SOURCE: Mazel, David. “Four Views of Yosemite.” In American Literary Environmentalism, pp. 93‐156. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Mazel examines Clarence King's Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in order to explore the connections between early environmentalism, literary realism, and corporate capitalism.

Clarence King, geologist and writer, founder of the United States Geological Survey and author of the best‐seller Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), arrived in California in 1863, the same year as Frederick Law Olmsted. King had gone west to join the newly formed California Geological Survey, which he felt would offer him field experience to supplement the classroom training he had just completed at Yale's new Sheffield Scientific School. He and Olmsted had been friends back east, and when Olmsted took over the management of the old Mariposa estate, he asked King to help inventory the property's mineral resources. With the geological survey in...