The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  Not long after his arrival in California, the survey leaders recognized in King a youngster of talent and toughness and promptly hired him—without pay, at first—as a geologist proper. It was a decision that allowed him once again, as he wrote after all his sore weeks in the saddle, to be “one of those hammer-bearing sons of Thor.”

  He turned out to be a phenomenon, a whirlwind of a man. In the company of others who found it difficult to keep up with his energy and drive, he made sorties up into the High Sierra, astonishing and delighting his bosses by turn, making first ascents, naming peaks, and drawing maps of great accuracy that would last for generations. But he also lived the life of a swell, exuberant, happy, enthusiastic. It was around this time that he wrote in his diaries of his fascination with colored women, native women, slave women—all so much more attractive to him, he would say repeatedly, than the pale-skinned ladies who were the stuff of his colleagues’ customary social fare. It was a liking that would play a part in his later years in a profound and fascinating way.

  King returned to the East in 1866 after enduring three seasons of rigorous apprenticeship in California. Now that he was fully schooled in the art of fieldwork, despite his youth, he came up with an ambitious plan for surveying a cross section of the country along the route then being created for the transcontinental railway. In 1867, the year when the government in Washington so suddenly began to make a serious inventory of the country and created its Four Great Surveys to do so, lawmakers agreed with Clarence King that such a survey would be an excellent thing to undertake.

  Five days after President Andrew Johnson signed the legislation, King was named geologist-in-charge of what would be the most ambitious of all the surveys, the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. It was to be an army-directed exploration; it would take seven years to complete, and it would be, in the words of Henry Adams, “one of the classic scientific works of the century.”

  That so young a man, albeit one of the most daring of contemporary explorers, had won the top job was a matter of great astonishment in the capital. The secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, took King to one side: “Now Mr. King,” he said, “the sooner you get out of Washington the better. You are entirely too young to be seen with this appointment in your pocket. There are four major-generals who want your place.”

  Armed with a government guarantee of $100,000 and at least three years of work, he did get out of town, promptly. Some of the finest geologists from around the world were eager to join, for even though King was merely twenty-five, he had an intelligence and a personal magnetism that teased out the best and the brightest from the scientific community, and having gathered his team together, he embarked on his assignment with a fury. The thirty-five-strong group reached California by way of Panama, crossed the passes of the Sierra Nevada, and were out in the field surveying in Nevada by the summer. They spent the following years painstakingly surveying and collecting along a swath of territory that ran along the ever-expanding railroad route for more than a thousand miles between Winnemucca and Cheyenne.

  Clarence King (left), the diminutive, phenomenally learned, and intrepid first director of the US Geological Survey, had previously led the six-year Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, which mapped in detail the landscape with its flora and fauna along a line between Sacramento and Cheyenne.

  The discoveries King made during his years in the field were legion; the maps he and his team drew were innumerable; the volumes of his reports—massive, leather-bound quarto-size monsters with lush and lavish illustrations—have in recent years become the stuff of collectors’ passions. But the event that won him his laurels occurred in 1872, five years into his official work. He was approaching the end of his extended periods of fieldwork and at the time was situated with his exploring party well beyond the Rockies amid the flattening emptiness of the Great Plains. It was here that Clarence King first heard tell of what would come to be known as the Great Diamond Fraud. His success in solving it made him almost overnight one of the most famous geologist heroes America had ever known.

  The scam first raised its head in February, when the aforesaid pair of ragged-looking men arrived at the offices of the Bank of California in downtown San Francisco carrying a bulging canvas bag. They were prospectors, they claimed; they were there to place the bag in the vaults. The cashier demanded to see what was inside. What he found were hundreds upon hundreds of uncut diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, which if genuine would have unimaginable value. He called the bank’s flamboyant founder, William Ralston, whose personal fortune, based on mining the great Comstock silver lode in Nevada, guaranteed at least his sympathetic interest. He pronounced the find at first blush quite extraordinary and demanded to know more.

  The two visitors identified themselves as Philip Arnold and his cousin John Slack. They were prospectors from Kentucky and seemed frightened, at first saying little. But under pressure from the charming Ralston, they did let slip some details: they had been searching fruitlessly in a mountainous region quite some distance away from San Francisco for many months when, all of a sudden, they had happened upon a hill where many precious stones—rubies, garnets, and other colored stones mostly, but diamonds occasionally—were scattered.

  The jewels were so abundant that a mere kick of a boot heel would reveal more of them among the dust and gravel on the mountainside. The bag they had brought to the bank contained no more than a tenth of what they had found; the rest they had left behind in secure hands. They told an enthralled Ralston they were confident that there was still an immense quantity left: they had simply carried out as much as their mules could bear.

  The men refused point-blank to say where they had found the stones. They did reluctantly agree, however, to take two diamond experts—blindfolded—back to the field. Two weeks later, the team returned and declared that the find was even greater than imagined. Diamonds were to be found jutting out of the earth, were to be picked out of cracks in the rocks, were to be seen glittering in the dry beds of former streams. They brought back with them a second bag, quite as large as the first, and deposited it alongside the first in Ralston’s vault. The total assumed value of the gems was now a quarter of a million dollars, no mean sum in 1872.

  Ralston moved quickly. He formed a company, naming it with suitable swagger the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company, and persuaded twenty-five of the city’s business elite to chip in $80,000 each, a capitalization of $2 million. The word got out: madness erupted. A diamond frenzy spread like a forest fire through the San Francisco financial aristocracy; and by the summer’s end, twenty-five other firms had been founded, with a total capitalization of a quarter of a billion dollars.

  Ralston then brought onto his own board the great and the good and the not so good, including a lawyer who had run unsuccessfully against Lincoln, a member of the US Senate, and the magnificently named adventurer Asbury Harpending, who later wrote a book about the affair, most of it more wildly exaggerated than was necessary.

  The banker also sent two of his lawyers armed with sample stones across to New York, to the Manhattan offices of Charles Tiffany, the greatest jeweler of his times. What, pray, was his considered opinion? Back came the word: the stones were all genuine, all precious gems of enormous value. The small sample he had seen was worth $150,000, at the very least. If they had more, then the value was probably in the millions.

  Yet even Tiffany’s word was not an absolute guarantee. To secure once and for all the faith of any future investors, Ralston hired the country’s foremost mining engineer to perform all the due diligence that a highly risky mining operation demanded and pronounce upon its worth, for many others had had their fingers badly burned by placing risky bets on dubious geology. The engineer’s name was Henry Janin. He had examined more than six hundred mines in his career so far—and he had never once been wrong.

  Janin promptly traveled out to the mystery location, along with Arnold and Slack, in a train with the shades pulled over t
he windows. The journey took a day and a half. He then duly accepted the customary blindfold as he left the railroad depot and rode with it on for two blazing days on the back of a mule. He eventually, and by all accounts miserably, reached the site.

  The diamond fields were on the northern side of an unusual cone-shaped mountain, a peak that rose quite memorably out of the scrubby landscape. After spending the better part of twenty-four hours camped there, having walked across the prodigiously jewel-strewn hillsides, he pronounced the find entirely genuine. He offered his professional view that the company and its backers were set to make a fortune. And the one thousand shares he had just accepted (along with $2,500 cash) for giving this opinion would be likely to make him also a very rich man.

  Once they heard the news, San Francisco’s private investors agreed, and hundreds of them began clamoring for stock. The firm turned down offers of as much as $200,000 for claims on the promised land. No less a figure than Lord Rothschild, five thousand miles away in London, succumbed to the fever as well and demanded that his American agent buy the company outright—a move that Ralston resisted, although he did invite the Rothschild man onto his board. So certain was the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company of its future that Ralston opened a gleaming new office in a marquee building in the city center and hired nearly two dozen clerks to run its increasingly complicated business affairs.

  And then Philip Arnold and John Slack, not men for the boardroom lunch and the briefcase, suddenly overcome by nostalgia for their artless world of pick and shovel, mule and map, decided to cash out. They left behind confidential instructions on how to reach the mystery diamond fields, negotiated a price of $300,000 each for their interest in the new company, took all the proffered cash, and for good measure added a demand that they be paid on an ongoing basis a percentage of any future profits.

  This last was purest cheek. For there would be no profits, nor would there be a company.

  For it turned out that Clarence King, the government-commissioned geologist-extraordinaire, had heard the story and had smelled a rat. The supposed diamond find sounded to him like a blatant absurdity—for the simplest of geological reasons: diamonds can occur in one place, sapphires in another, and rubies in a third, but never, in King’s experience, were they all to be found in one place. It was not a geological impossibility, but it was very, very unlikely.

  If this wasn’t enough, then the suspected location of the supposed find seemed fishy. Arizona was widely suspected—yet it seemed unreasonable to King that it would take a thirty-six-hour railway journey and a further two-day trek by mule to reach anywhere in Arizona. To find out just where it was likely that the men had gone, it seemed essential that those who were skeptical of the prospectors’ claims now interview the man who had last accompanied them to the diamond field, the so-called mining expert, Henry Janin. Clarence King bearded him in his den, a celebrated San Francisco restaurant. King demanded to know two simple things: what had the weather been like during Janin’s trip, and when he was on their mules, in what direction did he imagine he had been traveling?

  Janin said he’d determined, from the arguments he overheard between Arnold and Slack and from the slight amount of sunlight he could discern through his blindfold, that they had traveled generally southward.

  And as for the weather—it had been hot, and he had suffered mightily in the saddle. The journey had been a kind of purgatory: his thirst and weariness had almost overwhelmed him.

  This proved to be the Sherlock Holmes moment. For Clarence King knew first that a thirty-six-hour railroad journey on the lines that then existed would take someone a thousand miles east of San Francisco, well beyond Salt Lake City. At the time that Janin had passed through, Salt Lake and most of Utah and Nevada had been enveloped in a drenching rainstorm. The weather had become dry only once they had passed farther east still, and into the rain shadow of the Rockies, in Wyoming. For Janin to have begun his journey with the muleteers in weather that was warm and dry, he would have to have been on the eastern side of the mountain range, somewhere near the town of Cheyenne, and to have proceeded south from there.

  So King jumped onto a train himself and headed out toward Cheyenne, to the very same countryside that he was already in the process of mapping. Indeed, the “cone-shaped mountain” that Janin had mentioned sounded faintly familiar to him: it was entirely possible his survey teams had already reconnoitered it, had maybe even mapped it. So King had some reason for optimism. He traveled east with his old school friend James Gardiner, now chief topographer of his survey: the pair arrived thirty-six hours later at the lonely Wyoming station of Rawlings Springs, just a few miles from the Green River bridge where John Wesley Powell had set off for his expedition to become the first down the Grand Canyon.

  And clues were accumulating. From asking myriad innocent questions of the attendants on the train it was clear they were, as one might say, on the right track. The two men were beginning to suspect just where the diamond field may have been, within a radius of about fifteen miles. These suspicions were bolstered by what they were told at the station—that a small party of men on horses had been seen thereabouts just a few weeks before, and they had headed off in hot weather, in a southerly direction. Janin’s recollection of his sightless journeying seemed to have been correct.

  But it was October now, and cold. The small expedition—King and Gardiner and four other helpers, all on horseback—set out armed with camping gear, sieves, and long shovels, in case they got snowed in. They wore several flannel shirts and long wool mufflers. They noted that balls of ice clung to their horses’ legs each time they crossed a frozen river, and that this ice clicked like castanets. After six days of cheerless riding, they reached the Colorado boundary. They were now at seven thousand feet, and though there was still a bitter wind, the snow had either melted or been blown away from the hillsides. There were tracks of horses, apparently made quite recently. And there was a mountain ahead of them, shaped like a low cone.

  Here they came across a crude wooden sign nailed to a tree. It was a claim to the water rights to a nearby stream, signed by the man whom they had met in the San Francisco restaurant, Henry Janin. This was, just as King had calculated, the likely place.

  Within moments, as they walked along a ridge below the cone-shaped hill, they began to find gems. A ruby was the first—then several dozen more after an hour or so of searching. That night they discovered just three diamonds. The next morning King got forty-two more stones, but barely any diamonds. There were also amethysts, spinels, and garnets, an assemblage of minerals that was as improbable as the sapphire-ruby-diamond combination that had already alerted King’s skeptical mind. And then he found a diamond perched on a small finger of rock—and this awakened every remaining suspicious fiber in his body: for how could it have stayed there, perched so precariously amid the Colorado gales and snowstorms, over the hundreds of years since it had been made?

  There is an apocryphal story that a German mining engineer who had accompanied the team sealed their suspicions by crying out when he found on the ground a diamond that had already been cut. “Look, Mr. King, this diamond field not only produces diamonds, but it cuts them also.”

  But there was no German on the team, nor was a cut diamond ever found. The final confirmation came more prosaically, in an anthill. For the men noticed that at the base of nearly every anthill on the ridge there were a number of tiny holes, eight inches deep or so, seemingly made with a stick pushed into the soft ground. And at the bottom of each hole lay a precious stone, put there by whoever had drilled the hole with his stick.

  The entire field was a fraud, a swindle, a hoax. The field had been salted, to use the miners’ term, had been cleverly peppered with cheap stones in the hope that someone would invest and help make those who did the salting very wealthy men indeed.

  As Philip Arnold and John Stack, now hastening away to somewhere with $600,000 in their pockets, had instantly become. It turned out they had b
ought their stones some months before in London and Amsterdam. They had made a $25,000 investment in a few hundred offcuts and rejects from unknowing stone cutters and gem dealers in Europe. They had then placed these stones, in all their varieties, in holes in the bases of anthills in a windy desert on the Colorado and Wyoming border and had waited as they slowly emerged onto the surface and into the sunlight.

  Charles Tiffany, who had famously valued the waste diamonds as “a rajah’s ransom” managed somehow to reburnish his tarnished reputation. Asbury Harpending fought a libel suit to try to regain his. Henry Janin—who had already gotten wind of impending trouble, and sold his thousand shares for $40,000 before the discovery of the fraud—remained friends for life with Clarence King. William Ralston paid his investors back and put the stock certificates under glass as a warning to be more prudent in the future—but three years later his entire financial empire collapsed, there was a run on his bank, and the day afterward his body was found floating in San Francisco Bay.

  Philip Arnold was arrested in Kentucky and charged. But his state refused to extradite him, and even displayed some small sense of pride that a doughty Southern son had managed so successfully to tweak the tails of some Yankee profiteers. In the end he cut a deal, paying back half the money in exchange for the charges being dropped. He used what was left to set up a bank of his own, only to be shot in the shoulder by a jealous rival. He died painfully of pneumonia caused by complications from the wound. His cousin, John Slack, was never found.

  As a consequence of his detective work, his high intelligence, and his apparently unimpeachable code of morals, Clarence King was to enjoy fame and good fortune for almost all the rest of his days. Everyone applauded. One newspaper said it all: “Fortunately for the good name of San Francisco and the State there was one cool-headed man of scientific education who esteemed it his duty to investigate the matter in the only right way, and who proceeded about his task with a degree of spirit and strong common sense as striking as his success.”