Clarence King
| Clarence King | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
January 6, 1842 Newport, Rhode Island, USA |
| Died |
December 24, 1901 (aged 59) Phoenix, Arizona, USA |
| Fields | Geologist |
| Alma mater | Yale University |
| Known for | Exploration of the Sierra Nevada |
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| 1st Director of the United States Geological Survey | |
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In office 1879 – 1881 |
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| Succeeded by | John Wesley Powell |
Clarence Rivers King (January 6, 1842 – December 24, 1901) was an American geologist, mountaineer, and author. He served as the first director of the United States Geological Survey from 1879 to 1881. King was noted for his exploration of the Sierra Nevada.
Clarence King was the son of James Rivers King and Florence Little King. Clarence's father was part of a family firm engaged in trade with China, which kept him away from home a great deal, and he died in 1848, so Clarence was brought up primarily by his mother. His only two siblings had also died by 1848.
Clarence developed an early interest in outdoor exploration and natural history, which was encouraged by his mother and by Reverend Dr. Roswell Park, head of the Christ Church Hall school in Pomfret, Connecticut that Clarence attended until he was ten. He then attended schools in Boston and New Haven, and at age thirteen was accepted to the prestigious Hartford High School. He was a good student and a versatile athlete, of short stature but unusually strong.
His mother received an income from the King family business until it met with a series of problems and dissolved in 1857. After a few years of straitened circumstances, during part of which Clarence suffered from a serious depression, his mother married George S. Howland in July 1860. Howland financed Clarence's enrollment in the Sheffield Scientific School affiliated with Yale College in 1860.
At Yale King specialized in "applied chemistry" and also studied physics and geology. One inspiring teacher was James Dwight Dana, a highly regarded geologist who had participated in a scientific expedition to the South Atlantic, South Pacific, and the west coasts of South and North America. King graduated with a Ph.B. in July 1862. He and several friends borrowed one of Yale's rowboats that summer for a trip along the shores of Lake Champlain and a series of Canadian rivers, then returned to New Haven for the fall regatta.
In October 1862, on a visit to the home of his former professor George Jarvis Brush, King heard Brush read aloud a letter he had received from William Henry Brewer telling of an ascent of Mount Shasta in California, then believed to be the tallest mountain in the country. King began to read more about geology, attended a lecture by Louis Agassiz, and soon wrote to Brush that he had "pretty much made up my mind to be a geologist if I can get work in that direction." He was also fascinated by descriptions of the Alps by John Tyndall and John Ruskin
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