Although Clark was not a trained anthropologist or folklorist, she collected large numbers of American Indian and First Nations oral traditions and made them available to a wide readership.
[2] During World War II she worked as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service in the Cascade Range.
In the years after her work as a lookout she went on research trips through North America, interviewed indigenous people, and collected their oral traditions.
She recovered many of these traditions from research of library documents such as early anthropological studies, manuscripts of pioneers, but also by talking to members of the Native tribes herself.
These and other stories contain indigenous knowledge about landmarks as, for example, Crater Lake and cataclysmic events such as earthquakes and floods, and have been used to gain additional insights into the geological past.