You've probably never heard of him, but Clarence King was famous once. As a geologist, he helped map the American West, and he organized the United States Geological Survey as its first president. As a writer, he had a bestseller, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.
He dined at the White House and had a genius for friendship; among his intimates were writer and diplomat John Hay, historian Henry Adams and novelist Henry James. Hay, who in his youth was Lincoln's secretary and who in the fullness of his years was McKinley's secretary of state, thought King the best man of his time and was puzzled by the fact that King's talents did not make him rich.
"I fear he will die without doing anything," Hay wrote to novelist-editor William Dean Howells, "except to be a great scientist, a delightful writer, and the sweetest-natured creature the Lord ever made.''
The answer to the puzzle, Martha A. Sandweiss believes, lies in a duplicity of character so deep that it prevented King from focusing his energies and eventually sapped them. The sweetest-natured creature the Lord ever made was also a world-class liar.
He had to be. His friends always knew of his not-quite-kidding admiration for women of what he called "archaic" races — Mexican, Indian, Hawaiian. But they didn't know that as "James Todd" he courted, married and had five children with Ada Copeland, who was born a slave.
King died in Phoenix in 1901 of tuberculosis. He was 59. Ada Copeland Todd King died in Flushing, N.Y., in 1964, at 103, in the house that John Hay had bought for her anonymously.
Princeton's Sandweiss came along too late to interview Ada King. But she has labored heroically in the data fields available to her, including census records and trial records. If her book is uncomfortably filled with qualifiers — Ada must have done this, could have been that — she is still the first to recognize that King's secret life was central to who he was, and to what he was not.
David L. Beck is a writer and editor in St. Petersburg.
News
