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Men are born either catastrophists or uniformitarians. You may divide the human race into imaginative people who believe in all sorts of
impending crises . . . and others who anchor their very souls to the status quo.
Clarence King, "Catastrophism and Evolution" 1877
Henry Adams believed that his friend Clarence King was the "best and brightest man of his generation" (The Education 416). When Adams met King in 1871 the young man had seemed destined for greatness as "King had moulded and directed his life logically, scientifically, as Adams thought American life should be directed" (312). Having begun his career with Josiah Dwight Whitney's geological survey of California, by the time he met Adams at the age of twenty-nine he was himself heading the Geological Survey of the 40th Parallel. At thirty-seven King became the first director of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey only to resign after two years to follow his fortune in the mines of the Southwest. His friends recognized his merit not only as a scientist, but as a man of letters, praising equally his Systematic Geology (1878) and his collection of popular adventure essays, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872). Although Adams speculated that "With ordinary luck [King] would die at eighty the richest and most many-sided genius of his day" (313), King would not be so fortunate. After several financial failures and a bout in a mental hospital, King died of tuberculosis, bankrupt and alone in a "California tavern" at the age of fifty-nine (416).
Where Adams, in an oblique criticism of the values of the Gilded Age, attributed King's failure to the pursuit of money, more recently critics like John O'Grady have located King's difficulty in the divided psyche they see reflected in his prose. I suggest, in turn, that King's conflicted selfhood emerges from inconsistencies within the broader cultural narratives he employs in his attempt to construct a coherent identity for both self and nation.
King came into his own both as a writer and as one of the nation's preeminent geologists in an America changed not only by the violence of the Civil War, but also by an ever-increasing influx of immigrants to an increasingly urban and industrialized America. As Gail Bederman and others...