Clarence King

On March 20, 1879, President Hayes sent to the Senate the nomination of Clarence King to be the first Director of the U.S. Geological Survey. The Senate confirmed the nomination on April 3, and King took the oath of office on May 24.

The first duty enjoined on the U.S. Geological Survey was the "classification of the public lands." In the year that the Geological Survey was established, the Federal Government still held title to more than 1.2 billion acres of land, nearly all of it west of the Mississippi River, of which only 200 million acres had been surveyed. The edge of settlement was at about 102° West; beyond the frontier were only isolated pockets or belts of settlement, and in vast areas beyond the frontier, the population was officially less than 1 per square mile.

The very brief enabling legislation did not define in detail the duties of the new organization, thus leaving much to the Director's judgment. King concluded that the Geological Survey's classification of the public lands, especially as Congress had made no change in the General Land Office, was not meant to supersede the classification made by the Land Office as a basis for granting title, and the Public Lands Commission agreed. To meet the requirement for classification, King therefore planned a series of land maps to provide information for agriculturists, miners, engineers, timbermen, and political economists.

The duty of examining the geologic structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain offered many possibilities. The year in which the Survey was established, however, was one of great monetary uncertainty, when knowledge of precious metal resources was vital, and one in which the iron and steel industry faced problems in obtaining suitable raw materials, while information about the Nation's mineral wealth, mining and metallurgical techniques, and production statistics was meager. For the Survey's initial program of work, therefore, King chose to emphasize mining geology, to devote but a small effort to general geology, and to confine paleontology and topographic mapping to what was necessary to support the geologic studies. Although King in so doing, emphasized practical studies at the expense of basic studies, he nonetheless expected that the facts gathered in the mining-geology studies would lead to advances in basic science.