the ground had been salted and the claim was a fraud (Wilkins, Clarence King 177‐79). When Ralston and Janin were informed, they returned to the site with King, who had little trouble convincing them that they had been deceived. The story went public, and King was lauded not only for saving investors millions of dollars, but also for preserving the reputation of California's fledgling financial establishment. He was the toast of the nation, and his name graced front pages from San Francisco to London. Not coincidentally, sales of his recently released book surged (Wilkins, Mountaineering vi).

The entire episode can be read as a linguistic parable: the swindlers' clever manipulation of the investors and the media engendered an intertext made up of newspaper stories, investment prospectuses, the report of the mining engineer, and, of course, the carefully written but putatively natural landscape of the diamond field. Such a text was not without precedent, its linguistic underpinnings being in fact typical of the “El Dorado” narratives so common in the literature of the Americas. A similar situation—Walter Ralegh's claims in his 1596 Discoverie of Guiana concerning a fabulous South American gold mine—has been analyzed in an instructive way by Mary Fuller and is worth examining briefly here for the parallels it offers to the diamond swindle.

The apologia worked up by King James's court to justify Ralegh's execution subjects the latter's claims concerning the existence of what he variously called Manoa or El Dorado to a close analysis. “James's accusations amount to an intensely skeptical critique of Ralegh's language,” writes Fuller. “He claims that Ralegh's writing is a screen not for things but for palpable intentions; that the things of which he writes are imaginary, and that their objective properties … are constructs responsive to the wish and will of the writer.” To defend his text against such skepticism, Ralegh had resorted to physical evidence in the form of gold ore, a “handfull of the mine,” which he hoped would ground his claim somewhere beyond the untrustworthy realm of language. Though he doubtless did not think of it in quite these terms, he hoped to demonstrate that at the end of the chain of signifiers making up the legend of Manoa there was something incontrovertible, a material object that was not itself the product of any linguistic operation. In so doing, Fuller notes, he was attempting to make use of “resources not available to the mere poet: speaking of gold, he puts a piece of ore in the refiner's hand” (44).

But material reality—in Ralegh's case, a “handfull of the mine”—proves insufficient to validate such claims. How, for one thing—even if one assumes the existence of El Dorado—was the reader in London to know that the ore had actually come from there? The supposedly “mute” testimony of objects turns out to be not univocal but ambiguous, and hence to require spoken or written corroboration; instead of providing the hoped‐for escape from words, the material routes the reader back into the circuit of language. In the case of the discovery narrative—much as we saw with Natty Bumppo's repeated attempts to ground the sign in “nature”—not even things turn out to be free of the influences that engender the figurative drift of language. As Fuller notes, the objects Ralegh produced “as underpinnings for representations” turned out to be “fully implicated with rhetorical procedures: substitutions of parts for whole, transportations, ellipses. … [I]n the particular case of Ralegh, the part‐for‐whole synecdoche of handfull for mine masks a previous figure of metonymy—in fact, a congeries of previous figures” (45). Ralegh's critics had good reason to question the validity of his synecdoche, of his rhetorical substitution of a handful of ore—which might have come from anywhere—for an actual gold mine in Guiana. Clearly, the synecdoche cannot be valid unless the felicity of the underlying metonymy, the “naturalness” of the association of the transported ore with a specific mine, can be established. This Ralegh could not do with certainty because, as he admitted, he had never personally been to El Dorado; he claimed only to have come near it (54).

In the end, the material Ralegh had hoped would serve as irrefutable testimony for his own claims—and more generally for the underpinnings of the investor confidence necessary to early colonialism—turned out to be vulnerable to the same sort of skeptical analysis to which his words had been subjected. In a final effort to validate his claim, he returned to Guiana in search of the mine itself, an expedition that became “literally a search for the referent, a place to which [could] be attached the proper names Manoa and El Dorado,” and which, unfortunately for the soon‐to‐be‐executed Ralegh, proved fruitless (51).

The text engendered by the diamond swindle has much in common with other El Dorado stories. There was, for example, a great deal of money at stake—as a number of nervous investors were all too aware—and the remote, still‐secret location of the mine precluded the usual means of verification. It thus shared what Fuller calls the “peculiar constraints” of the discovery narrative, of “a writing situation … in which the issue of truth, veracity, was particularly at stake and also particularly difficult to check” (45). More important, its authority rested ultimately on an appeal to the material—in this case, to the gems displayed in San Francisco by Arnold and Slack, and the stones turned up by Janin in situ in the field.

King was not a linguist but a geologist, and his on‐site investigation of the swindlers' text focused not on its words but on the material representations underpinning them. His procedure, which recalls the virtuoso tracking activities of the heroes in chapter 21 of The Last of the Mohicans, amounts to a “close reading” of the material: “[W]e … lay down upon our faces, and got out our magnifying‐glasses and went to work, systematically examining the position of the stones and their relation to the natural gravels. The first point which excited my suspicion was the finding of a diamond on a small point, or knob of rock … in a position from which one heavy wind, or the storms of a single winter, must inevitably have dislodged it” (Deposition). The questions King must answer—How did this object come to be here? Is its occurrence natural or the result of human intervention? Are these formations such as would naturally be associated with a diamond field?—are essentially questions about rhetorical procedures, about the transportations and substitutions undergone by the object/signifiers supporting the swindlers' truth claims.

His suspicion aroused by what appears to be an unnatural transportation, one that has left a diamond sitting where the elements would not have allowed it to remain for long, King continues the investigation. His plan for “testing the whole question” consists “of a system of outside prospects conducted over the whole mesa, carried out by digging a bushel or two of earth, averaging it, sifting it in sieves, and then washing both the saved gravel and the refuse dirt at the stream; of an examination of the trails and tracks of all the party; a following of their work from beginning to end; … a scrutiny of the rock itself, and of the socalled Ruby Gulch. … The result … was that we found no single ruby or diamond anywhere off the neighbourhood of the rock or off the line of the original Arnold survey.” At issue here is the appropriateness of a metonymy. The swindlers' claims rely on the purportedly natural association of the gemstones to the gravels in which they are found, but King's investigation demonstrates that the gems are actually more closely associated with the hoaxers themselves: “I fixed upon the trail of Arnold and Janin, recognizing Mr. Janin by his slender foot. … Along the line of their outward march, here and there in the vicinity of survey stakes, we found an occasional ruby, but 10 ft. off their line of travel never one.” The final touch in King's analysis of the swindlers' text is his examination of the ant mounds found at the site. Because ants bring small stones from lower levels of the earth up to the surface, prospectors use anthills the way a psychoanalyst uses a dream or a slip of the tongue—to gain information about a formation's underlying structure. King's examination reveals “artificial holes broken horizontally with some stick or small implement through the natural crust of the mound, holes easily distinguished from the natural avenues made by the insects themselves; when traced to the end each artificial hole held one or two rubies.” The purported association of the stones in the anthills with the underlying levels of the putative mine, another metonymical underpinning for the part‐for‐whole synecdoche of the gems displayed in San Francisco, is again invalidated. Not only are the holes made by men clearly distinguishable from those made by ants but, as King so tellingly adds near the end of his deposition, in every case “about the salted ant‐hills were the old storm‐worn footprints of a man” (Deposition).

It later came out that Arnold and Slack had actually purchased the gems in Amsterdam and London (Wilkins, Mountaineering 184). If we agree with Fuller that a thing “carried from a place in which it is proper to one in which it is not proper” has already “undergone the process which makes words figurative or metaphorical” (49), then King's deposition amounts to a demonstration that what was claimed to be natural was all along rhetorical, the result of human agency—a construct, to recall Fuller's words, “responsive to the wish and will of the writer.” The swindlers' salted landscape‐text is comparable to the “lying trail” written by that other troublesome figure, Cooper's Magua, the one destabilizing the grounds of an expanding corporate capitalism just as the other destabilized the grounds of a European colonialism.

In an exaggerated way, King's exposure of the diamond swindle demonstrates how decidedly unnatural intentions insinuate their way into seemingly “natural” or “realistic” representations. It reminds us of the persistence of rhetorical mediation between language and the things it claims to represent—in particular, of the suspect character of King's own mimetic aesthetic. Yet King seems never to have applied the lesson to his own texts; if anything, his trust in the authority and objectivity of his language grew stronger following the diamond incident. He seems to have seen in his analysis of the swindlers' text not a warning about the subtlety and persistence of mediation, but a vindication of science as a way of discovering and outwitting it.

This heightened confidence in his own language is evident in a long passage describing his 1873 ascent of Mount Whitney that was added to the 1874 edition of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. Following the climb, looking back at the peak from below, King reflects on the persistence of “mythologizing” in our appreciation of landscape—a mode he feels has typified descriptions of mountains ranging from the Aryan myth of the “white elephant” Dhavalagiri to Ruskin's “Mountain Gloom” and “Mountain Glory” chapters in Modern Painters (252). Contrasted with this mode is the scientific approach, as exemplified by the Alpine writings of the geologist John Tyndall. “To follow a chapter of Ruskin's,” King writes, “with one of Tyndall's is to bridge forty centuries and realize the full contrast of archaic and modern thought” (253).

King acknowledges the power and attraction of the Ruskinian mode, but leaves no doubt as to which of the two is to be privileged. As he muses on “the geologic history and hard, materialistic reality” of the mountain, his reverie is interrupted by an archaic figure, a Paiute Indian elder, who tells him that “the peak was an old, old man who watched this valley and cared for the Indians, but who shook the country with earthquakes to punish the whites for injustice to his tribe. … I watched the spare, bronzed face, upon which was written the burden of a hundred dark and gloomy superstitions; and as he trudged away across the sands, I could but feel the liberating power of modern culture which unfetters us from the more than iron bands of self‐made myths. … I saw the great peak only as it really is, a splendid mass of granite, 14,887 feet high, ice‐chiselled and storm‐tinted, a great monolith left standing amid the ruins of a bygone geological empire” (253). The familiar dichotomy between myth and reality is here widened by King, who demotes myth to mere “superstition” as he imputes a “liberating power” to modern culture—which for him, as for so many others of his generation, is epitomized by science. His alignment of science with “reality” implies the replacement of the Indian's myth with a projection of his own, but King does not make obvious what is really at stake here: the displacement of one ideology by another. The Indian's myth, his interpretation of the meaning of natural phenomena, is openly political, for it hopes to facilitate the restoration of his people's lost power. But whereas the content of the Indian's myth is explicit, the politics with which King replaces it is disguised; couched in the language of science, it appears natural and objective to any reader who valorizes such language.

This movement is very deft. The appearance is not of two ideologies in contention, but of an obvious “myth”—clearly a construct, openly political—being replaced by an innocent description, a mimetic, “unmediated” representation of just that sort of hard reality that, as Trilling reminds us, was well calculated to instill trust in the minds of King's American readers. King promises to show us the mountain “as it really is,” and indeed the facts he proceeds to give us are reasonably accurate. But by offering them as a replacement for the Indian's myth—which is not a fact but a truth, a statement about the meaning of fact—he collapses a crucial distinction. This sort of conflation is common in “objective” or “realistic” discourse; in such usage, “fact and truth are the same, fact and meaning of fact are the same. All you have to do is invoke the magic word, reality” (Westbrook 13). King uses the word really here in just this way: as the magic word that allows him to pass off mere facts as their own meanings, to mythologize under the cover of simply reproducing the “real” in language. But to say that a mountain is 14,887 feet high is not merely to state a fact; it is also—if only in the implication that the fact is worth foregrounding for the reader—to suggest an interpretation. Of what value, after all, is this particular fact? To the Paiute elder—who might not dispute its accuracy—such a precise figure as “14,887 feet” has no meaning, for it has no relation to his ideology, to his culture or its prospects. But it is meaningful to King precisely because it establishes a usefully precise datum in the immense grid he is imposing on the landscape, a mapping whose primary purpose is to allow the region to be more efficiently controlled and exploited by his own culture.

That this is the context in which this particular detail begins to have meaning is made clear by the metaphorical passage immediately following it, in which the mountain, clearly a perdurable symbol of American hegemony, towers above the “ruins” of the Indian's culture, whose time has passed just as surely as a former geological epoch. To write that the mountain has undergone erosion is to report a fact of geology. But to do so using metaphors grafted onto nature from the realms of sculpture and painting—“ice‐chiselled and storm‐tinted”—is to assign a meaning to this fact, to suggest that there is a shaping hand, a conscious design, at work in nature. For King, that design could be no other than the belief that the nation's westward expansion, so greatly facilitated by his surveys, had divine sanction. In the same vein, by identifying the Paiute's culture with inevitable geological processes, King naturalizes that culture's disappearance; his realistic description legitimates power by representing as natural what is really the result of human agency.

HOW I LOVED COTTER: MYSTIFYING THE FRONTIER

In The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Limerick stresses that in order to “be moved from national resource to commodity to profit, the West's holdings clearly had to be transformed by an investment of capital and labor,” adding that this is “the elemental fact obscured by the myths and romances” of the American frontier (97). King's writings illustrate this point repeatedly. “The mountains of our great vacant interior,” he writes in a typical example, “are not barren, but full of wealth; the deserts are not all desert; the vast plains will produce something better than buffalo, namely beef; there is water for irrigation, and land fit to receive it. All that is needed is to explore and declare the nature of the national domain” (qtd. in Raymond 631; my emphasis). Of course King knows the West is not “vacant” at all; if the tales in Mountaineering are any indication, virtually everywhere he turned in it he found Indians, Mexicans, and newly arrived whites already in possession. But the rhetoric of discovery, as Mary Louise Pratt has demonstrated, habitually effaces such human presence, producing an “attenuated” prose in which agency resides not with human beings but with the land itself (123). Thus for King it is neither labor nor investment but the land itself that will produce wealth in the West, just as it is the land that will legitimate its own appropriation. Such writing bespeaks the confidence of a maturing capitalism that sees no real obstacles between the discovery of raw resources and their transformation into wealth: “all that is needed” is to know what is there and to “declare” it one's own. And the ideological effect of such writing, as Limerick suggests, is to obscure the realities of western transformation, to write out of existence the unequal social structures organizing frontier economies. The West appears Edenic not only in its absence of previous human occupants, but in the absence of fixed social classes.³

That King founded his aesthetic, as he thought, in a “realistic” rejection of mythmaking is ironic, given that today Mountaineering reads so patently as part of the nation's myth of a “classless frontier.” If this seems so in King's descriptions of landscape, it is even more evident in his narrative passages, particularly in the two chapters detailing the ascent of Mount Tyndall. King's official report on this exploit is quite prosaic (Wilkins, Clarence King 68), but the account in Mountaineering is full of bravado and hairbreadth escapes and has obviously benefited considerably in the retelling. This embellishment aims, of course, to thrill the reader and to enhance the writer's masculinity; it also embodies the idea, popularized twenty years later by Frederick Jackson Turner, of the democratizing effects of the frontier. This myth creeps up on the reader gradually in those passages, scattered throughout Mountaineering, where the raw exigencies of western life bring members of disparate races and classes into intimate contact—the backwoods settlement where all eat together in the only inn, or the mountain storm that brings everyone together in the warmth of the same campfire. With the exception of its pronounced homosociality, it is essentially the sort of interclass conviviality Frederick Law Olmsted hoped to induce with Central Park.

Like Olmsted, King moved in the highest society. In New York he frequented William Cullen Bryant's Century Club; in Washington he was a close friend of the likes of Henry Adams and John Hay. On the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada, in contrast, King frequently found himself teaming up with the only other member of the survey crew willing to take the risks of extreme mountaineering: the mule skinner, Dick Cotter. These two men would rarely have crossed paths back east; out west, however, as they pass through one alpine adventure after another, the social barriers between them appear to fall away. This process reaches its climax on the perilous ascent of Mount Tyndall, just when their shared hardships become most extreme—when night overtakes the climbers on a narrow shelf of rock, forcing them to bivouac with neither fuel nor shelter in temperatures fast falling toward zero. Such extreme circumstances produce a degree of intimacy and cooperation impossible within the strictures of the metropolitan class structure. “How I loved Cotter,” King wrote of the long, freezing night in which they nearly perished. “How I hugged him and got warm, while our backs gradually petrified, till we whirled over and thawed them out together!” (51). Here we see the natural exigency of frontier existence keyed to its highest pitch; survival not only allows but seems to dictate an interclass and intrasex intimacy that would elsewhere be proscribed.⁴

For the remainder of the climb, King and Cotter appear to work together as equals. Cotter more and more frequently takes the lead when King is at a loss as to how to proceed, and when the terrain steepens, they rope themselves together so that, should the worst happen, they will “share a common fate” (58). At one point, King is forced to tie his silk handkerchief, a signifier of his superior status, around a spike of rock as an anchor (57); its abandonment later on the climb symbolizes the rugged wilderness landscape “filtering out” distinctions of class.

Cotter and King reach the top of the peak two days later. The apparent class integration that has developed during the climb will resume during their long trek homeward, but for a moment on the summit, we are reminded that it is only a myth after all. “I rang my hammer upon the topmost rock,” King writes of this moment of triumph. “We grasped hands, and I reverently named the grand peak mount tyndall” (64). The pronouns here are noteworthy: the two men share equally in the event by shaking hands, but to King alone is reserved the right of naming the peak. This prerogative is his, of course, by virtue of his rank in the survey hierarchy, in the class structure that, despite the narrative's intimations to the contrary, he has transported intact into the heart of the “democratizing” wilderness.

This brief slip is for King what the unnaturally placed diamond was for Arnold and Slack: an unintentional revelation that the “realistic” text is not a faithful reproduction of some objective “reality,” but instead a construct, “responsive to the wish and will of the writer.” The social function of this construct becomes clearer when we realize that it appeared just as King's detailed surveys were making the West less democratic—when, by facilitating the orderly development of the region by absentee corporate financiers, they were precluding the individualistic entrepreneurship of the American democratic myth. To see the myth in this way is to see its similarity to that told by the old Indian, for whom mythologizing was a means of perpetuating a vision in spite of disturbing evidence that it would never again be a reality. It is also, perhaps, to see what may well be the only consistent thread running through the widely varied activities of King's career: his reading and writing of the West in ways that served an ideology of capitalist expansion. When that ideology called for accurate maps to facilitate development, King was there to provide them with his transit and barometer. When it called for a secure and predictable investment climate, King was there again—this time to deconstruct a swindle that threatened to panic the market. Finally, as the influx of capital began the economic reorganization that would eventually replace the mythic frontier hero—the lone prospector, the resourceful forty‐niner, even the death‐defying, mountain‐climbing geologist—with the likes of Kennecott Copper and Peabody Coal, King was there again; not to deconstruct this time, but to construct a landscape that seemed the very embodiment of boundless opportunity, that maintained in image the illusion of what was even then being foreclosed in reality.

Notes

1. Wilkins, Clarence King 57; see also Roper, FLO 233‐34.

2. As Patricia Limerick has pointed out, mining operations such as those at Mariposa provide a particularly clear window into this period of western history because they recapitulate the region's frenetic economic and social transformations in a sort of fast‐forward review: “Mining placed settlements of white people where none had been before. It provoked major conflicts with Indians. It called territories and states into being and forced them to an early maturity. It drew merchandising and farming into its wake. As it changed from individual enterprise to a consolidated, industrialized business, mining threw the West into the forefront of industrialized life” (99‐100).

3. In reality King was highly class conscious, a fact that manifests itself when he writes in modes other than that of the discovery narrative. Like Lafayette Bunnell, to give one example, King tries to dissociate himself from what he considers Yosemite's more vulgar visitors. In the following passage he has just passed near the famous Inspiration Point, which has provided generations of visitors their first view of the valley: “I always go by this famous point of view now, feeling somehow that I don't belong to that army of literary travellers who have here planted themselves and burst into rhetoric. Here all who make California books, down to the last and most sentimental specimen who so much as meditates a letter to his or her local paper, dismount and inflate” (127). On another occasion King wrote of the “vulgar gold‐dirt” (154) of the mining districts in which he worked. This contempt for Mammon seems a hollow pose, considering how assiduously King strove for wealth later in his life. But at least in his belletristic writings he evidently felt compelled to mimic the sort of disinterested air that his wealthier friends could genuinely afford.

4. In this scene and elsewhere, the sexual undercurrent of King's adventures with Cotter seems palpable. In addition to a genuine homosexual desire, it may mark a certain gendering of King's class anxieties, a conflation of the two men's socially proscribed class relationship with an equally “transgressive” gender relationship. But any attempt at a queer analysis of King would have to take into account his common‐law marriage to a poor black woman, Ada Todd—a heterosexual but otherwise proscribed relationship crossing boundaries of both race and class. William Howarth terms this secret marriage “King's supreme fiction, the novel he never wrote” (King, Mountaineering xi), and contends that while “King detested this secrecy … he lacked the courage to defy prevailing social taboos. He also had a life‐long preference for women of color, an appetite that conveniently preserved his own prestige and power” (xii). The marriage may thus have functioned more generally to compensate King for the feelings of social inadequacy he felt while circulating in the high society of Washington and Manhattan. Todd was more than twenty years younger than King (Wilkins, Clarence King 359)—which also would have bolstered King's sense of power and prestige. Wilkins notes that while King was attracted to women of color, whom he seems to have viewed as embodying “the archaic” he so much admired, “his role of voluptuary of the primitive and exotic … could swing to that of bitter misogynist” when it came to white women “of his own class” (Clarence King 359). For details, see King, Mountaineering xi‐xii; and Wilkins, Clarence King 362‐64, 408‐11.

Works Cited

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Fuller, Mary C. “Ralegh's Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana.” Representations 22 (winter 1991): 42‐64.

King, Clarence. “Current Literature.” Overland Monthly 5 (December 1870): 578‐83.

———. Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. 1874. Reprint, with introduction by William Howarth. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

Olmsted, Frederick Law. “The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove.” Landscape Architecture 43 (October 1952): 13‐25.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen.” Critical Inquiry 12 (autumn 1985): 119‐43.

Roper, Laura Wood. FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 55‐66. New York: Longman, 1989.

Wilkins, Thurman. Clarence King: A Biography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988.

———, ed. Introduction to Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, by Clarence King. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.