King, Clarence

MOUNTAINEERING IN THE SIERRA NEVADA

Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872. First edition, first printing with the publisher’s monogram on the title page and lacking the "Electrotyped by" notice on the verso. Octavo: 292 p. Old library embossed stamp to the title page. In a modern cloth binding with gilt titles. The Zamorano Eighty #47

In what is widely considered to be the seminal work on American mountaineering, King wrote the only "unofficial account" of the Whitney California State Geological Survey (1860-1868), combining keen scientific observation of the land and wilderness with perceptive social scrutiny of rural Californians in the best tradition of American travel writing. On a western journey in 1863, King serendipitously encountered his fellow Sheffield Scientific School at Yale alumnus William H. Brewer on board a steamer on the Sacramento River, who secured an appointment for King to the Whitney survey, for which Brewer was chief botanist. For the next several years during the time when mountaineering as a sport was in its infancy, King tramped, clambered, and climbed through Yosemite, Shasta, and the Kings Canyon region. His high-spirited, occasionally excessive account of the experience, told in the form of sketches originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, is "certainly a masterpiece of vital, uplifted youth on a spree of adventure. It is one of the obligatory books for readers who wish to know their country before industrialism stereotyped it" (Henry Seidel Canby).