Book of the Day: a real-world Indiana Jones

Leonard Clark, The Marching Wind, (Funk & Wagnalls, 1954, 1st ed. ). LOC 54-9738. Hardcover, no dust jacket. 368 pp. w/index. 8 pp. b&w photos, w/maps by Grace Jones from the author’s sketches. 9 x 6”, brown cloth boards quarter-bound in a lighter color cloth, black spine titling. Red spot color on the title page. Aside from some slight creasing at the bottom and top of the spine, the book is in very good condition. HBB price: $15.

Kirkus Reviews considered the work in 1954:

Again on the track of the controversial (The Rivers Ran East (1953) was in search of the legendary seven cities of Cibola) veteran explorer Clark's journal here follows the precarious trip from Hong Kong to the inner reaches of forbidden Tibet in search of the mysterious God-mountain range, the Amne Machen, allegedly higher than Everest. His first reports on this five months trek were greeted with incredulity by the press of this country; Life, October, 1949, openly doubted his claims that the Amne Machen peak, seen and estimated from a distance, was 28,000 feet high - -or higher than Everest. This book, which Clark did not intend to write, is an answer to some of the hostile ""legends"" which have grown up around the 1949 trip and admits that the measurements of the peak were made with outmoded instruments that could be wrong by as much as 2,500 feet -- one way or the other. Regardless of the argument about the peak, this is still an exciting account from its financing by Governor Ma Pu-fang to the time when they viewed the long-sought mountain range. Hunger, hostile tribesmen and a ""mauling"" wind often threatened to force the explorers to turn back and there were times when their goal seemed impossible of achievement. But they did get through, saw the mountain range, collected their specimens and data for use when development of the resources of this wasteland is called for and came home -- to disbelief. Much of the temper of the tribes who inhabit Tibet, ""citadel of isolation"" is revealed; the reporting is straightforward and credible; it's a frank, lively answer to a stay-at-home's wanderlust.

Born in 1908, Leonard Francis Clark attended the University of California before becoming an adventurer, aviator, mountain climber and fortune hunter in the 1930s- a cross between Richard Halliburton and Indiana Jones. Of his first book, A Wanderer Til I Die, (1937), one reviewer noted,

...this young American has adventure in his blood. From tiger and python hunting in China, to treasure hunting in Malaya, a camera expedition in Sumatra, Java, the Celebes, Japan, Borneo, Mexico's highest mountains and so on. The adventures themselves are so mad that the recounting of them seems sometimes not as spirited as it should be. His style is unpretentious, simple -- is it possible we miss the bombast of some fellow adventurers? Illustrated with photographs. For the armchair adventurer.

Another added,

And while his later travel accounts are better known, “A Wanderer Till I Die” is the book that sets the pace for Clark’s event-filled life. Though only twenty-six when the story opens, he’s already armed with a keen eye, a sense of humour, no regrets and his trusty Colt 45 pistol. Clark delights in telling his readers how he outsmarts warlords, avoids executioners, gambles with renegades and hangs out with an up and coming Communist leader named Mao Tse Tung. In a world with lax passport control, no airlines, and few rules, the young man from San Francisco floats effortlessly from one adventure to the next. When he’s not drinking whiskey at the Raffles Hotel or listening to the “St. Louis Blues” on the phonograph in the jungle, he’s searching for Malaysian treasure, being captured by Toradja head-hunters, interrogated by Japanese intelligence officers and lured into shady deals by European gun-runners. But he always comes out smiling, if still broke. For that’s the charm of A Wanderer Till I Die. Clark takes you on a tour of Asia, the “land of sweet sadness,” and doesn’t apologise for his views or actions. His lifestyle, like the world he inhabited, is a thing of the past. But if you crave the vicarious thrill of hunting tigers with a faulty rifle, or if you’ve ever fantasized about offering your services as a mercenary pilot to a warlord, only to discover that the man interviewing you is the wrong general, then this is the book for you. Amply illustrated, “A Wanderer Till I Die” leads you down the road to adventure with a man for whom no danger was too great to entice him to risk his life again and again.

When World War II broke out, Clark joined the US Army and made his way to the CIA’s predecessor, The Office of Strategic Services’ Detachment 101 (1942-1945) from Tibet through Burma, China, and Indochina on insurgent missions and behind-the-lines skulduggery.

After the war- the Legion of Merit and a Bronze Star to his name- Clark set off to find the South American Lost Cities of Gold (The Rivers Ran East, 1953, was the best-selling account he wrote of his  exploits with a University of Lima graduate-guide and a plucky, multilingual adventuress called Inez Pokorny). Undeterred by the brushback he got from Life magazine when he published what became The Marching Wind in 1949, he pushed out the expanded book form four years later. The Amne Machen peaks were a sort of mountaineering grail then: Wikipedia notes,

The first European to describe the mountain was the British explorer Brigadier-General George Pereira on his expedition on foot from Peking to Lhasa of 1921-2, sometimes reckoned one of the great geographical discoveries of the twentieth century. Pereira, who saw Amne Machin from about 70 miles away, thought its "height must be at least 25,000 feet [7,600 m], and might be anything; it dwarfed all other mountains near it."

However, the massif remained unclimbed until 1960. The Amne Machin mountains had been overflown by a few American pilots who overestimated the elevation to 30,000 feet (9,100 m). A 1930 article of the National Geographic estimated the peak elevation to 28,000 feet [8,500 m] according to the report of Joseph Rock, an American botanist and explorer who, despite death threats from the Golog Tibetans, had ventured to within 80 km of the mountain. For a while, the mountains were considered as a possible place for a peak higher than Mount Everest.

Today the consensus elevation is 20, 610 feet.

Clark died exploring for diamonds in Venezuela, a 49-year-old relic of the palmy days of the gentlemen-adventurers of the 1930s. In the field of travel writers and collectors, Clark remains a 20thC master.