I know your article well. I really enjoyed it, especially the harrowing business of dealing with barometers on mountains. I gave a talk a couple of years ago about scientific surveys of the Appalachians – in particular the work of Arnold Guyot of Princeton. I’m still amazed that he got such good altitude measurements hacking his way through the brush day after day. I don’t know about any secondary work that looks at Fremont-Humboldt specifically. My hunch is that Aaron might know more- Laura’s new work is on Cosmos which might be too late for this- I’m not sure how early she goes. The other person you might want to try talking to is Susan Schulten at University of Denver. Her latest work involves Humboldt and takes her earlier into the 19th century.

Do you know any scholarship that takes up Fremont-Humboldt connections? I wrote at some length about Fremont a few years ago (see, e.g. Common-place 4:4, “The Pathfinder’s Lost Instruments”) but knew nearly nothing then about Humboldt. Perhaps the Laura Walls book touches on this?

I’ve never been, before. Are there mixers in the evenings after the panels?

King was also a student of James Dwight Dana at the Sheffield Scientific School, who himself spent four years aboard the United States Exploring Expedition with Charles Wilkes.

From preliminary readings in the mid to late 19th century, what strikes me as most relevant to your article is that no one is talking about Lewis and Clark. If Lewis and Clark were such a strong cultural symbol, one would think folks like King would roll out their names in order to substantiate/justify/trumpet their own projects. But, in his book Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), King only mentions Lewis once in passing and Clark not at all.

An analysis of the Fortieth Parallel Survey (1867) and the early USGS (1879) might illuminate this issue.