John Muir : Family, Friends, and Adventures [1 ed.] 9780826335326, 9780826335302

Citation preview

Biography 2 Western History 2 Environmental History

2 Sally M. Miller is the former managing edi­ tor for publications at the John Muir Center for Regional Studies and professor emerita of history, University of the PaciWc, Stockton, California.

2 Daryl Morrison is head of special collections at the General Library at the University of California, Davis.

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com  2   1-800-249-7737

—from the Introduction

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“Muir’s orientation toward plants and trees,

what we might call his plant-mindedness, suf­ fused all he observed and experienced, as nature and wilderness revealed to him the inter­con­ nectedness of all life, woven in a carpet of transfused cells that gloriWed each other and in so doing manifest the work of God. “Let us then examine Muir through a lens ground here at the beginning of his journey in the Calypso borealis and, at the terminus, in the beauty of the Araucaria imbricata, to which he instinctively gravitated high on the western slope of the Andes. We will explore the inter­ vening years during which Muir experienced his path-Wlled pathless journey. Muir, as did his mentor and lifelong friend Jeanne Carr, would germinate friendships like wild­Xowers and would grow his family, whom he carried in his heart wherever he went. Through this lens of friends and family let us examine Muir as he wandered, cultivating awareness of wild­ erness and the preservation of wild, healthful, and scenic places as he grafted new plants, people, and places onto his person.”

Miller & Morrison

Jacket photo: John Muir, San Francisco, ca. 1872. Photographer: Bradley and Rulofson.©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. background: PhotoDisc/©Getty Images Jacket design: Kathleen Sparkes

Muir Insti­tute dedicated to promoting the legacy of the famed environ­ mentalist. These essays are papers presented at the institute in 2001. Ruth Sutter explores the friendship between John Muir and his neigh­ bor, John Swett, the innovative California educator. Daryl Morrison con­ siders the role Muir played in the lives of children and they in his. Ronald Limbaugh provides two essays: one describes the dispute about the pub­ lication of some of Muir’s most personal correspondence, while the other presents the friendship of Muir and landscape painter William Keith. Ronald Eber focuses on Muir as the national spokesman for American wilderness and forests. Char Miller highlights the interplay between John Muir and GiVord Pinchot in America’s nineteenth-century environmen­ tal movement. Daniel Philippon examines how Muir’s later domestic life changed his rhetoric and how he promoted the preservation of wilderness. Barbara Mossberg presents an overview of Muir’s vision of the value of wilderness necessary for America’s physical, spiritual, economic, and cul­ tural survival. James Perrin Warren describes how a shared experience on the Alaska Expedi­tion could bring naturalists Muir and John Burroughs closer in their ap­proach. Bonnie Johanna Gisel provides an account of an 1873 trip through the Tuolumne Canyon by John Muir and his friend and mentor, Jeanne C. Carr. Corey Lewis studies Muir’s methodology to understand and experience his Weldwork approach. Michael Branch focuses on Muir’s Wnal journey to explore South America and Africa. Each of these essays will bring new ideas for future study of John Muir.

John Muir

Since 1980 California’s University of the PaciWc has hosted the John

John Muir

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edited by Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison

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John Muir

John Muir, San Francisco, ca. 1872. Photographer: Bradley and Rulofson. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

John Muir Family, Friends, and Adventures 12 edited by Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison

University of New Mexico Press

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Albuquerque

© 2005 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2005 printed in the united states of america year printing 09 08 07 06 05 1 2 3 4 5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data John Muir : family, friends, and adventures / Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8263-3530-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Muir, John, 1838‒1914. 2. Naturalists—United States—Biography. 3. Conservationists—United States—Biography. I. Miller, Sally M., 1937– II. Morrison, Daryl. QH31.M9J63 2005 333.72’092—dc22 2005014659

k Book design and type composition by Kathleen Sparkes This book is set using Minion 10.5/13.5 26p3 Display type is Arcana Manuscript, Serlio, and Cochin

g To the memory of William F. and Maymie B. Kimes whose contributions to the study of the life of John Muir are immeasurable

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k Behold! The Good Luck Tree Recipient of the John Muir Educators Society Award for Promoting Love of Earth A Vermont Treasure Rare Magnificent Specimen Willow This tree has inspired poetry And dedication to the preservation of the earth. All who live with this tree Are protected by her strength; soil is bound Preventing erosion and flood damage; In life’s storms she provides comfort and joy And gives courage to the spirit. Known also as “The Blessing Tree,” in many hard times this tree has reawakened my sense of gratitude and wonder For living on this earth and my commitment to teaching About its beauties; She has given me heart and seen me through; Danced a hula, graceful as a ballerina in her tattered tutu; As you come under her care, know THIS TREE IS LOVED And will love you too —Barbara Mossberg

Contents 12 List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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Introduction Meeting John Muir’s Family, Friends, and Adventures Between the Calypso borealis and the Araucaria imbricata Bonnie Johanna Gisel 1

Part I 2 Family and Friends chapter one John Muir and the John Swett Family Ruth E. Sutter 15 chapter two John Muir and the Bairns Muir and His Relationship with Children Daryl Morrison 31 chapter three California’s Kindred Spirits John Muir and William Keith Ronald H. Limbaugh 65

Part II 2 Controversies chapter four Pride, Prejudice, and Patrimony The Dispute Between George Wharton James and the Family and Friends of John Muir Ronald H. Limbaugh 83 chapter five “Wealth and Beauty” John Muir and Forest Conservation Ronald Eber 105

chapter six With Friends Like These John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Drama of Environmental Politics Char Miller 121

Part III 2 Literary Aspects chapter seven Domesticity, Tourism, and the National Parks in John Muir’s Late Writings Daniel J. Philippon 149 chapter eight If Trees Are Us A Relativity Theory Showing the Genius of John Muir’s Domestic Vision of Nature for Public Policy and the National Ethos Barbara Mossberg 169

Part IV 2 Adventures chapter nine Near and Far Burroughs and Muir on the Harriman Alaska Expedition James Perrin Warren 203 chapter ten “Those Who Walk Apart but Ever Together Are True Companions” Jeanne Carr and John Muir in the High Sierra Bonnie Johanna Gisel 215 chapter eleven Meeting Muir’s Mountains Corey Lewis 235 chapter twelve John Muir’s Travels to South America and Africa Michael P. Branch 249 Contributors Index

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Illustrations 12 fig. i.1 John Muir, ca. 1890. xiv fig. 1.1 John Muir and John Swett on the Swetts’ family porch, 1912. 16 fig. 1.2 Adobe built by Abilino Altamirano ca. 1849, purchased by John Swett in 1881 along with property adjacent to the Strentzel-Muir orchards. Photograph with Swett family, ca. 1892. 22 fig. 1.3 John and Mary Louise Swett, 1912. 25 fig. 2.1 Annie Vanderbilt from John Muir’s 1878–79 Alaskan journal. Portrait surrounded by Muir’s sketch of bear paws. 32 fig. 2.2 Merrill Moores, portrait [Indianapolis, ca. 1867]. 44 fig. 2.3 John Muir’s letter to Janet Moores, February 20, 1887. 47 fig. 2.4 Anna and George Galloway, Wisconsin, ca. 1863. 53 fig. 2.5 Wanda and Tom Hanna with their children [Martinez, California, ca. 1925]. 58 fig. 3.1 William Keith, portrait of the artist, probably posed in his studio, ca. 1880s. 66 fig. 4.1 Newspaper clipping on Hanna and George Wharton James suit. 94 fig. 5.1 John Muir poses in front of a tree [August 1902]. 106 fig. 5.2 A big tree cut for shingles. Converse Basin, ca. 1890s. 111 fig. 5.3 John Muir holding a sugar pinecone. Yosemite National Park, ca. 1890s. 113 fig. 6.1 Gifford Pinchot, ca. 1900. 122 fig. 7.1 John Muir standing in the family pear orchard. Martinez, California, ca. 1912. 155 fig. 7.2 John Muir (seen at left) on a Sierra Club outing at Porcupine Flat, Yosemite National Park, July 13, 1907. 158 fig. 7.3 Muir in an automobile stops to talk to a friend, ca. 1910. Muir recognized that automobiles would bring tourists to parks, but that they would be a mixed blessing. 162 fig. 8.1 Sequoia domes—Fresno Grove. A drawing of trees by John Muir. 185

fig. 9.1 The Two Johnnies: John Burroughs and John Muir on St. Matthew Island, ca. 1899. 204 fig. 10.1 Shadow Lake, headwaters of Merced River, fifteen miles above Yosemite, 1873. 227 fig. 10.2 Anemone occidentalis. Sketch by Jeanne C. Carr, 1873. 229 fig. 11.1 A group of students on the trail with Muir’s text in hand. 237 fig. 11.2 A field studies student overlooking Tuolumne Meadows. 240 fig. 11.3 Studying a colony of the unique, insect-eating pitcher plants of the Sierra. 244 fig. 12.1 John Muir enjoying the outdoors with two of his grandchildren. Martinez, California, ca. 1910. 254 fig. 12.2 A page from Muir’s 1911 journal, showing field sketches of Araucaria braziliensis. 257 fig. 12.3 Journal sketch of Adansonia digitata, the baobab tree, from John Muir’s South American journal, January 19, 1912. 258

Acknowledgments 12 For over two decades, the University of the Pacific has served as the repository for the bulk of the extant papers of the great environmentalist John Muir. During the course of these decades, the university within its California History Institute series has held a number of John Muir Institutes dedicated to Muir’s legacy. Those institutes, often leading to publications, have placed the University of the Pacific at the center of ongoing developments in Muir historiography. It is with great pleasure that we offer to Muir scholars and fans, as well as others interested in ecology, another volume of essays representative of the latest thinking about Muir’s work and its significance. As editors of this new Muir collection, we offer our deepest gratitude to the presenters at the institute held in 2001, the best of whose work appears in edited form in this collection. We also express our thanks to the other authors whose essays have been added to this collection. Additionally, we wish to thank University of the Pacific administrators whose support for the John Muir Center for Environmental Studies enables this important work to go forward. Bonnie J. Gisel, who served as interim director of the John Muir Center for Environmental Studies in 2000–1, coordinated the institute that year on Muir, and her outstanding work in attracting scholars of Muir laid the foundation for this volume. We as well as the other authors express our thanks to her and to William R. Swagerty, director of the Muir Center, Gary L. Miller, dean of the College of the Pacific, Robert R. Benedetti, former dean of the College of the Pacific, and Philip N. Gilbertson, provost of the University of the Pacific. The support of all of them has been essential to these Muir programs. Lastly and most especially, more thanks than can be expressed are due to two staff people of the center for their crucial and unflagging energy devoted to this project, Pearl Piper and especially Marilyn 1

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Norton. Simply put, without them none of our publications and programs would be a reality. The founding director of the University of the Pacific’s John Muir Center for Environmental Studies, Ronald H. Limbaugh, represented in this volume by two essays, wishes to dedicate his work to the late Sherry Hanna, the wife of Strentzel Hanna, John Muir’s oldest grandchild. She graciously allowed him full access to the papers in her possession. Copies of some of her papers are now on deposit at Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, along with the rest of the Muir family collection. Muir scholars owe the Hanna families, especially Sherry and her in-laws, the late Richard Hanna and his sister Jean, a great debt for making the papers available to researchers. As an additional note, one of our earlier Muir publications, John Muir: Life and Work, was published by the University of New Mexico in 1993. Its acquisitions editor, David V. Holtby, now the editor in chief of the University of New Mexico Press, encouraged the publication of that book and, ten years later, this one as well. All of the Muir authors and others involved in this project wish to thank him for his support and faith in this work. Sally M. Miller Daryl Morrison Stockton, California

fig. i.1. John Muir, ca. 1890. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

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Meeting John Muir’s Family, Friends, and Adventures

Between the Calypso borealis and the Araucaria imbricata Bonnie Johanna Gisel

12 John Muir left Wisconsin in March 1864 and headed north into Canada, where he matriculated as a student at the “University of the Wilderness.” He was twenty-six. In April, he waded into swamps. In May, he traveled as far as Simcoe and Grey counties in Ontario. In June, he stayed with the Campbells of Bradford, Ontario. In July, he botanized north of Toronto in the Holland River swamps in search of the Calypso borealis, an uncommon lady-slipper orchid. He found the Calypso, about which he wrote to Jeanne Carr in 1866—a letter that resulted in his first publication later that year.1 The experience of seeing the Calypso borealis proved to be epiphanic for Muir. It was a solemn moment when he and nature commingled. Muir and the orchid merged in a divine complex of mind and flower, hand and leaf, leg and stem, heart and blossom, soul to soul. Never before had he seen a plant so full of life, so perfectly spiritual. On a plat of yellow moss near a fallen hemlock log, he found himself in the presence of the Calypso, whom he recognized as a 1

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superior being who loved him. He sat down beside the wild plant and wept for joy—such beauty in a plant creature, such pleasure, deep, pure, eternal. The singular beauty of the Calypso—visible proof of Muir’s invisible faith in God, who created such a friend as this—certainly served as fuel for the fire of restlessness that urged him on. A seed of divine truth that germinated throughout his life, Muir would read the power and goodness of God from the things that He created. And his mentor and friend, Jeanne Carr, often reminded Muir of the beauty of nature, of its pure and deep communion, of the glorious chart of God in nature spread out for them to see. Doomed by a restless spirit of inquiry to be carried into wilderness, Muir, now twenty-nine, began his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867. Perhaps he thought about the lady-slipper orchid as he encountered the changing botanical climate the farther south he walked. In Georgia, he saw Spanish moss (Tillandsia), a cypress swamp, and a banana tree. In Florida, he found the Magnolia grandiflora, and he wrote that he was meeting many strange plants as well as a palmetto in a grassy place. The palm may have triggered deeper thoughts. “They tell us that plants are perishable, soulless creatures, that only man is immortal . . . but this . . . is something that we know very nearly nothing about.”2 Earlier, through Kentucky, Muir walked past miles and miles of beauty, over swelling hills, and lordly trees that cut into his memory and forever remained with him. He walked through Madisonville, Tennessee, to Gainesville, Georgia, then into Florida and traveled on to Cuba, intent on visiting “some part” of South America. Weak with malarial fever, Muir wrote to Jeanne Carr from Cedar Key. He was creeping about getting plants and strength. While he convalesced and planned his trip to South America, he contemplated the common belief that the world was made especially for humanity and his own belief that each animal and plant was created first to experience its own happiness. The dust of the earth was the source from which Homo sapiens and all other creatures were made—all earth-born companions and fellow mortals. The dignity of all life—independent yet interrelated and community-bound—was a thread in the fiber of Muir’s growing preservationist objectives that he tweaked in different ways, against different cords, throughout his life. Muir’s sensibility toward nature and wilderness, gathered up and garnered from the writings of Thomas Dick, Alexander von Humboldt, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walter Brooks, and Alphonse de Lamartine, would later be reflected in the work of Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954), botanist and horticulturalist, in The Holy Earth, published in 1943, and in the land ethic

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of Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), published in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There in 1949. In January 1868, Muir booked passage to Cuba on the Island Belle. For a month he walked beaches and collected shells and plants. Though his health did not improve, he inquired about a ship headed for Colombia or Venezuela, from where he planned to travel to the headwaters of the Orinoco, then south to the Amazon. Unable to find a ship bound for South America, still plagued with the residual discomforts of malaria, and with limited funds, Muir turned north to New York to go west to California and Yosemite Valley. Forty years separated Muir and his thousand-mile walk from the journey he would take to the Orinoco and the Amazon in 1911. Before Muir would travel in search of the Araucaria imbricata (the monkey-puzzle tree), he visited Alaska seven times beginning in 1879. In the summer of 1893 he toured Europe, including his birthplace, Dunbar, Scotland, and in 1903 he traveled from Europe to Russia, onward to the Far East, Australia, and New Zealand, principally to study trees. Between 1864 and 1911 (in addition to his thousandmile walk and his rambles in the Sierra), Muir climbed Mount Shasta; hung in a Douglas spruce (Pseudotsuga menziesii) in a windstorm in a valley of a tributary of the Yuba River; resided with the John Swett family at their home in San Francisco, where he wrote “God’s First Temples” for the Sacramento Daily Union, in which for the first time he drew attention to public protest of the destruction of forests and urged federal control of forests; and visited Utah and explored the Wasatch Mountains. He traveled south into the San Gabriel Mountains of California, where he visited the plot of land purchased by Jeanne and Ezra Carr—soon to be transformed into Carmelita. He ascended Mount Rainier; returned home to Portage, Wisconsin; joined—exofficio—the National Forest Commission to inspect watershed forests in the western United States; and hiked the Grand Canyon with Gifford Pinchot. In 1909 Muir, once again, visited the Grand Canyon, this time with his friend John Burroughs. Given the extent of Muir’s travels and all he saw, he still never forgot the Calypso borealis that he observed in Canada in 1864. The orchid proved to be a paradigmatic moment that throughout his life linked and shaped his unfurling efforts in search of plants and trees—the sketches of which would fill the pages of his journals over the years. Muir saw the palmetto in Florida; the Chamaebatia foliolosa (Sierra mountain misery), the small shrub with white flowers like those of the strawberry, in the valley of the north fork of the Merced River; the Cassiope mertensiana (white heather), upon the high Sierra meadows; and the Linnaea borealis (twinflower), the fragrant little

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slender trailing evergreen wildflower that carpeted the upper valley of the Sacramento River. With like-mindedness Muir, who professed never to have abandoned his plans to see the Amazon, at seventy-three and alone traveled into the South American rain forest on what would be his last journey in an effort to find the Araucaria imbricata.3 Perhaps for Muir his journey in search of the monkey-puzzle tree brought some sense of closure to his life, throughout which he primarily felt, as evidenced in his writing, that he traveled in search of beauty and scientific inquiry. He had gone to Canada to botanize, to find the Calypso and visit his brother, Daniel, and he drew closure in his travels to remote places—in South America and Africa—where he studied and sketched more of the world that he believed was full of curious life and so very precious. Muir, indeed, remained a botanist at heart from first to last. Embraced by the lady-slipper orchid as his journey began in 1864 and still in the waning years of his life in 1911—he spoke about the urgency of this final trip— in search of the monkey-puzzle tree. Muir’s orientation toward plants and trees, what we might call his plant-mindedness, suffused all he observed and experienced, as nature and wilderness revealed to him the interconnectedness of all life, woven in a carpet of transfused cells that glorified each other and in so doing manifest the work of God. Let us then examine Muir through a lens ground here at the beginning of his journey in the Calypso borealis and, at the terminus, in the beauty of the Araucaria imbricata, to which he instinctively gravitated high on the western slope of the Andes. We will explore the intervening years during which Muir experienced his path-filled pathless journey. Muir, as did his mentor and lifelong friend Jeanne Carr, would germinate friendships like wildflowers and would grow his family, whom he carried in his heart wherever he went. Through this lens of friends and family let us examine Muir as he wandered, cultivating awareness of wilderness and the preservation of wild, healthful, and scenic places as he grafted new plants, people, and places onto his person.4

1 2 Muir scholars and enthusiasts are forever drawn to the events that turned Muir’s life away from human invention and toward the study of nature and wilderness. We seek insightful explanations for events, people, and circumstance that guided him west to California and into and above Yosemite Valley and throughout his travels. We still savor the descriptions of his cuisine or the lack of it—that which he ate or did not eat. We want to know more about

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the women and children to whom he related and the romance in his life, whether for person or plant, waterfall or quadruped. We are alert to the tribulations that surround lost letters and promises kept and broken during his lifetime and following his death. Some stories seem beyond human endurance and, therefore, apocryphal. But Muir scholars and enthusiasts continue to lift the veil of doubt through new avenues of inquiry both historical and literary.5 Muir’s life was rich in inquiry, observation, and adventure. It was rich in the words he wrote—derived from his “eye within the eye” through which he saw in all natural objects the realized ideas of God’s mind—that came all too stubbornly to his pen. Muir composed five books in his lifetime and edited and wrote essays for Picturesque California. Four books were published posthumously. He composed over two hundred essays, and he wrote thousands of letters and received thousands more. Richer still was Muir’s life in family, friends, and acquaintances. If he expressed discontent or frustration with humanity in our relation to nature and wilderness, he nonetheless celebrated human relations. And he loved an audience with whom he could share his adventures through story, which he enjoyed more than writing. Devoted to Louie, Wanda, and Helen and to Jeanne Carr, Muir extended his commitments and loyalties to J. B. McChesney, John Swett, William Keith, Robert Underwood Johnson, William E. Colby, Katherine Hooker, Marian Randall Parsons, and Theodore Parker Lukens—to name a few of his intimates—who reciprocated his friendship. For a man who professed to seek pathless ways—something we have come to believe—Muir counted as his friends distinguished politicians, businessmen, entrepreneurs, academicians, and scientists. Let us then consider the relations Muir shared throughout his life—the family, friends, and also the adventures—that continue to stimulate the study of his life and work.6

1 2 The John Muir series of conferences is unique, in part because the conferences are held once every five years. John Muir: Family & Friends, the fifth Muir institute, was convened by the University of the Pacific in 2001 in the northern Sierra, in the Plumas National Forest. More than the result of their infrequency, Muir institutes bring together scholars, family, and enthusiasts who seek to continue to clarify the corpus of Muir’s work and share their findings with each other in an atmosphere that is ignited by the same wonder and passion Muir himself experienced. As in any conference, the presentation of papers provides

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a platform upon which new ideas are weighed and measured against the historiographical record and literary criticism. Here participants strove to demarcate facts and interpretation with a certain appetite, conscious of together charting new ground in Muir scholarship, environmental history, and environmental literary criticism. The conference atmosphere was garnered with a certain solemnity of purpose, but an afternoon was devoted to field study with most presenters and attendees traveling in groups out into the Plumas National Forest for geological and botanical inquiry that Muir would have liked. What may we discover about John Muir that we do not already know? Proof that there is much more to consider and interpret, two books on Muir and a second edition of John Muir: To Yosemite and Beyond: Writings from the Years 1863 to 1875 (edited by Robert M. Engberg and Donald Wesling) were published prior to the May 2001 institute and five books appeared within a year of the institute. Following this vein of fecundity, John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures provides a synthesis of thought and kernels of new approaches—some that have already found their way into books, those that will in the not-too-distant future, and others that will simply remain here to be incorporated into the work of other scholars. John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures is, therefore, a nucleus, in and through these essays, of current research and a springboard for the Muir conference of 2006.7 Ruth E. Sutter, “John Muir and the John Swett Family,” briefly explores the life and work of John Swett as an innovative California public educator and more fully considers the Swett family’s friendship with John Muir. Muir boarded with the Swett family on Taylor Street in San Francisco, where he wrote for three winters. The Swett family ranch “Hill Girt,” was located down the road from the home in which Muir and Louie Wanda Strentzel resided following their marriage in 1880 and is the scene of the abiding friendship between Muir and Swett. Daryl Morrison, “John Muir and the Bairns: Muir and His Relationship with Children,” considers Muir’s curious affection for children that reflected his own wide-eyed love of nature. Morrison presents a succession of vignettes from Muir’s letters and the writings of adults who Muir befriended as children. Over and against his own intolerable childhood, in his esteem for children and childhood, we see Muir as the sentimental admirer, the teacher, the storyteller, the benevolent gift giver, and the father. Ronald H. Limbaugh, “California’s Kindred Spirits: John Muir and William Keith,” imagines a painting not unlike Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, with John Muir and William Keith atop Glacier Point above Yosemite Valley. Renewing the union of prose and art that framed American nature

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imagery, Limbaugh examines the westward tilt of culture as presented in the work of Muir and Keith. In exploring the friendship shared by Muir and Keith, we understand something more about their equal regard for the natural world. We gain a sense of how Muir helped to popularize Keith’s landscape paintings and how Keith encouraged and defended his friend John Muir. In Ronald H. Limbaugh’s “Pride, Prejudice and Patrimony: The Dispute Between George Wharton James and the Family and Friends of John Muir,” we read of George Wharton James beginning immediately following Muir’s death in 1914 to write an unauthorized biography despite the efforts of family and friends to control the interpretation and dissemination of material about Muir. Limbaugh investigates the story behind James’s acquisition of the letters Muir wrote to Jeanne C. Carr, Wanda Muir’s injunction against James, the resulting publication of Letters to a Friend, and the appointment of William Frederic Badè as literary executor of the Muir estate. In the next essay, Ronald Eber’s “‘Wealth and Beauty’: John Muir and Forest Conservation,” the focus is on John Muir as the national spokesman for the American wilderness and the protection of America’s forests. An advocate for national parks and wilderness areas, Muir, however, also recognized logging as a legitimate use of public forests. Eber examines Muir’s preservationist rhetoric, his regard for conservation, and the evolution of his writings about forests and forest management. Char Miller’s “With Friends Like These: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Drama of Environmental Politics” highlights the interplay between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot in the nascent environmental movement in the late-nineteenth century in America, centered on their ideological visions, strategic perspectives, and political maneuverability. Miller invites us to partake of the theater of interchange salient in the discourse of rhetorical devices engaged in by Muir and Pinchot. Daniel J. Philippon’s “Domesticity, Tourism, and the National Parks in John Muir’s Late Writings” affirms that both critics and biographers of John Muir have recognized correctly that a pragmatic shift occurred in his priorities over time, from the experience of the solitary observer in nature to the experience of residents of domestic space as tourists in the wilderness. This shift to save the wilderness was more than a manipulation of rhetoric. According to Philippon, Muir negotiated a complex cultural discourse influenced by his audience and family. Barbara Mossberg presents a sweeping view of Muir’s significance in her “If Trees Are Us: A Relativity Theory Showing the Genius of John Muir’s Domestic Vision of Nature for Public Policy and the National Ethos.” John

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Muir roused, sustained, and preserved a vision of the value of wilderness necessary for America’s physical, spiritual, economic, and cultural survival. Mossberg delineates her search for Muir as both inspiration and leader in the development of the meaning and value of nature grounded in the emergent national infrastructure of laws, organizations, and institutions created to manage the heritage of American wilderness. James Perrin Warren, “Near and Far: Burroughs and Muir on the Harriman Alaska Expedition” gives readers a new perspective on that fabled expedition. Warren conceives of the relationship between John Muir and John Burroughs as a spatial and metaphoric geography—Muir associated with wilderness, Burroughs with pastoral landscape. Though they stand far apart in the geography of nature writing, at opposite ends of a schematic literary map, Warren argues that they are much closer than they appear. Bonnie Johanna Gisel’s “‘Those Who Walk Apart but Ever Together Are True Companions’: Jeanne Carr and John Muir in the High Sierra” demonstrates how three important events commingled for John Muir in Madison, Wisconsin: he developed a friendship with Dr. Ezra S. and Mrs. Jeanne C. Carr, he began to keep a commonplace book, and he was introduced to the study of botany. By 1873, when Jeanne Carr visited Muir in Yosemite Valley, it was obvious all three had a lasting influence on his life. Little has been known about Carr’s ramble with Muir and Dr. Albert Kellogg, noted California botanist, up along Cloud’s Rest Trail to the headwaters of the Merced and the San Joaquin. As life and misfortune would have it, this was the only wilderness saunter they shared. Corey Lewis in his “Meeting Muir’s Mountains” notes that traditional methods of literary scholarship explore John Muir the field scientist, environmental activist, and author. But the ability to study Muir the mountaineer requires the use of extra-textual sources and interdisciplinary field-based methodologies. Lewis considers Muir’s public voice through the process of direct contact with the world and close observation of nature. Through Muir’s journals—both written and sketched—Lewis argues that Muir reflected on his faith, self-growth, ethical awareness of the natural world, and politics of wilderness preservation. Michael Branch’s “John Muir’s Travels to South America and Africa” focuses on Muir’s rewarding and final journey to South America and Africa. Branch explores Muir’s earlier epic thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico and discovers Muir had every intention of continuing on in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt to the Orinoco and the Amazon. Forty years later Muir experienced a forty-thousand-mile odyssey and the Aracaria imbricata (monkey-

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puzzle tree) he saw in the Andes and the Adansonia digitata (African baobob) he found near Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River.

1 2 The interpretation of John Muir’s life, like all history and environmental literary criticism, is the study of what we as human beings value—the things that matter. In Muir’s experience he valued his family and friends and this included plants, trees, quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and insects and mountains, streams, and waterfalls. He valued and professed the application of an “inclusive right relationship” among all parts and pieces that compose the biodiverse community of which he wrote and spoke. For Muir his relationship with the world was always one of equal justice. Through our study of Muir, we impart fact and interpretation and opportunities so that others can see for a moment from our vantage point the value Muir placed on nature. In so doing we encourage others to examine John Muir’s vision. And we unveil pools of nature’s thoughtfulness from which bubble up infinite possibilities of knowledge and inquiry that may be shared with others through the written and spoken word. Here are occasions to inspire enthusiasm for new places and new ideas with the hope that like John Muir, we may contribute to the conservation of the smallest ecosystems and the preservation of the world. Yosemite Valley, September 2002

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Notes 1. John Muir, “For the Boston Recorder. THE CALYPSO BOREALIS. Botanical Enthusiasm. From Prof. J. D. Butler,” Boston Recorder, December 21, 1866, 1; Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, March 15, 1867, John Muir Papers microfilm, hereafter JMP microfilm, 02/00906; Bonnie Johanna Gisel, ed., Kindred & Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 42–44. 2. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, August 30, 1867, JMP microfilm, 01/00587; Gisel, 57. In 1911 Muir felt about the same. He wrote to John Burroughs that he had gone on and on, “heaven knows where.” John Muir to John Burroughs, July 14, 1911, JMP microfilm, 20/11429. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, in The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books, with an introduction by Terry Gifford (London: Diadem Books, 1992), 136, 138, 146, 160–61.

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3. The earlier name imbricata was synonymized into araucana in 1873. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, December 21, 1874, JMP microfilm, 03/01461; Gisel, 256–57. John Muir, “A Windstorm in the Forests of the Yuba,” Scribner’s Monthly 17 (November 1878): 55–59. John Muir, “God’s First Temples. HOW SHALL WE PRESERVE OUR FORESTS?” Sacramento Daily Union, February 5, 1876, 8, cols. 6–7. Regarding Jeanne Carr and the development of Carmelita, see Gisel, 268–79. 4. In her autobiographical notes, Jeanne Carr described her encounter with a Cypripedium arietinum (the lady-slipper orchid), her friendship with Dr. William Tully, who taught at the Castleton Medical College, the genesis of her botanical studies, and the friendships that she attributed to her love of botany. See Jeanne C. Carr, “My Own Story,” Jeanne C. Carr Papers, CA 28, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 5. On October 1, 1897, Muir published “Trails of the Gold Hunters in Northern Seas and on Mountain Passes,” in The [San Francisco] Examiner, in which he described the process of bread preparation. He directed that good bread may be made from flour, a little salt, and water. Squeeze the dough into thin cakes about the size of a biscuit and throw them on hot coals raked from the heart of the campfire. Turn them before they begin to burn. When firm, set them on edge to toast thoroughly. Or cut a stick of birch, pine, spruce, cottonwood, or willow, sharpen it, and squeeze a handful of dough. Coil it in a thin spiral around the stick, set it upright at baking distance from the fire, and give it a quarter turn from time to time. 6. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, March 15, 1867, JMP microfilm, 01/00496; Gisel, 43. The list of books Muir published includes The Mountains of California (New York: Century Co., 1894); Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901); My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911); The Yosemite (New York: Century, 1912); The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913). It may also include Edward Henry Harriman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1911). In addition, Muir edited and wrote essays for Picturesque California and the Region West of the Rocky Mountains, from Alaska to Mexico (San Francisco and New York: J. Dewing, 1888); Picturesque California: The Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Slope (New York: J. Dewing, 1894). The following books were published posthumously: Travels in Alaska (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), Cruise of the Corwin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), and Steep Trails (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), and may include Letters to a Friend, Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866–1879 by John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915). 7. See Steven J. Holmes, The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Gretel Ehrlich, John Muir: Nature’s Visionary; (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2000); Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling, eds., John Muir: To Yosemite and Beyond: Writings from the Years 1863 to 1875 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999); Michael P. Branch, ed., John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon

introduction

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and East to Africa (Washington: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2001); Bonnie Johanna Gisel, ed., Kindred & Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001); Elizabeth Pomeroy, John Muir: A Naturalist in Southern California (Pasadena, CA: Many Moons Press, 2001); Dennis C. Williams, God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature (Texas A&M University Press, 2002); John Warfield Simpson, Yearning for the Land: A Search for the Importance of Place (New York: Pantheon, 2002). Several children’s books on John Muir have also been published. They include Joseph Cornell, John Muir: My Life with Nature (Nevada City, CA: Dawn Publications, 2000); Karen Clemens Warrick, John Muir: Crusader for the Wilderness (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enclow Publishers, 2002); Patricia Topp, Call Him Father Nature: The Story of John Muir (Nevada City, CA: Blue Dolphin Pub., 2000); David Armentrout, John Muir (Vero Beach, FL: Rourke Pub., 2002); Wil Mara, John Muir (New York: Children’s Press, 2002); Charles W. Maynard, John Muir: Naturalist and Explorer (Rosen Publishing Group, 2003); and Thomas Locker, John Muir: America’s Naturalist (Fulcrum Pub., 2003).

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Part I2

Family and Friends

chapter one 1

John Muir and the John Swett Family

Ruth E. Sutter

12 John Muir and John and Mary Louise Swett and their children became friends in the mid-1870s, when the Swetts offered Muir a room in their house in San Francisco. A few years later, when Muir told the Swetts about some available farmland, they became neighbors in Alhambra Valley, southwest of Martinez, California. Muir’s person and life are known through his own writing and the work of biographers. The members of the Swett family are less well known today.1 However, the ways in which Muir wrote about them show that he saw himself as a member of the family. It gave him a domestic circle when he did not have one of his own, and the Swetts continued to help him in practical ways for the rest of their lives. John Swett came to California in 1853 from the township of Pittsfield, New Hampshire. He was part of the gold rush to California, one of thousands who found more poison oak than gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and had to look for other jobs on farms or in towns. Swett turned to teaching, work he had prepared for but was ambivalent about as a career. At Rincon Point School in San Francisco he met Mary Louise Tracy, a young 1

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fig. 1.1. John Muir and John Swett on the Swetts’ family porch, 1912. Courtesy Contra Costa County Historical Society.

teacher whose father was active in California politics and whose mother had a liberal education in New England schools. Mary’s parents objected to her marrying a “simple schoolteacher.”2 They could not have foreseen that Swett would become State Superintendent of Public Instruction (1862–67) and work effectively with the legislature in the establishment of a statewide public school system and with teachers and administrators in the professionalization of teaching. When John and Mary married in May 1862, they rented an apartment with rooms for a household helper and a boarder. The three-story house they bought on Russian Hill in the city in 1868 had even more extra rooms for hired help and boarders and, in time, their four children, both of their mothers-in-law, and guests. Muir was one of the guests. They met him through mutual friends: J. B. McChesney, an educator in Oakland, and Jeanne and Ezra Carr at the University of California in Berkeley. It was John Swett who, in winter 1874, first invited Muir to the house so he would have somewhere to write; Mary had met him at the home of Jeanne and Ezra Carr, and she wrote in reminiscences after

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Muir’s death a description of his arrival: “I prepared the room. He came along and brought a lot of luggage, curiosities, and things with him, and took possession of this room. He set up on the bureau one of his clocks, the one that was in the shape of the scythe of Father Time. It stood on the bureau and a rope passed over to the corner of the room where there was suspended the weight which kept the clock going.” She added, “Mr. Muir didn’t get to work upon his writings immediately, but he was very interesting as a talker. We used to sit long evenings and talk, that is he did the talking.”3 Soon Muir was using familial terms to describe his relationship with Swett. A letter he wrote to Jeanne Carr on his return from climbing Mt. Shasta in spring 1875 begins, “Here I am safe in the arms of Daddy Swett.”4 On another occasion, “John Swett, who is brother now, papa then, orders me home to booking.”5 On yet another, he referred to “Paterfamilias Swett.”6 He addressed a letter to “Dear bro Swett.”7 Clearly Muir was fond of the Swett children and they of him. Mary remembered as a “characteristic incident” Muir’s coming back from an expedition: “One day my little son Frank, a child about eight years old[,] was standing in the bay window and looking up the street when he exclaimed, ‘There comes Mr. Muir. Now I shall have a game of checkers.’ [Muir] was looking very travel-stained and weary, and his natural desire would be to go up to his room as soon as possible. Frank stayed close to him, and as Mr. Muir went up the stairs he was right at his heels and said, ‘Would you like to have a game of checkers, Mr. Muir?’ Unhesitatingly came the reply, ‘I certainly would.’” At Christmastime he thought of giving twelve-year-old Emily “one of these newfashioned red cloaks” with a riding hood. Mary objected that it was too costly “and I was bent on not taking that cloak on the ground that he had already been very generous to the children.” He said he would write an extra article to pay for it, and he did. When he saw a toy he liked, he would buy it for one or another of the children, and he “contracted the habit,” Mary wrote, “of giving the children five dollars apiece for a Christmas present.” Mary remonstrated with him when he began to extend these gifts to the grandchildren: “‘Mr. Muir, when is this thing going to stop[?]’ ‘When I die,’ he answered.”8 The grandchildren, late in their own lives, had happy memories of these gestures.9 When he offered to pay his way, the Swetts refused to take his money, telling him he was perfectly welcome to stay with them. Mary wrote, “He insisted that unless permitted to pay his board he would leave. Then it was agreed that in lieu of paying board in money he should act as guide for John Swett, Mr. [William] Keith and Mr. [J. B.] McChesney through the Yosemite Valley, where Mr. Muir had lived so long.”10

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This was the first such adventure for Swett, although “Mack” McChesney and the landscape painter William Keith had been to the mountains before with Muir. Muir wrote at length in his journal about the trip and his companions—their eagerness to go on when he warned of a storm in Yosemite Valley (“Swett with a subdued clerical composure, and Mack in his abundant clothing snug as a beetle”), but then of their need for shelter after a storm on Mono Lake (“Towards morning we got ashore and back to our camp in an old abandoned hut in the possession of wood rats. Yet it was a house, and all city visitors must have a roof over their heads. . . .”).11 For Swett, “Under the instruction of Mr. Muir, every day was crowded with the richest and rarest of lessons.”12 According to the San Francisco city directories, Muir lived with the Swetts for three years. Actually it was for three winters of the years 1875, 1876, and 1877, with visits at other times of the year. During this time the Swetts drew Muir into public life and evidently also into taking positions on public policies. The Swetts were inclined toward public service by their upbringing. People where John Swett grew up took a great deal of interest in schools, churches, and local problems; his father and other relatives were active on the town council and its committees throughout their lives. In California, Swett found a far more diverse, urban society than the one he had left in New Hampshire, but he carried with him a sense of community responsibility and obligation to serve others. Mary’s parents, especially her father, Frederick Palmer Tracy, were activists. Tracy was first a clergyman, then a journalist (covering the 1848 revolutions in Europe for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune), and then, in California, an attorney and judge who was involved with some of the land grant cases after the United States acquired California from Mexico; he was a friend of Governor Leland Stanford and went to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860 to work on the first draft of the party’s platform. Mary spent her life encouraging others’ efforts—her students’, her husband’s, her associates in the Woman Suffrage Movement, her children’s, and John Muir’s. The Swetts urged Muir to reach out to an audience beyond their dinner parties. At Jeanne Carr’s urging Muir had contributed articles on glaciation in the Sierra Nevada to the New York Tribune and The Overland Monthly before 1875, but in subsequent years he wrote more extensively. Mary said Muir was “dilatory” about writing because “at that time [when he moved in with them] he had a poor opinion of his own powers. He also had this idea— that if people wanted to see these wonders let them go and see them for themselves—he wasn’t bound to go and make these trips for them.” But they

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pressed him to write. About every night John Swett would say, “‘Well, Mr. Muir, have you begun that writing?’ And the reply would be, ‘Well, no, I haven’t begun yet,’ and then he would generally branch off into some story. Finally John [Swett] became insistent, and at last Mr. Muir prepared an article. It went to Harpers, and they sent him, as nearly as I remember, $50 for it. He felt much encouraged by this reception of his first effort, and he soon began to realize that his writings had a commercial value.” After a few more such successes,“He began to write steadily, but he was always a slow and careful writer, never a prolific one.”13 In fact, the pecuniary motive was important to Muir. He wrote not just because of his friends’ insistence. Mary also told the story of his meeting Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of Century Magazine, in San Francisco at a time when he wanted to go back to the mountains for “a much needed rest.” Mary reported that Johnson told Muir he had “come out here with directions not to go back until I have the promise of an article from you for a certain copy of the magazine.” Muir wanted to refuse, but “then [Johnson] took out a roll of $250 and held it out as he said, ‘Now do take this and give up your trip just at present and write us that article. We must have it.’‘Well,’ Mr. Muir confessed, ‘All the Scotch that was in me woke up and my fingers just naturally curled around that bunch of greenbacks and went down into my pocket, and now I’m a slave.’”14 In 1876 Muir began, nervously, also to give lectures. He appeared before the Literary Institute of Sacramento on January 25. His subject was glaciers, but he included the Sierra forests in his lecture. Swett wondered if legislators had heard him, and a week later Muir wrote an article for a Sacramento newspaper on the need for forest protection. This appears to be an early expression of Muir’s environmental advocacy.15 Until Muir became well known enough in northern California to receive invitations to speak, Swett paid for the lecture halls and got Muir’s supporters to sit in the audience. At some of these events Swett’s young son Frank sold the tickets.16 In 1878 Muir moved to another residence in the city, that of bookseller Isaac Upham, because the Swetts’ youngest daughter, Helen, had become seriously ill. She had been “a special pet in Mr. Muir’s study,” John Swett wrote.17 Muir once gave her a large doll, and Mary’s mother wrote in her diary of busying herself making clothes for it.18 Muir had to stay away now, until she was “out of danger and is very nearly her own sweet amiable engaging little self again” and then he could see her weekly.19 In the meantime, however, another attachment was drawing him away from San Francisco. Jeanne Carr had told him about the orchardist John Strentzel in Alhambra Valley. Strentzel was experimenting with the production

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of various fruits, and Muir became interested in his work from a botanical point of view. The Strentzels welcomed his visits and he enjoyed their company, especially that of their daughter, Louie Wanda. When he returned to the Upham house, he found people had been looking for him, he wrote Louie: “Everyone, according to the eternal unfitness of civilized things, has been seeking me and calling on me while I was away [from San Francisco]. John Swett, on his second failure to find me, left word with Mr. Upham that he was coming to Martinez some time to see me during the summer vacation!”20 In April 1880 Muir announced his engagement to Louie. He wrote in his journal about going to see “the immortal[s . . . Brown and] Swett” with his news.21 Many of his associates responded with their congratulations. For her perceptions of Muir and her ironic advice to Louie Strentzel, Mary’s letter is worth quoting in full. It is dated April 8, 1880: My dear Miss Strentzel: When Mr. Muir made his appearance the other night I thought he had a sheepish twinkle in his eye, but ascribed it to a guilty consciousness that he had been up to Martinez again and a fear of being rallied about it. Judge then of the sensation when he exploded his bombshell! At first laughing incredulity—it was April. We were on our guard against being taken in, but the mention of Dr. Dwinnell’s name and a date settled it, and I have hunted up a pen to write you a letter of congratulation. For John and I are jubilant over the match. It gratifies completely our sense of fitness, for you both have a fair foundation of the essentials of good health, good looks, good temper, etc. Then you both have culture, and to crown all you have “prospects” and he has talent and distinction. But I hope you are good at a hair-splitting argument. You will need to be to hold your own with him. Five times to-day has he vanquished me. Not that I admitted it to him— no, never! He not only excels in argument, but always takes the highest ground—is always on the right side. He told Colonel Boyce the other night that his position was that of champion for a mean, brutal policy. It was with regard to Indian extermination, and that he (Boyce) would be ashamed to carry it with one Indian in personal conflict. I thought the Colonel would be mad, but they walked off arm in arm. Further, he is so truthful that he not only

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will never embellish sketch or word-picture by any imaginary addition, but even retains every unsightly feature lest his picture should not be true. With hearty regard, I am Yours very truly Mary Louise Swett22 Her mother, Emily Tracy, wrote in her diary on April 12 that their housekeeper, Hain, carried Muir’s “satchel and bundle to the cars” preparatory to his departure to be married. On April 14, the day of the wedding, “The weather broke away in the afternoon & the sun came out. I hope it will be pleasant this evening for Mr. Muir and Miss Louise Strencil [sic] are to be married at Martinez, and I think John Muir ought to be congratulated on marrying into so fine a home, for he has indeed been a wanderer upon the face of the earth.”23 John Swett went to the wedding. On his return he reported that “the Bride was dressed in White Satin with long train. Room trimmed beautifully with apple blossoms fastened to white sheets and hung around the room. About a dozen or fifteen present.” Mother Tracy added: “They sent down a generous box of the cake which was enjoyed by us all. Mr. Muir has made out splendidly and so has Miss Strencil [sic].”24 The Muirs stayed with the Swetts in June, and Mother Tracy commented of Louie: “I like her very much & they seem quite happy together. . . . We are very quiet,—Mr. Muir & wife are generally by themselves in their chamber, reading or playing checkers or something. They went out and made purchases this afternoon to be carried up home [to Martinez] with them.” They left on June 27. “Hain went out with them to help carry their luggage. The [street]cars were not at the corner so he went all the way to the boat. How shiftless, Muir ought to have provided a carriage for his bride.” A few weeks later John Swett and his son Frank visited the Muirs at the Strentzel ranch in Alhambra Valley. They were interested in buying farmland, and Muir showed them property adjoining his father-in-law’s orchards. The deed of sale to Swett identifies 185 acres purchased in 1881 for $7,000.25 Swett’s plan was to retire there eventually. In the meantime he had obligations in the city. Following his terms of office as State Superintendent of Public Instruction, he taught in Denman High School and Lincoln Evening School and held administrative positions at the Girls’ High School and Normal Class, the teacher training department of the high school. He spent twenty-five years in this work, but then political maneuvering in the schools by the city boss, Christopher Buckley, made him decide to resign.26 Teachers pressed him to

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fig. 1.2. Adobe built by Abilino Altamirano ca. 1849, purchased by John Swett in 1881 along with property adjacent to the StrentzelMuir orchards. Photograph with Swett family, ca. 1892. Courtesy Martinez Historical Society.

run for City Superintendent of Schools instead. He won that election and served until 1895. The following year the property in the country, where his son Frank was already establishing orchards and vineyards, became his home and John Muir his neighbor. Muir and Strentzel acted as mentors to these new farmers. While his father was working in San Francisco, Frank was studying horticulture at the University of California, Berkeley, and spending weekends at the Alhambra Valley property. His diary entries for 1885 and 1886 include a number of references to Muir and to the Strentzel orchards.27 On Saturday, October 1, [1885], for example, he “got some pears at Muir’s,” that is, pear cuttings. He acquired grape and plum stock from Muir and from Strentzel as well. This was the beginning for Frank of the part he would play in the agricultural development of Contra Costa County and in fruit growing in California. He later became president of the California Pear Growers Association and the Grape Growers Protective Association, Horticultural Commissioner of Contra Costa County, a member of the State Agricultural Commission, and, during the 1930s, Chief of the U.S. Farm Debt Bureau.

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Mary named the Alhambra Valley property “Hill Girt Ranch.” It was girdled by hills much like her husband’s childhood home in New Hampshire, or so she thought from his description. By the time they moved to the ranch full time, it was producing profits. As early as summer 1891, Frank expected to have “six or seven hundred boxes of pears, the trees being beautifully loaded,” and there were also cherries, “about five tons” of apricots, and a promising grape crop. The youngest son, John French, was building a dam in a creek that skirted the property, and Frank was overseeing the excavation of a wine cellar and the laying of the foundation for a new house.28 The first house on this property was an adobe built in the 1840s. The Strentzel home was a short walk away, about a quarter of a mile from the Swett home. John and Louie Muir lived in it when they were first married, while her parents built a larger house closer to the town of Martinez. The Muirs’ daughters, Wanda and Helen, were born in the old Strentzel home. The Muir family moved to the new house—the current National Historic Site on Alhambra Avenue—in 1890 to help care for Louie’s mother after her father’s death. This house was about a mile from the Swetts’ home. Both men traveled in the 1890s and early 1900s, Muir on expeditions that took him to all the continents of the world and Swett to education conferences and educators across the United States, but in between their trips they visited each other and argued, as Frank’s daughter, Margaret, remembered. “The two men would cross from one ranch to the other and talk, but they didn’t agree. They would argue and argue and argue. For someone who didn’t realize these were two strong minds, one honing his mind on the other, it was quite a sight.”29 One of the things they argued about was education. Swett was a lifelong believer in education supported by public funds; Muir thought education should primarily be the responsibility of the family. This view is puzzling in light of his own experience—“thrashing” was frequent at his school in Scotland but also at home, where he learned the Bible “by heart and sore flesh.”30 Frank Swett quoted him as saying that modern education “isn’t all wet but there are wet spots in it.”31 What they were he did not say. But Muir was a teacher, too. Art Strain, a teenager in Martinez during Muir’s lifetime, remembered that Muir taught young people “to protect, not kill, birds and animals,”32 and so Muir once startled Mary Swett by returning from Kings River Canyon “with a large wing of a white pelican. As I could not imagine Mr. Muir’s killing a pelican or any other bird under any circumstances I questioned him, and found that he had bought the wing of

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[from] a boy who had killed the pelican. As the wing was over three feet long, I realized at how great inconvenience to himself he had brought this gift to me. For many years it decorated a door of my front hall.”33 A few years before the Swetts moved to Hill Girt Ranch permanently, their oldest daughter, Emilie, married a San Francisco attorney, John W. Parkhurst. Emilie died in childbirth in 1892. The child, Ruth, then became part of the Swett household, and her account adds details about the household and the continuing association of the Swetts and the Muirs.34 She remembered that her grandmother was “always busy writing letters.” Mary answered letters to John and wrote to her own associates and family members. She proofread both her husband’s and John Muir’s writing. The following letter to Muir, which she wrote after reading the manuscript for his The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, is illustrative: Dear Mr. Muir, I have never got hold of anything more absorbingly interesting than these type written pages and they will be read as classics by posterity. But now I want you to take pity on my ignorance and tell me when and where the spelling of pigeon was changed to pidgeon, for it must be there has been an authoritative change or neither you nor the typewriter would use it. On page 40 you say “gave David and I” instead of “gave David and me” and later occurs “called David and I” instead of “called David and me,” but on the whole it is excellently typed. O here’s to the whole Autobiography, and may we all live to see it in print and listen to the plaudits which will welcome it! John Swett is fairly gloating over the noble addition it will be to all the school libraries in the land. What an avenue of influence it will open to the hearts of the children of the next generation! How it will teach them to know and appreciate and love and respect the rights of the lower animals! When you consider how much type written proof I have corrected for John all our lives together, you will realize how almost impossible it would be for me to refrain from noticing and commenting upon anything in the nature of a typographical error, and will excuse me, I know, for “butting in” and will let my sincere admiration and ardent praise offset my mild criticism. Do not answer this note; I realize the value

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fig. 1.3. John and Mary Louise Swett, 1912. Courtesy Contra Costa County Historical Society.

of your time, but tell John what there is to be said about “pigeon vs. pidgeon” and let me sign myself Your friend and admirer and well-wisher, Mary L. Swett Hill Girt, Nov. 11, 191235 Mary’s correspondence shows her involvement also with the California State Woman Suffrage Educational Association based in San Francisco. She worked for the submission and resubmission of the suffrage amendment to the California constitution. She corresponded with others who were interested in the Woman Suffrage Movement, including Emmiline Pankhurst in England. She was interested in the work of Millicent Garret Fawcett “in connection with the education of women, and the Woman Suffrage Movement.”36 These concerns were shared by Louie Muir and her mother, who donated land for a public library in Martinez in 1891.37 Of her grandfather, Ruth said that “he was such a pleasure to all of us— except he loved to cut down trees, and I can remember grandmother occasionally when she saw him going out with sometimes a saw or something in his hand. She would say ‘John Swett, don’t go to cutting down any trees without

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letting me know because I want every tree around this place here. I hate to see any of them go. Remember.’ He was usually very careful, he and grandmother got along very smoothly, there was a wonderful atmosphere of affection. . . . [John Swett] was a warm and delightful person and very hospitable. People would come up to the ranch . . . be invited to stay over. . . . There were always people coming and going at the ranch, never knew how many people there would be for dinner.”38 This had always been the case, beginning in their home in San Francisco. The warmth with which John and Mary Louise Swett received people, their unfailing hospitality, provided Muir with a haven of friendship. He could count on them. Since neighbors rarely write to one another there is little direct evidence for this. The few items that have been preserved, however, demonstrate Muir’s trust in the Swetts and affection for them. These notes show his capacity for exuberance, too. When John and Louie’s daughter Wanda was born, he wrote, “We are five now, four steadfast old lovers around one little love. Bloomtime has come and a bloom baby has come and never since the glacial period began on earth were happier people.”39 When he and Wanda took Helen to southern California for her health and Mary Louise sent along a box of doughnuts, he wrote, “Those doughnuts!!!! Brown cycles of delight are now doing their duty, spending their sweetness on the three Muir pilgrims at balmly palmly Palm Springs.”40 In 1913 the University of California at Berkeley awarded both Swett and Muir honorary degrees. Swett said he would go to the ceremony to keep Muir company. Muir said Swett ought not to have to go alone.41 In a letter to Wanda and Helen after Muir’s death, Mary Louise wrote, “The world seems empty without those two old friends, John Muir & John Swett.”42 John Swett, a founder of public education in California, died on August 22, 1913, at Hill Girt Ranch. John Muir, a founder of the conservation movement that has spread around the world, died in a Los Angeles hospital on December 24, 1914. Both of them were widely mourned and memorialized. They had touched and changed people they never knew. Swett did so by establishing principles of public education in California at a time when public funding was controversial. Muir did so by calling attention to the beauty and integrity of the natural world at a time when the conquest of its resources was glorified. If one looks only at the long-range effects of their work, it is possible to forget that such men also had daily lives. It was in their daily lives as friends and neighbors that they stimulated each other’s work.

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Notes 1. At the turn of the twentieth century John Swett was more widely known than John Muir. In California, Swett was known as the State Superintendent of Public Instruction who, in the 1860s, established with the legislature and in public consciousness the principles of public education. He was also known as a teacher of teachers. His national prominence came from his addresses at meetings of the National Education Association beginning in 1872 and his influence on the work of such educators as Amory Dwight Mayo and contributors to the American Journal of Education. Kevin Starr gives a beautifully concise summary of Swett’s life in Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 87–88, emphasizing the importance of New Englanders and their role in bringing culture and education to California. Only two full-length biographies, initially doctoral dissertations, have been published on Swett: William G. Carr, John Swett: The Biography of an Educational Pioneer (Santa Ana, CA: Fine Arts Press, 1933), and Nicholas C. Polos, John Swett: California’s Frontier Schoolmaster (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978). Both are mainly descriptive and uncritical. The best source of information about Swett remains his Public Education in California: Its Origins and Development, with Personal Reminiscences of Half a Century (New York: American Book Co., 1911). Historians of education in California who describe Swett’s work in context are Roy W. Cloud, Education in California: Leaders, Organizations and Accomplishments of the First Hundred Years (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952), 39–43, and William W. Ferrier, Ninety Years of Education in California, 1846–1936 (Berkeley: West Coast Printing Co., 1937), 10–12, 62–67, 314–15. The foremost historian of education in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, Lawrence A. Cremin, has given little attention to schools west of the Mississippi River and mentions Swett only along with others who promoted public schools following Horace Mann’s work in Massachusetts. 2. Margaret Swett Plummer, interviews with the author, July–September 1989. 3. Mary Louise Swett, “Mrs. John Swett’s Reminiscences of John Muir,” January 8, 1916, 1, John Swett Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Bancroft hereafter cited as CU-B. 4. William F. Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923, 1924), II, 50. 5. Badè, Life and Letters, II, 54. 6. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, ed., John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 203. 7. John Muir to John Swett, n.d.[ca. 1892], MS 48, John Muir Papers, HoltAtherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, Stockton, CA; hereafter cited as John Muir Papers, CStoc-WA.

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8. Mary Louise Swett, “Reminiscences,” 1–2. 9. Plummer, interviews with author; Ruth Parkhurst Aley, interviews with author May 27–28, 1989. 10. Mary Louise Swett, “Reminiscences,” 1–2. 11. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 201–7. 12. John Swett, Public Education, 232. 13. Mary Louise Swett, “Reminiscences,” 1. John Swett said that Muir “polishes his articles until an ordinary man slips on them” (quoted in Badè, Life and Letters, II, 119–20). 14. Mary Louise Swett, “Reminiscences,” 3. 15. See Thurman Wilkins, John Muir: Apostle of Nature (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 126–28. The newspaper article appeared as “‘God’s First Temples’: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?” Sacramento RecordUnion, February 5, 1876. 16. Frank Swett, interview with John Jensen, n.d., notes in History Center, Contra Costa County Historical Society, Martinez, CA. 17. John Swett, Public Education, 232. Muir named his second daughter after Swett’s daughter Helen. 18. Emily Tracy, diary entries for December 19 and 21, 1877, John Swett Papers, CU-B. 19. Badè, Life and Letters, II, 118. 20. Ibid., 121–22. 21. Ibid., 131. 22. Ibid., 131–33. Dr. Dwinnel was the minister who was expected to conduct the wedding ceremony. 23. Emily Tracy, diary. 24. Ibid. 25. Document at Hill Girt Ranch, Martinez, CA. 26. John Swett, Public Education, 239–40. 27. Frank Swett, diary excerpts, History Center, Contra Costa County Historical Society, Martinez, CA. 28. Frank Swett, letter to grandma [Tracy], June 8, 1891, John Swett Papers, CU-B. 29. “John Swett Kin Recalls When Muir Lived in Martinez,” Oakland Tribune, April 17, 1988, A1–2. 30. John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 31. 31. Frank Swett, interview with John Jensen. 32. Art Strain, interview with Jim Sparke, May 14, 1959. 33. Mary Louise Swett, “Reminiscences,” 4–5. 34. Aley, interviews with author.

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35. Mary L. Swett to John Muir, November 11, 1912, MS 48, John Muir Papers, CStoc-WA. John Swett gave Muir a copy of his own autobiography, Public Education in California, which he inscribed on the flyleaf, “To John Muir, my most intimate personal friend for more than thirty years, this little booklet of mine is presented as a slight recognition of our unbroken friendship. John Swett. Martinez, Apr. 30, 1913.” John Muir Personal Book Collection, CStoc-WA. 36. Mary Louise Tracy, John Swett Papers, CU-B. 37. Charlene Perry, “The Martinez Library Story,” typescript, n.d., Martinez Historical Society Museum, Martinez, CA. 38. Aley, interviews with author. 39. John Muir to Mrs. Swett, March 29, 1881, MS 48, John Muir Papers, CStoc-WA. 40. John Muir, Wanda Muir, Helen Muir to Mrs. Swett, June 13, 1905, MS 48, John Muir Papers, CStoc-WA. Muir’s good friend Jeanne Carr, however, in an undated letter to Mary Louise, wrote, “The inexplicable perversity of the Scotch character accounts in part, for Muir’s ingratitude . . . but from first to last, I have never seen in him a joyous, cordial acceptance of blessing or favor from God or Man” (Jeanne Carr to Mary Louise Swett, n.d., John Swett Papers, CU-B). 41. Plummer, interviews with author. 42. Mary L. Swett to Wanda and Helen, January 11, 1915, John Swett Papers, CU-B.

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John Muir and the Bairns

Muir and His Relationship with Children Daryl Morrison

12 During an Alaska trip, John Muir found lodging with John Vanderbilt, a merchant. Writing to his fiancée, Louie Strentzel, from Fort Wrangel in 1879, he states, Little Anna Vanderbilt, two years old, is the heart kernel of this home. . . . —a dainty white dot of a lass, pink as a daisy, fair as any flower in the dew, our little Doctor of Divinity, preaching precious bits of love, kicking and toddling over the carpet like a canoe in a tide-rip, with sturdy zigzags of will, half angle, half angel, celestial and terrestrial happily blended.1 This attentive statement by John Muir, a nineteenth-century man, is further emphasized by the charming photograph of Amy Vanderbilt that he pasted in his journal and framed with a pencil sketch of bear paws. The portrait may be found amidst his travel notes in his 1879 Alaska journal. It seems unusual for a man to take this much interest in a toddler not his own. This raises curiosity about Muir’s dealings with other children and his feelings 1

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fig. 2.1. Annie Vanderbilt, from John Muir’s 1878–79 Alaskan journal. Portrait surrounded by Muir’s sketch of bear paws. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

toward children in general. Why is it of interest to study Muir’s relationships with children? Surely, the study of Muir as literary figure or scientist holds more interest to scholars than Muir’s ruminating about children. But in understanding how Muir treated children, we develop a fuller view of Muir, the man. We see the family man and friend. Muir’s relationship and thoughts on women and the place of animals have been described in recent works.2 Like other disenfranchised beings on the planet, children are in an unprotected, weak position. They can be endearing or frustrating to adults. The way Muir related to children brings us a clearer understanding of his personality. This chapter can necessarily only provide excerpts from some of the many examples of Muir’s letters to and from children that give a glimmer into his relationships with them. Children’s correspondence may be very simple. The views we have of children in Muir’s life come primarily from his own letters mentioning children, references made by other adults, or the “child” writing later in life as an adult. Many of Muir’s letters were written to women, who are more likely than men to connect families. Muir understood the importance of children to women, and many times he made queries or briefly mentioned the children in a woman’s family.

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Besides correspondence, other evidence of children in Muir’s life can be found in photographs in the John Muir Papers. Since any friend or acquaintance might share a photograph of a child or grandchild, there is no way to know how important these children were to Muir unless they are connected to correspondence. This chapter was called “Muir and the Bairns” to hearken back to Muir’s Scottish heritage. Muir used the term bairns in his autobiographical work, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, and also in letters to his wife, Louie Muir, as evidenced in a June 14, 1899, letter from Sitka, Alaska, addressed to “Dear Louie and Bairns.”3

The History of Childhood In understanding something of the treatment of children during John Muir’s time spanning from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, it is helpful to review briefly the history of childhood and John Muir’s own childhood experiences. Although Muir was born in 1838, his parents, primarily his father, Daniel Muir, used a parenting style that had its roots centuries prior to Muir’s birth. Different concepts regarding the treatment of children, with class and gender also creating significant differences, have occurred throughout time.4 Up through the eighteenth century in Western civilization, children worked alongside adults as soon as they were considered capable of independence from their mothers. Boys at seven years of age went immediately into the greater community of men, sharing in the work and play of their companions, while girls usually stayed at home, working closely with their mothers.5 Children were considered as imperfect or miniature adults who were basically evil. It was the adults’ job to break their rebelliousness and to control them through strict discipline beginning in infancy. In this way boys and girls would become good citizens and morally upright men and women.6 A seventeenth-century child had neither voice nor rights and was under the complete control of his or her father. A mother’s role was to bear, suckle, and care for infants, but after the first few months, fathers should take over and “by their severity” correct the mother’s indulgence.7 Calvinist parents of that era believed that they were bringing up children for God. From that standpoint, the biblical commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother” was fundamental.8 The eighteenth century brought a more optimistic view of human nature, although children were still measured in terms of services that they performed.

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John Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) attacked the doctrine of infant depravity. Locke’s advice was to “get spanking over with as soon as possible,” and he suggested that spanking be coupled with the use of shame.9 A profound change occurred in adult attitudes toward children during the course of the nineteenth century. A growing sentimentality toward children emerged. Childhood was seen as a unique and distinctive time of life. The environment provided by the parents was thought to shape the growing child. Children were perceived as thinking beings who saw the world differently from adults.10 Traditional attitudes toward children, however, showed remarkable persistence and limited changes in the way children were actually treated. Calvinist parents, such as Muir’s father, did not share the optimism of romantic Transcendentalists, who were coming to believe, like Wordsworth, that children came into this world “directly from heaven—pure and undefiled.” Evangelicals of all denominations continued to believe that children still had the sin of Adam in them.11 Women had always been the primary caretakers of children, but in the nineteenth century, child care was increasingly recognized as a woman’s task.12 It was not accidental that the decline of physical punishment coincided with the rise of the middle class and the importance of women within the family. By the second half of the nineteenth century, women’s legal rights were expanded, including the possibility of custody of children in the event of divorce. Fathers were often absent from the scene, employed outside the home, and mothers were even supervising sons. At school, women began to dominate the teaching ranks. Children in turn were now viewed as tender innocents in need of gentle moral nurture. The Victorian mother and child came to dominate sentimental representations of family life, which was in strange contrast to the increased exploitation of children for labor in the industrial age.13 The rural, frontier experience also placed many hardships on children. Chores were continuous and onerous, from driving cattle to fetching water. Work imposed on older children seemed reminiscent of much earlier ages. The men were interested in economic advancement and (as was John Muir’s father) passionate about land ownership.14

John Muir’s Childhood Most of what we can learn about John Muir’s childhood comes from his autobiographical book, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), written toward the end of his life. In helping readers to understand how Muir felt

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about children, it is important to understand Muir’s relationship with his father. Muir’s father, Daniel, had a lifetime commitment to an evangelical, Calvinistic approach to religion and life. This led to severe discipline and an austere family life. The family’s immigrant status was also a factor, as evidenced by the old-fashioned approach to child rearing by the Scotch. Finally, the rural frontier with its need for child labor was a contributing factor to the difficult childhood that Muir experienced. Many working-class and immigrant families in the United States continued child-rearing practices that had been commonly abandoned in America.15 Daniel Muir married Ann Gilrye in 1833. Children were born to them in fairly rapid succession. In 1834 came Margaret and Sarah two years later. In April 21, 1838, John Muir was born. As the eldest son, he was to bear many responsibilities. John was followed by David two years later and Daniel three years later. In 1846 twin sisters, Mary and Annie, were born, followed by Joanna in Wisconsin.16 Muir had a relatively carefree early childhood in Scotland. At three he went to school and enjoyed his first books at David Brae School. Muir had loving relationships with his mother, siblings, and grandparents. His grandfather Gilrye took pleasure in teaching John how to read. Although Daniel Muir participated in a number of religious sects, finally settling on the Disciples of Christ, in his conception of God he remained strictly Calvinist. During John’s earliest years in Scotland, Daniel was a little less severe with his children and was known to enjoy his fiddle and gardening.17 Muir describes exploring Dunbar Castle, the coast, and fields. He participated in games of running, jumping, wrestling, scrambling, and fighting with friends. At seven or eight he went to grammar school. A stern and punishing schoolmaster now ruled his life. Muir wrote, “If we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped; for the grand, simple, all-suffering Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.”18 At about this same time his father made him learn Bible verses every day, so by the time he was eleven he could recite three-fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and “by sore flesh.” It was all done by “whipping and thrashing.”19 Although Daniel was stern, John recognized that his father had the best interests of the boys in mind. He forbade John and David from playing truant in the fields, fearing they might get hurt in climbing over walls, be caught by gamekeepers, or fall over a cliff into the sea. John noted, “He warned us of beatings, and looked very hard-hearted, while naturally his

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heart was far from hard, though he devoutly believed in eternal punishment for bad boys both here and thereafter.”20 Many children saw the emigration experience as a new adventure. Muir was wildly excited about immigrating to America. He wrote of his expectations, “No more grammar, but boundless woods full of mysterious good things; trees full of sugar, growing in ground full of gold; hawks, eagles, pigeons filling the sky; millions of birds’ nests and no gamekeepers to stop us in all the wild, happy land.” Although the Wisconsin frontier experienced by Muir must certainly have been harsh, with its severe winters and possibility of construction accidents (among other dangers), his autobiographical writing was filled with descriptions of Wisconsin wildlife. Muir stated, “When we first saw Fountain Lake Meadow, on a sultry evening, sprinkled with millions of lightning bugs throbbing with light, the effect was so strange and beautiful that it seemed far too marvelous to be real.”21 Children were intended to be an asset in farm labor. For many frontier children, school represented relief from work and the companionship of other children. School often lasted a brief three or four months between seasons of farm work and due to severe winter weather. After leaving Scotland, John Muir was not to go to school until some dozen years later, when he entered the University of Wisconsin. Ann Gilrye Muir accepted her husband’s child-rearing ideas. It is telling that there are few references to her in My Boyhood and Youth. It is Muir’s father who sets the tone for the family. Ann was brought up to believe that under God a man was master in his own household. His decisions were not to be questioned. Ann Gilrye was a quiet but strong presence in the house. While she might try to protect the children, it was done behind the scenes. Muir wrote that upon returning home from his errant play—“Late or early, the thrashing was sure, unless father happened to be away. If he was expected to return soon, mother made haste to get us to bed before his arrival. We escaped the thrashing next morning, for father never felt like thrashing us in cold blood on the calm holy Sabbath.” But no punishment, however sure and severe, was of any avail against the attraction of the fields and woods. Muir’s love of nature, budding independence, and interest in escape from his harsh life were evident at an early age:“We were free,—school cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature’s glad wildness.”22 Muir noted of his own upbringing as an immigrant, “Like Scotch children in general we were taught grim self-denial, in season and out of season, to mortify the flesh, keep our bodies in subjection to Bible laws, and mercilessly punish ourselves for every fault imagined or committed.”23

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His ironic statements do not hide a soul hurt by his treatment: “It was a hard job in those days to bring up Scotch boys in the way they should go; and poor overworked father was determined to do it if enough of the right kind of switches could be found.”24 In his autobiographical work and letters to his childhood friend James Whitehead, Muir shared his feelings about treatment of children. I have good reason, as doubtless you know, to hate the habit of child beating, having seen and felt its affects in some of their worst forms in my father’s house; and all my life I have spoken against the habit in season and out of season. . . . When the rod is falling on the flesh of a child and, what may oftentimes be worse, heartbreaking scolding falling on its tender little heart, it makes the whole family seem far from the Kingdom of Heaven.25 Daniel’s discipline included not only physical beatings, but berating and lectures that were possibly more difficult to accept, or as Muir called them, “heart thrashings.” His father used the eighteenth-century child-rearing style of inducing shame. As the eldest son of a frontier family, John was given the lion’s share of work to do on the farm from the age of eleven. Prior to agricultural mechanization, Muir’s family was raising wheat—planting, reaping, raking, binding, stacking, and thrashing. We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry. . . . We were called in the morning at four o’clock and seldom got to bed before nine, making a broiling, seething day seventeen hours long loaded with heavy work, while I was only a small stunted boy; a few years later my brothers David and Daniel and my older sisters had to endure about as much as I did . . . 26 Muir was somewhat bitter when his father took over another farm to extend his landholdings. After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake farm . . . —father bought a half-section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.27

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In My Boyhood and Youth, Muir also recounted the often-cited story of his digging a well at Hickory Hill farm and having his life endangered when he hit a poisonous gas. Daniel Muir returned his son to work a few days later. With bitterness and self-pride Muir stated, “Father never spent an hour in that well. He trusted me to sink it straight and plumb . . .”28 There was little recognition of John’s contribution to the farm. When I told father that I was about to leave home, and inquired whether, if I should happen to be in need of money, he would send me a little he said, “No; depend entirely on yourself.” Good advice, I suppose, but surely needlessly severe for a bashful, home-loving boy who had worked so hard.29

Muir’s Interactions with Children Neighbors commented on the harsh treatment of Muir by his father, but the conditions were within the boundaries of acceptable parenting during the nineteenth century. In twentieth-century sociological terms, Muir had been the victim of physical and psychological abuse. Muir rejected the pattern of child rearing in which he had been raised. As the eldest son in a family with a difficult father, Muir played a close, supportive role to his two brothers and five sisters. John Muir’s own kind nature asserted itself in his treatment of children. Muir exhibited an appreciation for children more in tune with the twentieth century. Muir prolonged his bachelorhood and as a traveler spent many years away from his parents and siblings. After his marriage at age forty-two to Louie Strentzel and the births of their daughters, he spent much of his time away from his own family. Yet his letters prove that family was very important to Muir. By connecting to the families that he met in his travels, Muir was able to create or re-create through friends the family experience and support that he needed. In Wisconsin, his sisters’ families, especially the Galloways, and his professors’ families—the Butlers and Carrs—played an important role in his life. In Canada, it was the Trout family, in Indianapolis, the extended family of the Moores/Merrills and Graydons, and in California, the Hutchings family, the Swetts, and others. Muir seemed to endear himself to all generations of a family, but with children in particular. In writing his sister Ann in August 1868, Muir notes, I am always a little lonesome, Annie. Ought I not to be a man by this time and put away childish things. I have wandered

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far enough, and seen strange faces enough to feel the whole world a home, and I am a batchelor [sic] too. I should not be a boy, but I cannot accustom myself to the coldness of strangers, nor to the shiftings and wanderings of this Arab life.30 Muir questioned his extended bachelorhood and envied the growing family of his sister. Writing Sarah in November 1873, Muir states, Have just got down the mountain-side from my long trip and find a large pile of letters . . . and you say, “Yet another Galloway.” What a thicket of underbrush is growing up around you. How truly rich you and David are in all that is worth having, children, love and land. . . . Heaven bless you and David and all the dear little ones.31 In analyzing Muir’s relationships with children, five different types of relationships seem apparent. There is Muir as sentimental admirer of children, Muir the teacher who brought children an appreciation of nature, the storyteller/entertainer, the benevolent friend, and the worried father. Muir as the sentimental, admirer of children manifests itself most often in Muir’s comments about babies, toddlers, and young children. His correspondence is most heartfelt in his condolences to parents and families whose children have died or been very sick. Many children died in the nineteenth century from a myriad of causes; diphtheria seems to have been rampant, as suggested in Muir’s early letters to and from Wisconsin. Muir had been devoted to Fannie Pelton, the baby daughter of Edward W. and Frances N. Pelton. Fannie reciprocated his love and the moment he appeared, her little hands would wave in the air.32 In an 1861 letter to the Peltons responding to the news of the death of twenty-month-old Fannie, we see the close emotional relationship that Muir felt for little Fannie. Muir wrote pages and pages in response to the news that baby Fannie was dead. Well well do I know “Fannie is dead.” O God what can I say or what can I do. How little letterfuls of condolence can do here. Your little blessing is away but Oh Mr. and Mrs. Pelton you know that Jesus loves the little dear. . . . And all is well and you’ll go to her in just a little while though she cannot come to you . . . You know

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how sorely I felt this myself and how deeply I sympathize with you but—I’d better say no more.33 In responding to an 1863 newspaper report that the young son of friends, Elmer Newton, was dead, Muir wrote the parents, And is little Elmer really dead? Seemingly so well and happy upon my knee, and so soon away to the tomb. I sent you a picture, my boy, just a few weeks ago. I thought of you as the same gleeful little fellow in the parlor with Willie, or receiving your fond Mother’s kisses. Ah, little did I think that the chill winds were then heaping the frozen snows upon your grave. . . . I have often wished that children so guileless and happy might never grow old and never die. . . . But Mrs. Newton, my pen feels lame indeed.34 Muir saw the beauty and innocence of children and was a keen observer of children and their play. He admired the beauty of babies and children in a very sentimental fashion. His genuine fondness for children was rewarded by their touching confidence and devotion. Alice McChesney, the daughter of Sarah and J. B McChesney, the Superintendent of Schools in Oakland, had a special place in Muir’s heart. Muir wrote the McChesneys from Yosemite Valley, in 1872: —Kiss your Alice some extra times for me. She is the sweetest flake of childhood I found in all your town and she comes back to me in form and voice and in touch too, with living vividness.35 In an 1874 letter to Alice, he describes his stay at Shasta: My Dear Highland Lassie Alice: It is a stormy day here at the foot of the big snowy Shasta and so I am in Sisson’s house where it is cozy and warm. There are four lassies here—one is bonnie, one is bonnier, and one is far bonniest, but I don’t know them yet and I am a little lonesome and wish Alice McChesney were here. I can never help thinking that you were a little unkind in sending me off to the mountains without a kiss and you must make that up when I get back. . . . It is a dark, wild night, and the Shasta squirrels are curled up cozily in their

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nests, and the grouse have feather pantalets on and are all roosting under the broad shaggy branches of the fir trees. Good-night my lassie, and may you nest well and sleep well—as the Shasta squirrels and grouse.36

Hutchings Children We know children could irritate Muir, but this is rarely reflected in his letters. Floy Hutchings is the only child about whom he made negative comments. Muir went to Yosemite, working for J. M. Hutchings as a sawyer. Florence Hutchings, or Floy, as she was called, was the eldest daughter of Hutchings and his wife, Elvira. Born in 1864, she was the first white child born in Yosemite, “a strange little elf, as wild as the rock-walled valley she lived in.” Because of her lightning-quick movements John nicknamed her “Squirrel” and referred to her in letters as “that tameless one” and “a little black-eyed witch of a girl.” In describing Therese Yelverton’s book, Zanita, to the Galloways, he noted the character Zanita is Floy Hutchings, “a smart and handsome mischievous topsy that can scarce be overdrawn, but she is not truthful and I never much liked her. Her sister Cosie, as we call her . . . is more beautiful far in body and mind, a very precious darling of a child.”37 Gertrude, or “Cosie,” was a cuddlesome, blond baby of two, affectionate and sunny. At once she became Muir’s favorite among the children. Cosie, later Mrs. Gertrude Mills, recalls “a patient gentle man holding my sister or myself upon his knee while he showed us the composite parts of flowers calling attention to their beauty and individuality of shape and coloring, or of our trotting after him in the meadows looking for blossoms and their insect visitors.” The third Hutchings child, Charley, was a crippled, ailing boy. Cosie remembered her brother, just a year old, sitting in a large dishpan . . . and John Muir talking to him. “That was typical of his kindly understanding for helpless things that endeared him to everyone.”38 A second relationship style is Muir as a teacher and mentor. Muir had taught school for a brief stint in Wisconsin, but his role as teacher manifested itself throughout his life in more informal settings. Those who reaped the benefit of the “Pied Piper” Muir were led into the woods and fields for instruction on plants, animals, and the beauty of nature. The children who were lucky enough to share in these field trips were to remember them their entire lives. Muir’s niece, Celia Galloway, reminisced, It was my uncle who first taught me to love the trees. I was a small girl when he told me the names of the trees that grew on my

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father’s Wisconsin farm, the oaks, elms, maples, hickories, and the butternuts. He explained that each tree was different from its neighbors, just as people are different from one another, and that like people they each have their own traits and whims and peculiarities. He explained in language a little girl could understand. . . . He taught me the names of all the wild flowers that grew there, too, and he admonished me to always call them by their right names. “For how would you like to be called by a name that didn’t belong to you?” he said. My uncle said I [should never pick the wild orchids] for they were very rare in that locality, and must be allowed to grow undisturbed. . . . John Muir must have loved children, for I tagged at his heels through the woods and the marsh and the meadows of that farm like a little puppy.”39 When Muir attended the State Agricultural Fair in Wisconsin in 1860, he used the help of two small boys, each a son of Professors Carr and Butler— who offered their services to assist Muir in demonstrating his early-rising machine. With tight-shut eyes they lay down on the mechanical bed while Muir set the clockworks that would shortly dump them out on the floor.40 Young people were entranced with his mechanical and engineering skills. When Muir left Canada and Wisconsin to work in a factory in Indianapolis, he carried with him a letter of introduction from his professor, J. D. Butler, for Miss Catharine Merrill. The letter stated, Herewith let me introduce to you Mr. John Muir, sometime a student of mine here—a worthy young man in every way. He was till lately engaged as an inventor in a Canadian manufactory. But one of those fires . . . threw him out of work there. If you can walk the fields with him, you will find that Solomon could speak no more wisely about plants. Mr. Muir would be very helpful in your Mission Sabbath School, or indeed in any other.41 Within a few minutes John was in the parlor, enthralling family members with stories of his Canadian rambles. “Miss Merrill lost no time in gathering up a flock of grown-ups and children, including her nephews and nieces, to follow this wonderful new Pied Piper out to the woods.”42 Muir took up abode in the Sutherland family home and worked in the factory. He taught a class of boys at a mission Sunday school sponsored by Miss Merrill.

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This was anything but a solemn event, as Muir would vanish into the woods with the boys to observe Nature, while on other occasions they met in his room to experiment with his trick bed and other machines and to learn elementary chemistry.43 In early March of 1867, Muir experienced the eye injury that was to have a major impact on his life. While working late in an Indianapolis factory, he was adjusting a belt with a sharp file when the file slipped and pierced his right eye. For four weeks he remained in a darkened room, the left eye blinded also through nerve shock. Gradually recovering, he spent much time whittling toys for the Sutherland children. His club of boys arrived in relays to read to him.44 Professor Butler wrote from Madison expressing his concern about the injury but indicating his understanding that Muir was among friends. My dear friend: We are with you in spirit and in sympathy. Our mutual friend, Miss Merrill, has informed us of your sad and irreparable loss. . . . I know well it is one thing to reason and quite another thing to feel as one knows he should in pain, darkness, and gloom lowering over the future. In all the blasting of your hope may you find Christ to be more precious than your right eye! . . . I have now a double joy that you are known to the Merrill brotherhood, for I know that some of your sorrows will be hence alleviated. Your friend, James D Butler45 Merrill Moores was his most constant reader and with his brother, sister, and cousins brought him flowers. Katharine Graydon, one of the children who visited him, has related that he often told them stories of what he had seen and heard and that throughout her life, she “cherished the memory of that dark room and of those beautiful stories.”46 After his recovery, Muir visited his family in Wisconsin before setting out on his more extended travels. Muir wrote his sister and brother-in-law from Indianapolis on June 7, 1867: Dear Sarah and David: I am coming home in a few weeks accompanied by a little friend of mine eleven years of age, his name is Merrill Moores, and he belongs to that family that cared for me when I was in the dark.

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fig. 2.2. Merrill Moores, portrait [Indianapolis, ca. 1867]. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

We may stay with you a week or two to gather flowers and strength, for he is wearied with his schoolbooks and I with sickness. This little friend read for me almost every day. I am pleased with this mark of confidence from his mother in permitting him to go with me and also with the opportunity of repaying some part of the great debt of gratitude and kindness that I owe,—and I feel sure that you will give him a cordial Scotch welcome for my sake. My heartiest love to the little ones. Tell them Uncle John is coming in two weeks or three. . . . My eye is much better than any of the doctors expected and I hope to find that you have difficulty in determining at first sight, which is the injured one. Most cordially yours, John Muir47 With renewed joy, Muir showed Merrill many of his favorite places. Along with his nieces and nephews, Anna, George, and two-year-old Cecelia Galloway, they made many picnicking trips about the farm.48 Merrill Moores wrote of his adventure and also made astute observations about the relationship that he observed between Muir and his father:

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Well, do I remember this delightful trip [through Illinois and Wisconsin], following as a meek and small disciple and learning the love of nature. . . . It seemed to me that we walked interminable miles across the prairies, Muir teaching me botany and geology and above all the love of primitive nature. I remember Daniel Muir with great distinctness. . . . He was a narrow and bigoted fundamentalist, who made no secret of his belief that the study of geology was blasphemous . . . and I regretted to discover that . . . botany [was viewed] as almost as wicked as geology.49 As Merrill had indicated, that last visit home was indeed not entirely a happy one. John Muir became exasperated by the constant nagging by his father that he had been “walking in the paths of the Deevil.” John flared up and said: “I’ll tell you this, Father, I’ve been spending my time a lot nearer the Almighty than you have!” Another scene occurred the day they left Hickory Hill. While John was saying good-bye to his mother and sisters, his father stated, “My son, hae ye na forgotten something? . . . Hae ye no forgotten to pay for your board and lodging?” John handed his father a gold piece and said, “Father, you asked me to come home for a visit. I thought I was welcome. You may be very sure it will be a long time before I come again.” Muir kept his word, and father and son were to meet up only once more.50 Muir returned Merrill safely to Indianapolis, then set off on what was to be known as his Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. It is evident in his letters to Merrill that he missed his little friend’s companionship, and then Muir imagined Merrill by his side. As he arrived in Cedar Keys, Florida, in January 1868 he wrote, My Dear friend Merrill: I was very glad to hear from [you.] I need you even more than I did last spring. I could keep you in sight better than when we traveled in Wisconsin, for if you left the path, the saw palmettos would saw you and the bamboo-briars would hold you, prick you at the same time, and if you made out to heave and roll yourself through all of these fences you would soon find yourself sore with uncountable bayonet wounds, or entangled in a mesh of gum vines like a porpoise in a herring net. Ah, my boy, you would have to go softly here. Nature does not permit people to romp among her south flower fields as she does in those open ones of the north. . . .

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I suppose your holidays were very Merrilly spent with your many friends. . . . I am ever your friend, John Muir51 On May 10, 1868, Jeanne Carr, Muir’s friend and mentor, wrote Merrill inquiring about Muir and expressing concern that she hadn’t heard from him since Florida when he had reported himself sick with fever. It seems indicative that Carr would expect a child correspondent to have information about Muir.52 In July 1872, Merrill Moores, then sixteen years old, went to Yosemite to spend the summer with Muir. One of their earliest trips together was to Mount Lyell to plant stakes across the glacier near the top of the mountain and thus measure its flow. At this time Mrs. Carr was sending a number of prominent scientists to visit Muir. Merrill recorded some of the events. Harvard botanist Asa Gray and Muir set off for Mount Lyell with Merrill along to care for the horses. On the very apex of the magnificent mountain peak, Muir predicted Merrill would never be a naturalist but might possibly become a great man.53 Muir’s prediction came true, as Merrill Moores became an eminent lawyer and was elected a member of Congress for Indiana in 1915. He served on the National Parks Committee at his own request that he might advance the conservation plans so “dear to the heart of John Muir.”54 Muir was to have a lifetime correspondence with the Moores family. On February 23, 1887, he wrote Janet Moores from Martinez, after not having seen her for twenty years. Six-year-old Wanda sat by his side as he wrote the letter. My Dear Friend Janet: Have you really turned into a woman, and have you really come to California, the land of the sun, and Yosemite and a’ that, through the whirl of all these years! . . . Through all the landscapes I have looked into, with all their wealth of forests, rivers, lakes and glaciers, and happy living faces, your face, Janet, is still seen as clear and keenly outlined on the day I went away on my long walk. . . . To-day you appear the same little fairy girl, following me in my walks with short steps as best you can, stopping now and then to gather buttercups, and anemones, and erigenias, sometimes taking my hand in climbing over a fallen tree, threading your way through tall grasses and ferns, and pushing

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fig. 2.3. John Muir’s letter to Janet Moores, February 20, 1887. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, ©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

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through very small spaces in thickets of underbrush. Surely you must remember those holiday walks, and also your coming into my dark-room with light when I was blind! And what light has filled me since that time, I am sure you will be glad to know—the richest sun-gold flooding these Cal[ifornia] valleys. . . . I only meant to tell you that you were not forgotten. You think I may not know you at first sight, nor will you be likely to recognize me. . . . [Draws and describes his sketch to Janet.] Most people would see only a lot of hair, and two eyes, or one and a half, in the middle of it, like a hillside with small open spots, mostly overgrown with shaggy chaparral, as this portrait will show. Wanda, peeping past my elbow and asks, “Is that you, Papa?” and then she goes on to say that it is just like me, only the hair is not curly enough; also that the ice and island sketches are just lovely, and that I must draw a lot just like them for her. I think that you will surely like her. She remarked the other day that she was well worth seeing now, having got a new gown or something that pleased her. She is six years old. . . . Ever truly your friend, John Muir55

Children of the Harriman Expedition In 1899, Muir played the teacher role again on the Harriman expedition. From letters, it appears that Muir was a favorite of the children. Financed by Edward H. Harriman, the railroad magnate, the party cruised north on a steamship with 126 people aboard, including a score of eminent scientists.56 The Harriman family included three daughters, Mary, Cornelia, and Carol, and two sons, Averell and Roland. Mrs. Harriman’s brother, W. H. Averell, came with his family, which included his wife and daughter, Elizabeth, and her friend, Dorothea Draper.57 At first Muir had been unsure about the trip under the auspices of a railroad baron, but Muir’s feelings warmed toward Harriman when he saw the president of the Union Pacific playing on deck with his children, “keeping trot-step with little Roland while helping him to drag a toy canoe with a cotton string.”58 The railroad barons who built the Central and Southern Pacific railroads, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, and Mark Hopkins, were known as the Big Four, so Muir jokingly dubbed Mary, Cornelia, Elizabeth, and Dorothea, the “Big Four,” telling them at the same time of his

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“Big Two” at home. The youngest children—Carol and Roland—he named “the Little Two.” Muir accompanied the “Big Four” on a three-mile hike along a glacier.59 Muir wrote the following letter home to his daughters, Wanda and Helen, from Kodiak, Alaska, on July 3, 1899: Darlings Wanda and Helen— I have often thought how fine it would be to have you on this trip. The Harriman & Averil [sic] girls and Miss Draper about your own ages enjoy it so much and have so bright and merry and instructive a time. So many grand mountains with birds and flowers and glaciers and waterfalls and so many wise men to tell them about all they see. . . . 60 We see a glimmer of the Harriman-Averell children’s easy and affectionate relationship with Muir in their letters after the expedition. On a crosscountry railroad trip, the children were delayed due to a wreck and took the time to write Muir a “round robin” letter from the Big Four. Their letter, to which each added a note, makes reference to “G.Q.” We can speculate that this stands for the “Great Quartet.” Hunting was an important activity for Harriman and his friends. Muir’s influence is clearly exhibited in the lessons the children learned about hunting. Here are a few excerpts from the letter written over several days by the Big Four: August 5 [1899] Dear Mr. Muir: As I waited until the morning to write I can tell you more news. Now we are at Solidude, the scene of the wreck—and indeed the name of the place is in keeping with our feelings—for the fragments of the H.A.E. [Harriman Alaska Expedition] are sad and lonely, not because we haven’t “ham and eggs” but because we haven’t you. . . . Yesterday some naughty men shot some little birdies, although I would have said “no, no” had I been there. Meanwhile, with remarks that the “Big Four” all miss you and your glaciers terribly, Lovingly your friend Beth [Betty Averell]

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Helper, Utah, Rio Grande & Western R.R. August 4 [1899] Dear Mr. Muir: We have been wading in glacial puddles in the heart of the Rocky mts. And are thinking sorrowfully of you, and wishing you could enjoy yourself thus also. We are detained on account of a wreck ahead. . . . We have wished for the last two days for the coolness of a Muir glacier, and for your refreshing sayings. . . . We all wish you were here, especially your repented sinner, who wears no more the shooting jacket. Mary Harriman [August 6, 1899] Dear Mr. Muir: I do hope that you found all your family well, and I wish we might see your girls. Do bring them East next time you come. The “big four” will always look back with pleasure on the happy times we spent with “cold storage” and be mighty glad that he and we were members of the H.A.E. With love, Your friend, Dorothea Dear Mr. Muir: Mary has told all that has happened so I can only express my sorrow at your not being here, with us, and taking us off for walks. We miss you terribly, and only wish you were here to tell us your stories of your tramps on glaciers Cornelia Harriman61 Muir’s role as storyteller/entertainer was closely related to his role as a teacher. In a world without television, movies, and video games, one should consider what Muir’s attention and interest directed at a child in the form of storytelling, rhymes, and joking play might mean for entertainment. Cecelia Galloway reminisced: I remember my uncle telling stories at our dinner-table and being completely carried away with the thrill of them. One that I have heard him tell was afterward published in book form,—

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“Stickeen,” the story of the little black dog who fell in love with my uncle at first sight, and immediately adopted him to be his God whom he adored, who followed his heels all day, and slept at his feet at night. The brave little dog who shared with him one of the most terrible experiences on the great Muir Glacier in Alaska.62 Muir often stayed with the Swett family in San Francisco to work on his writing. Helen Swett remembered: John Muir was one of the most delightful raconteurs in the world. . . . We children gathered about fascinated at the true stories he told of adventures in Yosemite, the high Sierras, and later on, in Alaska wilds. Mr. Muir had many characteristics which endeared him to children. He was gentle, cheerful, and filled with good humor. He never teased or ridiculed a child, never scolded, and was never personal. We were always fascinated when he brought out for us the broad Scotch burr of his native land and even sang for us occasionally a snatch of a Scotch ballad. On returning from trips of exploration this slender, bearded, blue-eyed enthusiast always came in laden with specimens of all sorts—bits of granite showing deep scratches as a result of glacial action; evergreen boughs laden with cones; from Alaska, curios made by Eskimos. One made up of bears’ toe-nails which, when shaken, produced a sound as musical as any glacial waterfall. A sailor presented him with the wing of an albatross and he brought it to the house on Taylor Street where it served for years as a reminder of Alaska and its wonders, as he related them to us, in the guise of bed time stories told around the open fire. He himself would not have killed the albatross. His way was to observe and relate, but to leave the birds and the beasties themselves unharmed. We see young people nowadays poor in vocabulary in the midst of plenty. The informal talks of Mr. Muir furnished us children with many an expression that was new to us and which enriched our own vocabularies without our being fully conscious of what was happening.63 Many of Muir’s letters to children took on a different tone and seemed like simplified stories. He knew how to adapt his stories to the child’s level and make his comments entertaining.

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In December 1868 Muir wrote Charles Moores from a sheep camp, two miles north of Snellings: My dear little friend Charles— I am glad to hear that you are learning to read and to sing. I am a shepherd now and sometimes I sing when I am with the sheep. Larks sing almost every morning in California. I wish you could be with me and then we would all sing together, and I would give you a pet lamb and help you to make a little mill upon the stream that runs behind my cabin. There are a great many glossy black ravens where I keep my sheep. They say: Croak croak, when they want a lamb and I say: There is none dead. There are a great many rabbits here that run so fast the dogs cannot catch them. Their ears are six inches long. They are very handsome. They skim over the grass about as fast as a bird’s shadow. I wish I could see the beautiful snows of Indiana winter again. . . . I have a little dog too. I call him Compie because he is my companion. The stars of California twinkle more than the stars that are above Indiana. A flower grows in the mountains that is like candy-stalk and leaves and all look just like red, crispy candy. I don’t know when I will be home but I will be glad to see you when I come. I hope you will write to me always. I pray that you may ever be happy and good, and that your eyes may always have abundance of the best and sweetest light that God may send to the world. From your friend, John Muir64 Correspondence between Muir and children eased his lonely life. In his stories, Muir was willing to share nature’s lessons even if they were dire. To his nephew George Galloway he wrote: [February 27, 1869] Dear Georgie: . . . It came on snow just a few minutes this winter, most of that day there was cold rain and high wind, and a great many lambs died. If you had been here you would have had a terrible job carrying [in] the lambs that were cold into the house. The floor was covered with them, but more than three hundred of them died that day, and two

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fig. 2.4. Anna and George Galloway, Wisconsin, ca. 1863. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

hundred old sheep. They were so wet and cold. More than twenty thousand died within ten or twelve miles. Wasn’t that terrible. But it is fine warm days now, and the lambs feel skippy and gay, and they run in bands around a clay bank, dancing as if they were daft. Sometimes a gray eagle catches one and flies away with it. You must write to me . . . [John Muir].65 Another letter from George Galloway shows that children responded to Muir’s letters with their own stories, as evident from Muir’s affectionate response in this letter of April 25, 1872, from the Yosemite Valley: Dear Nephew George Galloway: I got your letter and read it twice. I like letters when they are written by farmers’ boys for then they are always full of something that smells like hay and wheat and fresh butter and milk and they always seem to be tanned brown with sunshine. I think your description of the long shining tailed peacocks is first-rate. You

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are going to make a grand scholar. I’m glad you like your wild cats and dogs. I like all things that are wild better than tame things. God takes care of everything that is wild but he only half takes care of tame things. . . . Goodnight . . . [Uncle John]66 As a benevolent friend Muir went out of his way to give little gifts to children and provide jobs to youths and favors for friends and family. Gifts included gold coins, books, and fruit baskets from the ranch. The MuirStrentzel home was always open to friends traveling to and from California. In an early letter from Henry Butler in 1867 we see evidence of Muir’s generosity even when he himself had very little. Madison, Feb. 24th 1867 My dear Friend: . . . Ever since my Father’s return I have wanted to thank you for the beautiful present you sent me, Paradise Lost, which is among the best of books. With the dollar you were so kind as to send, I did as you wished, and bought a bundle of candy for Albert Carr, one for the Griffens, another for the Pickards, one for the Sterlings, and some for myself and my sisters; all thanked you very much. . . . Your young friend, H S. Butler67 In his later years, Muir found pleasure in lessening the troubles of others. He could be careful about money but then could share it freely. His files are filled with letters from family, friends, and charities thanking him for his gifts. One day, he asked his niece, Mary Reid Coleman, to drive him around on a tour of “early Christmas giving.” Stopping first in Martinez, he drew from the bank a supply of gold pieces, which he then began to distribute. An unknown shabby mother and little girl were stopped on the street, and he bent down to talk with the child. He then slipped her a shining coin. Driving on, they stopped at a farmhouse of an impoverished family, and while Mary Coleman engaged the mother in conversation, he played with the children.“When he went away, each child was the richer by a big yellow coin.” Following those charitable visits, he stopped by the Swetts house and gave out more coins.68 Margaret Swett, later Plummer, was a beneficiary of such a gold coin and mentioned it with pride in her interpretive talks as a Muir Historic Site ranger.

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All of the above types of relationships are evident in Muir’s relationship with his own children, Wanda and Helen, but he added a significant dose of the “worried father.” John and Louie Muir became parents on March 25, 1881. The new baby transformed John into a proud and ecstatic father at fortythree, an age when many men were already grandfathers. His delight was obvious from his letter from Martinez, California, on March 27, 1881, announcing the birth to his mother.69 Dear Mother, Our dear little baby has come to us. She was born just two days ago, March 25 at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. . . . Our darling firstborn is a tiny, healthy happy daintily featured lassie not at all dull and lumpish like most of the baby garblings that I have seen. She looks about her with her bright blue eyes as steadily as if she were a year old instead of only two days. . . . Heaven bless her & make all her life happy & loveful as the promise in every quarter is now. . . . Ever lovingly your son, John Muir70 Despite his happiness, Alaska called, and before Wanda was two months old, Muir was traveling. He had been reluctant to leave, but Louie had argued that he needed the trip for the sake of his health and work. His letters home indicated his concern for his wife and daughter.“Oh, if I could touch my baby and thee! A thousand kisses . . . Ah, you little know the long icy days, strangely nightless that I have longed and longed for one word from you.”71 Muir’s success and absences from home garnered jealousy and criticism from neighbors. But it is evident from his letters that his thoughts were close to home and he remained an attentive father who worried greatly about his children. His letters contained many instructions to Louie to keep the children safe. On June 16, 1881, from Plover Bay, Siberia, Muir writes to Louie,“You must keep Annie Wanda downstairs or she may fall. . . .”72 An illustrated letter to threeyear-old Wanda shows Louie being assisted up a mountain in Yosemite by being pushed up from behind with a stick.73 It is evidence of the rare trip in which both parents were absent, causing both Muir and Louie a high level of anxiety. In a letter of July 6, 1884, from Yosemite Valley, Louie Muir wrote her parents: Dear Grandpa and Grandma: How thankful we are this evening to hear from you and little Wanda. John was so anxious that he became really miserable.

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He entreats you to keep the baby away from hot water and from those hall doors. As soon as you get this telegraph, “Baby all right,” if all is well. John’s eyes fill with tears whenever I speak of the baby, but we are thankful we did not try to bring her, for the ride on Thursday was perfectly awful, in an old stage. . . . Dear mother, write a few lines about the baby every day. . . . Louie Muir74 In August 1885, Muir returned to Wisconsin to visit his family after many years apart. He wrote Louie from Portage City, Wisconsin, “Tell my Wanda that I’ll soon be back to her, and be careful never to talk in any other than a light cheery way about me to her.” Apparently, Muir had no interest in being the stern, disciplinarian father.75 Muir missed his little girl and in his first letter to her from Portage City in September of 1885, he wrote: My dear Wanda, Every day since papa went away, many times he has wanted to see his own little girl, because papa loves her so much, and papa will soon be home and then he will see his little girl all the time and bring something to her from Portage City. . . . There is a pretty lake where papa used to live when he was a little boy, and pretty ducks and fishes swim about in the lake, and violets and lilies, and ferns in a meadows, and blue flowers and some pink ones, and papa picked some for baby and mama, and you can show them to Grandma and Grandpa. . . . Papa had to buy an overcoat, it is so cold, and people make big fires in stoves to keep warm. Everybody said, “How old is little Wander,” and I said “That is not her name. It is Wanda” and they said, “We thought it was Wander because her papa was a wanderer.” Papa is glad you sent him so many kisses and nice letters, and he always sends some back to you and waves his hand to his dear Wanda every night. 76 Muir’s second daughter, Helen Muir, was born on January 23, 1886. From the very first she was fragile and seemed to fall prey to many childhood diseases.77 Writing his brother David from Martinez in August 7, 1887, Muir stated, “Our little Helen has been very sick, but is now nearly well again. We now know what the agony of the loss [of] a child is, for we had lost hope for a time of her recovery.”78

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In October 1890, John Strentzel died, and the family moved to the “Big House.” Muir established his “scribble den” in an upstairs bedroom, away from the confusion and noise of the household. The tension of writing often made him short-tempered and irritable, especially during the girls’ music lessons. But following his writing sessions, Muir would walk, tell stories, and play with his daughters. As Wanda said, “Father was the biggest, jolliest child of all.”79 Instruction certainly was an important part of Muir’s relationships with his daughters. His lessons were gentle, but with a greater expectation of learning on their part than he required of other children. Muir’s formal schooling had been scant and discipline harsh, and he developed new ideas for the girls’ education. He felt, “More wide knowledge, less arithmetic and grammar, keeps the heart alive, nourishes youth’s enthusiasm.”80 Helen Muir reminisced, Neither Wanda nor I attended public school. . . . The walks in the hills are among my happiest childhood memories. . . . In the spring we had the wild flowers to enjoy and study too, for lessons in botany were part of the walks. We chose our walks according to the plants we wanted to see. . . . Some of the Latin names of the plants are still in my poor head. . . . Papa had a perfect memory and expected me to remember all I learned in those years. Papa taught us from the time we were small children that all creatures have feelings and troubles and joys just like people, and that we must always remember that fact and be considerate of them. . . . One of his earliest teachings was to be quiet around all creatures so you would really get to observe and know their ways. Both Wanda and I from the time we could read, were given daily lessons to commit to memory. First such easy poems as Shelley’s “Cloud,” Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” or rather selections . . . from Shakespeare’s plays, from the Bible . . . and poems of Keats, Milton and Longfellow and Burns. His belief was that these beautiful words learned at an early age were literally stored in our minds, to be drawn on and enjoyed all through life.81 Some of the most wonderful of Muir’s letters with charming illustrations are to Wanda and Helen. Correspondence between Muir and Wanda was published in a book titled Dear Papa. Although Muir often mentioned in his letters that he would take the girls on his travels, he never did when they were

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fig. 2.5. Wanda and Tom Hanna with their children [Martinez, California, ca. 1925]. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

young. Later, they took outings in California, often with the Sierra Club. The fragility of his wife’s and daughter Helen’s health meant that Wanda was left behind as the strong one. Wanda did stay behind, even at the sacrifice of graduation from college.82 Wanda married Tom Hanna in 1906 and had six children (four while Muir was living): Strentzel, John, Richard, Robert, Jean Louise, and Ross. Helen married Buel Funk in 1909 and had four boys (two during Muir’s lifetime): Muir, Stanley, Walter, and John. The grandchildren gave their “hilarious old grandfather many an excuse to visit the two ranches.”83 Between work periods, Muir went down to Wanda’s adobe to play with the children. “So flourished the boy undergrowth,” he gleefully wrote. “Interesting mugginses and as lively as chipmunks.”84 Muir died in 1914, leaving behind, in addition to his extraordinary record, a legacy of grandchildren.

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Conclusion During the early years of the twentieth century, there were predictions that “the next hundred years was going to be ‘The Century of the Child’; for never before in history had children been so much written about, studied, and fussed over.”85 Muir as a nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century man embraced better treatment of children as a personal style. He was always ahead of his time in regard to his treatment of those without a voice—plants, animals, women, and children. Certainly, his attitude toward the treatment of children was at least in part inspired by the harsh treatment he had received as a child. Childhood throughout most of history had been difficult. Many American children were very badly mistreated. In spite of this, each successive generation of American children has exhibited a capacity for spontaneity, freshness, and playfulness that is testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. Children seem to invite openness and sharing.86 It is this spirit that Muir appreciated and was drawn to in his own interactions with children. It is easy to see from his correspondence that Muir made children a part of his entire life. Children loved and appreciated him as their teacher, mentor, storyteller, entertainer, and friend. He appeared truly to enjoy their company. Muir was very important to many children, as is evident in a number of reminiscences from those who knew him in their childhood and held his memory dear throughout their lives. In return Muir gained greatly from his relationships with children. Children could reflect back to Muir his own wide-eyed, childlike love of nature. He enjoyed the role of teacher and found rapt students in young people. Muir enjoyed children as a respite from work, as was especially evident in his relationship with the Swett children, his daughters, and his grandchildren. Children returned his love. In a postscript from an 1897 letter from Theodore Lukens, a Pasadena bank president and friend, he said of his granddaughter, “Little Lottie says, ‘I have only got two men I love—Mr. Muir and Grandpa.’” 87 Muir’s relationship with children reflects a caring and understanding that suggests his appreciation of the innocence of childhood and of children’s place in the world.

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Notes 1. John Muir, letter to Louie Strentzel, Fort Wrangel, October 9, 1879, in John Muir Papers, microfilm edition, 03/01927, hereafter cited as JMP microfilm; also in MS 48, John Muir Papers, Badè Transcriptions, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, Stockton, CA, hereafter cited as MS 48, CStoc-WA.

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2. Bonnie J. Gisel, ed., Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), and Ronald Limbaugh, John Muir’s “Stickeen” and the Lessons of Nature (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1996). 3. John Muir, letter to Louis Muir, June 14, 1899, JMP microfilm 10/06146; also transcribed by William Frederic Badè in MS 48, Bade Transcription, CStoc-WA. 4. Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 12; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Socializing Middle-Class Children: Institutions, Fables and Work Values in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective, ed. Ray N. Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 120. 5. Phillipe Aries, “Education and the Concept of Childhood,” in Childhood in America, ed. Paula S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 283. 6. Ross W. Beales, Jr., “In Search of the Historical Child: Miniature Adulthood and Youth in Colonial New England,” in Growing Up in America, Hiner and Hawes, 9; Elliott West, Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 1; Calvert, Children in the House, 150. 7. Calvert, Children in the House, 3–4. 8. William G. McLoughlin, “Evangelical Child Rearing in the Age of Jackson: Francis Wayland’s Views on When and How to Subdue the Willfulness of Children,” in Growing Up in America, Hiner and Hawes, 93. 9. Fass and Mason, Childhood in America, 2; John Sommerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood, vol. 140 of Sage Library of Social Research (Beverly Hills: Sage Publication, 1982), 121–22. 10. Carl N. Degler, “Introducing Children into the Social Order,” in Childhood in America, Fass and Mason, 213; West, Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America, 1–2. 11. Hiner and Hawes, Growing Up in America, 83; McLoughlin, “Evangelical Child Rearing,” 96. 12. Carl N. Degler, At Odds, Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 73, and Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 88. 13. Fass and Mason, Childhood in America, 2, 236; Degler, At Odds, 213. 14. Elizabeth Hampton, Settlers’ Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 13–16, 226–28. 15. Calvert, Children in the House, 9. 16. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (New York: Knopf, 1946), 10–11.

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17. Ibid., 5; John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 30, 43. 18. Muir, Story, 22–33. 19. Ibid., 31–32. 20. Ibid., 44. 21. Ibid., 71. 22. Ibid., 49–50. 23. Ibid., 130. 24. Ibid., 84–87. 25. William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), vol. I, 57–58; Muir, Story, 213–17. 26. Muir, Story, 222–24. 27. Ibid., 227. 28. Ibid., 231–34. 29. Ibid., 262. 30. John Muir, letter to Annie L. Muir, August 15, 1868, JMP microfilm, 01/00643. 31. John Muir, letter to Sarah Muir Galloway, November 14, 1873, JMP microfilm, 02/01318; also in MS 48 Badè Transcription, CStoc-WA. 32. Note signed E .O. W. [Emily O. Pelton Wilson] on John Muir letter to Frances N. Pelton [first four pages missing], 1861, MS 48, Badè Transcription, CStoc-WA. 33. John Muir, letter to Francis Pelton ca. 1861, MS 48, Badè Transcription, CStoc-WA. 34. John Muir, letter to Mrs. John A. Newton [December 1863], MS 48, Badè Transcription, CStoc-WA; Muir to Mary E. Newton, December 1863, JMP microfilm, 01/00331. 35. John Muir at Yosemite Valley to J. B. McChesney, December 20 1872, JMP microfilm, 02/01218; also in MS 48, Badè Transcription, CStoc-WA. 36. John Muir, letter to Alice McChesney, November 8, 1874,JMP microfilm, 03/01449; also as MS 48 Badè Transcription, CStoc-WA. 37. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 126–27. 38. Gertrude Hutchings Mills [reminiscence], 1923, in Series, Badè Papers, JMP microfilm, 51/00035; Wolfe, Son of Wilderness, 127. 39. Cecelia Galloway, John Muir [reminiscence], Series Wolfe Papers, JMP microfilm, 51/00133. 40. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 59. 41. James D. Butler, letter to Catharine Merrill, April 26, 1866, JMP microfilm, 01/00428. 42. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 98–99. 43. Ibid., 100. 44. Ibid., 104–5.

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45. James David Butler, letter to John Muir, March 20, 1867, JMP microfilm, 01/0500. 46. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 105. 47. John Muir, letter to Sarah and David Galloway, June 7, 1867, JMP microfilm, 01/00559. 48. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 106. 49. Merrill Moores [reminiscence], in JMP microfilm, series Badè Papers, 51/00032. 50. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 107. 51. John Muir, letter to Merrill Moores, January 1, 1868, JMP microfilm, 01/00605. 52. Jeanne C. Carr, letter to Merrill Moores, May 10, 1868, JMP microfilm, 01/00624. 53. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 159–60. 54. Merrill Moores, Recollections of John Muir as a Young Man [reminiscence], 1919, series Badè Papers, JMP microfilm, 51/00032; Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 159. 55. John Muir to Janet D. Moores, February 23, 1887, JMP microfilm, 05/02966; Badè, Life and Letters, vol. II, 214–18. 56. John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 378. 57. William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan, Looking Far North: The Harriman Expedition to Alaska, 1899 (New York: Viking, 1982), 4. 58. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 281. 59. Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, 73; Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 280–81. 60. John Muir to Wanda and Helen Muir, July 3, 1899, JMP microfilm, 10/06155; John Muir, Dear Papa: Letters Between John Muir and His Daughter Wanda, ed. and documented by Jean Hanna Clark and Shirley Sargent (Fresno, CA: Panorama West Books, 1985), 67. 61. Beth Averell et al., letter to John Muir, August 5, 1899, JMP microfilm, 10/06171. 62. Cecelia Galloway, John Muir [reminiscence, 1944], p. 17 in Wolfe Papers, JMP microfilm, 51/00133; Limbaugh, John Muir’s “Stickeen,” 21. 63. Helen Swett Artieda, “John Muir in Our Home” [reminiscence], 1940, Series Wolfe Papers, JMP microfilm, 51/00047. 64. John Muir, letter to Charles Moores, December 21, 1868, JMP microfilm, 01/00662. 65. John Muir, letter to George Galloway, February 27, 1869, letter with correspondence to Muir’s sister, Sarah Galloway, JMP microfilm, 02/00707. 66. John Muir, letter to George Galloway, April 25, 1872, JMP microfilm, 02/01101; also in MS 48, Badè Transcription, CStoc-WA. 67. Henry S. Butler [son of James D. Butler] to John Muir, February 24, 1867, JMP microfilm, 01/00490. 68. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 310.

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74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

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Muir, Dear Papa, xviii. Muir, Dear Papa, 2; John Muir, letter to Ann G. Muir, JMP microfilm, 04/02192. Muir, Dear Papa, 2. John Muir, letter to Louie S. Muir, June 16, 1881, JMP microfilm, 04/02270. Muir, Dear Papa, 6–7; John Muir, letter to Wanda Muir, July 16, 1884, JMP microfilm, 05/02615. Louie S. Muir, letter to John and Louisiana Strentzel, July 6, 1884, JMP microfilm, 05/02625. John Muir, letter to Louie Muir, August 30, 1885, JMP microfilm, 05/02764. John Muir [first letter] to Wanda Muir, September 9, 1885, JMP microfilm, 05/02780. Muir, Dear Papa, 12. John Muir, letter to David G. Muir, August 7, 1887, JMP microfilm, 05/02997; also in Badè Transcription, MS 48, CStoc-WA. Muir, Dear Papa, 28. Ibid., 8. Helen Muir [reminiscence], 1943, Series Wolfe Papers, JMP microfilm, 51/00106. Muir, Dear Papa, x–xi. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 328–29. Ibid., 345–46. Hiner and Hawes, Growing Up in America, 239; Mary Cable, The Little Darlings: Child Rearing in America (New York: Scribner, 1975), 163. Hiner and Hawes, Growing Up in America, xxiii. Theodore P. Lukens, letter to John Muir, June 12, 1897, JMP microfilm, 09/05548.

chapter three 1

California’s Kindred Spirits

John Muir and William Keith Ronald H. Limbaugh

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Introduction Hudson River artist Asher B. Durand’s most famous painting depicts Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant standing on a rocky outcrop overlooking the wilderness beyond. Entitled Kindred Spirits, its completion in 1849 symbolized the marriage of poetry and painting, two essential ingredients in the matrix of values that made up America’s version of the romantic movement during the first half of the nineteenth century. A half century later a similar painting might have been designed to express another type of cultural bonding. Imagine two men standing on Glacier Point above Yosemite Valley. One, with shabby beard and crumpled clothes, has his head held high and arms outstretched, taking in the scene like some glorious wildflower basking in sunshine. The other stands back a bit, strokes his chin, and contemplates the depth and dimension of the grand vista spread out before him. Thus, in our mind’s eye, we see John Muir and William Keith, the virtual descendents of the poet William Cullen Bryant and the painter Thomas Cole, symbolically renewing the union of prose and art that characterized much of American nature imagery in that era. 1

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fig. 3.1. William Keith, portrait of the artist, probably posed in his studio, ca. 1880s. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

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As popular American icons a century ago, Muir and Keith represented two contiguous points of a cultural compass that had a distinctive westward tilt. Both were Scottish transplants, immigrants or perhaps refugees from an older society that still looked on individual creativity with some suspicion, as if selfexpression was another name for self-indulgence, a Calvinist sin. More by accident than by design, both émigrés found new life and energy on the “bohemian shores” of Northern California, a place of boundless energy and creativity and limitless optimism as well as reckless waste and self-gratification. The cultural fountain of all this excitement was San Francisco, the head and heart of the Far West before 1900. Organized religion had an uphill struggle in this post––gold rush metropolis filled with rich and poor, vice and virtue, mediocrity and greatness. All that tradition abhorred, San Francisco had in abundance, which is precisely why it became the mecca for artists, writers, poets, feminists, activists, miscreants, and other challengers of social convention. Keith centered his studio in the heart of San Francisco and thus absorbed and contributed to its creative energies. Muir was ambivalent. A primitivist by inclination, he rejected the idea of civilization even while often accepting its benefits. To him, San Francisco was an alien entity that disoriented humans and undermined their faith in a beneficent universe. It was a place of evil, but it was also a magnificent resource that even Muir could not live without, despite his sanctimonious sermons against materialism and urbanization. Though only a visitor—and a reluctant one unless his friends invited him—Muir spent more time in San Francisco than he cared to admit.

Art Keith and Muir first became acquainted through a mutual friend, Jeanne Carr. When and where Carr met Keith is unclear, but she was both intimate friend and surrogate mother to Muir, who first knew her at the University of Wisconsin as the wife of his geology professor. In his youth, Jeanne Carr had looked after Muir’s interests like a talent scout. During the time that he lived and studied in Yosemite, she took charge of his literary career and directed all of her important acquaintances his way. In 1872, guided by her description and letter of introduction, Keith and a friend found Muir’s mountain lair. From the very first conversation, artist and naturalist found common ground in the beauty and wonder of wild nature. Muir was something of an artist himself, but his sketches are like blueprints, filled with minute details copied faithfully from nature. Though philosophically a romantic idealist, believing that nature’s truth and beauty and

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harmony were manifestations of a higher power, aesthetically Muir was an uncompromising naturalist. To him there was no greater image of beauty than the unadorned wilderness he beheld with the naked eye. Humans could read the book of nature to discover fundamental moral lessons, and he opposed artistic efforts to exalt nature by exaggerating its emotional impact, in the manner of monumental landscape painters like Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Moran. For the first few years of their relationship, Keith was too enamored of Muir’s wilderness wisdom to challenge his aesthetic principles. In this period, wrote Brother Cornelius, “The Muir ideals of the truth, character, and grandeur of nature, especially of the mountains, were . . . Keith’s artistic aim.”1 As Michael Cohen reported, Keith said the young naturalist was so extraordinary that “we almost thought he was Jesus Christ. We fairly worshipped him!”2 In turn, by encouraging Keith and promoting his work, Muir was a valuable asset to the artist. In the early 1870s Muir’s help was especially valuable in popularizing Keith’s huge landscapes. His published review of Keith’s California Alps, for instance—a canvas purchased by The Mission Inn in Riverside and still on display there—virtually bubbled with superlatives. The work, Muir wrote, was a “bold outspoken manifestation of the sublimest attributes of the Sierra . . . a kind of bible of the mountains.”3 Two years later, reviewing a Keith landscape titled The Headwaters of the Merced for Overland Monthly, Muir marveled at the details but at the same time extolled the painting’s unity and grandeur. The “painted rocks are so truly rocky,” he said, “we would expect to hear them clank and ring to the blows of a hammer.” He concluded: Keith is patiently following the leadings of his own genius, painting better than he knows, observing a devout, truthfulness to nature, yet removing veils of detail, and laying bare the very hearts and souls of the landscape; and the truth of this is attested more and more fully by every picture that he paints.”4 But Muir was a better naturalist than an art critic. Keith himself had reservations about these early landscapes, though it took years to develop a new style. A surviving letter from 1877 hints at these early doubts. Muir, writing from Yosemite, is anxious to see his friend again and hopes that he “. . . still hunger[s] & thirst[s] for the beauty wh[ich?] is here, that the landscapes you beheld from our clean mountain windows have not become dim.”5 Later Keith acknowledged his doubts in a retrospective lecture:

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At that time I was almost as crazy about the mountains as he was and was continually trying to paint them, but the trouble about painting mountains is that you are hampered with the bigness of them, that it would require a canvas as big as a house and then it would only be a panorama.6 By 1883, as Brother Cornelius has written, the artist’s “epic period” was over.7 As Keith turned to more intimate, synthetic landscapes, Muir thought he was “artistically dead.” The two remained good friends, but the honeymoon was over as far as art was concerned.8 In later years the subjects and style of Keith’s canvases were the chief sources of argument between them, but age mellowed both men, and their bickering became a sort of ritual that nobody took seriously, not even themselves. As Keith told George Wharton James, “Muir is Scotch, I’m Scotch, so we quarrel all the time.”9 To their friends and the press,“Willie” and “Johnny” took on the persona of “old cronies,” trading banter and barbs like circus comics. One example, described and doubtless embellished by a reporter, is typical of their stylized repartee: Nothing gives the artist more delight than to have the great authority upon glaciers “get after” one of his paintings. “You never saw a sunrise like that, Keith,” the scientist will say, standing in moody disgust before his friend’s latest impressionist canvas. “Why in the deuce don’t you imitate nature? You’ll never paint a decent picture till you can do that.” “Look here, now, John,” this very seriously from the painter, “if you’ll go out early tomorrow morning and look toward the west you’ll see nature imitating my sunrise, and then,” Mr. Keith always adds when he finishes a good story on his friend, “Muir will go off growling, looking exactly like Carlyle in a fit of dyspepsia.”10

Travel Muir and Keith first met on a high Sierra trek, but their common love of nature was offset by their differences in mode and manner of travel. Muir was an inveterate optimist, filled with energy, oblivious to heat or storms, and— despite his meager diet—remarkably healthy while he was in the high country, although prone to colds and flu in the flatlands. Keith, in contrast, was

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moody in the mountains, a fair-weather camper with a weak constitution that grew increasingly frail in later years. On their first trip together in the fall of 1872 Keith burned the rice on his initial assignment as camp cook. The next spring, during a high Sierra trip with Emily Pelton and several others, including Keith’s wife and two children, the party ran out of food, but Muir saved the expedition by hiking forty miles to base camp and back for provisions. In November 1873, returning by train after a trip to Utah with the photographer Carlton Watkins, Keith developed an unidentified illness and became despondent. In his remarkable biography of Keith, Brother Cornelius said this might have been the occasion when Keith brooded about his future to Muir, who cheerfully responded: “What of it mon, do you want to live forever?”11 Two years later, in the summer of 1875, Muir led Keith and two other friends, J. B. McChesney and John Swett, up Tenaya Canyon to the high Sierra and down Bloody Canyon to Mono Lake. The first night, reaching an abandoned cabin after climbing 1,800 feet during a snowstorm, some of the party wanted to camp outdoors, but Keith resisted. According to Muir,“Keith broke up the weather council, declaring with a scowl and flash of savage wit blacker than any cloud in the sky, and with a voice like thunder, that it was ‘perfect madness for poets, painters, and mountaineers to seek the darksome, dripping, snowdusted woods in such wild, woeful weather.’”12 This outburst stopped the show, and the party spent the night in the cabin. Eventually reaching the high country, they explored for a few days and then started down the other side. The summit invoked in Keith “a feeling of sadness in the whole landscape” because of the “blue black sky which seems to close in upon you.”13 Slipping and sliding, the party and their pack train worked their way cautiously down Bloody Canyon toward Mono Basin. Muir’s version of the night on Mono Lake is one-sided and must be used with caution. Despite the levity of his description, he was clearly annoyed by the fickle and unheroic behavior of his companions. At first they were eager to row out to the islands, several miles from shore. But the boat they borrowed was less than seaworthy under the extraordinarily high winds the party confronted while trying to return, and they had to spend part of the night on an island. Wet, cold, without fuel or food and unable to sleep, all except Muir were anxious to start back as soon as possible despite the danger. Finally, after midnight, they “could no longer be restrained,” and disembarked with Muir at the prow as pilot, two others rowing and one steering. They headed directly into the face of the wind, riding through waves that “broke repeatedly, and we had to bail to keep afloat.” Finally they reached the shore and wearily walked back to camp, as Muir noted derisively, in “an old

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abandoned hut in the possession of wood rats. Yet it was a house, and all city visitors must have a roof over their heads.”14 For a number of years after 1875 the two friends traveled widely but separately, each with his own crowded agenda. Muir ventured beyond the Sierra into the Great Basin, and north to Shasta, and then to Alaska three times before settling down as a fruit farmer and family man in Martinez through most of the eighties. After Keith lost his first wife in 1882, he remarried a year later and the newlyweds lived in Europe for a couple of years. Returning to California in 1885, the couple settled in Berkeley. Then at Muir’s suggestion, Keith traveled alone to Alaska for artistic inspiration, returning to paint a series of landscapes he advertised as Dreams of Alaska.15 Not until 1887, when Muir invited Keith to illustrate Picturesque California, a multivolume travelogue he had contracted to edit, did new opportunity arise for a joint outdoor adventure. The two took the train to Puget Sound, gathering notes and sketches for a chapter on the Oregon countryside. Awed by the looming presence of the great Cascade peaks and encouraged by friends they met along the way, Muir organized an expedition to climb Mt. Rainier and promptly took charge of supplies. According to Mary Keith, among the provisions he ordered was “a lot of butter, which, of course, got rancid, and made them all sick”—all except Keith, that is, who stayed in camp while the others climbed. He “ate sparingly” and thus “escaped.”16 Without question the most celebrated expedition involving the two friends was their trip to Scotland and the Continent in 1893, satirized afterward by a San Francisco paper under the title: “How William Keith and John Muir Did Europe Together Without Meeting.”17 Like trying to run a relay with runners on two different tracks, the results were predictable, a comedy of errors. Both men were simply too vulnerable to the suggestions of wives and friends, too different in disposition, and too egocentric to carry out a common objective. Mary Keith, reminiscing later, said the planning began long in advance. At first it was to be an all-male tour. She made that clear in her letter to Muir’s wife, Louie, dated two months before departure: About the Scotland trip, I think it a fine idea and especially for Mr. Muir. If he don’t go he will be sure to go to that horrid Alaska, and perhaps climb that big mountain, that has never been climbed and you know how daring he is. As for Mr. Keith, I am sure it will do him good, and increase his reputation as it will that of Mr. Muir.18

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The initial plan called for the two men to meet in New York, where they would board a passenger liner for England, then walk across Scotland together on a kind of pilgrimage. But as departure time approached, the plans went awry. Bogged down with “book-making,” as he characterized the work on his first major publication, The Mountains of California, Muir put off leaving Martinez for several weeks. Keith left anyway, taking his wife along for company and stopping for several days in Chicago, where they had an advance tour through the Columbian Exposition grounds with Daniel Burnham, the chief architect. The day after they went on to New York, leaving word for “Johnny to come on.” Muir arrived in Chicago and, unhurried, he spent several days with Burnham and other friends before taking the train east.19 In the meantime, the Keiths visited the American impressionist George Inness and other acquaintances, biding their time until Muir caught up. But Muir’s New York editor had other plans. The naturalist was hardly off the platform at Grand Central Station before he was swept up by Robert Underwood Johnson of the Century Company and escorted on a two-week tour of the famous homes and haunts of the New York and New England literati. Frustrated by further delay, the Keiths disembarked for Europe, leaving word for Muir to meet them in Paris. They had promised a friend they would go on to Madrid to see the Velásquez collection in the Prado, and they didn’t want to delay because, as Mary recalled, “it would soon be too hot to go there.”20 Muir finally departed for Europe in June, but the day he reached Paris, the Keiths started for Madrid. By the time they returned, Muir had gone on to London. There he wrote to his friend: Wandering Willie, where in all this confused world of streets, cars, hotel[s], stations, etc., are you? I got to Liverpool July 1st by the Etruria, and feeling sure you were off to Spain gave up all hope in my infantile loneliness of finding [you]. Most of the time since then I couldn’t even find myself, and yet on the whole I’ve had a sort of [a] good time.21 Considering his agenda, Muir’s letter seems patronizing. In a four-week whirlwind of activity he had visited friends and relatives in Scotland, toured the fiords of Norway, paid homage to Coleridge in the English Lake District, and was now heading for the Swiss Alps. After that, he said, “perhaps a little more of the north of Scotland and home.” As an afterthought he wrote: “I hope you and Mrs. K. had a good time, but your Scotch or Swedenborgian conscience must have been sore at times.”22

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Clearly, Muir knew Keith well. The artist by that time was fed up both with Muir and with the insufferable European weather. He had been miserable in Spain because of the heat, and now he learned that the summer rains had started in England. No more thought of a walking trip through Scotland! Ill and disconsolate, all he wanted now was to get back home in time for the watermelon season. The Keiths departed on the next available ship.23 In later years the two friends took other trips together, mostly in conjunction with Sierra Club outings, but Keith’s increasingly frail health took its toll and made extended voyages out of the question. In 1903, failing to persuade his artist friend to join him, Muir started on a world tour with Harvard botanist C. S. Sargent and his son. After three months they left Muir in Asia and returned home. From a lonely ship in the Indian Ocean Muir penned a plaintive message to Keith: “Strange I have to make these long journeys alone. Can never get anybody to go with me even half of the way. . . .”24 After he returned from his eighteen-month tour in 1904, Muir persuaded Keith and another friend to join him on a short trip by train to the Arizona desert, where Muir’s youngest daughter, Helen, was to stay while she recovered from a respiratory ailment. Despite the relative comfort of a Southern Pacific coach, Keith suffered from the heat both en route and at their hotel in Adamana, while Muir was seemingly inexhaustible. As Keith noted in a letter to his wife, Muir was “wild as ever, crazy when he gets out [into the] wilderness.”25 Two years before his death Keith made one last trip with Muir. It was not a happy time for either man, for the occasion was a desperate last-gasp effort by the Sierra Club to save Hetch Hetchy from, as Muir put it, the “dam dammers” of San Francisco. As a charter member of the Sierra Club and an outspoken wilderness advocate, Keith had been Muir’s staunch ally, rebutting the San Francisco developers with an indignant public outcry: “God knows best, and if He wanted a lake there He would have put it there Himself.”26 But by 1909 he was too old and too ill to be of much help. On the way back from the weeklong pack trip he was badly shaken when his horse nearly threw him. This episode was quite a contrast to the happier times of 1907, when on a similar trip, as Muir wrote in The Yosemite, Keith had come under the spell of Hetch Hetchy’s fall colors and its “great godlike rocks in repose [which] seemed to glow with life.” In this blissful state he had roamed for days, making about forty sketches and declaring “with enthusiasm that although its walls were less sublime in height, in picturesque beauty and charm Hetch Hetchy surpassed even Yosemite.”27

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Food Aside from their ethnic ancestry and their links to San Francisco, what did these two friends share? Certainly they were not similar physically. At five feet ten inches and about 140 pounds, Muir was angular and wiry, with an astonishing reservoir of stamina that made him practically indefatigable on long excursions. In contrast, Keith was stout, with sedentary habits and a robust appetite. Gastronomically Muir was erratic and therefore quixotic. His biographers marvel at legendary feats of endurance while consuming little more than scraps of bread along with tea.28 Muir embellished his own legend by publishing descriptions of heroic treks on a Spartan diet. Privately, however, he consumed more than he acknowledged in public. Keith, much more conventional, was amazed at Muir’s extraordinary eating habits. After their first trip together Keith wrote a glowing portrait of his new friend, expressing amazement at Muir’s sparse diet of oatmeal, crackers, tea, and sugar. It “would scarcely seem sufficient for more than one or two good meals,” he exclaimed, but with it he “will subsist and travel over the roughest country imaginable, sometimes for weeks together.”29 After years of association with Muir, Keith developed a more sophisticated perspective. He learned the secret of his friend’s legendary stamina, and he later used it as ammunition in the friendly banter that animated their conversation. As Mary Keith wrote in a reminiscence penned in the 1920s: [Keith] used to laughingly say that though Muir was a poor provider on these excursions, not wanting to be bothered and needing to travel light, and bragging about subsisting, while in the wilds, on a handful of oatmeal, Muir would make up for his enforced fast, when he returned to the restaurants of effete civilization, by gorging for several weeks, which goes to prove, that man cannot live by bread alone, or even scenery.30 As Keith learned from close association, Muir had a rather cultivated palate, which fame and affluence in his senior years provided frequent opportunity to gratify. In his final decade or so, he often rode the noon train from his home in Martinez to San Francisco, where he met his friends for lunch. The poet Charles Keeler, one of the inner circle, described one such meal at a French restaurant. For starters the trio ordered soup, grated cheese, and long bread sticks. The main course included a French omelet, mashed potatoes, and calves tongues with rolls and jelly, all washed down with red wine and “fizz water.”31

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On other occasions Muir dined lightly, avoiding red meat but still following the habits of a lifetime diet of American and European staples. There were also special meals, such as the one Muir hosted for nearly eighty antidam members of the Sierra Club at the Poodle Dog, one of San Francisco’s most prominent French restaurants. Anticipating a stormy meeting over Hetch Hetchy that would follow the meal, Muir fortified his supporters with food and drink. Later he described the banquet to a friend: The long flowery table flanked by the mountaineers looked something like a Sierra Canyon and so the merry witty feasters called it the “Muir Gorge.” At a quarter past eight o’clock we marched to the meeting and with a fine triumphant alpenglow on every face overwhelmed the poor Hetch dammers. Next morning the [San Francisco] Call reported that Muir, the naturalist, had packed the meeting, though I had only packed seventy-seven stomachs.32

Humor Muir and Keith each had a rollicking sense of humor, not at all characteristic of the dour Scotch image. As C. F. Lummis wrote, Keith belied the traits of his ethnic background as he was neither stingy nor “dull to a joke.”33 Muir’s playful badinage was legendary but also tedious at times. During a trip to the Grand Canyon with John Burroughs and his intimate friend Clara Barrus, for instance, Muir drove Burroughs to distraction with obsessive talk and continuous badgering about his timorous city habits. Barrus, unaware of Burroughs’s state of mind, at one point exclaimed to a friend: “To think of our having the Grand Canyon, and John Burroughs and John Muir thrown in!” To which Burroughs replied dryly: “I wish Muir was thrown in sometimes, when he gets between me and the canyon.”34 Keith, on the other hand, was a practical joker. He was a notorious tease, poking fun at the foibles of friends and family. Mary, his second wife, was a feminist, and received her share of ridicule. At a gathering of friends her husband even played the fool, dressed as Susan B. Anthony. Mary took it well, however, and even Anthony herself enjoyed the levity when she visited the Keiths at their Berkeley home on her West Coast tour in 1895.35 Muir was often the butt of Keith’s jokes. One time at Muir’s house celebrating the latter’s birthday, Keith found a book in his host’s study with the

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date of Muir’s birth on the flyleaf. As Mary Keith described the incident, Keith “slyly altered it to read a much earlier date and brought it down . . . to the dining room to tax him with it before his [Muir’s] wife, her mother and the children. None enjoyed the joke on himself more than Muir.”36 On another occasion Keith’s elaborate joke backfired. E. H. Harriman, the railroad magnate, had invited Muir and Keith to lunch at the Palace Hotel; Keith thought it would be “great fun” to tell Muir that Harriman was hosting a “grand function at which many of the noted men of San Francisco would be present, and that everybody would be expected to respond to a toast.” This, Keith knew, would confound Muir, who had “a horror of speechmaking and would rather go to jail than respond to any toast.” The naturalist was “in a state of nervous prostration” when he started for the hotel with Keith, who privately thought that no one but Harriman would be there. Keith was in an old suit, “which his friend Willis Polk declares has made the tour of the world with him four times.” To Keith’s surprise, when he entered the dining room Harriman was there with “one of the most exclusive gatherings of society ladies and gentlemen that could possibly be got together in San Francisco, and all dressed in the height of fashion.” Hence “. . . the man who did the laughing after the lunch was Muir, and he is chuckling yet at his friend’s expense.”37

The Last Years The twilight years were hard on both men. Age and infirmity gradually took their toll, and personal tragedy complicated their lives. Muir lost his wife to heart disease in 1905, and soon his daughters married and moved away, leaving him alone in the Big House at Martinez. His answer for loneliness was travel when he had time or hard labor at home grinding out manuscripts, with frequent interruptions by visitors, which relieved the drudgery. Influenza, or “La Grippe” in the parlance of the day, was also a frequent visitor to the Muir household after 1900, and Muir’s antidote was literally to head for the hills. The miasmic theory of disease still prevailed in that era, and Muir thought by breathing the glorious mountain air he would overcome the miserable chills and fever contracted at sea level. Regardless of the dubious science behind the theory, it seemed to work, for he always felt better in the high country. Keith had what is often called a type A personality and a more complex pathology. His indiscriminate appetite, rich in salt, fat, and cholesterol, no doubt contributed to the high blood pressure and debility he suffered with increasing regularity in his latter years. Losing his studio and hundreds of finished paintings and sketches in the great San Francisco conflagration of

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1906 added severe mental strain and a financial hardship to his physical problems. Thereafter both the quantity and quality of his art declined, although he still had occasional surges of energy and flashes of genius. As if united by a common enemy, Muir and Keith drew closer together in their senior years. The banter continued, but it was mixed with solicitous concern and gratuitous advice. For instance, when Muir learned in 1901 that Keith was “sick abed with a cold,” his remedy was to “take no medicine, keep warm, read my book, and all will be well. . . .”38 In turn, hearing in 1909 that Muir was ill at Martinez, Keith chided: Would you but take a thought & mend your ways. I’m sad for you. . . . What you need is care & nourishment, and you cant get that where you are. If you were here in Berkeley or in San Francisco, you could be well taken care of, & would be well. Why dont you think of this?39 Two years later Keith was on his deathbed, and when Muir heard the news, he penned a letter filled with compassion: I’ve been hoping to see you ever since I got back from the south but you had always left your studio when I called. Anyhow you must know that I am always with you in sympathy & always glad at every whisper of good news of your gaining however slowly in health. . . . Never be [down?] the pictures you are now painting seem to me better than ever. God bless you brave old friend so with all my heart I pray John Muir40

Conclusion The truly binding tie of Muir and Keith’s long friendship was not common nationality or humor but mutual regard for the natural world and all its creatures. They shared the view that nature should be protected from human desecration, that creatures large and small had moral worth, that beauty in nature was a divine gift, that wilderness had spiritual value. Despite their differences over the “relative values of truth and beauty,” as Emily Hay expressed it, they spoke as one voice in defending nature from the wanton hand of humans. When Muir raised his voice against farmers in Yosemite Valley or developers in Hetch Hetchy, Keith defended him publicly against

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opponents who tried to undermine his credibility. Even the needless killing of a toad in their presence aroused their mutual indignation.41 The lives of these two kindred spirits might mean little today had they not lived at a critical time in American history. At the end of the nineteenth century, the slash-and-burn mentality that had typified American attitudes was on the cusp of change. A new cultural paradigm was emerging after a troubled decade of panic and depression, labor unrest and chronic unemployment, adventurism overseas and “a bully war” that had imperialistic consequences. America looked backward in this era, reflecting on its pioneer experience and finding new meaning in the heritage of cheap land and wilderness that by 1900 were rapidly disappearing. Using the power of words and pictures to teach moral lessons, both Muir and Keith contributed to this new vision. They helped stimulate, and benefited from, the nation’s newfound appreciation for the values of wild nature. What could be more appropriate than to close with a poem from Robert Burns, taken from a volume Keith once owned and Muir later acquired, perhaps as part of the painter’s legacy to the naturalist. It now resides in Muir’s personal library at the University of the Pacific. Reminiscent of the epicurean sentiments of Omar Khayyám, the verse expresses, it seems, a slice of life that Keith and Muir sought to capture in their intimate moments together: Here’s a bottle and an honest friend! What wad ye wish for mair man? Wha kens, before his life may end, What his share may be of care, man? Then catch the moments as they fly, And use them as ye ought, man: Believe me, happiness is shy, And comes not ay when sought, man.42

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Notes 1. Brother Cornelius, Keith: Old Master of California, (New York: Putnam, 1942), vol. I, 75. 2. Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 253. 3. Quoted in Brother Cornelius, I, 79.

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4. Overland Monthly 14 (May 1875): 481–82. 5. Letter, John Muir, Yosemite Valley, December 19, 1872, to “My dear Keith,” in John Muir Papers (microfilm) 2/01214, hereafter cited as JMP microfilm; MS 48 John Muir Papers at the Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, Stockton, CA, hereafter cited as CStoc-WA. 6. Brother Cornelius, I, 268–75. 7. Ibid., 83. 8. Excerpt from George Innes, by Eugene Neuhaus, quoted in Linnie Marsh Wolfe, notebook 83.29, MS 48, CStoc-WA. 9. Quoted in Wolfe, notebook 83.29, p. 45, John Muir Papers, CStoc-WA. 10. John Tod, “How William Keith and John Muir Did Europe Together Without Meeting,” San Francisco Call, June 13, 1897, 19, columns 6–7. 11. Brother Cornelius, I, 78. See also Mary Keith, “Biographical Sketch of William Keith” (undated manuscript), 18, in Inez Henderson Pond Papers, MS 10, CStoc-WA. 12. John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 201. 13. William Keith, “An Artist’s Trip in the Sierra, Yosemite Valley, July 5, 1875,” Overland Monthly 15 (August 1875), typescript copy in Inez Henderson Pond Papers, MS 10, CStoc-WA. 14. Muir, John of the Mountains, 206–8. 15. Brother Cornelius, I, 166–67. 16. Mary Keith, “Biographical Sketch,” 18–19. 17. Tod, “How William Keith and John Muir Did Europe,” 19, columns, 6–7. 18. Letter, Mary Keith, Berkeley, April 19, [1893], to Dear Mrs. Muir, in JMP microfilm, 7/04111. 19. Mary Keith, “Biographical Sketch,” 19. 20. Brother Cornelius, I, 253–60; Mary Keith, “Biographical Sketch,” 18–19. 21. Letter, John Muir, London, August 8, 1893, to “Dear Willie” Keith, JMP microfilm, 7/04272. 22. Ibid. Keith regularly attended the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco and tried, without much success, to encourage Muir to attend. Both Scottish friends, however, enjoyed the company of the church’s pastor, Joseph Worcester. R. H. Limbaugh, John Muir’s ‘Stickeen’ and the Lessons of Nature (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1996), 53–54. 23. Brother Cornelius, I, 260. 24. Letter, John Muir, at sea, October 1903, to “Dear Willie” Keith, JMP microfilm, 13/07804. 25. Excerpt from letter, William Keith to wife, Grand Canyon Hotel, Williams, AZ, June 11, 1904, quoted in Linnie Marsh Wolfe notebook 83.29, MS 48, John Muir Papers, CStoc-WA. 26. Quoted in Brother Cornelius, I, 476.

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27. John Muir, The Yosemite (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1962), 200. 28. See, for example, C. F. Lummis’s description of Muir’s diet in “The Right Hand of the Continent,” Outlook 67 (January 1903): 13–19. 29. William Keith, “John Muir, the Geologist of the Yosemite,” ed. Robert Engberg, Pacific Historian 27 (Summer 1983): 47–51. 30. Mary Keith, “Biographical Sketch,” 18. 31. Charles Keeler, Personal Recollections of William Keith, TMS (typescript copy), February 6, 1927, in Inez Henderson Pond Papers, MS 10, Box 1, CStoc-WA. 32. Muir to Katherine Hooker, February 22, 1910, in MS 48, John Muir Papers, CStoc-WA. 33. Turbese Lummis Fiske and Keith Lummis, Charles F. Lummis: The Man and His West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 153. 34. The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, ed. Clara Barrus, vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 134–38. 35. Brother Cornelius, I, 349–53, 373–74. After the turn of the century Keith became more sympathetic toward the suffragists, even donating paintings to help his wife raise money for the cause. Upon his death in 1911 the National American Woman Suffrage Association included his name in memorial resolutions adopted for “prominent suffragists who had died during the year.” The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5, 320. 36. Mary Keith, “Biographical Sketch,” 18–19. 37. “The Biter Bitten,” The Wasp XLIX, no. 20 (May 16, 1903): 443. 38. Muir to Keith, December 23, 1901, reprinted in Brother Cornelius, vol. I, 386. 39. Letter, William Keith [SF], [ca. 1909], to “Dear Johnny,” in JMP microfilm, 18/10603. 40. Letter, John Muir, ca. April 1911, to “Dear Mr. Keith,” in JMP microfilm, 20/11316. 41. Brother Cornelius, I, 178–79, 385. 42. The Works of Robert Burns: With His Life by Allan Cunningham, vol. VIII (London: James Cochrane, 1834), 215, in John Muir Personal Library, CStoc-WA.

Part II2

Controversies

chapter four 1

Pride, Prejudice, and Patrimony

The Dispute Between George Wharton James and the Family and Friends of John Muir Ronald H. Limbaugh 12 John Muir’s death on Christmas eve in 1914 ended a remarkable life but at the same time opened an era of assessment that continues to this day. Like a martyred president glorified by the power of postmortem appraisal, Muir’s reputation as writer and environmental activist has grown larger than life. Today, Muir is celebrated in song and story, an authentic American hero for the postmodern age. As we have recently witnessed in the extraordinary presidential campaign of 2000, political reputations are built on sound bytes that may or may not be accurate or complete. Of course, spin-doctored images of candidates for office are different from the more reflective portrayals of historical figures, but the differences are more of degree than of substance. Both are subjective impressions sustained largely by dedicated followers motivated by personal and partisan desires. The effort by Muir’s family and friends to control the development of his biography is a well-known example of a practice all too common in family history. Unfortunately, the results are often counterproductive and only trigger new efforts to uncover the “facts,” however defined. 1

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Merely five days after “Papa” John Muir closed his eyes for the last time in a Los Angeles hospital and only a matter of hours after his internment at the family plot in Martinez, his grieving daughters received a bitter aftershock. George Wharton James, speaking at Switzer’s camp in the San Gabriel Mountains to a Sierra Club gathering, announced that he would write Muir’s biography and publish “portions of 100 letters” written by Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, his intimate “spiritual mother,” as scholar Bonnie Gisel calls her.1 This was appalling news, but hardly unexpected. For more than a decade, Muir and his family had tried to get those letters back from that “unscrupulous exminister,” as Muir had described him.2 To forestall James, Muir’s eldest daughter, Wanda, hastened to San Francisco and launched a legal counterattack. Consulting two attorneys, she had an injunction prepared and at the same time wired the Houghton Mifflin Company, Muir’s publisher, thus laying the groundwork for Letters to a Friend, the first, but fortunately for biographers and historians not the last, published version of John Muir’s evocative letters to Carr.3 A full exploration of the origins of this dispute is not developed here, as most of the details are covered in the introduction to Gisel’s book Kindred and Related Spirits. She explains why Muir was anxious to retrieve the letters. This essay addresses two related questions: why was James the object of so much enmity, and what happened to Muir’s letters after his death? A controversial figure long before he tangled with John Muir, George Wharton James had risen from poverty to affluence as a promoter and publicizer of the great American Southwest. He was born in England, of a pious but poor Methodist family who encouraged his early interest in church work. Coming to the American desert for his health in 1881—like so many others with respiratory problems in the late nineteenth century—he took up preaching and was eventually ordained. But wanderlust and marital controversy cut short his ministerial career. He was too fascinated with southwest Indians and scenery to settle down. His first wife eventually left him and obtained a divorce, on grounds of cruelty, after which the Methodist Church tossed him out—although it later recanted and restored his license. Disgraced and temporarily defrocked, yet seemingly far from discouraged, he found a new niche as explorer, writer, and lecturer, exploiting the insatiable popular market for travelogues about exotic people and places. Remarried in 1895 to a respectable widow with a family dedicated to enhancing his fame and fortune, by the turn of the century he was a well-known regional author and lecturer, living in Pasadena but traveling widely and churning out books and articles by the dozens.4

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Pasadena during its boom years as a rival to Los Angeles was also the home of Jeanne C. Carr, who with her husband, Ezra, had taken up fruit farming in their senior years on a small acreage they called “Carmelita.” As a profit-making enterprise, it was a notable failure, but as a pilgrimage for friends and literati, the Carr property buzzed with visitors. In the 1880s, during Muir’s own years as a fruit farmer in Martinez, he visited the Carrs occasionally and even helped them with their tree plantings.5 After more than a decade of experimentation, with limited resources and declining health, Professor Carr died in 1894.6 Widowed and living alone, Jeanne’s own health deteriorated rapidly. Yet she continued to entertain visitors, among them George Wharton James. After one visit, Carr wrote Muir, gently chiding him for not coming to see her more often: G Wharton James inquired if I had ever met Mr Muir; would like to make his acquaintance. “So would I; G Wharton, it should be made every seven years”; measured thus we shall soon need to be introduced.7 Whether Muir knew James at this time or had any qualms about him is not recorded, but it is clear that Carr and his letters to her were on his mind as she began showing the symptoms of what probably was Alzheimer’s disease, then called dementia. In 1897 he asked John P. Lukens, a Pasadena friend and fellow conservationist, to check on her condition and received alarming news that her mind was “nearly gone” and that she had been placed in a home for elderly women in San Francisco.8 How vigorously Muir pursued the Carr matter after that is unclear from the record; his extant papers include only two more inquiries prior to her death. Both were in 1901, the first asking Lukens for an update on her condition, the second, late in the year, mentioning his letters to her and claiming that she had “repeatedly promised” to return them. Lukens promised to help recover them but evidently could do nothing, presumably because by that time her court-appointed guardian, B. O. Kendall, had disposed of her personal effects. Carr lingered on until 1903, dying at the age of seventy-eight on her brother-in-law’s ranch in Ventura County.9 Unknown to Muir, sometime before her death Jeanne Carr promised James he could have Muir’s letters. At least that is what James later told Muir and his family, and there appear to be no grounds to doubt him. After all, however problematic today, neither Carr nor James seemed concerned about the ethical or legal issues posed by giving away—or worse yet publishing— Muir’s precious personal correspondence. Carr, of course, had intentionally

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helped launch Muir’s writing career in 1866 by unilaterally forwarding his rapturous letter describing Calypso borealis to his old college professor J. D. Butler, who promptly sent it to a Boston newspaper for publication.10 Neither Carr nor James had any legal training, and at that time, case law regarding the protection of literary rights was not well established or understood, especially by the general public. Moreover, by the mid-1890s Carr was isolated, depressed, and vulnerable when James began calling. She may have been impressed by his literary production and by his fervent desire to promote the careers of western writers, as he did so uncritically in later publications.11 James also claimed she was worried that Muir would burn the letters if they were returned to him. “If you let John Muir know you have these letters,” she allegedly told James, he will try to get them away from you to destroy them. This would be a great loss, and I want you to promise me that no matter what he says you will retain the letters and publish them, if the time for so doing seems to arise.12 James seemed not above manufacturing conversation to make a good story, and we have only his version of events, so it is well to remain skeptical about what he reports Carr had told him. Considering that the letters might have contained passages that could prove embarrassing to either Muir or Carr if made a matter of public record, it is hard to imagine a rational person giving personal correspondence to a stranger, especially one with a clouded reputation. But this begs the question as to Carr’s mental state: was she wholly rational when she listened to the fervent appeal of a literary promoter who proposed to tell the world about John Muir? James doubtless allayed any concerns she may have expressed by telling her what he later told Muir: that he would do nothing to hurt Muir’s reputation and would not publish any material of a “purely personal nature.”13 Carr’s mental debility spared her from further thoughts regarding James or his avowed promise to promote Muir. Had she been aware of the literary crucifixion James suffered in 1901 at the hands of Charles Fletcher Lummis, she doubtless would have reconsidered the bargain. Editor of Land of Sunshine, Southern California’s best literary journal, with a half-dozen books published and a long list of lectures and articles promoting Indian rights, local history, regional literature, and other causes, Lummis was the most respected, if not the most popular, “expert” on the land and its culture. Perhaps he was also jealous of the infringement on what he considered his turf.

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A cultivated intellect with a Harvard degree, he was incensed by the slipshod scholarship of the poorly educated James. In a venomous review-essay, after reminding readers that James had been “degraded from the pulpit after full trial, for unspeakable vileness,” Lummis proved that the ex-preacher’s purported eyewitness narrative of the Navajo fire dance had actually been lifted almost verbatim from an unacknowledged source. But in labeling James a plagiarist, a liar, and a thief, Lummis, as one biographer concluded, “comes off the loser.” Lummis’s reputation was diminished by this episode, while James, though hurt, continued to reach popular audiences and eventually earned the respect of at least some members of the academic community.14 In 1901, John Muir had not yet met Wharton James, but Muir and Lummis had been friends for years.15 They shared mutual interests and the same social circles. A skilled photographer, Lummis brought his camera to Martinez on an extended visit to the Muir home about the time of his blistering editorial on James. No mention of James appears in their voluminous correspondence, but it seems likely that the former minister and his unseemly affairs were regular topics of conversation whenever the Muir and Lummis families got together. Given this background, Muir’s reaction to the news that James had the Carr letters is understandable. Some time after receiving several cartons from Carr’s executor—how long is uncertain, since the date he acquired them is unrecorded—James selected several poignant Muir letters and used them in two laudatory articles he prepared for publication. The first appeared in a San Francisco literary quarterly in December 1904. The second was published three months later in The Craftsman, a literary journal of which James was associate editor. Not a stickler for details, James was more interested in speculating on the meaning of the Muir-Carr relationship than in getting his facts straight. Both articles began with a preface emphasizing Carr’s role as “guiding force” and “confidant” to Muir. In the first essay, after introducing Mrs. Carr as Muir’s “literary mother,” James wrote, erroneously, that the Carrs had arrived in California before Muir and then had induced him to “pay them a visit.” Once here, he continued, Muir went to Yosemite and was completely bewitched by its charms. What follows is a passage describing Muir’s spiritual quest that, had the eclectic James lived a century later, might have been paraphrased from Harry Potter. “And what a joy such a witchery is!” he gushed. James actually saw Muir not as wizard but as prophet, returning from the wilderness like Moses to preach Nature’s lessons. Yet James was not content to let Muir be “his own man,” to quote a recent politician. In both articles, the main thrust was Muir’s debt to Jeanne Carr. In the first, James said

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Carr was Muir’s “guiding star” who “led him into the noble paths of life, and then kept him there.” We may beat about the bush all we will [he concluded], but there is a spiritual potency in the love of a good, elderly woman for a young man that will stimulate him to his highest and best endeavors. Such was the relationship between these two, and John Muir is what he is today largely owing to the earlier impulses given to his soul by this highly intellectual and deeply spiritual woman.16 The second article, an elaboration of the same theme sandwiched together in scissors-and-paste style between lengthy quotations, began with a series of excerpts from several early Muir letters, illustrating the California Scot’s wide range of emotions as well as his descriptive powers. Readers learned of Muir’s “desire to be a Humboldt,” the depths of his agony after the eye accident, and his first descriptions of Yosemite and the southern Sierra. The article ended with a paraphrased version of Muir’s heroics in rescuing S. Hall Young after his fall on a mountain in the Alaskan panhandle.17 In between was a reiteration of Muir’s obligation to his “spiritual mother”: [W]hile the honor which attaches to the self-made man, can not be taken away from Mr. Muir, the gift of his personality and accomplishments to the Nation and the world is jointly due to himself, as the active, and the kindly enlightened woman, as the passive agent; each force being absolutely necessary to the other.18 Muir apparently first learned of these publications from James himself and was furious.“He had the impudence to send me a lot [of copies],” he complained in a letter to Robert Underwood Johnson. “I wrote & told him he had no right to publish or keep those letters, & he answered never a word.”19 Muir’s response is revealing: it shows that his primary concerns were not what he said or did that he did not want others to know, but that he had lost control over his own creative works and that James might profit at his expense. This “unscrupulous ex-minister . . . tries to get hold of anything in any way to make money,” he told Johnson.“One of [those published letters] would make a good magazine article.” He thought of suing for their recovery but decided against it.20 Yet Muir also suffered a common malady: author’s pride. “I kept no copy of them or notes,” Muir explained to his editor, “& if I can’t get them away from James I would rather let him publish them notwithstanding the fringe

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of sentimental rubbish he draws around them.” Apparently, Muir worried more about getting credit than about exposing the contents of those letters. For years, James remained mute to Muir’s written demand that the letters be returned. Clearly, he was hurt by Muir’s scornful response to his friendly entreaties, however naive, but he was not yet ready to confront him. Perhaps he hoped the great naturalist would cool down, but instead Muir boiled in resentment and heaped abuse on James at every opportunity. Finally in 1908, after James had a talk with John Burroughs and worried by the effect of Muir’s constant carping, James penned an obsequious apology. He said he acted only from the noblest of motives—to bring Muir’s soulful wilderness message to a larger audience. Humbling himself before the master, James wrote that “I have too long loved you and revered you and reveled with joy in your work to do or say one single thing that would not glorify you and your work.”21 But return the letters—the one thing Muir wanted—James refused to do. Frustrated by the impasse and too bitter to address James directly, Muir stewed and fretted, now alone in the Big House at Martinez after his wife, Louie, died in 1905. His daughter Helen was at Daggett, still recuperating from respiratory problems but also taking interest in a handsome neighborhood young man who would soon be her husband. His other daughter, Wanda, had married a young engineer she had met in Berkeley. They lived nearby, but with household and motherly chores of her own, the elder daughter could not devote as much time to her father’s needs as she had done earlier. To relieve the loneliness and the drudgery of writing, Muir frequently caught the train at “Muir Station,” virtually at his doorstep, and headed for town. He often took day trips to San Francisco to have lunch with William Keith and other friends or rode south for a longer stay with Helen. Occasionally on these southern California excursions he stopped at Pasadena for a visit with Lukens and a coterie of friends that included Colonel A. H. Sellers and John D. Hooker, both retired midwestern businessmen who, like thousands of others, came west to enjoy their twilight years in the “land of sunshine.” Wherever he went in these latter years and whenever he was with trusted friends, he told engaging stories, but invariably the conversation got around to “book making,” as Muir liked to call his writing career. With thousands of pages of journals and notes scattered around his “scribble den” and with fan mail pouring in and book dealers practically camping at his doorstep, he felt tremendous pressure to publish. Muir’s celebrity status and his almost desperate desire to finish his life’s work are parts of the emotional calculus that must be factored into any consideration of the motives behind his dispute with James. He had always relied on previous writings—journal notes,

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published correspondence, early articles—to provide grist for new material. A captivating Yosemite book was imperative after the Hetch Hetchy fight began, but most of Muir’s original journals had been lost or given away, and he needed those letters to Carr to refresh his memories. His southern California friends heard this lament with increased urgency after 1908, during the writing of The Yosemite. Unfortunately for Muir and for generations of readers, he got the letters too late to put them to use. The book came out in 1912, an undistinguished rehash of old publications and secondhand notes, probably the most forgettable of his collected works. Early in 1909, following Muir’s Christmas visit to southern California, Sellers devised a strategy to recover the precious letters—or at least copies— and enlisted the help of A. C. Vroman, Pasadena’s foremost book dealer. Sellers explained the plan to Muir, who gave them his blessing. Vroman’s role as mediator is crucial, for he had earned the respect of both authors and, indeed, looked forward to selling more of their books in his store. He called James, told him Muir was “very friendly” but needed copies of the letters for his autobiography, and asked him to meet Muir to agree on terms and conditions. James jumped at the chance. It offered a way to ease the rift and still keep Muir from getting the originals.22 Anxious to hold James to the bargain before he left on a lecture tour, Sellers urged Muir to come to Pasadena as quickly as possible. The elder man deferred at first, citing his heavy involvement in the Hetch Hetchy fight, but promised to be in Pasadena late in January after a short visit to Helen.23 On January 23 the two principals met at Vroman’s. James later described it as a cordial meeting, but Muir said little, and the atmosphere must have been chilling. His terse note to Helen that he “got the desired letters to be copied and returned to him” speaks volumes. James recalled turning over the originals only on Muir’s promise not to destroy them, although James agreed that “if on going over the letters he found some parts of a purely personal nature that he wished to destroy, he had my full permission to do this.”24 Immediately upon receiving Carr’s quaint package—the letters were folded into plain envelopes and pasted somewhat randomly in a bound volume of blank certificates from the State Board of Public Instruction—Muir turned them over to a waiting secretary, evidently hired by Vroman for the purpose. She sat in the back of Vroman’s store, typing furiously. In three days she had completed the job, producing a ribbon copy and a carbon.25 Muir kept the originals for three months, comparing them to the copies and preparing a deletion list. During the process he had help from his Pasadena friends. As Mrs. Sellers later explained to Wanda:

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I remember so well the day we sat in the library of my home, looking over the same letters, and the remarks your father made as each letter was read, and after too, when they had been returned to Dr. James.26 By April the task was done. Muir, with great aplomb, dutifully packaged the originals and personally returned them to James, along with an envelope on which he had prepared a list of requested expurgations. Not wishing to mutilate the letters himself, James gave them back. “I told him to cut [them] out for himself,” he later recalled. Whether the letters were excised on the spot or sometime afterward is not clear, but James eventually received the sanitized originals, and Muir placed the emended copies in his safe deposit box at a Martinez bank.27 This phase of the Muir-James dispute thus ended quietly and peacefully, though Muir and his family knew there could be no end to the matter so long as James had the letters and intended to use them. Six years later, rushing to print with a collection of doctored copies seemed to Muir’s heirs the only way to prevent a publishing “calamity,” as Wanda described the proposal she had received from James three weeks after he announced his intentions publicly.28 His letter, dated January 16, 1915, sought permission to use the letters and claimed that Muir had explicitly approved the project. He told Wanda that her father personally went over these letters, had copies of them all made, eliminated everything he felt did not belong to the public, & returned them to me with the statement that when he was gone, if I wished to publish them he would have no objection. Thus edited by him, I feel there can be no reason why they should not be given to the world. . . . To ease any interpretive concerns, James said he would seek advice from Sierra Club members in crafting the text and offered to let the heirs review the manuscript prior to publication. He also added a disarming proviso regarding the letters: “. . . If for any reason you & your sister would prefer that they be held, I will gladly heed your wishes & keep them.”29 No one could mistake the tone of Wanda’s reply a week later: “Personally, I am very much opposed to having these letters published and do not wish you to do so.”30 Since James had made it clear he would “gladly” cancel publication plans if the daughters objected, why didn’t the matter end here? What harm could James do with unpublished letters from which all sensitive

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material had been removed? Today, with literary rights securely protected by both statute and case law and with conservative judges and savvy copyright lawyers eager to defend the interests of injured clients, it does not seem reasonable to assume that a popular author would risk the consequences of publishing protected literary property without consent of the copyright owners. But to Muir’s family and friends the issue was not legal but moral, not a matter of copyright but a matter of trust. Would James keep his word? Fay Sellers made the issue clear when she told Wanda that her father “didn’t care for” James.31 A letter from Sarah McChesney, an animal rights advocate and feminist, the wife of teacher J. B. McChesney, with whom Muir stayed in Oakland in the 1870s, reinforced the point: “You are quite right to guard [your father’s] . . . memory against such a man as G. R. James.”32 C. W. Carruth, an old Muir friend, called James a “gifted pirate,” while an unidentified Berkeley colleague, when she heard of James’ intentions, said it “must have been nothing but a blackmailing scheme from the start.”33 Loudest, and most articulate, in this critical chorus of family advisers was a familiar voice. Charles F. Lummis spared few words in describing his old adversary. James is “a notorious dead-beat and thief and liar,” he told Wanda, “though a man of real talent and of wide experience. If he knew enough to be honest he would be a strong character. But even his books are permeated by his inability to tell the truth all the time.”34 Bolstered by such opinions, Wanda steeled herself for a fight in court. Though Helen was supportive, she stayed in Daggett, recovering from a dangerous bout with typhus, leaving her older sister to handle all the paperwork. Wanda also had to deal with the press. The Hearst papers, always given to hyperbole, called the case “unique in the annals of California.” Reporters cornered the principles and peppered them with questions, sending back halfbaked stories, confusing readers, and occasionally making up details. One account identified Mrs. Carr as Muir’s “cousin”; another said the heirs were in a race with a Los Angeles “woman” to publish Muir’s letters.35 For his part, James played to the crowd, an innocent victim of feminine wrath. “It is too small an affair to be bothered with,” he sniffed.“Had the heirs . . . told me they perferred [sic] not to have the letters published, I certainly would not have gone to the trouble I have in the matter.”36 Though Wanda received legal advice prior to filing the injunction, she did not understand the copyright laws. She told Fay Sellers that she had gone to court to stop James from “using the letters” and that she would also “copyright them if he has not already done so.”37 She warned Sellers to keep the matter quiet, believing it was critical to keep James in the dark until a stay

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was issued prohibiting his use of the letters. Sellers’s response was sympathetic but equally confused about the legal implications: “I am afraid nothing can be done legally to prevent Mr James from using these letters,” she lamented, “as your Father knew about them, and did not bring suit to recover them. Do you think you could copyright the copies?”38 One member of the Hanna household had a better grasp of the law. Wanda’s husband, Tom, had had “several talks” with his father-in-law about the James affair before Muir died and asked an attorney for advice. The lawyer made it clear that James had no legal grounds to publish any letters by Muir without permission. As Hanna later told a family friend: “The right of publication belongs with the author or his heirs.”39 Why he didn’t explain this basic principle, still valid today, to his wife is a mystery only if we assume Wanda had confidence that the courts could stop James. In truth, James was a maverick, seemingly capable of any possible breach of literary etiquette. Ignoring Wanda’s letter of refusal just as he had ignored Muir’s earlier demand, James’s first inclination was to publish the letters regardless of the family’s wishes. His attitude was clearly revealed to a reporter after news of the injunction hit the press. Disputing the cause of action, he explained what he had written to Wanda but added: My letter must have read that I would not publish the letters under any circumstances without her permission. This I did not intend to ask as I considered her father’s permission the only one necessary.40 A few days later, still defiant, James told another journalist: [T]he originals belong to me by right of gift from Jeannie Carr. That I allowed Mr. Muir to make copies and to edit them might have been remembered by his heirs before they listened to legal advice and filed this injunction.41 Faced with an intransigent adversary, Wanda felt she had no choice but to proceed with a twofold strategy: first, use the courts to stop James from publishing the letters, and second, forestall any future threat by copyrighting and publishing them in a limited family edition that she hoped would never be circulated widely. Stopping James proved easy, once lawyers were involved. At first vowing to “fight the matter through all the courts if necessary,” James inevitably

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fig. 4.1. Newspaper clipping on Hanna and George Wharton James suit. James Eastman Shone Collection of Muiriana, MSS 301, HoltAtherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, ©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

bowed to his attorney’s advice to sign an out-of-court agreement by which neither side would take any further action and neither James nor “anyone else” would publish the letters in his possession. As Wanda’s lawyer explained, this “let Mr. James down rather easily” by making it appear that “Mr. James had freely and voluntarily withdrawn his right to the publication of the letters, and at the same time it protected the estate.”42 Publishing a limited edition was equally simple, though controlling circulation proved impossible. Initially Wanda thought that a formal registration of copyright in Washington would be enough to prevent any unauthorized use of her father’s letters, but Houghton Mifflin editors convinced her it would be prudent to publish a copyrighted limited edition and offer it for sale to provide double protection. Aware that several of Muir’s friends had already read the letters, she and Helen agreed to publish two hundred copies

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of the book. At first they thought of buying all of them to prevent distribution but reluctantly bowed to their publisher’s advice and agreed to a very controlled marketing. As Wanda later explained to Carr’s son Edward: “I did not wish to have any sold but it seemed the only way to prevent their general publication.”43 Wanda also understood the literary significance of the letters, as she made clear to Helen: “There is very little of a personal nature in them and they are as beautiful, I think, as anything he ever wrote.”44 Houghton Mifflin’s circular announcing the limited edition excited Muir fans, but dealers had great difficulty obtaining copies. Vroman, who had read the manuscript letters and thought “every library in this country should have a copy,” received about twenty-five books from the publisher and was sold out in a matter of hours.45 San Francisco dealers got another twenty-five, and of those, Wanda purchased six to add to the twelve copies she and Helen received directly from the publisher.46 A would-be author, planning a biography of Muir but finding no copies of Letters available, pleaded with Houghton Mifflin to let him borrow the proof sheets. The publisher was unmoved. One of Houghton’s editors, anticipating a complete series even before the heirs had time to consider it, responded with a lesson in humility: unauthorized biographers should not expect access to Muir’s letters prior to the publication of an authorized edition.47 Despite Helen’s resistance to any quick publishing decisions, she and her sister felt the pressure of friends and publishers.48 That Muir had been working on an Alaska book just before he died was common knowledge. In his later years, he had discussed several book plans with various publishers and in several notebooks had roughed out book titles and chapter contents. Many old friends had visited Muir at the Big House in Martinez and had seen the piles of manuscripts that littered the floor. Houghton Mifflin editors were so confident the heirs would accept the inevitable call for a collected edition that they kept the type of Letters to a Friend so it could be reprinted when the timing was right. Three months after Letters came out, Helen and Wanda appointed William Frederic Badè as literary executor of the Muir estate. A religious scholar of Moravian descent who came west in 1903 to teach at Pacific Theological Seminary (later renamed Pacific School of Religion), Badè loved the mountains. He joined the Sierra Club his first year in California and rose swiftly in the ranks, serving as director, book review editor, and later as president. During the Hetch Hetchy campaign Badè was a dedicated fighter, Muir’s left hand as much as William F. Colby was Muir’s right. He seemed the “logical choice” to edit Muir’s unpublished papers.

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In the aftermath of the James dispute, Badè’s role as literary executor was critical. His first task was to win the confidence of Muir’s daughters. Helen was especially wary of losing control of her father’s papers. Just before Badè’s appointment she made her views clear to Wanda: Now as to what my ideas about the rest of the manuscript[s] are. Simply this—I dont want anything more published, and if you will stop and think you will remember how Papa felt about his notes and all unfinished papers and will see that in refusing to let any of them be published now I am simply carrying out what I know to be his wishes regarding them. Let them stay in the bank vault now and when I come up we can talk over dividing them and what shall be done with them when you and I are ready to pass out [on?] . . . 49 Badè eased her concerns in their first meeting. Cautious and deliberative, he was not anxious to publish anything without first, mastering the subject and second, exhausting all the sources of information. Above all, he impressed on the two heirs the need to collect all of Muir’s written works before they were lost. He urged them to save everything in the nature of magazines, papers, and correspondence, so that nothing may be lost that would be helpful for the reconstruction of the sequence of events and data referred to in his writings and letters. The most insignificant scrap, apparently worthless, may assume importance in the reconstruction of the ensemble.50 Colby later wrote that Badè “turned into a veritable Sherlock Holmes and ran down clues of every available sort until he had amassed either the originals or at least copies of most of Muir’s voluminous correspondence.”51 The heirs took comfort in his meticulous scholarship, and they apparently accepted his rationale for thoroughness without serious reservation. Adroitly, Badè also broached the touchy James affair. To help fill the “many gaps” in Muir’s correspondence, Badè posed a hypothetical question to Wanda: I wonder whether James will some time give me access to his series for comparison. So far as HE is concerned he ought to be

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favorably disposed towards any request I may make, for I have often given him assistance. I congratulate you and your husband on the success with which you have circumvented him.52 Securing Muir’s original letters to Carr became a high priority once Badè took charge of the family papers, which the heirs allowed him to place securely at Pacific School of Religion. James, having few options, was receptive to Badè’s solicitations. In August 1916, the first packet of sixty-five letters arrived in Berkeley from Pasadena, with a promise of more to come. Although James meant it as a gift, Badè promised to pay $100 for the first shipment and $3.00 a letter for any others—though he didn’t say when James would be paid. A check from the Muir Estate arrived five years later. In the meantime, James had located six more letters and had assured Badè that he would keep his eye out for more that might still be buried amid the cartons of Carr papers he had not thoroughly searched.53 Though Badè relentlessly pursued the matter, James never fulfilled his promise. In June 1923, he wrote that he was too ill to look further and—mimicking Muir—was going to the mountains to recuperate. But later that year he died in a St. Helena, California, sanitarium. Less than a week after hearing the news, Badè sent condolences to his widow, Emma, and in the same note asked for the material promised by her late husband. Not wishing to appear stingy as well as insensitive, he added that for any useful letter he received he would pay a “reasonable sum.”54 Her son-in-law, Elmer Hall, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, put him off with a curt note: “We are not yet ready to take up the matter of my father-in-law’s literary papers.”55 By no means discouraged, Badè followed up a month later, now pledging $6.00 per item and expanding his request to any letters by Muir or by mutual friends of Muir and Carr. Surprisingly, James’s heirs were not antagonized by this dogged pursuit. In January 1924, Hall arrived at Badè’s office with nine more letters his sister-in-law had found after rummaging through the Carr material. Still not satisfied, Badè asked for another search. He knew there were twenty or more letters still missing from the list he had prepared after analyzing Carr’s notes. He told Hall’s sister-in-law, Edith Farnsworth, who had taken over the housekeeping chores for her mother in Pasadena, to look carefully for the missing letters but also to send him “all the miscellaneous correspondence and papers and books left by Mrs. Carr on the chance that there are here and there broken notes of correspondence with her friends. . . .”56 James’s son-in-law was back in Badè’s office three months later, this time with a small package containing soul-searching letters between Elvira

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Hutchings, Jeanne Carr, and John Muir. They dispelled the last mysteries behind the mutilated letters in the Muir-Carr correspondence—enough to excite even the stolid professor of religion. Mercenary but professional to the core, Badè wrote Hall later that the Hutchings letter and Carr items enclosed with it are of such interest to me that I gladly enclose a check for $6.00, hoping that this may seem satisfactory to you and Miss Farnsworth. As I think I told you recently, the Hutchings letter furnishes the broken ends of a situation which becomes wholly clear through other papers in my hands.57 Badè reinforced the point in a letter to James’s widow, Emma, over a year later. Agreeing with her comment that the “Hutchings-Muir-Carr complex . . . should be allowed to slumber,” he wrote: “In any case I now have enough documentary evidence to settle any questions that may arise about it.”58 Though he tried to remain neutral in the aftermath of the dispute, Badè was caught between the two contending parties. To cultivate the James heirs, he played to their emotions, expressing sympathy at the loss of the family patriarch and professing friendship to a man loathed by Badè’s employers, Wanda and Helen. His dilemma is clearly revealed in his response to a letter from Emma James, written nearly a year after her husband died. His widow, now out of mourning, decided it was time to speak out. She felt her mate had been badly treated, and she made her feelings clear to Badè: My first husband and I knew Mrs. Carr long before Mr. James met her, and it has been distasteful for me to go over her correspondence and papers, or let anyone else do so, remembering the Golden Rule. Of course Mr. James was not to blame because she gave these things to him, with a special request in regard to the Muir letters. In order to avoid unpleasantness he permitted Muir to expurgate to suit himself, and I considered it a great injustice to him when the Muir heirs made such a fuss. I should have respected them more if they had pursued a different course. I did not know he had sold those letters to you until after his death, but under the circumstances suppose it was permissible.59 Badè’s reply a few days later was a masterpiece in the literature of selfjustification. It should, however, be understood in the context of the times.

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In the same year as Badè’s letter, Bruce Barton wrote a best-selling tract on the “real Jesus,” a classic defense of the business mentality of the twenties.60 Whether or not the Berkeley professor of religion ever read Barton is unknown, but thinking of Jesus as businessman might have inspired this characteristic response: What you say about the unjust treatment meted out to your husband by the heirs of John Muir, has been known to me, for I learned of it in various ways and also through your husband who told me about it in considerable detail. In my capacity as the biographer of John Muir, I was hardly in a position to take sides, but I presented your husband’s view of the case to the Hannas and represented to them that Mr. James was fully entitled to a remuneration for the letters, although in justice to him, I ought to say that he turned them over to me quite freely and they were in my safe for a long time before I paid him an agreed sum, I think $100, for them. This was done, not because Mr. James asked for it, but because I insisted that it was the only right thing to do. . . . Your husband and I were good friends unto the end and I think he realized that I desired to have the right thing done so far as lay in my power.61 Badè’s quest for Muir material ended with the completion of his twovolume biography, The Life and Letters of John Muir, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1923. From his perspective, there was little more to say. He had gathered all the evidence and filled in all the gaps, but devotion to the Muir legend, even more than loyalty to the Muir heirs, kept him from exposing any possible impropriety. Even the master’s style had to be cleansed prior to publication. Badè was a heavy-handed editor, altering words and phrases, correcting punctuation and spelling, even manufacturing sentences when he felt it necessary. Houghton Mifflin editors, in keeping with modern editorial standards, tried to protect the integrity of the original text, but Badè appealed to higher authority whenever a dispute arose. For example, while galleys of Cruise of the Corwin were being prepared, he wrote a testy letter to the publisher: It is apparent . . . that Mr. Allen, if he has had charge of the editing, intends to pass informalities of style and grammar to which the Muir sisters are strongly opposed. Mrs. Hanna and her husband

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were here recently and they were very emphatic on this point. Knowing how Muir felt about this matter, I share their feelings.62 A copy of this letter went to Wanda, along with both explanation and justification. Badè said he sent her the copy merely because I wish you to be informed about any pressure which I am exerting to prevent Muir’s writings from being pushed into publicity with the raw edges showing. One man on the editorial staff of Houghton Mifflin has edited Thoreau’s works in a very verbatim and literal manner, much to the detriment of the reputation of Thoreau, as Mr. Muir used to say. Publishers are, of course, anxious to make posthumous published material appear either more finished than it is, or else as little finished as possible in order to appeal to that public curiousity [sic] which likes to see a noted author entirely off his literary guard. I think it undesirable to yield to either of these desires. . . . 63 Badè’s literary responsibilities ended with the publication of Letters, the capstone of a widely distributed and highly popular multivolume series still being reprinted in one format or another. For nearly sixty years Muir readers were spared the personal details of his life, the mixture of pride and prejudice, the filial complications of patrimony that had been collected and suppressed by Badè in cooperation with the heirs. The first hints of a more complex and more human personality hiding behind an apotheosized image of the great naturalist came only after the family papers were deposited at the University of the Pacific in 1970. Missing were the sensitive letters Badè had recovered from James, but enough clues remained to begin the postmodern reconstruction that still continues today.

1 2

Notes 1. Clipping from Pasadena Star, December 29, 1914, in John Muir Papers, Badè series, MS 48, Holt-Atherton Special Collections Library, University of the Pacific, hereafter cited as CStoc-WA; Bonnie J. Gisel, ed., Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 6.

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2. John Muir to RU Johnson, December 15, 1906, John Muir Papers, microfilm 16/08986, hereafter JMP microfilm. 3. Wanda Muir to Fay Sellers, January [27], 1915, photocopy, Sherry Hanna collection, CStoc-WA. 4. Roger Keith Larson, Controversial James: An Essay on the Life and Work of George Wharton James (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1991), 2–35; Peter Wild, George Wharton James, Boise State University Western Writers Series no. 93 (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1990), 8–19. 5. Elizabeth Pomeroy, John Muir in Southern California (Pasadena: Castle Press, 1999), 10. 6. Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 267–80. 7. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, Pasadena, December 18, 1894, JMP, microfilm 8/04719. 8. Muir to Theodore P. Lukens, June 10, 1897; Lukens to Muir, June 12, 1897, JMP, microfilm 9/05547, 9/05549. 9. Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 282–86. 10. William F. and Maymie B. Kimes, John Muir: A Reading Bibliography (Fresno, CA: Panorama West Books, 1986), 1. 11. Larson, Controversial James, 65. 12. G. W. James, quoted in Pasadena Star, February 13, 1915, 1. 13. James to Muir, July 16, 1908, copy in Badè series, MS 48, CStoc-WA; Pasadena Star, February 13, 1915, 1. 14. Wild, George Wharton James, 25–34; Larson, Controversial James, 36–38; 62–63. 15. Pomeroy, John Muir in Southern California, 21–25. 16. George Wharton James, “John Muir: An Appreciation,” Impressions Quarterly (December 1904): 106–8. 17. Ibid., 644–67. 18. George W. James, “John Muir: Geologist, Explorer, Naturalist,” The Craftsman (March 1905): 643. 19. John Muir to RU Johnson, December 15, 1906, JMP, microfilm 16/08986. 20. Fay H. Sellers to Wanda Muir Hanna, January 14, 1915, in Sherry Hanna collection, MS 48, CStoc-WA. 21. G. W. James to John Muir, July 16, 1908, JMP, microfilm 17/09826. 22. A. H. Sellers to John Muir, January 11, 1909, JMP, microfilm 18/10093. 23. Sellers to Muir, January 15, 1909, JMP, microfilm 18/10101; Muir to Sellers, January 18, 1909, JMP, microfilm 18/10104. 24. G. Wharton James, interview in Pasadena Star, February 13, 1915, 1. 25. John Muir to Helen Muir, January 25, 1909, JMP, microfilm 18/10111. 26. Fay H. Sellers to Wanda Muir Hanna, June 8, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 27. James interview, Pasadena Star, February 13, 1915, 1.

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28. Wanda Muir Hanna to Fay Sellers, [ca. January 27, 1915], MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 29. G. W. James to Wanda Muir Hanna, January 16, 1915, Badè Papers, box 6, MS 48, CStoc-WA 30. Wanda Muir Hanna to G. W. James, January 23, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 31. Fay H. Sellers to Wanda Muir Hanna, January 14, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 32. Sarah J. McChesney to Wanda Muir Hanna, February 8, 1914[5], MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 33. C. W. Carruth to Wanda Muir Hanna, February 22, 1915; unidentified author to Wanda Muir Hanna, February 16, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 34. Charles F. Lummis to Wanda Muir Hanna, February 15, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 35. Los Angeles Examiner, February 4, 1915, 1; clipping from unidentified paper, February 2, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna collection, CStoc-WA. 36. G. W. James, interview in San Francisco Examiner, February 5, 1915, 1. 37. Wanda Muir Hanna to Fay Sellers, [ca. 27 January 1915], MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 38. Fay H. Sellers to Wanda Muir Hanna, January 30, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 39. Thomas Hanna to unknown family friend, March 12, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 40. G. W. James, interview in Los Angeles Examiner, February 4, 1915, 1. 41. G. W. James, interview in Pasadena Star, February 13, 1915, 1. 42. William C. Crittenden, letter to “Executors of the Estate of John Muir,” June 4, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 43. Wanda Muir Hanna to Edward C. Carr, March 19, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 44. Wanda Muir Hanna to Helen Muir Funk, February 18, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 45. Fay H. Sellers to Wanda Muir, June 8, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 46. Wanda Muir Hanna to Helen Muir Funk, April 5, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 47. Charles N. Eliot to Houghton Mifflin Co., ca. April 1915; Houghton Mifflin Co. to Charles N. Eliot, May 7, 1915, Badè papers, MS48, CStoc-WA. 48. Helen Muir Funk to Wanda Muir Hanna, April 17, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 49. Helen Muir Funk to Wanda Muir Hanna, April 17, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA.

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50. William F. Badè to Wanda Muir Hanna, May 9, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 51. William F. Colby, “William Frederic Badè, 1871–1936,” Sierra Club Bulletin (reprint, 1937), 6. 52. William F. Badè to Wanda Muir Hanna, May 9, 1915, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 53. W. F. Badè to G. W. James, August 24, 1916, April 3, 1917; G. W. James to W. F. Badè, November 15, 1921, MS 48, Badè series, CStoc-WA. 54. G. W. James to W. F. Badè, June 17, 1923; W. F. Badè to Mrs. George Wharton James, November 13, 1923, MS 48, Badè series, CStoc-WA. 55. Elmer E. Hall to W. F. Badè, November 19, 1923, MS 48, Badè series, CStoc-WA. 56. W. F. Badè to Edith E. Farnsworth, January 2, 1924, MS 48, Badè series, CStoc-WA. 57. W. F. Badè to Elmer Hall, April 3, 1924, MS 48, Badè series, CStoc-WA. 58. W. F. Badè to Mrs. G. W. James, September 10, 1925, Badè series, CStoc-WA. 59. Emma James to W. F. Badè, September 22, 1924, MS 48, Badè series, CStoc-WA. 60. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (1924; reprint Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1925). 61. W. F. Badè to Mrs. G. W. James, October 10, 1924, MS 48, Badè series, CStocWA. 62. W. F. Badè to Ferris Greenslet, September 17, 1917, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA. 63. W. F. Badè to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas R. Hanna, September 19, 1917, MS 48, Sherry Hanna Collection, CStoc-WA.

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chapter five 1

“Wealth and Beauty”

John Muir and Forest Conservation Ronald Eber 12 John Muir was a lover of trees and forests. Upon leaving his home in Wisconsin, he “went off strolling into the woods botanizing.”1 By the late 1800s, he was the national spokesman for a new appreciation of the American wilderness and the leading public advocate for the protection of America’s forests from destruction and waste. To Muir, mountain wilderness and forests were places of indispensable natural wealth and beauty. They had both material and spiritual value. Reconciling the emerging conflict between these broad values was difficult for Muir, as it is for conservationists today. Muir’s views about how a “civilized nation” should “care” for the nation’s great forests are the focus of this chapter.2 Muir’s inspirational writings have primarily been used to support the establishment of national parks, monuments, and wilderness areas and more recently to stop commercial logging in national forests. However, Muir recognized logging and timber management as legitimate uses of public forestlands. His ideas about the need to protect forests and the appropriate use and management of forestlands are not as well known as his ideas about the need to establish national parks and other preserves. Muir’s specific role in the establishment of Federal Forest Reserves and the subsequent National Forest System has received some study, but a thorough analysis has not been undertaken and is beyond the scope of this chapter. 1

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fig. 5.1. John Muir poses in front of a tree [August 1902]. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

This chapter will look at the evolution of Muir’s writings about forests and forest management in the context of his time and examine the different reasons Muir uses to explain why and how the nation’s forests should be protected. Specifically, it will examine the early influences on Muir’s ideas about forestry and his shifting views between 1876 and 1898 about (1) the value and importance of forests; (2) the harm caused to forests by various activities, especially grazing and timber cutting; and (3) the need for the preservation and conservation of forests. Finally, it will speculate on what Muir’s views might be on some of today’s forestry issues. Hopefully a careful analysis of

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his views will emerge that can guide the followers of John Muir involved in today’s crusades concerning the use and management of the public lands in the National Forest System.

Preaching God’s Forestry Muir’s writings remained fairly constant about the need to preserve forests, but he clearly shifted his emphasis on why they should be protected. Muir continually preached a new appreciation of nature and the American wilderness. His first essays and articles on the forests of the Sierra were descriptive of the trees and set forth Muir’s great love for his new home in the wilderness.3 To Muir, mountain wilderness was a sacred place—to be revered rather than abused. He recognized that people needed wilderness to escape the pressures of modern life and that the mountains and forests are not only important sources of timber but also “fountains of life.”4 His views were inspired by the leaders of the transcendental movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They popularized a new view of nature that celebrated its beauty as sacred, emphasizing the spiritual rather than material values of wild nature. This view urged the preservation of forests and wild places for the public to use and enjoy for contemplation or recreation. These views are clearly evident in all of Muir’s earliest writings about the Sierra wilderness and the nation’s extensive forestlands.5 As Muir’s exploration of the Sierra continued in the early 1870s, he began to take note of the extensive logging and sheep grazing that was harming Yosemite Valley, the giant sequoia trees, and the beauty of the Sierra. It was in the Sierra Nevada that Muir became alarmed about the increasing harm caused by the indiscriminate grazing and logging to the forests he loved. This angered Muir and motivated him in 1876 to first speak out against the “pure destruction” he witnessed, to urge the protection of these important areas to an increasingly interested public audience.6 At this time, Muir’s emphasis shifted about why the forests should be protected. His articles after 1876 began to emphasize the practical value of forests and their use for material gain more than only their spiritual values. The foundation for this new emphasis and the development of Muir’s views can be traced to the popular scientific ideas of the time. Muir’s thinking about forests was most strongly influenced by the epic book Man and Nature, written in 1864 by George Perkins Marsh. Marsh was a lawyer, congressman, historian, and foreign diplomat in Italy from Woodstock, Vermont. His book is considered the “fountainhead of the conservation movement”7

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and first made popular the idea that society had a responsibility to wisely use and restore the natural resources of the nation. Another source for Muir’s views would have been the widespread concern evident in Wisconsin about the need to protect forestlands. Wisconsin was heavily forested in the mid-nineteenth century and the Muir family had to clear and settle their homestead, as did so many other pioneers. It was here that Muir was probably first exposed to the importance of forests, the harm caused by widespread clearing, grazing, and burning, and the need for better use of forest resources. Wisconsin in 1867 was the first state to establish a statewide forestry commission to study this issue. The forestry commission’s report was similar to the approach used by Marsh’s earlier work “Man and Nature.”8 What is evident from a review of Muir’s later writings on forestry is how much they echo those of Marsh and the Wisconsin Forestry Commission. Muir’s writings about forests clearly use the same types of information to explain the importance of forests, the harm caused by their destruction, and the need to end abuse of these important natural resources.

Forestry in Muir’s Time Before further examining Muir’s writings, it is important to appreciate the emerging ideas about conservation and forestry of his time.9 In the middle of the nineteenth century, no policies of conservation or forest management existed. From the founding of the country until Muir’s time, the nation’s land use laws were designed to give away large tracts of public land and natural resources to settlers for farms, timber, and minerals as well as to the railroads. This policy promoted settlement and commerce. Vast forests were cut but not replanted. Public ownership and management of land or natural resources were not considered appropriate governmental activities. Not until after the Civil War did individuals begin to suggest ways to protect and appreciate the western forests and resources. By the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, the protection of the nation’s forests and natural wonders had gained widespread public support. At first, the new preservation movement had one primary concern: that certain public lands and their natural resources, mainly forests and timber, were too valuable to be owned or controlled by private interests for private profit, such as the mining and timber industries. Preservationists argued that the government should retain ownership of these lands and resources for the benefit of the public and to protect them from private claims and unregulated use. By 1900, the government had set aside 3.5 million acres in five national parks

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and about fifty million acres in forty forest reserves. Although the parks and forest reserves were protected from settlement or other private use, the government could still decide, on an individual basis, whether resources of particular lands should be used or their most spectacular wild places completely protected from development. Disagreement over the management and use of these parks and forest reserves during this period led to a new and distinct conservation movement. Conservationists believed in the scientific management and careful use and development of natural resources and forests for the materials they could provide. Preservationists did not necessarily disagree with them, but they also believed in protecting portions of the forests and wildlands for their scenic and wilderness values. For example, conservationists were willing to allow regulated cattle and sheep grazing on public lands rather than the unlimited free use that was the practice of the day. Preservationists opposed grazing because it caused too much damage to the forests and meadows. However, their differences over forest management were not so far apart. This disagreement between conservationists and preservationists is best exemplified by the contrasting views of John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, then chief forester of the United States under President Theodore Roosevelt. Pinchot believed that all land and resources should be managed “for the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.” He argued that they should be efficiently developed for the present generation without waste for the common good and “the benefit of the many and not merely for the profit of a few.”10 Muir believed that some portions of forests and wildlands should be preserved for their beauty and spiritual value as opposed to developed solely for their material resources (water, timber, minerals, or electric power). According to Muir, “specimen” places—“bits of pure wildness”11— should be protected and remain undisturbed for future generations. Muir thought that these two views were compatible. The seemingly intractable conflict between the demand to protect the nation’s forests and local opposition to “locking up” natural resources made it increasingly difficult for the U.S. Congress to establish new national parks. To counter this, supporters of public protection for the parks and forests placed a seemingly innocuous section into the Land Revision Act of 1891. Until its repeal in 1907, it gave the president the authority to retain any forestland as a public reservation and allowed the president to lead national efforts to protect America’s forests and wildlands. The forest reserves created as a result of this act helped protect city water supplies, limit sheep grazing, and prevent valuable forests from being claimed by timber companies, railroads,

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or land speculators. Along with the first national parks, the lands reserved under this act from 1891 to 1907 today compose a large portion of the National Forest System in the West and also some of what eventually became America’s most renowned national parks, including Bryce Canyon in Utah, Crater Lake in Oregon, Grand Canyon in Arizona, Grand Teton in Wyoming, and Mounts Rainier and Olympic in Washington.12 At the time that the forest reserves were being established, the United States had no tradition or real experience with national parks. The first national parks were established well before the creation of the National Park Service in 1916. Yellowstone was created in 1872, and in 1890 Yosemite was created around the famed valley that Congress had already given to California in 1864 for “public use, resort and recreation.”13 Along with Yosemite, Sequoia and General Grant were also created in 1890 to protect the giant sequoia trees in the Sierra as “reserved forestlands.”14 Yet there was no real or perceived distinction in how the general public viewed the purpose of these designations. The use of these first national parks and forest reserves did not clearly specify how they should be managed. Thus forestry and forest management in Muir’s time presented very different issues than those now faced by today’s environmental movement. Unlike today, preservation did not mean a park or wilderness designation but rather retention of the forestland in public ownership in either a forest reserve or national park. Muir believed that “the forests must be, and will be, not only preserved, but used.” But he was also insistent that certain lands, especially those in public ownership, “be maintained unimpaired” for future generations.15

The Value and Importance of Forests Muir’s earliest writings about the need to protect forests emphasized their practical uses and values. A consistent theme held that forests were “the most precious and indispensable” of the nation’s natural riches. Their “real value” was “how they affect climate, act as barriers against destructive floods, protect and hold in store fertilizing rain and snow and form fountains for irrigating rivers.” It was a modern view that recognized the importance of the forest as part of a larger watershed. If these values were “appreciated and understood,” the government would protect them with “the most jealous care, instead of being left exposed, as they are, to the mercy of every vagrant hunter and sheep-owner who cares to destroy them for pleasure or paltry personal gain.”16

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fig. 5.2. A big tree cut for shingles. Converse Basin, ca. 1890s. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

It was only in the late 1890s, as the battle to protect America’s forests intensified, that Muir returned to an emphasis on the spiritual values of the forests in his efforts to support their preservation. This is evident in his subsequent articles and later during the political battle to protect the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park from flooding. His later articles once again began to emphasize that forests are not only fountains of “timber and irrigating rivers,” but also fountains of “beauty” and of “life.”17

The Harm Being Done to Forests John Muir continually emphasized that the forests were “threatened with utter destruction” from the “ravages of fire, the axe and countless hordes of hoofed locusts [what Muir called sheep]. . . and when once destroyed, can never be wholly restored.”18 Sheep grazing and its related fires were his chief concern and the primary reason he used to urge the preservation of forestlands. To this he added that “lumbermills” were “centers of desolation” but “sheep desolation has no center, it is universal.” At the time, the public

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domain forests were being used as free pasture by “incredible” numbers of sheep. As Muir described it, the “ravenous hordes” ate too much and trampled all the remaining grass, flowers, and brush so that the forest looked “as if devoured by locusts.” Then the herders would set “running” wildfires to improve access for the huge flocks and to increase the amount of available forage.19 According to Muir, fires destroyed from “five to ten times as much timber as the axe and saw, even under present grossly wasteful methods of lumbering”20 Except for protection by the U.S. Army at the first national parks (which Muir strongly supported), the government had no way to keep the sheep out or stop the fires. He was also concerned that without some type of rational management, the uncontrolled growth of underbrush would increase the danger of fire, especially to the larger trees. A remarkable consistency is found in Muir’s published articles and public statements about the type of harm being done to the forests. Whether urging the protection of forests in general, the creation of Yosemite National Park, or the expansion of the national forest reserves, Muir continually returned to his theme that the “utter destruction” of the forests was from the locustlike sheep and from the “fire and the axe.”21 As to specific forest practices, he was outraged about those who stripped the bark from the giant sequoia trees and the fact that the “methods of lumbering are as yet grossly wasteful” because so much timber is left on the ground to be burned “together with the seedlings, on which the permanence of the forest depends.”22 The “clearing has surely gone far enough; soon timber will be scarce, and not a grove will be left to rest in or pray in.”23

Forest Conservation and Preservation Muir’s ideas about how to protect the nation’s forests evolved dramatically in the late nineteenth century.24 In 1876, Muir’s initial idea for what we now call “conservation” was very general. He merely suggested that something be done, that the California state legislature “discover and enforce any method tending to lessen . . . the destruction going on.”25 Shortly thereafter, he introduced a new and recurring theme that only a “portion” of the main forest belt above six thousand to seven thousand feet be protected from “running fires, sheep and the axe. . . .” To achieve this goal, he suggested the creation of a “Commission of Forestry, similar to those of France, Germany, Italy or Austria. . . .”26 Again in 1888, he urged that a “few specimens” of Oregon’s forest wealth “be spared to the world” and that “a park of moderate extent” be established

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fig. 5.3. John Muir holding a sugar pinecone. Yosemite National Park, ca. 1890s. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, ©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

and include “at least a few hundreds of each of these noble [sugar] pines, spruces and firs.”27 His primary objective was to protect “specimen sections of natural flora—bits of pure wildness.”28 He did not suggest or advocate the prohibition of the cutting of timber. In fact, he consistently wrote and spoke about a type of “permanent, practical, rational forest management”29 that today would be called “sustained yield.” When comparing how “every other civilized nation” protected its forests, he viewed favorably the Swiss practice of “cutting each year an amount of timber equal to the total increase, and no more.”30 Muir was only absolute when it came to sheep. After ensuring that the forests were reserved from sale and entry, he was most adamant that “THE SHEEPMEN MUST GO!”31 Otherwise, he was more flexible about the stewardship of forests. He stated over and over in a variety of ways that “the forests, like perennial fountains, may be made to yield a sure harvest of timber, while at the same time all their far-reaching beneficent uses may be maintained unimpaired.”32 Before the Sierra Club’s 1895 annual meeting, he stated that “forest

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management must be put on a rational, permanent scientific basis. . . .”33 Again in an 1897 article, he favorably explained the aims of “the most advanced students of forestry” as follows: After careful study of the varied conditions of the different forest regions and the wants of the people, to invent and recommend a permanent, practical, rational forest management, somewhat like those in force in every other civilized country, by which, while checking needless waste, the forests may be made to yield a perennial supply of timber for every use and to spare by thinning cut, cutting only the trees that ought to be cut, without injury of what are left, but rather to their advantage, and thus, without further diminishing the area of the forests, make them grow more beautiful, productive, and useful every year.34 Overall, Muir wanted to reserve “every remaining acre of unentered forest-bearing land in all the country, not more valuable for agriculture than for tree-growing” and to have them “protected and administered by the Federal government for the public good forever.”35

John Muir and Today’s Forest Issues If John Muir were involved in today’s controversies about forest management—what would he say or advocate? Even though circumstances have changed significantly since Muir’s time, many issues remain the same. The effects of the “fire and the axe” still leave their imprint on the forest. What constitutes rational or scientifically based forest management is as elusive today as it was in Muir’s time. However, based on Muir’s writings, an educated guess is possible about what his position(s) might be. Some may be more obvious than others, but it is still interesting to speculate.36 Muir would still support protecting additional “portions” of the forests as national parks, monuments, preserves, and wilderness areas. Logging techniques and the extent of other extractive activities are far beyond what could have been imagined in Muir’s time. Wild areas once remote and isolated are now encroached upon and threatened. Muir would certainly support protecting these newly threatened areas and the Roadless Area Conservation Rule established under former president Clinton to protect the remaining 58.5 million acres of roadless lands in the National Forest System. He would see the value in protecting the high-altitude old-growth forests. Extensive timber

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sales and industrial “clear-cut” forestry just replicate the “utter destruction” he detested. Muir would likely support the basic idea behind the “Healthy Forests Restoration Act” but also very likely oppose the Bush administration’s proposals to waive environmental safeguards in order to speed up timber sales to thin the forest, especially of “old growth” trees, and reduce the risk of catastrophic wild fires. Muir clearly recognized that not controlling the growth of the “underbrush and young trees” would lead to wildfires endangering “the larger trees.”37 In his time, management policies were lacking to protect or maintain the forest environment, and he clearly did not object to cutting some trees as long as the forest’s “far-reaching beneficent uses may be maintained unimpaired.”38 Thus it is doubtful Muir would lend unqualified support to the “no commercial cut” policy being advocated by some for the national forests. Although he would favorably view the policy’s objectives—to protect forests from large-scale clear-cut logging and road building, Muir’s writings clearly indicate that some timber cutting was acceptable and necessary, especially to prevent dangerous and harmful forest fires. His approach to “common-sense” forest management suggested “cutting only the trees that ought to be cut, without injury” to the forest.39 Muir was an experienced botanist and amateur natural scientist, and it is also very likely that the new information available today about forest health, ecology, and biodiversity would lead him to reevaluate and update his views about what trees should be cut and what he would consider “a rational permanent scientific basis” for forest management.40 In light of what he wrote, he would probably not object to some timber cutting and thinning of second-growth forests to “yield a perennial supply of timber for every use,” to reduce the danger of wildfire, and to “make them more beautiful, productive and useful every year.”41 Muir saw the glorious forests of the West “towering serene through the long centuries, preaching God’s forestry fresh from heaven.”42 Although he understood society’s practical needs for “timber and irrigating rivers,” he also clearly saw the forest for its “beauty” and spiritual values. It was the forest and not just the trees that inspired him and led to his belief that in their natural condition, or under wise management, keeping out destructive sheep, preventing fires, selecting the trees that should be cut for lumber, and preserving the young ones and the shrubs and sod of herbaceous vegetation, these forests would be a never failing fountain of wealth and beauty.43

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How Muir would reconcile his great love for the wild with his approach to forestry is just a guess. He recognized that the fight for the forests was “part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong and we cannot expect to see the end of it.”44 In light of today’s continuing controversy over the appropriate use and management of our national forests, Muir’s views appear all too true.

1 2

Notes 1. From an unpublished Muir journal as quoted in Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling, ed., John Muir: To Yosemite and Beyond: Writings from the Years 1863 to 1875 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 27. 2. John Muir, “The American Forests,” Atlantic Monthly 80 (August 1897): 145–57, and reprinted in Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, November 1901), 337. 3. See Muir’s early writings summarized in William and Maymie Kimes, John Muir: A Reading Bibliography (Fresno, CA: Panorama West Books, 1986), 1–16. 4. Muir, “Forests of the Sierra. The Destruction That Is Being Wrought in the Mountains. John Muir’s Protest against the Wantonness of the Sheep-Herder and Lumberman—Value of the Forests,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, June 29, 1889, p. 1, col. 6. 5. Assessments of early influences on Muir’s study and writings about nature and forestry are based on the following: Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (New York: Knopf, 1945), 81–83; George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (originally published in 1864), edited by David Lowenthal for Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA, 1965); David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter, especially chapter XIII: “Man and Nature,” 246–76 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Richard Fleck, “John Muir’s Homage to Henry David Thoreau,” Pacific Historian 29, nos. 2 and 3 (Summer/Fall 1985): 55–64; Edmund Schofield, “John Muir’s Yankee Friends and Mentors: The New England Connection,” ibid., 65–89; State of Wisconsin, Report on the Disastrous Effects of the Destruction of Forest Trees (Madison, WI: Atwood & Rublee State Printers, 1867), reprinted May 1967 for The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, George Banata Company, Menasha, WI. See also Nancy M. Slack, “Botanical Exploration of California from Menzies to Muir (1786–1900) with Special Emphasis on the Sierra Nevada,” in John Muir Life and Work, ed. Sally M. Miller (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); and Michael Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

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6. John Muir, “God’s First Temples. How Shall We Preserve Our Forests? The Question Considered by John Muir, the California Geologist—Views of a Practical Man and a Scientific Observer—A Profoundly Interesting Article. Communicated to the Record Union,” Sacramento Daily Union, February 5, 1876, p. 8, cols. 6–7. Also reprinted in Selected Writings by John Muir South of Yosemite, ed. Frederic R. Gunsky (Garden City, NY: American Museum of Natural History, 1968), 242–45. 7. Lewis Mumford as quoted in the introduction by David Lowenthal to Marsh, Man and Nature, ix. 8. State of Wisconsin, Report on the Disastrous Effects of the Destruction of Forest Trees, reprinted in part in Conservation in the United States, A Documented History: Land and Water 1492–1900, Frank E. Smith, general editor (New York: Chelsea House, in association with Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), 670–85. 9. The history of conservation and forestry in America is a broad subject with an extensive bibliography in its own right. A number of books that provided insight for this essay were reviewed. These include the following: Roy Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain 1776–1970 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2nd ed., revised 1942 and 1976); Char Miller, ed., American Forests: Nature, Culture and Politics (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997); Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967); Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Stewart Udall, The Quiet Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963); Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington: Island Press, 2001); and Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, Americana Library Edition, 1967). 10. Pinchot, Fight for Conservation, 48 and 46, respectively. 11. “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club, November 23, 1895,” Sierra Club Bulletin 1, no. 7 (January 1896): 276. 12. The information about the establishment of the first national parks, forest reserves, and national forests comes from the following: John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1920); John Ise, Our National Park Policy: A Critical History (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press for Resources for the Future, 1961); The Lands Staff, Establishment and Modification of National Forest Boundaries and National Grasslands: A Chronological Record 1891–1996 (Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service, November 1997); and Gerald W. Williams, National Monuments and the Forest Service (Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service, November 17, 2000). 13. Ise, Our National Park Policy, 11, 53, 55. 14. Ibid, 55.

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15. “A Plan to Save the Forests: Forest Preservation by Military Control-Statement from John Muir,” Century Magazine, 49 (February 1895): 631. 16. Muir’s statement is quoted in Robert Engberg, “John Muir’s ‘Great Evils from Destruction of Forests,” Pacific Historian, 25, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 12, which includes the entire text of Muir’s original article: “Great Evils from Destruction of Forests,” San Francisco Real Estate Circular, 14 (April 1879). 17. Muir, “The American Forests,” in Our National Parks, 360; and “Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” in Our National Parks, 1. 18. Muir quoted in Engberg, “John Muir’s ‘Great Evils’ from Destruction of Forests,” 14. 19. Ibid., and “A Plan to Save the Forests,” 631. The latter article uses many of the same phrases as the first. 20. John Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” Harper’s Weekly, 41 (June 5, 1897): 566. 21. Muir, “God’s First Temples. How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?” 22. Muir, “The American Forests,” 351–52. 23. Ibid., 337. 24. Muir’s involvement in the early conservation movement and his evolution from “poetry to politics” is best covered in the following: Robert Underwood Johnson, “John Muir and Our Activities in Forest Conservation,” in Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), 278–316; Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981); Holoway R. Jones, John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965); Ronald Eber, “John Muir and the Pioneer Conservationists of the Pacific Northwest,” in John Muir in Historical Perspective, ed. Sally M. Miller (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999); Char Miller, “Before the Divide: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot and the Early Conservation Movement,” in Gifford Pinchot: The Evolution of an American Conservationist (Milford, PA: Grey Towers Press, 1992); Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling, ed., John Muir: Summering in the Sierra (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Robert Engberg, “John Muir: From Poetry to Politics, 1871–1876,” Pacific Historian 25 (Summer 1981): 10–19; and Robert Engberg, “John Muir’s “Great Evils from Destruction of Forests,” 10–14. 25. Muir’s quote from “God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?” included in Robert Engberg, “John Muir: From Poetry to Politics, 1871–1876,” 10–19. 26. Muir quoted in Engberg, “John Muir’s “Great Evils from Destruction of Forests,” 14. 27. John Muir, ed., “The Basin of the Columbia River,” West of the Rocky Mountains (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1976), 476–78. This is a reprint of the version in Picturesque California, published in 1894. 28. Muir, “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club,” 276. 29. Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” 566.

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30. Muir, “The American Forests,” 337–38. 31. Muir quoted in Engberg, “John Muir’s “Great Evils from Destruction of Forests,” 14. 32. Muir, “A Plan to Save the Forests,” 631. 33. Muir, “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club,” 284. 34. Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” 566. 35. Ibid, 567. 36. The views expressed in this section are solely those of the author of this chapter. Muir’s views about the value and importance of forests explained in this chapter are entirely consistent with the primary reasons used by the Sierra Club and other organizations to urge protection of the nation’s national forests. See “Ten Reasons to Protect Our National Forests,” Sierra, 87 (November/December 2002): 17. For more on the current movement to end “commercial logging” in the national forests, see the Sierra Club’s Web site for its campaign: www.sierraclub.org/forests/overview. For more information about the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative, go to www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/healthyforests or www.fs.fed.us/projects/hfi 37. Muir, “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club,” 284. 38. Muir, “A Plan to Save the Forests,” 631. 39. Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” 566. 40. Muir, “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club,” 284. 41. Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” 566. 42. Muir, “The American Forests,” 334. 43. Ibid., 360. 44. Muir, “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Sierra Club,” 276.

chapter six 1

With Friends Like These

John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Drama of Environmental Politics Char Miller

12 Earth First! founder Dave Foreman was pulling a journalist’s leg when in an interview he described Earth First!, the radical environmental organization he had founded in 1980, as a “secretly controlled” offshoot of mainstream environmental groups that could be “trotted out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or the Wilderness Society look moderate.” Russell Train of the World Wildlife Fund joshed too when he made a similar point about the uncompromising founder of the Friends of Earth: “Thank God for David Brower. He makes it easier for the rest of us to look reasonable.” And James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, could laugh that his combative mien and acerbic style swelled the ranks of both moderate and radical environmentalists.1 Politics is such good fun. Beneath the humor, however, lies an important insight: there is a selfconscious choreography to environmental politics. Contending organizations and, just as often, contentious individuals play to and off one another to gain Portions of this chapter have previously appeared in a different form in Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2001).

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fig. 6.1. Gifford Pinchot, ca. 1900. USDA Forest Service.

advantage and to secure a hearing. Or they may, as Foreman, Train, and Watt reveal, strike a strident pose, knowing the impact this might have on others’ actions, and then bank on that impact for reasons of their own. A raucous, unfettered environmental left, for instance, makes the Sierra Club appear more centrist and dispassionate. This kind of reciprocity also influences arguments across the political spectrum. James Watt deliberately attacked environmental sacred cows, well aware of—indeed counting on—the reaction it would generate among his opposition; the predictable fury his words unleashed further galvanized his supporters within the early 1980s Sagebrush Rebellion, [a movement in the West, to return federal lands to the control of the states]. For all their ideological differences, Earth First! and the Wise Use movement shared important political traits, even a kind of mutual genesis. This subtle interplay between allies and opponents first emerged in the late nineteenth century, part of the birthright in fact of the then-nascent environmental movement. Its originators were John Muir and Gifford Pinchot,

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who were centrally involved in developing the movement’s ideological visions, strategic perspectives, and political maneuverability. They understood that politics was a form of theater, and their tangled and tempestuous relationship not only reinforced that understanding, but has a contemporary resonance: out of their heated interchanges emerged a dramatic narrative that has hitherto defined the context for environmental discourse and set its interpretative agenda.

Storyline According to Linnie Marsh Wolfe, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Muir, the narrative begins with a dramatic exchange in Seattle between Muir and Pinchot over the question of sheep grazing in the Cascades. Although she supplies no date for this event (for now note that they met in that city in 1897), she knows exactly where it occurred—in the crowded lobby of the Rainier Grand Hotel. Pinchot, a recently appointed Special Forest Agent for the Department of the Interior, had traveled to Seattle that fall as part of an extended tour of the newly created forest reserves in the West, the creation of which had greatly angered ranchers and farmers, mine operators, and lumber owners. They had been infuriated that President Cleveland, in setting aside twenty-one million acres, had locked away resources that they hoped to exploit. So hostile and powerful were these forces that through their representatives in Congress they had managed to suspend Cleveland’s action, pending congressional hearings. Pinchot had come west to measure the depths of this hostility and, where possible, to build support for the president’s action.2 Pinchot’s was no easy task. He encountered the expected stiff opposition, but he also managed to secure favorable reports, notably in the Spokane Spokesman-Review and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He would brag to his mother that the latter’s editor, after a lengthy interview, “came to the right view” and demonstrated his newfound knowledge in a strong editorial supporting Pinchot’s position. But these victories came at a cost, engendering an hostile reaction from an unexpected quarter—John Muir.3 Muir had stopped in Seattle on his way from Alaska to his home in California. He and Pinchot were well acquainted, having traveled together as members of the National Forest Commission in 1896. The commission, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, had fulfilled its charge to evaluate sites in the West for national forests and parks, and its recommendations were the impetus for Cleveland to “set aside” those acres, the action that so

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riled westerners. When Muir arrived in Seattle on September 5, 1897, the younger Pinchot, who felt a strong affinity for the famed naturalist, was “much delighted” to see him again and spent the better portion of that day and night with one whom he considered to be “a storyteller in a million.”4 Such admiration did not protect Pinchot from Muir’s wrath when, the next morning, he reportedly read Pinchot’s interview in the Post-Intelligencer. Muir was astonished that although the forester had championed the need for the reserves, he had also assured his audience that he did not believe that sheep grazing would unduly damage them. Muir accosted Pinchot in the hotel lobby, Wolfe wrote, and demanded to know whether Pinchot had been correctly quoted on the matter of sheep. Pinchot acknowledged that he had been (after all, he had dictated the interview to the newspaper’s stenographer), whereupon Muir snapped: “In that case, I don’t want anything more to do with you. When we were in the Cascades last summer, you yourself stated that the sheep did a great deal of harm.” The wool, it seems, had not been pulled over his eyes.5 Muir’s biographers have not been fooled either. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, among others, believed this incident unmasked Pinchot as a hypocrite. That he now would accept grazing in the reserves, she affirmed, was a cheap political gambit designed to curry favor with the powerful wool growers associations in the Pacific Northwest. Pinchot’s “little appeasement policy,” Wolfe observed, provoked Muir’s righteous indignation, so much so that with “his eyes flashing blue flames,” he renounced his friendship with Pinchot. Political ramifications were unavoidable. Thereafter, “a rift opened that swiftly widened” between the two men—one that, by extension, fractured the conservation movement. Pinchot had come to represent those who favored conservation, a policy that reflected humanity’s overt management of the environment. Muir stood for those who disdained such stewardship and advocated the preservation, not the exploitation, of resources and wilderness. This deplorable rift, Wolfe concluded, set back the movement considerably, and Gifford Pinchot was responsible for this tragedy.6 Wolfe’s is a compelling interpretation, consoling those who see themselves as Muir’s intellectual heirs, embrace his perception of the proper relationship between humanity and nature, and dismiss Pinchot as morally bereft and a political hack. There are, however, a couple of problems with this anecdote and the conclusions that have been drawn from it. First of all, the artful scene that Wolfe set in Seattle, which historians sympathetic to Muir have recounted ever since, may not have occurred in the way Wolfe has described. Wolfe’s sole source is an unrecorded conversation between Muir and William

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E. Colby, a close friend and secretary of the Sierra Club. And although Pinchot’s diary records that he and Muir met in the lobby on the afternoon of September 6, 1897, theirs was apparently a most cordial meeting: Lunch with [J. A.] Holmes [of the U.S. Geological Survey] at the Rainier Grand and after met John Muir in the lobby. Spent the afternoon with these two. Much delighted to see Mr. Muir again. Dinner with them . . . Church in the eve with Holmes and then dictated interview for the Post Intelligencer . . . then more later with Muir and Holmes. As this primary document indicates, Pinchot did not provide the Seattle PostIntelligencer with his views on grazing in the reserves until later that evening, and what biographer Wolfe takes for the smoking gun comes from a single line in the lengthy article that appeared on September 7: “Pasturage may also be permitted by the secretary under suitable rules and regulations.” Whether Muir would have been enraged by this most-qualified statement is less intriguing than the question of whether he ever saw it and, if so whether he would have had an opportunity to confront Pinchot about its supposed implications. According to the shipping records of the PostIntelligencer, Muir was aboard the SS Puebla when it set sail from Seattle for San Francisco at 8:00 a.m. on September 7, the morning in which Pinchot’s words appeared in print. Surely, given the constraints of nineteenth-century ocean travel, the “eminent scientist” would have boarded the vessel some hours earlier, which narrows the time possible for Muir and Pinchot to have encountered each other. Did they cross paths at, say, 6:00 a.m.? Would a knot of reporters—who Wolfe indicates witnessed the fascinating interchange— have gathered there at such an early hour, and if so, why did not they report this dramatic moment?7 The tentative character of Wolfe’s data is qualified by the fact that Muir and Pinchot continued to correspond after Muir’s alleged severing of their association. Nor in this correspondence did they shy away from discussing the very issue that reportedly drove them apart—sheep grazing. Three months after meeting in Seattle, Muir wrote Pinchot that he was “rather discouraged” that General Land Office Commissioner Binger Hermann “should have thrown open the Oregon Reserves to sheepmen and sheep.” In casting blame on Hermann, Muir indicated that he understood the differences between Hermann’s decision to “throw open” the reserves and Pinchot’s advocacy of regulated grazing therein. These policy distinctions enabled Muir

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to advocate a stronger alliance with Pinchot. Hermann, Muir asserted, was one of those “blundering plundering money making officials” that together they must fight to protect the reserves.8 Although Muir and Pinchot disagreed about whether any sheep should be allowed to graze in the forest reserves, a disagreement that had surfaced during their tour with the Forest Commission, Pinchot was not in favor of intensive grazing. He later proposed strong regulations governing the precise extent and nature of grazing allowable on federal lands, believing he did so in response to John Muir’s teachings. In May 1900, for instance, he traveled to Arizona with Frederick V. Coville, a Department of Agriculture botanist, to investigate what Pinchot called the “ticklish question” of grazing. It had become so ticklish because grazing was “the most important use that had yet been made of the forest reserves and the center of the bitterest controversy.” Into that controversy Pinchot and Coville plunged, and after three weeks of riding through the territory’s northern mountains and southern river valleys, the two reached a not-so-startling conclusion: “The trip established what I was sure of already,” Pinchot wrote, “that overgrazing of sheep does destroy the forest. Not only do sheep eat young seedlings, as I proved to my full satisfaction by finding plenty of them bitten off, contrary to the sheepmen’s contention, but their innumerable hoofs also break and trample seedlings into the ground.” He also found that overgrazing by sheep stripped Arizona high-country watersheds of ground cover, contributing to soil erosion and silted rivers. “John Muir called them hoofed locusts,” Pinchot declared, “and he was right.” This hardly sounds like a man who had been pierced by the naturalist’s “flaming blue eyes.”9 If the two men’s relations were not as strained as the apocryphal Seattle hotel incident would suggest, if their differences over the question of grazing were not as pronounced as they might appear, why do most of Muir’s biographers persist in casting Pinchot as the black sheep? Part of the answer can be found in another, and related question: why have the majority of Pinchot’s biographers elevated their subject to heavenly heights, thereby demoting Muir and frequently writing him out of the history of the American conservation movement? To judge, for example, from even a cursory glance at the indices of the standard biographies of Gifford Pinchot, Muir was at best a minor player in the evolution of the American idea of nature. His name, let alone his ideas, are rarely mentioned, the contact between these seminal figures has gone largely unrecorded, and the most explosive issue over which they battled quite publicly—the nearly decade-long

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fight over a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park—has been passed over in silence.10 Why? The answer lies in the interplay between historiography and environmental politics. Both sets of historians have used their subjects to reconstruct the past along certain lines to reaffirm present-day perspectives and values. Stephen Fox indicates in the preface to his important biography of Muir that he chose his subject because he “noticed that of the early pioneers of the conservation movement, only one—John Muir of the Sierra Club— still seemed an active force in the movement today.” Muir’s unique relevance also caught biographer Michael Cohen’s eye. His biography of Muir, The Pathless Way, was not just about the great naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club, Cohen wrote, but about “my own thinking; and not only my own thinking but the thinking of a whole community, of my generation,” a generation in whose heart Muir “has always had a special place. . . .”11 Pinchot has had a special place in the hearts of his biographers, too. Many of these have used “the Chief ” as a lens through which to write an institutional history of the Forest Service, thereby projecting (and protecting) his reputation down through time. The purpose of this quest for a usable past is obvious, even if not always conscious. By denying a central place to one’s subject’s opponent in the past, one can undermine his successors’ legitimacy. That’s one reason perhaps why the relationship between the Sierra Club and Forest Service, organizations the two men helped establish, have been so tense for so long.12 Neither Muir nor Pinchot would be much surprised by the way their respective biographers have treated the other or by the way their institutional legacies have repeatedly clashed, for they are in large part responsible for sparking these ongoing disputes. Both men were immensely skilled at generating the kind of favorable public relations that ignores the competing claims of the opposition and casts an opponent’s actions or beliefs in the most unfavorable of lights. Historians who have studied these men have been unable to break with this pattern of analysis.13 If an objective reading of the relationship between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot is difficult, perhaps impossible, to obtain, it is, nonetheless, important to attempt to reconstruct their interactions as accurately as one can. Without the attempt, the two men will completely disappear behind the cardboard figures historians have constructed to represent them. Fortunately, a different representation of them is now possible because a portion of their correspondence, long buried in the Pinchot papers, has come to light, illuminating new aspects of their interaction during the pivotal decade of the

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1890s. These letters, together with those in Muir’s Papers, make it possible to lay out a more complete evolution of their relationship that makes the story of the early conservation movement considerably more complicated.

High Ground John Muir was particular about where he met people. He preferred to meet those he hoped to convert to his beliefs about the need for the preservation of wilderness in the mountains themselves. That was where his politics were carried out, biographer Michael Cohen has noted, for “mountain thinking was different, and so consequently was mountain society.” Such elevated heights were the only proper setting for a conversion to wilderness values, and if only that conversion “could be made strong enough, it would be carried back down to the lowlands and change cities.”14 That said, the setting for one of the first meetings between Muir and Pinchot in June 1893 could not have been more inappropriate. They met not in the sunlit valleys of Yosemite in which Muir cultivated the friendship and support of so many of the luminaries of the early conservation movement. They instead were introduced to each other in the urban (and darker) canyons of New York City. More precisely, they met at a dinner party in the elegant Gramercy Park home of Gifford’s parents, James and Mary Eno Pinchot, where, Muir wrote his wife, he was entertained in “grand style.”15 The Pinchot home and style were emblems of the family’s financial and social status. James Pinchot had a number of highly successful commercial ventures in New York and an equally successful number of forays into urban and rural land speculation, including lumber production; still more impressive was the dowry, later inheritance, that his wife, daughter of Amos Eno, a nineteenth-century Donald Trump, brought to the marriage. The Pinchots, then, were in a position to entertain lavishly and did so frequently, collecting interesting dinner guests as avidly as any big-game hunter stalked trophies. When the Pinchots learned that the celebrated John Muir was in the city prior to sailing for Europe, they immediately invited him to dinner. Muir accepted. That evening he played the role of amiable raconteur of the American wild west, albeit in full dinner dress. Mountain thinking could make little headway in such an urbane and civilized environment.16 Then again, maybe it did, for this was the beginning of a close relationship between Muir and Gifford Pinchot, the oldest son of Muir’s hosts. James and Mary Pinchot followed up this first meeting with invitations to Muir to spend several evenings at their home in New York and at Grey Towers, the

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family’s extraordinary Normandy chateau (designed by Richard Morris Hunt) overlooking the Delaware River Valley in Milford, Pennsylvania. Muir called it “cottage in the hills.” Pinchot’s parents hoped that these meetings, however infrequent, would help further their twenty-eight-year-old son’s fledgling career as a forester. Muir, the great spokesman for America’s forests, would be a valuable person for Gifford to know.17 They were right. Early correspondence between the two men suggests that Muir gladly took up the role of mentor and guide.“Nothing in all my trip gave me greater pleasure than finding you a Young Man devoting yourself to the study of World Forestry amid the whirl of commerce,” Muir wrote after returning from Europe, a letter that at once flattered and encouraged Pinchot’s devotion to his forestry career. That his devotion to forestry was based in part on a rejection of commercial enterprise—and was thus in concert with Muir’s mountain thinking—was accurate to a point. Pinchot’s maternal grandfather, Eno, could not accept or understand his grandson’s choice of career and repeatedly had sought to lure him into his lucrative businesses. In the end, Amos Eno failed to change his grandson’s mind, but that did not mean, as Muir implied, that Gifford had rejected the commercial world. His taking up a career in forestry, for which he would earn precious little money, depended on the very financial success he spurned, an action that gained Muir’s praise.18 Pinchot also treasured the older man’s advice to learn forestry through living in American forests. Muir had called the experience “getting rich,” an ironic redefinition of the phrase, and Pinchot worked hard to collect this form of wealth. He wrote in the spring of 1894 that he had been “trying to live up” to Muir’s expectations. That May, while working on a forestry plan for George Vanderbilt’s North Carolina estate, known as Biltmore, he put words to action. “In a very small way I have tried your plan of going alone, and was off for four days by myself,” Pinchot informed his mentor. “They were as pleasant days as I have ever passed in the woods, and I am only waiting for the chance to do more . . . [for] I am perfectly satisfied that I can learn more and get more out of the woods than when there is anyone else along. . . .” Living up to his guide’s code did not mean he thought he could ever eclipse him, however. “I am afraid that I shall never be able to do the amount of hard work that you have done, or get along on such slender rations,” Pinchot acknowledged, but he hoped that by following Muir’s path he might “be able to get more into the life of the forest than I have ever done before.” Clearly this suggests he thought of himself as Muir’s protégé.19 Muir, as befits a mentor, applauded Pinchot’s tentative efforts to follow in his steps. “You are choosing the right way into the woods,” Muir responded.

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“Happy man. You will never regret a single day spent thus.” Muir then urged his protégé to press on with his work in the woods. “Go ahead. Yours must be not merely a successful but glorious life.” Indeed, he challenged Pinchot to give his ambition free rein: “Radiate radiate radiate far and wide as the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe,” he wrote in Whitmanesque exultation; “you have,” he confided, “a grand future and a grand present.” That exultation he would no doubt live to regret when in the early twentieth century Pinchot radiated well beyond Muir’s orbit and thus out of his control. But that trajectory lay in the future. For now, Pinchot’s career seemed assured and in tandem with Muir’s own vision. The latter’s only regret was “that I cannot join you on your walks.”20 That regret lasted until the summer and fall of 1896, when, as members of the National Forest Commission, the two men shared many a hike. To walk together did not necessarily mean they thought alike, however. Indeed, they conceived of their work for the commission in quite different terms, reflecting the different calculations each man made about his ability to contribute to the group’s deliberations. Muir actually was not an official member. He refused to accept an appointment to the commission, traveling as an observer because he believed that he should retain his independent voice and maintain his credibility, even while influencing the commission’s findings. Pinchot adopted a strategy in which holding the post of secretary to the commission was critical. Working from within was the one way that he, as the youngest member of the commission—younger by a full generation in some cases—could gain access to the centers of power in which the final report would be written.21 These differing approaches to the commission’s labors offer insight into the two men’s basic personal and political styles. Muir was uncomfortable as a joiner, while Pinchot would prove to be the consummate organizational man, contrasting traits that lay at the heart of the later ideological disputes arising between them. This was the period when they began to sense that their interpretations of conservation might not always be the same, that when they looked at trees, they did so with different eyes. Muir confirmed this indirectly when, in a letter to his wife, he commented that of all the members of the commission only its head, Charles Sprague Sargent, Harvard botanist and director of the Arnold Arboretum, viewed them as he did; Pinchot, by contrast, lashed out at Sargent’s deficiencies at precisely this point. The Harvard arborist, he felt, consistently missed the big picture; he “couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”22 It is tempting to infuse this difference of opinion with all the weight and force of those that would come in the future, to suggest that they had never

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really been kindred spirits. But in so doing one would turn a complex human relationship into a rather simplistic one. And these were anything but simple men. As their letters and diary entries indicate, they delighted in each other’s company during the commission’s tour, so much so that when Muir, ever the independent, decided to take leave of the commission in July for a quick trip to Alaska, he invited Pinchot along. The younger man accepted with alacrity but was unable to go at the last moment due to a conflict with a commissionsponsored inspection trip of the Bitterroot Mountains. “You will know, without any words from me, how sorry I am that matters turned out in this way,” Pinchot wrote in canceling his travel plans. “I had already written home that I was going with you, and I know how sorry my people will be when I tell them . . . that the plan is changed.” He was clearly and unabashedly proud of the connection he and Muir had fashioned that summer.23 That link was forged in their shared concern over the deplorable state of the American forest and in lighter ways as well, most visibly in the adolescent bravado with which they displayed their common enthusiasms. One evening in Oregon, when their colleagues chose to sleep in cabins, Muir and Pinchot bedded down under the stars in an “alfalfa mow.” Several days later Muir, Pinchot, Sargent, and a fourth member of the commission, Arnold Hague of the U.S. Geological Survey, rowed across Crater Lake to inspect the island that rises at its center, only to be forced back to shore when a violent thunderstorm swept over them and white-capped water poured into the overloaded boat. When the sodden crew regained land, Muir and Pinchot broke away from the others, scampered up a steep hillside, reaching a rocky ledge about one hundred feet above the lake where they built a fire to dry out their clothing. That night, Muir noted in his diary, Pinchot stood out in another way. He alone slept outdoors in a driving rain, an act that could only have endeared him to his mentor. “That was the sort of behavior,” Michael Cohen notes dryly, “which would go a long way toward making Muir forget other indiscretions.” By their actions and affectations, Muir and Pinchot were equally boys among men.24 They thought of themselves as brother truants, too. This was especially evident during their visit to the Grand Canyon in October 1896. During their stay they set off on what turned out to be a daylong tramp along its southern rim, exploring its many crevices, exchanging observations about its geology, flora, and fauna, and doing handstands better to perceive the canyon’s muted hues, the “reds, grays, ashy greens of varied limestones and sandstones, lavender, and tones nameless and numberless.” Pinchot mostly listened as Muir spoke, enthralled by his knowledge, caught up in his stories. The pair decided

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not to return to their hotel that night, choosing instead to sleep among the cedars and pines, resting on piles of juniper boughs at the canyon’s edge. They did not get much sleep, for Muir regaled the younger man with his adventure stories, including “The Stickeen,” which lasted well into the night. When at 4:30 a.m. the sky began to lighten, they returned to the hotel, sneaking back “like a pair of schoolboys,” Pinchot remembered,“well knowing that we must reckon with the other members of the commission, who probably imagined that we had fallen over a cliff.”25 Muir shared Pinchot’s fond memories of schoolboy high jinks. He wrote Pinchot how he “looked back with pure pleasure to . . . our own big day of sunshine and starshine along the verge of the tremendous and divine Colorado Canon,” where, he reminded his protégé, they had so recently stood “with heads level + hearts level + eyes upside down.” They were, it seems, at one, and for the rest of the decade they constantly made reference to their Grand Canyon excursion, drawing upon its reservoir of good will and intense feeling to sustain cordial relations; camping was a powerful metaphor for a special kind of male bonding.26 This connection was easy to maintain when differences of opinion over forest policy did not loom large. In July 1897, for example, Muir wrote Pinchot to congratulate him on his appointment as special forest agent, urging him to do “grand work for Yourself and for all of us.” In supporting Pinchot’s decision to take this position, part of the responsibility of which was to redraw the forest reserves boundaries, Muir reacted differently than Charles Sargent. The latter denounced Pinchot’s decision in a scathing letter to another of the younger man’s advisers, Sir Deitrich Brandis, former head of the British Forestry Service. “When I made him secretary . . . I did so with the expectation that he would eventually be able take a prominent place in National Forestry.” That expectation was now shattered: “He has gone over now to the politicians,” Sargent affirmed, “and his usefulness, I fear, is nearly at an end.” Muir disagreed. By working from the inside, by accepting this “most responsible position especially under present conditions,” Pinchot could effectively preserve the size and character of the troubled reserves, Muir believed. “In running the new boundaries of the new reservations no doubt small changes should be made,” but for “every acre you cut off, fail not I charge you to add a hundred or a thousand.”27 This encouragement was reinforced through an invitation to Pinchot to join Muir in one of his treks that summer: “I shall hope to meet you somewhere in the Rockies. Possibly we may go to Alaska.” In any event, he continued, keep “me advised of your movements—I shall be delighted to meet

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you again in as charming a region as Lake McDonald.” For his part, Pinchot could think of nothing better than to travel with Muir. “You know that my appetite for being in the woods with you has grown vastly by what it fed on” the previous summer. For them both, walking together had a number of meanings.28 Even when their paths diverged and Muir became more sharply critical of Pinchot’s policy of conservationism at the beginning of the twentieth century, they continued to recall past hikes and plan future ones. In August 1899 they spent five days together in Northern California, during which Muir and C. Hart Merriam, future head of the Biology Division of the Department of Agriculture,“told stories all the way”; Pinchot scribbled in his diary that these were “two wonderful men to travel with.” Their travels took them on a brief tour of the Calaveras Grove of sequoias, then threatened with lumbering, and they plotted ways to save the giant trees. It was like old times.“That trip, short as it was,” Pinchot later wrote Muir, “is one of the brightest spots in my year,” adding that to “make a trip with you on foot, with my pack on my back, has been one of my keenest hopes since the summer of the National Commission.” Such a tramp in the woods would be a tonic, he wrote, “where a man could go and work and get the wrinkles in his mind smoothed out.” His was in need of smoothing, too: “I have to get into the woods, clear in, sometime this fall,” he confessed, “or winter’s work will not amount to anything. And the prospects for useful work are too good to be wasted for lack of forest-made snap.” Pinchot’s prescription for good health and increased productivity was no less genuine for its calculated appeal to Muir’s oft-declared belief in the medicinal qualities of arboreal retreats. He had learned well from the master; two could play the game of mountain politics.29

Family Squabbles The cordiality and reciprocal character of these letters, and the shared love of the natural world they reveal, are impressive in and of themselves. But they are all the more so when one realizes that these two men had reached a point in their thinking and careers in which such reciprocity was increasingly difficult to manage. The bonds of language (and affection) could only stretch so far, and by the late 1890s the limit had been reached. By then a new stage in their private correspondence and public relationship emerged in which the previous roles of mentor and student were no longer applicable or acceptable. In their place, a more discordant tone set in that would characterize their interactions until Muir died in 1914.

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The break between them did not come with a rush, and its evolutionary character is perhaps best analyzed on two levels—one political and the other personal—each of which infused the other, intensifying the conflict. The potential for political disagreement was first manifest during the discussions of the National Forest Commission over the nature of its final report. In the group’s official deliberations and private conversations it became clear that its members were divided roughly into two camps. Sargent, Muir, Alexander Agassiz of Harvard University, and Henry Abbott of the Army Engineers believed that the only way to preserve the reserves was to close them to development and that the best way to keep them inviolate was to deploy the U.S. Army. Pinchot and Arnold Hague disagreed sharply. The forests were to be used, they argued, not closed off; the most effective force to ensure their protection and regulated use was the creation of a professional, nonmilitarized, civil agency, a forest service, along the lines of those Pinchot had examined while studying forestry in Europe in 1890. This dispute posed a significant threat to the writing of the commission’s final report. As Pinchot acknowledged to Muir just prior to the concluding series of meetings, “I am somewhat anxious to know just how the cat will jump. It is a rather critical time.” But the cat did not jump as Pinchot hoped. Instead, the commission voted in favor of Sargent’s proposals, urging President Cleveland to set aside vast tracts of public lands that would be closed to all development, except for mining and lumbering; the army would patrol these areas. The preservationists appeared to have won the first round.30 The victory was hardly bloodless. Pinchot threatened to write a critical, minority report but did not; the threat to the appearance of unanimity infuriated Sargent. In a letter to Muir, Sargent voiced his pent-up frustration with Pinchot and Hague, slapping out at their “strenuous demands” and adamant opposition to his perspective. “I was obliged to talk rather disagreeably with them,” he wrote, and was only too “delighted that my official connection with them has come to an end. They have . . . done much harm in letting out the impression that the commission was divided in its opinions.” But it was divided, a division that did more than just forever set Sargent and Pinchot apart; it foreshadowed the impending split between Pinchot and Muir.31 Why was the break between them not already overt? Part of the answer is simple: they liked each other, and this continued to take precedence over whatever philosophical or political differences might exist. Moreover, it was not clear exactly how deep those differences ran. Muir had not yet fully resolved the key question of whether preservation and conservation were incompatible. His essays in the Century during the period of the Forest

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Commission’s work made it clear that he embraced Pinchot’s idea that national forests should be preserved and used: “It is impossible in the nature of things to stop at preservation,” Muir declared in 1895. Forests, “like perennial fountains, may be made to yield a sure harvest of timber, while at the same time all their far-reaching uses may be maintained unimpaired.” That balancing act was still evident in his 1897 essay “The “American Forests,” in which he directly praised Pinchot’s work. The young forester was not wrong in seeing Muir as an ally.32 Their alliance was strategic; they were allies in a joint struggle to defend American forests from unrestrained development. For Muir, the principles of forestry and the scientific management of public lands were a considerable advance over the slash-and-burn tactics that generations of Americans had employed in their conquest of the continent. Forestry seemed to promise the survival of trees, and thus of wilderness, and he was only too happy to join with those such as Pinchot, who were its chief advocates. Muir’s support of forestry was equally crucial for Pinchot. Without the former’s eloquent voice and sharp pen raised on behalf of forests and forestry, the public’s interest in them would not have been as great. Without that interest, as Pinchot knew better than most, there would be no legislation passed in support of the reserves or for the establishment of a forest service, and, bluntly put, if there were no forest service, there would be no career for Gifford Pinchot. Muir and Pinchot, then, not only liked each other, they needed each other.33 This web of mutuality would unravel under the pressure of new circumstances. Once their initial objectives were realized, they developed new perspectives that called their original alliance into question. In the years following the Forest Commission, for instance, Pinchot was appointed head of the Forestry Division (later Bureau) in the Department of Agriculture. He built it and its successor, the Forest Service, into one of the most potent bureaucracies in American political culture. He would have little use, thereafter, for the voluntarism that had characterized the Forest Commission’s activities or for the preservationist visions that came to dominate its proceedings. Pinchot was now an insider, a power broker whose source of strength lay in the political networks he constructed in Washington and nationwide and in the technological and managerial solutions he brought to bear on environmental matters. Muir’s vision had changed, too. Beginning in 1898, after observing the manner in which the reserves were managed, or mismanaged, he began to believe that forestry and wilderness were incompatible, a tentative conclusion that would harden into conviction in the first years of the new century. This

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shift had a direct impact on his relationship with Pinchot. They were now firmly on opposite sides of the fence, with the head of the Forestry Bureau now more easily lumped in with those plundering lumber barons, long recipients of Muir’s disdain. Old ties could not flourish in such an environment. These ties withered further in the heat generated in the battle over the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. This spectacular valley, carved out of the Sierras by glaciers and the Tuolumne River, lies to the northwest of Yosemite. It had become part of that National Park in 1890 and was designated a “wilderness preserve,” a status for which Century editor Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir, and others had long fought. But as early as the 1880s, San Francisco’s water board and politicians had discussed the possibility of constructing a dam at the narrow end of the valley, creating a much-needed reservoir for the City by the Bay. Those plans were revived early in the twentieth century, and in 1903 and 1905 San Francisco applied to Ethan A. Hitchcock, the Secretary of the Interior, under whose jurisdiction the valley lay, for permission to build the dam. Hitchcock denied these early requests, indicating that they violated the spirit of the national park, but not before requesting that Pinchot examine the question. Pinchot, who had recently been appointed the first head of the Forest Service, was only too happy to oblige. He assured the secretary that the dam would not “injure the National Park or detract from its beauties or natural grandeur,” an assurance that amazed Muir. “I cannot believe Pinchot, if he really knows the valley, has made any such statements,” he wrote Johnson, “for it would be just the same thing as saying that flooding Yosemite would do it no harm.”34 But he had made the statement, as Muir learned after writing directly to Pinchot, seeking confirmation of his views. The forester noted that for him “the extreme desirability of preserving the Hetch Hetchy in its original beauty” must be weighed against the water needs of “a great group of communities” in the San Francisco Bay Area. The people’s needs in this instance took precedence over the cause of wilderness preservation. Muir saw the question in another light, challenging the basis of Pinchot’s approach. Ignore the “benevolent out cry for pure water for the dear people,” he urged, for the “scheme for securing these water rights is as full of graft as any of the lumber companies to obtain big blocks of the best timber lands.” Besides, if the object is simply water, it “can be obtained below Hetch Hetchy, tho’ at a greater cost. The idea that San Francisco must go dry unless Hetch Hetchy Yosemite is drowned is ridiculous. . . .” Given this difference of opinion, it is no surprise that this was probably the last letter Muir sent Pinchot.35

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The debate continued, accelerating in force when in April 1906 an earthquake jolted San Francisco, bursting water and gas pipes and setting off a fire that incinerated much of the city’s housing stock and industrial base. Hoping to capitalize on the wave of national sympathy for its plight, the city promptly reapplied for permission to dam Hetch Hetchy. Pinchot was at the ready: “I was very glad to learn from your letter . . . that the earthquake had damaged neither your activity nor your courage,” he wrote Marsden Manson, the city engineer. “I hope sincerely that in the regeneration of San Francisco its people may be able to make provision for a water supply from the Yosemite National Park. I will stand by to render any assistance which lies in my power.” His assistance, especially when combined with the support of a new secretary of interior, James Garfield, a close friend of Pinchot’s, produced the desired result: San Francisco received administrative approval to proceed with its plans to build a reservoir in the valley.36 Although Congress turned back this effort, due to a storm of protest that Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir, and numerous others let loose, the issue would not go away. In 1907, Muir and Pinchot met for a day in California to discuss Hetch Hetchy. Pinchot admitted he had never seen the valley and, according to Muir, therefore “seemed surprised to learn how important a part of the Yosemite Park the Hetch Hetchy really is.” Pinchot suggested that Muir write Secretary Garfield and request that he “keep the matter open until [the Sierra Club] could be heard.” In September, Muir fired off an extended description of the valley to Garfield. Less than a month later, Pinchot wrote the president, Theodore Roosevelt, that although he fully sympathized with Muir’s and Johnson’s position, “I believe that the highest possible use which could be made of [Hetch Hetchy] would be to supply pure water to a great center of population.”37 The issue remained unresolved until 1913, and then only after Pinchot and Roosevelt were out of office. It would be under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, and through the efforts of his secretary of the interior, Franklin Lane, former city attorney of San Francisco, that Hetch Hetchy would become a reservoir. Once again, Pinchot came to the forefront. Although he was no longer head of the Forest Service—President William Howard Taft had fired him in 1910 during the Ballinger controversy—he was an important witness in the congressional hearings that summer. His position remained that the public welfare was of preeminent importance: “Injury to Hetch Hetchy by substituting a lake for the present swampy shore of the valley . . . is altogether unimportant when compared with the benefits to be derived from its use as a reservoir.” To make this claim, those benefits must

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be widespread, and he believed that they were. It was on this precise point that he sought to turn the political tables on those such as Muir who set beauty in opposition to utility, wilderness preservation before human consumption. It was elitist to keep the valley “untouched for the benefit of the very small number of comparatively well to do to whom it will be accessible,” he declared. “The intermittent esthetic enjoyment of less than one per cent is being balanced against the daily comfort and welfare of 99 per cent”—and for Pinchot, the scales necessarily tilted in favor of the masses. The dam at Hetch Hetchy was a matter of equity.38 The masses be damned: Muir and his supporters were certain that the San Francisco project was not a democratic initiative and would benefit only powerful special interest groups. Capturing the dam’s water power would feed the “political ambition” of former San Francisco mayor James D. Phelan, Muir complained to Johnson, and enable sugar magnate Claus Spreckels to make a grab for the city’s streetcar lines. That Pinchot could cozy up to these San Francisco capitalists was perverse, a far cry from the man Muir had once known. When Pinchot was dismissed from the Forest Service in 1910, Muir could only shake his head at what might have been: “I’m sorry to see poor Pinchot running amuck after doing so much good hopeful work—from sound conservation going pell-mell to destruction on the wings of crazy inordinate ambition.” Nothing in the last days of the Hetch Hetchy debate made him change his opinion.39 Political disagreements and sharply contrasting visions of how natural resources should be used go a long way to explaining the collapse of the friendship of Muir and Pinchot. But there was another, more psychological context to that collapse, one that is especially crucial when considering Pinchot’s behavior. In breaking with Muir, he was breaking with an older man whom he considered a mentor. The timing of this break is important. It not only came after Pinchot’s professional career was assured, after he had been named head of the old Forestry Bureau in 1898, but it also came in conjunction with a series of other breaks in his relations with other mentors. Of particular note here are his relations with Bernard E. Fernow, his predecessor at the Division of Forestry, and with Charles S. Sargent. Fernow had encouraged Pinchot in his choice of career from the start, and he claimed that it was his idea that Pinchot pursue postgraduate studies in forestry in Europe, following his matriculation at Yale. While a student at L’École Nationale Forestière in Nancy, France, between 1889 and 1890, Pinchot and Fernow regularly corresponded, discussing the kinds of courses Pinchot should take, what books

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to read, and what national forest systems in Europe to study. Fernow also urged Pinchot to remain abroad for two years so that he could deepen his knowledge of forestry and promised him a job in the forestry division upon his return to the United States. The young man hastily agreed, sensing that in Fernow he had found a guardian angel. That did not mean they were on the best of terms, however. Pinchot’s father, James Pinchot, distrusted Fernow, whom he believed was “posing and insincere,” and naturally enough urged his offspring to seek employment elsewhere; other advisers, notably Charles S. Sargent, shared the senior Pinchot’s view, and Gifford Pinchot began to back away from his commitment to work under Fernow. His hesitancy was reinforced when, in the late winter of 1891, the two men traveled together through the piney woods of Arkansas. Fernow, he found, had a domineering personality, proved harshly critical of others in the profession, and sought sole credit for advances in forestry. Pinchot, no shrinking violet himself, grew “pretty weary” of these traits, of Fernow’s “running everybody down with tiresome uniformity,” and realized that they could not work effectively together. When George Vanderbilt offered Pinchot the opportunity to demonstrate practical forestry on five thousand acres of his land in North Carolina, Pinchot jumped at the chance. Fernow was miffed, believing that Pinchot had gone back on an oral agreement. He then suggested that the experiment on Vanderbilt’s estate would prove impracticable and that in taking on the job, the young forester had jeopardized his fledgling career.40 The two continued to needle each other for years to come. When Pinchot published a small tract on the white pine in 1896, Fernow wrote a devastating review of it in Garden and Forest; Muir counseled Pinchot not to write a rebuttal. “Never mind Fernow. Go ahead with your own work + very soon he will become polite and good,” counsel that in this instance Pinchot heeded. But he in turn could be just as impolite. Pinchot might grant that Fernow had a “remarkable native ability,” but in his heart he believed that the Germanborn forester was too cautious, his perception of the possibilities of forestry were too limited, and his expertise was exaggerated—this from one who had but eighteen months formal training in forestry! That aside, Pinchot’s critical evaluation of Fernow allowed him to circumvent his job offer in 1891 and then happily to succeed his former adviser as head of the Division of Forestry in 1898.41 Pinchot’s relations with Charles Sargent ran a similar course. Like Fernow, Sargent had encouraged Pinchot’s desire to become a forester and had maintained a correspondence with him while he was studying in Europe. In these

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letters he offered advice, as had Fernow, on the direction young Pinchot’s career should take. When America’s newest forester returned to the United States, Sargent was there to open doors and ease the way. Inviting Pinchot to join the National Forest Commission was the most important of these gestures; it was an extraordinary break for the thirty-one-year-old forester, who, by now, must have been accustomed to beneficent intermediaries. In making the most of this opportunity, Pinchot alienated Sargent. But then, that was not hard to do, for Sargent shared some of Fernow’s personality characteristics. He was opinionated, a man of great self-assurance and no small ego. When crossed, as he was when Pinchot challenged the recommendations of the final report of the commission, he lashed out at the ingrate. Pinchot clearly did not understand, Sargent complained in a letter to Sir Deitrich Brandis, that being selected for the commission was unprecedented, “as only members of the Academy serve on such Commissions,” and that was doubly true for the coveted position of secretary, which he had secured for Pinchot. This honor alone should have guaranteed Pinchot’s compliance.42 Relations deteriorated when Pinchot accepted Interior Secretary Bliss’s offer to act as a confidential forestry agent in 1897. Sargent accused Pinchot of dropping his friends for a political appointment, a sign to the Harvard professor that their standards of conduct were on different planes entirely. Little wonder that he predicted the end of his former protégé’s professional career when Pinchot took over Fernow’s position in the Department of Agriculture. “This is a good place for him,” Sargent mused in a letter to Muir.“He can do no harm there and after a very short time people will cease to pay any attention to what he says.” That bit of wishful thinking would come back to haunt him in later years, so much so that Sargent took to calling Pinchot “that creature,” and later still, in the 1920s, he rued the day he had met and helped advance his career.43 The personality disputes between Fernow, Sargent, and Pinchot were not unlike those between Muir and Pinchot. Each of these older men had much to teach the younger man about American forests and forestry. Each had sought to direct his manifold energies and talents in ways that would benefit their various and allied causes, and each saw in him a youthful reflection of themselves—strong shoulders that could help bear his elders’ burdens. But these relationships contained within them, in the manner of those between parents and children, the seeds of separation; they were oedipal in complexity, if not in construct. These conflicts were later immortalized in the controversial invitation list to the important 1908 Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources that Pinchot drew up. It was an impressive gathering.

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Pinchot biographer Nelson McGeary believed that never “in the history of the country had so many important government officials and scientific men been brought together” as at this White House conference. What McGeary failed to note, however, was the list of those men not invited: Bernard Fernow, John Muir, and Charles Sargent, an act of omission that was as psychologically charged as it was politically motivated.44

Creative Tensions For all the energy these internecine battles consumed, they did not cripple the early conservation movement, as Linnie Marsh Wolfe and other historians have argued. These struggles were essential to its development and success. The political strife, ideological differences, and psychological tensions energized and tightened the dialogue between reformers and radicals, between conservationists and preservationists, and the broader public whom they hoped to influence. In no other way could conservation have become a household word and an idea of considerable force in the politics of the Progressive Era. This situation is not unique to this particular movement. It is found in virtually all efforts to reform the American polity. This was as true for the abolitionists of the antebellum era as it has been for those advocating the civil rights of minorities in the post–World War II era. In each instance, the battles over rhetoric and ideals, intemperate as they often were (and are), have served a broader purpose: each group gained by the other’s presence. Radicals can make moderates look more conservative to those who fear reform, and the moderates can often secure greater success as a result. Moderates, pushed by the logic of confrontational politics, are often compelled to adopt elements of the radical agenda to maintain their standing in a particular movement. This is not to suggest that change is inevitable, that history is inherently progressive. But we should not be blind to the dynamism of such struggles. It was out of the tradition of brawling over environmental policies and politics, for example, that the national park and forest systems were born, and out of it too came the subsequent creation of wilderness areas in the national forests. Political conflict, in this respect, is generative and choreographed, with opposing factions acting more like partners in a dance in which each seeks to take (or grab) the lead—and occasionally steps on the other’s toes. It was just such a dance that Muir and Pinchot led during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a dance their successors have repeatedly joined.

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Notes 1. Dave Foreman quoted in Michael Parfit, “Earth First!ers Wield a Mean Monkey Wrench,” Smithsonian (April 1990): 184–204; Foreman expands on this theme in his Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), 17–21; Russell Train quoted www.earthisland.org/brower/sub_bio.cfm; Ron Wolf, “God, James Watt, and the Public’s Land,” Audubon (May 1981): 58–65. 2. Although Wolfe does not date the episode, a remarkable lacuna that has led subsequent historians to select various dates for when it might have occurred, it is clear from Pinchot’s diary that he met Muir in the lobby on September 6, 1897. But that is all it confirms. Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999), 122–32; Pinchot, diary, 1897, reel 1, Gifford Pinchot Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as GP); on Pinchot’s public relations campaign, see Stephen Ponder, “Gifford Pinchot: Press Agent for Forestry,” Journal of Forest History (January 1987): 26–35. 3. Pinchot, diary, September 5, 1897, GP; Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 122–32; Stephen Ponder, “Conservation, Community Economics, and Newspapering: The Seattle Press and the Forest Reserves Controversy of 1897,” American Journalism (1986): 50–60, analyzes the decided impact Pinchot’s visit had on public opinion in Seattle. 4. Pinchot, diary, September 5, 1897, GP; Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 103; on the National Forestry Commission, see Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (New York: Knopf, 1945); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 5. Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 103; Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 275–76 recounts the hotel lobby denunciation. 6. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 275–76. Elements of this story reappear in Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 163; Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (New York: Viking, 1985), 312; Jim Dale Vickery, Wilderness Visionaries (Merrillville, IN: ICS Books, 1986), 88–91; Lawrence Rakestraw, “Sheep Grazing in the Cascade Range: John Minto vs. John Muir,” Pacific Historical Review (November 1958): 371–82, employs the story, too, but dates it three years later. 7. The entries to Pinchot’s diaries for September 7, when the incident was supposed to have taken place, do not corroborate Wolfe’s account but are instead positively banal. Pinchot ran errands in the morning, which included a medical checkup and having his outfit repaired, all in preparation for his departure from Seattle on a four o’clock train heading east. Surely he would have penciled in such a momentous confrontation as Wolfe describes, especially given the fact that he had been so careful to record his extensive

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and happy interactions with Muir on the previous day. He was, moreover, a man who regularly used his diary as a way of venting his grievances and settling scores. That he did not do so in this case suggests that there may not have been a score to settle; for an extended analysis of the discrepancies in the secondary accounts of this event, see Char Miller, “What Happened in the Rainier Grand’s Lobby? A Question of Sources,” Journal of American History (March 2000): 1709–14. Ibid; In none of the three oral histories compiled with Colby and in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, is the Seattle hotel incident recalled. This does not mean that it did not happen, of course, but is suggestive of the tale’s apocryphal character; Muir to Pinchot, December 16, 1897, microfilm; Muir to Robert Underwood Johnson, August 3, 1898, 10/05869, John Muir Papers, microfilm, hereafter cited as JMP microfilm, supports the notion that Muir knew Pinchot’s support of grazing was qualified and thus not in the same category as Hermann’s. Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 177–80; Turner, Rediscovering America, 312, also notes the complexity of Pinchot’s position on the question of grazing in the forest reserves. Muir and Pinchot spent five days together in August 1899, among other things studying sheep devastation in Northern California; see Pinchot, diary, August 8–12, 1899, GP; John Muir, “The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” in Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 33, provides a concise view of his reaction to sheep and shepherds in the Sierra Reserve: “. . . Sheep in uncountable hordes . . . trample it and devour every green leaf within reach; while the shepherds, like destroying angels, set innumerable fires, which burn not only the undergrowth of seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends, but countless thousands of the venerable giants.” Like Muir, Pinchot “never did love a sheepherder.” Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 178. M. Nelson McGeary, Gifford Pinchot, Forester-Politician (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); Harold T. Pinkett, Gifford Pinchot: Public and Private Forester (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Barry Walsh, “Gifford Pinchot, Conservationist,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal (Summer 1987): 3–7; Henry Clepper, Professional Forestry in the United States (Baltimore: published for Resources for the Future by Johns Hopkins Press, 1971). Stephen R. Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), ix; Cohen, The Pathless Way, xiii. McGeary, Pinchot; Pinkett, Pinchot; Walsh, “Gifford Pinchot,” 3–7; Susan Schrepfer, “Establishing Administrative ‘Standing’: The Sierra Club and the Forest Service, 1897–1956,” in American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics, ed. Char Miller (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 125–42; Hal K. Rothman, “‘A Regular Ding-Dong Fight’: The Dynamics of Park ServiceForest Service Controversy During the 1920s and 1930s,” in Miller, American Forests, 109–24.

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13. On Pinchot’s public relations campaigns, see articles by Steven Ponder, “Federal News Management in the Progressive Era: Gifford Pinchot and the Conservation Campaign,” Journalism History (Summer 1986): 42–48; “Conservation, Community Economics, and Newspapering,” 50–60; and “Gifford Pinchot,” 26–35. Discussions of Muir’s public relations campaigns are found in Cohen, The Pathless Way, and Fox, The American Conservation Movement. Would that I could claim to be free of such prejudices! I won’t even try, though my situation is somewhat different, not to say schizophrenic: I am writing a biography of Gifford Pinchot, despite the fact that my environmental beliefs are more closely akin to those of Muir. This dilemma is compounded, for to explain why Pinchot acted and believed as he did, I must try to understand him—to think like him—as much as is possible. The biographer’s craft, then, depends upon empathy, and I will not be the first who has found that this leads to the taking of sides, to adopting the worldview of one’s subject. 14. Cohen, The Pathless Way, 320. 15. Ibid., 320; William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 265. 16. An extended discussion of the Pinchot family fortunes appears in McGeary, Pinchot, 3–16; Char Miller, “The Greening of Gifford Pinchot,” unpublished manuscript; John Muir to Louise Muir, June 13, 1893, in Badè, Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. II, 265, recounts his whirlwind social life in New York that June, mentioning the Pinchots, meeting Gifford, and the stories he was asked again and again to recount. 17. Muir to Pinchot, April 16, 1894, GP; Pinchot to Muir, June 19, 1893, September 13, 1893, JMP, microfilm 07/04314. 18. Muir to Pinchot, April 16, 1894, GP; Pinchot to Muir, September 13, 1893, JMP microfilm 07/04314. 19. Pinchot to Muir, September 13, 1893, JMP, microfilm 07/04314; Pinchot to Muir, April 8, 1894, JMP microfilm, 08/04494; Pinchot to Muir, May 13, 1894, JMP microfilm 08/04545. 20. Muir to Pinchot, April 16, 1894, GP. 21. Cohen, The Pathless Way, 317–20; Smith, Pacific Visions, 159–61. 22. Smith, Pacific Visions, 160–61; Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 91, 101. 23. Pinchot to Muir, July 23, 1896, JMP, microfilm 09/05267. 24. Cohen, The Pathless Way, 294–95; Linnie Marsh Wolfe, ed., John of the Mountain: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 357. 25. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 363; Pinchot to Muir, October 21, 1896, JMP, microfilm 09/05318; Muir to Pinchot, October 28, 1896, GP; Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 100–103. 26. Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 100–103; Muir to Pinchot, October 28, 1896, GP; December 17, 1897, GP.

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27. Pinchot to Muir, July 2, 1897, JMP, microfilm 09/05569; Muir to Pinchot, July 8, 1897, GP; several months later Muir apparently changed his mind about the value of Pinchot’s new job—Muir to Charles S. Sargent, October 28, 1897, JMP, microfilm 09/05652. 28. Muir to Pinchot, July 8, 1897, GP; Pinchot to Muir, December 9, 1896, JMP, microfilm 09/05353; July 2, 1897, JMP, microfilm 09/05569. 29. Pinchot, diary, August 8–12, 1899, GP; Pinchot to Muir, August 20, 1899, JMP, microfilm 10/06179; Pinchot to Muir, February 2, 1900, JMP, microfilm 11/06324; Muir to R. U. Johnson, August 16, 1899, JMP, microfilm 10/06174; Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 170–71. The essays in Muir’s Our National Parks (1901) particularly speak to his belief in the health-giving qualities of forests. 30. Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 119–22; Cohen, The Pathless Way, 292–94; Fox, The American Conservation Movement, 112–15; Pinchot to Muir, October 21, 1896, JMP, microfilm 09/05318. 31. Sargent to Muir, May 3, 1897, JMP, microfilm 09/05522. 32. Muir, “A Plan to Save the Forests,” Century (February 1895); Muir, “The American Forests,” 336–42, and “The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” 1–36 in Our National Parks (1901), also speak to the productive use of forests, use that was in line with Pinchot’s understanding of that term; Cohen, The Pathless Way, 297–301. 33. Ibid. 34. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, chapter 10; Smith, Pacific Visions, 159–66; Muir to Robert U. Johnson, March 23, 1905, Robert Underwood Johnson Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as RUJP). 35. Pinchot to William E. Colby, February 17, 1905, RUJP. Pinchot sent a copy of this letter to Muir as a concise statement of his views; Muir to Pinchot, May 27, 1905, JMP, microfilm 22⁄13426. It is at least the last letter in Muir’s files. 36. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, chapter 10; Smith, Pacific Visions, 159–66; copies of Pinchot to Marsden Manson, May 28, 1906; November 15, 1906, are in RUJP; they are also cited in The Independent, August 8, 1910, 375–76. 37. Muir to James Garfield, September 6, 1907, JMP, microfilm 16/09246. Pinchot, who visited Muir during a break in the 1907 Irrigation Conference in Sacramento, hoped to return to discuss Hetch Hetchy in detail with Muir but was unable to do so due to the “press of work”; Pinchot to Muir, September 6, 1907, JMP, microfilm 16/09256; Pinchot to Roosevelt, October 11, 1907, quoted in Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 164. 38. Pinchot to Frederick Perry Noble, September 11, 1913, RUJP; Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 170–71. 39. Muir to Johnson, September 11, 1913; September 3, 1910, RUJP. 40. Fernow to Pinchot, July 15, 1890; September 19, 1890; Pinchot, diary, February–March 1891, GP; McGeary, Pinchot, 21–26.

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41. Fernow to Pinchot, February 2, 1892; Pinchot to Maurice Hutton, February 23, 1907, GP; Muir to Pinchot, October 28, 1896, GP; Pinchot to Muir, October 21, 1896, JMP, microfilm 09/05318; December 9, 1896, JMP, microfilm 09/05353; McGeary, Pinchot, 25–27. 42. Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 130–31; McGeary, Pinchot, 37–43. 43. Sargent to Muir, June 27, 1898, JMP, microfilm 10/05842; Sargent to Muir, quoted in Turner, Rediscovering America, 325. 44. Robert Underwood Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), 304–5.

Part III2

Literary Aspects

chapter seven 1

Domesticity, Tourism, and the National Parks in John Muir’s Late Writings

Daniel J. Philippon

12 Many critics and biographers of John Muir have observed a general shift in Muir’s priorities over time, a move away from an emphasis on the experience of the solitary observer in nature and toward a more lenient understanding of the experience of other humans in the world—both as residents of domestic space and as tourists in the wilderness. Roderick Nash articulates a version of this observation when he describes the change in Muir’s rhetoric from his early advocacy of the “rights of nature” to his later use of more anthropocentric arguments. “Why did Muir abandon the environmental ethics approach?” Nash asks. The reason, it seems clear, is that he got into politics and became pragmatic. Muir believed the only way to save the American wilderness was to persuade the American people and their government of its worth to them. Consequently he tempered his biocentricity and the ethical system it implied, hiding them 1

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in his published writing and speeches under a cover of anthropocentrism. It is important to recall that Muir’s remarks about the rights of nature appeared first in his private, unpublished journals and not in book form until after his death. Muir knew very well that to go before Congress and the public arguing for national parks as places where snakes, redwood trees, beavers, and rocks could exercise their natural rights to life and liberty would be to invoke ridicule and weaken the cause he wished to advance. So he camouflaged his radical egalitarianism in more acceptable rhetoric centered on the benefits of nature for people.1 That Muir tempered his radicalism over time has long been acknowledged as a truism among scholars, but to suggest that Muir was less than forthright with his readers minimizes in important ways the very real changes Muir underwent over the course of three decades. Moreover, such an interpretation rests upon an incomplete understanding of Muir’s rhetoric as simply the manipulation of language rather than the negotiation of a complex cultural discourse. A more subtle understanding of Muir’s representations of nature has begun to be articulated by Michael L. Smith, Robert L. Dorman, Steven J. Holmes, and other critics, who emphasize the importance of the domestic in Muir’s writing.2 This chapter will contribute to this trend by arguing that Muir’s late writings about Yosemite, such as those found in The Mountains of California (1894) and Our National Parks (1901), were not an attempt to camouflage Muir’s true beliefs but were rather a reflection of the domesticating influence exerted by both his audience and his family.3 Muir’s initial rejection of the domestic life in favor of the wilderness sojourn, and his location of God in the mountains instead of the home, came in reaction to the strict Calvinism imposed on him by his father. As his reputation as a writer grew, however, and especially once he became a husband and a father, Muir became more sensitive to the value of the domestic—and its touristic counterpart—as an essential element in the preservation of nature.

“Going to the Mountains Is Going Home” In the early 1870s, Muir’s identification of mountain landscapes with God’s light and lowland civilization with the darkness of evil was a vivid and clearcut reversal of the Calvinist dichotomy of his father, who instead attempted to bring the light of civilization to the darkness of the wilderness.4 “Heaven

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knows that John Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains,” Muir wrote in his journal in October 1871.5 As time passed, however, the starkness of Muir’s dichotomy softened considerably. As Stephen Fox has observed, the truth of Muir’s sentiments is to be found somewhere in between these two extremes. “At one pole he always overstated the nature of the opposite extreme. He neither loved the wilderness nor hated civilization as much as he claimed.”6 Holmes agrees, observing that Muir never really lived the dichotomy between wilderness and civilization that he constructed: “Leaving all his human contacts for ‘pure nature,’ for good, was never a real possibility for him. Instead, his emotional bonds to home cut across ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilization,’ or rather the natural, human, and divine realms, resulting in complex and shifting configurations of the desired and the defiled.”7 Michael P. Cohen attributes this softening to Muir’s discovery of his calling as a writer. In December 1871, Muir published his first article, “Yosemite Glaciers,” in the New York Tribune, followed the next month by another contribution to the Tribune, “Yosemite in Winter.” Three months later, in April 1872, his first magazine article, “Yosemite Valley in Flood,” appeared in the Overland Monthly. The title of this last article was telling, because over the next ten years Muir himself would release a flood of articles on the Yosemite and surrounding regions, publishing them in some of the nation’s leading periodicals and newspapers, such as the Overland Monthly, Harper’s Monthly, Scribner’s, and the San Francisco Bulletin. How was it possible, Cohen asks, for Muir to write for such popular magazines without uprooting himself? What we now know—that working in and through a medium, with its own conventions, has a way of shaping the mind of the creator—Muir also suspected. Popular literature and industrial tourism have this in common: they vulgarize the writer and the tour guide as well as the reader and the tourist. Muir was on the brink of a very dangerous abyss. . . . By falling into the occupation of a popular writer he could endanger the very message he had a sacred mission to convey. He would have to stand astride the abyss between wilderness and civilization and mediate between the vision he had gained in the mountains and the expectations of his readers.8 Part of the way Muir accomplished this mediation was by domesticating the sacred.9 Rather than invoking the nineteenth-century discourse of the

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home as a sacred space, Muir turned to the spaces he already knew to be sacred and made them seem more like home. In so doing, Muir helped to convince Americans that “useless lands” were valuable because their value as “sacred spaces” was inseparable from their value as “domestic spaces.” As Holmes points out, this process was part of Muir’s own coming to terms with Yosemite as a home. According to Holmes, it was only after repeated experiences of leaving and then returning to Yosemite throughout the 1870s that he came to commonly refer to that specific place as his “true mountain home”; this process was especially powerful after he had begun to make a literary career on the basis of his descriptions of Yosemite and had begun to be strongly associated with that place in the public mind. . . . Yosemite took on the force of a symbolic center only after he had left and then returned to it—with no plans of actually staying there to live. Thus, Yosemite gained meaning precisely through marked contrast with his actual homes of the period; freed of many of the requirements for a literal home, Yosemite could serve as a locus of religious and symbolic meanings in the context of a developing literary career and personal identity.10 Muir made his argument about Yosemite’s sacred domesticity by adopting one of the literary techniques of Henry David Thoreau, which Ralph Waldo Emerson first identified as the “old fault of unlimited contradiction” in an important journal entry from August 25, 1843. “The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned,” Emerson wrote of Thoreau. “It consists in substituting for the obvious word & thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild mountains & winter forests for their domestic air; snow & ice for their warmth; villagers & wood choppers for their urbanity[;] and the wilderness for resembling Rome & Paris.”11 Muir’s adoption of this technique suggests that Thoreau’s use of “unlimited contradiction” was no trick, though. As Cecelia Tichi observes about Walden, “the premise of a domesticated environment . . . frees Thoreau to explore and celebrate wildness as a tonic for thought. . . . His wildness is held in a domestic embrace.”12 Despite the different objects of their attention, Muir shares with Mabel Wright an emphasis on the friendship of nature. “Throughout his work,” observes Lawrence Buell, “Muir insisted to the point of obsessiveness on nature’s companionableness, no matter how superficially forbidding. . . . Such

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transformations of images of harshness into images of shelter and comfort are typical of Muir; they show how important to him it was, for whatever reason, to think of nature as his friend.”13 One of the reasons this was important, of course, was rhetorical. Nature was not just Muir’s friend; it was to be the reader’s friend, and no reader wants to neglect his or her friends in their time of need. Sherman Paul explains that one of the ways Muir makes himself at home is “by speaking of ‘Nature’s carpeted mountain halls,’ by frequently considering landscape and natural phenomena in terms of rugs, lacework, and embroidery. He reminds us that nature, even though God makes it, is ‘feminine,’ with all that this has immemorially meant for our dwelling there.”14 Like Wright, Muir even disregarded the “pathetic fallacy” and personified the plants, animals, and even landscape elements he encountered, making them all seem “familiar,” like members of the human family.15 The first instance of Muir’s best-known example of “unlimited contradiction” appeared on August 3, 1875, as part of Muir’s series “Summering in the Sierra” for the San Francisco Bulletin. Muir began the article, titled “In Sierra Forests,” by announcing that “going to the mountains is going home.”16 On August 24, 1876, Muir expanded on this statement, noting that “the regular tourist, ever on the flow, is one of the most characteristic productions of the present century; and however frivolous and inappreciative the poorer specimens may appear, viewed comprehensively they are a most hopeful and significant sign of the times, indicating at least the beginning of our return to nature,—for going to the mountains is going home.”17 Remarkably, Muir expanded on the meaning of his statement by making one of his earliest declarations of hope in the possibility of tourism, a sure sign that his attempt at mediation between the wilderness and civilization would come through the domestication of the sacred. If the interaction of the domestic and the sacred was a prominent theme for Muir from his earliest days in Yosemite, it remained so until the end of his life in 1914.18 Robert Underwood Johnson, for instance, recounts that when Muir wrote for the first time to a young admirer, he “expressed the hope that she would ‘find that going to the mountains is going home and that Christ’s Sermon on the Mount is on every mount.’”19 One of Muir’s betterknown statements, however, may best demonstrate the continuity of Muir’s thinking about this topic. In a late journal entry from around 1913, Muir summed up the course of his life by stating: “Not like my taking the veil—no solemn abjuration of the world. I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found was really going in.”20 Cohen claims that “such was simply not the case. He was abjuring the world

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when he went out, and those who cared about him were constantly trying to bring him back in.”21 Yet Muir specifically notes that he is not renouncing the world here, and his language here seems to support his assertion; close attention to its ellipses suggests that Muir may have meant that going out [of his own house] was really going in [to God’s house], a place of worship, and one that Muir increasingly attempted to entice others to enter.22 On the literal level, Muir was himself becoming more domesticated by the end of the 1870s, and his life as a husband and a father in the following decade changed him visibly, making him better able to communicate with middle- and upper-class readers and more willing to accede to the actual domestication of Yosemite through tourism. John P. O’Grady observes that Muir “never divested himself—even during his pilgrim years—of the domestic urge,” a fact borne out by a letter to his sister Sarah written on January 12, 1877: “Little did I think when I used to be, and am now, fonder of home and still domestic life than any one of the boys, that I only should be a bachelor and doomed to roam always far outside the family circle.”23 Indeed, Muir often expressed his loneliness in letters and his journal throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s. “I am lonely among my enjoyments,” Muir wrote Jeanne Carr on May 17, 1870; “the Valley is full of visitors, but I have no one to talk to.”24 And to his journal in October 1872, Muir confided: “There perhaps are souls that never weary, that always go unhalting and glad, tuneful and songful as mountain water. Not so, weary, hungry me. In all God’s mountain mansions, I find no human sympathy, and I hunger.”25 With more than a little prodding from Jeanne Carr, Muir eventually settled down at age forty-one and married Louie Wanda Strentzel on April 14, 1880, receiving the Strentzels’ seventeen-room ranch house as a wedding gift and later taking over the responsibilities for their 2,600-acre fruit farm.26 In late interviews and conversations, Muir tried to emphasize that his true “home” remained in the wilderness despite his marriage. In 1906, for instance, Muir told The World’s Work that “home is the most dangerous place I ever go to. . . . As long as I camp out in the mountains, without tent or blankets, I get along very well; but the minute I get into a house and have a warm bed and begin to live on fine food, I get into a draft and the first thing I know I am coughing and sneezing and threatened with pneumonia, and altogether miserable. Outdoors is the natural place for a man.”27 And Ray Stannard Baker recounts Muir speaking of his home in Martinez as “a good place to be housed in during stormy weather, to write in, and to raise children in.” But, Muir told Baker, “it is not my home. Up there is my home,” he said, pointing toward the Sierra.28

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fig. 7.1. John Muir standing in the family pear orchard, Martinez, California, ca. 1912. Photographer George R. King. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

Nevertheless, several critics suggest that Muir’s domestic life was in fact quite beneficial to his long-term goal of wilderness preservation.“Muir scholars tend to exaggerate the frustrations Muir experienced in the 1880s,” notes Ronald H. Limbaugh.“Exchanging the wild Yosemite days for a prosperous life in Alhambra Valley was a willful act that brought with it security and fortune, things he had never known before.”29 Robert L. Dorman similarly observes that “Muir hagiographers are sometimes puzzled by this interregnum of

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domesticity and conventionality” in Muir’s life, suggesting instead that the 1880s merely represent the surfacing of several conventional Victorian elements Muir had always embodied. “Many habits of the Victorian mind, Muir’s Victorian mind—his secularized Christian worldview, his belief in evolutionary progress, his faith in objective science, his genteel aesthetic and literary tastes—were to guide him in the wilderness and allow him to interpret it for a mainstream audience who read him avidly because they shared these comfortable assumptions,” Dorman claims.30 Another critic, Harold P. Simonson, argues that Muir’s later years tempered his early romanticism. The “purity” of the mountains, Muir realized, could no more provide salvation than could the “sickness” of the lowlands. In fact, Muir discovered that the lowlands offered him the opportunity for experiencing the fullness of human experience: social and political service, a happy family life, a successful career, and many rich friendships. As Simonson puts it, “To turn away from human society in hopes of achieving spiritual purity denied the claims of time and place and denied as well the need for human love. . . . In wildness the soul comes to know a certain weariness that the lowlands, for all their ills, can alleviate.”31 Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Muir’s early biographer, sums up the contributions of these “lost years” of Muir’s life by noting that when one considers the great work of the ensuing quarter-century, during which, largely owing to his leadership, the national park and forest reserve systems were established in America, it is apparent that the six or seven years of withdrawal contributed their necessary share to the pattern and purpose of his life. For it was then he learned to live and work with men and women, and to understand and utilize social institutions. When he emerged in 1889, to take up his public work, he was no longer “an unknown nobody in the woods,” but a shrewd, practical man of the world, and a lover of his fellow man.32

The Mountains of California Although The Mountains of California was published in 1894, when Muir was fifty-six, the book was less a creation of the 1890s than it was a portrait of Muir in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when the articles upon which the volume is based were first published in Scribner’s. Nevertheless, Muir worked hard during the early 1890s to tighten and polish these essays and assemble

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them into a book of which he could be proud—the first book-length work he would publish. In a letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, who was coordinating the book’s publication for the Century, Muir wrote: “I have worked hard . . . adding lots of new stuff, and killing adjectives and adverbs of redundant growth—the verys, intenses, gloriouses, ands, and buts, by the score.”33 Muir’s effort was repaid richly, as the book sold out of its first printing in a few months and went on to sell about ten thousand copies total.34 More than any other of Muir’s works, The Mountains of California illustrates the challenges Muir faced in coming to terms with his domestic audience. In attempting to avoid what Donald Wesling has called the danger of “hectoring the reader into a moral response,” Muir instead chose to act as a learned tour guide, developing a persona that he hoped “would establish a human perspective upon the complexity of nature and ground his descriptions in scientific fact,” as Christine Oravec has noted.35 Muir was thus forced to become the protagonist of his own adventures, a role not always compatible with his own humble vision of humanity’s place in the world. In his study of narrative in American nature writing, Randall Roorda has effectively described the tension such a role embodied, noting that “in recognizing the writer as a protagonist, we are posed in dramatic contradistinction to the writer; we both ‘move through [the landscape] with’ and come up against that writer. . . . Thus we enthuse with a writer like Muir, through his eyes; but part of us gapes at him, too, as at a spectacle; and there is drama in this encounter.”36 As a collection of Muir’s Scribner’s articles, The Mountains of California functions as a kind of anthology of such moments, the best known of which are Muir’s ascent of Mount Ritter in “A Near View of the High Sierra” (chapter 4) and his climbing of a Douglas spruce in “A Wind-Storm in the Forests” (chapter 10). In Mountains, Muir was able to transcribe the oral narratives for which he had become legendary among his circle of listeners and offer them to a wider audience of readers, crafting in the process a literary persona— “John o’ the Mountains”—through which readers could vicariously experience the mountains without ever leaving their armchairs.37 The result, for many readers, was equivalent to the reaction of Muir’s friends whenever the mountaineer came down from his Sierra rambles.“We almost thought he was Jesus Christ,” the artist William Keith told William Colby. “We fairly worshipped him!”38 The result for Muir was that he became far more sensitive to the needs of his readers and far more aware of the value of tourism. Muir’s role as a tour guide in The Mountains of California took on a quite literal status in 1901 with the beginning of the Sierra Club’s outing program, still in existence today. An early indication of just how far Muir had traveled

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fig. 7.2. John Muir (seen at left) on a Sierra Club outing at Porcupine Flat, Yosemite National Park, July 13, 1907. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

since his solo mountaineering days came during the first official annual meeting of the club, held on November 23, 1895, at which Muir was asked to deliver a speech, which he called “The National Parks and Forest Reservations.” Said Muir: It is encouraging to learn that so many of the young men and women growing up in California are going to the mountains every summer and becoming good mountaineers, and, of course, good defenders of the Sierra forests and of all the reviving beauty that belongs to them. For every one that I found mountaineering back of Yosemite in the High Sierra, ten years ago, I this year met more than a hundred. Many of these young mountaineers were girls, in parties of ten or fifteen, making bright pictures as they tramped merrily along through the forest aisles, with the sparkle and

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exhilaration of the mountains in their eyes—a fine, hopeful sign of the times.39 Clearly, this was a father of daughters speaking! And it was during this speech that Muir delivered what has become the unofficial motto of the outings program: “Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine-trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest protection would vanish.”40 The first of the club’s annual outings took place in Yosemite National Park’s Tuolumne Meadows in the summer of 1901, an event attended by ninety-six men and women, including—notably—both of Muir’s daughters. During the day, individuals and groups hiked to various parts of the High Sierra, and at night they returned to the base camps, where supply wagons, mule trains, and full-time chefs provided the necessary food and equipment. Muir and faculty members from Berkeley and Stanford gave campfire lectures on natural history, including talks by William R. Dudley on forestry, C. Hart Merriam on birds and animals, and Theodore Hittell on the history of Yosemite.41 In preparation for the outing, organizer William Colby recommended that the participants read The Mountains of California, along with Joseph LeConte’s Ramblings Through the High Sierra.42 “The Club outing is a great success,” Muir wrote Louie on July 20, 1901. “God’s ozone sparkles in every eye. I never before saw so big and merry a camp circle, a huge fire blazing in the center. I had, of course, to make a little speech.”43 In his proposal for this first outing, Colby had declared that “an excursion of this sort, if properly conducted will do an infinite amount of good toward awakening the proper kind of interest in the forests and other natural features of our mountains, and will also tend to create a spirit of goodfellowship among our members.”44 Such seems to have been the case, as fifty new club members joined after the first outing, and roughly two hundred had by the following summer.45 The persona for which Muir had become well known by this time had more than a little to do with this surge in membership. As Colby told Muir when he began planning the following year’s outing, “they all ask, the first thing, if you are going to be with us.”46

Our National Parks These two threads of Muir’s philosophy—conservation and tourism—come together most clearly in the essays contained in Our National Parks, published

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in 1901, shortly after the conclusion of the first Sierra Club outing. On the one hand, Our National Parks is Muir’s most explicitly conservationist book, a point stressed by the Dial in its review of the book. “No one has done more to draw the attention of the public to the desirability and necessity of forest preservation than Mr. John Muir,” the reviewer noted, and Our National Parks “embodies some of his most trenchant appeals for public interest and legislative action”47 On the other hand, the book also contains some of Muir’s strongest statements about the value of tourism, a fact recognized by an anonymous reader in New York, who wrote to Muir on August 10, 1903: “This is the first of your published works I have met, and being of stern necessity tied up to an office business, with the hills and streams out of sight and the love of them strong in me, imagining the delight of seeing the Sierras, of breathing the fine clean air, of making acquaintance with those blessed trees of yours . . . ah, it is a treat, a vacation more enjoyed than many.”48 If government action would not preserve the forests, Muir reasoned, then perhaps tourism would; perhaps getting people into the forests would demonstrate to them that nature was indeed a utilitarian resource—though one for spiritual, not consumptive purposes.49 When the book’s opening essay, “The Wild Parks and Forests Reservations of the West,” originally appeared in the Atlantic in January 1898, the magazine’s editor reported that the article increased the magazine’s circulation “enormously.”50 It is easy to see why this was the case. “Wild Parks” not only offered readers a whirlwind tour of western America, but it also validated whatever desires they may have had to see these spaces for themselves. “The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see,” Muir announced at the beginning of his essay. Then, turning again to his own version of Thoreau’s “unlimited contradiction,” he noted that “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers but as fountains of life.”51 Whereas such a statement was perfectly in keeping with the Muir of the 1870s, his subsequent extension of this thought would hardly have been thinkable thirty years ago. Certainly the younger Muir would have bristled at the notion that “even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms, mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees arrayed more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game with red umbrellas—even this is encouraging, and may well be regarded as a hopeful sign of the times.”Yet the 1901 Muir even goes so far as to stress the “good roads” by which a visitor can

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reach the wilderness. Still, the older Muir does not hesitate to follow this statement with a description of the destruction caused to the nation’s flora by several groups: farmers in the Central Valley of California, loggers and shepherds in the Sierra, and cattlemen in the southwestern deserts. Muir next takes his readers on a tour of the West’s forest reserves, anticipating all the while their possible objections to his enthusiasm. “No American wilderness that I know of is so dangerous as a city home ‘with all the modern improvements,’” he assures his audience. “One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.” Finally, defining “parks” as “places for rest, inspiration, and prayers,” he argues for the transformation of many of the forest reserves he has surveyed into such parks, often using the “parklike” openings of such a reserve as the Grand Canyon to argue for its designation as an authorized “national park.”52

Conclusion Part of Muir’s purpose in writing Our National Parks had been to facilitate the transfer of the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove from the State of California to the federal government, which Muir believed would do a better job managing the valley than the state had done throughout the 1890s. The successful recession of the valley in 1906, however, reflected the compromises that would increasingly become necessary for the preservation of the national parks—and nothing better embodied these compromises than the domestication of nature through tourism. As John A. Jakle has written, “The quest to protect nature inviolate provided much of the intellectual and emotional drive behind park development, but the tourist, as consumer, and as responsive citizen, provided the economic and political rationale needed to translate philosophy into accomplishment.”53 Muir certainly recognized this fact, and the older he grew, the more generous he became with tourists, eventually even accommodating himself to the idea of cars in Yosemite. In a December 12, 1912, letter to Howard Palmer, for instance, Muir noted that there was no use in trying to keep those “useful, progressive, blunt nosed mechanical beetles” out of Yosemite. “Good walkers can go anywhere in these hospitable mountains without artificial ways,” Muir told Palmer, “but most visitors have to be rolled in on wheels with blankets and kitchen arrangements.”54 With the arrival of the automobile and its portable domesticity, going to the mountains had truly become going home. As his comments to Palmer indicate, Muir had strong reservations about the transformation of Yosemite into what David Louter has termed

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fig. 7.3. Muir in an automobile stops to talk to a friend, ca. 1910. Muir recognized that automobiles would bring tourists to parks, but that they would be a mixed blessing. John Muir Papers, HoltAtherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

a “windshield wilderness,” but he also recognized the positive effect automobile tourism could have on park preservation efforts.55 William Colby shared Muir’s optimism with the second National Park Conference, held at Yosemite in October 1912, when he stated the Sierra Club’s position on automobile tourists in national parks: “We hope they will be able to come in when the time comes, because we think the automobile adds great zest to travel and we are particularly interested in the increase of travel to these parks.” For Yosemite, Colby added, the proper time was “very close at hand.”56 Muir and the Sierra Club, says Louter, “embraced the automobile as a way to expand the political support of parks and meet utilitarian arguments with their own that auto tourism to national parks would promote economic growth. . . . Evidently, Muir saw automobiles the way Emerson saw trains. Cars seemed to present a lesser menace than grazing sheep in Yosemite or flooding one of its valleys.”57 Ironically, the political support Muir hoped those auto

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tourists would bring could not be marshaled in time to prevent the flooding of Hetch Hetchy Valley. In 1913, the same year Interior Secretary Franklin K. Lane lifted the ban on automobiles in Yosemite National Park, he also approved San Francisco’s proposal to dam the valley for a reservoir.58 Though never fully at ease with twentieth-century notions of tourism, Muir eventually came to appreciate that wilderness protection could not occur without “park” status and that “park” status could not occur without tourism. Moreover, his evolving understanding of what a national park should be was dependent not only upon tourism but also upon its domestic context. The years Muir spent as a husband and father in Martinez seem to have helped him clarify the ways in which the fate of his beloved Sierra Nevada rested as much on the domesticating influence of civilization as it did on wilderness devotees like himself. From his family and from his audience, in other words, Muir learned that a month in the backcountry was not always the necessary prerequisite to personal or political transformation and that much good could come from even the briefest, most touristic visit to the wilderness.

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Notes 1. Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 41. Leslie Paul Thiele makes a similar claim: “Muir, like Leopold and Carson, often camouflaged, subsumed, or tempered deep ecological orientations within a humanist rhetoric when attempting to win over the public and politicians.” See his Environmentalism for a New Millennium: The Challenge of Coevolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 186. 2. Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Robert L. Dorman, A Word for Nature: Four Pioneering Environmental Advocates, 1845–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Steven J. Holmes, The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). 3. See also my own Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), which develops this argument in more detail. 4. Paul Brooks, Speaking for Nature: How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson Have Shaped America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 29; Thomas J. Lyon, John Muir (Boise, ID: Boise State College, 1972), 16.

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5. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, ed., John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938; reprinted Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, 86). 6. Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 54. 7. Holmes, Young John Muir, 246. In a related observation, Robert Underwood Johnson writes of Muir’s “mock contempt for man” and observes that “he was deeply interested in human nature.” See Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), 282. 8. Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 132. 9. William Cronon links this transformation to tourism in “The Trouble with Wilderness.” According to Cronon, “As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated. The wilderness was still sacred, but the religious sentiments it evoked were more those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat. The writer who best captures this late romantic sense of a domesticated sublime is undoubtedly John Muir, whose descriptions of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada reflect none of the anxiety or terror one finds in earlier writers” (see Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996), 75. 10. Holmes, Young John Muir, 242. 11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 9 (1843–47), ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 9. 12. Cecelia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 166–67. Muir first read Thoreau during his time in Yosemite, apparently at the urging of Jeanne Carr. See John Muir, Letters to a Friend: Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866–1879 (1915; Dunwoody, GA: Norman S. Berg, 1973), 84; Bonnie Johanna Gisel, ed.,Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr, foreword by Ronald H. Limbaugh (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 111. His first reading of Walden apparently came when Abba G. Woolson sent Muir her copy of the book in March 1872 (see Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 395n). “Few men understand Thoreau as Muir does,” wrote Bailey Millard in 1908. “I thought I had read Walden, having gone through the volume at least a dozen times, but it remained for Muir, who knows the book backward, to read it to me. This he did from memory while I walked with him one rainy day at Martinez. . . . Emerson once said that, although Muir had not known Thoreau personally, he would have been the best man in the world to edit his works.” See Millard, “A Skyland Philosopher” Bookman 26 (1908): 596; see also Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 83.

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13. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 193–94. 14. Sherman Paul, For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 255. 15. John Tallmadge, “John Muir and the Poetics of Natural Conversion,” North Dakota Quarterly 59, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 72–74. Cf. Thomas Lyon: “If all nature is a living system, and human consciousness a dynamic and flowing part of it, then there is no pathetic fallacy, because there is no distinct boundary on one side of which is ‘all that is human,’ and on the other side, ‘the natural’” (see Lyon, John Muir, 43). Michael L. Smith also argues: “The change in perspective that Muir aimed for was grounded in feminine social traits. To perceive the dynamics of interdependence, to feel connected with nature and ‘kin to everything,’ to see the natural environment from the point of view of its inhabitants—all required skills for which scientists (and men in general) were rarely trained or socialized” (see Smith, Pacific Visions, 97). 16. Robert Engberg, ed., John Muir Summering in the Sierra (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 79. 17. Peter Browning, ed., John Muir in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations (Lafayette, CA: Great West Books, 1988), 34–35. 18. “I am feasting in the Lord’s mountain house, and what pen may write my blessings?” Muir asked Jeanne Carr in a December 6, 1869 letter (see Muir, Letters to a Friend, 71; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 94; emphasis added). 19. Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays, 286. 20. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 439. 21. Cohen, Pathless Way, 148–49. 22. Randall Roorda discusses this passage as a paradigm of the retreat in Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 21–26. 23. John P. O’Grady, Pilgrims to the Wild: Everett Ruess, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Clarence King, Mary Austin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), 60; William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 62. 24. Muir, Letters to a Friend, 77; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 106. 25. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 89. See also, for example, Muir’s letters of July 26, 1868, and February 24, 1869, to Jeanne Carr, and his letter of August 15, 1868, to his sister Annie (reprinted in part in Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours [New York: Viking, 1985], 166). Steven Holmes also notes Muir’s loneliness during the Yosemite years (see Holmes, The Young John Muir, 208, 241). Of course, Muir was not always desirous of human contact, as his September 8, 1871, letter to Carr makes clear: “I feel sure that if you were here to see how happy I am and how ardently I am seeking a knowledge of the rocks, you could not call me away but would gladly let me

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27. 28.

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go with only God and his written rocks to guide me. You would not think of calling me to make machines or a home, or of rubbing me against other minds, or of setting me up for measurement” (see Muir, Letters to a Friend, 105; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 147). Turner, Rediscovering America, 262–63. For more on the Martinez years, see P. J. Ryan, “The Martinez Years: The Family Life and Letters of John Muir,” Pacific Historian 25 (Summer 1981): 79–85. [French Strother,] “A Conversation with John Muir,” World’s Work 13 (1906): 8249. See also Millard, “A Skyland Philosopher,” 599. Ray Stannard Baker, “John Muir,” Outlook 74 (1906): 377. See also George Gerard Clarken, “At Home with John Muir,” Overland Monthly 52 (1908): 126; and Strother, “A Conversation with John Muir,” 8804. In April 1896, while still working on the ranch, Muir had also written in his journal: “How time flies, & how little of my real work I accomplish in the midst of all this ranch work & the petty details of a domestic kind. How grand would be a home in a hollow sequoia!” (see Turner, Rediscovering America, 276n). Ronald H. Limbaugh, “Stickeen and the Moral Education of John Muir,” Environmental History Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 26. Dorman, A Word for Nature, 111–12. Harold P. Simonson, “The Tempered Romanticism of John Muir,” Western American Literature 13 (1978): 238–39. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, xiv. Badè, Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. II, 287. Nevertheless, the reviewer for the Athenaeum accused Muir of a “constant indulgence in an unbridled luxury of language.” See Athenaeum 105 (1895): 77. Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 117. Donald Wesling, “The Poetics of Description: John Muir and Ruskinian Descriptive Prose,” Prose Studies, 1800–1900 1, no. 1 (Fall 1977): 42; Christine Oravec, “John Muir, Yosemite, and the Sublime Response: A Study in the Rhetoric of Preservationism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 67 (1981): 250. Roorda, Dramas of Solitude, 18. Muir is not, in this respect, all that different from Thoreau. Consider Thoreau’s well-known pronouncement at the beginning of Walden: “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained” (see Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley [1854; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971], 3). See also David Wyatt’s chapter on Muir in The Fall into Eden, in which he comments that “the extreme tensions in Muir’s recorded experience of landscape—between spectatorship and participation, harmony and salience, discipline and freedom—urge him into stances in which one side of the tension is consciously repressed, while being unconsciously maintained.” See Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45.

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37. I disagree, therefore, with Christine Oravec’s belief that “Muir suggested that his armchair readers abandon an image of themselves as sightseers, scenic appreciators, tourists, to a life of strenuousness and commitment” (see Oravec, “John Muir, Yosemite, and the Sublime Response,” 253). Muir certainly would have preferred that his readers embrace “a life of strenuousness and commitment,” but he did not—indeed, could not—actually suggest this, lest he risk alienating his largely eastern audience. For an example of Muir’s talkativeness, see Turner, Rediscovering America, 294. 38. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 154. 39. John Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” Sierra Club Bulletin 1, no. 7 (January 1896): 280. 40. Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” 282–83. 41. Stanford E. Demars, The Tourist in Yosemite, 1855–1985 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991), 75. 42. William E. Colby, “Proposed Summer Outing of the Sierra Club—Report of the Committee,” Sierra Club Bulletin 3, no. 3 (February 1901): 253. 43. Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 120. 44. Colby, “Proposed Summer Outing of the Sierra Club,” 250. 45. Douglas H. Strong, “The Sierra Club—A History; Part 1: Origins and Outings,” Sierra (October 1977): 13. 46. Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 120. 47. Review of Our National Parks, by John Muir, Dial 32 (1902): 163. For another review of the book, see the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 20 (1902): 419. An enlarged edition of the book was also reviewed in the Dial 47 (1909): 460–61. 48. Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, p. 117. 49. Environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff offers an alternative to this utilitarian view of spirituality, arguing that aesthetic and spiritual ideals “have to do not with the utility but with the meaning of things, not with what things are used for but what they express.” See Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 63. 50. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 277. Like The Mountains of California, Our National Parks collects essays Muir had originally published in a national periodical—not Scribner’s this time, due to Muir’s dissatisfaction with Johnson’s editing of his work, but the Atlantic, in whose pages the essays appeared from 1897 to 1901. 51. John Muir, Our National Parks, foreword by Alfred Runte (1901; San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 1. 52. Ibid., 2, 21, 23, 26. 53. John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 69.

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54. Badè, Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. II, 378–79. 55. David Louter, “Glaciers and Gasoline: The Making of a Windshield Wilderness, 1900–1915,” Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West, ed. David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long, foreword by Earl Pomeroy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 248–70. 56. Richard G. Lillard, “The Siege and Conquest of a National Park,” American West 5, no. 1 (January 1968): 31. According to Lillard, Colby “was for letting cars drive along the rim to Glacier Point and for improving the road from Inspiration Point down. He saw no harm in mixing cars and horses. The mountain roads were no different from Market Street. There were drunken drivers and accidents in both places.” See Lillard, “The Siege and Conquest of a National Park,” 31. Automobiles had been allowed in Yosemite for a brief period, from 1900 to 1907, before the acting superintendent banned them, claiming they were “constantly a source of annoyance and friction” and “constantly endangering the lives of tourists in the Valley” (see Lillard, “The Siege and Conquest of a National Park,” 68). 57. Louter, “Glaciers and Gasoline,” 257. 58. Ibid., 256.

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If Trees Are Us

A Relativity Theory Showing the Genius of John Muir’s Domestic Vision of Nature for Public Policy and the National Ethos Barbara Mossberg 12 Sept. 4, 1908 Happy the man to whom every tree is a friend— who loves them, sympathizes with them . . . with their brave struggles . . . and in joyous, triumphant exuberance . . . waving their friendly branches. . . . We may love them all and carry them about with us in our hearts. And so with the smaller flower people that dwell beneath and around them, looking up with admiring faces, or down in thoughtful poise . . . —John Muir We are often told that the world is going from bad to worse, sacrificing everything to Mammon. But this righteous uprising in defense of God’s trees in the midst of exciting politics and wars is telling a different story, and . . . every sequoia, I fancy, has heard the good news and is waving its branches for joy. The wrongs 1

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done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when light comes, the heart of the people is always right. —John Muir One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. —John Muir

Introduction: Making a Federal Case of It: John Muir’s Leadership in American Culture Who are we? Americans have always asked. Especially in the 1860s, the American Civil War churned national self-consciousness. The fate of the United States hung in the balance as military and political leadership battled over the value and meaning of being a nation. The challenge of seeing how separate, competing, coexisting, overlapping identities belong together gave thrust to our greatest writers. From Emily Dickinson’s stressed sense of a fractured and often opposed self— I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—Too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know! to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” writers worried themes of incompatible inclusion: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)1 In 1868, as battlefields, rhetoric, and literary insights flamed, a Scottish immigrant college dropout in the Far West provided an ecological solution to the paradox of our national identity. John Muir (1838–1914) was a botanist and geologist. His worldview recognized wholes, systems of vital relationships in which everything is connected and interdependent. He left the Civil War behind to engage in another kind of fight to bring wholeness and healing to the American spirit. Muir argued that our physical, spiritual, economic, and cultural survival depends upon natural resources—our wilderness. By definition, essential

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resources belong to all the people, including future citizens, and thus require federal governance. Accordingly, Muir and his colleagues turned to the U.S. government to create a structure of accountability and responsibility for the nation’s wilderness forests. Because he understood the environment as indivisible from the needs and rights of “we the people” as a whole, Muir emerged as one of the most effective statesmen to ground environmental protection. Abraham Lincoln had paved the way for defining wilderness preservation as vital to the “national interest” in his grant to California of the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove in 1864. In his role of fostering an emergent nation of laws, organizations, and institutions to manage the heritage of the American wilderness and forest preserve, Muir followed in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and others who provided moral and intellectual leadership at critical moments of the American republic: he was a citizen who combined legal, ethical, and scientific arguments to win hearts and minds on behalf of the nation’s political and spiritual destiny. With the pragmatic understanding that the fate of a tree depends upon laws and therefore, politics, Muir took his personal love of trees and flowers and strove to connect their well-being in the American imagination and conscience to our identity and destiny as a nation. Laws needed to be made and enforced that required national public support. Muir and his colleagues based their vision of what could stop the destruction of American wilderness on confidence in the American democratic system—the belief that “when light comes, the heart of the people is always right.” Muir had faith that “the people” will understand our own interests in ensuring the future of our natural resources.

We Changed Our Mind Muir was devoted and tireless in his efforts to generate public policy based on a fundamental respect for the intelligence of the American voter. But the decision to base a strategy for wilderness protection upon the American political processes does not explain what made the strategy work—the fact that we have a system of parks and preserves protecting our forests and wilderness today and a political will to continue to create and enforce such laws and policy. To understand Muir’s influential role in the process of winning public support, we can point to factors intrinsic to leadership, such an ability to see “the whole picture,” a hopeful imagination, and a sense of personal responsibility. When Muir saw the source of his own intellectual, spiritual, and emotional happiness imperiled—the destruction of the American forests and watersheds—he did not despair or turn inward in philosophic

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resignation. He transcended his predilection for solitary scientific research and writing to play an activist public role in the national spotlight—the kind of light that forces the blooming of the public conscience. As Muir took up the pen to argue the case for wilderness in the national arena, the fact that he was a world-renowned scientist in the fields of geology and botany, among others, gave his lobbying credibility with lawmakers and the public. But while his stature as a scientist certainly contributed to Muir’s leadership in wilderness legislation, Muir’s primary achievement, and what this chapter argues is the key to his effectiveness, is that his work to inspire laws to protect trees and their habitat changed how we see our environment—and thus our ability to determine our future. In order to make wilderness preservation a matter of “national interest,” he had to argue the value of wilderness in the first place. If people understood its value, then we could be counted on as allies in its preservation. Muir based his campaign for the worth of wilderness on a personal responsibility and courage, something even stronger than the desire to protect one’s homeland, even if that “homeland” is understood as earth itself: love of one’s “own.” Muir presented wilderness as an inextricable part of ourselves. Bringing this vision to the American political process in the aftermath of the Civil War, a time in American history of increased federal efforts to expand rights and citizenship for a far more inclusive polity, Muir lobbied for inhabitants of wilderness to become “citizens” protected by national laws. Muir infused wilderness into the nation’s understanding of its own value—its truth and beauty.

Part One: Muir’s Wilderness Is Our Kind of Place Most people are on the world, not in it, have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them, but are undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone. —John Muir The earth is a good mother —John Muir . . . a howling wilderness —Cotton Mather . . . savage . . . wasteland . . . —Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary

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History may look back and say that for its first two hundred years, the United States saw destruction of wilderness as a mark of its own progress, based on the general view of “wild” nature as the antithesis of civilization. If we consider an objective source of popular opinion, Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary,2 we see wilderness characterized in terms of desolation and waste and “wild” qualities our human race has prided itself on trying to overcome— uncivilized, dangerous, volatile, out of control. Wild connotes anarchy both natural and civil: barbarous, unrestrained violence, fury, frantic, crazy, undisciplined, unruly, lawless, disregardful of moral restraints, disorderly. Synonyms include impracticable, riotous, and ferocious. Wilds is a “desolate region or tract; waste; wilderness; desert.” Wilderness is spiritually demoralizing. It is too much, too big, useless, trash, confusing, and devoid of life or value. Even as powerful descriptions of nature as glorious existed and Native Americans sang reverently of nature, the colonial and pioneer experience of wilderness was more complex. The view of wilderness in our literature reflected a way of seeing and experiencing wilderness as a place of terror or something whose value lies in how it can be overcome and “developed.” From Cotton Mather to Nathaniel Hawthorne, settlers describe a “howling wilderness,” the entering of which makes one vulnerable to evil forces that prey on the spirit as veritably as wolves.3 Our culture’s understanding of wilderness, so pejorative, is deeply imbued with fear. There are dire consequences for those associated with the outlaw attributes of wilderness. We eradicate and reform what threatens moral and physical order in our lives. In such a zeitgeist, to be wild or wilderness can be a death sentence. And clearly, if something is termed waste, the message is that it is disposable. If civilization were to be improved, wilderness needs to be modified and commodified: trees to be cut down, land to be mined and plowed, rivers to be drained and diverted and dammed. John Muir saw wilderness differently. Famous in his time for being practical, even ingenious, as a businessman and industrial inventor, and as a scientist who unveils mystery through scrupulous observation and data-driven insight, Muir had firsthand evidence to challenge a view of wilderness as a place of terror and waste. The wilderness he experienced was governed by exquisite cosmic order. It was a place of health and safety. It was a place of continuous revelation that nurtured his genius, both intellectual and spiritual. From the scientist’s and businessman’s point of view, it is essential to agriculture and a sustainable economy, vital to the nation’s future. In fact, Muir understood that it was public policies allowing wilderness destruction that actually were turning precious natural resources into waste.

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In only a twenty-year period, from 1868, when he first entered the Sierra, to 1888–89, Muir saw devastation of wilderness increasing. He witnessed the destruction of wilderness by commercial interests as logging and sheep and mining industries devastated the Sierra landscape. He saw the results of environmental degradation in his travels in Europe. The practical Muir hated waste, and he saw waste on tragic scales. Carelessness and ignorance were putting the nation’s long-term interest at risk. Muir was urgently committed to stopping the destruction he saw. But it was not enough to explain to people that wilderness was being destroyed. With the conventional view of wilderness as dangerous and bereft of civilized values, destroying or controlling it would not necessarily be considered harmful. It could, in fact, be considered progress. And Muir knew it was not enough to take people to see wilderness for themselves and count on their becoming its advocates. He learned as a tour guide the fallacy of this assumption.4 Judging from the often passive response to what he considered majestic and glorious manifestations of divinity, Muir saw that mere exposure to nature was not sufficient to rouse a protective response. Indeed, people could look at a threethousand-year-old tree and imagine a dance floor or calculate profits from garden stakes and patio furniture.5 People were all too capable of regarding a cascading waterfall with apathy or wanting to “improve” it. If wilderness was to be protected, a different way of seeing it had to be learned. As a people, we needed a new way of thinking about ourselves and our relation to each other and the earth. This was a matter of education on a national scale. The campaign to protect wilderness would depend upon transforming historically ambivalent attitudes toward nature. Muir always had experienced the beauty and sacred meaning of wilderness as overwhelming both spiritually and intellectually. He knew that long-term public policy solutions in a democracy must express commonly held values. Thus, Muir sought a way to make people care enough about wilderness that they would work to save it—recognize within it qualities for which we do hold common values. For that, Americans needed a new sort of guidebook about how and why to see the natural world. Muir’s own “guidebooks” that he carried with him included the Bible and writings by Henry David Thoreau and Robert Burns (this was more or less symbolic, since he had memorized all three, as well as passages from European and American romantic and “transcendental” writers). Muir’s authorial activism was in the form of “guidebooks” that were editorials designed to challenge and influence how we think about nature. In making public his extremely personal response to nature, Muir’s writings about his own experience provided a way for Americans to think about

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wilderness not as alien but as something vital to whom we are. Herein we see the genius of Muir’s depiction of wilderness as the antithesis of the terrible place defined in Webster’s. John Muir’s wilderness is inextricable from our most basic emotional values and precepts for all we hold dear. It is domestic terrain, a habitat of relatives. Muir’s wilderness is a place of family and friends, both lovable and loving, source of our greatest joy. Through this lens, we can see that wilderness invokes our most tender and fiercely protective care. Preserving it is key to our very ability to survive on earth. It is through his writings that John Muir works his magic to transform in our imaginations a place once considered chaotic and useless, valued only when cut or plundered beyond all recognition. Muir establishes himself as our mental guide to the wilderness. It is with words that John Muir inspired the legislation, presidential leadership, and media and public support for wilderness. His writings still powerfully influence national and international policy decisions about public lands, and the ways issues regarding their use are framed and discussed, from the White House to the Supreme Court to editorials to the letters-to-the-editor section in the local paper. In today’s headlines, we see the discussion of The Yosemite Plan express the language and message of Muir’s understanding of the wilderness as a “temple,” a spiritual place of wonder and renewal. But this message is not unique to Muir. What makes Muir’s reports on wilderness rouse support and new actions on the part of the American people?

Literary Lobbying and Political Hobnobbing “About two years ago public opinion, which had long been on our side, began to rise into effective action. On the way to Yosemite [in 1903] both the President and our Governor were won to our side [President Theodore Roosevelt and California governor George C. Pardee], and since then the movement was like Yosemite avalanches. But though almost everybody was with us, so active was the opposition, we might have failed to get the bill through the Senate but for the help of Mr.–[Henry Harrison]. . . . I am now an experienced lobbyist; my political education is complete. Have attended Legislature, made speeches, explained, exhorted, persuaded every mother’s son of the legislators, newspaper reporters, and everybody else who would listen to me. And now that the fight is finished and my education as a politician and lobbyist is finished, I am almost finished myself.”6 And so wrote John Muir to Robert Underwood Johnson on the successful passage of legislation in California to put Yosemite at last under the protection of the federal government. John Muir’s public policy leadership in

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environmental protection is rooted in his strategic use of writing to influence legislation. As we assess his achievement as a writer, it is useful to distinguish among the unusual combination of factors that went into Muir’s writing, his purpose as a published writer—to influence political thinking and behavior. Immersed in the humanities as a child, John Muir developed into a scientist before he was a “writer,” and he was a writer long before he used his writings self-consciously as a lobbyist to influence public opinion specifically to inspire legislation. His career was essentially that of someone who walked the earth with a journal and a spiritual consciousness, who beheld the environment with a scientist’s keen observation and artist’s aesthetic viewpoint. When his roaming took him to the Sierra in the late 1860s and he first found work as a sheepherder and then as a mill hand, Muir was already “on the job.” He was a witness to nature’s laws, a student of what nature had to teach, a reporter on nature’s “news,” and a preacher and teacher of nature’s lessons. He was always taking notes and conducting “live” interviews and oral histories with his wilderness subjects. Thus positioned in “the field” in the wild west of the 1860s, not far from where gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill only twenty years earlier, John Muir had a unique vantage point for witnessing firsthand the beauty of nature in its untouched state and increasing ecological damage. His wonder and excitement were mixed with sorrow and anger. In the years from 1868 to 1888, he witnessed the degradation of meadows and thousand-year-old trees, the denuding of whole hillsides and valleys, through mining, logging, grazing, and other commercial activities. The Sierra landscape and the Yosemite Valley itself were being despoiled before his eyes. “It is almost impossible to conceive of a devastation more universal than is produced among the plants of the Sierra by sheep.” The groves “are being barbarously destroyed by visitors hacking of chips and engraving their names in all styles,” and “the grass is eaten close and trodden until it resembles a corral. Nine tenths of the whole surface of the Sierra has been swept by the scourge.”7 By 1873, only five years after he had arrived in the Sierra, John Muir decided that something had to be done, and decrying the situation alone would not help. The situation, Muir wrote, “demands legislative interference.”8 This conclusion is a watershed in American cultural history. As a writer, Muir could have responded to the environmental crisis with alienation and despair, even eloquent righteousness. He could have eschewed a public role, confining his writing to a select readership. He could have resigned himself philosophically and turned to other matters. But Muir’s cultural context informs his diagnosis of the problem. His conviction of the

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necessity of governmental action reflects a belief both in government’s role for the nation’s interests and in the people as a whole having jurisdiction over natural resources.9 The first steps of governmental responsibility for Yosemite had been taken. But Muir saw that this original legislation was not enough. The land was still at risk.10 Protecting the environment from private interests was a relatively new concept. Even as the enactment was passed into law, management and enforcement problems resulted from the fact that commercial establishments already existed in Yosemite Valley. The United States had to become convinced of its protective role as a political entity. Once the American people could see the need to preserve the environment, laws and their enforcement mechanisms could be developed. Then, as Muir saw it, the political process needed public opinion objecting to abuses and violations and calling for more effective protection policies. In this conclusion, Muir had a critical ally. Robert Underwood Johnson was associate editor of Century Magazine, prominent in the national media. During a visit to the West Coast in 1889, Johnson joined Muir in a trip to the Sierra. Appalled by the evidence of deterioration of the landscape occurring under the auspices of protection from the State of California, Muir and Johnson discussed what was needed to stop the destruction of Yosemite. Building on the principle of land protected by the government, they envisioned a national park that would encompass both Yosemite Valley and much of the surrounding region. Johnson and Muir crafted a political strategy relying on the national media. Muir would write two articles on behalf of the park proposal for the influential Century, which Johnson could use in a lobbying campaign in Washington, D.C. Johnson promised to bring before the House Committee on Public Lands a plan for a national park whose boundaries would be proposed by Muir. Johnson’s lobbying strategies reflected Muir’s reputation as a writer. From his journals, often culled from scraps of paper onto which he jotted notes during the day, Muir wrote letters, and these letters began to find an audience as they were shared among an influential group of educators and other cultural and civic leaders. His mentor, Jeanne Carr, the wife of a former professor at the University of Wisconsin, sent him distinguished visitors to be shown around Yosemite. In 1871, Muir hosted Clinton L. Merriam, a New York congressman interested in geology, and John Daniel Runkle, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Like Carr, they urged him to publish the results of his scientific findings on glaciers, which he had written about in his journals and shared in his letters. Muir adapted several

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of his letters into newspaper article format, so that his first published essay, “Death of a Glacier,” appeared in the New York Tribune (1871). In 1872, his third year in Yosemite, Muir spent the winter putting together accounts of his experience in nature for The Overland Monthly, a California literary journal. The following year he worked on fifteen different articles and was a regular contributor to The Overland Monthly. In 1876, he published, “In God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve the Forests?” in the Sacramento Daily Union (strategically chosen for its location in the state capital). In this article, he followed up on his declaration of 1873 of the need for “legislative interference,” calling for governmental responsibility for management of the forests. In the years 1881–88 Muir largely devoted his energies to his young family and managing the family’s fruit ranch. When he revisited the Sierra in 1888, the evidence of acceleration of damages to the environment shocked Muir. It was at this point that Johnson and Muir, camping in the high country, outlined their plans for the battle to preserve Yosemite through increased governmental jurisdiction. The Muir-Johnson strategy involved the conversion of Muir’s journals into articles whose purpose was to show wilderness through Muir’s eyes as so tremendous that people could understand what was at stake in this battle to preserve it. When “The Treasures of Yosemite” and “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park” were published, as Johnson foresaw, they precipitated a debate in Congress over the proposal for a national park. Picked up by the national press, with supporting editorials in many cities, his articles roused public attention. A bill was introduced in Congress to create Yosemite National Park within the boundaries defined by Muir, and letters of support flowed into Washington, D.C. General John W. Noble, secretary of the interior under President Benjamin Harrison, inspired by the writings of Muir, worked with the president to ensure passage of the bill. It became law on October 1, 1890. Legislation to create the Sequoia and General Grant national parks was also passed to preserve the trees Muir memorialized. When destruction of the areas surrounding Sequoia and Yosemite threatened the wilderness ecology, Muir helped build public support to extend the park boundaries. He again turned to print, writing “A Rival of the Yosemite” for Century. His story of a landscape being “hacked and smashed” joined with his calls for specific protective legislation resulted in the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. This “enabled” the president of the United States by proclamation to “set apart . . . in any state or Territory . . . any part of the public lands wholly or in part covered with timber . . . as public reservations.” Muir’s writings convinced political leaders of the urgency of environmental solutions.

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But if environmental solutions belong in the public sector, rooted in the American political process, then laws are subject to revision. Public opinion can shift. Muir saw that even as legislation and regulations protecting wilderness were being passed, private commercial interests continued to fight environmental protection laws and practice. Thus, efforts had to be made to sustain public pressure on lawmakers and civic leaders to preserve and build on public policy gains. Muir never took for granted that Yosemite was protected. Maintaining Yosemite and wilderness areas required vigilance. Commitments of presidents, Congress, and the American people required continuous education. With colleagues from the University of California, lawyers, and others, Muir helped form the Sierra Club in 1892. The club dedicated itself to education in the cause of legislation to permanently protect the environment. Understanding that the park was vulnerable to attacks by commercial and outlaw interests in its current management by the State of California, the Sierra Club played a key role in lobbying for Yosemite to become a national park. Here Muir’s vision of the role of the federal government protecting interests of all the citizens was pivotal in framing the concept and legislation of the national park. In his official capacity as head of the Sierra Club, for which he served as president until his death in 1914, Muir spent time not only writing educational pieces for wide dissemination but in being a presence in Washington, D.C., with lawmakers and other policy leaders. Now, when issues came up, Muir could call upon friends in government, industry, and media. He balanced personal lobbying and writing to win support for legislation. By 1893 the Forest Reserve Act had gone into effect. Four million acres had been preserved. Muir went to Europe on a scientific expedition, continuing his vocation as a writing rambler. There he saw countries whose forests had been eradicated but also witnessed efforts to develop sustainable forest policies. With a new sense of a mandate for national legislation, Muir went directly to Washington to consult with policy leaders. He agreed to prepare a book for publication from his essays of 1875 to 1881. This book, published in 1894 as The Mountains of California,11 was designed to rally the national preservation movement. It features evocative writing on nature, including chapters on the squirrel, tree riding in a storm, and the sequoias. The immediate success of this book, perhaps predictably, also spawned renewed opposition from timber and mining interests, which began to try to counter environmental influence in Congress to repeal the land preservation acts. Muir saw this as a moment of crisis in the environmental protection movement. In spite of existing legislation, people were illegally making claims to the wilderness and mining, cutting down trees, and letting sheep roam.

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Everywhere Muir looked, even in the national forest reserves, he saw “workings of ruin, down the entire Pacific coast.” Thus, a pattern emerged in which we see Muir’s literary career take shape explicitly in service of lobbying for government protection of the wilderness. Muir strategically placed his writing to influence local and national media in such journals as the Overland Observer, Scribner’s, Atlantic, and Harper’s. He published in newspapers that legislators read. He and his allies initiated some pieces, and just as often, national political and cultural leaders commissioned pieces from Muir. How did John Muir achieve critical influence as a lobbyist on behalf of his client, Tree (and Friends and Family of Tree)? An example of how the process worked is seen in the events following Muir’s efforts to inspire the Forest Reserve Act. In 1897 Muir was part of a team that advised the Forestry Commission to make the recommendation to the president for a bill which would create thirteen new reservations, scientifically manage our forests, create new national parks, and repeal timber and mining laws that were thought to allow fraud and robbery of public resources. President Grover Cleveland, like Harrison before him, was impressed with Muir’s case, but senators from western states lobbied against the bill. Would the national momentum to preserve the nation’s wilderness as a primary resource continue? Would the nation allow lawlessness and the inevitable eradication of our natural resources? These questions framed the rhetorical strategies Muir would use. In consultation with the National Forestry Commission, The Atlantic Monthly commissioned John Muir to write “The American Forests.”12 In 1898 Muir followed this essay with a second article, “Wild Parks and Forest Preservation.” The two articles made public support for forest preservation sufficient to overcome opposition when Congress tried to stop or repeal preservation bills. The House opposed the Senate amendment to abolish forest preservation acts, and it failed by a vote of 100 to 39. Political support for Muir’s environmental leadership was strong when Teddy Roosevelt became president of the United States. In his first address to Congress, Roosevelt identified forest and water needs as the most vital internal question for the nation. Roosevelt immediately established environmental preservation as a priority in his administration and planned a trip to Yosemite, which he asked to be led by Muir personally: “I do not want anyone with me but you, and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days, and just be out in the open with you.”13 In 1906, Yosemite Valley became part of Yosemite National Park, the culmination of seventeen years of legislative battles. Muir was famous, revered

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around the world. An American icon, he enjoyed an influence few writers have experienced in the national political arena. It was with this credibility that Muir took up the fight to save part of Yosemite National Park, the Hetch Hetchy Valley. As Muir describes it, Hetch Hetchy is Yosemite Valley’s geological and aesthetic twin. Waterfalls, granite peaks, and other features mirror those of Yosemite Valley. Muir was aghast when it seemed that San Francisco’s idea for solving its water problems was by damming this valley. Since giving the city of one state rights to water from a national park entailed congressional approval, the issue became a national legislative battle, involving two presidents of the United States (at least), cabinets, Congress, and the media. Although people still find it hard to believe that Congress allowed the damming of part of a national park for the sake of one city’s having cheaper water and energy, perhaps no one was more surprised by the passage of the Raker Act of 1913 than John Muir. He described himself as having placed his faith in the American people and being convinced that they would prevail. Always prone to chest ailments and exhausted from his efforts to prevent the drowning of the Yosemite Hetch Hetchy, Muir succumbed to pneumonia shortly thereafter, in 1914. Some have speculated that the legislative defeat was a contributing factor in Muir’s final illness. But Muir’s writing was his lobbying, and this writing continues to have life. Muir’s effectiveness as a lobbyist for legislation to preserve the environment has only continued to grow. The Sierra Club is a powerful organization with thousands of members around the world. Muir’s books are being reissued, scholarship is advancing, and Muir is recognized as iconic in popular culture and history, including in recent theme parks on California history and in an IMAX film. That film, Wild California, features people whose pioneering vision has shaped a nation. The issue of whether or not the Hetch Hetchy should have been dammed, and what should yet be done about it, persists almost ninety years later. The writing by John Muir and others, led by the Sierra Club, plays a key role in keeping this debate alive. Presidents have become involved once again. For example, former president Ronald Reagan commissioned a study of the feasibility of restoring the valley, and his administration recommended restoration. In another instance, when a portion of Sequoia National Forest (later added to Sequoia National Park) was the subject of a development project that entailed cutting down trees to put in a road, power lines, parking lots, and lodging buildings for a major resort, the words of John Muir were used to inspire a public outcry and court challenge that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Muir’s writing influenced the terms in which the case was

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fought and ultimately successfully resolved by a state legislative action spearheaded by the Sierra Club.14

The One-Paragraph Gauntlet: We Have Been All Wrong About Trees What made John Muir’s writings catalytic for environmental legislation? In “The American Forests,” perhaps his most influential and quoted essay, Muir responded to the call for an article that could bolster support in Congress for existing laws and to strengthen laws governing Yosemite. Muir began by considering the practical economics and spiritual value of the forests to the nation’s health. He concluded: “Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,—chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. . . . Through all the wonderful eventful centuries since Christ’s time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees . . . but he cannot save them from fools,—only Uncle Sam can do that.”15 This moving and provocative passage provides a window into how Muir engaged the American mind. What was different about his writings? In a few lines, we see nature in a transforming way. Muir vividly portrays the predicament of gigantic trees, tragically trapped. We can relate to the horror of their situation. We had never thought of trees like this. From the public’s point of view, here is a rugged explorer and adventurer, a scientist with an international stature, a national coffee-table author, an adviser to presidents and Congress, with all the credibility and credentials and dignity those roles infer; thus, when he allows himself a public persona of spiritual passion, aroused to wrath and despair, it is a tour de force that both shames the conscientious American public and—the opposite side of the same coin—inflames its pride in its commitment to do right. We are not only enjoined to do the right thing, but the righteous thing. Invoking God and Christ as players in our national drama, Muir puts the fate of trees into a religious context. In this way, he suggests that the American public has taken upon itself the responsibility to do what was historically the Lord’s work, that of protecting the environment. In placing at risk “creatures” of the Lord, our ancient redwoods and sequoias, the United States has assumed spiritual liability. Muir’s approach resembles a religious leader exhorting a flock. Muir takes what the public mind may consider a simple “business” issue, cutting down a tree, a matter of individual rights to make money. By identifying the giant trees as the Lord’s creations, lumbering the tree is an ignoble act against God’s majesty.

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We see the contrast between our human ability to destroy, which “any fool” can do—this does not seem right now, after all—and the ability to create, which is God’s. The word fool is powerful in this context, for Muir contrasts the ease with which “anyone” in our society can cut down a tree with the implications of an irreversible act of irreverence. The shock for readers lies in the image of dishonor associated with actions not previously seen as compromising our humanity. Muir links the country’s dignity and integrity with its spiritual fate. When we consider that the public would not necessarily understand the cutting down of a tree as hurtful, we see what Muir is changing in his portrayal of trees and a society that allows people to destroy them. By stating that trees would run away if they could—and the identification of trees as living creatures by reference to their “hide,” “backbone,” and “horns”—Muir portrays trees as sharing a human or animal consciousness. Thus, we see an anomaly. Trees are “magnificent” beings whose life span the human mind can barely comprehend. But these emblems of the sacred are reduced to a pathetic status by a society in which fools have free reign. “Hunted down” and “chased,” trees are helpless victims of a dishonorable “sport” in which there is no fair play. Muir thus creates sympathy and empathy for trees older than any other living thing on earth and so large we cannot see them whole. Muir invokes tragedy in the tension, then, between traditional ideas about trees and graphic imagery evoking our ability to see trees as logical beings wishing to survive. Even if we accept, which Muir did not, the practice of hunting animals for sport, the image of trees as beings who cannot escape human aggression makes their being cut or burned or dynamited for dubious ends (such as matchsticks and garden stakes) seem shameful. Muir departs from conventional scientific and public policy discourse. The language of passion, a moving blend of mournfulness and bitterness and wit, would not apply to a natural world characterized in the alien way the dictionary defines wilderness. Muir’s characterization of the world is so intimate that even “centuries” are addressed with an unscientific enthusiasm as “wonderful.” The rhetorical strategy in this passage now reaches the stage where the reader must break with conventional social norms—e.g., the belief that it is acceptable to cut down an ancient tree—to retain his or her pride as a citizen. In Muir’s formulation, the wilderness of terror and monstrosity and indifference is transformed into defenseless if dignified beings that evoke our humanity’s most noble instincts, protection of that which needs our care. In redefining wilderness, Muir is redefining citizenship. Showing trees treated as objects of sport, Muir puts the reader in the position of siding with

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dignified trees against cowardly fools. Muir then positions the reader to understand that in siding with trees against fools, the reader is taking up the side historically supporting trees—God’s side. Now Muir can exert his strategic weapon: he leaves the citizen reader’s desire to be wise, good, fair, honorable, and respectful to creatures of the wilderness in the hands of “Uncle Sam.” In so doing, Muir invests “Uncle Sam” with the moral and constitutional responsibility to protect the wilderness. The reader must hope that “Uncle Sam” has the wisdom to understand that saving the trees will save our own souls, not to mention the economic future of our nation. Thus, Muir provides patriotic incentive for the reader to advocate legislation that will protect the wilderness. In this brief passage quoted above, then, we see the physical world characterized as requiring our protection and the U.S. government characterized as a responsible family member. Since Muir’s goal in writing the article and concluding it with this passage is to inspire support for legislation, in turn requiring support of the American people, Muir’s strategy lies in getting the reader invested in Uncle Sam’s assumption of “his” responsibility. The use of “Uncle Sam” by Muir makes explicit that wilderness is in the jurisdiction of the U.S. government, dependent on its capacity to enact and enforce laws on behalf of the national interest. In defining the fate of trees as in the national interest, Muir seeks to enlist his citizen readers to rouse Uncle Sam to ensure protective legislation. Muir’s invocation of Uncle Sam expresses the letter and spirit of Lincoln’s signing of the Yosemite Grant bill. In his argument that the fate of trees is the nation’s business and requires “legislative interference,” Muir is building a national constituency for a vision that sees wilderness as in need of protection by national, governmental, political, and legal solutions. To convince the government to care, people have to care. Muir believed that if the American people could learn to love wilderness, they would work to preserve it. Thus, his case for the necessity of wilderness legislation must overcome a careless attitude about trees and wilderness or one that sees their value only in what income wilderness can generate. His portrayal of wilderness must reveal how and why to love it. If Uncle Sam is a family member protecting people bonded by shared blood and commitments, the “family” he protects now includes the trees in our wilderness areas. It is in this context that I believe John Muir’s writing can be understood to have provided transformational leadership for wilderness legislation. Muir writes about nature as family and friends, in ways that will evoke our love and loyalty. His metaphoric portrayal of trees and their companions

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fig. 8.1. Sequoia domes—Fresno Grove. A drawing of trees by John Muir. Shone Collection of Muiriana, MSS 301, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

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in the wilderness as “us”—including not just plants and animals but even the rocks—is so powerful that late in the twentieth century the Supreme Court could be found debating whether trees have “standing” in our courts of law. In the world of Muir’s writing, trees and other wilderness inhabitants are fellow citizens. Understanding our relationship, we no more could destroy wilderness than we would rampage our own nurseries or savage our porches and parlors.

Trees as Fellow Scribes, Frolic Companions, Family, and Friends Henry Fairfield Osborn reflected that Muir wrote about trees “as no one else in the whole history of trees, chiefly because he loved them as he loved men and women.”16 Trees “all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do.”17 Although “The American Forests” makes trees tragic in their inability to run away from slaughter, Muir shows how to comprehend and empathize with trees in a way that does not make them objects of pity or even of noble compassion. Trees are dynamic “frolic companions” matching Muir’s own spirited friendship. Trees appear as expressive and exuberant in fellow feeling as Muir himself: “singing and writing wind-music,” “thrilled with glad excitement,” “swirling in wild ecstasy.”18 When Muir walks among them, they “spread their arms in welcome.”19 Muir’s wilderness family is a sweet and rambunctious lot, dramatic and full of vitality. They “fondle their little ones.”20 Muir shares with us his own feelings about trees as capable of feeling, and loved as passionately and tenderly as a human being. The depiction of trees emphasizes not only their capacity to suffer but to enjoy. Muir’s identification with trees extends to empathizing with them as fellow beings struggling to get their message out. Muir tells us he can feel trees “mutely . . . calling for him to tell their story to the world.” Near the North Fork of the Kings River, he writes, “A noble company of pines reared their brown columns and spread their curving boughs above us in impressive majesty. . . . Beyond was another circle . . . a black, sharp angled line of tree writing along the base of the sky. Who shall read it for us?”21 “Could one of these sequoia kings come to town in all its godlike majesty, so as to be strikingly seen and allowed to plead its own cause, there would never again be any lack of defenders.”22 Muir depicts trees as not only conscious but reverent. They are spiritually vigorous; they spread their arms in blessing, and preach. A tree is “loving the ground while transparently conscious of heaven and joyously receptive of its blessings, reaching out its branches like sensitive tentacles, feeling the

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light and reveling in it.”23 Muir describes trees as “hushed and thoughtful, as if waiting in conscious religious dependence on the sun” and engaged in “worship.”24 “Every tree seemed religious and conscious in the presence of God.”25 The “story” and meaning of trees include their role as emblems of the divine. In such passages, trees are conscious; they want to communicate with us; they are gesturing for our attention and imploring us to “read” their meaning. Through Muir’s lens, we see trees’ nobility, humor, exuberance, nurturing, hopefulness, and emotional qualities. Thus, when Muir describes trees consciously suffering ill treatment at our hands, it seems criminal. Describing a redwood as “skinned alive,” he writes, “This grand tree is of course dead, a ghastly ruin. Forgive them; they know not what they do.”26 Muir’s physical world has a pulsing heart. Trees may have a Christ-like sensibility, but the admiration and tenderness Muir feels for trees are explicitly connected to how we feel about our family members. When Muir was in Egypt, he met a woman with whom he began to talk about the giant sequoia. She asked him if such trees would make good furniture. “Madam,” he reports himself replying, “would you murder your own children?”27 In fact, the concept that trees are our future is critical to Muir’s vision of environmental preservation. He wrote, “When a man plants a tree he plants himself.”28 In the wilderness, Muir claimed that “we feel ourselves part of wild Nature, kin to everything.” All that Muir sees around him are “people”—gnat, butterfly, mosquito: Muir uses the term people so often for the entities he encounters in nature that he seems to be making a case for the humanity or even soul of everything in existence, to counter the concept of wilderness as alien from human experience and understanding. As Muir surveys his environment, “people of the so-called solitude” such as deer caring for their young, “well-clad” bears, squirrels, birds, “happy” insects, plants, streams, he reflects, “One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers.”29 His language for his fellow creatures takes on the affection and love of a parent or lover. Even a chipmunk is described as “so able, gentle, confiding, and beautiful, they take one’s heart, and get themselves adopted as darlings.”30 He certainly did not describe the natural world in detached clinical terms. Trees, then, are only one part of a natural world that Muir conceived as self, “friends and family.” Citizenship extends to plants, flowers, rocks, mountains. Plants are “noble,” have “minds, are conscious of their existence, feel pain and have memories.”“Flowers having enjoyed their share of life’s feast—

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all alike pass on. . . . Yet all are our sister or brother and they enjoy life as we do, share heaven’s blessings with us, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity.” Flowers are “born today,” “plant people,” “nature’s darlings.”31 Rocks are “talkative, and more lovable than ever”; “the very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brothers.”32 Mountains are “calling.”33 Such family and friends are not only sources of happiness; as with trees, they themselves experience “exuberant” joy. “How the wild oats danced and rippled and clapped their spikelets like happy hands in a passion of joy.”34 On a walk: “Sauntering in any direction, hundreds of these happy sun-plants brushed against my feet at every step.”35 A cascade: “Impetuous, majestic, in all its wild, snowy thundering, ever making tremendous supply of power and motion, and exuberant joy . . . glad as the stars and as calm.”36 Squirrels: “brimful of glad, hilarious energy . . . comic . . . the mountain’s merriest child . . . pure, condensed gayety . . . exuberant, rollicking, irrepressible jollity.”37 The squirrel’s “tail interprets his feelings . . . human . . . with unmistakable humanity.”38 Water ouzel: “a joyous and lovable fellow,” “hilarious,” “human,” “the mountain stream’s own darling.”39 The land itself is a joyous companion with whom to “eat out”: “To dine with a glacier on a sunny day is a glorious thing.”40

wilderness, n. 1. place of delight 2. holy 3. place of tenderness 4. home Although John Muir is an inventor and scientist respected in many countries for his original discoveries in botany and geology, he approached the natural world with the sentimental affection and adoration of a lover or parent. Muir’s experience in wilderness transports readers to a new world where one is as cared for as much as one cares. The notion of “uncivilized” in the definition of wilderness in any large dictionary is dissolved. Through Muir we experience the wilderness not as a terrain of terror but of delight; not of alienation but of belonging; not of desolation but of domestic life; not of howling but of singing.41 Showing the environment in the most human, intimate terms, Muir talks to flowers in the lilting Scottish of his boyhood: “Oh you bonnie muggings! How did ye coom sae far frae hame?” Muir’s guidebooks make scientific observations. But he shows himself as an eager and grateful participant in nature’s drama. He is an ecstatic and exuberant actor; nature is God’s stage and script. This, I believe, is what makes his writing transformational. Although John Muir was one of America’s first public media stars and extreme sports adventurers, risking his life constantly in “he-man” escapades rivaling today’s action heroes, his prose is lyrical and emotionally expressive. He comes across as a gentle apostle and evangelical who sees wilderness as

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evidence of God and glory—and in such a “temple” feels safe, nurtured, and at home. The power of Muir’s imagery influenced how the Supreme Court heard Sierra Club v. Secretary Morton, Department of Interior, involving the development of Mineral King in 1971. The case revolved around the issue of whether trees have “standing” in a court of law: Can they be aggrieved victims? Do they have legal protections as citizens? The key “core terms” of the case show the extent to which a new understanding of wilderness is now a part of national public discourse: “aggrieved,” “beauty,” “wonders.” We can see Muir’s transformational role in American culture in the fact that wilderness is debated at the federal level in terms of beauty and wonders and in terms of how the public as well as nature itself is harmed when ancient trees are clear-cut. Who is the aggrieved victim when a tree is cut? To read Muir’s The Yosemite, The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, and other books describing trees with so much passion as loved and loving, emblems of the divine, and guardians of the soil, climate, and healthy global economy is to understand that the victim of the loss of trees and their environment is us, the public. Our understanding of our personal and immediate responsibility for the fate of the earth is the basis of Muir’s effectiveness in rousing the American public to support and defend the wilderness. Wilderness, so long seen as alien, objectified, and commodified, is relational. Recognizing ourselves in Muir’s portrayal of nature, the public sees our fates inextricably woven together. Trees are us: . . . when we plant a tree, we plant ourselves, and we have deeply personal stakes in its preservation. We would be foolish and self-destructive not to preserve and protect its habitat.

Part Two: If Trees = Us: The Legacy of John Muir’s Familial Artistry This chapter has advanced a thesis to account for Muir’s ability to arouse a commitment on the part of the American public to protect trees—his radically empathic portrayal of our rooted companions on earth as “friends and family.” Muir’s art—his literary use of metaphor—has made us understand trees as our relations and ourselves. His science grounds these metaphors. From a practical point of view, Muir’s portrayal of trees generates our most urgent preservation instincts. We need trees for our spiritual resilience. But we also need them for our survival as a species. Muir was spectacularly successful in getting “us,” the U.S. public, and our government, “Uncle Sam,” to

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understand this. Muir’s vision is still a powerful force in national discourse. However, is his strategic use of art to impact national public policy limited to his genius? Do we celebrate his contributions to the environmental preservation movement because of his uniqueness? Was presenting trees as family an eccentric strategy that only could work for him? In fact, the effectiveness of his literary strategies is borne out in our own time. The work of Julia Butterfly Hill is one example.42 Hill, like Muir a child of an itinerant preacher, also traveled to the West Coast and felt a kinship with the gigantic trees, which—again like Muir—she learned were being threatened by commercial interests. They were being cut even when local or federal statutes protected them. Hill joined a “tree-sitting” movement to protect giant trees from being cut. In this strategy, people link their own fates with those of the “marked” trees in which they sit, on the theory that people might cut down a tree but not when a person is in it. Hill climbed a marked tree and ended up living in it for two years. Her purpose was to make the commercial owners, the Pacific Lumber Company, extend to the tree the humanitarian principles by which we treat one another. She quickly realized that for her actions to be successful, she needed public awareness of her situation. National publicity would pressure the lumber company to spare this interspecies team. Therefore, like Muir, Hill worked directly with the media to publicize her story: she loved this tree so much that she would sacrifice her own lifestyle and potentially her own life to save it, for the tree was worth it. The value of trees was one message: trees inspire and deserve our protective instincts. Just as significantly, Hill developed a persona for the tree, a wise elder named “Luna.” The tree wore a banner, Respect Your Elders. When named, the tree assumes in the public’s imagination a life, personality, and even soul. Trusting this tree with her life, giving herself over to the cause of “Luna,” Hill made people see the tree as Muir made us see trees—as family. Hill has taken the concept of trees as “friends and relations” as a way to invoke a different set of standards in our treatment of them, based on what is moral and humane. Policy would be enacted on the basis of what treatment our conscience dictates is appropriate for a cherished “elder.” As Muir explained to the woman in Egypt—“Madam, would you murder your own children?”—the idea of harm to “Luna” in the name of new porch furniture becomes morally unacceptable. Muir used lecture formats and the national press, newspapers and monthly magazines, through which to work his metaphoric magic. Hill’s equivalent was the use of press conferences, national television and radio, and the Internet. Like Muir, she placed her faith in the power of the media to

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rouse public awareness of her vigil for “Luna.” Embedded in the media message of passionate devotion to an elder are values for which our culture wants to be held accountable. Like motherhood, treatment of the elderly is something for which we “fight.” Hill’s evident love of this tree, her personal sacrifice and willingness to stay in it indefinitely—she ended up spending two years through rain and wind and even, like Muir, during wild, terrifying storms—inspired others to care about its fate. Also like Muir, Hill’s writing about Luna inspired others to help her publicize the message about the harm of clear-cutting and violating existing environmental protective legislation. As did Muir, Hill sought long-term solutions in the American legal system, getting public support for enforcement of policies of the California state regulatory agencies (the Department of Forestry, for example). Like Muir, she sought to attract cultural, political, legislative, and business leaders to her cause. Two years of rousing national interest and support for Luna’s cause brought pressure to bear on Pacific Lumber Company, including by members of Congress. Hill adopted a primary feature of Muir’s strategy to work with “Uncle Sam” to bring together the political, business, and cultural communities for long-term social goals. Just as Muir worked with lawyers to develop legislation and sought productive partnerships with the private sector, Hill worked with lawyers coordinating the public and private sectors to develop a contract that would protect “her” tree forever. Perhaps the Pacific Lumber Company was motivated to make such a contract because of the national attention brought by the media to the “human interest” story of “Luna.” The breakthrough in Hill’s negotiations with Pacific Lumber came when its chief executive, John Campbell, was reported by Hill to have said, “I see us protecting Luna.”43 Referring to the tree by the name “Luna,” he expressed the tree’s spiritual meaning. Once we name something, we make it part of “us.” It assumes soul-like properties, invoking our commitment to extend to this entity protocols of caring for and about a life that matters to us. In a book Hill wrote about her experience in the tree, The Legacy of Luna: A Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods, she describes herself taking literally Muir’s conception of forest companions. She and the tree had become one interdependent being. After two years of a common identity, living within its branches, when Hill had to leave it, she felt “like I’m being separated from a part of myself—a piece of me—the essence of who I am. . . . When I leave this tree, I will be leaving the best friend I’ve ever had. . . . The woman I have become is being torn right now.”44 Hill describes hearing Luna’s voice comforting her, just as Muir heard and expressed the

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voice of the wilderness as a loving spirit and “mother.” Hill also experienced what Muir suffered: the continuing hostility of business interests toward environmental protection laws and other legal agreements. Hill saw the environment suffering from illegal damages, and in fact once the agreement was made with the lumber company to ensure permanent protection of the tree, Hill’s fight to save the tree was not over. The original version of her book ended with the triumphant Julia Butterfly Hill exiting the tree, knowing she had helped to save its life. Citing this outcome would be evidence of the efficacy of the strategy to dramatize our relationship with trees. But perhaps even more vivid evidence of the success of Muir’s legacy is revealed by a catastrophe. Shortly after Hill left Luna, protective agreements notwithstanding, the tree was attacked with a chain saw. Over 60 percent of its core was damaged. Hill responded with the modern-day version of the Muir public relations arsenal—poetry, media interviews, Web site updates and links, and reaching out to public and private organizations and foundations. Muir would have done the same. The proof of the power of Muir’s vision of an environment of family and friends is seen in the public’s response to the attack on the tree, not as an anonymous character in the environmental drama played out in the nation’s newspapers, nor as a statistic, but as the elder “Luna.” The extent to which Hill’s work had created a global community that cared about the tree as a family member was seen in people whose imaginations had become emotionally and spiritually engaged and now were invested in the tree’s fate. Scientists around the world formed an emergency medical team to assess the damage and try to repair it to the fullest extent possible. They flew to the Lost Coast in Humbolt County, California, and issued joint press releases telling of their prognoses and daily progress, and referred to the tree as one would a celebrity patient whom it was an honor to attend. Hill’s portrayal of the tree on television, radio, newspapers, the Internet, and in her book made people reach out to Hill to express grief and solace and sympathy as we would for anyone suffering an attack on a family member. People articulated their own personal relationship with “Luna.” “I carry Luna in my heart,” wrote John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution. Significantly, he signed this letter as a relative—“Your brother.” A twelve-year-old was reported to have had convulsions at the news; when she could speak, she said, “Luna’s been cut.” She then wrote, “It became clear to me that crying would get me nowhere. . . . I had to do something . . . that could help. I rummaged through my computer files trying to remember the website my godfather [who makes canopy walkways] had told me about where I could print out a petition to protect the logging

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of old-growth redwoods. . . . I would print a petition for every class. I would try to get 4th, 5th, and 6th graders to sign and become aware.”45 The Luna story illustrates the power of Muir’s metaphoric vision of trees as “us.” He uses a process that reveals the connections of concepts in our imaginations. In the world we see, things do not appear as “one.” Yet Muir, with the scientist’s knowledge of biological interdependence, challenges this assumption: “Most people are on the world, not in it, have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them, but are undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone.” In the “real world,” however, Muir argues as a scientist, we are related, indispensable to each other for our most basic life requirements. The impact of the metaphoric strategy to equate trees with “us” is multiplied by Muir’s trust in the social order: we do the right thing by our relations. Further, we act out of self-preservation when we protect “ourselves.” In his famous passage about trees in the major breakthrough piece “The American Forests,” designed to create support for legislation for Yosemite National Park, Muir kept referring to “Uncle Sam’s” role in protecting trees and their wilderness habitat. Using the expression for the government, “Uncle” Sam, Muir did more than employ a colloquial term—he invoked the responsibility of a “relative.” His persistent efforts to write and publish about the wilderness, in order to inspire our love for it, were based on a faith in our commitment to do the right thing for our relations. He provided us with a way to extend our sense of relations to the earth and our universe. He reminded the public that trees’ fates, by our own laws, are now in our hands: “God . . . cannot save them from sawmills and fools; this is left to the American people!” This belief in the hearts and minds of the American public was the basis for John Muir’s strategy to save the wilderness. The extent to which this vision is carried forth today is seen in the epigraph Julia Butterfly Hill chose for her book: “These kings of the forest, the noblest of a noble race, rightly belong to the world, but as they are in California, we cannot escape the responsibility as their guardians. Fortunately, the American people are equal to this trust”— John Muir. In fact, Muir does not end there. His sentence continues: “equal to this trust or any other that may arise as soon as they see and understand it [italics author’s].”46 It is Muir as an educator we see, nation building through metaphor. We see at work the activist humanities—art and literature that awaken social consciousness, conscience, and spiritual wisdom—in the education of citizens for leadership and contributions to society.

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Epilogue A recognition of Muir’s educational strategies to change how we see wilderness is important not only for our appreciation of his achievement in American culture, but to inspire a sense of possibility and responsibility on our own parts as individuals in our society. The messages in the stories of Muir and Hill were brought home to me quite literally when our family moved from Vermont to Washington, D.C. I faced a crisis. Selling our house meant leaving our willow tree that I had loved and felt protected by for years. As someone for whom this willow had danced, I felt responsible for its fate. Neighbors and real estate agents told me they thought it should be cut down because it was so large (over a hundred feet tall, and its shady canopy almost as wide). How could I convince a new owner to protect the tree? I enlisted the help of my then eighty-one-year-old father from California, who quoted John Muir to me even before I could read. He flew to Vermont, and together we created a strategy. Taking a page from Muir, we resolved that words could save the tree. We made a poster, which my father framed in weatherproof glass and helped chain to the tree. I began with the amazed way Muir saw nature, “Behold!” Whatever we behold, we cannot harm. I created an award for the tree in Muir’s name and tried to put every reason to save the tree into words, stressing the fact that the tree both inspires loyalty and gives love. “Put in that it is good luck,” my father said: “No one would take that away.” Behold! The Good Luck Tree Recipient of the John Muir Educators Society Award for Promoting Love of Earth A Vermont Treasure Rare Magnificent Specimen Willow This tree has inspired poetry And dedication to the preservation of the earth. All who live with this tree Are protected by her strength; soil is bound Preventing erosion and flood damage; In life’s storms she provides comfort and joy And gives courage to the spirit. Known also as “The Blessing Tree,” in many hard times this Tree has reawakened my sense of gratitude and wonder For living on this earth and my commitment to teaching About its beauties; She has given me heart and seen me through;

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Danced a hula, graceful as a ballerina in her tattered tutu; As you come under her care, know THIS TREE IS LOVED And will love you too Perhaps the most disarming aspect of Muir’s writing is that his vision of nature as family and friends extols a reciprocal relationship. Hill’s book, memorializing her experience with a tree, is also a tale of reciprocal love. We recognize the strategy of bringing the “word” to the public to rouse our protective instincts and capacity to love all we hold dear. For our elders, our children, our little darlings, we would do anything in our powers. We would rise to the occasion, whatever is required, bringing to bear strength, resilience, fortitude, courage, heroism, and untiring devotion. Once we call something “noble darlings,” “joyous,” “mirthful,” and “loving,” we are in a relationship governed by humane commitments. We cannot kill or maim something we think of as “darling,” as “ours,” as us. Saving the earth, tree by tree, squirrel habitat by squirrel habitat, requires our ability to envision that “equals” sign, that flag of our connection to and interdependence with one another, whether our skins are flesh or bark. Muir modeled this ability, and in so doing, he shaped a new mandate for national public policy on the environment. To celebrate Muir’s accomplishments is to recognize his tremendous optimism that the public will act once we “see and understand.” As the fight to save Luna and wilderness areas and ancient growth trees and habitats and watersheds continues, and the campaign is vigorously under way to “restore Hetch Hetchy,” the twin Yosemite valley Muir tried so hard to prevent from being flooded for a water reservoir for San Francisco, I wonder . . . can a valley be “a noble darling”? Can a watershed be us? Just as Lincoln and subsequent administrations fought for the federal role to oversee civil rights, it was ultimately deemed essential for the federal government to protect national resources for all citizens. We are back to the situation in which Muir first entered the national stage, calling for the federal role to ensure the national parks serve all citizens and not just one state’s or region’s interests. The fight Muir undertook to save Hetch Hetchy from being dammed, with which he concluded The Yosemite, continues as Muir’s legacy today. Is connecting the fate of a wilderness valley and national interests—nature as “kin”—too much of a stretch for language’s powers or our imaginations to envision relationships? Emily Dickinson, Muir’s contemporary and reclusive spiritual sister, who also had faith in her “dear

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countrymen,” writes a poem in which she makes the ability to claim kinship with the world perhaps naively outsized and comic, but an endeavor that has divine favor. A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King, But God be with the Clown— Who ponders this tremendous scene— This whole Experiment of Green— As if it were his own!47 John Muir’s educational credentials include honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard, and his geological and botanical research won acclaim from the world’s most renowned scientists in these fields. All the same, he seems to be Dickinson’s divine clown, pondering “this tremendous scene,” with his ability to enjoy nature “whole” as a scientist and “as if it were his own.” In the commitments of writers, teachers, cultural interpreters, and citizens around the world to environmental education, Muir’s legacy is one of public responsibility for taking care of a beloved earth, as if it really were our own. He makes us see what our children have at stake in its preservation. Reading Muir strengthens our capacity to undertake the most noble and essential work of all, work on behalf of the future. From a political standpoint, that is, from the standpoint on which Muir believed there were solutions to the needs of the human spirit, to work for the preservation of natural resources is an act of national security. It requires a level of imagination most basic in the human psyche. If we see trees as us, nature as inextricable from whom we are, we understand that preserving natural resources renews our sources of joy and love. Most of all, Muir wanted us to see: “How little note is taken of the deeds of Nature! What paper publishes her reports? If one pine were placed in a town square, what admiration it would excite! Yet who is conscious of the pine-tree multitudes in the free woods, though open to everybody? Who publishes the sheet-music of winds, or the written music of water written in river-lines? Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains? What record is kept of Nature’s colors—the clothes she wears—of her birds, her beasts—her life-stock?”48 This is work that John Muir expressly had faith we will now take up.

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Notes 1. Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951) 288; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Bantam [1892 ed.], 1983), section 51 of “Song of Myself.” 2. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992). 3. Studies of the cultural context in which Muir wrote include F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); Michael Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Roderick Frederick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 33–36, 37. 4. For example, in 1888 at Mt. Shasta, Muir cites “the destruction of the forest about Shasta. The axe and saw are heard more often in Shasta woods, and the glory is departing” (Linnie Marsh Wolfe, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938], 289). Lake Tahoe and in the Sierra were “trampled and eaten out of existence by hoofed locusts” (Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir [New York: Knopf, 1945], 238, 244–45). 5. Muir’s experience with tourists showed challenges to be overcome for people to experience wilderness positively. Letters report visitors with “blank, fleshly apathy,” looking at scenes “with about as much emotion as the horses they ride upon” (William Frederic Badè, ed., John Muir: Letters to a Friend, Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866–1879 [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916], 80–81). “We hide from the lessons of Nature. We gaze morbidly through civilized fog upon our beautiful world clad with seamless beauty, and see ferocious beasts and wastes and deserts” (Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 82). “When an excursion into the woods is proposed, all sorts of exaggerated or imaginary dangers are conjured up, filling the kindly, soothing wilderness with colds, fevers, Indians, bears, snakes, bugs, impassable rivers, and jungles of brush, to which is always added quick and sure starvation” (William Frederic Badè, Steep Trails [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918, republished by Sierra Club Books, 1984], 312). By 1890, Muir concluded, “Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate” (Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 320). 6. “Yes, my dear Johnson, sound the loud timbrel and let every Yosemite tree and stream rejoice!” John Muir, letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, July 16, 1906, on the successful passage of legislation in Congress to establish federal control of Yosemite (John Muir, Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, selected essays edited by William Cronon [New York: Library of America, 1997], 350).

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7. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 238–39, 245–46, 271–73. 8. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 173–74. 9. See, for example, Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987), 292; Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. 10. See Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 534, 701–20 (“The American Forests”). 11. John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Century Company, 1894), Muir’s first book, is composed of eighteen published essays that were revised and interwoven with new material. 12. Charles Sprague Sargent, chairman of the National Forestry Commission, wrote Muir: “No one knows so well as you the value of our forests—that their use for lumber is but a small part of their value.” Proposing that Muir write syndicate letters for the public press, Sargent said, “There is no one in the United States who can do this in such a telling way as you can, and in writing these letters you perform a patriotic service” (William Frederic Badè, ed., The Life and Letters of John Muir, in John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings, ed. Terry Gifford [Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1996], 371). As told by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Sargent wrote to Walter Hines Page, Atlantic’s editor, “There is but one man in the United States who can do it justice, and his name is John Muir” (Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 273). “The American Forests” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, August 1897, and was revised by Muir for Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901). 13. Letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, February 24 (1905). Gifford, John Muir: His Life and Letters, 374–77. 14. Sierra Club v. Secretary of State Morton, 1971. 15. Muir, “The American Forests,” 157; Our National Parks, 365. See also John Muir, “Save the Redwoods,” Sierra Club Bulletin,” XI, no. 1 (January 1920), 4. 16. Edwin Way Teale, ed., The Wilderness World of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 182. 17. Ibid., 323. 18. Ibid., 185‒86. 19. Ibid., 77. 20. John Muir, The Yosemite (New York: Century, 1912), 98. 21. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 181. 22. See John Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” Sierra Club Bulletin (January 1896): 282–83. “If people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.” John Muir, “Save the Redwoods,” Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 868. See also Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 429. In “The American Forests,” Muir describes “blasted trees appealing to heaven for help as if still half alive, and their mute eloquence is most interestingly touching.” Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 717.

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 443. Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir, 217. Muir, The Yosemite, 74, 88. Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 717. See n. 21. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 297–98. John Muir, “Semi-Tropical California,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, September 7, 1977. Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 724; Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir, 113–15; Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 354; Muir, The Yosemite, 150; Muir, Our National Parks, 56; “. . . animal people, intimately related to us” (John Muir, “The Wilderness and the Forest Reservations of the West,” Atlantic Monthly [January 1898]: 25; Muir, Our National Parks, 28). “Even the storms are friendly and seem to regard you as a brother” (Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 767). Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 224–225, 297 (in a single passage the words happy, kissing, glory, rejoices are applied repeatedly to cells, insects, raindrops, rocks), 253. Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir, 113–15. Muir, Steep Trails, 19–20; Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 293; Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir, 321–23; Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling, ed., To Yosemite and Beyond: Writings from the Years 1863–1875 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), 145; Peter Browning, ed., John Muir in His Own Words (Lafayette, CA: Great West Books, 1988), 13; John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 319. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 173. Ibid., 355. Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir, 104. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 171. Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir, 132. Muir, The Mountains of California, 196–201. Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir, 147–61. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 317. “Every morning . . . the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, ‘Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song’” (Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 19); “June 2. Warm, sunny day, thrilling plants and animals and rocks alike . . . making every particle of the crystal mountain thrash and swirl and dance in glad accord . . . in joyful rhythmic motion in the pulses of Nature’s big heart” (Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 194). Muir explicitly rejects the Puritan characterization of wilderness: “The myriads of flowers tingeing the mountain-top do not seem to have grown out of the dry, rough gravel of disintegration, but rather they appear as visitors, a cloud of witnesses to Nature’s love in what we in our timid ignorance and unbelief call howling desert” (Muir, Nature Writings, ed. Cronon, 242).

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42. Julia Butterfly Hill, Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods (Harper San Francisco, 2000). 43. Ibid., 214. 44. Ibid., 245–46. 45. These responses were posted on the Web site Hill established through the Circle of Life Foundation shortly after the incident was reported on its home page, May 2000. 46. Muir, “Save the Redwoods,” Sierra Club Bulletin XI, no. 1 (January 1920), 1‒4. “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when light comes the heart of the people is always right.” 47. Johnson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, poem 1333. 48. Wolfe, John of the Mountains, 220–21.

Part IV2

Adventures

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Near and Far

Burroughs and Muir on the Harriman Alaska Expedition James Perrin Warren

12 The purpose of this chapter is to present the relationship between John Muir and John Burroughs as a spatial metaphor or geography. In fact, however, the geography is both real and metaphorical. In his writings and in his role as a cultural figure, Muir is associated with wilderness and the wild, with mountaintops and glacial lands far from civilization, and with the sublime encounter between the solitary explorer and the wild. Burroughs, on the other hand, is associated with the pastoral “middle landscape” described by Leo Marx, with woodlands and settled, green fields and with the moderate and picturesque stroll of amateur birders and botanists. The two writers stand far apart, in the geography of nature writing—on opposite ends of a rather schematic and oversimplified literary map. In reality, however, Muir is rightly seen as the quintessential mountaineer, while Burroughs is rightly seen as a Hudson Valley farmer and rambler.1 But even though the two writers are as far apart as the Catskills and the Sierras, I argue that they are much nearer than they seem to be at first glance. A nearer view of Muir and Burroughs can begin with a photograph of the two standing together on the island of St. Matthew in the Bering Sea in 1

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fig. 9.1. The Two Johnnies: John Burroughs and John Muir on St. Matthew Island, ca. 1899. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

the summer of 1899 during the Harriman Alaska Expedition. The two naturalists are far away from their respective homes, about as far away as they could possibly be and still be in the continental United States. The landscape is barren, it seems—ice as white as Burroughs’s beard, rocky slopes, and gray sky. But the two writers are near to each other in pose and position: they are clothed nearly alike, though Burroughs, with his wool trousers tucked into long boots and with his leather gloves, may seem a bit more stylish than Muir.

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Both hold a bouquet of flowers in the left hand, and the camera seems to have caught the two in the middle of conversation. Muir turns his torso toward the camera, while Burroughs faces Muir, and their stances are clearly open toward each other. Whatever differences nevertheless exist, they are called “The Two Johnnies” in the caption to the photograph. Muir and Burroughs are both far from and near to each other. Nor is the island as barren as the photograph suggests. In the “Narrative of the Expedition,” Burroughs describes the “experience of walking over ground covered with nature’s matchless tapestry,” a “thick, heavy carpet of variegated mosses and lichens . . . with rugs and mats of many colored flowers—pink, yellow, violet, white.” True, the island was “enveloped most of the time in fog and cloud,” and Burroughs describes the danger of climbing some thousand feet up one of the “cloud summits”: “I came suddenly upon a deep cleft or chasm which opened in the moss and flowers at my feet and led down between crumbling rocky walls at a fearful incline to the beach. . . . The wraiths of fog and mist whirling through and over it enhanced its dreadful mystery and depth. Yet I hovered about it, retreating and returning quite fascinated by the contrast between the smooth flowery carpet upon which I stood and the terrible yawning chasm.”2 On St. Matthew Island, Burroughs introduces us to the sudden meeting of picturesque and sublime, pastoral and wild landscapes. The Harriman Alaska Expedition took place between May 23 and July 30, 1899. Organized and financed by the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, the expedition brought together some 126 members, including twenty-five members of the “scientific party,” three visual artists, and two photographers. Many of these professionals were luminaries in their fields. Burroughs and Muir were, of course, renowned naturalists and writers. William H. Dall, paleontologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), was a respected expert on Alaska. B. E. Fernow was dean of the School of Forestry at Cornell University, Henry Gannett was chief geographer of the USGS, and C. Hart Merriam was chief of the Biological Survey of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and eventually the editor of the thirteen-volume Harriman Alaska Expedition. Two artists would become famous after the expedition: Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the painter of birds, and Edward S. Curtis, the photographer best known for his studies of Native Americans. In addition, George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society and editor of Forest and Stream magazine, contributed essays on the natives of the coastal region and the salmon industry. Harriman assembled most of this stellar group in New York City on May 23, took a private train across country to Seattle, and there met with Muir, Curtis, Charles Keeler, and other westerners. The millionaire had chartered the

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steamship George W. Elder from the Pacific Coast Steamship Company and had it completely refurbished and outfitted for the two-month voyage from Seattle to Siberia and back.3 Perhaps the most famous description of the expedition came in August 1899, when Muir wrote the four girls of the Harriman family: “On the Elder, I found not only the fields I liked best to study, but a hotel, a club, and a home, together with a floating University in which I enjoyed the instruction and companionship of a lot of the best fellows imaginable, culled and arranged like a well-balanced bouquet, or like a band of glaciers flowing smoothly together, each in its own channel, or perhaps at times like a lot of round boulders merrily swirling and chafing against each other in a glacier pothole.”4 Muir’s description blends the characteristic imagery of flowing glaciers and swirling, chafing boulders with the more surprising imagery of academic companions “culled and arranged like a well-balanced bouquet.” Like the mixed landscapes in Burroughs’s description of St. Matthew Island, Muir’s figurative landscapes combine the pastoral and the wild. Even this first attempt at mapping the landscape of Burroughs’s and Muir’s relationship is oversimplified and binary. More accurate would be a composite geography of late-nineteenth-century American nature writing. Such a geography would not reduce the landscape to two alternatives of wilderness and pastoral. Instead, a composite geography would recognize gradations between two extremes. It would note, for instance, the role of sheep and sheepherding in the Sierra, even if the sheep are often figured as “hoofed locusts.”5 Or it would note, without irony, that when Burroughs and Muir meet for the first time, on June 1, 1893, in New York City, each of them is between literary dinners, and neither one feels satisfied by the initial meeting. So Muir will write to his wife that Burroughs “gave no sign of his fine qualities” and that “I can hardly say I have seen him at all,” while Burroughs notes in his journal that Muir has “the Western look upon him. Not quite enough penetration in his eyes.”6 Despite the mutual lack of recognition, the two writers were to become close friends and see many fine qualities in each other. And it is precisely this more complicated view that creates a sense of a composite geography of American nature writing at the end of the century. A particularly salient place for this complex mapping is the Harriman Alaska Expedition, the thirteen-volume series published from 1901 to 1914 under the general editorship of Merriam. Volume one combines Burroughs’s “Narrative of the Expedition,” Muir’s “Notes on the Pacific Coast Glaciers,” and Grinnell’s essay “Natives of the Alaska Coast Region.” Under the title

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History, Geography, Resources, volume II presents a wide range of subjects, with eight nontechnical essays such as “Days Among Alaska Birds,” by Charles Keeler, at the time the director of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco; Fernow’s “The Forests of Alaska”; and Merriam’s “Bogoslof, Our Newest Volcano.” Although later volumes become more technical and specialized, G. K. Gilbert’s study of Glaciers and Glaciation, volume III, and the composite study of Geology by six different writers, volume IV, are extremely useful to read with Muir’s essay on the Pacific coast glaciers. Finally, the various volumes include a host of illustrations—paintings, photographs, sketches, and pen-and-ink drawings—that are printed as plates and as textual figures. Thus the thirteen volumes combine to create a remarkable record of the Harriman Expedition and of scientific, literary, and artistic representations of Alaska. Even though the Harriman Alaska Expedition series presents a composite geography of multiple perspectives, it does not deliver a comprehensive, all-inclusive view. There is no doubt, for example, that the party was engaged in a survey rather than an in-depth study. The geologist Gilbert calls the cruise “fairly comprehensive” as a “reconnaissance of glacial geology” and notes that the two-month survey was rapid and varied and, accordingly, superficial. It included general impressions from the ship and more detailed observations at a few points: he lists landings at thirty-four localities, at three of which the students of glaciers camped for several days. In addition, the scientists analyzed thousands of photographs in order to study changes in the size of glaciers.7 A similar sense of composite though partial geography comes from focusing on one particular place, Glacier Bay. One of Muir’s principal values to the Harriman Expedition was his deep knowledge of the bay, since he and S. Hall Young had made two separate canoe voyages to the area in 1879 and 1880; indeed, Muir was widely considered the “discoverer” of Glacier Bay. In addition to the earlier canoe trips, Muir had camped and explored the bay for over a month in the summer of 1890, working in concert with Professor Harry Fielding Reid and a party of “six or eight young students.”8 Like the Harriman Expedition itself, however, Muir’s written contribution to the series, the essay “Notes on the Pacific Coast Glaciers,” is a roughly chronological “reconnaissance” of the glacial landscape as seen from the deck of the George W. Elder or from one of the steam launches or rowboats. Muir describes Glacier Bay in order to show how far the glaciers have receded in the twenty years since his first exploration and the resulting changes in the landscape. Muir notes two main changes: first, the Grand Pacific Glacier had

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receded so far that the confluence of tributaries had disappeared, leaving three glaciers where there was once only one; second, islands that were enveloped in the glaciers had now been revealed by the receding ice. Muir reads the “glacial earth-sculpture” both forward and backward, imagining the future “birth” of islands and, more beautifully, the prehistoric “grand continuous ice-sheet that flowed over all the island region of the coast.”9 For readers familiar with The Mountains of California, Muir’s modest title is appropriate, for the essay is really nothing more than a rapidly composed set of notes. While the “Notes” essay is rather dry and restrained, Muir’s influence on the party aboard the Elder can be felt in Burroughs’s “Narrative of the Expedition.” Burroughs describes the entry into Glacier Bay and the fifty-mile course up to Muir Glacier: The next day [June 8] finds us in Glacier Bay on our way to the Muir Glacier. Our course is up an arm of the sea, dotted with masses of floating ice, till in the distance we see the great glacier itself. Its front looks gray and dim there twenty miles away, but in the background the mountains that feed it lift up vast masses of snow in the afternoon sun. At five o’clock we drop anchor about two miles from its front, in eighty fathoms of water, abreast of the little cabin on the east shore built by John Muir some years ago. Not till after repeated soundings did we find bottom within reach of our anchor cables. Could the inlet have been emptied of its water for a moment we should have seen before us a palisade of ice nearly 1,000 feet higher and over two miles long, with a turbid river, possibly half a mile wide, boiling up from beneath it. Could we have been here many centuries ago, we should have seen, much further down the valley, a palisade of ice two or three thousand feet high. Many of these Alaska glaciers are rapidly melting and are now but the fragments of their former selves. From observations made here twenty years ago by John Muir, it is known that the position of the front of Muir Glacier at that time was about two miles below its present position, which would indicate a rate of recession of about one mile in ten years.10 Muir’s influence is clear in the retrospective vision of many centuries ago and the sense of the rapidly melting, receding glaciers. But the most striking sentence of the passage is in fact the confluence of several tributaries from Muir’s

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writings. Moreover, it suggests that the best way to appreciate Muir’s description of the Pacific coast glaciers is to read several accounts in conjunction with one another, or in layers, in order to arrive at a composite map of Glacier Bay and the relationship between Burroughs and Muir. In the “Narrative of the Expedition,” Burroughs imagines the draining of the inlet revealing the wall of ice, and his account repeats images Muir had already published several times. In Picturesque California in 1888, for instance, Muir describes the Muir Glacier in this way: “The steamer sails up the fiord with its load of wondering tourists, making a way through the drifting icebergs with which the waters are crowded, and drops anchor with half a mile of the blue, shining ice-wall in which the glacier terminates. . . . Its height above the water is probably three or four hundred feet, but far the greater portion is below the water and terminal moraine. If the water and the rockdetritus of the bottom were drained and cleared away, this magnificent wall of pale blue ice would probably be found to be not less than a thousand feet in height.”11 Muir revised the passage for the essay “The Alaska Trip,” in the August 1897 number of Century Magazine: “The height of the ice-wall above the water is from 250 to 300 feet, but soundings made by Captain Carroll show that 720 feet of the wall is below the surface, while still a third unmeasured portion is buried beneath the moraine material that is being constantly deposited at the foot of it. Therefore, were the water and rocky detritus removed, there would be presented a sheer precipice of ice a mile and a half wide and more than a thousand feet in height.”12 Finally, at the end of his life Muir revised the 1897 passage slightly for inclusion in chapter sixteen,“Glacier Bay,” in the 1880 portion of Travels in Alaska, published posthumously in 1915. Travels in Alaska compiles accounts of the 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips to Alaska, with three separate descriptions of Glacier Bay and Muir’s explorations of the glaciers in the area. But as suggested here, Muir also used his own previously published accounts, revising them for inclusion in the book. So the book ultimately becomes a composite map of a changing landscape. For example, the account “The Discovery of Glacier Bay,” first printed in Century Magazine in June 1895, becomes part of chapters nine, ten, and fourteen in Travels, and although the discovery actually occurred in 1879, the article also summarizes the 1880 exploration of the bay. In fact, Muir used the description of the calving icebergs, the end of the “Discovery” essay, again just two years later, in the “Alaska Trip” article for Century Magazine. A simple chronological reading suggests that the growth of the tourist industry on the southeast coast of Alaska rapidly changed the experience of Glacier Bay from the harrowing adventure of 1879 to an easy walk undertaken by hundreds of tourists

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on rough boardwalks to the top of Muir Glacier in 1890. But even here it is overly simple to assume that Muir’s disdain for tourists, expressed in Travels as the maxim “Great is the power of the guidebook-maker, however ignorant,”13 is his only opinion of them. After all, “The Alaska Trip” is framed as a steamship tour, in which the reader becomes a tourist and is directed by Muir himself to appreciate the sights of the Inside Passage. Moreover, adventure was still possible for travelers to this area of Alaska in 1890: the account “My SledTrip on the Muir Glacier,” chapter eighteen of Travels, is as hair-raising as the rescue of Hall Young on Glenora Peak in 1879 or the escape from Davidson Glacier with the little dog Stickeen in 1880. These textual tributaries are interesting in their own right, of course, but Muir’s influence on Burroughs is more direct and experiential than textual. Toward the beginning of the “Narrative,” Burroughs notes that “in John Muir we had an authority on glaciers, and a thorough one—so thorough that he would not allow the rest of the party to have an opinion on the subject. The Indians used to call him the Great Ice Chief.”14 Even though Burroughs clearly resists Muir’s authority as domineering and silencing, he ultimately incorporates Muir generously into his account of the expedition. Thus, Burroughs knew how to listen to Muir and to learn from him. In describing the Muir Glacier, Burroughs sounds least like the caricature of himself that the schematic contrast between the “Two Johnnies” would suggest. His descriptions employ the rhetoric of elemental forces that he most admired in the poetry of Walt Whitman. They are reminiscent of Thoreau’s Walden, particularly the “sand foliage” and “tonic of wildness” passages of “Spring.” At the same time, Burroughs uses the communal “we” to place the composite group of scientists, naturalists, artists, and photographers in the landscape. He begins by saying, “We were in the midst of strange scenes, hard to render in words,” and then he describes “the miles upon miles of moraines upon either hand, gray, loosely piled, scooped, plowed, channeled, sifted . . . the sparkling sea water dotted with blue bergs and loose drift ice . . . and the cleft, toppling, staggering front of the great glacier in its terrible labor throes stretching before us from shore to shore.”15 If the sense of a communal vision contrasts sharply with Muir’s more solitary vision, the landscape itself is rendered in sublime, elemental terms that recall Muir’s many descriptions: “We saw the world-shaping forces at work; we scrambled over plains they had built but yesterday. . . . We were really in one of the workshops and laboratories of the elder gods, but only in the glacier’s front was there present evidence that they were still at work.”16 Burroughs attempts to catch the gods at work by climbing up a huge granite ridge against which the western side of the

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glacier has broken and toppled, “but while I stayed not a pebble moved, all was silence and inertia. And I could look down between the glacier and the polished mountain side; they were not in contact; the hand of the sculptor was raised as it were, but he did not strike while I was around; in front of me upon the glacier for many miles was a perfect wilderness of crevasses, the ice was ridged and contorted like an angry sea, but not a sound, not a movement anywhere.”17 On a particularly sunny day, Burroughs and Keeler climbed Mt. Wright, three thousand feet above the glacier, and Burroughs returns to the rhetoric of startling contrasts: It was indeed a day with the gods, strange gods, the gods of the foreworld, but they had great power over us. The scene we looked upon was for the most part one of desolation—snow, ice, jagged peaks, naked granite, gray moraines—but the bright sun and sky over all, the genial warmth and the novelty of the situation, were ample to invest it with a fascinating interest. There was fatigue in crossing the miles of moraine; there was difficulty in making our way along the sharp crests of high gravel banks; there was peril in climbing the steep boulder-strewn side of the mountain, but there was exhilaration in every step and there were glory and inspiration at the top. Under a summer sun with birds singing and flowers blooming, we looked into the face of winter and set our feet upon the edge of his skirts. But the largeness of the view, the elemental ruggedness, and the solitude as of interstellar space were perhaps what took the deepest hold. It seemed as if the old glacier had been there but yesterday.18 From the top of Mt. Wright, Burroughs achieved an opening of perspective that is exhilarating and unexpected. He attempted to hold that largeness within the contrast of seasons and the personifying of the glacial landscape in literary tactics that he had used to describe the experience of Muir Glacier. He was taken hold of by “the largeness of the view, the elemental ruggedness, and the solitude as of interstellar space.” It may have been fortunate for Burroughs that Muir was far away, but it was also fortunate that, like Muir, Burroughs allows the sense of wilderness to take “deepest hold” upon him. There can be no doubt that Muir exercised a powerful influence upon Burroughs’s perspective during the Harriman Alaska Expedition. Indeed,that influence remained strong for at least another decade, resulting in Burroughs’s

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trip to the Grand Canyon and Yosemite with Muir in 1909 and the geological and evolutionary essays that figure centrally in the 1912 Time and Change, perhaps Burroughs’s finest late volume. The friendship between the two writers was always vexing to Burroughs, but it was nonetheless abiding and deep, and it was of fundamental importance in bringing him to take a larger view of the American landscape than he had yet achieved. Muir’s influence is finally most telling because of Burroughs’s resistance: the two premier literary naturalists of the late nineteenth century are like two “round boulders merrily swirling and chafing against each other in a glacier pothole.”19 It is tempting to stop here, with the strong sense of Muir’s influence on the most prolific nature writer of the day and the suspicion that the influence may well have been reciprocal. But to do so is once again to give in to the temptation of oversimplification. The geography of American nature writing is composite, not merely binary. The friendship of Muir and Burroughs is a vital part of that geography, but the “Narrative of the Expedition” and Muir’s Alaska writings suggest that the map of American nature writing is inclusive and complex. This chapter began with the pair of bearded men holding a bouquet of flowers and facing each other on the ice of St. Matthew Island. There are other photographs of the two old men one could examine for inspection and interpretation. But for now it is best to conclude that Burroughs’s “largeness of . . . view” is a composite of several partial perspectives, not simply a reflection of the Great Ice Chief. The perspectives included the views of Burroughs himself, of John Muir, of Walt Whitman, of Henry Thoreau, and probably of R. W. Emerson, too; they included views of scientists like Gilbert and Fernow and artists like Curtis and Gifford and Fuertes; they included elemental ruggedness as well as birds singing and flowers blooming; they encompass good fellows and companions as well as the solitude of interstellar space; they included thundering icebergs and the silence of strange gods.

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Notes 1. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 73–144. For recent refigurings of the pastoral, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995), 31–52, and Terry Gifford, Pastoral (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Near and Far

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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The scholarship in humanist geography is growing, largely as a result of the seminal work done by Yi-Fu Tuan in works like Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977) and Topophilia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); for telling examples of the range of work being done in humanist geography, see the volume Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed. Paul C. Adams et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Burroughs’s “Narrative of the Expedition” leads the thirteen-volume Harriman Alaska Expedition Series, vol. I (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1902–14), 1–118. The quotation appears on pp. 111–12. The best account of the expedition as a whole is the out-of-print volume by William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan, Looking Far North: The Harriman Expedition to Alaska 1899 (New York: Viking, 1982); for the material in this paragraph, see pp. 3–15. William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 330. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra and The Mountains of California, in Nature Writings, ed. William Cronon (New York: Library of America, 1997), 185, 387, et passim. Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. II, 265; Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, vol. I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 340. G. K. Gilbert, Glaciers and Glaciation, in The Harriman Alaska Expedition Series, vol. III, ed. C. Hart Merriam (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1904; reissued 1910), 2–6. John Muir, Travels in Alaska (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915; reprint New York: Penguin, 1997), 214. John Muir, “Notes on the Pacific Coast Glaciers,” in Merriam, The Harriman Alaska Expedition Series, vol. I, (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1902; reissued 1910), 128. John Burroughs, “Narrative of the Expedition” in Merriam, The Harriman Alaska Expedition Series, vol. I (1902), 35–36. “Alaska,” reprinted in Nature Writings, 684. John Muir, “The Alaska Trip,” Century Magazine 54 (August 1897): 523. Muir, Travels in Alaska, 207. Burroughs, “Narrative of the Expedition,” in Merriam, The Harriman Alaska Expedition Series, vol. I (1902), 18. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 46–47.

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19. Burroughs was often compared to Thoreau throughout his career but not because of the similarities between particular passages of their writing. Instead, they were both praised for their knowledge of plants and birds and their intimate connection with nature. Henry James called Burroughs “a sort of reduced, but also more humorous, more available, and more sociable Thoreau . . .” but it was not a comparison Burroughs appreciated. He wrote several essays on Thoreau, and while he admitted Thoreau’s influence, he was much more forthright about the influence of Emerson and Whitman on his writing.

chapter ten 1

“Those Who Walk Apart but Ever Together Are True Companions”

Jeanne Carr and John Muir in the High Sierra Bonnie Johanna Gisel

12 The voice of the upper falls at evening is a deep bass, and the lower a rippling treble which we do not discriminate during the day or when the air is still. With them are harmoniously blended the whirl of the pines; millions upon millions of delicate rising strings are vibrating to every breath and giving off sound which though separately too delicate for our half trained senses to recognize are made into music which even the dullest may appreciate. . . . I sat one Holy Sabbath day upon [the shores of Shadow Lake.] The blue arch above was not purer in color than the blue below. . . . Round about stood the grand gray congregation of mountains and the Sun with his face turned eastward. . . . Upon the sandy floor and the strip of sandy beach little drooping willows neatly paired nodded together during the 1

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Sabbath service . . . grasses swayed as if by some impulse of their own, and bracken spread its graceful fronds as if blessing the kind earth upon which it grew. . . . Nearby a garden of lupines worshipped in a mode of their own, turning their happy faces towards the Sun, as angels toward the Lord, and opening their lovely little silver hands to receive His blessing.1

An Individualized Existence In the autumn of 1860 John Muir left Portage, Buffalo Township, Wisconsin, and headed to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society Fair held annually in Madison. He was twenty-two, charming, gentle, and humorous, and had twinkling blue eyes, a tangle of unshorn auburn hair, and a beard. His clothes were handmade. His appearance was rustic. Muir entered the fair grounds with his hand-carved wooden clocks, thermometers, and an early-rise machine that drew an inordinate amount of attention. Fair officials sent Jeanne C. Carr, a petite thirty-five-year-old mother of four boys, as an emissary to report on Muir’s inventions, for which he won a diploma and a monetary award of five dollars. Jeanne was the wife of Dr. Ezra Slocum Carr, Professor of Chemistry and Natural History at the burgeoning University of Wisconsin. It was Allie Carr, her youngest son, and Henry Butler, the young son of Dr. James D. Butler, Professor of Greek at the university, who climbed repeatedly onto Muir’s earlyrising bed only to be sprung over and over into the cheering crowd. Carr recalled that her introduction to Muir would probably have been forgotten had her husband not reported Muir’s attendance in his lectures the following year. Allie and Henry pestered Jeanne until she agreed to visit Muir in his dormitory room in North Hall. Among the clocks and the early-rising bed was a wooden desk he made that moved textbooks required in each course of study to the front and opened them to the appointed page. This and a curious apparatus for registering the growth of an ascending plant stem during each hour captivated Carr’s attention. She was intrigued by Muir’s unspoiled nature and faithfulness to detail—scientific, moral, and spiritual. The original and promising inventions bespoke of a bright mind and inquisitive demeanor and opened doors. Literally the most important belonged to the home of Jeanne and Ezra Carr at 114 Gilman Street in Madison.2 Beginning in 1861, when Muir matriculated at the university, three important interrelated events occurred that would transform his life. First, he became a close friend of the Carr family—Jeanne and Ezra and their four sons, Ezra Smith, Edward Carver, John Henry, and Albert Lee (Allie). Second,

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Professor Butler encouraged Muir to keep a calendar of daily events that he adapted to a botanical journal. For the better part of Muir’s life, he would carry a journal—of different sizes, with different covers, some very small, some that just fit into his pocket—from which he composed letters to friends, essays, and eventually, his books. Third and last, Milton Griswold, a fellow student, somewhat formally introduced Muir to the study of botany. But Jeanne Carr’s influence upon Muir’s study of botany should not be underestimated. She was, after all, a field botanist who had already published articles on horticulture in the Wisconsin Farmer, and she encouraged Muir to visit her home where he observed her herbarium, Wardian cases, and solarium that wrapped around the front and side of the yellow sandstone house. Carr grew geraniums, tea roses, sage, and ivy. For study and enjoyment, her garden served as her university within and around her home. Muir walked in the garden, where Anemone nemorosa and Dielytra grew, where his study of field botany took root.3 Muir’s desire to study botany led from the University of Wisconsin to the University of the Wilderness. He departed from Portage in 1864 and headed for a life more fully situated in Nature in Canada West (Ontario). Muir’s friendship with Jeanne Carr germinated while he worked in Meaford (a small town in the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron), manufacturing rakes and broom handles. His motivation for leaving was, in part, financial—he could not afford either to remain at the University of Wisconsin or to attend another university, where he might have studied medicine, a thought that had certainly crossed his mind. A letter from Carr confirmed that Muir was unaware that the faculty at the University of Wisconsin invited him to matriculate as a free student. Muir recognized his own particular unique expression of tenderness and respect for Nature, but he was uncertain about his future and concerned about the productive years ahead. He needed time to sort out matters. The letter from Carr, however, also included a proposal that they exchange thoughts. This would be a means of his growth, though he felt that he and Carr were students in very different classes—he an alpha novice in the botanical and horticultural sciences that she had studied for many more years than he. The letter writing that began in 1865 would continue for thirty years.4 Carr played a pivotal role as mentor and literary agent in Muir’s life following his arrival in California in 1868. Described as Muir’s most intimate lifelong friend, she was also his spiritual mother. As fellow botanists and spiritual soul mates, they tethered their Christian faith to Nature. Expressions of religiosity and spiritual growth fitted into their letters to each other and formed a lasting bond of kindred friendship. Carr wrote to Muir from San Mateo on Easter Sunday in March 1869:

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“The Lord is risen indeed.” The Universe is singing anew the Easter song of the ages, sung long before “the visible church” had an existence—the sweet assurance to all the future that God is in His world. My thoughts are unto you ward, dear Shepherd, and there is no other soul with whom I would prefer to keep this spotless day sacred to the holiest memories and hopes. I have not been to church to see the crosses of white callas and the wreaths of spirea and myrtle—not yet upon the hills, but the day has nevertheless been blessed—and I doubt not the blessedness has reached and filled you also. In 1871 Muir wrote to Carr from the transept of Upper Yosemite Falls, where baptized in the night moon glory he wished she too could mingle in the glorious spray. Muir prayed among the spouts of the fall and wanted Carr to expose her spirit to the rays of heaven that entered his soul—“Oh the music that is blessing me now!”5 The more Muir wrote, the more his letters to Carr revealed thoughts and feelings he had never shared with anyone. While he remained dependent on her as his spiritual mother during times of loneliness (often she traveled in his thoughts as if she were there with him), he served as a surrogate naturalist for Carr, who infrequently sauntered into wilderness and when she did was never alone. Vicariously Carr wandered with Muir, shared his scientific observations, and felt encounters with the divine. His letters nourished her faith, provided an added awareness of God manifest in wild places, and led to greater knowledge of nature and science. Patient with Muir’s pathless sauntering, Carr nonetheless charted courses he sometimes followed—he recognized that she understood the direction and purpose of his life before he knew them. He read what she suggested he read: Alponse de Lamartine’s novel The Stonemason of Saint Point; the writings (homilies, prayers, and poems) of the Reverend Walter R. Brooks, a Baptist minister whom Carr befriended during her tenure in Madison, Wisconsin; and something about Yosemite. Carr believed God had given Muir “the eye within the eye, to see in all natural objects the realized ideas of His mind.” She also hoped that he would take as great an interest in art and culture as he did in all things wild. To bridge the gap between Nature and culture, she introduced him to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Gray, William Keith, Albert Kellogg, John Swett, J. B. McChesney, Joseph LeConte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Sir Joseph Hooker, and Louie Wanda Strentzel of Martinez, California, whom Muir married in 1880. Carr sent many people to Yosemite and, as a result, has been accused of

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distracting Muir from his mountain and glacier studies and from his writing. But Muir invited many others. In fact, in 1872 he wrote to Carr that he would have to save a slice of his season for her.6 Carr wanted others to experience Muir’s “individualized existence,” his perceptions and observations, his clarity and simplicity, his ability to read and see the messages of God’s soul he witnessed in the wilderness. It was her intention to share Muir, whom she saw as one of God’s beloved, with the world, and she drew him over and over again into the public sphere. Her mind was made up, his “fugitiveness” was to be gathered, “lest you should die like Moses in the mountains and God should bury you where ‘no man knoweth.’” With her own proclivity for Nature and flora, she filled her letters with observations of the natural world as a means to sharpen his perception and style. She knew the joy of finding a voice for one’s best thoughts.7 Muir, who did not want to cast any anchor, was unaware that Carr sent a revised manuscript of one of his letters to Benjamin P. Avery, the editor of the Overland Monthly, though he knew that the following month Ezra Carr delivered “Yosemite Valley in Flood.” In April it was published, and by the end of the year the Overland published two additional essays. By 1873 Muir was referred to as a leading contributor—three essays were published that year, eight during 1874. The transformation of Muir’s wilderness rambles into Nature tracts combined empirical observation with poetic charm. Muir’s purpose was to write in such a way that he would “entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.” He assured Carr there were limits as to what he was capable of doing for the public. His hope was that the wilderness about which he wrote would become a destination. For those places readers could not climb and for those who could not travel, Muir’s writing rendered vicarious experience steeped in Nature truth and fable. Muir thought of himself as a “John the Baptist.” He became the poster child for Yosemite, the new Adam in the American Far West, and his work and his personality eclipsed the work and recognition of others who had forged a foothold in Yosemite Valley. In light of Muir’s literary success, Carr knew that letter writing must be abandoned—correspondence consumed too much time. Silence would spread between them, a reasonable sacrifice to Muir’s higher goal. Though words were difficult to fashion, the spark that ignited the direction Muir’s relation with the profane world would take was clear, strong, and true.8

An Encounter with Calypso borealis When Muir arrived in Canada in 1864, he set out to find the Calypso borealis. Perhaps he thought of himself and his life as similar to that of the uncommon

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orchid. Subject to his own lonesomeness, he wrote about the Calypso—“They were alone. Not a vine was near, not a blade of grass, nor a bush. Nor were there any birds or insects, for great blocks of ice lay screened from the summer’s sun by deep beds of moss, and chilled the water.” The solitary Calypso had no companions in the ignoble hemlocks nor the arborvitae. It was Jeanne Carr (herself like the uncommon orchid Cypripedium arietinum that she saw in a cedar swamp in Dake’s Woods in Castleton Corners, Vermont), who would fill the void of loneliness in Muir’s young adult life. For her many friendships grew from the one wild Cyprepedium. Both geographically and spiritually—naturally—the two orchids and the two botanists shared uncommon ground.9 Muir seemed to intuit the grand scheme of things in the beauty and pleasure and deep, pure endlessness of the life of the Calypso that sparked his own sense of purpose. He experienced simple pleasure on the open plat of moss in company with the Calypso and grasped a certain reverence for all that is sublime in nature and life. In January 1866, about the time he reported seeing the Calypso borealis, he sent Carr a common list of plants he found upon the shaded hills and glens of Canada. Aspidium spinulosum, A. marginale, A. aculeatum, A. lonchitis, Asplenium acrostichoide, and Botrychium lunariodes grew in many places. Cyptopteris bulbifera grew in arborvitae shade in the company of Linnaea borealis. Adiantum fluttered on hillsides. Near Niagara Falls he saw Osmunda claytoniana, and he found more Calypso borealis—in dark hemlock woods. Among these friends he would not compromise his sense of worth, his value of life—he would not “monopolize the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, the pride of life.” There would be no pomp and marvel of the human-made world for him. His purpose resided with the flora that God had granted.10 Carr valued Muir’s irresistible simplicity and his gentleness and humaneness toward all creation that she encountered in the words he wrote. Following his departure from Canada in 1866, his return to Indianapolis, and the resulting eye injury he suffered while employed at Osgood & Smith, what could she do but express her love for his life, “a more individualized existence than is common”? And now, John, . . . May you feel the “everlasting arms” beneath your pillow, may Infinite tenderness supply all the wants of your spirit and the needs of your life, may each of these days of trial be luminous with His Presence. . . . There was little doubt that Muir was an erudite observer. For Carr, a quintessential nineteenth-century reformer, he was fodder for her faith, for her belief

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that God gave each of us to the other to nurture—to enlighten and to ameliorate individual character and to help our friends improve the world as a powerful and lucid manifestation of God. In regard to Muir, he hoped that his humane understanding of Nature would have a civilizing influence.11

To Meet in Yosemite Valley Muir was unable to be moderate in his desires—for him there was no rest. In search of “sweet fields,” he “bade adieu” to human inventions and directed his life to the study of the inventions of God. Muir’s evangelical roots directly influenced his chosen course. Essentially he felt that he had gone to work for God. First, in 1867, he wandered on a botanical ramble through the American South with the intention of continuing on to South America to follow the Orinoco and the Amazon rivers. By the time he reached the Cedar Keys, he was weak with malaria. Limited funds and the inability to find a vessel bound for South America forced him to rethink his plan. He traveled north to New York City to go west to Yosemite Valley, arrived in California in late March 1868, and immediately headed for the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite Valley. Nearly nine months passed before Carr heard from Muir—fate and flowers had carried him to California. She wrote that she rejoiced that he was found.12 Following Ezra Carr’s resignation from the University of Wisconsin, the Carr family left Madison, Wisconsin, and moved to California in November 1868. The Carrs were impressed with California’s climate, scenery, and agricultural opportunities—Ezra Carr’s younger brother, Nelson Carr, had taken up farming in California. Rumors about a new university in Oakland precipitated thoughts of settling on the east side of San Francisco Bay, and Ezra Carr the next year would join the faculty at the University of California as Professor of Agriculture, Agricultural Chemistry, and Horticulture. Jeanne Carr felt blessed that Muir was already in California, but the Carrs did not move because he was there. In fact, Muir intended to leave California for South America and complete his original plan to travel to the Amazon—a route he followed only in 1911. After leaving Wisconsin, the Carrs themselves considered moving to South America rather than to California—tempted by President Domingo Sarmineto’s call for recruits to engage in the educational development of Argentina. Jeanne and Ezra never did travel to South America. Their sons, Ned and John Henry, left in late 1870 to join the Bolivian Commercial and Colonization Company. They returned in 1872—Ned with what was probably malarial fever, John Henry with only the clothes he wore.13

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Muir, with no friends in California, was anxious for the Carrs to arrive. Jeanne’s proximity to him wielded a far greater influence upon his relations and writing than had she remained in Wisconsin or moved to South America. As Muir grew closer to Nature and further from culture, she hoped at least in part to modify his desire to forever be a mountaineer, a botanist, and a glaciologist sequestered in a high mountain pass. She may have envied his solitude, but she also believed there might have been too much of it. For all her concerns about his remoteness, it was something she personally craved, and Muir living in the High Sierra directly benefited Carr in her pursuit of solitude. Within six months of her arrival in California she was on her way to Yosemite Valley to visit Muir, whom she had not seen in two years. When she set out by stage from Stockton, she thought about the glorious lessons of the mountains God had written for her. Muir and Carr spoke of the Yosemite baptism they would share. Most important for him was that her experience be other than that of a tourist. To fully worship in the mountain temple required time. Carr was not to be a hasty or careless observer.14 Muir never received the letter Carr sent that announced her arrival date. While she traveled with a group of San Francisco schoolteachers from Clark’s Station to Mariposa Grove, he was in the foothills “entangled with sheep.” When she was alone in Yosemite Valley, he was five miles west of the valley on July 11, then three miles north above Yosemite Falls on July 13, opposite the Hutchings Hotel. Carr rode through the pine columns, along the granite walls and spires, upon the mosaic floor of strange and lovely wildflowers. The beauty of Yosemite deepened her conviction that from “Our Great Mother” Nature she learned of God’s everlasting love. Not fewer than eight letters traveled in search of Muir. Carr wrote: “Having up to this moment followed your directions as nearly as I could, I can only . . . simply acquiesce in the inevitable and go away without seeing you until in God’s own time and way we are once more permitted to enjoy face to face communion.” Though disappointed that Muir was not there to share her joy, she forgave him. On the bridge between Vernal and Nevada Falls, she left a prayer for Muir, who had traveled in spirit with her. “The Lord bless thee and keep thee.”15 Muir was certain Carr would promptly return to Yosemite Valley, the portal for his thoughts, scientific inquiry, loneliness, and restlessness, the place he wanted most to share with her. Carr sent her friends to the valley, for which Muir kindly thanked her. In July 1872, he could no longer wait. Approaching a “fruiting-time” in his mountain work, he wanted more than ever to see her. Carr summed up the three years that kept her from Yosemite Valley by assuaging her soul and Muir’s that they were true companions though they walked

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apart.“Not those who cling to you, but those who walk apart yet ever with you are your true companions.” Muir felt that he had learned to live close to her without seeing her. Though spiritual geography held them in a kindred embrace, physically they lived as if a continent apart. Carr suggested that Muir catch his best glacier birds and fly down to Oakland—if only for a talk. But his birds were flying everywhere—“into all mountains and plains, of all climes and times,—and some are ducks in the sea, and I scarce know what to do about it.” Soon he would touch Carr “with these very writing fingers ere long.”16 Encouraged by Carr, William Keith, Joseph LeConte, and J. B. McChesney, Muir arrived in Oakland in December. He found it difficult to reconcile the demands of town life, though he tried his best to be entertained and entertaining. In a flurry of activity visits were made to libraries, museums, and galleries and to meet Edward Rowland Sill, Ina Donna Coolbrith, and Benjamin P. Avery. Muir sat for a portrait in the studio of Rulofson. After two weeks he fled from the urban world back to God’s temple. Memories of Oakland faded the closer he got to Yosemite. Thoughts of Carr’s selfsacrificing everlasting love burned clear in his eyes and the light of their friendship required no adjustment—“for all of the clean love that the world contains is divine, and circles around God as stars around their sun!” Whatever Carr said to Muir refocused him, redirected his life toward his writing. But bookmaking frightened him. He was uncertain of his ability to shape words. He would, as she suggested, look into lexicon granaries though he found the English language full of rags and sparse to provide instruments that gave form to his thoughts and experience. Carr believed these were excuses. Muir returned to writing in earnest.17

The Only Divine Ramble On June 6, 1873, weary from walking through heavy snow, Muir rambled back to Yosemite Valley from the Lyell Glacier. He forgot his exhaustion and the pain of his sun-blistered face with the news that Carr would soon be in the valley. She hoped to study forests and flora, following in the footsteps of David Douglas, the eminent Scottish botanist-explorer. With Muir, Albert Kellogg, noted botanist and founder of the California Academy of Sciences, and William Keith, the landscape painter, her opportunity was nearing fruition and would enlist food for her soul. Throughout the friendship Carr and Muir shared (during his visits to the Carr home on Gilman Street, woven between the lines of every letter Jeanne wrote to him, fused to her heroic attempts to follow Muir as he walked to the Gulf of Mexico and through the

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High Sierra, along all his pathless wanderings), Muir, in Carr’s estimation, the living inheritor of the spirit of David Douglas, tendered an opportunity for her to live a season in Yosemite and the High Sierra. She would alight like a bird upon the Merced and Tuolumne rivers, among the burnished columns and cloistered aisles, under a ceiling of blue and film white, upon a floor of varied green, infused by the incense of a thousand flowers, amidst the music of a thousand white Gillenia mingled into a song, worshiping in spirit and with every sense.18 In June the excursion party—Carr, Kellogg, Keith, and Allie Carr, nearly sixteen, arrived at Clark’s Station. They walked to the Mariposa Big Tree Grove and camped under Grizzly Giant, while Muir tramped up from the valley late in the evening to join them. In the morning light at Mariposa Grove they entered through the Gate of Heaven into the House of God, where Sequoiadendron giganteum guarded the entrance to the sacred valley. Carr dressed in a short skirt, an old velvet jacket, a leather belt, heavy mountain shoes with strong nails, and a big hat, an outfit that would last throughout the duration of the trip, until the end of August.19 From Mariposa Grove the party headed to Sentinel Rock and Glacier Point and down Glacier Point Trail into Yosemite Valley, where they camped for several days. They lingered and bathed in the fountains of Illilouette, Nevada, Vernal, Yosemite, and Bridalveil. They found the language of God written on mountains, by rivers, in meadows and canyons. Carr, Kellogg, and Keith would study flora, forest, and landscape, collect plants, sketch, and paint. Muir would examine living glaciers and the snow fountains of the Tuolumne, Merced, and San Joaquin rivers and continue his journal and sketches. Two weeks were spent up beyond Tenaya Canyon, above the Tuolumne River, in the Tuolumne Canyon, the only trail the one they made as they traveled on foot. They descended from 9,400 feet over snowbanks to mountain chaparral and entered the watershed of the melting snow that swept past them in foaming torrents. They slid over ice and snow, Carr dragging her twentypound pack. Quickly she ate the meat biscuits she had stuffed in her jacket pockets. On hands and knees they crept through a side canyon, traveled until dark, and camped on the bank of the Tuolumne River. The river ran with a strong current and when they felled a Pinus ponderosa to make a bridge, the log snapped and threaded its way downstream. Muir and Carr forged ahead into a cataract that poured over a lip from a placid lake basin. The water above the fall was green and still and rushed impetuously downward one hundred feet, where it was arrested by a spine of earth that took the shock of the moving column of water. Then it sent the central mass of water into the air in a

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jet nearly fifty feet high, bursting into rockets and streams as it climbed, mingling with curves of fountain spray and showers of sparkling foam bells. A Calocedrus decurrens carried them over the main trunk of the river and into the heart of the Tuolumne Canyon. Barefoot, they crawled along glacier-polished rock. From camp to camp they stowed provisions, only to find black bears devoured nearly everything. On their return Muir pushed on ahead to meet Allie and Manuel, a driver, who delivered them to Tenaya Canyon and stationed themselves there in anticipation of the party’s arrival. Late in the evening, “a voice cried in the wilderness! Bread, meat, sugar, letters!!” There Muir stood in ragged trousers and torn shoes.20 Carr and Kellogg camped and botanized in Yosemite Valley while Muir led an excursion party that included Emily Pelton, a friend from his days in Prairie du Chein, Wisconsin, William Keith, Keith’s wife, Alice Elizabeth (Lizzie), and their son, Charlie. Upon Muir’s return from Mono Lake, Mt. Dana, and Mt. Lyell on July 24, he, Carr, and Kellogg, accompanied by Manuel and two packhorses, headed up the Merced River along Cloud’s Rest Trail to the sources of the Merced and the San Joaquin with 150 pounds of provisions—enough for six weeks of climbing. They rambled and camped “where mountain angels led them,” in rocky and forested river ways and reached a crude log hut that sheltered Muir during his glacial studies on Mt. Lyell and Mt. McClure in 1872. They explored Little Yosemite, the regions of Cathedral Peaks, Mt. Lyell, the Minarets, and the Merced Group (the Clark Range) and saw Eriogonum umbellatum, Pseudotsuga menziesii, thickets of Salix, Cornus stolonifera, and Rosa eglanteria. Carr sketched a Pinus ponderosa near camp above Shadow Lake and a Juniperus occidentalis that she saw on the bank of the Merced River.21 Muir went on alone to study glaciers on a fourteen-day excursion to Mt. Lyell and Mt. McClure. He camped with few provisions and no blankets. On August 12 he crossed the Merced Divide and camped at the bottom of one of the San Joaquin canyons on a narrow isthmus of rock upon which grew one Pinus albiculis. On August 14, beneath a Tsuga mertensiana, he sketched a view up the canyon of the San Joaquin while a chipmunk came up beneath his up-curved arm and sat upon the middle of his sketch. The broad and basiny canyon contained at least ten lakes, forests of Pinus albicaulis and Pinus contorta, and meadows of flowers he had never before seen—Chaenactis glabruiscula, the alpine pincushion. Carr and Kellogg made their highest camp in the Merced Group, on one of the fountain summits of the Illilouette Basin. On August 17, near Summit Lake, Carr drew the effects of snow on a Tsuga mertensiana. Occasionally deer and bear were seen, but never human

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footprints. Upon the Merced and Tuolumne rivers in regions of perpetual snow and ice they slept by unspoiled and uncivilized rivers.22 Carr returned to Oakland during the first week of September. She proudly carried a portfolio of drawings that included one of Shadow Lake on the headwaters of the Merced River, where “a garden of lupines worshipped . . . turning their happy faces toward the Sun,” and a sketch of the Anemone occidentalis that grows in the High Sierra. Though she left Yosemite to oversee the move to her new home adjacent to the university campus in Berkeley, she had wanted to continue on with Muir and Kellogg as they headed toward Mt. Whitney with Billy Simms, an amateur artist, and Galen Clark, the guardian of Yosemite. A trail of five letters described the five-week journey. Carr could only wonder what might have been had she continued on with her friends.23 The California Farmer hailed Carr for having scaled the highest summits of the Sierra. A purveyor of knowledge in a realm dominated by men of science, she was the first non-native woman to pass through the entire length of Tenaya Canyon and the excursion party was the first to visit the eight large cataracts on the main branch of the Tuolumne River during high water. Carr saw glaciers that uncovered hidden landscapes and falling snow flowers that gave motion to rivers and fed and fertilized the valleys that lay between the mountains and the ocean. Two months in the High Sierra engendered her authority. On October 10 she spoke to the Oakland Farming Club about her experience on the Tuolumne Canyon and the six-week excursion to the headwaters of the Merced and the San Joaquin. Having climbed over morass, through chaparral on mountainsides and across thick riparian junglelike river bottoms, Carr gained status that placed her among a select group of stalwart nineteenth-century women who achieved exotic knowledge, miles and mountains beyond the “cult of domesticity.”24 Creative, independent, and a pioneer for women’s rights and education, the ubiquitous Carr gained distinction as a participant in a ramble in the High Sierra, lengthy by any standard in 1873. The trip had as much to do with the private faith-filled person Carr struggled to be as with the public person she was. It was more than her contribution to the advancement of empirical science, the study of field botany—more than lean courage and tenacity. Carr found the pleasure of spiritual travel, miles and days without an ache or weariness as if walking unhampered by a body scorched by the sun or legs sore from climbing granite walls. Mountain bread, terminal communion, stimulated and rested her mind and soul. Pathless wilderness wandering confirmed that rocks, canyons, water and wind, animals, ouzels, meadows and groves, and all the stars in the Milky Way were divine words that flowed

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fig. 10.1. Shadow Lake, headwaters of Merced River, fifteen miles above Yosemite, 1873. Sketch by Jeanne C. Carr. Courtesy of the Archives at the Pasadena Historical Museum.

smooth from the lips of the Lord. The season of 1873, spent in the High Sierra with dear friends—Muir, Kellogg, and Keith—embodied for Carr a more useful and fecund life (by her own high standards), in which she saw Nature continue to unfold the vast glory of God and kindle friendship, everlasting friendship.25 By autumn, in anticipation of her family settling into their new home in Berkeley, Carr planned to meet Muir at Tahoe City. They would explore Lake Tahoe and Donner Lake and continue on to Mt. Shasta. She was eager to return to wilderness, where faith, sublimity, patience, charity, and immortality were preached, eager to see the mountains that lavished beauty and pure lessons. But she did not join Muir. The tragic death of her son, Ezra, a railroad brakeman crushed between two cars of a passenger train in Alameda in October, kept her close to home. Muir received the news of the Carrs’ terrible bereavement and from Tahoe City sent heartfelt sympathy and prayers that God would sustain them. “I could not hear or see you, yet you shared all of my highest pleasures, as I sauntered through the piney woods, pausing

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countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clear, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual.” Carr and Muir never again climbed through canyons toward High Sierra meadows, gazed upon towering mountain spires, walked along august headwaters of vast rivers where they drank mountain bread, or rambled through euphonic fields of lupines and pasqueflowers. In 1895 Carr wrote one final letter to Muir. On a Sunday afternoon in Pasadena, she remembered walking in the shadowy footsteps of David Douglas, one wilderness interlude—far from the discord of human life—where lessons of truth were read upon mountains and they sauntered in the face of God.26

Epilogue As Muir became a prominent public figure, as his family and the ranch grew and required his attention, and as he struggled with his own health issues— Muir suffered from recurring bronchitis—he distanced himself from Carr. Following his marriage to Louie Wanda Strentzel in 1880 and until 1887, though Muir corresponded with his immediate family, he seldom wrote to friends. While it is understandable that Carr became a less important figure in Muir’s life, the mechanism by which he chose to silence her contribution was clearly intended to thwart the revelation of the impact she did have and the personal struggles—spiritual as well as professional—he experienced and shared with her. Muir’s letters to Carr exposed lessons, obstacles, and insights; rendered visible his commitment to places and ideas in which he believed; and enveloped his development of a literary voice, his devotion to Carr, and her sentiments for him and his work. This was more than Muir wanted disclosed and resulted in a battle that began in 1897, when Carr gave letters Muir had written to her to George Wharton James, the associate editor of the Craftsman. James, whom Muir detested, planned to publish the letters based on a pledge made to Carr. In February 1915, a restraining order prevented James from pursuing his plan, and Wanda Muir Hanna arranged with Houghton Mifflin to copyright and publish the letters in a limited edition.27 Muir did visit Carr once in 1896 in Pasadena at her home on Kensington Street. In 1897 Theodore Parker Lukens wrote to Muir about Carr, who succumbed to dementia and, unable to care for herself, was placed in the Crocker Home in San Francisco. Lukens hoped Muir would visit her—there is no record that he did. In two letters written to Lukens in late 1901, Muir expressed concern for Carr’s welfare, but he expressed equal if not more pressing concern for the letters she promised to send him, perhaps during his visit

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fig. 10.2. Anemone occidentalis. Sketch by Jeanne C. Carr, 1873. Courtesy of the Archives at the Pasadena Historical Museum.

in 1896. On December 14, 1903, when Jeanne Carr died in Templeton, California, at the home of Ezra Carr’s brother, Elijah Melanthon Carr, Muir was en route from Ceylon to Treemantle, Australia. Her last days were peaceful and she did not seem to suffer much pain. It is unlikely Muir knew of her death until he was closer to home in May 1904.28 Jeanne Carr, throughout her life, was particularly fond of plants and believed in some way she had once lived naturally with them. Her perception of Nature and her love for all things wild was as keen as Muir’s, but in him she saw the ability to articulate for Nature, whose voice—songs and celebrations, shouts and laments—would be enhanced by her kindred friend’s ability to behold the hope that resided in wilderness.

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The Plants And if, amid the cataclysms that clamor round us everywhere nowadays, you declare that all this babble about beauty and flowers is a vain impertinence, then I must tell you that you err, and that your perspectives are false. Mortal dooms and dynasties are brief things, but beauty is indestructible and eternal, if its tabernacle be only a petal that is shed tomorrow.29

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Notes 1. Jeanne C. Carr, “Shadow Lake, Headwaters of Merced River, 15 miles above Yosemite, 1873,” reverse side of sketch, 1873, Jeanne C. Carr Papers, Pasadena Museum of History, Pasadena, CA. 2. Jeanne C. Carr, “John Muir,” Californian 2 (June 1892): 88–94. 3. See Jeanne C. Carr, “Cultivation of Annuals,” Wisconsin Farmer 9 (April 1857): 147–48; Jeanne C. Carr, “My Rose Garden,” Wisconsin Farmer 9 (May 1857): 183–84. Wardian cases (also known as a Ward’s case), invented by Dr. Henry Chase Ward in 1851, resembled a miniature greenhouse or covered terrarium. Portable and used to transport fragile, exotic plants and protect plants from extreme cold, Wardian cases became a status indoor garden accessory in midnineteenth-century America. Displayed in parlor windows and ranging in cost from $18 to $50, they were primarily a luxury of wealthy homeowners. By the 1880s, with the influx of popular magazines and journals, instructions for the construction of Wardian cases were published, and the availability of inexpensive glass and window sash made it possible for the construction of simple cases in which to house indoor fern gardens. Thus their popularity and availability increased. Allison Kyle Leopold, The Victorian Garden (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1995), 44–45. 4. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Trout’s Mills, near Meaford, September 13, [1865], John Muir Papers, microfilm edition (hereafter JMP), microfilm 01/00376 and in Kindred & Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr, ed. Bonnie Johanna Gisel (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 29–32. 5. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, San Mateo, March 28, 1869, JMP, microfilm 02/00711; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 82–83. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Midnight [Yosemite, April 3, 1871], JMP, microfilm 02/00906; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 135–37.

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6. Alphonse de Lamaratine, The Stonemason of Saint Point: A Village Tale (London: G. Routledge and Co., 1851); Walter R. Brooks, God in Nature and Life (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1889). Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, Madison, April 15, [1867], JMP, microfilm 01/00535; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 48–49. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, Madison, March 15, [1867], JMP, microfilm 01/00496; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 42–44. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite Valley, February 13, 1872, JMP, microfilm 02/01048; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 168–69. 7. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, [San Mateo, February 26, 1872], JMP, microfilm 02/01062; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 171–72. 8. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite, [September or October], 1871, JMP, microfilm 02/00981; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 150–52. Jeanne C. Carr to the Editor, The Overland Monthly, Oakland, January 17, 1872, Overland Monthly file, C. H. 97, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 166. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite Valley, October 7, 1874, JMP, microfilm 03/01445; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 252–53. Muir referred to the public as “moiling, squirming, fogbreathing.” John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite Valley, December 25, 1872, JMP, microfilm 02/01221; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 199–202. 9. “For the Boston Recorder. THE CALYPSO BOREALIS. Botanical Enthusiasm. From Prof. J. D. Butler,” Boston Recorder, December 21, 1866; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 40–42; Jeanne C. Carr, “My Own Story,” ca. 1886, Jeanne C. Carr Papers, CA28, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, hereafter cited as J. Carr Papers, Huntington. 10. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, “The Hollow,” January 21, 1866, JMP, microfilm 01/00407; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 34–37. “For the Boston Recorder. THE CALYPSO BOREALIS. Botanical Enthusiasm. From Prof. J. D. Butler,” Boston Recorder; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 40–42. 11. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, Madison, March 15, [1867], JMP, microfilm 01/00496; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 43–44. 12. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Near Snelling, Merced Co., California, July 26, 1868, JMP, microfilm 022/13237; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 71–74. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, Castleton, Vermont, August 31, 1868, JMP, microfilm 01/00647; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 74–77. 13. Michael Branch, ed., John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001). 14. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Seven Miles North from Snellings, May 16, 1869, JMP, microfilm 02/00727; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 84–86. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Hopeton, May 20, 1869, JMP, microfilm 02/00730; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 86–87.

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15. Jeanne C. Carr, “Letter from the Yo Semite Valley,” July 1, 1869, J. Carr Papers, Scrapbook I, 11, 13, Huntington. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Seven Miles North from Snellings, May 16, 1869, JMP, microfilm 02/00727. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Five Miles West of Yosemite, July 11, 1869, JMP, microfilm 02/00734; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 87–89. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, Yosemite, Wednesday evening, July 30, [1869], JMP, microfilm 02/00739; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 89–90. Jeanne C. Carr, “A Sabbath in the Yo Semite,” J. Carr Papers, Huntington. Jeanne C. Carr, “Miscellaneous Notes,” ca. 1875–1890, J. Carr Papers, CA25, Huntington. 16. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite, July 29, [1870], JMP, microfilm 02/00858; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 114–16. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, [Oakland], Saturday night, [July 1872], JMP, microfilm 02/01138; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 182–84. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite Valley, August 5, 1872, JMP, microfilm 02/01143; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 187–88. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, July 14, 1872, JMP, microfilm 02/01129; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 181–82. 17. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite Valley, December 25, 1872, JMP, microfilm, 02/01221; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 199–202. 18. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Yosemite Valley, June 7, 1873, JMP, microfilm, 02/01281; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 218. Jeanne C. Carr, “Notes on David Douglas,” ca. 1870, J. Carr Papers, CA32, Huntington. Jeanne C. Carr, “Narrative Fragment of Yosemite Trip, 1873,” JMP, microfilm Miscellaneous Papers 51/00234. Gillenia trifoliate (American ipecac, western dropwort, bowman’s root), an herb native to America, grows to a height of three feet with foliage and stems that have a burgundy cast. The white flowers rise above the foliage like dancing butterflies. The principal constituent of the cure-all elixirs sold by traveling medicine salesmen in nineteenth-century America was Gillenia trifoliate—better know as the “dime-a-bottle plant.” 19. “Mrs. Carr’s Remarks on the Big Tuolumne Canon, Etc., [Before the Oakland Farming Club, Oct. 10th],” Pacific Rural Press (San Francisco), October 25, 1873; Jeanne C. Carr to Ezra S. Carr, Yosemite Valley, July 11, 1873, JMP, microfilm 02/01284; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 218–21. 20. Ibid. 21. “Mrs. Carr’s Remarks on the Big Tuolumne Canon, Etc.,” Pacific Rural Press, October 25, 1873. 22. Ibid. John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938; reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 141–63. See John Muir, Journal, June 1873–August 1873, JMP, microfilm 24/00677–00778. Jeanne C. Carr, “In the Sierras. The Lovers of Science Penetrating Untrodden Heights in the Mountain Wilderness,” September 10, 1873, J. Carr Papers, Scrapbook I, 17, Huntington.

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23. Jeanne C. Carr to Louie Wanda Strentzel, University of California, Oakland, California, October 29, 1873, JMP, microfilm 02/01312; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 227–28. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Clark’s Station, September 13, [1873], JMP, microfilm 02/01298; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 221. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Clark’s Station, September 15, [1873], JMP, microfilm 02/01300; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 222. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Camp on South Fork, San Joaquin, near divide of San Joaquin and Kings Rivers, September [27, 1873], JMP, microfilm 02/01302; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 222–24. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Camp in dear Bonnie grove where the pines meet the foothill oaks, about 8 or 10 miles SE from the confluence of the N fork of Kings River with the trunk, October 2, [1873], JMP, microfilm 02/01305; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 224–25. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Independence [California], October 16, 1873, JMP, microfilm 02/01306; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 225–26. 24. “California Scenery and Her Artists,” California Farmer, July 31, 1873, J. Carr Papers, Scrapbook I, 15, Huntington. Jeanne C. Carr, “Glaciers of California,” ca. 1874, J. Carr Papers, CA 21, Huntington. Mrs. Carr’s Remarks on the Big Tuolumne Canon, Etc.,” Pacific Rural Press, October 25, 1873. Jeanne C. Carr, “Female Education in the United States,” California Teacher, ca. 1870, J. Papers, Scrapbook I, 74, Huntington. Horace Mann, A Few Thoughts on the Powers and Duties of Women (Syracuse: Hall, Mills, and Co., 1853). Sarah B. Cooper, “Ideal Womanhood,” Overland Monthly 6 (May 1871): 453–60. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151–74. 25. Jeanne C. Carr, “Miscellaneous Notes,” ca. 1875–1890. Jeanne C. Carr, “Yosemite and the Great New Canyon,” Oakland Daily News, J. Carr Papers, Scrapbook, Huntington. 26. John Muir to Ezra and Jeanne C. Carr, Tahoe City, November 3, [1873], JMP, microfilm 02/01315; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 228–29. Jeanne C. Carr to John Muir, Pasadena, Sunday, [1895?], JMP, microfilm 08/05072; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 307. 27. Regarding Muir and James see Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 11–16. 28. John Muir to Jeanne C. Carr, Martinez, November 12, 1895, JMP, microfilm 08/05047; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 307. T. P. Lukens to John Muir, Pasadena, California, June 12, 1897, JMP, microfilm 09/05548; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 308. John Muir to Theodore Parker Lukens, Martinez, November 13, 1901, Lukens Collection, Box 2, Huntington; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 309. John Muir to Theodore Parker Lukens, Martinez, December 18, 1901, Lukens Collection, Box 2, Huntington; Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 309. E. M. Carr to John Muir, Templeton, December 18, 1903, JMP, microfilm 13/07830; also in Gisel, Kindred and Related Spirits, 310. Jeanne C. Carr is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. 29. Reginald Farrer, The Rainbow Bridge, quoted in Victoria Padilla, Southern California Gardens: An Illustrated History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 221.

chapter eleven 1

Meeting Muir’s Mountains

Corey Lewis

12 I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been. . . . No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul know these mountains. . . . One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.1

John Muir is valued by literary scholars and professors of environmental literature for being an adventurous mountaineer, an accomplished field scientist, a successful environmental activist, and an inspiring author. However, throughout English departments today, we most often study, teach, and write about him as if he were merely the latter of the four. If we were to study the syllabi of the vast number of literature courses that include Muir or if we were to peruse the wide variety of articles being published in literary and interdisciplinary academic journals 1

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on his life and work, we might be left with one question: Where in all of this are Muir’s mountains? While the traditional methods of literary scholarship are useful when applied to Muir’s work, they do not, by themselves, provide a complete method for analysis, discussion, and understanding. In fact, this is the case with most ecocritical approaches to the growing canon of environmental literature. Ecocriticism, or ecological literary criticism, is an emerging field of literary criticism that investigates environmental themes in literature as well as the social and environmental implications arising from literary works. While many ecocritics hope to engender greater understanding of environmental issues and texts through their work, they may fall short of this goal due to their reliance on traditional methods of literary scholarship that focus on texts to the exclusion of their extra-textual environments. In her most recent book, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes, “If the body is the register of the real then reading with one’s feet is real in a way that reading with one’s eyes alone is not.”2 For a literary ecologist, “reading with one’s feet” entails doing fieldwork, engaging directly with the natural world represented in works of literature and using this extra-textual experience to inform and augment one’s scholarship. For an ecocritic who also teaches literature, “reading with one’s feet” necessitates reforming and expanding one’s pedagogical practice so that it includes fieldwork and field experiences for students struggling to understand the relationships between the texts they read and the world they inhabit. While fieldwork has traditionally been a part of the sciences, it is often seen as extracurricular, unnecessary, and even counterproductive within the humanities. This is especially true within the field of literary criticism, where it is tacitly assumed that since the object of study is a text, all meaning and relevant information will likewise be found in texts. Such forms of textual primacy, however, seem inadequate for the comprehensive study of environmental themes in literature as well as the growing canon of literary works that are specifically responding to contemporary environmental problems. In Story Line, Ian Marshall laments the singularly textual approach, observing that “literary critics in general have neglected fieldwork. If the evidence they seek is not in the library, they don’t want to know about it.”3 As a discipline, literary studies seem reluctant to recognize that similar investigations of extra-textual sources, the physical and geographical contexts of a literary work, might also constitute a valid and necessary scholarly practice. In Action Research as Living Practice, Dennis Sumara and Terrance Carson assert that “thinking ecologically . . . means more than engaging in

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fig. 11.1. A group of students on the trail with Muir’s text in hand. Photograph supplied by the author.

discourse with others about ideas; ecological thinking is an attentiveness to the way in which we enact our lives with others in particular places.”4 For ecocritics trained within the traditional methods of literary criticism, engaging in such a process of “ecological thinking” may necessitate making certain uncomfortable, but profitable, changes in our scholarship and pedagogy as well as in our lives.

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Many contemporary ecocritics have begun to answer this challenge by experimenting with a variety of interdisciplinary field methodologies as a means for supplementing traditional literary analysis of environmental texts. Such ecocritics as John Elder, Michael Cohen, Michael Branch, Scott Slovic, Glen Love, Ian Marshall, David Robertson, William Howarth, Ann Ronald, and many others have recognized the benefits of incorporating interdisciplinary field-based methodologies in both their scholarly and pedagogical practices. These ecocritics, as well as many others working in the field, recognize the applicability of Aldo Leopold’s assertion in A Sand County Almanac that “no important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.”5 Adopting the interdisciplinary, field-based methodologies utilized by literary natural historians, such as John Muir, is one way for ecocritics to reform the intellectual emphasis of our field and aid the practice of ecocriticism in evolving so that it can begin to make practical and substantive changes in a people’s ethical commitments and environmental actions.

Muir as Methodological Model Muir serves as an excellent place to start in the development of a comprehensive ecocritical methodology that is capable of studying both texts and extratextual environments. In the first place, Muir’s consistent call for direct experience and field studies seems to warrant such an effort. Also, Muir’s work itself is clearly interdisciplinary, unifying objective scientific studies in natural history with subjective literary responses to the natural world. By utilizing Muir as both a subject of study and a model for methodological approaches, we can begin to define a coherent and comprehensive methodology for the practice of ecocriticism as a whole. While in the beginning of his career Muir was not a proponent of bringing people into the field, his later works demonstrate that he had become quite the champion of parks, field trips, and early forms of ecotourism. As Michael Cohen notes in “John Muir’s Public Voice,” “The young Muir loved the mountains but hated the tourist.”6 His letters to Ezra Carr and his journals are filled with warnings and derogatory remarks all aimed at the outdoor recreationalist. In one letter to Mrs. Carr he writes, “All sorts of human stuff is being poured into our Valley this year, and the blank, fleshly apathy with which most of it comes in contact with the rock and water spirits of the place, is most amazing.” He goes on to describe the tourists as “scum collecting in hotel and saloon eddies.”7

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However, as Muir grew older and came to witness the increasing demand for, and destruction of, his prized Sierran wilderness, he realized that he would soon have to choose between the “fleshy apathy” of tourists or the industrious exploitation of developers, ranchers, and miners. As Cohen notes, “Because he came to face practical and political choices, by the end of the nineties he became not so much a defender of the wilderness as a champion of recreation and a booster of parks.”8 For Muir, tourism, recreation, and the aesthetic values of Yosemite and the Sierra became powerful political and rhetorical tools for leveraging the public support necessary to protect the Sierra Nevada region from being despoiled. Even in his earliest writings we can see the seeds that would later blossom into Muir’s widely recognized public voice. In his letters, from that first summer in Yosemite, to Jeanne Carr, his brother David, and sister Sarah, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson and others, he never tired of inviting his friends to come witness the natural wonders of the Sierra for themselves. In one of these early letters to his brother, for example, he describes the manner in which the Lord creates beauty in all of the natural world and states, “But here in this place of surpassing glory the Lord has written in capitals. I hope that one day you will see and read with your own eyes.”9 A study of his letters from the Yosemite years reveals that two out of every three letters includes some explicit reference to his desire that the reader come visit and see with his or her own eyes the wonder and beauty of his beloved “Range of Light.” In addition to his unpublished journals and letters, the bulk of Muir’s published works—which were composed later in his life—contain this persistent call for readers to come experience the mountains for themselves. In the Mountains of California, for example, Muir writes, “I would fain ask my readers to linger awhile in this fertile wilderness, to trace its history from its earliest glacial beginnings, and learn what we may of its wild inhabitants and visitors.”10 His reasons for encouraging readers to come and experience the Sierra directly are numerous and varied. Muir asserts, again in Mountains, that the only way to understand and know wild nature is through the direct experience of it. He writes: And what fine wildness was thus revealed—storms and avalanches, lakes and waterfalls, gardens and meadows, and interesting animals—only those will ever know who give the freest and most buoyant portion of their lives to climbing and seeing for themselves.11

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fig. 11.2. A field studies student overlooking Tuolumne Meadows. Photograph supplied by the author.

In My First Summer in the Sierra he notes that words are incapable of describing the beauty and grandeur of the High Sierra: The most extravagant description I might give of this view to any one who has not seen similar landscapes with his own eyes would not so much as hint its grandeur and the spiritual glow that covered it.12 In addition, Muir recognizes that such wild experiences invigorate our faculties and cure us of both our worry and stress as well as our apathy and indifference. The insistent Muir urges his readers to come to the Sierra, exclaiming that the high mountain passes will “kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”13 For those of us teaching undergraduates today, many of whom suffer from chronic bouts of severe and debilitating apathy, such a promise is indeed attractive. Muir’s attitude toward experiencing the natural world directly is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in his historic meeting with Ralph Waldo

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Emerson in 1871. At Jeanne Carr’s urging, Muir invited Emerson to join him in “a month’s worship with Nature in the high temples of the great Sierra Crown.”14 The two spent many hours together in the Yosemite Valley and traveled together to the Mariposa Grove, where Muir asked Emerson to spend one night with him camped at the feet of the giant sequoias. Despite Emerson’s enthusiastic response, his friends would not allow the elder scholar to spend a night out in the cold mountain air, fearing for his health. Despite his affection for Emerson, Muir parted ways with the company, returned to Mariposa Grove, and built a fire at the feet of his beloved, living giants. Later he wrote, “The trees had not gone to Boston, nor the birds; and as I sat by the fire Emerson was still with me in spirit, though I never again saw him in the flesh.”15 Over the intervening years, between this final parting and Emerson’s death, Muir would refuse repeated invitations and urgings from the elder scholar to leave his beloved mountains and return east to study among the erudite and educated, saying in actions more than in words that no better teacher could be found than the wonders of the natural world. By 1895 Muir had come to see engaging people directly with the natural world as the best means through which to get them to preserve it. He told the Sierra Club in that year, “Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pinetrees. Their sermons in the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be gotten into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.”16 It was with this philosophy that William Colby announced the first Sierra Club outing in 1901 to Tuolumne Meadows, a program for which Muir was an enthusiastic supporter. This first trip included Muir’s My First Summer and LeConte’s Rambles as recommended reading, as well as educational talks by William Dudley, C. Hart Merriam, and Muir himself. William Colby asserted, “An excursion of this sort, if properly conducted will do an infinite amount of good toward awakening the proper kind of interest in the forests and other natural features of our mountains.”17 The promise of being able to develop an environmental ethic in the public through such outings led Muir to support and participate in the program. In addition to supporting Sierra Club outings, Muir himself consistently served in the capacity of tour guide and field studies instructor for a number of important personages, ranging from Emerson to Roosevelt. These activities, in fact, are as important a part of Muir’s legacy as his published writings, for it was the cumulative effect of both that preserved such a large number of our wildlands and national parks and, of course, fixed his reputation indelibly in American history.

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Practice as Process The act of writing is, in fact, a process, an evolution that metamorphoses vague ideas and past experiences into concrete assertions and linguistic representations that persist through time. The word itself comes from the Latin volvere, volvi, volutum, or “to roll.” The act of writing is akin to this early linguistic reference to the unrolling of the scroll, the thing suspected but not realized until it is present. Ecocritic John Elder, discussing the writing process as it relates to the literature of wilderness, observes that all nature writing contains the same three elements: “close observation of nature, within an awareness of the modern science of ecology; a journal of the author’s own growth, by means of that intense relation to nature; and speculation about larger religious and political issues connected with the cause of wilderness-preservation.”18 In short, when we read environmental literature, we are retracing that author’s process of close observation of nature, reflection of self-growth, and increasing ethical awareness of the natural world. Our own process, however, as it is contained within the methodologies of traditional literary criticism, entails only the close observation of that author’s words, seldom involves reflection of our own self-growth, and involves an ethical awareness of the natural world that is derived completely from books rather than from direct contact with that world itself. As we attempt to solve this problem, we may find the wisdom of Muir’s favorite transcendentalist mentor to be quite useful. Emerson himself writes in “The American Scholar,” “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.”19 Writing over 160 years ago, Emerson already noted a dangerous tendency on the part of American scholars to lend too much primacy to the text, especially classical texts from the old world, at the expense of their own, rich intellectual and natural heritage. Thanks to such forms of textual primacy, exclaims Emerson, “the book becomes noxious: the guide is tyrant.”20 The only escape from such forms of intellectual tyranny lies beyond the bondage of books, in the real world and in our own experience. In order to better understand the texts we study, as well as the world to which they refer, then, we must engage ourselves and our students in the same process of observation, reflection, and awareness that the authors themselves go through, using their texts both as subjects of study and as models for how to engage in the process of investigation. John Muir’s work, for example, contains all of the elements described by Elder, and can serve as a useful model for both understanding the common practices of natural historians as well as possible methodologies for ecocritics to develop and use themselves. Much of Muir’s writing demonstrates a

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consistent and obvious use of two alternating rhetorical strategies: close, objective, observation of natural phenomena and subjective, emotional, and self-reflective responses to those phenomena. By studying how Muir utilizes both of these strategies and then applying them in the field with our own writing or that of our students, we can gain new insight into his literary work and the natural world in which we live. We can witness Muir’s first rhetorical strategy, for example, in his 1875 field journal, where he models the manner in which one must use patient observation and direct experience in order to come to know and understand the natural world. In one section of the journal, Muir sketches and dissects cones and seeds from the red fir, or Abies magnifica, noting that each cone has approximately 280 scales with two seeds in each. He then includes with his sketch careful measurements of the cones, scales, and seeds along with a verbal description of their distinguishing characteristics. Through such careful observation, Muir not only teaches his readers about the unique characteristics of his mountain friends, but he also demonstrates the value of the scientific study of wild nature and the manner in which it should be performed. Muir’s second rhetorical strategy was to include his own emotional responses to the wonder of his natural surroundings. Of the Jeffrey and ponderosa pine, for example, he writes that there is nothing more impressive than “the fall of light upon these silver pines. It seems beaten to the finest dust, and is shed off in myriads of minute sparkles that seem to come from the very heart of the trees, as if, like rain falling upon fertile soil, it had been absorbed, to reappear in flowers of light.”21 An assignment that I often use with students in the field and have adopted for use in my own field journals begins with the study of a number of different excerpts from The Mountains of California, passages that spotlight and describe individual species. We take note of Muir’s dual—objective, subjective—strategy and pay careful attention to the manner in which he interweaves objective scientific information with subjective emotional response. After we have read, studied, and discussed his techniques in these passages, we each take to the field, armed with our field guides and journals, and attempt to employ the techniques ourselves. I usually begin by having the students sketch the particular species they have chosen as a means for focusing their observational study. We use Muir’s own sketches both as subjects of study and as models, for as Steven Holmes notes, after Muir came to Yosemite, “sketching became one of his major activities and even preoccupations, as a way to begin to grasp and to take in the new landscape.”22 For students, the process of sketching and visually studying their

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fig. 11.3. Studying a colony of the unique, insect-eating pitcher plants of the Sierra. Photograph supplied by the author.

subject forces them to slow down, focus, and analyze distinguishing features and characteristics as well as engage in a process of representation that is related to but different from literary and linguistic representation. After they have completed their sketches, the students begin the compositional process by describing their species objectively, recording its distinguishing characteristics, size, shape, pattern of growth, and location, while using field guides to supplement their observations with accurate information regarding the species history and life cycle. Finally, they record their own subjective responses, generated by reflecting on the worth, value, and unique characteristics of the particular species they have been studying. Such a process engages students on a variety of intellectual levels and gives them firsthand experiences with which to judge and analyze similar literary texts produced by other natural historians and environmental authors. While I have most often used such field-based approaches to Muir’s work in the Sierras so that students can study firsthand the same species and natural processes that he studied, I have also had success in using these strategies in a variety of other settings from vacant lots and manicured, campus grounds to the tropics. For example, in a recent field studies course on the

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Pacific Coast of Mexico, I had students apply these same strategies to the study of the dry, tropical forests of the Cuixmala Biosphere reserve. Although using excerpts from The Mountains of California as models, we discussed Muir’s South American travels and looked at several examples from his journals of tropical species. Students sketched, studied, and wrote about the fascinating, green-gray hanging mosses that, as one student noted, strangely resembled Muir’s famous, hoary beard. From geological studies at the peak of a thirteen-thousand-foot volcano to relaxing and reflecting beachside, these students found themselves not only studying Muir’s writing and methods, but also using his methodologies as they engaged in a similar process of trying to record and translate their wilderness experiences and natural history studies into words that could convey their full meaning. When my students and I return from the field, we continue to utilize Muir’s methods and practices both as model and as subject for study. With our own firsthand observations recorded in our field journals, we turn to a study of Muir’s journals and notebooks to explore the process of construction and revision necessary to turn a series of journal entries into a cohesive and unified piece of literature. First we look at Muir’s journal pages themselves. Here we can see quite readily that the process of revision is not only ongoing and continuous, but is quite extensive. On a single page of Muir’s 1887 notebooks, for example (from which My First Summer in the Sierra was constructed), we note that while the original thought is most often left, the language used to convey it goes through extensive revision, until almost no word is left untouched. In the original we find this passage, “Oh, these glorious old mountain days. Ripe and sweet and luscious, like fruit to be eaten,” which is crossed out and replaced with “O, these great” and great is crossed out and replaced with “vast” so that the revised passage reads, “O, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, so peaceful, workful, indef[atig]ably fine.”23 And a few lines later we can see the original: “So rocky and substantial, yet so infinitely spiritual, exciting at once to work and rest. Bestowing substance in its grandest forms, yet throwing open a thousand windows to show us heaven,” is also crossed out and replaced with a slightly revised version: “Exciting at once to work and rest. Days in which light, everything seems equally divine, opening as a thousand windows to show us God.”24 While many scholars and students study My First Summer in the Sierra, probably one of Muir’s most canonized works, few study how it came into being. The standard assumption of most readers seems to be that it is a fairly accurate account of his first season in the Sierra high country. Such an assumption is supported no doubt by the journalistic quality of the text—complete with separate

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dated entries—and the level of detail and direct observation. However, as Steven Holmes notes,“the published First Summer is based not upon an original journal but upon three handwritten notebooks that date from 1887; whatever journal he actually kept during the summer of 1869 is now lost.”25 From a careful study of these notebooks one can see that already a narrative structure is being formed through revisions that did not exist in the original journal. In his study of the 1887 notebooks Holmes concludes that the recorded account of Muir’s “first summer” “can probably be trusted only in a very limited way: the sheer record of the places and objects that Muir encountered in his travels is in large part reliable, but much of the narrative structure and interpretive language of the 1887 notebooks is the product of an extensive process of revision that was undertaken at some as-yet-unknown time(s) between 1869 and 1887.”26 From our own study of the notebooks as well as our own experiences with field journaling, we can fairly confidently come to a similar conclusion. However, recognizing that Muir engaged in a process of extensive revision and organization of his original field notes does not necessarily mean that the published version of My First Summer is an inaccurate or untruthful account of Muir’s experiences. Rather, it teaches us that My First Summer is indeed a literary text, a product of both close observation of nature in the field and of the imagination and intellect. Such a realization allows us to look again at the craft, the process involved in the creation of My First Summer, and aids us in improving our own process of crafting literary representation out of personal experience. Without having engaged in a similar process of field study and direct, wilderness experience, as well as journaling, revising, and composing, we would not have the same understanding of Muir’s literary accomplishments and methods, nor of Muir’s mountains themselves. By incorporating field-based methodologies into the practice of ecocriticism and ecocritical instruction, we can not only discover new things about old texts, but we can also reinvigorate the classroom and our scholarship and more successfully work toward instilling an environmental ethic in ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.

1 2

Notes 1. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, ed., John of the Mountains (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 94–95. 2. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A Natural History of Walking (New York: Viking, 2000), 70.

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3. Ian Marshall, Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 147. 4. Dennis Sumara and Terrance Carson, Action Research as a Living Practice (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), xx. 5. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 210. 6. Michael Cohen, “John Muir’s Public Voice,” Western American Literature 10 (1975): 177. 7. Badè, William Frederic. The Life and Letters of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 221. 8. Cohen, “John Muir’s Public Voice,” 79. 9. Badé, Life and Letters, 209. 10. John Muir, Mountains of California, ed. William Frederic Badè (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 150. 11. Ibid., 90. 12. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, ed. William Frederic Badè (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 115. 13. Muir, Mountains of California, 91. 14. Arlen J. Hansen, “Right Men in the Right Places,” Western Humanities Review 39, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 167. 15. Badé, Life and Letters, 257. 16. Quoted in Michael Cohen, The Pathless Way (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 303. 17. Quoted in Cohen, The Pathless Way, 311. 18. John Elder, “John Muir and the Literature of Wilderness,” Massachusetts Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 375. 19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Emerson: The Complete Essays, ed. Brooks Atkinson (1837; New York: Modern Library, 1940), 64. 20. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 49. 21. Muir, Mountains of California, 185. 22. Steven J. Holmes, The Young John Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 206. 23. Notebook, Sierra journal, summer of 1869, v. 1, 1869 [ca. 1887], John Muir Papers, microfilm edition, 31/00180. 24. Ibid. 25. Holmes, The Young John Muir, 253. 26. Ibid., 254.

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John Muir’s Travels to South America and Africa

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12 I’ve had a most glorious time on this trip, dreamed of nearly half a century—have seen more than a thousand miles of the noblest of Earth’s streams and gained far more telling views of the wonderful forests than I ever hoped for. —John Muir to Katharine Hooker, written from the Amazon delta, September 19, 19111

Seeing Muir Whole When we think of John Muir, a number of images come to mind. There is the Muir we associate with California’s Sierra Nevada, the mountains he spent much of his life exploring and studying, which he affectionately called the Range of Light. There is Muir the environmentalist, who helped protect Yosemite as a national park, formed and led the Sierra Club, and fought to From John Muir’s Last Journey, Michael P. Branch, ed. Copyright © 2001 by Island Press. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

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the bitter, tragic end to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed and inundated in what became a landmark battle in American environmental history. Then there is Muir the accomplished naturalist, whose early studies in Sierra geology were the first to prove Yosemite’s glacial origins and whose later botanical studies won him the admiration of scientists worldwide. Perhaps we think of Muir the hiker, who walked 1,000 miles from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, or Muir the intrepid explorer, who in seven trips to Alaska discovered dramatic features of the northern landscape. Of course Muir was also a gifted mountaineer whose many climbs, whether into a Douglas fir crown in a windstorm, behind a Yosemite waterfall by moonlight, or along the dark, snowy shoulders of Mt. Shasta, have become legendary. Some may think of the young Muir who was so talented an inventor or of the older Muir, who was the confidant of presidents and the friend of prominent journalists, artists, writers, and industrialists. Finally, from these and many other remarkable experiences emerges Muir the nature writer, a man who, though he himself often described writing as an unfortunate distraction from nature and a sadly indirect way to communicate its sacredness, produced works of environmental writing that distinguish him as one of America’s most eloquent and influential literary voices on behalf of the aesthetic, ecological, and spiritual value of wilderness. Amidst these various activities and accomplishments, however, is another Muir of whom we know far too little and of whom scholars and admirers of Muir too rarely speak: John Muir the world traveler. Though “John o’ Mountains” has been variously remembered as the wild child of the Wisconsin wilderness, the guardian angel of the blessed Sierra, and the grand old man of Alaska, his several significant journeys abroad have been largely forgotten, or in the case of his last, to South America and Africa, are little known. In order to fully understand how global were Muir’s interests as a traveler, botanist, and environmentalist, it is imperative that we recognize the vital role of international travels in Muir’s life and work. In his first trip abroad, taken in 1864 at age twenty-six, Muir made a sevenmonth botanical excursion across the border to the wilds of Canada to study flowers. Almost thirty years later, in the summer of 1893, he toured Europe, visiting Scotland, Norway, England, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Ireland, to meet with fellow naturalists and visit such celebrated landscapes as the glacial fjords of coastal Norway, the English Lake District, the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, the Lakes of Killarney, and the Scottish Highlands. A decade later, from May 1903 to May 1904, Muir toured the world, primarily to study trees. Traveling at first with Harvard botanist Charles S. Sargent and then on his

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own, Muir went to Europe, Russia, the Far East, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand before returning to San Francisco via Honolulu. Muir’s world tour, made when he was already in his mid-sixties, confirmed his passion for international travel and nature study and whetted his appetite for a voyage to South America and sub-Saharan Africa, the two major areas of the globe he had not yet seen. Muir’s final international journey—the final major journey of his life and the one he proclaimed his most rewarding—is even lesser known than the Canadian excursions and the world tour and is the subject of John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa.

The True Beginnings of the Last Journey To understand the significance and poignancy of John Muir’s last journey, we must revisit his first major journey, the famed 1867 thousand-mile walk from Indianapolis, Indiana, to the Gulf of Mexico, made when he was twenty-nine years old. Having recently recovered from the industrial accident that left him temporarily blind, Muir left Indianapolis on September 1, 1867, headed for points south and traveling by the “wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way” he could find.2 “I propose to go South and see something of the vegetation of the warm end of the country, and if possible to wander far enough into South America to see tropical vegetation in all its palmy glory,” he wrote.3 And so, keeping his own promise that if God should restore the gift of sight, he would use it to study the beauty of the creation rather than the contrivances of man, Muir walked alone, a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico at Cedar Keys, Florida, with the intention of continuing to South America by boat. The now-famous flyleaf inscription with which young Muir began the journal of that epic walk clearly suggests his new orientation toward life: John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe. Although Muir’s accident did not generate the idea of explorations far afield, it did inspire him to try to fulfill a childhood dream. As a boy Muir had delighted in the adventures of South American and African explorers and had yearned someday to have such adventures himself.“Boys are fond of the books of travelers, and one day, after I had been reading Mungo Park’s travels in Africa,” wrote Muir in his autobiography, referring to the Scottish explorer’s 1860 book Travels in the Interior Regions of Africa, “mother said: ‘Weel, John, maybe you will travel like Park and Humboldt some day.’”4 Even more important than Mungo Park in inspiring Muir’s early dreams of international exploration was the great German explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who served as a model of the sort of broad-minded, philosophically inclined

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natural scientist that Muir aspired to become. It was largely through Humboldt’s account of his South America travels that Muir developed his most burning ambition: to explore and study the tropical rain forests of the great Amazon basin. Muir’s letters from the mid-1860s demonstrate unequivocally that he developed high hopes for a voyage to South America before his 1867 industrial accident. The most telling of these letters, written to a friend on the day following his misfortune, makes clear how serious he was about the southern journey: “For weeks,” he wrote, “I have daily consulted maps in locating a route through the Southern States, the West Indies, South America, and Europe—a botanical journey studied for years. And so my mind has long been in a glow with visions of the glories of a tropical flora; but, alas, I am half blind. My right eye, trained to minute analysis, is lost and I have scarce heart to open the other.”5 And as his vision slowly returned, Muir more fully admitted the strength of his passion for the journey. “For many a year,” he commented, “I have been impelled toward the Lord’s tropic gardens of the South. Many influences have tended to blunt or bury this constant longing, but it has outlived and overpowered them all.”6 Muir’s journal of the epic walk—the first of his sixty extant journals— was posthumously published in 1916 as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, and it has received a great deal of well-deserved critical attention since then. What has received far too little attention, however, is the fact that Muir’s ultimate goal for the walk was not the Gulf of Mexico, but rather South America. Cedar Keys was not a destination but an unplanned, illness-induced stopover on a longer trip toward the greatest of the world’s river basins, as Muir’s own description of his travel plan makes clear. “I had long wished to visit the Orinoco basin and in particular the basin of the Amazon,” he wrote, describing his ambitions for a truly Humboldtian adventure. “My plan was to get ashore anywhere on the north end of the continent, push on southward through the wilderness around the headwaters of the Orinoco, until I reached a tributary of the Amazon, and float down on a raft or skiff the whole length of the great river to its mouth.”7 When a ship arrived in Cedar Keys bound for Havana in early January, Muir decided he would add a Cuban sojourn to his plans; however, Muir’s beachcombing and botanizing along the Cuban coast, while enjoyable, failed to fully restore his strength. He finally decided, regretfully, that his ambitious journey to the Amazon could not be effected under such adverse circumstances and would have to be put on hold. Muir’s decision in that moment of postponement changed the course of his life and radically influenced the development of American environmental

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concern, protection, and literature as we now know them. “I could not find a vessel of any sort bound for South America, and so made up a plan to go North, to the longed-for cold weather of New York, and thence to the forests and mountains of California,” wrote Muir, who had seen a brochure boasting of the geological and botanical wonders of the Sierra Nevada.8 “There, I thought, I shall find health and new plants and mountains, and after a year spent in that interesting country I can carry out my Amazon plans.”9 It proved a fateful decision, for upon his arrival in San Francisco, via the Isthmus of Panama, in late March 1868, John Muir walked into the Sierra, into Yosemite, and into history.

A Dream Long Deferred It might be said that the John Muir we have come to know and appreciate is the figure who developed during the forty-four-year hiatus between his first and second attempts to reach the Amazon. Nearly everything we know of Muir’s contributions as a writer, mountaineer, scientist, natural philosopher, and environmental advocate follows from his auspicious arrival in California. But if, after Muir’s first glimpse of the Sierra, “the rest is history,” then the history of Muir’s life and travels as it has commonly been told remains incomplete. For during the four decades spanning Muir’s better-known adventures, he continued to dream of the Amazon journey that had been thwarted in his youth, and he never relinquished hope that he might someday complete the voyage that had been so earnestly begun when he left Indianapolis in 1867. In 1908 Muir, now a national icon and a famous scientist, preservationist, and writer, turned seventy years old. His wife, Louie, had died three years earlier, and his daughters, Wanda and Helen, had begun to give him grandchildren; he had begun to excavate old dreams and memories by dictating material for his autobiography; activist work had begun to limit his opportunities to travel; and his advancing age seemed to increase the urgency of his literary affairs. In a letter of March 2, 1911, Muir described the several books he was then working on, adding that “I have also planned a book describing other Yosemites, another on mountaineering . . . one on trees, one or two on Alaska, two or three on earth sculpture, etc., two or three on travels abroad, and one on animals, etc.”10 Weighing his literary ambitions against the magnetic pull of wilderness travel, Muir decided, as he had so many times before, that making books would have to wait. Shortly before his seventy-third birthday, Muir responded passionately to a friend who had inquired whether he had finally given up

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fig. 12.1. John Muir enjoying the outdoors with two of his grandchildren, Martinez, California, ca. 1910. John Muir Papers, HoltAtherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

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the idea of voyaging to South America: “Have I forgotten the Amazon, Earth’s greatest river? Never, never, never. It has been burning in me half a century, and will burn forever.”11 During late winter or early spring, 1911, Muir began to plan in earnest for what he knew would be his last chance to fulfill the long-held dream of reaching the great river. Perhaps thinking of one of his favorite poetic lines—“’twill soon be dark,” from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “To J. W.”—Muir wrote to his friend Robert Underwood Johnson that he hoped to reach South America “before it is too late.”12 Having tied up what loose ends in California he could, Muir left San Francisco on April 20, 1911, bound by rail to the East. During the three months between his arrival in New York and his August 12 departure for the equatorial rain forests of Brazil, Muir was tremendously busy lobbying influential public figures on behalf of Hetch Hetchy and arranging for publication of his autobiography and his Yosemite book, which he had not yet completed. In reading the many unpublished letters written to Muir in the weeks preceding his departure, it is striking how energetically Muir’s friends and family attempted to dissuade him from taking the solitary voyage. Politely dismissing the admonitions that he was too old, too ill, or too important to undertake the voyage, Muir resolved to reach the Amazon despite the objections of sympathetic friends who did not fully share his passion for wilderness. As he contemplated the upcoming journey, Muir seems to have felt a keen sense of impending separation from loved ones, combined with a conviction that a trip so important to him as a person and as a naturalist had to be made before it was too late. To his friends and family—and particularly to Helen, his often infirm daughter who was now the mother of an infant son named Muir—he wrote tender letters of concern offering paternal words of advice and encouragement. Muir’s sense of loneliness and mortality, as well as his sense of urgency to begin the voyage, were intensified by the unfortunate loss of many of his close friends to the ravages of old age. In a poignant letter to Helen, Muir speculates on the recent deaths of three of his closest friends: “Your letter received yesterday telling our dear Sellers’s death Sunday made me sad,” he wrote. “I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling.”13 Given the objections voiced by his friends and family, the anguish caused by the recent deaths of several close friends, the worries about Hetch Hetchy Valley, the grueling task of completing the Yosemite manuscript, and the lonely prospect of traveling, old and alone, into the Amazon jungle, it is remarkable that Muir’s journey happened at all. Despite these discouragements, Muir’s

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resolve to visit the Amazon seems never to have wavered throughout this period. “It’s kind of you to care so much about my loneliness in my travels,” he wrote to a concerned friend, “but I’m always fortunate as a wanderer and fear nothing fate has in store.”14 On the eve of his departure he wrote that “I start tomorrow for the great hot river I’ve been wanting so long to see, and alone as usual.”15 But Muir remained sanguine about his solitary travels: “Oftentimes our loneliest wanderings are most fruitful of all,” he commented.16 On August 10, 1911, Muir finished the manuscript of his Yosemite book and just two days later went down to the harbor to begin what was to be his last great journey. In 1868 the young John Muir had hesitantly deferred his South America journey and had instead come to New York and caught a ship to California. Now, forty-four years later, he was back, and, at long last, he was Amazon bound.

The Forty-Thousand-Mile Odyssey Muir’s epic voyage began on August 12, 1911, when he left Brooklyn and sailed south through the Atlantic and Caribbean to Belém (then Pará), Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon. From here Muir steamed one thousand miles up the great river, fulfilling his dream of following Humboldt’s tracks into the greatest river basin on Earth. Near Manaus, at the confluence of the Amazon and Rio Negro, Muir spent an exciting week observing trees, plants, birds, and reptiles, and making a special trip into the thick jungle in search of the rare, gigantic water lily, Victoria regia. Though the infrequency of upriver steamers prevented him from going another thousand miles into the interior, as he had hoped, Muir was deeply satisfied with his Amazonian jungle experience as the completion of the trip that he had begun four decades earlier. Returning to Belém, Muir then sailed to Rio de Janeiro, where he admired the glacially sculpted landscape and the view from the surrounding mountains before continuing south along the Brazilian coast. From Santos, Brazil, Muir began his quest to find a rare tree of the Araucaria genus, Araucaria braziliensis, which he knew to be native to southern Brazil. Now far off the routes taken by the few tourists who visited this region during the early twentieth century, Muir traveled by rail inland from Santos and then by small steamer up the Iguacu River into the heart of the Brazilian wilderness, where he at last found vast forests of Araucaria braziliensis. He remained in the forest for more than a week, spending nearly every hour of daylight, regardless of the weather, making precise observations of the unusual tree in its native habitat.

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fig. 12.2. A page from Muir’s 1911 journal, showing field sketches of Araucaria braziliensis. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

Muir next returned to the coast and sailed south to Montevideo, Uruguay, and then Buenos Aires, Argentina. From coastal Argentina he began the second of the great tree quests of his voyage, traveling west across the South American continent to Chile, where he hoped to find the even more rare cousin of Araucaria braziliensis, Araucaria imbricata, the so-called monkeypuzzle tree. Muir, however, had no certain information about where the tree might be found and instead simply followed his botanist’s instincts five hundred miles south, from Santiago to Victoria, where, after an arduous mountain journey through rough terrain and up to snow line, Muir at last discovered the forest he had crossed the continent to see. He spent an ecstatic day studying and sketching the monkey-puzzle tree before sleeping out beneath its branches in the Andean night. Delighted with his observations of the monkey-puzzle forest, Muir was soon off again, returning to Santiago and then back across the pampas to Buenos Aires. From Buenos Aires he returned to Montevideo, seeking a ship bound for South Africa, where he intended to continue his travels and botanical studies. The second major phase of Muir’s journey began in early December, when he sailed for South Africa via the Canary Islands—then a grueling

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fig. 12.3. Journal sketch of Adansonia digitata, the baobab tree, from John Muir’s South American journal, January 19, 1912. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library, © 1984 MuirHanna Trust.

thirty-five-day ocean voyage that clearly suggests Muir’s deep desire to study the flora and landscape of the African continent. After spending Christmas and New Year’s at sea, Muir at last arrived in Cape Town in mid-January 1912. From coastal South Africa, Muir began yet another great tree pilgrimage— this time to Adansonia digitata, the African baobab—traveling inland by rail to search for the tree near the famed Victoria Falls of the Zambezi River. Among the oldest living things on earth, the baobab is believed to live up to two thousand years. Little wonder that Muir was so determined to find this remarkable tree or that he so delighted in studying the baobab when at last he found it growing near Victoria Falls. Indeed, after observing and sketching the baobab, Muir declared the experience one of the most rewarding of his life.

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Traveling to the southwestern coast of Africa, Muir sailed north to Mombasa, in present-day Kenya, where he began the next leg of his journey. In early February he went inland by rail across the wildlife-rich Athi plains to Nairobi and then on to the shores of Lake Victoria. Taking a small boat across the great lake, Muir studied central African flora on his way to Ripon Falls, where he watched the waters of the Nile beginning their three-thousand-mile course to the sea. Muir then returned to coastal Africa, where he spent a few days studying trees as he prepared for the long homestretch of his journey. In late February Muir sailed north: through the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, and Gulf of Suez, then through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean Sea to Naples, Italy. On March 15 he began the final leg of his travels, first plying the sea along the mountainous coast of Spain, then sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar into the North Atlantic. After weathering unusually severe storms at sea, John Muir arrived safely back in New York on March 27, only a few weeks shy of his seventy-fourth birthday. He had traveled forty thousand miles since leaving America the previous summer and had not been ill a single day.

“The Most Fruitful Year of My Life” During his eight-month journey to South America and Africa, Muir recorded his observations in three pocket-sized travel journals, with a fourth small journal book devoted to notes gleaned from his reading of books and pamphlets about the botany, zoology, and geology of the two “hot continents.”17 Like his earliest extant journal, which records the thousand-mile walk to the Gulf, this last of Muir’s sixty extant journals was carried with him through forest and field and includes both precise scientific observations and general philosophical ruminations. In addition to written descriptions of flora, fauna, and landscapes both wild and domestic, the journals are also replete with field drawings of the mountains, sunsets, and, especially, the rare trees Muir felt so privileged to witness during his journey; here, in delicate pencil sketches that are sometimes as small as a thumbnail and rarely larger than a playing card, Muir has left minute renderings of towering peaks, sweeping savannas, and gigantic ancient trees. That his techniques of observation and engagement with nature were visual as well as textual is suggested by the number of sketches included—more than 160—and by their organic relationship to the text: the journal pages typically combine written and pictorial representations in referential association.

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These journals allow us to travel with Muir as he journeys up the great Amazon, into the jungles of Southern Brazil, to snow line in the Andes, through South and Central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study. In their words and images, Muir’s journals provide us a rare opportunity not only to see what Muir sees, but also how he sees—to glimpse not only the wild and domestic landscapes of the southern continents, but also to see how the fully mature John Muir observed, considered, and represented the beauty of the equatorial and subequatorial regions to which he made his final pilgrimage. Despite their tremendous value and importance, Muir’s 1911–12 travel journals have received very little attention, and until the publication of John Muir’s Last Journey in 2001, this material remained unpublished. Why have we ignored Muir’s international travels, and how do the journals from his South America and Africa voyage help us to achieve a more complete and more nuanced view of Muir’s life and character? One important reason we have largely ignored Muir’s travels may be that we like to think of Muir as someone whose wanderings imaginatively chart our American wilderness. While this identification with Muir as an American nature writer, explorer, and preservationist is understandable, Muir’s international travels and nature studies remind us that his allegiance was not to Wisconsin, California, or America, but to Earth. Even before the South America and Africa journey Muir’s literary ambitions encompassed his international travels, and he affirmed in a letter of March 1911 that among the books he earnestly planned to write were “two or three on travels abroad.”18 As the inscription to the first extant travel journal of “the wanderer”—as Muir often called himself—so powerfully reminds us, his address was not Yosemite Valley, California, but “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.” The journals of Muir’s last journey clearly show that his appreciation for natural beauty and his desire to study plants in their native habitats transcended national borders. So, too, his environmental concern, as when he laments that the Andean forests “are being rapidly destroyed” by comparing the effects of irresponsible timber practices in Chile to those he has seen in other parts of the world. “Dry limbs and brush are piled around every tree and the burning goes on until nothing but black monuments are left of all the flowery leafy woods,” he wrote. “Only on a small scale can even New Zealand show equal tree desolation.”19 And so, too, his work as a natural scientist, for Muir so loved rocks and ice and trees that he would seek them in any wilderness, including the “noble palmy ice land” of the subequatorial jungle.20 The various and

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precise tree studies contained in these journals demonstrate that Muir was an accomplished botanist whose impressive expertise and passion led to successful botanical studies far beyond the Range of Light. It is also likely that those interested in Muir have hesitated to examine the 1911–12 materials because they are the record of an old man’s experiences. Societal preference for youth and vigor has perhaps predisposed us to freeze Muir in visions of a young man who scaled cliffs and rode avalanches. Although Muir was almost thirty when he first saw Yosemite, in his midfifties when he founded the Sierra Club and published his first book, and even older during several of his voyages to Alaska, we persist in imagining him primarily as the indefatigable mountaineer, crucified on the face of Mt. Ritter or meditating in freezing sublimity on Mt. Shasta. When we do tell the story of the older Muir, our narrative is too often limited to the Hetch Hetchy battle and to a narrow account of that battle that martyrs Muir to the cause of wilderness preservation by attributing his death to the loss of the treasured valley. Perhaps it is to Muir’s credit that he has achieved a form of eternal youth in our collective imagination. Like Thoreau, Muir often appeals to the idealized part of each of us that would be strong, wild, independent, holy, and free of the corruption—if not also the responsibility—of civilized life. It is also the case that our preference for the image of a youthful Muir is conditioned by Muir’s own oeuvre, since the books he published during his lifetime— including, notably, his autobiography—are based primarily upon experiences and journals of the young Muir. Nevertheless, picturing Muir only on summits and in treetops endorses a cult of youth that deprives us of a full understanding of his accomplishments as a person, writer, and naturalist. Even if we prefer not to think of it, Muir did travel in trains, steamships, and automobiles, and he did grow old and feel the weakening in his body, and he did suffer from the loss of his wife and the death of many of his closest friends. But one of the lessons of Muir’s 1911–12 journals and correspondence is that he also bore up under the weight of these losses and troubles with remarkable strength of body and character. That the seventy-three-yearold Muir chose to undertake this ambitious voyage to South America and Africa alone—and that he did so with such vigor, passion, pleasure, and success—suggests a courage and independence every bit as impressive as the youthful strength we are more accustomed to associating him with. The South America and Africa journals help us to see Muir as a different kind of hero, one whose endurance and intellectual curiosity carried him into far fields of adventure even as he aged.

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Corollary to our hesitancy in thinking of Muir as an old man is our hesitancy in thinking of him as a social man—a person whose connections with family and friends were deep and earnest. For many, the name John Muir conjures visions of a man who preferred to be alone, who loathed to leave the woods for the defilement of civilization, and who, with a blanket and a little bread and tea, could exist apart from and above the emotional connections that bind humanity together. One of the contributions of Muir’s South America and Africa journals— and, especially, his correspondence—from the voyage is that they remind us of what a loving man Muir was, how genuinely he missed his family and worried about their well-being, how deeply attached he was to his daughters and his grandchildren, how generous he was with the many people for whom he cared. Muir did travel alone on his last voyage, but he also met and befriended many fellow travelers whose company and hospitality he enjoyed. He did value solitary nature study, but he also frequently admitted that he felt lonely and far from home. Muir’s late journals and correspondence re-humanize Muir by reminding us that he was a brother, husband, father, grandfather, friend, neighbor, orchardist, and businessman as well as a scientist, adventurer, and writer—not just an iconic representative of American wilderness but a fully developed human being with genuine affections, ambitions, and fears. These South America and Africa journals also make a valuable contribution to our understanding of Muir’s literary style and aesthetic sensibility, and they introduce a provocatively wide range of literary subjects. Although—and in part because—the 1911–12 journals were never finally crafted for publication, they demonstrate the spontaneous energy and insight of Muir’s field observations. Written from train cars and steamer decks, houses and hotels, parks and botanical gardens, and the deep jungles, forests, and swamps that Muir described as places “according to my heart,”21 these daily observations and sketches show us Muir in the field rather than at his desk— in the moment rather than in the mode of literary retrospection that so often characterizes his often heavily revised published work. The haikulike compression and intensity of some of Muir’s brief journal notes often suggests an aesthetic and literary sensibility that differs provocatively from that of the effusive wilderness psalmist of the early Sierra journals. The 1911–12 journals also expand Muir’s literary subject, for they provide us an unusual opportunity to examine his impressions of tropical rather than temperate flora, equatorial rather than northern glacial geology, and human culture rather than strictly natural history. He delights in the fecundity and impenetrable verdure of the Amazonian rain forests, despite the fact that his

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contemporaries associated the region primarily with malaria and man-eating reptiles. He remarks on the kindness of the South American people and is constantly appreciative of the generosity of the traveling companions he meets along his way. As a glaciologist and geologist he expresses his joy at finding “so clear and noble a manifestation of ice-work at sea level so near the Equator,” where he is thrilled to discover “glacier domes feathered with palms instead of hemlocks and spruces and pines.”22 In Africa he hunts not for big game, as did his friend Theodore Roosevelt, but for the bigger game of the rare, immense baobab tree, noting appreciatively after having at last found a representative of the species that he had enjoyed “one of the greatest of the great tree days of my lucky life.”23 The various ocean voyages that were part of Muir’s last journey also give us an opportunity to read Muir’s descriptions of seascapes rather than landscapes, the latter of which constitute the vast majority of his nature writing. His descriptions of dolphins, whales, seals, seabirds, flying fish, and ocean waves, light, and storms provide interesting insights into his nautical travel experiences and the aesthetic sensibility through which he understood and represented those experiences.

Traveling the Milky Way When he set out for the Amazon in the summer of 1911, Muir commented to friends that “the world’s big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”24 And near the end of his journey, he unequivocally affirmed that “I’ve had the most fruitful time of my life on this pair of hot continents.”25 As for the landscapes, plants, and animals he felt so privileged to have seen on his journey, he wrote happily that “the new beauty stored up is far beyond telling.”26 When John Muir arrived back in New York in late March 1912, he was just a few weeks shy of his seventy-fourth birthday. He had been away for seven and a half months, during which time he had traveled forty thousand miles, sailed for 109 days, crossed the equator six times, and studied the rivers, jungles, forests, plains, mountains, and rare trees of the southern continents he had longed to see. “We all travel the milky way together, trees and men,” Muir once wrote after riding out a Sierra windstorm in the wildly pitching crown of a towering Douglas fir. “Trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense,” he philosophized. “They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.”27 Muir, a man who traveled to trees and who felt trees

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travel, thought of his own wanderings as a motion as natural and exhilarating as the tossing of a spruce crown in the wind; his own tree-wavings had taken him through the wilds of South America and Africa and brought him home safely to California on his seventy-fourth birthday. Less than three years after returning from his last journey, John Muir’s long, productive life came to an end, and when he died, peacefully, on Christmas Eve, 1914, some of his voluminous unpublished manuscripts lay within his reach. When Muir left Indianapolis in September 1867, with his sight restored and his vision of life clarified, he was bound for the Amazon. When he arrived there in September 1911, after the forty-four-year detour that became most of his adult life, he at last fulfilled a very dear and nearly lifelong dream. And if the first of his extant journals had begun with the orienting declaration, “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe,” his final journal, published for the first time in John Muir’s Last Journey, affirms that the pledge Muir once made in blindness was faithfully kept and that he remained, until the end, a student, lover, and citizen of earth.

1 2

Notes 1. John Muir, John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa, ed. Michael P. Branch (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001), 67. 2. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, ed. William Frederic Badè (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992), 1. 3. Ibid., xix. 4. John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989), 145. 5. Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk, xvi. 6. Ibid., xviii. 7. Ibid., 96. 8. Muir, John Muir’s Last Journey, 96. For more on Muir’s decision to go to New York, see James Mitchell Clarke, The Life and Adventures of John Muir (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 58. 9. Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk, 96. 10. Muir, John Muir’s Last Journey, 14–15. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. Ibid., 10. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. Ibid.

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 147. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1945), 331. 25. Muir, John Muir’s Last Journey, 159. 26. Ibid., 126. 27. John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Dorset Books, 1988), 256.

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Contributors Michael P. Branch, whose doctorate is from the University of Virginia (1993), is Associate Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is a co-founder and past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and book review editor of the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He is co-founder and series co-editor of the University of Virginia Press book series Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism. He is co-editor of The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment (University of Idaho Press, 1998), editor of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa (Island Press, 2001), and the author of the forthcoming Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden. Ronald Eber of Salem, Oregon, is a freelance writer on land use, environmental issues, and conservation history with special emphasis on the Pacific Northwest. He holds a degree in Geography from California State University at Northridge and a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon. His previous essay titled “John Muir and the Pioneer Conservationists of the Pacific Northwest” appeared in John Muir in Historical Perspective, edited by Sally M. Miller (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999). Bonnie Johanna Gisel is curator at the Sierra Club’s LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite National Park, where she designed the Wilderness Quilt Project and Words for Wilderness Around the World. She is the editor of Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr and she has published articles on John Muir and Jeanne Carr as well as articles about her personal journeys in wilderness. Gisel received a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Drew University. 1

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Corey Lewis is a recent graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Literature and Environment Doctoral program. He currently teaches for the Great Basin Institute, an interdisciplinary field-studies program based at the university. His dissertation, “Reading the Trail: Exploring the Literature and Natural History of the California Crest,” investigates the relationship between the work of Mary Austin, John Muir, Gary Snyder, and the California landscape itself. Ronald H. Limbaugh earned a Ph.D. at the University of Idaho and for thirty-four years taught history at the University of the Pacific. Author and editor of a number of books and articles in the field of western American history, including Rocky Mountain Carpetbaggers (1980) and John Muir’s Stickeen and the Lessons of Nature (1996), he has specialized in environmental history and the history of technology. His latest book coauthored with Willard P. Fuller, Jr. is Calaveras Gold: The Impact of Mining on a Mother Lode County (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004). Char Miller is chair of the History Department and director of the Urban Studies program at Trinity University. He was named a 2002 Piper Professor, a statewide award for excellence in teaching and service to higher education, and has other teaching awards. Miller is author of Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Island Press, 2001), which won the 2002 Independent Publishers Biography Prize; the 2002 National Outdoor Book Contest Award for History and Biography; the Connecticut Book Award for Biography, 2002; and ForeWord Magazine’s Gold Award for Biography; it was also named one of the Top Ten Biographies of Social Activists and to Academic Magazine’s Core 1000 list. Miller co-authored the award-winning The Greatest Good: 100 Years of Forestry in America (SAF, 1999) and is the editor most recently of On the Border: An Environmental History of San Antonio (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict (University of Arizona Press, 2001), and Water and the Environment Since 1945: Global Perspectives (Detroit: St. James Press, 2001). Sally M. Miller is Professor Emerita of History and editor of publications, for both a quarterly newsletter and collections of essays, at the John Muir Center for Environmental Studies at the University of the Pacific. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has held a visiting professorship at the University of Warwick, England, and Fulbright appointments in New Zealand and Finland, and has lectured widely overseas. She has written

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and edited a dozen books and many articles on social and cultural history. Her books include The Ethnic Press in the United States, John Muir: Life and Work (University of New Mexico Press), and John Muir in Historical Perspective (Peter Lang). She is a former editor of The Pacific Historian. Daryl Morrison is the Head of Special Collections at the University of California, Davis. Prior to that she was the Head of the Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of the Pacific Library for twelve years, where she curated the John Muir Papers, and earlier the librarian at the Holt-Atherton Special Collections. Previously, she was the Western History Collections Librarian at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. She has a Masters in Library Science from the University of Illinois and a Masters in Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma. She has published articles on women in the west and on California history. Most recently, she is the editor of William F. Swasey’s The Early Days and Men of California (Sacramento Book Collectors Club, 2004). Barbara Mossberg, President Emerita of Goddard College, serves as Dean of the new College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at California State University, Monterey Bay. Dr. Mossberg received her Ph.D. in Literature from Indiana University. While at the English Department at the University of Oregon, she co-founded its American Studies Program. She has twice held a senior Fulbright as Bicentennial Chair of American Studies at the University of Helsinki, including the Senior Fulbright Distinguished Lectureship. She has also lectured and conducted programs on American cultural history as U.S. Scholar in Residence for the USIA/State Department. Mossberg has won research and teaching awards from the University of Oregon, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Danforth Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and other awards. Dr. Mossberg’s book on Emily Dickinson was named by Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Dr. Mossberg has lectured nationally and internally on John Muir. She is working on a book, University of the Wilderness: What We Learn from the Art and Science of John Muir for Educating for Global Citizenship. Daniel J. Philippon is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Director of the Program in Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Ethics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he teaches courses in environmental rhetoric, history, and ethics. He is the co-editor (with Michael P. Branch) of The Height of Our Mountains (Johns Hopkins, 1998), editor of The Friendship of

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Nature (Johns Hopkins, 1999), and author of Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Georgia, 2003), on which his chapter in this collection is based. Ruth E. Sutter is a community historian who taught history and social science courses at Diablo Valley College from 1964 until 1996. She has published The Next Place You Come To: A History of Communities in North America and articles on colonial and immigrant communities. She is currently editor of the Martinez Historical Society newsletter and is working on a biography of John Swett. James Perrin Warren is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. He has published two books with Penn State Press: Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment and Culture of Eloquence. His current research is focusing on John Burroughs, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mary Austin, and he is working on a book titled John Burroughs and the Place of Nature. He teaches nineteenthcentury American literature, environmental literature, and critical theory.

Index Abbott, Henry, 134 Abies magnifica (red fir), 243 Action Research as Living Practice (Carson & Sumara), 236–37 Adansonia digitata (baobab tree), 258 Adiantum, 220 Africa, and Muir’s world tour, 249–64 Agassiz, Alexander, 134 Alaska: and Keith’s paintings, 71; Muir’s travels to, 3, 55, 203–12 “Alaska Trip, The” (Muir), 209, 210 Amazon, and Muir’s journey to South America, 256 “American Forests, The” (Muir), 182–86, 193, 198n12 Anemone occidentalis, 226, 229 Anthony, Susan B., 75 Araucaria braziliensis, 256, 257 Araucaria imbricata (monkey-puzzle tree), 4, 257 Argentina, and Muir’s world tour, 257 art: and romantic movement of nineteenth century, 65; and William Keith as artist, 67–69. See also sketching Aspidium aculeatum, 220 Aspidium lonchitis, 220 Aspidium marginale, 220 Aspidium spinulosum, 220 Asplenium acrostichoide, 220 Atlantic Monthly, The, 160, 167n50, 180, 198n12

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automobile tourism, and Muir on national parks, 161–63, 168n56. See also tourism Averell, W. H., 48 Averell family, and Muir’s relationship with children, 49 Avery, Benjamin P., 219, 223 Badè, William Frederic, 95–100 Bailey, Liberty Hyde, 2 Baker, Ray Stannard, 154 Barrus, Clara, 75 Barton, Bruce, 99 Bible: and Muir’s childhood, 35; and Muir’s “guidebooks,” 174. See also religion biographies: efforts by Muir’s family and friends to control development of, 83–100; of Gifford Pinchot, 126–27, 144n13; of John Swett, 27n1 Bolivian Commercial and Colonization Company, 221 botany: and Jeanne Carr, 10n4, 217, 226; and Muir’s stature as scientist, 172, 188, 196; and Muir’s travels, 4, 261; and Wardian cases, 230n3. See also Araucaria imbricata; Calypso borealis Botrychium lunariodes, 220 Branch, Michael, 8–9, 238 Brazil, and Muir’s world tour, 256 Brooks, Walter R., 2, 218 Brower, David, 121

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Bryant, William Cullen, 65 Buell, Lawrence, 152 Burnham, Daniel, 72 Burns, Robert, 78, 174 Burroughs, John, 3, 75, 89, 203–12 Bush, George W., 115 Butler, Henry, 54, 216 Butler, James D., 42, 43, 86 California: Carr family’s move to, 221–22; Frank Swett and horticulture in, 22; and John Swett’s career in education, 16, 18, 21–22, 23, 26, 27n1; Muir’s travels in, 3. See also Hetch Hetchy Valley; Mono Lake; San Francisco; Shasta, Mt.; Sierra Nevada; Yosemite Valley; Yosemite National Park California Alps (painting by Keith), 68 California Farmer, 226 Calocedrus decurrens, 225 Calvinism, and Muir’s childhood, 33, 34, 35, 150 Calypso borealis (rare form of lady-slipper orchid) 1–2, 3, 4, 86, 219–20 Campbell, John, 191 Canada: list of plants found by Muir in, 220; and Muir’s travels, 217, 250 Carmelita (home of Ezra & Jeanne Carr), 85 Carr, Albert Lee, 216, 224 Carr, Edward (Ned), 221 Carr, Elijah Melanthon, 229 Carr, Ezra Slocum, 16, 85, 216, 219, 221 Carr, Jeanne: and botany, 10n4, 217, 226; dispute over ownership of letters from Muir to, 83–100; and introduction of Muir to William Keith, 67; and introduction of Muir to John Strenzel, 19; letter of Merrill Moores to, 46; Muir’s friendship and correspondence with, 4, 215–29; and

Muir’s marriage, 154; and Muir’s meeting with Swett family, 16; and Muir’s political activism, 177; and Muir’s reading of Thoreau, 164n12; and Muir’s writings, 18, 86, 217; on nature and spirituality, 2; on Scotch character of Muir, 29n40 Carr, John Henry, 221 Carr, Nelson, 221 Carr, William G., 27n1 Carruth, C. W., 92 Carson, Terrence, 236–37 Cassiope mertensiana (white heather), 3 Century Magazine, 19, 134–35, 177, 178, 209 Chaenactis glabruiscula, 225 Chamaebatia foliolosa (Sierra mountain misery), 3 children and childhood: history of, 33–34, 59; and life of Muir, 34–38; Muir’s relationships with, 17, 19, 31–33, 38–59. See also family; Muir, Helen; Muir, Wanda Chile, and Muir’s world tour, 260 Clark, Galen, 226 Cleveland, Grover, 123, 180 Cloud, Roy W., 27n1 Cohen, Michael P., 68, 127, 131, 151, 153–54, 238 Colby, William F., 96, 124–25, 159, 162, 168n56, 241 Cole, Thomas, 65 Coleman, Mary Reid, 54 Columbian Exposition (Chicago), 72 Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources (1908), 140–41 conservation movement: and debate between Muir and Pinchot on forest management, 134–41; and forestry in Muir’s time, 109–10; Muir’s involvement in early, 118n24; and Muir’s views on forestry, 112–14;

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and Muir on tourism, 159–61. See also environmental politics; forestry and forest conservation Coolbrith, Ina Donna, 223 Cornelius, Brother, 68, 69, 70 Coville, Frederick V., 126 Craftsman, The (journal), 87 Crater Lake, 131 Cremin, Lawrence A., 27n1 Cronon, William, 164n9 Cuba, Muir’s travels to, 2, 3, 252 culture: Muir’s leadership in American, 170–71; Muir and understanding of wilderness, 173, 194 Curtis, Edward S., 205, 212 Cypripedium arietinum (lady-slipper orchid), 10n4, 220 Cyptopteris bulbifera, 220 Dall, William H., 205 Dial magazine, 160 Dick, Thomas, 2 Dickinson, Emily, 170, 195–96 Disciples of Christ, 35 “Discovery of Glacier Bay, The” (Muir), 209 domesticity, and wilderness in late writings of Muir, 149–63 Dorman, Robert L., 150, 155–56 Douglas, David, 223, 228 Dreams of Alaska (paintings by Keith), 71 Dudley, William R., 159, 241 Durand, Asher B., 65 Earth First!, 121, 122 Eber, Ronald, 7 ecocriticism, and expansion of methods of literary scholarship, 235–46

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education: and career of John Swett in California, 16, 18, 21–22, 23, 26, 27n1; Carr’s advocacy of women’s, 226; and Muir’s childhood, 35, 36; and Muir’s influence on perceptions of wilderness, 193, 194–96; and Muir’s role as teacher, 23–24, 41–50, 57, 59; of Muir at University of Wisconsin, 36, 216, 217. See also mentors Elder, John, 238, 242 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 107, 152, 218, 240–41, 242, 255 Eno, Amos, 128, 129 environmental history, and interpretation of Muir’s life, 9. See also history environmental literary criticism: and interpretation of Muir’s life, 9; and methods for study of Muir’s writings, 235–46 environmental politics: and Muir’s writings and lobbying efforts, 175–82; and views of Muir and Gifford Pinchot on forest management, 121–41. See also conservation movement; preservation movement; public policy Europe, Muir’s travels in, 3, 71–73, 179, 250, 251. See also Scotland experience, and Muir’s attitude toward natural world, 240–41, 243–44 family: and imagery in Muir’s writings on nature, 187–88; Muir and domesticity, 154; Muir as member of Swett family, 15; and Muir’s early life, 34–38; and Muir’s relationships with brothers and sisters, 38–39. See also children and childhood; Muir, Ann Gilrye; Muir, Daniel; Muir, Helen; Muir, Louie Strenzel; Muir, Wanda Farnsworth, Edith, 97 Farrer, Reginald, 229

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Fawcett, Millicent Garret, 25 Federal Forest Preserves, 105 Fernow, Bernard E., 138–39, 140, 205, 207, 212 Ferrier, William W., 27n1 fieldwork, and methodology of ecocriticism, 236, 244–45 fires, and Muir on forest conservation, 112 Florida, and Muir’s walk to Gulf of Mexico, 2, 45–46, 221, 251, 252 food, and friendship between Muir and Keith, 74–75 Foreman, Dave, 121, 142n1 Forest Reserve Act of 1891, 178, 179, 180 forestry and forest conservation: evolution of Muir’s writings about, 105–16; and Muir’s relationship with Gifford Pinchot, 121–41. See also conservation movement Fox, Stephen, 127, 151 Friends of the Earth, 121 friendships, of Muir: and correspondence with Carr, 215–29; and imagery in writings on nature, 187–88; and relationship to nature, 152–53; and relationship with Swett family, 15–26; and William Keith as kindred spirit, 65–78 frontier, and Muir’s childhood, 34, 35, 36, 37–38 Fuertes, Louis Agassiz, 205, 212 Funk, Buel, 58 Funk, Helen. See Muir, Helen Galloway, Anna, 44, 53 Galloway, Cecelia, 44, 50–51 Galloway, Celia, 41–42 Galloway, George, 44, 52–54 Gannett, Henry, 205 Garfield, James, 137

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General Grant National Monument, 110, 178 geography: and Harriman Alaska Expedition, 203–12; and scholarship on humanist, 213n1 geology, and Muir’s stature as scientist, 172, 188, 196. See also glaciers Gilbert, G. K., 207, 212 Gillenia trifoliate (American ipecac, western dropwort, bowman’s root), 232n18 Gisel, Bonnie Johanna, 8 Glacier Bay (Alaska), 207 glaciers: Muir’s study of in Sierras, 225; publication of Muir’s scientific findings on, 177–78, 207 Goetzmann, William H., 213n3 Grand Canyon, 3, 131–32 Gray, Asa, 46, 218 Graydon, Katharine, 43 grazing, and Muir on forest conservation, 111–12, 124, 125, 143n9 Grinnell, George Bird, 205, 206 Griswold, Milton, 217 Hague, Arnold, 131 Hall, Elmer, 97–98 Hanna, Tom, 58, 93 Hanna, Wanda. See Muir, Wanda Harriman, Edward H., 48, 76, 203–12 Harriman Alaska Expedition (Merriam), 205, 206–7 Harriman expedition, 48–50, 203–12. See also Alaska Harrison, Benjamin, 178 Harvard University, 196 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 173 Hay, Emily, 77 Headwaters of the Merced, The (painting by Keith), 68

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health: of Carr in last years, 85, 228–29; and injury to Muir’s eye, 43, 220; of Muir in last years, 76, 77, 228 Hermann, Binger, 125–26 hero, Muir as authentic American, 83 Hetch Hetchy Valley: and movement to restore, 195; Muir and fight to save, 136–38, 145n37, 163, 181; Muir’s and Keith’s trip to, 73; Sierra Club and campaign to save, 95 Hill Girt Ranch, 23‒24, 26, 28n25 Hill, Julia Butterfly, 190–93, 195, 200n45 history: of childhood, 33–34, 59; and cultural understanding of wilderness, 173; of forestry and conservation, 117n9. See also environmental history Hitchcock, Ethan A., 136 Hittell, Theodore, 159 Holmes, Steven J., 150, 151, 152, 165n25, 243, 246 Hooker, Sir Joseph, 218 Hooker, John D., 89 Houghton Mifflin, 94, 95, 99, 228 Howarth, William, 238 humor, and Muir’s friendship with Keith, 75–76 hunting, and Muir’s influence on children, 49 Hutchings, Charley, 41 Hutchings, Elvira, 97–98 Hutchings, Florence, 41 Hutchings, Gertrude, 41 Hutchings family, and Muir’s relationship with children, 41–48 immigration, and Muir’s childhood, 35, 36. See also Scotland Inness, George, 72 inventions, of Muir, 216 Italy, and Muir’s world tour, 259

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Jakle, John A., 161 James, Emma, 98 James, George Wharton, 83–100, 228 John Muir: To Yosemite and Beyond: Writings from the Years 1863 to 1875 (Engberg & Wesling), 6 John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa (Muir), 251, 260, 264 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 19, 72, 137, 153, 157, 164n7, 177–78 journals: environmental literary criticism and study of Muir’s, 245; and Muir’s world tour, 259–63 Juniperus occidentalis, 225 Keeler, Charles, 74, 205, 207, 211 Keith, Alice Elizabeth, 225 Keith, Charles, 225 Keith, Mary, 71–72, 74, 75, 76 Keith, William, 18, 65–78, 157, 218, 223, 224, 225, 227 Kellogg, Albert, 218, 223, 224, 225, 227 Kendall, B. O., 85 Kentucky, and Muir’s walk to Gulf of Mexico, 2 Kenya, and Muir’s world tour, 259 Kindred and Related Spirits (Gisel), 84 Kindred Spirits (painting by Durand), 65 labor, and Muir’s childhood, 36, 37 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 2, 218 Land Revision Act of 1891, 109 Land of Sunshine (journal), 86 Lane, Franklin K., 137, 163 lawsuit, and dispute over ownership of letters from Muir to Carr, 93–94 LeConte, Joseph, 159, 218, 223 lectures, by Muir, 19

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legacy, and Muir’s influence on environmental policy, 189–96 Legacy of Luna: A Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods, The (Hill), 191–92 Leopold, Aldo, 3, 238 letters: dispute with George Wharton James over ownership of Muir’s to Carr, 83–100, 228; of Mary Swett to Muir, 24–25; of Moores family to Muir, 46; and Muir’s childhood, 37; and Muir’s friendship with Carr, 4, 215–29; Muir’s to and from children, 32, 49–56, 57; and Muir’s world tour, 255, 262; and relationship between Muir and Pinchot, 127–28, 129, 131, 133. See also writings Letters to a Friend (Muir), 84, 95 Lewis, Corey, 8 Life and Letters of John Muir, The (Badè, 1923), 99–100 Lillard, Richard G., 168n56 Limbaugh, Ronald H., 6–7, 155 Lincoln, Abraham, 171, 184, 195 Linnaea borealis (twinflower), 3–4, 220 literary criticism. See environmental literary criticism literary executor, Badè’s role as, 95–100 Literary Institute of Sacramento, 19 literature. See biographies; environmental literary criticism; journals; letters; writings livestock. See grazing Locke, John, 34 Looking Far North: The Harriman Expedition to Alaska 1899 (Goetzmann & Sloan, 1982), 213n3 Louter, David, 161–62 Love, Glen, 238 Lukens, John P., 85 Lukens, Theodore, 59, 228 Luna (tree), 190–193, 200n42

Lummis, Charles Fletcher, 75, 86–87, 92 Lyell, Mt. (California), 225 Lyon, Thomas, 165n15 McChesney, Alice, 40–41 McChesney, J. B., 16, 18, 70, 218, 223 McChesney, Sarah, 92 McClure, Mt. (California), 225 McGeary, Nelson, 141 magazines, Muir’s writings for popular, 151. See also Atlantic Monthly; Century Magazine; Overland Monthly Man and Nature (Marsh, 1864), 107–8 marriage, of John and Louie Strenzel Muir, 21, 38, 154, 228 Marsh, George Perkins, 107–8 Marshall, Ian, 236, 238 Marx, Leo, 203 Mather, Cotton, 173 mentors: Carr and Muir’s writings, 86, 217; and Muir’s relationship with children, 41–48; and Muir’s relationship with Gifford Pinchot, 129–30, 138. See also education Merriam, C. Hart, 133, 159, 205, 207, 241 Merriam, Clinton L., 177 Merrill, Catharine, 42 Methodist Church, and George Wharton James, 84 methodology, and ecocriticism, 235–46 Millard, Bailey, 164n12 Miller, Char, 7, 143n7 Mills, Gertrude. See Hutchings, Gertrude Milton, John, 2 Mono Lake (California), 18, 70–71 Moores, Charles, 52 Moores, Janet, 46–48 Moores, Merrill, 43–46 Moores family, and correspondence with Muir, 46

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Morrison, Daryl, 6 Mossberg, Barbara, 7–8 Mountains of California, The (Muir), 72, 150, 156–59, 179, 208, 239, 243, 245 Muir, Ann Gilrye (mother), 35, 36 Muir, Daniel (father), 33, 35–36, 37, 38, 44–45 Muir, Helen (daughter): birth of, 56; and dispute over ownership of letters from Muir to Carr, 89, 92, 94–95, 96, 98; marriage of, 58; Muir’s letters to, 255; Muir’s relationship with, 55, 57 Muir, John, 16, 106, 113, 155, 158, 162, 204, 254: childhood of and relationships with children, 31–59; and development of public policy on wilderness, 169–96; and dispute over ownership of letters to Carr, 83–100; domesticity, tourism, and national parks in late writings of, 149–63; and evolution of writings about forests and forest management, 105–16; and friendship with William Keith, 65–78; Gifford Pinchot and politics of forest management, 121–41; and Harriman Alaska expedition, 203–12; and John Muir series of institutes at University of the Pacific, 5–9; methods for study of writings of, 235–46; and relationship with Carr, 4, 215–29; and relationship with Swett family, 15–26; summary of life, travels, and writings of, 1–5; and travels to South America and Africa, 249–64 Muir, Louie Strenzel (wife): and children, 55–56; death of, 76, 253; and marriage to Muir, 21, 38, 154, 228; Muir’s meeting with and engagement to, 20–21, 218 Muir, Wanda (daughter): and dispute over ownership of letters from Muir to Carr, 84, 89, 91, 92–93, 94–95, 96, 98, 228; marriage of, 58; Muir on birth of, 26; Muir’s relationship with, 55, 57

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Muir Glacier (Alaska), 209, 210–11 My First Summer in the Sierra (Muir), 240, 245–46 Nash, Roderick, 149–50 National Academy of Sciences, 123 National Forest Commission, 3, 123, 130, 134, 180 National Forest Service, 135 National Forest System, 105, 107, 110, 114, 117n12 National Historic Site, Muir home in Martinez as, 23 National Park Conference (1912), 162 national parks: domesticity and tourism in late writings of Muir, 149–63; establishment of, 117n12; and Land Revision Act of 1891, 110. See also Yellowstone National Park; Yosemite National Park National Parks Committee, and Merrill Moores, 46 National Park Service, 110 National Woman Suffrage Association, 80n35 nature: Carr’s view of, 226–27, 229; and friendship of Muir with Keith, 77–78; Muir’s emphasis on friendship of, 152–53; Muir’s view of art and, 68; Muir on wilderness and, 107, 169–96 Newton, Elmer, 40 New York Tribune, 151, 178 New Zealand, and Muir’s world tour, 260 Nile River, headwaters of, 259 Noble, John W., 178 Norway, Muir’s tour of fjords, 72 observation: and Muir’s rhetorical strategies, 243–44; and Muir’s world tour, 259, 262

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ocean voyages, and Muir’s world tour, 263 O’Grady, John P., 154 Oravec, Christine, 157, 167n37 Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 186 Osmunda claytoniana, 220 Our National Parks (Muir), 143n9, 145n29, 145n32, 150, 159–61, 167n50, 198n12 Overland Monthly, The, 151, 178, 219 Pacific Lumber Company, 190, 191 Pacific School of Religion, 97 Palmer, Howard, 161 Park, Mungo, 251 Parkhurst, John W., 24 Parkhurst, Ruth, 24, 25–26 Pathless Way, The (Cohen), 127 Paul, Sherman, 153 Pelton, Edward W. & Frances N., 39 Pelton, Emily, 70, 225 Pelton, Fannie, 39–40 personality, Muir’s relationships with children and understanding of, 32 Phelan, James D., 138 Philippon, Daniel J., 7 philosophy. See spirituality; Transcendentalism photographs: and children in Muir’s life, 33; and images of Muir, 16, 106, 113, 155, 158, 162, 204, 254; and relationship between Muir and Burroughs, 203–5 Picturesque California (Muir), 71, 209 Pinchot, Gifford, 3, 109, 121–41, 144n13 Pinchot, James & Mary Eno, 128–29, 139 Pinus albiculis, 225 Pinus contorta, 225 Pinus ponderosa, 224, 225 Plumas National Forest, 6

politics. See environmental politics; public policy Polos, Nicholas C., 27n1 Post-Intelligencer (Seattle) 123, 124, 125 practice, and process in methodology of ecocriticism, 242–46 preservation movement: and debate between Muir and Pinchot on forest management, 134–41; and forestry in Muir’s time, 108–10; and Muir’s views on forestry, 112–14 Progressive Era, and conservation movement, 141 Public Education in California: Its Origins and Development, with Personal Reminiscences of Half a Century (Swett), 27n1, 29n35 public policy, influence of Muir on development of on wilderness, 169–96. See also environmental politics railroad barons, and Harriman expedition, 48 Raker Act of 1913, 181 Reagan, Ronald, 181 Reid, Harry Fielding, 207 religion: and ministerial career of George Wharton James, 84; and Muir’s childhood, 35. See also Bible; Calvinism; Disciples of Christ; Methodist Church; Pacific School of Religion; spirituality Roadless Area Conservation Rule, 114 Robbins, John, 192 Robertson, David, 238 romantic movement, art and poetry in nineteenth-century, 65 Ronald, Ann, 238 Roorda, Randall, 157, 165n22 Roosevelt, Theodore, 137, 180 Runkle, John Daniel, 177

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Sacramento Daily Union, 178 Sagebrush Rebellion, 122 Sagoff, Mark, 167n49 Sand County Almanac, A (Leopold), 238 San Francisco: and culture of Far West before 1900, 67; and damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley, 136–38, 181; earthquake and fire of 1906, 76–77, 137; Swett family and city directories of, 18 San Francisco Bulletin, 153 Sargent, Charles Sprague, 73, 130, 131, 132, 134, 138, 139–40, 198n12, 250 science. See botany; geology Scotland: and Muir’s cultural heritage, 29n40, 33, 35, 36, 69; Muir’s visit to in 1893, 3, 71–72 Scribner’s magazine, 156, 157 seascapes, Muir’s descriptions of, 263 Sellers, Col. A. H., 89, 90 Sellers, Fay, 90–91, 92, 93 Sequoia National Park, 110, 178, 181 Shadow Lake (California), 226, 227 Shasta, Mt., 197n4 sheep. See grazing Sierra Club: and automobile tourism in national parks, 162; and banquet hosted by Muir, 75; and campaign to save Hetch Hetchy, 73, 95; influence of on environmental politics, 181; Muir and founding of, 179; Muir and outing programs of, 157–59, 241; and Muir’s views on value and importance of forests, 119n36; and radicalism in environmental politics, 122 Sierra Club v. Secretary Morton, Department of Interior (1971), 189 Sierra Nevada: and Muir on ecological damage, 176; and Muir on forest conservation, 107; Muir’s trip to with William Keith, 69–71

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Sill, Edward Rowland, 223 Simms, Billy, 226 Simonson, Harold P., 156 sketching: and methodology of ecocriticism, 243–44; and Muir’s world tour, 259, 262. See also art Sloan, Kay, 213n3 Slovic, Scott, 238 Smith, Michael L., 150, 165n15 Solnit, Rebecca, 236 South (American): and Muir’s last journey, 4; and Muir’s walk to Gulf of Mexico, 2, 3, 45–46, 221, 251 South Africa, and Muir’s world tour, 257–58 South America: cancellation of Muir’s planned visit in 1868, 3; Muir’s travels to as part of last journey, 249–64 Spain, and Muir’s tour of Europe, 73 spirituality: botany and Muir’s, 4; and Carr’s view of nature, 226–27; and images of trees in Muir’s writings, 182–83, 187; in letters between Carr and Muir, 217–18; and Muir’s domestication of the sacred, 151–52, 153–54, 165–66n25; and Muir’s experience of Calypso, 2; and Muir’s identification with mountains, 150–51; utilitarian view of, 167n49. See also religion Spokesman-Review (Spokane), 123 Spreckels, Claus, 138 Starr, Kevin, 27n1 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 218 Story Line (Marshall), 236 Story of My Boyhood and Youth, The (Muir), 24–25, 33, 34, 36 storytelling, and Muir’s role as teacher, 50–52 Strain, Art, 23 Strenzel, John, 19–20, 23, 57

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Strenzel, Louie Wanda. See Muir, Louie Strenzel Sumara, Dennis, 236–37 Sutherland family, and Muir’s relationship with children, 42, 43 Sutter, Ruth E., 6 Swedenborgian Church, 79n22 Swett, Emily, 17, 24 Swett, Frank, 17, 21, 22, 23 Swett, Helen, 19, 51 Swett, John, 15–26, 27n1, 29n35, 70, 218 Swett, John French, 23 Swett, Margaret, 23, 54 Swett, Mary, 15–16, 16–17, 18–19, 20–21, 23–24, 24–25 Swett family, Muir’s relationship with, 3, 15–26, 51 Taft, William Howard, 137 Tenaya Canyon (Yosemite Valley), 226 Thiele, Leslie Paul, 163n1 Thoreau, Henry David, 2, 107, 152, 160, 164n12, 166n36, 174, 210 Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, A (Muir), 252 Tichi, Cecelia, 152 Time and Change (Burroughs, 1912), 212 tourism: and Muir’s Travels in Alaska, 210; and national parks in Muir’s late writings, 149–63; wilderness and Muir’s experience with, 197n5, 238–39. See also automobile tourism Tracy, Emily, 21 Tracy, Frederick Palmer, 18 Train, Russell, 121 Transcendentalism: influence of on Muir’s views of nature and forests, 107; and views of children, 34 travels, of Muir: summary of lifetime, 3–4; walk to Gulf of Mexico in 1867–1868, 1–3; with William Keith,

69–73; and world tour as last journey, 249–64. See also Alaska; Canada; Europe; Sierra Nevada; tourism; Yosemite Valley Travels in Alaska (Muir), 209 “tree-sitting” movement, 190–93 Tsuga mertensiana, 225 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 213n1 Tuolumne Canyon (Yosemite Valley), 224–25, 226 University of California, 26, 221 University of the Pacific, 5–9, 100 University of Wisconsin, 36, 216, 217 “unlimited contradiction,” and Muir’s literary techniques, 151–53, 160 Upham, Isaac, 19 Uruguay, and Muir’s world tour, 257 Utah, and Muir’s visit to Wasatch Mountains, 3 values: and influence of Muir on public policy on wilderness, 174; and Muir on forest conservation, 110–11 Vanderbilt, Amy, 31 Vanderbilt, George, 139 Vanderbilt, John, 31 Victoria, Lake (Kenya), 259 Victorian era: and Muir’s domesticity, 156; and representations of children, 34 Victoria regia (giant water lily), 256 von Humboldt, Alexander, 2, 251–52 Vroman, A. C., 90, 95 Walden (Thoreau), 152, 164n12, 166n36, 210 Wanderlust (Solnit), 236 Ward, Dr. Henry Chase, 230n3 Warren, James, 8

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Watkins, Carlton, 70 Watt, James, 121, 122 Wesling, Donald, 157 Whitman, Walt, 170, 210 Whitney, Mt. (California), 226 Wild California (film), 181 wilderness: and influence of Muir on development of public policy, 169–96; Muir as national spokesman for, 105; Muir’s appreciation of nature and, 107; Muir’s rejection of Puritan characterization of, 199n41; and Muir on tourism in national parks, 163, 164n9 Wilson, Woodrow, 137 Wisconsin: and Muir’s childhood, 36; Muir’s relationship with remaining family in, 38–39, 56; and Muir’s travels, 1, 3; and Muir’s views on forest protection, 108 Wisconsin Forestry Commission, 108 Wisconsin State Agricultural Society Fair, 216 Wise Use movement, 122 Wolfe, Linnie Marsh, 123, 124–25, 141, 142n2, 142–43n7, 156 women: Carr’s advocacy for education and rights of, 226; and child care in nineteenth century, 34; and Keith’s support for women’s suffrage, 80n35; and Mary Swett’s correspondence with women’s suffrage advocates, 25; references to children in Muir’s letters to, 32 Woolson, Abba G., 164n12 Worcester, Joseph, 79n22 World’s Work, The, 154 Wright, Mabel, 152, 153 Wright, Mt. (Alaska), 211

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writings, of Muir: and Burroughs on nature, 203–12; and Carr as mentor, 86, 217; and communication of personal response to nature, 174–75; domesticity, tourism, and national parks in late years of, 149–63; early influences on, 16n5; about forests and forest management, 105–16; and influence on environmental legislation, 176–82; and journals from world tour, 262–63; journals and letters as source materials for, 89–90; Mary Swett on, 18–19; methods for study of, 235–46; and relationship with children, 57; summary of published works, 5, 10n6; and use of trees in imagery and metaphor, 182–89, 193. See also biographies; journals; letters Wyatt, David, 166n36 Yale University, 196 Yellowstone National Park, 110 Yelverton, Therese, 41 Yosemite, The (Muir), 73, 90, 195 Yosemite National Park: and automobile tourism, 168n56; establishment of, 110, 112, 161, 178, 180–81; and Sierra Club’s outing program, 159. See also Yosemite Valley Yosemite Valley: Carr’s visit to Muir in, 222–28; John Swett’s trip to with Muir, 18; Merrill Moores and summer with Muir in, 46; Muir’s influence on protective legislation for, 177. See also Hetch Hetchy Valley; Yosemite National Park “Yosemite Valley in Flood” (Muir), 219 youth, and image of Muir, 261

Biography 2 Western History 2 Environmental History

2 Sally M. Miller is the former managing edi­ tor for publications at the John Muir Center for Regional Studies and professor emerita of history, University of the PaciWc, Stockton, California.

2 Daryl Morrison is head of special collections at the General Library at the University of California, Davis.

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com  2   1-800-249-7737

—from the Introduction

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“Muir’s orientation toward plants and trees,

what we might call his plant-mindedness, suf­ fused all he observed and experienced, as nature and wilderness revealed to him the inter­con­ nectedness of all life, woven in a carpet of transfused cells that gloriWed each other and in so doing manifest the work of God. “Let us then examine Muir through a lens ground here at the beginning of his journey in the Calypso borealis and, at the terminus, in the beauty of the Araucaria imbricata, to which he instinctively gravitated high on the western slope of the Andes. We will explore the inter­ vening years during which Muir experienced his path-Wlled pathless journey. Muir, as did his mentor and lifelong friend Jeanne Carr, would germinate friendships like wild­Xowers and would grow his family, whom he carried in his heart wherever he went. Through this lens of friends and family let us examine Muir as he wandered, cultivating awareness of wild­ erness and the preservation of wild, healthful, and scenic places as he grafted new plants, people, and places onto his person.”

Miller & Morrison

Jacket photo: John Muir, San Francisco, ca. 1872. Photographer: Bradley and Rulofson.©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. background: PhotoDisc/©Getty Images Jacket design: Kathleen Sparkes

Muir Insti­tute dedicated to promoting the legacy of the famed environ­ mentalist. These essays are papers presented at the institute in 2001. Ruth Sutter explores the friendship between John Muir and his neigh­ bor, John Swett, the innovative California educator. Daryl Morrison con­ siders the role Muir played in the lives of children and they in his. Ronald Limbaugh provides two essays: one describes the dispute about the pub­ lication of some of Muir’s most personal correspondence, while the other presents the friendship of Muir and landscape painter William Keith. Ronald Eber focuses on Muir as the national spokesman for American wilderness and forests. Char Miller highlights the interplay between John Muir and GiVord Pinchot in America’s nineteenth-century environmen­ tal movement. Daniel Philippon examines how Muir’s later domestic life changed his rhetoric and how he promoted the preservation of wilderness. Barbara Mossberg presents an overview of Muir’s vision of the value of wilderness necessary for America’s physical, spiritual, economic, and cul­ tural survival. James Perrin Warren describes how a shared experience on the Alaska Expedi­tion could bring naturalists Muir and John Burroughs closer in their ap­proach. Bonnie Johanna Gisel provides an account of an 1873 trip through the Tuolumne Canyon by John Muir and his friend and mentor, Jeanne C. Carr. Corey Lewis studies Muir’s methodology to understand and experience his Weldwork approach. Michael Branch focuses on Muir’s Wnal journey to explore South America and Africa. Each of these essays will bring new ideas for future study of John Muir.

John Muir

Since 1980 California’s University of the PaciWc has hosted the John

John Muir

2



edited by Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison

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