CLARENCE KING.

 

            WHEN I met Clarence King, he was most considerate, kind and companionable. There was not a trace of self-consciousness about him, but merely a genial recognition of a fellowman the air of one who as men measure men knowing that he was learned and gifted, never forgot that real men are men, and that brilliant accomplishments in this world are at best but a mastering of the alphabet of real learning that the exhaustless fields are beyond. There was a courtesy and refinement about Mr. King which to me seemed inborn, and which I never fully understood until I learned that when a baby of a year old his father died and that thereafter his gifted mother devoted her life to her boy's education and training. When I read that, I said to myself, "Why, of course it was the character of his mother shining out through the son."

            He was the same in a mining camp, in the private office of hard-headed financiers or at a reunion of college boys. His audience was always puzzled to quite analyze him.

            The truth was that he was a child of nature ; the great mountains were more real company for him than either men or men-made books, though he was a scholar and loved his friends exceedingly.

            He was drawn from his New England home by reading a description of Mount Shasta, and never rested until he had found that majestic mountain and climbed it. Then at its base he found a stream of water which by its color he believed had come from a glacier, and when assured by the highest geological authority that there were no glaciers on Shasta, he still had his convictions, and after years of exploration he found the glaciers on the sullen mountain's flank. He had a memory that never left him in the lurch ; he was so brave that he could perform feats that other men shuddered even to contemplate ; he kept his heart always open to every cry for help ; his knowledge was most profound, but to the last he was

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simple-hearted and eager to learn, and every phenomenon of nature was, when he found it, a joy to him. I can imagine him and John Muir walking side by side all day over Yosemite trails and hardly speaking, and then at night see them enthusiastic over the great day they had enjoyed.

            He grew to be a great geologist on the west coast and was more and more absorbed in the study up to the day of his death. We say grew to be, because that exactly expresses the fact. In a suit between two warring mining companies in Eureka, Nevada, he gave his expert testimony. In another case some years later, where the same formation was a question Mr. King was called upon again and reversed his previous opinions. When his former testimony was shown him and he was asked to explain the discrepancies between his statements, he frankly admitted that his first testimony was delivered upon superficial knowledge, stating why he was deceived at first and how a new light had come to him.

            The air was filled with whispers of combines to defraud, bribery, double-dealing, perjury and all the sinister accompaniments ; but there was not a thought on either side that expressed would have cast so much as a shadow on the stainless shield of Clarence King's integrity. He explored almost every defile, climbed to the summit of every western mountain and lifted the veil from every desert of the west, but we feel sure that only his over-mastering love of nature held him up to the work, for he was naturally refined and loved all refinements ; he loved the society of the gifted, accomplished and learned ; everything that was exquisite in art and literature : he loved, too, the comforts that come of richly furnished houses, delicate food, soft beds, rare books and pictures, trained service ; and the highest society held him as foremost guest.

            But with all these, I suspect he would periodically have broken away he would have followed a cloud to mark the changes of color that the sunbeams might paint upon it, or would have followed the trail to some new mountain that he had news of, or would have run away to the seashore to interpret the voices of the waves as they came rolling in from far-off lands.

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            'The call of the wild" was ever ringing in his soul. He climbed Lassen's Peak one day when the fog eight thousand feet deep had laid its mantle on the hills of Lassen, Shasta and Siskiyou counties, and all the Pitt River valley. It was just after the first fall of snow in the early winter, and seen that way a man's first impulse is to doff his hat as though in the presence of Deity.

            When King reached the crest of Lassen's Peak -- which is a sovereign mountain itself -- there, eighty miles away, the six thousand feet above the bank of fog, stood Shasta, its crest turned to purple and gold under the sunbeams, its sides white under the new fallen snow, and he cried out: 'What would Ruskin say could he see this ?"

            Ruskin gave the world some glorified pictures of the Alps, but never had seen an inspiration such as that would have given him.

            But we are not sure that King would not have achieved more fame had he chosen a purely literary career. Sir Walter Scott achieved immortality in weaving into simple stories, colorless without, the pictures of Scotland's mountains and the portrayals of Scotland's men and women, their looks and their deeds.

            What might not Mr. King have achieved had he chosen to portray the poetical side of the great west of America or of the fairest of foreign lands !

            Under his mother's care he wrote beautifully when but fifteen years of age. What might he not have done with his later knowledge and experience in the clearer light that had come to him ? For he knew how the mountains had been framed ; how the glaciers were started in their flow; the ages of the rocks ; and had translated their hieroglyphics into written languages. However distracted he may have been in other directions, he was always in accord with nature. Then his taste was so perfect, his wit so exquisite, his power of description so unequaled; his use of language so inimitable -- for he never lacked the exact word needed -- his observation so all-embracing that he never missed a detail -- like a woman who at a glance can take in every detail of a sister woman's attire as

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they pass on the street -- what might he not have produced in a literary way?

            Then he could master a strange tongue in a month and so all literature would have been at his command in its original form and expression.

            And he could in a moment ingratiate himself into any company, a band of cowboys in the west or an array of artists or scientists or writers in London or Paris, or had he been captured by cannibals, they would not have eaten him, but would have adopted him and within a week would have tendered him his choice of their prettiest dusky maidens for a wife.

            And still, after a hard day's work, or an evening spent with artists, brilliant men and women, to rest himself so that he might sleep, he was prone to solve some abstruse problem in mathematics or clear up from his field notes some doubts as to rock formations.

            The service he performed for his country in his reports of his studies of the great west, are invaluable and the work performed in getting together his data was something prodigious.

            Still as a simple man was he greatest, the every-day man, manly everywhere, manly without a shade of false pride in his nature ; the man at home everywhere, the man who held all other honest men as good as himself; one who would have taken a friend from the gutter and nursed him back to health and hope, but would not have taken the hand of a Caesar had that Caesar been unworthy the centuries may not produce his fellow, so versatile was he, so all-encompassing was his mind, so royal his heart, so exalted his character.

            Those who knew him best loved him most, and when he died, beyond the passionate grief that followed him to the grave, was a vast regret that he had never given full expression to the real height and depth of his nature, and that the world would never realize how altogether great and splendid a man he was, or how much the world lost when he died.