- Social Critique in the Writings of Clarence King
We have found more pleasure in Mr. King's studies of character than in his climbings.
—Anonymous reviewer of King's Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada
Clarence King's Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada was published in 1872, soon after its appearance as a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly; its engaging young author was at once a qualified geologist, a keen observer, an intrepid climber, and an evocative chronicler of his adventures in high places. His most interesting chapter, however, "The Newtys of Pike," has nothing to do with the sublimity of mountains or mountaineering. Its ostensible subject is a brief encounter, spanning less than a day in May 1864, with a family from Pike County, Missouri, raising hogs in the foothills of the Sierra. Its real subject is degeneration, a biological, social, and moral specter that worries King and was to obsess thinkers for the rest of the century.1 King regards the Newty family as illustrating this phenomenon, and he presents its results as at once grotesque and pathetic. Since trekking westward in 1850, first to Oregon and later to central California, the family had lost one child, and two others clearly will not survive to adulthood. Although their herd of swine numbers in the thousands, the Newtys have no roof over their heads, and they eat, sleep, and dress in a squalor matched elsewhere in the book only by the so-called Digger Indians. Shabby, shiftless, and improvident, Mrs. Newty smokes a pipe, spits, and spins tales about coon hunting rather than knitting, sewing, or otherwise clothing her family and adorning their surroundings. She and her husband speak a droll patois long [End Page 147] identified with hardscrabble rusticity: by the 1870s, "Pike County" had come to stand for extreme backwardness and uncouthness, filling a role in American humor played by the "Old Southwest" before the Civil War.2 But in this book King is less interested in satirizing loutishness than in calling into question the "brave spirit of Westward Ho!" which was already becoming part of California's self-congratulatory mythology. At best, he acknowledges, the pioneering instinct, "which has dared to uproot the old and plant the new," has "admirable" and "poetic" features that deserve to become part of the positive "story of America." But in his opinion the story has a darker side that has not yet been told:
when, instead of urging on to wresting from new lands something better than old can give, it degenerates into mere weak-minded restlessness, killing the power of growth, the ideal of home, the faculty of repose, it results in that race of perpetual emigrants who roam as dreary waifs over the West, losing possessions, love of life, love of God, slowly dragging from valley to valley to valley till they fall by the wayside.
(105)3
The Newtys are part of this "dreary brotherhood"; "cursed with a permanent discontent," they are "sad product[s] of the disease of chronic emigration" (105, 107).
Born in 1842, King writes in his late twenties about experiences in his early twenties, when, instead of serving in the Civil War, he had joined the staff of the California State Geological Survey under William H. Brewer,4 not long after graduating from Yale's Sheffield Scientific School. But he never represents himself as having migrated or as a Westerner. For him California is a scene of serious work and equally serious climbing adventures, yet the notion of its becoming his home never arises. Through his scientific activity, his mountaineering, his encounters with various people and places, and his critical commentary on them, King seeks to master California, not to become a Californian. Associated with a group pursuing worthy scientific goals, he is censorious toward the inchoate longings that have drawn people like the Newtys westward and have kept many of them from settling properly once they reached the West. The Newtys left a promising homestead in [End Page 148] Oregon for California. They now contemplate moving to Montana, and King predicts that from Montana they will pursue the will-o'-the-wisp of better fortune to Texas...