The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West and the woman he loved Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity. a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as the best and brightest of his generation.
But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport:. for thirteen years he lived a double life-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King. And a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd.
The fair blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line. revealing his secret to his black common-law wife. Ada Copeland only on his deathbed.
In Passing Strange noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the dramatic distinctively American tale of a family built along the fault line.
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