Clarence King was often written by historians, academics, but mostly in books on geological mapping and exploration of the American West. It runs also in biographies and literary history, since he moved in glittering circles and was once widely held in high esteem. It was called “the best men and the brightest of his generation” by a close friend, Secretary of State John Hay.
Hay went even further: “This polished trifle, this exquisite mind, which broadcasts throughout the conversation in which he was engaged in an iridescent mist and persiflage epigram, was one of the greatest scholars of his time . Another admirer put it this way: “The problem with King is that his description of the sunset on the spoils.”
King was a blond Newport blueblood who distinguished himself at an early age. He traveled in the West of the 1860s, have found work at the California State Geological Survey, helped map the Sierra and became a geologist in charge of the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th parallel in 1867, when he was 25. He then became a familiar lighting in both New York and Washington. But his early years of homelessness is only the prelude to what appears to have been definitely rootless state.
Or it seems to his friends, who became his unexpected absences and thought him an eternal bachelor. Their impressions of it goes no further. What they do not know is that when the King had no life in the various clubs and hotels, he is married and father of five children. He was deeply devoted to his wife, Ada, a black woman 19 years his junior. This man with blue eyes, descended signatories of the Magna Carta, has successfully cultivated the impression that he was too black.
The existence of Ada and their children has become common knowledge that in 1933, during a trial in which Ada tried to recover the funds it was promised by Clarence. He was dead for over 30 years so that the shock wave generated by the trial have been considerable. More dramatic, Ms. Sandweiss his account, is how Clarence revisionist demoted from hero of “tragic hero”, not to mention “the most richly overpraised man of his time,” the discovery of it was married to a former slave. That was typical of the disgusting titles surrounding the trial: “Mammy Bares life as wife of the scientist.”