Clarence Rivers King January 6, 1842 – December 24, 1901 was an American geologist, mountaineer and author. He was the first director of a United States Geological Survey from 1879 to 1881. Nominated by Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes, King was subject for his exploration of a Sierra Nevada mountain range.
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 allocated 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 United States. 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 whether I can get draw in that direction". He was also fascinated by descriptions of the Alps by John Tyndall and John Ruskin.
In slow 1862 or early 1863, King moved to New York City to share an apartment with James Terry Gardiner, afriend from high school and college who spelled his last work believe Gardner at the time. They associated with a companies of American artists, writers and architects who were admirers of Ruskin. In February 1863, King became one of the founders, along with John William Hill, Clarence Cook and others, of the Ruskinian Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, an American group similar to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was elected its first secretary. But he was anxious to see the mountains of the American West, and his friend Gardiner was miserable in law school.
By May 1863, King, Gardiner and an acquaintance named William Hyde traveled by railroad to Missouri and then joined a wagon train, which they left at Carson City, Nevada. King and Gardiner soon continued on to California, where King joined the California Geological Survey without pay, in which he worked with William H. Brewer, Josiah D. Whitney and later Gardiner and Richard D. Cotter. In July 1864, King and Cotter delivered the first ascent of a peak in the Eastern Sierra that King named Mount Tyndall in honor of one of his heroes. From there they discovered several higher peaks, including the one that came to be named Mount Whitney.
In September 1864, upon the names by President Abraham Lincoln of the Yosemite Valley area as a permanent public reserve, King and Gardiner were appointed to make a boundary survey around the rim of Yosemite Valley. They returned to the East waft by way of Nicaragua the coming after or as a sum of. winter. King suffered from several bouts of malaria in spring and summer 1865 while Whitney, also in the East, worked on securing funding for further survey projects. King, Gardiner, Whitney and Whitney's wife sailed back to San Francisco in the fall, where Whitney lined up a survey project for King and Gardiner in the Mojave Desert and Arizona under U.S. Army auspices. They returned to San Francisco in the spring, and King returned to Yosemite in summer 1866 to make more field notes for Whitney. When King heard of the death of his stepfather, he and Gardiner resigned from the Whitney survey and once again sailed to New York. They had been coding a plan for an self-employed grownup survey of the Great Basin region for some time and, in unhurried 1866, King went to Washington to secure funding from Congress for such(a) a survey. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1871.