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If Clarence King lived today, you might see him on the cover of Outside or Scientific American -- or maybe on CNN's Larry King Live.
But in which persona? Self-taught mountaineer, frontier geologist or survivor of stampeding Nebraska buffalo, torture-bent Arizona Indians and a cave-cornered Wyoming grizzly?
All those and more, according to The Explorer King, first-time author and journalist/historian Robert Wilson's vivid portrait of a forgotten icon of the West's discovery.
King, who hobnobbed with some of the late 19th century's most influential men, was an international celebrity at age 31 and died a penniless has-been less than three decades later.
An accused Civil War draft dodger, King would serve his nation another way: surveying and mapping the frontier during and after the war.
Wilson, a former books editor at USA TODAY, deftly synthesizes the times and King's place in them. His smooth narrative, cobbled more than a century later from memoirs, letters and King's writings, speaks of impressive research, a three-page bibliography and 18 pages of footnotes.
The Hollywood-worthy exploits of a Yale-trained geologist and thrill junkie made King a literal "rock star."
The scientific feats were the real thing, writes Wilson, now editor of The American Scholar. King answered key questions about the West's origins and geology. His "40th Parallel Survey of the Great Basin from California to the Rockies" won him the first directorship of the U.S. Geological Survey. He was made a hero for exposing the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872 when two swindlers faked a gemfield in a remote spot that King's own team had surveyed.
But King also packed pulp-fiction chills into serious field study in California, bagging (and sometimes naming) peaks from Shasta and Lassen in the Cascades to Whitney and other 14,000-foot summits in the Sierra Nevada.
King, "one of the ablest scientists of his generation, was not going to lose the enthusiasm for adventure and romance that sent him West in the first place," Wilson writes.
The author skims over why King faded into obscurity behind the West's other great explorers, from Lewis and Clark to Powell and Muir. He finds a life split into stark opposites: Indiana Jonesian feats in his 20s and 30s but failed mining ventures and drawing-room bombast in his 40s and 50s. King died of tuberculosis in 1901, two weeks short of age 60.
One more mystery begs for light: King's secret 13-year marriage to a black nursemaid named Ada. She knew him only as "James Todd" until just before his death. Of the postmortem hubbub, Wilson asks: "Did racism contribute to his tumble from the highest peaks of renown?"
Great question, but no answer here.
But these are only small omissions from a large life. Wilson's laser focus produces a nice line that might serve as epitaph for that life: "He spent the first half of it achieving things and the second half talking about those achievements."
Patrick O'Driscoll covers the West from USA TODAY's Denver bureau but did not know Robert Wilson while the author worked at the newspaper.
The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax -- Clarence King in the
Old West
By Robert Wilson
Scribner, 302 pp., $26
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© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
