Fearless, brilliant, reckless, equally at home in the trackless wilderness and in the most glittering society, Clarence King was one of the most remarkable men of his time. Born in Rhode Island in 1842, King early found his life's work in geology. Barely out of school, he joined an expedition as geologist to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, learning to live amid brutal hardship and danger and beginning a succession of discoveries that would make him one of the most famous scientists in America. Before he was thirty, he was chosen by Congress to head a far-ranging survey to chart the vast Southwest and later the mineral wealth of the nation.

His amazing exploits soon made the handsome, witty, supremely elegant explorer the toast of the great cities of America and Europe, and won him the friendship of the most influential men of the age. Honest to a fault, he helped settle disputes involving hundreds of millions of dollars, and his spectacular detective work uncovered one of the biggest swindles in mining history. The extraordinary promise of Clarence King's rare combination of gifts was never completely fulfilled. His career was marked by mistakes and misfortune, and marred by an impulsiveness at times verging on foolhardy.

A dramatic story of a great nineteenth-century geologist-explorer, and a colorful saga of a time when the American West was a glorious challenge to men's daring and imagination.

From the dust jacket