The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  The successful exposure of the diamond fraud coincided with the effective end of the Great Survey of which King had been in charge. The Four Surveys were all done now (the fourth, led by the non-geologist soldier George Wheeler, was in the main a mapping expedition). It remained only for the usual squabblings and rivalries attendant on such government-run matters to conclude in 1879 with the formation of the US Geological Survey, which exists still to this day. Clarence King was appointed its first director; John Wesley Powell was its second—the appointments honoring two of those who had made so much of their Western experiences. Ferdinand Hayden, the great explorer of Yellowstone, had to be content with a professorship instead.

  It took me a long cold afternoon to drive clear across Sweetwater County. The Rockies were in the distance on my right. Low mountains shelved downward to my left. Ahead of me the countryside was beautifully desolate, with sandstone buttes and mesas, small winding creeks and little waterfalls and runnels, an uncared-for expanse of scrub and tumbleweed, with occasional gatherings of rusting oil tanks beside farms of quietly dipping nodding donkeys, each of them sucking the last remnant drops of precious oil from long-forgotten wells. The road was good, paved and well repaired with oil money, no doubt, through the entire mileage of the county. Then, WELCOME TO COLORADO said a yellow sign, peppered with bullet holes—whereupon the road became dirt the moment we crossed.

  The Bureau of Land Management looks after this remote, unwanted wilderness and does its best to keep away people who have no business there. I had explained to its office in Rock Springs that I was curious about the history and wanted to walk the land where Clarence King and Henry Janin and Arnold and Slack had once walked. A kindly man there eventually relented and gave me a map. I used it for navigation over the last few miles, for which the GPS aboard the car had no information at all, identifying it as simply an immense empty expanse, as if it might be the sea.

  But it was, of course, a place littered with prominent and long-ago-mapped features—all of them the result of the King expedition of a century and a half before. And then Diamond Peak, the immediately recognizable low and cone-shaped hill on the flanks of which the gems had been planted, was lying squarely ahead of me, its bulk slightly to the right.

  The wind, which had been stilled ever since I left Rock Springs, now picked up again, and there were more flurries of snow. The top of Diamond Peak was pure white, with ice crystals glinting in the low spring sun. I spent an hour or so there, fossicking around in the ground, kicking the anthills, turning over a promising selection of small boulders, dredging channels in the dust with my boot heels. It was all fun and good exercise, and I had the intense pleasure of knowing I was at the time perhaps the most isolated man in America, scores of miles away from any other human being, in the absolute middle of nowhere.

  It would be pleasing to be able to report that after spending a while on this lonesome search, I saw a sudden pink glint in the dirt. It would be agreeable to say I then fell to my knees and within seconds picked up the gleam and discovered a ruby, a gemstone that had been bought in a job lot in Hatton Garden just a few miles from where I had grown up in London, and had then been lodged in the Colorado dirt here by a Kentucky con man and adventurer whose nefarious salting-doings had been uncovered by a son of Rhode Island, a Yalie, who had once ridden a horse clear across America. It would indeed have been pleasing to report this. But it never happened.

  For fossick and kick and dredge as I might, everything on the slopes of Diamond Peak these days is dust and gravel, tumbleweed, scrub, and bird feathers, with the occasional organic traces of rabbit and prairie dog. I looked around, considered the view, enjoyed the sublime isolation—and then the snow began to fall more steadily, the wind began to howl in a way peculiar to the Great Plains, and the view of the Rockies in the west faded from sight. I got back into the car, bumped along ten miles of dirt, and then found solid Wyoming pavement once again, and was back on the interstate highway by nightfall, without a stone of any worth to show for my troubles.

  There is a curious small coda to Clarence King’s story, a happenstance that serves to render this heroic figure more distinctly human than might be suggested by his great cascade of achievements. It all goes back to his fondness for dark-skinned and native women.

  In a book review for the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, King outlined the basis for his predilections for such ladies:

  Whoever has strolled at dusk where palm groves lean to the shore and watched the Indian women sauntering in the cool of evening with a gait in which a ripple of grace undulates—whoever has seen their soft, dark eyes, and read the expression of tenderness and pathos which is habitual on their faces, can but feel that here simple nature has done all she can for a woman.

  It was all Rousseau, Gauguin, the Bounty mutineers, and Robert Louis Stevenson, with a touch of Arthur Munby, all wrapped up in one. And from his writings it seems that it was sincerely felt—a feeling deep within King’s heart that women “in the primitive state” were the very best, and that “Paradise, for me, is still a garden and a primeval woman.”

  By contrast, white women held few charms. When his friend John Hay once tried to arrange a meeting with an especially attractive and eligibly patrician lady in Washington, King recoiled: “To see her walk across a room, you would think someone had tilted up a coffin on end, and propelled the corpse spasmodically forward.”

  Well aware of the social dangers involved, King—by now living in New York—tried his level best to find the “natural woman” of his dreams. Night after night, after leaving the celebrated clubs of which he was a member, and after his virtuoso performances as the greatest storyteller in the city of the day, he liked to leave behind the haut monde and make his entry, with robust enthusiasm, into the much more exciting demimonde, the black demimonde in particular.

  He liked to spend his late nights trawling the insalubrious corners of the cities in which he lived and stayed. He would travel on official business overseas. During his travels to London in particular, he behaved rather like Dorian Gray, with his visits to “the dreadful places” near Blue Gate Fields—though in King’s case not, it seems clear, solely or even principally for the purpose of sex. He went to mingle with people who, he claimed, acted more on instinct than on intellect, to indulge in behavior that took him back somewhat to his happier and more liberated times, when he was in the field and had been very much a man of action, when he had spent his days as a climber, a mountaineer, a hunter.

  It was in New York in either late 1887 or early 1888 that King met a nursemaid named Ada Copeland. The fair-skinned and blue-eyed Clarence King, a Yale-educated geologist and former senior government official from a good and old family in Newport, met and fell in love that winter with a young black woman from the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Georgia. She had been born into a slave family. He was forty-six; she was twenty-eight. He was white, and she was black.

  But he had no wish for embarrassment or social ostracism. He could not afford to be embroiled in the scandal that would be certain to erupt if it ever became known that he was courting a woman who in those less sophisticated times would have been called a Negress. And so he came up with a plan—an ill-thought-out, heat-of-the-moment plan that, because it involved an ever-more-complicated web of deceit, was doomed from the start for eventual failure.

  As soon as the couple met, he embarked on a lie. He decided to tell Miss Copeland three things—and by extension, four. He would not tell her his real name, instead announcing, without thinking, that his name was James Todd. Second, he made no mention of Newport but said instead that he came from Baltimore. And third, as if the first two lies did not bring complication enough, he said he used to be an itinerant steelworker but now had employment as a porter on the Pullman express trains.

  This third falsehood was the single most important of all. The job of Pullman porter had long been a reserved occupation—and Miss Copeland was to infer and understand from what she was told that the man who
had tipped his hat so effusively to her was, despite outward appearances, a black man. Not perhaps as fully black as she, but black in law and by custom nonetheless.

  Under Victorian social rules, if he had only a drop of Negro blood in his veins, his genetic makeup could legitimately be claimed to be that of a black man. He could, in other words, assert without too much fear of contradiction that he was a man of the same basic color and caste as the woman he would later marry.

  Though a white man from Rhode Island, Clarence King had a yielding respect and affection for women of color. He eventually met and married Ada Copeland, from a Georgia slave family, though renaming himself “James Todd” and insisting he was a pale-skinned black Pullman porter. The pair had five children together; one son, Wallace, is pictured here with his mother.

  And when James Todd did marry Ada Copeland, in September 1888, at a small ceremony conducted by a Methodist minister in a private house in Manhattan, one feature of the occasion suggested his subsequent fate. None of his friends or relatives attended the wedding. James Todd was alone, and he would in a sense remain alone for almost the rest of his days—because Clarence King had told no one, and indeed could tell no one, of his decision or of the life he intended to live with the woman who would in short order bear his five children.

  Because James Todd was a chimera, he could have no relatives or old friends of substance. And because Clarence King had plenty of both but could admit his other life to no one, a strange separation slowly got under way. King embarked on his final thirteen years as two distinct and very separate people, of which until the very end his new wife knew only one.

  The complications of such an arrangement were legion. His world was now awash with deception, avoidance, excuses, feigned illness, absence. (At one geological congress, he met a young geologist whose name was James Todd, which must have given him momentary pause, at least.)

  And there were the costs—of among other things, maintaining two households. As Clarence King, he lived alone in a residential hotel on Manhattan’s Eleventh Street. As James Todd, he lived with his fast-enlarging Todd family in a small house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, across the East River in Brooklyn. To this man from a family that was socially grand but financially threadbare, such an arrangement was likely to prove corrosive, probably ruinous. To sustain himself, King borrowed money from an unsuspecting John Hay; the first of six loans would be nearly $200,000 in today’s money; in the end, he owed the equivalent of millions.

  From time to time, there were episodes of domestic panic. To help pay the bills, King tried mining in Mexico and cattle ranching in the West. All of his ventures failed, and in his later years, he was reduced to acting as a mining consultant and a professional expert witness in geology-related court cases—a mournful fall from grace for so bright a figure as he had once been. John Hay felt for his friend: “I fear he will die without doing anything, except to be a great scientist, a delightful writer, and the sweetest creature the Lord ever made.” But Hay was never told the truth, or the reason.

  Racial passing—the profoundly difficult effort that had to be made, day in and day out, without ever allowing a mistake, in order to convince others that you belonged to a different race than you appeared to—imposed a formidable burden on King. As he approached the mid-1890s, he began to suffer both physically and mentally from its strictures. He had long been a dandy, given to wearing dinner dress in field camps and exotic velvet suits in New York. But now his friends began to notice that his appearance was shabby, his beard more often than not unkempt, his clothing frequently ragged and soiled. And he flew into rages. One afternoon he was arrested after an altercation in, of all places, the lion house in Manhattan’s Central Park Zoo, and then he so offended the magistrate that he was committed for two months to an insane asylum, his long-suffering friends paying the bills and offering attentive support. His medical report diagnosed him as suffering from acute melancholia.

  On his release, he became ever more furtive, ever more terrified that his friends were about to find out what he thought of as his awful secret. He moved the family out to Flushing, Queens, farther from Manhattan, hoping to make it less likely that the worlds of the Kings and the Todds would ever collide.

  Here, pinioned in so distant and economical a part of town, the family did start to enjoy some modest prosperity: in January 1900 there was a New Year ball mentioned in the local paper and celebrated by “Mrs. Ada Todd”—suggesting that the former nursemaid now enjoyed a newfound status and believed she could count on a more stable future in the new century for herself and the four children who survived. Yet because she did not know the truth, she never realized the irony of the newspaper notice, which announced the theme of the celebration ball as a masquerade.

  This remains the most puzzling aspect of all. For almost all of their marriage, and while helping to raise their children, King clung tenaciously, even in the privacy of his home, to the complex cascade of fictions. Maybe he intended to keep Ada from ever knowing, but within the year of the ball and her momentary flush of social success, she did find out. She did so because King, torn apart by strain, fell ill—terminally ill, as it turned out—with tuberculosis. He moved out of New York, alone, and fled to the warmth of the American Southwest to convalesce and maybe to become cured.

  But once he finally accepted that he would not survive, he wrote to Ada and told her some of the truth. He did not tell her all. He disclosed little of his background. But he did inform her, at long and perplexing last, that his first name was not James but Clarence, and that thanks to his surname she was not in fact properly Mrs. Todd but should be called from now on Mrs. King.

  Not long after this stunning revelation, Clarence King died, on Christmas Eve, 1901. His doctor in Phoenix, where he spent his final days, was the one person who knew King had died a married man. The doctor accordingly sent a telegram to Ada with the news. And when he came to inscribe the death certificate for her, he—with an infinite kindness—filled in the line that asked for a description of the deceased, and which offered Black as one choice, with a single typewritten word—American.

  It seems possible he did this to fulfill a wish the hapless man may have expressed on his deathbed. Some years before, King had written an essay, in which he stated that he imagined an ideal America in which “the composite elements of American populations are melted down into one race alloy, when there are no more Irish or Germans, Negroes and English, but only Americans.” Perhaps the doctor knew that. Perhaps, in some way, by marrying into a black family and siring five children who were of mixed race—“melted down into one race alloy”—King played his microcosmically small part in helping his country achieve that. To the highly complex and multilayered business of the uniting of the states, Clarence Rivers King contributed by his vital role in the great geological surveys and perhaps also by crossing the lines of race and class.

  The Great Surveys had been officially concluded in 1872. Clarence King died in 1901. The frontier, which had been so much a part of pioneer America’s experience, was effectively closed and ended as a phenomenon in the 1890s. So it is reasonable to say that by the last quarter of the century, the states of America, at least in terms of knowledge of their surface and subsurface components, were fully known and linked with one another so entirely and so intimately as to be, now in fact just as in name, United.

  Yet other components still needed to be clicked into place. For an American in Maine to feel true kinship with a brother American in Arizona, for a New Yorker to be able to feel at one with an Oregonian or Alabamian, for a Kansas farmer to be able to send his wheat to market in Florida, or for a Massachusetts mill owner to sell his shoes or textiles to a store in California or North Dakota, people and the things they made needed to be able to move with speed and ease from one corner of the nation to another. To achieve this, to overlay this kind of ability on the bedrock of all the knowledge that had been so painstakingly assembled, it was now vitally necessary to create the ways and means for Ameri
cans to enjoy real and true mobility, so they and their goods could reach out to all corners, to all the nooks and crannies of the nation.

  These means—which had to be in conception far more sophisticated than the crude simplicities of the wagon trains and cavalry squadrons and survey parties—all now had to be conjured out of the national imagination. Transporting devices had to be planned, invented, tested, and then made and manufactured. And just as important, so also the ways across which these means would then travel—the waterways, roadways, railways, and skyways—all had to be identified, built, improved, made more useful, made permanent, made safe.

  The waterways would be the first. They were already there—the nation’s rivers. They were obvious, they were free, and for years they would be preeminent. For a long while, they would remain so until, in a nation growing as fast and furiously as the new America, even the immense network of rivers became inadequate to the task. They turned out to be neither numerous, extensive, nor convenient enough. Then Americans had to build new rivers for themselves, which they did with all the energy of a new race of pharaohs, devoted to the task of uniting America by water.

  PART III

  WHEN the AMERICAN STORY TRAVELED by WATER

  1803–1900

  The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world—in fact I don’t know anything which has more power—except perhaps the Mississippi.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, QUOTED IN WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL, My Diary North and South, 1862