1,253 research outputs found
The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2010/2011
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PAGE 2 John Muir Back and Newsletter Going Digital After a year, we are back! Last year we announced that we would become an occasional newsletter, projecting two issues per year. We only released one issue this past year. In an age of high cost of reproduction and mailing we have decided to follow the trail of other newsletters by going digital. Those with e mail can continue to receive at no charge the newsletter as part of a web serve list. Simply e mail us at [email protected] and we will include you in our future announcements and you will receive a PdF version of the Newsletter. Those who do not have web access, please send us a short note requesting a hard copy of the Newsletter. We suggest a donation of nln 1 869: OYamhte, to tne AMmmll al JlLount Jy^olLmxxAt, eX&Q&n tnauAana LeeX, nian, tne, hiatve&t paint in wle. 6, iawun&n nvn LeeX, natie. net taucnea. From Mount Hoffman John Muir My First Summer in the Sierra By Terry G if ford Your \u27ramble\u27 up from the Valley To spend a night on this bare mountain, A steep ascent of five thousand feet, Left me breathless before I turned the page. And even starting from Snow Flat I was pleased to pause on a real chair (My first in weeks of boulder- seats) Left outside by the tree-stump table Amongst the cabins of May Lake Camp. Breathless from the final scramble And the view, looking down on Half Dome, Cloud\u27s Rest, far glaciers and Tenaya Lake, I sit quite still and meet the marmots Smiling eerily like cats as they creep Out from their crevices, expecting to be fed. Disgusted by these half-tame summit pets I turn and scree-slide down the dusty trail To bathe my legs in the clear May Lake. From: Terry Gifford, Reconnecting with John Muir (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 131. John Muir Event at Pacif April 13 On April 13, 2011, a special John Mur event will be held in the Janet Leigh Theater at University of the Pacific. From 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. photographer Scot Miller will give a presentation on his work in the illustration of the 100th anniversary edition of My First Summer in the Sierra. From 7:30 until 9:15 p.m., film maker Catherine Tatge of Global Village Media will give a brief introduction to her film John Muir in the New World . This is a biographical documentary of the extraordinary life of John Muir and his influence on American history. The 90 minute film, which is sched uled to be broadcast on the PBS American Masters series on April 18, will be shown after Ms. Tatge\u27s introduction. From 9:15 until 10:00 p.m. there will be a reception and book signing by Scot Miller.
Page 3 Mike Wurtz In the archives 2010 Online Inventory of Muir Papers is Updated By Michael Wurtz Holt-Atherton Special Collections University of the Pacific Library Recently, the staff of the Holt-Atherton Special Collections had announced the addition of thousands of John Muir correspondence to the web - library.pacific.edu/ha/muir and click on digitized material. This was added to images of Muir\u27s drawings, photographs, and journals. These digital assets have been a tremendous help to researchers around the world. However, there is still much of the collection that is not available online. Digitally scanning and loading the entirety of John Muir Papers and other collections would be a daunting task, so only the most useful and significant items are made available via the web at this time. In addition to all the new online material, we have updated the John Muir Papers finding aid. A finding aid, sometimes referred to as a finding guide, could be considered an inventory, table of contents, index, and annotated bibliography all in one. Collections that are the size and scope of the Muir Papers cannot be easily itemized. Atypical six inch box can hold over a thousand individual documents. To list and describe each of those items would take a great deal of time. Archivists have chosen to organize collections along the lines of what the creator (in this case, John Muir) intended. Once we have created the categories (such as letters, drawings, published materials, etc.) we describe them in slightly more specific terms, such as by date or location or subject. Then the researcher must request the items by folder or box. The online material represents the richest portion of the John Muir Papers. However, it is a minority of all the Muir material. The microform project that was completed in the 1980s includes much more of the collection, but still not every item. The entire collection resides at Holt- Atherton Special Collections in the University of the Pacific Library. How can the researcher find out about what is in the materials that are not accessible via the web or microform? The online finding aid is the answer. It lists the contents to every folder in the collection. For example, researchers will find that the Papers contain most of the collected bibliography of Muir as listed in Kimes\u27 John Muir: A Reading Bibliography. They will also find photographs that have been donated to the collection since the microform project was completed. In addition, the collection includes Muir biographer William F. Bade\u27s transcriptions of many of Muir\u27s Journals, as well as Bade\u27s collected reminiscences, and personal letters. One can also find Linnie Marsh Wolfe\u27s correspondence and papers as she wrote her biography of Muir, and her transcriptions of some of Muir journals. Papers from the Strenzel and Muir family including legal and business papers for the Muir ranch in Martinez are also available. There is also poetry to and about Muir; John Muir\u27s clipping files that he kept on many different topics and memorabilia that includes Muir\u27s odds and ends such as passenger lists, maps and botanical information from trips he took around the world. Researchers can also find a few real jewels within the John Muir Papers that have never made it to microform or online including photographs of construction of the Half Dome Cables Trail in 1919 and clippings on early California agriculture that were probably collected by Muir and his father-in-law, John Strentzel. To get to the finding aid for the John Muir Papers, visit library.pacific.edu/ha/muir/find and click on Finding Aid of the John Muir Papers. From the above website, researchers are invited to click on Related Collections. Here, researchers can see over a dozen finding aids to other Muir related collections that the University of the Pacific Library holds.
Page 4 Charles E. Swann\u27s Military Map of Kentucky and Tennessee www.davidrumsey.com &heJve, \A nathlna, nuyce, eXaauenl in. JLatwie, than a nvoumXain fivtteam, ana Void, id, tne, Ia/iaI s eXleA, daw.. . . (continued from page 1) Muir\u27s choices of routes, and through comparison to modern maps. Some of the maps examined were George Woolworth Colton\u27s 1869 Map of Kentucky and Tennessee, 9 A.J. Johnson\u27s 1866 Map of Kentucky and Tennessee, 10 as well as all the relevant, internet- available maps from the collections of the Library of Congress11, the David Rumsey collection of historical maps12, and the historical map archive of the University of Alabama.13 These comparisons show that the best available map from the era of Muir\u27s walk is Charles E. Swann\u27s 1863 Military Map of Kentucky and Tennessee. 14 Also valuable because it gives the names and characteristics of roads, is N. Michler\u27s 1862 Map of Middle and East Tennessee.15 The 1863 map Mountain Region of North Carolina and Tennessee by W. L. Nicholson and A. Lindenkohl16 has almost twice the scale and was useful for confirming the previous two maps. Finally, the General Topographical Map by Julius Bien & Co. was issued by the United States War Department in 1895, but it was part of an Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861- 1865 and seems to show features as they existed in 1865, not 1895. Sheet XV is the relevant map.17 None of these maps show features with the accuracy and scale with which we are familiar today. None of them show elevation contours; however the General Topographical Map of Julius Bien mentioned above depicts mountain- David Rumsey Map Collection r.........,n, I ous terrain through the use of hachures. The earliest maps that would today be considered topographic maps are the 30 minute quadrangles18 issued by the US Geological Survey in the 1890s. These were surveyed two or three decades after Muir\u27s walk, so they need to be used judiciously and in connection with the Civil War- era maps. Reconstructing the route In order to reconstruct Muir\u27s probable route, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf and Muir\u27s journal for the trip were searched for geographical clues, then a reasonable route was traced out on Civil War-era maps. That information was then transferred to topographical maps from the 1890s, and then transferred to modern maps. The result of this process has been recorded on Google maps.19 To see this map, go to http:// maps.google.com/ Click on search options. On the drop-down menu, select User-created maps. Type in John Muir Cumberland. Click on search maps. Then click on John Muir\u27s Crossing of the Cumberland to see Muir\u27s route and places visited along the way. This process is for the most part easier than it sounds, and while it cannot be and does not pretend to be exact, most individuals performing the process would come up with a very similar route; however a researcher possessing detailed local historical and geographical knowledge could probably improve the end result. According to Muir\u27s journal and A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, Muir passed through Burkesville, Kentucky on September 8. He (i.nriivil inttncjf.-Tphk.-il m,sp. Sh^r-1 XV. lull us Hkn A Co.r I itfe.., \.Y. (EH\u27J] ifw:*) The author found this map of the Cumberland drawn in 1895, but represents this area from the Civil War, to have provided the most detail of that area from the time that Muir passed through. (captured from the David Rumsey Map Collection website)
page 5 Google rn a PS John Muir Cumborl and Search Maps 6M Cmrtiom UlMUX Save 1oM» Mans Jolin Muir\u27s Crossln-g of Hie Cumberland My cost estimation ti4 ihe route t aken b| John Muir when he crossad tho Cumberland Plateau on 10.11, and 12 September 1 ST. Thw was pan of Mun\u27i wilh horn Lour*rfle. Kairtiicky.to Cedar h\u3ejr. Fkwde. 0\u3es.cnfced ^ Ins boor: *A Thousand-Mae Walk To 1h* GuT Red poioLert re-piesert towns v.s*ed bj Mini. Qfue\u3e poeTtera iapres*nl ailee to w* too ** to 901 b tew* of what Muir saw in 1867 Map by Dan Si yei. 7Z eiawa - Publ ic C» *!»d on Aug 38.2QB - Updated Mat 31 By Dan Slyer PM* Ineirtip-Will* tHrtrt»nt fftjftaaili KY Mun pasted through on 8 Septeenoir 1967 tjaraeslawn. 1H Muir passed through on 10 Seplerribe r 1887. ftnonuoirion. TH Howe ghost Irjwn Hur passed through in Che fflafleee] ol 17 Senteenbei 1967 t Kingston TN Mlui tie (Bit ten the night, of 1? Senlembar 1867 / Mull\u27. Wllle tnybesl eetlnwiion of the roule liken by John Mue wSoo ha ciassed the Cnmberland Placeau on 10. 11. and 12 Seplernoor 1867. This best eelmiatBd mule mosltp follows moderrt-datr roaoH, tot or places (a tf\u27T\u27 \u27 Blurts, rocknSut*s, natoril avclves. fpapa Cmk Sale Malum fraa 5tal* Natuul Area Jkichee and watereat* In Ihe 1356 Wwibuig (uadranuje, this lit! was called simply The Wideirwss 5 John Muir Cgmbe dand The author posted this user-created map of John Muir\u27s 1867 route through the Cumberland on Google maps. The map includes clickable points with information and photographs of places that Muir had visited. Instructions for finding this map online are included in the article. crossed the state line into Tennessee towards evening 20 on September 9. The next day, after a few miles of level ground 21 Muir walked upgrade with occasional views in which Kentucky was grandly seen 22 for six or seven hours 23 to reach the top of the Cumberland Plateau. He passed through Jamestown and as previously mentioned, spent the night with a blacksmith and his wife. On September 11 he walked a long stretch of level sandstone plateau 24 and was compelled to sleep with the trees in the one great bedroom of the open night. 25 Finally, on September 12 Muir breakfasted in Montgomery and descended the east slope of the Cumberland Mountains. He forded the Clinch 26 and reached Kingston before dark. 27 The Civil War-era maps show several routes from Burkesville to Jamestown, but the most direct route, the route that would be more in Kentucky than in Tennessee,28 the only route that would give a view north to Kentucky while climbing the plateau, and the only route that is level until one long steady climb to the top of the plateau, is the route through Albany, Kentucky and Pall Mall, Tennessee. In the author\u27s opinion, the only plausible ^oute from Jamestown to Montgomery is the Pile Turnpike. Montgomery, now a ghost town but then the Morgan County Seat, was then located on the upper reaches of Emory River, just west of Wartburg. From Montgomery to Kingston, the only practicable route is east through Wartburg, then branching southeast at Crooked Fork and proceeding northeast of Bitter Creek. This road reaches Emory Iron Works on the watercourse variously known as Emory Creek, or Little Emory Creek, or Little Emory River (its modern name). This route then descends through a gap in Wal- den Ridge on the left bank of the Little Emory, and finally fords the Emory and Clinch Rivers in the lowlands east of the plateau. In the text of A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, the eloquent... mountain stream 29 crossed by Muir on September 12 is identified parenthetically as the Emory River. However the mountain stream is unnamed in his journal. The gorge of the Emory River, as it descends from the plateau, is so rugged that no road followed it in 1867 and no road follows it even today. The author asserts that the name was inserted incorrectly either by Muir or by editor William Frederic Bade long after the trip,30 and that the eloquent mountain stream is actually the Little Emory River. JLe
Page 6 A y^/^ •&&** w \u27*ZSZ~L^M~ —S5
PAGE 7 Cystopteris (bladder fern) One of the plants mentioned by Muir From: luirig.altervista.org seat of Jamestown. Indeed, even today the telephone book shows that there are three households named Livingston in Jamestown. And all of them live near the author\u27s estimated route south of downtown Jamestown! At this point the author reached a dead end toward a solution of the blacksmith question, as many Fentress County records were lost during a 1905 courthouse fire. However, a determined seeker armed with local records and local knowledge might be able to uncover more. A visit today In his thousand-mile walk, Muir sought out the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find. 34 The geographical route Muir took is no longer particularly wild, leafy, or untrodden. Anyone wishing to recreate Muir\u27s journey will need to take side trips away from Muir\u27s geographical route to glimpse his spiritual route through the wild, the leafy, and the least trodden. John Muir\u27s Crossing of the Cumberland 35 suggests more than two dozen sites to visit, from waterfalls to overlooks to springs to virgin forests. It is interesting to note that the thousand- mile route taken by Muir is not the route taken by the present-day John Muir Trail, which runs for 42 miles in the Cumberland Plateau through Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area and adjoining Pickett State Forest. Nor is it the route taken by the John Muir National Recreation Trail, which runs for 21 miles along the north bank of Hiwassee River within Cherokee National Forest in eastern Tennessee. These two trails were named to acknowledge Muir as an early naturalist walker in the area, not to recreate his precise route. Acknowledgement The author is grateful for the help of Willie R. Beaty, President of the Fentress County Historical Society in Jamestown, Tennessee, who suggested some profitable avenues of investigation. Also to Wil Reding of Kalamazoo, Michigan who with his wife Sarah Reding retraced the thousand-mile walk route on 5 May to 25 June 2006, suggested improvements to a late draft of this article. ENDNOTES 1. Digitized images of Muir\u27s notebooks are available through http://librarv.pacific.edu/ha/ digital/muiriournals/muiriournals.asp See journal number 1, images 9 through 13. 2. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, ed. William Frederic Bade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916). Reprinted in John Muir, The Wilderness Journeys, ed. with introduction by Graham White (Edinburgh: Canon- gate Classics, 1996) 3. Ibid., (1916), p. 17; (1996), ed. White, p. 9. 4. Ibid., (1916), p. 22; (1996), ed. White, p. 11. 5. Ibid., (1916), p. 29; (1996), ed. White, p. 14. 6. Bonnie Johanna Gisel, ed., Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr, (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), pp. 57-59. 7. Muir, op. cit., (1916), p. 15; (1996), ed. White p. 8. 8. Ibid., (1916), p. 30; (1996), ed. White, p. 15. Muir\u27s Houghton-Mifflin editor, William Frederick Bade identified the river in brackets as [Emory River]. 9. George Woolworth Colton\u27s 1869 Map of Kentucky and Tennessee (scale 1:1,584,000) is available through http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/ us states/kentuckv/index.html It shows a road running from Montgomery, Tennessee to Kingston, Tennessee, along the west bank of the Emory River. The road shown on this map supposedly crossed Obed\u27s River just before that river joins with Emery\u27s River. Modern names for these rivers are Obed River and Emory River. Modern maps show that this supposed road would have to descend a 400-foot cliff to reach the Obed and then immediately ascend a 400-foot cliff on the other side. Colton\u27s map also shows Clear Creek emptying into the Obed upstream of Daddy\u27s Creek, whereas modern maps show that the reverse is correct. No other map of that era shows this road. 10. A.J. Johnson\u27s 1866 Map of Kentucky and Tennessee (scale 1:1,521,000) is available at the same web site listed in note #9. It shows a road direct from Kingston, Tennessee to Madisonville, Tennessee. 11. http://memorv.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/ gmdhome.html 12. http://www.davidrumsey.com/ 13. http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/ historicalmaps/index.html 14. Charles E. Swann, Military Map of Kentucky and Tennessee, 1863, scale 1:350.000 Available throughhttp:// www.davidrumsey.com/maps2433.html http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3951s.cs0216800 no tonxx^A, •pa/i/tiou.- ta/ttu, -\\kia, tWtXu-, qa, unviaOG^n. Had Muirwalked this same route 143 years after he did, he would have plenty of food options. This Hardee\u27s fast food restaurant on the Knoxville Highway in Wartburg, TN is probably only a few steps off the thousand mile walk to the Gulf. (Used with permission from the Fisherman\u27s Quartet website http:// thefishermansquartet.com November 18,2010
Page 8 Schrankia, (sensitive briar) One of the plants mentioned by Muir kansasnativeplantsociety.org 15. N. Michler, Map of Middle and East Tennessee, 1862, scale 1:235,000. Available through http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/ g3962t.cws00162 16. W.L Nicholson and A. Lindenkohl, Mountain Region of North Carolina and Tennessee, 1863, scale 1:633,600. Available through http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3900.cw0053000 17. Julius Bien & Co., General Topographical Map, sheet XV, United States War Department, 1895. Scale 1:633,600. Available through http://www.davidrumsev.com/detail?id=l-l- 26982-1100281 18. These U.S. Geological Survey 30 minute quadrangles (scale 1:125,000) are relevant: Wartburg, Tennessee, Edition of Mar. 1896. Topography by A.E. Murlin. Surveyed in 1893. Briceville, Tennessee, Edition of July 1896. Topography by J.F. Knight and E.C. Barnard. Surveyed in 1888-91. Loudon, Tennessee, Edition of Oct. 1895. Topography by F.M. Pearson 1884-5. Topography by C.E. Cooke 1891. Kingston, Tennessee, Edition of Mar. 1891. Topography by F.M. Pearson. Surveyed in 1884-5. Available through http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/ us_states/tennessee/topos/30mintopos.html 19. John Muir\u27s Crossing of the Cumberland. Available through http://maps.google.com/ Search User-created maps for John Muir Cumberland. 20. Muir, op. cit, (1916), p. 15; (1996), ed. White, p. 7. 21. Ibid., (1916), 22. Ibid., (1916) 23. Ibid., (1916). 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 15. 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid.. (1916), (1916), p. 16; (1996), ed. White, p. 7. p. 16; (1996), ed. White, p. 8. p. 16; (1996), ed. White, p. 8. p. 26; (1996), ed. White, p.13. pp. 29-30; (1996), ed. White, (1916), p. 31; (1996), ed. White, p.16. (1916), p. 32; (1996), ed. White, p.16. 28. About 25 miles in Kentucky and 10 miles in Tennessee, to the base of the plateau at Pall Mall. 29. Muir, op. cit, (1916), p. 30; (1996), ed. White, p. 15. 30. Although most of A Thousand-Mile Walk to The Gulf is a journal, wr
John Muir Newsletter, Summer 1995
No full textJohn Muir Newsletter summer 1995 university of the pacific volume 5, number 3 JOHN MUIR AND THE VAN DYKE RANCH: INTIMACY AND DESIRE IN HIS FINAL YEARS By Peter Wild (Editor\u27s note: Well-known author, poet, biographer and nature writer, Peter Wild is Professor of Modern Language at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The following paper is an outgrowth of his recent research on the Muir family in the Southwest. Part Two will be published in the next issue.) PARTONE When occasional gunfire erupted in the town, it could be heard at the nearby desert ranch, but that didn\u27t seem to bother Helen Muir. This is a beautiful day full of sunshine, and I am feeling sunshiny, too, Helen reassured herfather, John Muir (January 8,1908).\u27 I was very glad to get your all-well letter today, Muir responded from Martinez, at his orchard home in the San Francisco Bay area (January 9, 1908). Not many days before, Helen\u27s bout with pneumonia took a sharp turn for the worse, and Muir had made a desperate rush south with Helen in hopes that the warm, dry air of the Mojave desert would put his pallid daughter back on the path of recovery. Now the crisis, in an age when people regularly died of respiratory problems, seemed to be passing. Helen\u27s health would always be of concern, but in the main she grew ever more robust as the days passed into months. She came to love her new desert surroundings and eventually married a local rancher\u27s son. Such an upbeat exchange between father and daughter as marked the early correspondence of their separation beginning early in 1908 would be repeated overthe sixyears until Muir\u27s death in 1914. Duringthat time, Muir would take the train south to visit Helen, bounce his grandsons on his knee, regale the cowboys at the desert ranch with tales spun in his charming Scottish brogue and hand out boxes of pineapples, peaches, and cigars.2 Yet such happy letters often let slip hints of other, less pleasant matters churning under the surface of the hopeful Victorian prose flying between father and daughter. The truth is that Muir\u27s closing years were the most tumultuous of his mature life, and to probe such issues through letters and other documents gives a good measure of Muir both as a public figure and a private man. They show him to be a person, indeed, as his popular image suggested, rising with heroic strenuousness to wrestle with the national environmental problems of the day, writing doggedly in his final years to produce books that still stir nature lovers after almost a century, yet, less known, getting mired in the mundane afflictions that assail us all. Essentially, the problem was that Muir was getting old, and the cantankerous world was changing. Rude reality refused to conform to his bright vision of what it should be. Yet despite the pain and frustration this caused him, the dramatic loss of the biggest conservation battle of his life, the depths of his private loneliness for all his public acclaim, he would die a happy man, the comfort of any expiring writer, the manuscript of his next book nearly completed and laying beside him. Before that happened, unhappiness crept into Muir\u27s life. In 1905, he was living happily enough, surrounded by his wife, Louie, and his two daughters, Helen (continued on page 4)
1996 MUIR CONFERENCE PLANNING CONTINUES Be sure to mark your calendars for the special conference, John Muir in Historical Perspective, to be held April 18-21,1996. The planning committee is working on a three- day event, each day in a separate location to take advantage of the variety of Muir-related sites in Central California. Below is the tentative schedule: Thursday evening, April 18: Reception at John Muir National Historic Site, Martinez Friday morning, April 19: Academic sessions, John Muir National Historic Site Friday afternoon: Tours of Strentzel-Muir home, Muir Cemetary Saturday morning, April 20: Academic sessions, University of the Pacific, Stockton Saturday afternoon: travel to Yosemite National Park Sunday morning, April 21: Academic sessions, Yosemite Institute, Crane Flat Sunday afternoon: tour of Muir sites in Yosemite Valley Participants and guests will be invited to stay overnight at Martinez on Thursday. After Friday morning sessions and tours, they will travel to Stockton and stay overnight there. On Saturday afternoon, after morning sessions and a visit to the Holt-Atherton Library, home of the Muir Family Collection, the conference will recess so that participants may travel to Yosemite and spend the night at the Yosemite Institute in Crane Flat. On Sunday, following a morning academic session, they will have opportunity to visit several Muir sites in the Valley, and still have free time to enjoy the Park. The deadline for proposals is November 15. Tentative plans and locations may change, depending on the program committee\u27s recommendations and the success in developing the local arrangements. Outside funding will be essential. Any contributions, suggestions or comments will be most welcome and may be forwarded to: CHI96, John Muir Center for Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211. The conference invites proposals on any aspect of the theme. Proposals for papers and sessions should be forwarded, along with a brief resume, to the CHI 96 Program Committee, in care of its Co-Chairs, Professors Sally Miller and Ron Limbaugh, Department of History, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 by November 15,1995. Phone (209)946-2145;fax(209)946-2318. ELECTRONIC LETTERS Date: Wed, 31 May 199510:21:00 +0900 Subject: Muir and Buddhism To: [email protected] In the Spring 1995 issue of the John Muir Newsletter. Michelle L. Dwyer argues persuasively that Muir\u27s experience of and writings about Nature show strong affinities to Zen Buddhism. As I argued in my contribution to John Muir, Life and Work, I don\u27t think there can be any doubt about this point. Muir\u27s essential perception of reality is in conformance with the basic perceptions of Zen. This perception of Oneness, of undifferentiated existence, is basic not just to the three sects of Zen, but to Buddhism as a whole. Indeed, such identification with nature is at the heart of many spiritual traditions. Thoreau, even as early as his stay at Walden Pond, was experiencing such perceptions and identifying them, correctly, as common both to the Vishnu Purana and the sufi philosophy of Kabir. William James detailed many such ideas in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Certainly, as Ms. Dwyer says, Muir had no systematic knowledge of Zen, since the first glilmpse of Zen teachings didn\u27t reach America until the World Parliament of Religions atthe Chicago World\u27s Columbian Exposition in 1892. Most of Muir\u27s published work seems to be based closely on diaries written long before Zen could possibly have influenced him. But he was exposed much earlier to Vedic and Sufi influences through his Transcendentalist contacts. But there is no need to posit a direct teaching influence. These ideas are freely available within the mind and appear periodically in most or all religious traditions. Don Weiss, Ryozenji, Temple l.Bando 126, Oasa-cho, Naruto City, Tokushima-ken, JAPAN 779-02, e-mail PXQO [email protected] JOHN MUIR NEWSLETTER. VOL. V, NUMBER 3 SUMMER 1995 Published quarterly by the John Muir Center for Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 Editor Center Director Staff © Sally M. Miller R.H. Limbaugh This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper.
BOOK Mori no seija: Shizenhogo no chichi John Muir [A Saint in the Forest: The Father of NatureProtection John Muir]. ByKatoNoriyoshi. Yama-to-keikokusha. (Tokyo: 1995) 279 pp. ¥1600. Reviewed by KozyAmemiya, Sociologist Kato Noriyoshi, the author of this book, abandoned a publishing career in order to live in the mountains, and he now writes on the subject of nature while running a lodge. He visited the Giant Forest in the Sequoia National Park in the winter of 1992 when he was inspired to learn more about John Muir, who has been little known in Japan. The result is this book, written as an introduction for the Japanese audience to Muir, the father of wilderness protection. It is not easy to write a book on Muir in such a way that would make sense to a Japanese audience unfamiliar with American history and geography. Mr. Kato takes up this task by narrating Muir\u27s life in chronological order against the historical backdrop supported by geographical descriptions, and succeeds at least in painting an overall picture of Muir\u27s accomplishments. Kato reconstructs Muir\u27s life around several external factors. First is Muir\u27s childhood in Scotland, especially his strolls in the field with his grandfather, to which Kato attributes Muir\u27s love of nature. Secondly, attendance at the University of Wisconsin provided Muir with basic scientific training and life-long mentors. The third and most significant factor is his accidental arrival in Yosemite whose magnificent beauty enraptured Muir. His glacier theory as to the creation of the Yosemite Valley is the fourth factor and the highlight of Muir\u27s career as a Yosemite specialist. Muir\u27s married life and his political campaigns for congressional protection of Yosemite and other wilderness areas are the last factors considered. Muir is depicted as a fiercely independent individual who wholeheartedly devoted himself to the wilderness and to his family. Muir is also contrasted with nature philosophers of the East Coast elite and with scientists in academic institutions. Notwithstanding all this, the picture of Muir, the man, remains superficial and does not fully come to life. The problem is that Kato\u27s description of Muir often falls into a trite portrait of an eccentric. As a result, Muir\u27s personal and professional lives are not integrated into the larger cultural context. Nor does Kato discuss Muir\u27s ideas about nature in depth and in what way they are related to the various ideologies of the environmental protection movement. For a Japanese reader to understand Muir, it is important that an author provide a basic grasp of American ideas about nature and wilderness as well as an exploration of how they might differ from Japanese ideas. For example, did Muir regard nature as basically at odds with human beings and in need of human protection? Were Muir\u27s ideas about nature and wilderness in line with or REVIEWS different from that of American mainstream thinkers? Does nature mean the same as shizen, a favorite concept of the Japanese? How does wilderness, to which the Japanese language has no exact equivalent, differ from nature? Without thinking about these questions, it will be difficult for a Japanese to understand the social and cultural meaning of national parks in the American context and to appreciate Muir\u27s work. This book explores John Muir\u27s achievements. Without discussions of Muir\u27s ideas on the relationship between nature and human beings, however, it does not sufficiently explain what propelled Muir in his pursuits. As the Japanese take more interest in the environmental protection movement in the United States, they will demand a book to help them understand Muir in greater depth. Until then, this book will serve as a fair introduction to Muir. Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County Since World War II. Edited by Rob Kling, Spencer Olin and Mark Poster. (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1995) (paperback). Reviewed by Roy Childs, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of the Pacific (Editor\u27s Note: The John Muir Newsletter, with its focus on Muir and the environment sometimes finds that important work on urban and suburban developments merit attention. An example is the book considered below.) As this title suggests, the authors in this collection see the emergence of an urbanized Orange County late in the twentieth century as a phenomenon distinctly different in its spatial, economic and social patterns from urban centers which developed earlier. The resulting multinucleated metropolitan region may superficially resemble the stereotypical twentieth century suburb, but the reality is quite different. Hence, they apply the term \u27postsuburban\u27 to urbanized Orange County. The chapters in the book discuss the rise of Orange County\u27s postsuburban form as an element of post-industrial society, explain the economic forces responsible for this form, examine the resulting socioeconomic, occupational, and lifestyle consequences, and discuss the political dynamics, more or less in that order. The volume has value as a case study of Orange County and the kind of urban area it seems to epitomize, but has at least equal value as a discussion of contemporary urban theory. For, to make the argument that Orange County represents a new phenomenon, Kling, Olin, Poster and other contributing authors must critique existing theory as it applies to the Orange County case, and attempt new paradigms to frame the data they present. These discussions may prove as useful to the serious reader as the case study itself. (continued on page 6)
(continued from page 1) and Wanda, while managing the extensive orchards in Martinez. In June, however, Helen became seriously ill, and Muir\u27s life took a turn for the worse. Together with her elder sister, Wanda, Muir took Helen to Arizona to benefit from the bright sunshine and high desert air. Barely settled there, the three received word that Louie also was seriously ill. John Muir and Wanda rushed back to Martinez, only to stand by helplessly as Louie died in August. Now the family not only was weakened but split, with Helen remaining in Arizona because of her illness, while John and Wanda took turns traveling back and forth to stay with her. To complicate matters, Wanda married in 1906. Thereality of Muir\u27s vision of a stable Victorian home was disintegrating.3 For the rest of his life he would battle to shore up what had, to a large degree, already fallen apart. In his last extant letter to Helen, Muir was still lamenting: If I could only have you and Wanda as in the lang syne ... (Decembers, 1914). Adding to his woes, the growing city of San Francisco stepped up plans to enlarge its water supply. This would mean invading Yosemite National Park to create a reservoir inHetch-Hetchy Valley, one of the loveliest of the Sierra\u27s jewels. Bad enough in itself, this could be an alarming precedent, a license to violate other national parks for the real or imagined needs of an expanding economy. In response, Muir rallied the incipient conservation movement, rousing the nation to protest the invasion. Yet, despite years of exhausting activism and several near successes, Muir discovered that it was not enough to be on the side of the angels. Bankrolled by the proponents of growth, the politicians won out. Another battle lost.4 In short, during the closing years of his life, Muir was a torn man. As a youth exploring the Sierra in the 1870s, he may have been possessed by a genuine inner calm, but now in his seventies, he sat on his estate in sometimes foggy and chill Martinez, grieving for his lost wife and deceased friends, and depressed with loneliness.5 Usually not a man to complain, on February 13,1913, Muir wrote openly to James Whitehead. Briefly catching up his boyhood friend on the events of the decades, Muir concluded that his wife had died ... long years ago ... and that his two daughters were married. That left him ... alone in a large house with only books and hard literary work for companions. Feeling at loose ends as he shuffled around the big, empty house, he fretted over Helen\u27s health, while the hounds of the Hetch-Hetchy conflict constantly bayed, reminding him that what he had accomplished for wilderness preservation might be undone in one swoop. In the midst of this, plagued now by his own coughing assaults, he struggled to rouse himself, to find the energy and mental clarity to write what he knew would be his final books. At one point his friends saw illness and depression looming so large about him that a worried J. E. Calkins discussed Muir\u27s condition at length with fellow Sierra Club member A. H. Sellers. Calkins feared that ... we shall never have much more writing... from Muir before he ... crosses the Great Range (March 23,1908). One thing brought Muir through, and if to our far more skeptical age it smacks of cliche, it brought him through nonetheless. Time and again, when the Hetch-Hetchy affair looked bleak or when Helen again had a brush with death, Muir\u27s nineteenth-century optimism rescued him. It blended two impulses. Along with other Christians of the day weary of a constantly chiding and scowling God, Muir defanged his earlier Christianity of its hellfire and spun his beliefs into a rosy gauze, the generalized hope for abetter life now assured by a vague but avuncular Providence. Reinforcing this optimism was the transcendentalism popularized by the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. Again conveniently vague, making up with good feelings what it lacked in bothersome specifics, the attitude placed faith in intuition as the means to truth. It was an effervescent approach to nature-decades before Muir had called nature the great book full of priceless knowledge (September 13,1865). In this yeasty view, to study a leaf or to revel in the grand prospect of snowy peaks was to catch glimpses of nothing less than the face of God. Thus, taking all this together, Muir gives solace to a recent widow that her beloved husband now is in ... abetter world ... (ca. May 26,1914). MuirwritestheHookerfamily,rejoicingthatthey have found refuge in the ... healing, soothing mountains (June 13,1911). In fact, nature could be so efficacious that he urges Helen to leave home for a while and ... camp out under the pines ... as a cure for her baby\u27s teething (June 15,1911). And even when the Hetch-Hetchy battle is all but lost-and at the same time, the Kaiser\u27s army is marching roughshod across Europe-Muir consoles former Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson that though things may look bleak now, ... we are making some slight progress heavenward ... and someday ... man to man the worldo\u27er shall brothers be... (September 17,1914). Not that John Muir was a fool. A realistic businessman when need be, he could cut a sharp deal with a publisher or honestly best his fellow orchardists in Martinez. During harvest time, a train stopped at the local station and in the twilight hours dropped off packing crates for the growers. On such days, Muir rose early, to be sure he\u27d be first at the platform and get his pick of the best boxes. However, despite the practicality, Muir also had the good fortune of a salving, overarching philosophy to get him through his nights. Not that those nights were all dark. Muir was swamped with letters begging for photographs and autographs and assaulting him with their authors\u27 poetic efforts, conferring honorary degrees on him, inviting him to speak at this confab and that. Mail from admirers to their wilderness hero often began with high praise, then quickly shifted into requests for advice about intimate personal problems explained in pages of painful detail. Or they reminisced about meeting Muir briefly on the trail decades before. None of that shillyshallying, whining, or lightly veiled ingratiation for John M. Pfautz, a robust fan writing from Lisbon, Iowa. Leaving his rival eulogists far behind, he opened directly
with In my eyes you are Gods [sic] beloved Apostle ... (undated; ca. 1914). The naive and unrestrained adoration might have chafed a more sophisticated and less patient man but, taking it all with cheerful appreciation, Muir penned gracious responses. Then, too, on the positive side, if his writing was coming hard, nonetheless it was coming along. The sales of My First Summer in the Sierra, for example, proved so lucrative that publishers were vying for his next book, which of course delighted Muir (June 25,1911). Even Helen\u27s illness, dire affliction that it was, had unforeseen benefits. Muir tended to be a cave bear when he wrote. While the Bay fog swirled around the big house in Martinez, he holed up in his study, for weeks on end fussing to turn his mass of irascible notes into polished prose. Helen\u27s illness got Muir out, forcing him to travel south. There, he renewed old friendships and made new ones among the heady literati typified by Southwestern booster Charles F. Lummis. Particularly important in this regard was the city of Pasadena, then a cultural center in Southern California, with Vroman\u27s bookstore on 60 East Colorado Street serving as a lively gathering place.6 Representing the cream of the intellectual set there was Muir friend Adam Clark Vroman himself, a bibliophile and pioneer photographer of Southwestern Indians.7 Rather different and mildly eccentric was Muir\u27s fellow conservationist-at-arms Theodore P. Lukens. A pioneer in successful reforestation but also an enthusiast for some ill- fated adventures--be they mastering the intricate evils of learning to drive a car8 or trying to make twisting eucalyptus trees defy their nature and grow into a crop of future telephone poles\u27—Lukens nevertheless prospered, becoming the mayor of Pasadena and leading the charge against Hetch- Hetchy from the southern part of the state. Not that Muir\u27s joy was unadulterated. Helen developed typhoid and, though eventually she regained her strength, for a while she was dangerously ill in a Los Angeles hospital (April 2,1909). Addingto the mountaineer\u27s worries at the time was a sleazy game played by Geo
The John Muir Newsletter, Spring 2013
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PAGE 2 F o Andrea Wulf unding Garden Speaks e r s AT o N P A C I F I C On February 27, prize-winning author Andrea Wulf spoke on the subject of Founding Gardeners: How the Revolutionary Generation Created an American Eden. The talk was sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa, the University Library, and John Muir Center and attracted more than eighty faculty, staff, students, and community members, many of the latter members of Master Gardeners. Born in India of German parents on assignment to the equivalent of our own Peace Corps, Wulf grew up in Germany and earned her first degree in Cultural Studies and Philosophy at the University of Luneburg in 1996. Since then, she has made Britain her home, earning a second advanced degree in the History of Design at the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2005, she published This Other Eden, Seven Great Gardens and Three Hundred Years of English History, co- authored with Emma Biegen-Gamal, released by Little Brown and adapted into a six-part mini-series on BBC radio. In 2008, Brothers Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession was released by William Heinemann in the UK and by Alfred Knopf here in the United States in 2009. It won the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award and was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Price, the most prestigious non-fiction award in theU. K. In 2011 she published Founding Gardeners: How the Revolutionary Generation Created an American Eden, again through Heinemann in the U. K. and Knopf here in the U.S. It not only made the New York Times Best Seller List, but was described by a reviewer in the Times as an illuminating and engrossing new book by the Washington Post as lively and deeply researched history. Last year, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens appeared in seven languages. Described by the Boston Globe as a book both astrophysicists and poets can understand, Wulf retells the story of scientists and philosophers following the infrequent transit of Venus in modern times. She has received a number of prestigious fellowships in the past decade, including three years at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello; a White House History Fellowship through the Organization of American Historians and the White House Historical Association. Currently she is the Eccles British Library Writer-in- Residence and lives in London. Her most recent project and the reason she came to Pacific is her interest in John Muir. She is Andrea Wulf at Pacific on February 27,2013 currently working on The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt\u27s New World, to be published by Knopf in 2015. Von Humboldt\u27s influence on John Muir will be a chapter in this book. The talk on Founding Gardeners focused on the impact of John (1699-1777) and son William Bartram (1737-1823) as seed and plant collectors on better known political figures from the Revolutionary generation; notably Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, and James Madison. Described by famed Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus as the greatest natural botanist in the world, John Bar- tram\u27s garden within the city of Philadelphia provided Europeans and Americans with seeds from North American species. Wulf argues that gardening was much more than just a hobby for the four political giants in her study. Planting American species, the design of landscapes, and attitudes about green space generally reflect an Americanized approach quite different from the formal gardens of England and the continent. Connecting the Revolution with ideas of the founding fathers on the ideal farm and garden, Wulf concludes that democracy and an appreciation of American forests and wilderness are part of the formula that evolved through the process and practice of planting colonial and early National gardens. Wulf will return in 2014 to present on Alexander von Humboldt\u27s influence on John Muir.
Page 3 Archivist Sea R C H I N RIGHT Muir J T R A N S C Pro s Corner G FOR THE word: O U R N A L R I P T I O N J E C T By Michael Wurtz , Archivist Holt-Atherton Special Collections University of the Pacific Library Have you ever wanted to probe deep into the mind of John Muir? Read his own thoughts immediately after he conjured them? How about search his thoughts to see if he ever wrote about bears or avalanches? The staff of Holt- Atherton Special Collections, the home of The John Muir Papers, has started a project to transcribe the Muir journals so we can get in his mind. For years we have been able to read his thoughts in his books which have been edited and polished for public consumption. The Sierra Club transcribed those books into their website so researchers can read the books online or search for words in the text. Researchers can find this sort of search functionality in Google Books as well. In 2008, the staff of Holt-Atherton Special Collections had John Muir\u27s correspondence transcribed and scanned for the world to read. The letters are closer to Muir thoughts than the books. The transcriptions not only help with legibility issues of reading Muir\u27s ideas, but also make them searchable for keywords. A year earlier in 2007, the staff scanned Muir\u27s 78 known journals and put them online too. They were not transcribed, since they consisted primarily of faded pencil and cursive writing, and were occasionally written out in many directions on a single page. Only the most devoted Muir fans and researchers were ready to decipher his writing. Stephanie LeMenager, Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, recently took an interest in Muir\u27s journal documenting his trip Tunf»* Mj-ch l*H. QMwqiM Prnom*UOmM The glofr i( ^| la everywhere How could Moses uks the cetelast Shoh ii8 t^y Glory ~D1sm1 Swamp\u27 no suet, place in net Sweeps a» peopled with plants CE the purest beajty s glow in their darkest heei ;he across the Isthmus of Panama in 1868. She meticulously transcribed the 8 pages of Muir\u27s almost illegible writing (the transcription can be found in these pages two years ago). Then we took her transcription and added it to the online journal scans. Now researchers wondering about Muir\u27s mention of God in his journals can find, The glory of God is everywhere. How could Moses make the request, \u27show me the glory.\u27 Earlier, the director of the John Muir Center, Bill Swagerty, worked with students to transcribe for publication the World Tour journals. Although these were only 5 journals of 78, we took it as a beginning. Fortunately, between Muir\u27s early biographers, William Bade and Linnie Marsh Wolfe, many of Muir\u27s journals were transcribed- obviously not with a computer, but with a typewriter. Bade took some editorial liberties, and Wolfe would sometimes only transcribe bits and pieces of journals, but their intentions were good, and those journal transcriptions were much more legible and accessible for reading and eventual publication. The Bade and Wolf transcriptions have formed the core of a long-term transcription project that the staff of Holt-Atherton Special Collections has started. With the aid of student workers, we are entering the transcriptions into the online journals. Over the last couple of years, we have added legible and word- searchable text to almost 20 Muir journals. What can you do to help transcribe the rest of the journals? Visit go.pacific.edu/ specialcollections, navigate to Muir\u27s journals, choose a page - any page - of untranscribed journal, and take a crack at it. There is a comments link at the bottom of each page to which you can add your new found text. If you feel more comfortable with email, send us what you have along with the journal and page number, and we will add your transcription to our online journals. The value of this kind of project is the expanded access to Muir\u27s thoughts as he first experienced them, and to make them word searchable. Join us! ex stepping an ants [5«ol i.a n-rt cruet tn s-i ill if} over Che great \u3e i Little of its Burfarre t : - \u27 i qoinq in the forests ■ Side-by-side, the legible and word searchable text and a scan of a page from Muir\u27s 1868 journal describing his trip across the Isthmus of Panama. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library. © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.
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page 5 younger years.18 As Muir grew older, however, his dream now became a resolve: a long botanical ramble through...to South America. 19 Journals of his travels to Chile and Zimbabwe are emotionally engaged in a way that makes clear how rewarding he found these travels. 20 After his last journey through those mysterious and exciting countries, Muir himself considered it among the most important [trips] of his life and the fulfillment of a dream of decades. 21 It was not until the last years of his life that Muir could make his dreams come true and travel to his long sought-after destinations. In Chile, Muir\u27s main goal was to find the rare monkey puzzle tree. In Santiago, he went to the botanical gardens to search for information concerning Araucaria imbricata.22 In the middle of November, Muir was taken to the forests [he had] so long wished to see by a kind American sawmill owner.23 Once he was among the forests of the A. imbricata that he had so long dreamed of, it seemed familiar. 24 . th Muir had dreamed of the monkey puzzle tree for so long that once he saw this forest of them in Chile, they seemed familiar. November 1911-March 1912, Trip to South America, Part III, and Trip to Africa, John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library. © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. There were various reasons Muir wanted to travel to Africa some of which were to tour one of the only parts of the world he had not yet visited; to observe native African flora; to see the wildlife of the central African plains; and, to reach the headwaters of the Nile. 25 Although there were many reasons to visit the huge continent, Muir\u27s main mission was to find the enormous Adansonia digitata, better known as the African baobab, which he longed to see.26 Zimbabwe gave Muir the opportunity to see this magnificent tree in person. The day he found the tree was a wonderful day, wonderful in many ways; one of the greatest of the great tree days of my lucky life. 27 For Muir, the chance to see such rare and glorious trees was reason enough to travel across the world. Another tree that Muir had longed to see was the Baobab. One of the greatest of the great tree days of my lucky life. November 1911- March 1912, Trip to South America, Part III, and Trip to Africa. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library. ©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. Muir wanted to observe the creations and landscapes made by God and he traveled and grew stronger and richer in the knowledge of God\u27s earth in each journey he made.28 His main goal in life was to see, learn, and appreciate all of Nature\u27s creations until his dying day. Since God allowed him to regain his vision after the accident in 1867, he spent the rest of his time seeing the truth and beauty inherent in the world. 29 Although his travels had scientific, political, and literary purposes, his journeys were all spent seeking the pleasures one finds in the cathedrals of God. Ariadna Hernandez was born in Guanajuato, Mexico as the eldest of three daughters. At the age of three her family migrated to the United States. Her father was a field worker and was greatly interested in nature. He transferred his passion of all living creatures to her as a young girl, as well as a love for reading. She graduated from Lincoln High School in Stockton, CA and is now a 3rd year Environmental Science major here at the University of the Pacific.
Page 6 ENDNOTES 1. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (NY: Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 377. A map of Muir\u27s global travels is found in Gretel Ehrlich, John Muir: Nation\u27s Visionary (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2000), pp. 18-19. 2. Michael Branch, John Muir\u27s Last Journey (Washington DC: Island Press, 2001) p. xxviii. 3. ibid., p. xxix. 4. Letter from John Muir to Jeanne Carr, 1867 May 2. John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections © 1984 Muir Hanna Trust. 5. John Muir, Travels in Alaska (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1915; 1998 edition) p. 3. 6. Worster, Passion for Nature, p. 247. 7. Muir, Travels in Alaska, p. 110. 8. ibid., p. 246. 9. Worster, Passion for Nature, p. 377. 10. John Muir, World Tour, unpublished journals transcribed by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, edited by W. R. Swagerty, John Muir Papers, Holt- Atherton Special Collections © 1984 Muir Hanna Trust, Published in the John Muir Newsletter, 6 parts, 2005-2008. See Part I. 11. World Tour, Part I. 12. ibid. 13. Worster, Passion for Nature, p. 380. 14. Muir, World Tour, Part V. 15. Worster, Passion for Nature, p. 383. 16. Muir, World Tour, Part V. 17. Muir references these two explorers in Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, c. 1912, 1916 ed.), p. 207. Park (1771-1806) was a Scottish surgeon who in 1795 was supported by the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa to discover the course of the River Niger. His book, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa was published in 1799 and was widely read. On Humboldt\u27s influence on Muir and others, see Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006), especially chapters 8-9. Also see Michael Branch, John Muir\u27s Travels to South America and Africa, in John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures, ed. Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), pp. 249-65. 18. This story is repeated by Muir and his editor, William Frederic Bade in Story of My Boyhood and Youth, pp. 360ff; and in Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1916), pp. 143-68. 19. Branch, John Muir\u27s Last Journey, p. xxix. ibid., p. 102. ibid., p. xxiii. p. 110. p. 114. p. 115. p. 129. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. ibid., ibid., ibid., ibid., ibid. ibid., p. 147. Muir, World Tour, Part III. Worster, Passion for Nature, p. 112. SAVE THE DATE John Muir Symposium, March 21-22, 2014 Join us on the 150\u27\u27 anniversary or the Yosemite Grant, tne 100* anniversary or Muir\u27s death, ana the 50\u27\u27 anniversary or the passage or the Wilderness Act to revisit John Muir\u27s lire and legacy. University oi the Paciiic -will host the 60** Caliiornia History Institute on the Stockton campus irom Friday, March 21, through Saturday, March 22. Expect to hear papers by new Muir scholars currently working Muir\u27s legacy, as well as several ramiliar names \u27who have become regulars at Muir symposia. Plenary sessions and keynotes will be given by three scholars now living in the U. K.: Terry Girrord, Graham White and Andrea Wulr. A special exhibit on the history or the Muir Papers and their present locations is planned, as well as coordinated rield trips berore and alter the symposium. Ir interested in presenting or attending the conrerence, please contact : wswagertv (Sparine. edu
Page 7 Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Fest at Pacific Hosted by Sustaining Pacific & John Muir Center Thursday, April 11th, 2013 6-8:30PM rsily ol ihe Pacific, 3601 Pacific Avenue, Wendell Phillips Cenltr \u3et _ 6:00-6:30 PM Reception ■ 6:30-7:30 PM Films - Intermission 7:45-8:30PM Films Free and Open to the Public SfemCkib • Group patattoni Cevth Omy FutVeJ Baggi Tract Community nvm Dr. Shanna Eller, Director of Sustainability at Pacific and Lucy Kramer, an Environmental Studies major at Pacific, together with W. Swa- gerty of Muir Center, recently applied for a grant to host an environmental film festival through the South Yuba Citizens\u27 League (SYRCL) of Ne vada City, CA. Supported by Patagonia, CLIF Bar, Mother Jones, and Sierra Nevada Brewing, partners with Pacific include Friends of the Lower Calaveras, The Delta-Sierra Group within the Sierra Club, Stockton Earth Day Festival, and the Boggs Tract Community Farm. Exhibits will be mounted by partners in WPC\u27s courtyard and films selected by students from an available list of over sixty documentaries will be shown in WPC 140 on campus on Thursday, April 11 from 6 PM to 8:30 PM. The films are all short and range from following The Man Who Lived on His Bike across an entire year to a biography of Georgena Terry, founder of Terry Bicycles, who revolutionized that industry by creating a frame specific to a woman\u27s body; to an Afghan-produced film, Skateistan, highlighting co-educational opportunities for learning to skateboard in that part of the world; to Timber, a film by Adam Fisher on responsible versus irresponsible use of natural resources; to The Way Home, a journey in Yosemite National Park with the Amazing Grace 50+ Club of Los Angeles; to Chasing Water, a film based on photographer Pete McBride\u27s attempt to follow irrigation water from his family\u27s Colorado ranch down to the sea along the Colorado River. The event is free and open to the public with refreshments provided. ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL 9
SIGN UP FOR THE ELECTRONIC VERSION BY CONTACTING: THE JOHN MUIR CENTER University of the Pacific 3601 Pacific Avenue Stockton, California 95211 ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED ~T~ ~r ~r -j. . i V rv \u3eV- v\u3e The John Mu Center The John Muir Center promotes the study of John Muir and environmental- ism at the University of the Pacific and beyond. Center Objectives As one of California\u27s most important historical figures, John Muir (1838- 1914) was a regional naturalist with global impact. His papers, housed in the library\u27s Holt-Atherton Special Collections, are among the University\u27s most important resources for scholarly research. Recognizing the need both to encourage greater utilization of the John Muir Papers by the scholarly community, and the need to promote the study of California and its impact upon the global community, the John Muir Center was established in 1989 with the following objectives: • To foster a closer academic relationship between Pacific and the larger community of scholars, students and citizens interested in regional and environmental studies. • To provide greater opportunities for research and publication by Pacific faculty and students. • To offer opportunities for out-of- classroom learning experiences. • To promote multi-disciplinary curricular development. Phone: 209.946.2527 Fax: 209.946.2318 E-mail: [email protected]://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn/1094/thumbnail.jp
The John Muir Newsletter, Fall 1999
No full textTOP i Volume 9, Number 4 MUIR Fall 1999 VULUMJ, J, HUMbEK 1 i; TALL 1333 newsXhtter John Muir\u27s Struggle in the North: Travels in Alaska and The Cruise of the Corwin by Hal Crimmel, Ph.D. raditionally, Muir\u27s reputation has been that of America\u27s foremost wilderness lover, sage, and advocate, unrelenting in his quest for a pure wilderness experience. For Muir, wilderness was not a confrontation, Harold Simonson tells us, but a confirmation. 1 This is the Muir that captured the public\u27s imagination, j|e Muir who could write, The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones jtem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly. 2 Perhaps with ||ese moments in mind, Edwin Way Teale wrote of Muir, (Always, in truth, he found more than he expected in Sjature. Never did he get enough of wildness. 3 Clearly, the Muir we know best was the man who laid there was perfect freedom and relaxation in the Hoods. The Muir we do not know is the man who sometimes could not stand being out in the wild, who did not feel his psychic seams bursting with joy, but who rather pit oppressed and irritated. Just like the rest of us, Muir, |pe sure-footed, tireless lover of wilderness, encountered wild places that threatened and disoriented him. On his ffiousand-mile walk, Muir felt apprehensive about venturing into the vast swamps and marshes of south Georgia Kid north Florida, with their mosquitoes and malaria. Even in the West, where he believed rebirth possible, 4 ffluir did not always like what he saw. The Arizona desert didn\u27t please him 5 and Muir carefully masks his dislike of Yellowstone\u27s roaring geysers, steaming paint pots, and hills of cinder and ashes in his Our National Parks. Muir\u27s journals and letters on the region articulate |js struggle with the park\u27s uniqueness and his effort to |fnd a Yosemite-like order in the landscape. 6 Particularly in Alaska, Muir struggled to recreate the feelings he had for the Sierra, but ultimately failed as he Ibcame overwhelmed by a wilderness unlike anything he jpd ever encountered. Though he repeatedly tries to frame his thoughts using the language and metaphors he had em ployed with such great success in his California writings, his transposition of them especially into the strange key of the Arctic met with little success. What accounts for this failure, resulting in his brooding, fragmented symphonies on ice and water? What significance do Muir\u27s accounts hold for his reputation, and for the coherence of his wilderness philosophy? What do these accounts tell us about wilderness itself? John Muir traveled to Alaska a total of nine times during the years 1879, 1880, 1881, 1890, and 1899. Chronicling these trips were Travels in Alaska, based on his explorations of southeastern Alaska in 1879, 1880, and 1890, The Cruise of the Corwin, a collection of letters, journals, and newspaper articles detailing his trip to northern Alaska in 1881, Letters from Alaska, a collection of previously unpublished letters and dispatches from these trips, and John of the Mountains, a collection of Muir\u27s unpublished journals. Together these writings reflect the limits of Muir\u27s philosophy that exalted wild nature over human culture and civilization and maintained that all life was sacred. 7 Travels in Alaska and The Cruise of the Corwin depict a more terrifying wildness in nature than described in his California writings, writes Harold Simonson8 and in this sense they do mark a significant divergence from the traditional Muir genre. In Alaska the weather, land, and natives test Muir\u27s convictions about himself and his view of the wild. Early in the trip of 1879 it is evident that Alaska is not easily going to meet his expectations of an unspoiled Ur- California. For a man whose customary enthusiasm for wilderness permitted him to exult over snow-flowers and blessed immortals of light 9 even as his body became frozen and blistered when a blizzard forced him to spend the night lying in the scalding mud of Mt. Shasta\u27s fumaroles, Muir\u27s descriptions of the Alaskan coast, with (continued on page 3) UNIVERSITY OR page 1 F» A C I R I C
News & Notes Edinburgh John Muir Exhibition Just Concluded The City of Edinburgh sponsored an exhibit: An Infinite Storm of Beauty: The Life and Achievements of John Muir which ran from July 30 to October 2, 1999. The exhibit included important pieces of Muir memorabilia such as his field glasses, herbarium and plant specimens, his suitcase, commemorative stamps and medallions, family photographs, and portraits. In addition, some major paintings by William Keith from the Hearst Art Gallery in Moraga, California, were included in this exhibit, as well as almost a dozen photographs of the High Sierra by Galen Rowell. At the opening ceremonies on July 30, participants included the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the American Consul who represented President Clinton, the Minister for the Scottish Environment, Elizabeth Hanna, a great-great granddaughter of John Muir, Harold Wood, representing the Sierra Club, Phyllis Shaw and David Blackburn from the John Muir Historical Site at Martinez, California, and Nigel Hawkins, Director of the John Muir Trust. . . . In the meantime, as further evidence of John Muir\u27s historical importance, his likeness is increasingly being borrowed by the media and imitators, and perhaps to his dismay, were he alive, by advertisers. Next year, for example, there is to be a musical based on Muir\u27s life at the Concord Pavilion near the John Muir National Historical Site. This past September, a weekend fund raiser was held in Martinez, and Russ Hanna, Muir\u27s grandson, was featured with his jazz band. .. . Further to the north, remote Rocky Point in southern Oregon, where Muir summered in 1907, is the site of a fierce battle between environmentalists and developers. Ninety-two years ago, Muir stayed at the Upper Klamath Lake lodge owned by E. H. Harriman, and he wrote the following lyrical description of the area: The shining lake enlivened with leaping trout and flocks of waterfowl; the stream from the great springs like a river with broad brown and yellow meadows on either hand; and the dark, forested mountains, changing to blue in the background, rising higher and higher. A tiny recreational area now of 300 residents, it faces the prospect of the development of a major ski resort on an 8,000 foot volcano north of the town of Klamath Falls in the Winema National Forest where large areas are old- growth reserves for northern spotted owls. Surely, Muir would interest himself in this issue. . . . Winnipeg Conference Coming Up Washington State University and the University of Winnipeg have announced a conference to be held in Vancouver, Washington, May 24-28, 2000. It will focus on the area of Hudson\u27s Bay and surrounding territory, and will feature sessions on the fur trade, Native history and culture and on the Pacific Northwest. For information, contact Theresa Schenck (e-mail: tschenck@wsu. edu), Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164. Announcements The fourth installment of Reconstructing John Muir\u27s First Public Lecture, by Steve Pauly will appear in a later issue. The John Muir Center announces with great pleasure the publication of its newest book on Muir: John Muir in Historical Perspective, edited by Sally M. Miller. It will be available in time for Christmas gift-giving. It features 13 essays on Muir that were first presented to the California History Institute in 1996. The book is beautifully illustrated and is priced at $29.95. Any lover of John Muir and what he represented will want to own this book. Please contact Pearl Piper of the John Muir Center to arrange to purchase a copy. W NEWSLETTER Volume 9, Number 4 Fall 1999 Published quarterly by The John Muir Center for Regional Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 o Staff o Editor Sally M. Miller Production Assistants . . . Marilyn Norton, Pearl Piper All photographic reproductions are courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Libraries. Copyright 1984 Muir-Harma Trust. This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. page 2
John Muir\u27s Struggle In The North, by Hal Crimmel (continued...) its dismal blurring rain, and the shelterless and inhospitable region around Wrangell, where something like a forest loomed dimly through the draggled clouds 10 are downright listless. The subdued tone evident here is a regular feature of Muir\u27s Alaskan writings. Disoriented by weather in an enigmatic land easy neither to appreciate tip: understand, Muir\u27s writing suggests restraint rather I it.m passion. Conditions in the Arctic were not much better. There Muir would say that he had never seen weather so strong !; bewildering and depressing. As Herbert F. Smith has •i .ed, Muir\u27s status as a lover of storms is forced to bow fttthe greater power of the climate of the North Polar Regions. 12 The unmatched seventy of the storms in the in ,n region threatened his pride and called into question I\u27d;: identity as a man who loved storms. In the past, Muir i.. • satirized tourists who came to Yosemite seeking mod- He conditions, and the tender, pulpy people 13 whose Ire for comfort brought railroads into wilderness. He night himself superior to the average tenderfoot who sought affirmation in the gentler side of nature. Yet alter a long months in the Arctic, the inclement weather he H oiimei\u27cd forced him to reevaluate his identity as a lover - i torms for there he could only endure thorn rather than enjoy them. The electrical storms in which he customarily .need were altogether different there. Between the try- M/ conditions of daily life in the Arctic, and the bruising II i er of the wind and tides, Muir never managed to celebrate storms there as he did in the Sierra. Confronted with the conditions in Alaska, Muir was I Bed to admit that he shared the limitations of the urban iitosses he scorned. Accordingly, Muir\u27s claim, Just bread water and delightful toil is all I need, not unreasonable \u3c ti ;h, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any par - iN-nlar kind of spiritual nourishment, 14 arising as it did out • 111 n i ner experiences in the Sierra, began to look paro- il.tl. Applied to the Arctic, Muir\u27s declaration looked like ii \u3e sentimental fumbling of an urban romantic, accustom- ;; o a tender diet of succulent weekend trips in carefully ,\u27 uiaged national parks. The weather conditions made -•\u27• ii to him that he could not, in fact, live anywhere with • i y n ci nsi. of bread tied to his belt. As well, the land\u27s unfamiliar scale frequently spoke toltim in an unintelligible dialect that tested his powers of mprehension. In one instance, as Muir and his party it iitoached the shoreline and glaciers on the rain-soaked inlets near the Baird Glacier, their destinations seemed to fi t fie before their very eyes, causing them to doubt •v:i -ther they could ever land. Once they arrived, the very jnouiid itself repulsed their exploratory probes. On what magines to be familiar terrain, a glacial moraine, Muir *. .it* his party step ashore, but find themselves wallowing .\u27 gray, mineral mud, a paste made from fine mountain ■ Id, [which] kept unstable by the tides, at once took us in, swallowing our feet foremost with becoming glacial ; deliberation. 15 The party hastily retreats to their canoe. Humbled by weather in the Arctic and in Southeastern \u27 t ska, and repulsed by the land itself, Muir also learned that closeness with nature required unusual commitment and sacrifice in the North. In Unalaska the foul smell of Aleutian huts added a new dimension to the idea of being close to nature. The raw spectacle of hunting in the Arctic brought the specter of death too prominently into the wilderness equation for him to pretend it did not exist. These and other encounters with the natives brought challenging experiences and threatening confrontations. Hostile Indians frightened him. He was shocked by birth defects, mental illness, and widespread starvation and disease. In particular, his reactions to the piles of corpses and skeletons in the chapter The Villages of the Dead in The Cruise of the Corwin have significant implications for his conception of wilderness. The ramifications of his discoveries and his reactions to them show that Muir was not as accepting of wilderness as we might otherwise think. It also shows that the union with nature he so eagerly sought and celebrated in his California writings could be unpleasant, even disastrous. Nowhere was this driven home more dramatically than in The Villages of the Dead, settlements on St. Lawrence Island where starvation, and possibly disease, had killed two-thirds of the population during the winter of 1878- 1879. In one village, Muir and the party found twelve desolate huts close to the beach with about two hundred skeletons in them or strewn about on the rocks and rubbish heaps within a few yards of the doors. The scene was indescribably ghastly and desolate. 16 Muir describes shrunken bodies, with rotting furs on them and white, bleaching skeletons, picked bare by the crows. . .lying mixed with kitchen-midden rubbish where they had been cast out by surviving relatives while they yet had strength to carry them. 17 Even for Muir, this was disturbing scenery indeed. These still and desolate villages were indeed full of humanity though not of the sort Muir hoped to find and they shook his faith in the talkative, sympathetic, brotherly aspect of wilderness he was so enthusiastic about in My First Summer in the Sierra. Muir and the members of the expedition were astonished by the nonplused reactions of the natives. Asking one villager the whereabouts of the others elicits a happy, heedless smile from him and a reply in an almost a merry tone of voice, \u27Dead, yes, all dead, all mucky, all gone!\u27 18 suggesting that the natives accept starvation and death as part and parcel of life there. The natives have not temporarily surrendered themselves to the rhythms of the wild, as Muir was wont to do; they are committed to it in a way Muir never had been. For them, there can be no quick escape from hunger or scarcity, or severe weather, no surrender that could be terminated should conditions prove too unfavorable. Muir, however, with his California- grown expectations of wilderness, cannot accept this. It shakes him to think that surrendering oneself to nature means just that - not a temporary submission that can be conveniently rescinded. Dismayed and disoriented at having this element of his expectations of wilderness dashed, he blamed civilization for the piles of skeletons on St. Lawrence Island, and called for government assistance. Oddly, Muir did not realize that in a subsistence way page 3
John Muir\u27s Struggle In The North, by Hal Crimmel (continued...) of life, starvation and death are part of the wilderness experience. Wanting to have his cake and eat it too, Muir could not accept a complete surrender to the rhythms of the wilderness. He hoped to find a wilderness inhabited by happy, healthy natives, who would meet his expectations of primitive peoples. In Alaska, Muir was forced to take a closer look at his vision of the potential for humans and nature to live in harmony, and it behooves us to take note of Muir\u27s reformulation. Endnotes 1. Harold P. Simonson, Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism and a Sense of Place. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1989, p. 32. 2. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911, p. 319. 3. Edwin Way Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1954, p. xi. 4. Simonson, p. 45. 5. Edward Hoagland, Steep Trails. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994, p. vii. 6. Bruce A. Richardson, \u27 Fear Nothing\u27: An Interpretation of John Muir\u27s Writings on Yellowstone. in Sally M. Miller, ed., John Muir: Life and Work. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993, pp. 267-285. 7. Thurman Wilkins, John Muir: Apostle of Nature. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995, p. 265. 8. Simonson, p. 37. 9. John Muir, Steep Trails. Ed. William Frederic Bade. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994 (1918), pp. 53-54. 10. John Muir, Travels in Alaska (introduction by Richard Nelson). New York: Penguin, 1993. p. 15. 11. John Muir, The Cruise of the Corwin: Journal of the Arctic Expedition of 1881 in Search ofDe Long and the Jeannette. Ed. William Frederic Bade. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917, p. 79. 12. Herbert F. Smith, John Muir. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965, p. 102. 13. Muir, Steep Trails, p. 248. 14. Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, p. 103. 15. John Muir, Letters From Alaska. Eds. Robert Engberg and Bruce Merrell. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, p. 31. 16. Muir, The Cruise of the Corwin, p. 108. 17. Ibid., p 108. 18. Ibid., p. 111. On John Muir\u27s My First Summer in the Sierra By Stan Hutchinson In a letter to Henry Fairfield Osborn penned from the Los Angeles home of friend J. D. Hooker June 1, 1910, John Muir wrote that he had been hidden down here... working hard on books. In mid-May, he had sent his publisher the manuscript for a small book.. .entitled \u27My First Summer in the Sierra,\u27 written from notes made forty- one years ago. The title for this book was taken from a sentence in Muir\u27s Our National Parks, 1901, when he described a young shepherd met north of Kings River who was fresh from the East, and. . .this was his first summer in the Sierra. . . Biographers of John Muir have had varying opinions on the degree of consistency between Muir\u27s My First Summer in the Sierra (hereafter MFS ), published in 1911, and his journal chronicling that event. While some differences are to be expected between journal and finished book, their actual extent is difficult to establish. Over the course of several decades Muir reworked his original 1869 Sierra journal out of existence, saving only the drawings. The earliest surviving version of the journal may be found in three worn and heavily marked-up volumes dated from ca. 1887. A further-revised draft of ca. 1910 is also extant. In her biography of Muir, Linnie Marsh Wolfe flatly stated that while preparing his 1869 journal for publication Muir [wjisely.. .made few changes, allowing his text to retain all the fresh spontaneity of his early impressions. Michael P. Cohen and Frederick Turner in their respective biographies of Muir utilized the ca. 1887 and 1910 journal drafts to compare with MFS as published. Cohen stated that Muir reworked earlier journal material with later knowledge into an honest and truthful book. . .narrated with all the skill that a novelist might muster. Turner felt that, despite some inconsistencies with the ca. 1887 draft, Muir made few substantive changes, and MFS was for the most part. . .a faithful depiction of his experiences. Both of the surviving drafts differ with each other and MFS, and We cannot help but wonder how the book compares with the 1869 journal itself. Fortunately something of an end run can be made around that missing manuscript. Two letters written by Muir shortly after his return from that significant first Sierra summer provide tantalizing glimpses of the 1869 journal in its original form. According to Muir himself, and we take him at his word, passages in these letters were quoted directly from his journal and as such are among the few available for comparison with their counterparts in MFS. The first of these letters was penned to his younger brother Daniel, then a medical student in Michigan, and is dated September 22, [1869], the day after his return from the Sierra to the foothill ranch of his employer, Patrick Delaney. To Dear Doctor Dan Muir wrote that once while in the mountains he and the shepherd Billy had got out of flour and had nothing to eat but mutton and molasses candy. Then, wanting to be more specific to a medical man, Muir wrote that he would quote direct from my diary. His entry for July 2nd begins, Tea and mutton!... ourstaff of life. He also related that their strong tea made them dizzy like whiskey and, reacting violently with the mutton, caused a series of loud premonitory rumblings like those that preceded the great earthquake last year in San Francisco. In contrast, the longer July 2nd entry in MFS merely notes, We have been out of bread a few days.. . while dizzy like whiskey and earthquake rumblings of the journal become, under July 7th in MFS, Drank tea until half intoxicated. . . and digestive distress amid rumbling, grumbling sounds. . .might well pass for\u27baas\u27. The journal\u27s July 5th entry begins, Tea and mutton becoming more and more combative and so they change their diet to Mutton and molasses candy. . . In marked contrast the July 5th entry in MFS is thoroughly optimistic: Here every day is a holiday... and Everything rejoicing. The tea and mutton combativeness of the journal\u27s page 4
On John Muir\u27s My First Summer in the Sierra (continued...) 5th, in quite different content and length, moves to July 6th in MFS; the failed molasses experiment, also of the 5th, moves to the 7th where the sugar-cooking process and its several ramifications are explained with subtle humor. Muir quotes only the opening of the journal\u27s July 6th entry: Feel weak, sickish, and sour. .. In MFS the July I entry begins, Rather weak and sickish this morn- lo, ., . ., continues with a 7 72
The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2004/2005
No full textNewsletter UNiVfeftsnY or the Pacific, Stockton, cA Volume 15, Number 1 Winter 2004/2005 Black Sheep of the in Muir\u27s Motivations for Yosemite National hi] Jeimij Krone ERRA: GREAT! Park (he expansive 760,000-acre Yosemite National Park consists of meadows, forests, and mountains that presently awe over three million visitors annually.1 Yosemite Valley became the second national park in 1890 after an intense nationwide conflict that most tourists neglect to acknowledge when scaling the glacial-smoothened sides of Half Dome or navigating woodlands of sugar pines and giant sequoias. John Muir, a foremost figure in the early conservation movement, spearheaded the proposal and eventually succeeded against the powerful tourism and timber industries. Muir felt impassioned to save Yosemite from degradation by humans because he shared an affinity with the blessed dell, woods, gardens, streams, birds, squirrels, lizards and a thousand other inhabitants in the valley.2 Although Hetch Hetchy is recognized by historians as Muir\u27s most famous battle, the fight for Yosemite was the first significant dilemma he encountered.3 Muir\u27s motivations for the creation of Yosemite National Park were derived from his experiences and observations of the valley over the decades since his initial arrival in California in 1868. He voyaged to the west coast from New York and proceeded inland to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, reaching Yosemite to see the big trees he had heard of during his travels. Sheep in the Sierra.(Photo courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust) Muir\u27s experiences as a sheepherder in the Sierra in the summer of 1869 formed the foundation of his cause for preserving Yosemite in the late 1880s. As he resided in the valley for an extended period from 1868 to 1874 and visited numerous times over the next decades, he witnessed the evolution of capitalistic exploitation of the valley: the maniacal tourism industry that seemed to replicate exponentially over the valley floor, the harvesting of sequoias, pines, and redwoods that survived everything except man over hundreds of years, and the cattle and sheep that consumed every blade and bush in their destructive path. It was the latter of these evils that pushed Muir to preserve Yosemite by transferring management of this special place from state to federal guardianship. This study explores Muir\u27s thinking on Yosemite by assessing the articles that he published as well as his unpublished private journals and correspondence. Muir\u27s trip to Yosemite with Robert Underwood Johnson in June 1888 instigated his battle to protect Yosemite, which culminated in success with passage of the Vandever Bill in 1890 that created Yosemite National Park. The valley was previously protected under the Yosemite Grant from 1864 to 1890 as a reserve. A Board of Commissioners managed the small state park that was only fifteen miles in length and one (Continued on page 5) page 1
NeWs 4 Motes. California State Quarter Muir Event on University of the Pacific Campus California\u27s new quarter, featuring naturalist John Muir, Yosemite\u27s Half Dome and a soaring condor is now being minted as part of a 10-year, 50-state quarters program conducted by the U.S. Mint. On February 9, 2005, University of the Pacific\u27s John Muir Center, in conjunction with the Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections held a Muir Coin celebration with coin designer Garrett Burke and his family on campus. The festivities began with a most interesting presentation by the Burkes as they described how they came up with the quarter design. The presentation was followed by a reception complete with cakes decorated to look like the new quarter. Entertainment was provided by a 10-member Dixieland-style band directed by John Muir\u27s grandson, Ross Hanna. Clan Cijrrie Society Celebrates The Life and Legacy of John Muir on Ellis Island Clan Currie\u27s Annual Tartan Day Celebration this year focused on the Scots-bom father of America\u27s national parks . The Society has produced a new exhibit in honor of John Muir. In partnership with the National Park Service, Clan Currie, along with Scottish and American dignitaries had opening ceremonies on April 1, 2005 for the new Tartan Day exhibit, the first to be produced completely by the Clan Currie Society. Hilary Buchanan Boiler, a historian with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, served as principal researcher and author. The Clan Currie Society also formed an advisory panel including participation from the John Muir National Historic Site in Martinez, CA, the John Muir Birthplace Trust in Dunbar, Scotland, the Sierra Club in San Francisco, CA and the John Muir Trust in Edinburgh, Scotland. The exhibit is free to all visitors of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and will run into May. John Muir\u27s Birthday Celebration also Celebrates Earth Day After a three-year hiatus, Earth Day is returning to Contra Costa County with an added attraction: the celebration of the 167lh birthday anniversary of John Muir. The free event will be staged by the John Muir Association in Partnership with John Muir National Historic Site from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 23 at Muir\u27s picturesque estate, a unit of the National Park Service (4202 Alhambra Avenue just off Highway 4) in Martinez, CA. The Muir home will be open to visitors. More than 35 groups dedicated to conservation will participate in the festivities under the theme Celebrate the man who celebrated the earth. Were it not for John Muir\u27s passion for the natural wonders of his adopted country, it is likely many of them would not be here for us to enjoy, said Mary O\u27Hara-Zimmerman, chair of the celebration. Generations owe a debt of gratitude to John Muir and others like him whenever they visit Yosemite, hike through the Sierra Nevada, or visit a national park. He\u27s inspired every-day kind of people to take on monumental efforts for the sake of preservation, conservation and education. Earth Day visitors will be treated to music, a barbecue and other food while learning how to care for the earth from a variety of exhibits and demonstrations. Topics include conservation efforts, solar energy, alternative forms of transportation, recycling, and composting. Those attending the celebration will also have an opportunity to obtain the new California quarter depicting a likeness of Muir. Garrett Burke, who designed the coin, will be present to discuss his concept for the design. It\u27s hard to say if the quarter will translate into more visits, but it\u27s certainly translating into a higher profile and interest in Muir, said David Blackburn, chief of interpretation at the Muir site. It still surprises me when people come in here and say, \u27Who is this John Muir?\u27 We\u27re all hoping it serves as a catalyst for people as they put that quarter into a parking meter or a pinball machine or laundry machine. **************************************fc********* Mountain Days Mountain Days, the outdoor musical epic about the lives and loves of the great naturalist, John Muir, is going to play again this summer: Aug 3-7, 2005 at the Muir Amphitheatre in Martinez. There are new windscreens, fencing, box office, concessions building, picnic tables and a great show. At the amphitheatre, the Willow Theatre is also presenting an Independence Day weekend celebration featuring the companion piece to Muir, Sacagawea - symphonic suite and a production of The Sound of Music. It all starts July 1st and runs thru Aug 7. For more information, call (925) 798-1300 or visit www.willowstheatre.org **************************************************** The John Muir ILETTER Volume 15, Number 1 Winter 2004/2005 Published Quarterly by The John Muir Center for Environmental Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 ♦ STAFF ♦ Director W.R. Swagerty Editor W.R. Swagerty Production assistant Marilyn Norton Unless otherwise noted, ail photographic reproductions are courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections University of the Pacific Libraries. Copyright 19S4 Muir-Hanna Trust This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper « page 2
One Minute Mystery: Investigating John Muir\u27s Temperature Notation By Michael Wurtz Archivist, Holt-Atherton Special Collections University of the Pacific Library Archivists, like detectives, often find themselves unexpectedly on the trail of a mystery. Recently, a researcher called to ask about an unusual temperature-notation symbol in an essay called Alaska, torn John Muir\u27s Nature Writings (published by The Library of America, 1997). In this essay, Muir describes the climate of Alaska generally and the temperature specifically. He writes, July was the brightest month of the summer with fourteen days of sunshine, six of them in uninterrupted succession, with a temperature of about 60° Fah.; maximum at 12 M., 70°. The average 7 A.M. temperature for June was 54° 33\u27; 12 M., 57° 13\u27. The average 7 A.M. temperature for July was 55°93\u27; 12 M., 61° 75\u27. The average 7 A. M. temperature for August was 54° 20\u27: 12 M., 61° 83\u27. The average 7 A.M. temperature for September was 52° 23\u27 12 M., 56° 21\u27. The highest temperature observed here during the summer was 76°. The question was this: what unit of measurement was John Muir representing with the small tick mark he used after certain numbers? It looks much like a minute symbol, but temperature isn\u27t usually recorded in minutes. So, I set off in search of some answers. Rounding Up the Usual Suspects The obvious starting place for my search was to look at the original publication to see whether the book publisher might have inaccurately transcribed the passage. I checked John Muir: A Reading Bibliography by William and Maymie Kimes. I found that the passage in question first appeared in print in San Francisco\u27s Daily Evening Bulletin on November 8, 1879, in an article written from Fort Wrangel entitled Alaska Climate. Some Popular Errors Corrected - A Good Country to Live In. An Alaska Summer Day - Glorious Sunsets. Bright and Cloudy Weather - Rainfall - Temperature - Alaska Winters. The original article clearly showed those same tick marks, ruling out the possibility that they came from the book publisher. So, might the newspaper have introduced this notation? Did newspapers from that time typically record temperature to fractions of a degree? A quick check of the Stockton newspapers from that same era, and my recollections of other newspapers contemporary to Muir\u27s time, revealed that temperature information was generally not included - let alone fractions thereof. Therefore, we can probably conclude that the paper published the notation as Muir wrote it. So, I went to Muir\u27s notes and journals to seek clues as to how he measured or recorded temperature information on that trip, but I found no information about these observations. In fact, I found it quite odd that there appear to be no references to temperature observations in his journals and notebooks from Alaska. But hold that thought. Confronted with these dead ends, I decided it was time for some educated guesswork. Hunches and Speculations It never hurts to take a step back and question your basic assumptions at times like these. Might Muir have been indicating something other than fractions of temperature with his tick marks - maybe a different type of climatic observation, such as humidity? I gave some thought to this possibility, but soon realized that humidity averages would be unlikely to vary as much as the numbers Muir recorded (which range from 13\u27 to 93\u27) in the coastal areas where Muir spent most of his time. Back to temperature, then. Reminded that the temperature values were averages, I wondered whether the averaging process might explain the fractional portions of the numbers. Might Muir have recorded daily temperatures as whole numbers, but expressed the monthly averages with fractional remainders? I discussed this idea with Ron Wurtz, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (who also happens to be my brother). After doing some calculations, he pointed out that Muir\u27s average temperature for September, 52° 23\u27, couldn\u27t be the result of averaging whole numbers: If you sum only whole numbers and divide by 30, you will never get a fractional remainder of 21. And, for the 31 -day months, there is no way to get 75 or 20 [the fractional portion of the averages for July and August, respectively] from whole numbers. So, his thermometer must have been precise to fractions of a degree. If the numbers preceding the tick marks were fractions, what fractional portion of a degree did they represent? Could they be read as minutes - that is, smaller increments of 1/60 \u27 of a degree - much as degrees of longitude and latitude are divided by 60 minutes? Well, no, since some of the recorded numbers are higher than 60. Therefore, these numbers cannot be considered minutes in the traditional sense, but we will continue to call them minutes for lack of a better term. The next obvious question is: did Muir\u27s minutes represent increments of 1/100* of a degree? Hundredths of a degree would be a logical size for smaller increments, and the fact that the highest recorded minute measurement is 93\u27 fits with this theory. Of course, if this interpretation is correct, it seems a little odd that Muir wouldn\u27t have used decimal notation instead (for example, writing 55.93° instead of 55° 93\u27), as it seems simpler and more practical. Might he have actually used decimal notation, but a typesetter at the newspaper opted for tick marks instead? Or might he have been predisposed to think in terms of minutes instead of decimals by the measurement system he was using? How did he measure temperature, anyway? Time for more research... Real-World Clues Having decided that the l/lOO 1 of a degree explanation was the most likely one for Muir\u27s minutes, I needed to consider whether a real-world scenario could support this explanation. What sort of instrument could Muir have carried into the wilds of Alaska to measure such accurate temperatures? My brother Ron suggested that if the minute marks were 1 mm apart, then for 100 degrees, Muir would have needed a mercury thermometer 10 meters long. It\u27s possible his thermometer was one of those coiled ones, but it would have had to be about 4 inches in page 3
diameter with 30 turns. However, I realized that Muir probably wouldn\u27t have used a glass thermometer, since so much of his work was in rugged terrain where such an instrument would need special handling. Needing further clues, I investigated Muir\u27s writings in greater depth and came across the following passage in Story of My Boyhood: One of my inventions was a large thermometer made of an iron rod, about three feet long and five eighths of an inch in diameter, that had formed part of a wagon-box. The expansion and contraction of this rod was multiplied by a series of levers made of strips of hoop iron. The pressure of the rod against the levers was kept constant by a small counterweight, so that the slightest change in the length of the rod was instantly shown on a dial about three feet wide multiplied about thirty-two thousand times. This combined thermometer, hygrometer, barometer, and pyrometer appears in The Stoiy Of My Boyhood And Youth. This too seems a bit too delicate to carry up a glacier, but it shows Muir\u27s ability to make instruments that are quite precise and perhaps puzzling to anyone but Muir. who posed the question to me suggested, these unusual notations simply confirm Muir\u27s independent nature. I had all but given up trying to understand what exactly this notation was until I found in a notebook where Muir had designated two and half miles with 2°5 miles. Perhaps due to his European ancestry, he recorded decimals with a degree-like signs — and the newspaper decided to add the minutes for lack of understanding Muir\u27s meaning. Serendipity Reveals an Answer Like most written history, much of the mystery was solved long after I completed this article. In a typical serendipitous moment, I found a reference to Climate of South Eastern Alaska in The Guide and Index to the Microform Edition of the John Muir Papers. Sure enough, I found Muir\u27s draft article to the Daily Evening Bulletin{x
(Continued from page 1) mile in width. However, Muir desired an enlarged and federally- managed park. Muir\u27s attitudes toward domesticated sheep, informed by years of direct observation, ultimately motivated him to lobby for federal protection and enlargement of the Yosemite Grant in the late 1880s. Muir\u27s life in the decade prior to the Yosemite conflict countermarched from mountaineering to childrearing. Muir\u27s daily routine in the early 1880s was characterized by domesticity rather than rambling botanical excursions. He married in 1880 and settled into family life with his wife, Louie Wanda Strentzel. By 1885 he was fathering two young daughters, Annie Wanda and Helen Muir, on the rolling Martinez, California ranch. Muir successfully managed the family\u27s profitable fruit crops despite his outward appearance as an unsophisticated farmer with his long, unkempt beard and socially awkward mannerisms.4 Although Muir\u27s health regressed during this time, possibly due to his absence from wild places, settling into civilized society instead of granite boulders and pine groves exposed Muir to new political ideas. Muir gained political awareness as he read books in the sizeable Strentzel family library and controversial articles published in Bay Area newspapers. Muir examined political theories including nonsocialist alternatives to the free market and the ideas of political reformers such as Henry George and John Ruskin, but he rarely picked up ideas from these political models and individuals.5 As his political consciousness emerged, he realized that nature could not be adequately protected by the current economic system as private interests and profits would ultimately prevail in most cases, especially since industries such as the railroad tended to buy legislation in their favor. Devastation was occurring in many of his beloved mountains and forests, including Mount Shasta, Mount Rainier, and the Yosemite Valley, for which protective legislation was stalled or ignored, as in the case of Yosemite. Yosemite received some protection from private exploitation under the Yosemite Grant of 1864, but the Reserve was small and mismanaged. The Yosemite Grant was enacted for the same reasons Muir wanted federal protection of Yosemite almost thirty years later: preservation for protection of scenic values and the pleasure of the people as a whole.6 Private exploitation in the valley was threatening its trees, taking away scenic landscape that was supposed to be enjoyed by everyone. Passed in June of 1864, the Grant designated the valley as a natural preserve estimated to be fifteen miles in length and one mile in width.7 The Grant consisted of two parts, protecting the valley as well as the Mariposa Big Tree Grove upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use ... and shall be inalienable for all time. 8 Rules and regulations were established for the government of the Yosemite Reserve, which was controlled by a Board of Commissioners that was appointed by the state government. Landscape architect Frederick Olmsted served as the functional head of the board in its early years, drawing up a comprehensive management plan for California\u27s first state park.9 Only the Commission could approve residence or privilege to transact business in the valley, but it experienced difficulty in eradicating already existing hotels, cabins, and private claims on the valley floor. The Commission controlled the valley for the next few decades, albeit in very poor manner, as evident by the degradation inside and outside the Yosemite Reserve that was apparent by the late 1880s. Muir entertained the idea of enacting legislation to protect natural wonders in the late 1880s as he became aware of the ravaging effects of tourism, logging, and overgrazing in the West. Muir was mostly absent from wilderness travel during the 1880s, although he managed a voyage to Alaska in 1881 before the birth of his first daughter, and in 1885 he took a brief excursion to Yellowstone. In 1888, after seven years of ranching and raising children, Muir decided to rejuvenate his soul on a trip to the Pacific Northwest with his friend and Alaska companion, Hall Young.10 Muir stopped at Mount Shasta on the way, a sizeable foe that attempted to take his life in 1875, and lamented at the clear-cutting of old growth forests by the industrial world he had abandoned some two decades earlier. Muir pondered protection of these threatened wilderness areas upon his return to Martinez and so decided to retrieve his pen and retire to his den to write on the environmental devastation occurring in the West. As Muir dabbled in the ink bottle to gain public awareness of the problem, he found a worthy ally - or rather he found Muir. Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of the Century Magazine from 1873 to 1909, became interested in Muir in the 1880s for his literary genius and his popularity among American readers. A bespectacled man with a short salt-and-pepper beard below a slightly curved nose, Johnson feared that Muir had abandoned literature altogether, so he proceeded to meet with the solitary Scot in 1889 upon a rare visit to California in an effort to coax Muir to hasten his pen.12 Acc
The John Muir Newsletter, Fall/Winter 2011/2012
No full textFall/Winter 2011/2012 ; LA--/*. ; oJW J\\AAAA, uLwtiAjU)OlGA, THE JOHN MUIR CENTER SPECIAL POINTS OF INTEREST: The present is the key to the past. Muir would apply geological formation and specifically the action of glacial ice to the handiwork of God. Muir chose to live to entice people to look at Nature\u27s loveliness. In the beginning and to the end botany was the foundation upon which Muir\u27s work as a preservationist grew and glacial studies were seamlessly connected to his study of plants. An Essay P h e n o m on John E N A L S C I Muir E N C E IN THIS ISSUE An Essay on John Muir\u27s Phenomenal Science by 1 Bonnie J. Gisel 59th California History Institute to focus on . Women as History- Makers in California John Muir Class Visits A Walk in the Wild and the Muir House By Bonnie Johanna Gisel Curator, LeConte Memorial Lodge, Yosemite National Park Author, Nature\u27s Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir\u27s Botanical Legacy I. Origins of Muir\u27s Scientific Self The world John Muir sauntered through was one in which the distribution of erratics was attributed to a diluvial theory, a wave of sea ice due to catastrophic sudden and violent floods released from the interior of the Earth or caused by the upheaval of -^F * \u3e mountains. This diluvial theory gave way to a theory that provided a more rational explanation to account for the appearance of erratic boulders, and that theory was that erratics had been moved by vast sheets of moving glaciers. A debate—sea ice vs. land ice-remained a feature of geological discussion until about 1902. As well Muir found himself inquiring into the inner workings of science when fossil remnants—relicts of a world of unusual and exceptional creatures and plants, and the study of strata, continued to expand upon what James Hutton of Edinburgh regarded as an Earth im- James Hutton From http://etc.usf.edu/ clipart/60973/60973James hutton.htm mensely older than the thousands of years allowed by the chronology of the Old Testa- ment.1 Then, too, up from the sod of science, a Scotsman, uniformitarian, and friend of Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, who parented modern geology, examined an inorganic Earth in perpetual change, eroding, and reforming. He explained the former changes of the Earth\u27s surface by reference to causes now in operation. The present, he would say, is the key to the past. While a student at the University of Wisconsin, Muir was introduced to Lyell\u27s Principles, perhaps the 1853 ninth edition which created quite a sensation. Lyell banished any doubts about a glacial epoch, fully supporting the work of Louis Agassiz, an expert on fossil fish and the preeminent glaciologist, who happened to be an unabashed catastrophist. Disagreement would erupt over the rate of environmental change between those who supported change gradual and uniform, uniformitarians, of which Muir was one, and those who supported intermittent cataclysm, catastrophists. There was also Lyell\u27s Elements of Geology, published in 1838- the first modern textbook of geology, a systematic treatment based on the assumption that all the phenomena of geology can be explained naturally and discussed scientifically. In Yosemite, in 1872, Muir would request that Jeanne Carr send a copy of Lyell\u27s work. He would have opened the familiar volume to the frontispiece-a diagram of a vertical section through a volcanic island surrounded by sea and showing dia- grammatically how the four great classes of rocks were produced.2 Muir would apply geological formation and specifically the action of glacial ice to the handiwork of God. An exaggerated theory of a single polar cap, an Ice Age traveling from the North Pole over the northern hemisphere, was the brain-child (continued on page 3)
PAGE 2 59th California H To focus on Women in Calif I S T O R Y I N S T I T U T E A S H I S T O R Y ■ M A K E O R N A ?» R S On March 23, 24, students, faculty and guests of the University will gather for the 59th California History Institute. This year\u27s theme focuses on women who continue to be history- makers. Highlights include a field trip to the California State Museum by coach from Stockton on March 23 to two exhibits: Women and the Vote, and Notable Women in California History, the latter featuring 120 individuals. Papers and panels on March 24 will focus on the historiography of women\u27s history in the Golden State; the role of Latina, Filipina, Asian, and Native American women; women of note in Stockton\u27s own history; women\u27s organizations at Pacific; and a panel on women and environmental justice and activism. The luncheon keynote will be delivered by Judy Yung, Professor Emerita, U. C. Santa Cruz, whose publications include : Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (1995); Chinese American Voices; From the Gold Rush to the Present (2006); and (with Erika Lee) Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (2010). For more information and to register for the symposium please contact Juliann Hilton i [email protected] or call Muir Center and leave a message at 209 946-2527. JOHN MUIR C WILD lass Visits A Walk and the Muir House IN THE On January 19, twenty- one students in Pacific\u27s John Muir and the Rise of the Conservation Movement class visited the Oakland Museum of California and John Muir National Historic Site in Martinez. In Oakland the class toured the exhibit, A Walk in the Wild: Continuing John Muir\u27s Journey. Cu- rated by Dorris Welch, the exhibit focused on John Muir and science, using original materials from the John Muir Papers as well as furniture and artifacts from various institutions and family members. While there the class met John Muir Reid, the great-grandson of Margaret Muir-Reid, one of Muir\u27s older sisters. Reid is a professional artist who reports he has painted with the great- grandson of Muir\u27s close friend and fellow Scotsman, William Keith. His watercolors focus on landscapes of the Delta, Sierra, and Bay, as well as Yosemite, scenes that would be familiar to John Muir. In Martinez, Park Guide Daniel Prial gave the group an inspired talk and a memorable tour of the Muir House. Prial focused on Muir\u27s interest in bringing Nature into his residence, rather than keeping Nature out. The interpretation helped all to understand the rationale for planting trees exotic to the Alhambra Valley (including the famous redwood in front of the house), the large number of William Keith landscapes in the house, as well as architectural features incorporated by Muir into the house after it was remodeled, post-1906 San Francisco earthquake. These include the large modified central fireplace where he could burn logs instead of coal. Each student is researching one aspect of Muir\u27s life from the Muir Papers and all are following one major contemporary environmental issue keeping the class up-to-date on current events that relate to Muir\u27s legacy. This trip was made possible through a generous grant from Holt-Atherton Special Collections. John Muir Class, 2012, in front of the Muir House, Martinez, CA Photo by Bob Dash
PAGE 3 (continued from page 1) ;■;;,\u27.: -•• c, i; o i. o c; v. CatlU.Ee LYt.I.l. IWJ LDKbON ILIeJUT, Al.aHUAHl.C STULCr. kea.uiH^ Elements of Geo/ogy From: library.sc.edu/spcoll/nathist/ darwin/darwin5.html J\Luvid, IXoAidXic iawcneAt heaian an JtLiah (DViaet in UunhaA,, &cottand in a aaAden ad, much lihe, &acn an, of Louis Agassiz; and, in 1840, he published his definitive work on glaciers, Etude sur les Glaciers. Agassiz believed that not books but experience was wherein the answers to scientific inquiry resided. To this end and to his credit, he undertook the empirical study of glaciers, establishing a camp on a glacier of the Aar. God\u27s great plough, he called them. The glacial period was for Agassiz, a magnificent demonstration of the power of God in causing catastrophic Louis Agassiz From: www.eoearth.org/article/Agassiz_Louis events that wiped out life and replaced it with new flora and fauna—in this he disagreed with Darwin\u27s theory of natural selection. At the University of Wisconsin Muir studied Agassiz\u27s work with Ezra Carr. Carr ventured with students out into what he called Nature\u27s basement rooms, out over the glaciated landscape around Madison, equating the love of nature with the love of God. He reminded students to touch with something of reverence, the hem of that marvelous robe of living green, the Forests. Muir spoke of Carr as having been the first to place before him the Book of Nature. Later, Agassiz would speak of Muir as the first to have an adequate concept of glacial action. A world not for the faint of heart, Muir was resilient. Struggle and change were everywhere. A Civil War (that Muir referred to as unchristian), was followed by tense, ambitious, and controversial mending of a nation that drove Joseph and John LeConte, respectively, geologist and physicist, from Georgia and South Carolina to California and the burgeoning University of California. There was a quickening professionalization of science and competition between scientists on the east and west coasts of America. Muir was drawn into the fray over the fair apostles-Flora.3 Muir\u27s floristic journey began on High Street in Dunbar, Scotland in a garden as much like Eden as possible, and blossomed into an enthusiasm for botany during the nineteenth century\u27s flurry of amateur plant collecting and as botany took on the mantle of a professional science. With the aid of Alphonso Wood\u27s Class- Book of Botany, in which Wood suggested that the study of plants held higher purpose expanding the soul through beauty, purity, and wisdom, Muir became skilled at identifying plants and their habitats. He would agree with Wood, to study plants was to see God\u27s plans unfold. Through plants Muir gained an inordinate sense of the complexity of life and found that when he picked out anything by itself, it was hitched to everything else in the universe. Were not, he thought, all plants beautiful? Or in some way useful? Would not the world suffer by the banishment of a single weed? We encounter a faithful Muir drafted like so many others—among them his colleague and friend Joseph LeConte-into the Age of Darwin\u27s Origin of Species by Natural Selection, published in 1859. Darwin had not intended to argue either for or against God; nonetheless, he concluded there was no need for divine creation, and there was no divine goal-natural selection took care of everything-was responsible for the gradual but steady emergence of organisms. His theory destroyed for some, dampened or attempted to awash the sea of Christian faith for others, and crippled natural theology, provoking a major philosophical and theological debate that outlived the century. Muir read Darwin while in Yosemite.
Page 4 Joseph LeConte From: www.sierraclub.org/history/ leconte II. California: Perfect Pitch Arriving in California, in 1868, Muir was not more than a footstep behind the California Geological Survey under the direction of Josiah Whitney. The Survey was under funded, under appreciated, and under terrible constraints given the size and terrain of California. Support would wane for a variety of reasons. In part Whitney was opinionated, arrogant, and stubborn, and legislators believed too much emphasis had been placed on fossils and flowers. Legislative action was taken to shift focus to mineral resources, though Whitney never envisioned the survey as a prospecting party.4 Muir continued to study botany and took up the study of mountains. Influenced by Agassiz he would stress the role of glaciers in the formation of the Sierra and Yosemite Valley. Muir found deposits of glacial silt and striations etched into the granite walls and outlined the routes that carried the glaciers that shaped and scoured the Valley. It was not long before he professed to anyone who would listen that the Valley had been formed by glaciers and that there were living glaciers in the High Sierra.5 Whitney, a graduate of Yale, spoke of Muir as uneducated, called him that shepherd, an ignoramus, and of Muir\u27s findings, considered them a personal affront—given that his conventional geological wisdom held that the floor of Yosemite Valley had subsided during a series of cataclysmic events—a view he would never change. Muir\u27s disclosure of living glaciers, as well, struck scorn with both Whitney and Clarence King, who regarded the fields Muir saw as nothing more than snow. Upon graduation from Yale\u27s Sheffield Scientific School, King joined the Whitney Survey as a volunteer geologist in 1863. He soon found evidence in 1864, like Muir\u27s, (differing only in degree), that Yosemite Valley had been formed by glaciers. While Whitney initially published King\u27s findings in the first volume of the Geological Survey in 1865, he retracted when he published The Yosemite Guide-Book in 1869— noting there was insufficient evidence that the Valley had been formed by glacial action. King publicly supported Whitney. Acatastrophist, like Whitney, King, like Agassiz, disagreed with natural selection. King, essentially, towed the party- line.6 Picturing himself the quintessential field- geologist and mountaineer, King dismissed Muir as an ambitious amateur suggesting that he divert his enthusiastic love of nature into a channel, if there is one, in which his attainments would save him from hopeless floundering. Impatient with Muir\u27s poetic sensibilities and rhapsodizing without restraint, King thought Muir lacked seriousness—writing about dreaming and sleeping with glaciers with adjectives obstructing science. A writer himself, King suffered from long periods of self-doubt and leaned to exaggerate his mountain exploits. Perhaps there was proprietary jealousy and while Muir may have been poetic, King relied on hyperbole. King first serialized his adventures as a survey scientist for The Atlantic Monthly.7 Muir disagreed with King\u27s ambition to conquer the Sierra or any mountain. Mountains could and should, he thought and knew from experience, be climbed by acting in harmony with them. The harmony King lacked, had, Muir believed, contributed to his inability to reach the summit of Mount Ritter; and it was well known that King had a particular genius for climbing the wrong mountain. Muir succeeded where GEllLrWIiAl. Si till Df CAl.iritatMA. J. 1\u3e. fj —L.«iur. YOSEMITE GUIDE-BOOK: DFKOKiiTmx riv tins VtfcXRKfTE vau.v.v ASIr flit; .\u27.!\u3e\u27A8 HIS 9 v V;;. .vim. ANlr OK THE IttG TKEBS W \u3c\UmHlM.I. ILLUSTRATED 8Y MfcP9 AMD WOOOCU T?i. ^Kx\u3eUTi/tcM4iA could and dhauld...he, climhed hu aeXina, in hoAnvanu vliXh them.... Whitney\u27s Yosemite Guide-Book From: openlibrary.org/works/0L7026039W/ The-Yosemite Guide-book IThUSIlKli r.i .\i ii-M\u27irr.- iit Tin: LMUioomiltr: lSil\u27.r.
PAGE 5 The California Geological Survey, December 1863. From left: Chester Averill, assistant; William M. Gabb, paleontologist; William Ashburner, field assistant; Josiah D. Whitney, State Geologist; Charles F. Hoffmann, topographer, Clarence King, geologist, and William H. Brewer, botanist. (Bancroft Library) From www.yosemite.ca.us/library/the_yo semite-book/ Clarence King From: www.yosemite.ca. us/library/up _and_down_ california/5.1.html King failed, and he was not above reprisal, publicly lashing out with his pen at King in an attempt to embarrass. I am sure, scoffed Muir, in an article for The Overland Monthly, that the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne may be entered at more than fifty different points along the walls by mountaineers of ordinary nerve and skill. On reading King\u27s account of his Mount Tyndall climb, Muir wrote: He must have given himself a lot of trouble. When I climbed Tyndall, I ran up and back before breakfast. 8 In a climate brimming with scientific elitism and academic arrogance, Muir went about beholding to his stories of beloved glacial ice. He may not have kept to the conventions of scientific writing, but he observed geological processes at work, and interpreted a complex pattern of phenomena with insight that emerged as characteristically his own. His method of study, patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them as the ice did, remaining winter and summer to arrive at the truths which were graven upon them, aware there was virtually no documentation to substantiate his theories.9 Whitney and King found Muir and his ideas unkempt, and it is true that he lacked advanced academic scientific training, however, these were not barriers to scientific truth. Muir\u27s theories—the glacial formation of Yosemite Valley and the living glaciers in the High Sierra were more nearly correct than any geologist of his time.10 III. Does Ice A Scientist Make? Punctuating a Leap of Faith Whitney, who had been in Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne in 1863, knew that glaciers had played a significant role in the formation of the High Sierra. There was no disagreement with Muir on this. Whitney wrote to a colleague, G. J. Brush, July 10,1863: We are in the midst of what was once a great glacier region, the valleys all about being most superbly polished and grooved by glaciers, which once existed here in a stupendous scale having a thickness, in the Tuolumne Valley, of a thousand feet.11 Members of the Whitney Survey, however, were seemingly unaware that the snow bank upon which they climbed on Mount Lyell was actually a modern glacier. It was noted that there were no living glaciers in the Sierra Nevada. In 1872, Joseph LeConte observed the Lyell Glacier with Muir, but from a distance. He reported that such a glacier was neither true nor typical—but in some sense a glacier. Muir
Page 6 thought LeConte had made no effort to acquire adequate data—he had not seen glacial ice because he had not gone into the depths of the glacier.12 Muir poured his soul into the writing of a series of articles entitled Studies in the Sierra for The Overland Monthly that appeared in 1874—abridged for the national scientific community. Illustrated with his own drawings, the articles were intended to win converts to his theory on the glacial action at work in the formation of the Sierra and Yosemite Valley. For all the scientific truth borne of Muir\u27s empirical studies, the thread that held his glacial canon together was his faith. He found in the glacial tome answers to a deep theological need. Drawn to glaciers as the plows of God, Muir stood upon them and then within a glacial Shrund, a stranger in a stranger land, as near to the heart of the world as he could—a chamber hung with clustered icicles, subdued light, and solemn murmurs.13 God\u27s handiwork, Muir believed. Surely he had found Him in the act of creating, wielding tools, slowly shaping the Earth. There was the glory. For skeptics, here was the proof. Illuminating the indwelling of God in Creation yet being made, Muir offered up mountain bread to his readers. He hath builded the mountains... .The Master Builder chose for a tool the tender snow-flowers, noiselessly falling through unnumbered seasons, the offspring of the sun and sea. 14 IV. Where Science Ends & Faith Was Always There. Who created that tangled bank? That natural selection resulting from competition between organisms for survival, could produce human beings along with the higher flora and fauna but toward no goal, was the most disturbing of Darwin\u27s theory of evolution. Evidence pointing to evolution, including the evolution of Homo sapiens, had been accumulating for decades but had taken evolution to be a plan present from the beginning and a goal directed process.15 In 1909 during three day\u27s spent with French Strother at the Strentzel-Muir ranch in Alhambra, Muir reflected upon the meaning and purpose of evolution. Evolution, they say brought the earth through its glacial periods, caused the snow blanket to recede, and the flower carpet to follow it, raised the forests of the world, developed animal life from the jelly-fish to the thinking man. 16 But what caused evolution? To my mind, Muir noted, it is inconceivable that a plan that has worked out, through unthinkable millions of years, without one hitch or one mistake, the development of beauty that has made every microscopic particle of matter perform its function in harmony with every other in the universe—that such a plan is the blind product of an unthinking abstraction. No; somewhere, before evolution was, was an Intelligence that laid out the plan, and evolution is the process, not the origin of the harmony. You may call that Intelligence what you please. I cannot see why so many people object to call it God. For Muir Darwin\u27s evolutionary theory reduced mystery, yet, did not destroy the idea of God\u27s designing presence in Nature. What remained was one infinite mystery of existence, of every phenomena of Nature, and that Muir left to God. In the world view Muir endowed, scientific inquiry was ignited by faith, culture, and imagination from which it was birthed as well as by the truth that it sought. For him the journey was always about wildness and would endure to find the means to save parts and parcels of it. Turning always to plash in the divine light of the natural world in nature\u27s own reserve, he chose to live to entice people to look at Nature\u27s loveliness. Seeking the curious magical qualities of each present being, Muir was impelled to the life of lonely wandering solely by the love of God\u27s Earth and eternal, immortal Beauty. Eyes were important to Muir. With them he pursued the phenomena of science to solve puzzles that deepened his faith as he turned to share with others a world they could only half see. With eyes open to God\u27s
John Muir Newsletter, Spring 1993
No full textJohn Muir Newsletter spring 1993 university of the pacific volume 3, number 2 1993 EARTH DAY CELEBRATES TH MUIR IMAGE by Janene Ford On a clear, sunny spring day the Earth Day Conservation Fair in Sacramento attracted thousands of people including large groups of school children. Sponsored by the California Department of Conservation, many organizations were invited to participate by setting up booths in front of the Capitol showing various aspects of recycling, alternative energy, conservation, and other reflections on The Muir Image. The University of the Pacific, the John Muir National Historical Site, the Sierra Club and a number of government agencies such as the California Conservation Corps and Cal Trans were represented. Two staff members of the UOP Library, this author and Rachel Fenske, set up a display on The John Muir Papers and answered questions for visitors and distributed a handout. Their interaction with the younger students revealed that several children thought that John Muir invented Earth Day. Many visitors expressed great interest in the photographs of pages from Muir\u27s journals, sketches, and correspondence, People seemed fascinated with the photographs of two of Muir\u27s inventions, the bed and study desk. Many of John Muir\u27s great-grandchildren and a few of the great-great-grandchildren were present and received framed proclamations and attended a family picnic. Allison Lincoln, thirteen year old daughter of Lynne Hanna Lincoln of Dixon, wrote a poem about her grandfather and how he might feel about the earth today; it was read by Bill Hanna of Napa during the mid-day ceremony. Some of the crowd wore T-shirts with the words The Muir Image emblazoned on their backs. Entertainment, music, jugglers, and happy children carrying give-away shoe strings, pencils, tree seedlings, business cards, pamphlets, bags, and key rings marked the day. It is heartening to know that the Muir Message is not only still relevant, but is especially thriving in California. Those of us who work intimately with Muir\u27s original journals, books and other papers on a daily basis see serious scholars, authors, and students undertaking research, but seldom see young children or have the opportunity to show them the wealth of materials that are in our keeping. Extra copies of the handout are available. If readers would like one, please send a stamped self-addressed envelope to the Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Libraries, Stockton, CA 95211. CONTRIBUTIONS WANTED FOR THE NEWSLETTER As in earlier issues of this Newsletter, the staff wishes to invite its subscribers and readers to submit news, announcements, reviews and information to the Newsletter for consideration for publication. It is the goal of this Newsletter to keep its readers informed of all environmental news so that we can be as aware of relevant activities as possible. Please share your information with us so that we can spread the word. The editor welcomes your submissions and will determine whether they may be published in a forthcoming issue.
Nature\u27s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991, xxiii + 530 pp., maps, illus., bibl., index. Reviewed by Roderick Frazier Nash, [Editor\u27s note: With this issue, we inaugurate a policy of occasionally reprinting book reviews of noteworthy books dealing with the environment. The following review is reprinted from the American Historical Review with the kind permission of the Review and of the book reviewer. It appeared in the AHR 97 (June 1992): 939.] In Nature\u27s Metropolis William Cronon continues a scholarly career dedicated to demonstrating what history can learn from ecology. Cronon\u27s first major book, the celebrated Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983), examined environmental modification immediately before and after the initial contact of European settlers with the northeastern coast. Here, and in the present volume, Cronon points out that what we call nature is a complex mosaic of original and constructed, people-caused conditions. Obviously original or, in Cronon\u27s terms, first nature (p. 264), determined the pre-human environment. But thereafter, the most powerful force shaping the ecosystem derived from human ambition and human ingenuity. Cronon\u27s goal for environmental history is very close to that of ecology: understanding the interrelationships between mankind and the natural world. In the book at hand. Cronon shifts his focus several centuries later and several thousand miles westward from colonial New England. His narrative revolves around the city of Chicago, but his thesis is neither this metropolis nor any city can be understood apart from its environmental and economic hinterland,. In the case of Chicago, that region was nothing less than a huge slice of North America extending from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains - the Great West. Cronon takes pains to tell the city-country story as a unified narrative (p. xiv). Ecology-like, he integrates rather than separates. Constantly he emphasizes that urban and rural areas are parts of an interconnected landscape and share an interconnected history. The environment, Cronon argues, is not jut nature. Environmental historians must study urban and economic developments as well. History, like ecology, should strive for seamlessness. So, Cronon writes, The history of the Great West is a long dialogue between the place we call the city and the place we call the country (p. 54). Today, as the centennial of his controversial essay on the American frontier approaches in 1993, Frederick Jackson Turner has apparently become the whipping boy of every Western historian. Cronon is gracious about it, but he follows suit. His principal complaint is that Turner persuaded several generations of Americans that the frontier, way out there, had nothing to do with the urban civilization thousands of miles to the east. The frontier was the new world, and by the time cities appeared it had vanished. Cronon does not see it this way. The frontier, or as he calls it the country, is linked commercially and, in a real sense ecologically, to the city. For Turner, in other words, the isolation of the frontier explained American development. For Cronon the frontier was never isolated. The West was not a wilderness but part of an urban empire. Nature\u27s Metropolis sweeps from the 1830s, when Chicago (the place of wild garlic) took shape as a white community, to 1893 when the city on the lake hosted the World\u27s Fair (at which, parenthetically, Turner delivered his famous frontier address). As might be expected in this kind of integrative book, Cronon writes about a wide range of subjects. Most of them have been treated in more detail by others, but Cronon\u27s forte is synthesis. We learn in his book about railroads, reapers, refrigerated meat cars, grain elevators, credit and bankruptcy networks, and futures market. These chapters are organized around specific resources: grain, lumber and beef. In each case Cronon shows how the chains of causation that altered, and he is frank to point out, devastated some environments, extend from the frontier through Chicago to Eastern European markets. The buffalo gave way to cows, the native prairie grasses to wheat, and the majestic white pine to the desolate Cutover Lands. Cronon is sensitive to the liabilities as well as the (continued on page 6) JOHN MUIR NEWSLETTER. VOL. Ill, #2 (NEW SERIES) SPRING, 1993 Published quarterly by the John Muir Center for Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 Editor Center Director Staff © Sally M. Miller R.H. Limbaugh This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper.
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, by Clive Ponting. New York: St. Martin\u27s Press, 1991, i-xiv + 432 pp., maps, graphs, bib., index. Reviewed by Dan Flores, Hammond Professor of History, University of Montana Clive Ponting\u27s A Green History of the World sets a challenging task for itself — to tell in a single 400 page volume the environmental history of our planet from the spread of gathering-hunting societies across the globe 25,000 years ago through the pressing environmental issues of the late twentieth century. John Muir, were he alive today, would find this book valuable but perhaps too utilitarian in focus, too short on values and soaring inspirational language. Aldo Leopold, I suspect, would react very favorably to Ponting\u27s effort at a global and holistic treatment including his heavy reliance on statistical data — but like Muir might wonder what role an environmental ethic (particularly the Land Ethic) plays in Ponting\u27s story. The answer is: not much. Looking at the sweep of human history, Ponting sees the accelerating press of human population and major technological ratchet- effects like the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution as far more central to the real story of environmental history. In sharp contrast to books like Clarence Glacken\u27s Traces on the Rhodian Shore, Roderick Nash\u27s The Rights of Nature, Max Oelschlaeger\u27s The Idea of Wilderness, or J. Baird Callicott\u27s various articles exploring comparative environmental ethics and values, Ponting appears to believe that the various ways humans have thought about nature have really made previous little practical difference on the long-term story of environmental history. After digesting the mass of data in this book, I think that he may well be right. Without being preachy or heavy-handed about it, A Green History of the World takes readers into the heart of the historical debate about humans and the planet. Is there an evolving environmental crisis? The trends of history suggest that, while many of the specific issues we face are nothing new, there is a long-term, unfolding crisis. Viewing the arguments of scholars like Lynn White, Jr., who suggests that the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition are the cause, Barry Commoner\u27s idea that the new technology is the culprit, and Paul Erhlich\u27s belief that the swelling human population is the problem, Ponting seems to rank White\u27s causation a distant third. about nature — the animism of primary cultures, the various Far Eastern religions, Judeo-Christian traditions, the Scientific Revolution, capitalism, or Marxism — have not influenced the nuances of the human/environment relationships. They have, and in ways that are important to the quality of both the environment and of human life. But the fact is that despite the wide range of values and beliefs that these ways of thinking represent, history provides examples of societies adhering to all of them that have destroyed nature and undermined themselves. Animistic beliefs did not prevent the Paleolithic hunters, the residents of Easter Island, the Maya or the Sumerians from bringing their worlds crashing down on them. Nor have Taoism or Buddhism prevented large-scale environmental devastation in China or India, any more than Christianity, capitalism, or Marxism have in the modern West. What Ponting\u27s examination of la longue duree demonstrates instead is that since gathering-hunting societies filled up the available space on the planet by about 10,000 years ago, the press of human population has fostered an efflorescence of ethnological fixes to enable more and more of us to survive. It took roughly two million years to build up a planetary population of four million of us at the climax of our lives as gatherer-hunters. Agriculture boosted that population to 200 million within just 8,000 years. For 1500 years after Christ, the exchange of epidemic diseases between formerly isolated human gene pools kept the world\u27s population from mushrooming. But as populations genetically resistant to those diseases have evolved, and as the Industrial Revolution and a global economy have accelerated the pace of technological innovation, the human population has inundated the Earth like a spreading mold, fouling water, air, and land in a process that 10,000 years of history has long since internalized. The human population reached the one billion mark in 1825. Within a century there were two billion; by 1960, three billion; by 1975, four billion. We humans surged to more than five billion by the later 1980s. Faced with such a scenario, Ponting asserts, modern environmental legislation has been little more than cosmetic (p. 400). While this book provides us with no reason to be optimistic, it does seem to clarify a few important issues. One is that our nostalgia for an environmental Golden Age is misplaced unless we are willing to reach 10,000 years into the past for a global model. The second is that reducing the human population by the 99 % that the model would require is, frankly, an ecological and certainly a moral impossibility. It seems to me that Ponting is suggesting that the technology that ratcheted us here is now probably our only hope for saving our skins. It is not that the diverse range of human belief systems
JOHN MUIR IN NEW ENGLAND by Ron Limbaugh (Editor\u27s Note: Following the death of his father-in- law, John Strentzel, and the reorganization of the family orchard business in the Alhambra Valley of California, John Muir made plans for a European trip that would revive his creative energies. His wife Louie encouraged him; she would stay home with the two children while he and his Scottish friend William Keith, the San Franciso landscape painter, would revisit the Scottish moors they had last seen nearly a half-century before. In the spring of 1893 they made plans to travel separately to New York, then rendezvous there and sail jointly to Liverpool. The plans went awry, however, when Muir reached the East Coast. Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of Century and Muir\u27s acting literaiy agent, wanted to introduce him to the eastern literary establishment. The result was a whirlwind tour that dazzled Muir but delayed his departure for Europe. Tire following is an excerpt from a forthcoming book entitled John Muir and Stickeen: the Evolution of a Dog Story. It is used by permission of the author.) Muir\u27s eastern visit was intended as a brief stop en route to Europe. But Johnson converted it into a six- weeks celebrity tour, with Muir as the reluctant debutante. With Johnson opening doors and directing the agenda, Muir found himself the center of attention, a backwoods rustic with a repertoire of colorful anecdotes. He performed dutifully, meeting the social and intellectual elite, stuffing himself at banquets, and telling stories. A visit with John Burroughs was one of the first items on Muir\u27s agenda. Only a year older, yet in 1983 much better known than Muir, Burroughs was late- nineteenth century America\u27s most popular nature writer.1 He was a hesitant host, but at Johnson\u27s insistance he agreed to meet the visiting naturalist at Slabsides, Burroughs\u27 rustic home near Esopus, New York. Later known by their mutual acquaintances as The Two Johns, Burroughs and Muir became fond friends despite their contrasting personalities. Muir was an incessant talker whose wiry frame seemed to thrive on nervous energy in contrast to the portly Sage of Slabsides, who had acquired more conventional sleeping and eating habits.2 At their first meeting Burroughs was condescending, describing Muir as an interesting man with the Western look upon him, but a tiring conversationalist. You must not be in a hurry, he wrote, or have any pressing duty, when you start his stream of talk and adventure. Ask him to tell you his famous dog story ... and you get the whole theory of glaciation thrown in. 3 Moving north to Brahmin country, Johnson and Muir spent several days in and around Boston. They had a delightful day in the company of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, famed Civil War colonel of a black regiment, author and advocate of women\u27s rights. He escorted them on a Cambridge cultural tour which included the homes of James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both poets Muir knew well from the books in his personal library. At Harvard Muir was introduced to a number of prominent faculty, including Josiah Royce, the California philosopher, and Francis Parkman, prominent American historian whose books Muir read avidly. But the writer whose work he knew best was Charles S. Sargent, Director of the Arnold Arboretum and author of the multi-volume Silva of North America. At his home in nearby Brookline Sargent hosted a banquet with Muir the honored guest. Writing his family later, Muir said he had to repeat the dog story I don\u27t know how often .4 More banquets and story-telling followed. At a dinner party in Manchester, New Hampshire, wrote Muir, Sarah Orne Jewett was there, and all was delightful. Here, of course, Johnson made me tell that dog story as if that were the main result of glacial action and all my studies, but I got in a good deal of ice-work ... and never had better listeners. 5 A quick pilgrimage to Concord highlighted Muir\u27s New England visit. Johnson took him to all the shrines: Concord Bridge, Hawthorne\u27s Old Manse, the Alcott residence, the graves of Emerson and Thoreau on Author\u27s Hill in Sleepy Hollow Cemetary, and, of course, Walden Pond, an easy saunter from town. After a delightful P.M. with Emerson\u27s son Edward Waldo and his father-in-law Judge John S. Keyes, where the dog story doubtless surfaced again, the two visitors caught the night train back to Boston.6 The New England tour concluded, Muir and Johnson returned to New York, where a final round of parties and story-telling delayed his departure for Europe. At Gramercy Park Muir dined at the family estate of Gifford Pinchot. In a letter home he described the scene: Here and at many other places I had to tell the story of the minister\u27s dog. Everybody seems to think it wonderful for the views it gives of the terrible crevasses of the glaciers as well as for the recognition of danger and the fear and joy of the dog. I must have told it at least twelve times at the request of Johnson or others who had previously heard it.... When I am telling it at the dinner-tables, it is curious to see how eagerly the liveried servants listen from behind screens, half-closed doors, etc. 7 The six weeks Muir spent in the East ended with his departure for Europe late in June, 1893—without William Keith, who had tired of waiting and sailed alone. But Muir could look back with no small satisfaction: he had mingled with some of the best minds of the continent; he had come as a stranger and had been (continued on page 7)
JAPANESE JOURNALIST RESEARCHES MUIR\u27S LIFE AND WORK Shigeyuki Okajima, Deputy Directory of the Commentary Department for The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan\u27s (and the world\u27s) largest daily newspaper, was in the United States recently on an Eisenhower Fellowship as special correspondent for global environmental issues. This was a return trip to this country; in the early 1980s he spent a year in the U.S. as visiting scholar at the University of Washington. On his latest trip he toured American archival institutions and visited environmental organizations to learn about this country\u27s green movement, and in particular, to study the life and work of John Muir. A recipient of the Global 500 Award from a United Nations agency in 1988, he is a counselor for the Nature Conservation and Wild Bird Societies of Japan, and a committee member of the Japanese Alpine Club. In 1990 he published a Japanese-language history of the American environmental movement, and a year later wrote Only One Earth, an English-language textbook for Japanese high school students. His recent tour included a visit to the Holt-Atherton Library at UOP, where he discussed Japan\u27s environmental movement and his special interest in Muir\u27s contributions to the concept of a global environmental ethics. He presented the library with a copy of his book and with copies of several environmental articles he has published in American- language newspapers. The green movement in Japan, though still in its formative stages, is gathering momentum and will soon be a major force on the international environmental scene. NEWS NOTES Richard F. Fleck, well-known for his work on Thoreau and Muir, has recently edited a book on Native American writings, soon to be published by Three Continents Press. Entitled Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, it presents essays on six Native American novelists who have emerged as internationally acclaimed writers. The editor, formerly with Teikyo Loretto Heights University in Denver, in July will become Dean of Denver\u27s Community College. Oxford University Press is publishing a reference book for young adults, Earthkeepers: Observers and Protectors of Nature. Scheduled for publication in the fall of 1993, it will include an article on Muir and a photo from the Holt-Atherton Library. John Muir T-Shirts are available from the John Muir Memorial Association. Depicting Muir leaning on a hiking stick, the T-shirt project is a fund-raiser to support the work of the John Muir National Historic Site. A shirt can be purchased with a check for $14,00, made out and sent to the John Muir Memorial Association, c/o Dianna Ceballos, 2220 Spring Lake Drive, Martinez, CA 94553, (510) 680-7561. Another movement is afoot to Save Mount Shasta. This has long been a goal of environmental activists who recognize the need for saving Shasta\u27s biodiverse habitat from further urban-industrial encroachment. John Muir was one of the first to publicize Shasta\u27s natural treasures, a
The John Muir Newsletter, Spring 2002
No full text\f Volume 12, Number 2 NEWSLETTER Nature\u27s Temple: John Muir\u27s Spiritual Home by The Rev. Chris Highland, Marin County (Edited from an original paper delivered at the California History Institute/University of the Pacific John Muir Conference; May, 2001.) In our best times everything turns into religion, f;lj all the world seems a church and the mountains altars. ~ My First Summer in the Sierra homeless person told me recently that he wasn\u27t homeless. He was tired after a long walk; his clothes were a little dirty; his hair and bushy beard were messed up and he reacted against a city dweller complaining about all these street people like him. This bush dweller looked at me with piercing blue eyes, shook his head and almost shouted, I\u27m not homeless. I\u27m houseless! My home is with God in Nature. I wondered if this guy was John Muir reincarnated! I smile to think what John Muir would say if he heard this young man. He might admire his honest attitude, and begin peppering him with salty questions about savoring life beyond the confines of the city. Man, Where is the Wild?! In his journals, Muir urged us out of our comfortable but dissatisfying urban existence. He said, if most of humanity must go through this town state of development, then we surely and sorely need to head into Nature as a diver coming to the surface of the water to breathe. 1 So let us figuratively take a deep draught of forest mountain air, and seek out Muir\u27s true home. John Muir\u27s coming home is the universal metaphor for the spiritual journey, the ultimate high. It is the pinnacle of our soul\u27s climb to the stars with the scars of painful and joyful adventure. I would argue, if I really had to, that his message is a deep draw of fresh air, a prophetic announcement, the torah, gospel, dharma and The Word for today - especially for today\u27s rat-racing, tail-chasing, cell-phoning addicted world. What is it we need so much that John Muir had? What makes John Muir\u27s home our home, and how do we really get there? The easy answer is given by Muir himself. Just go. Don\u27t hesitate, levitate! Lighten up! Get you up and out and into the wild house with the sky-blue or star-strewn roof. Again in his journals Muir lamented our sloppiness and sleepiness: It is interesting to note the thinking of those who, brought up in the shadows of city business, have been sleeping all their lives. People need awakening, so he goes on to slap us awake: So much need is there for change of scene, new points of view.2 So MUCH need. Wouldn\u27t all readers agree? It would be too easy to slip into a sermon here; Muir might, but I am not a sermon-loving minister. I am a nature- loving pathfinder who tries to track Muir. Not to follow too literally in his footsteps - though in Scotland and the Sierras I think I\u27ve sauntered in his soles a few steps - but to trace the track of his soul along the contours and landscapes of this wide-open, ecumenical house we call Planet Earth.3 Much has been written about Muir\u27s religious sense and sensibilities. Some even reflect and analyze the parallels to other traditions that interweave, with a touch of imagination, throughout his mental meanderings. I, like others, recognize and celebrate his contribution to the history of interreligious understanding. But what I want to focus on transcends the Scottish Scootcher\u27s significance as a blow-the-doors-off kind of unnatural naturalist as far as religion is concerned. I want to say a few words that urge us toward creating a home-base, a base-camp, a community that practices what Muir calls a new point of view - an awakening of the heart and the mind to a new, daily experience of the sacred Temple of Nature. In 2000, while tracking Muir\u27s spirit through Scotland, I attended a church whose doors had welcomed the Muir (continued on page 8) UNIVERSITY O F T M R JK G I page 1
News & Notes JOHN MUIR MUSICAL SCHEDULED FOR AN EXTENDED RUN!! Mountain Days, the John Muir Musical, was so popular with audiences last year, that it has been scheduled for this year again from August 1-25 at the John Muir Amphitheater on the Martinez waterfront. Grounds open at 6:00 p.m. for picnicking and pre-show activities, and the performance is at 8:00 p.m. Tickets may be ordered at (925) 798-1300, or via the website: www.willowstheatre.org From the Beginning Mountain Days is a Broadway-style musical based on the life, vision and legacy of John Muir. Originally conceived by Richard Elliott, Artistic Director of the Willows Theatre Company, Mountain Days was commissioned by the Willows Theatre in conjunction with the Concord Pavilion Associates as the showcase event of the 2000 Arts Millennium Festival, a celebration of the arts in Contra Costa County. Tony Award nominee Mary Bracken Phillips provided the book and lyrics and internationally renowned composer Craig Bohmler wrote the sweeping score. Mountain Days premiered in October, 2000, at the Chronicle Pavilion in Concord for four performances with an attendance of nearly 10,000 and earned high critical praise. The concept of presenting the show as an annual event was received with tremendous support from the City of Martinez (home of John Muir and the Muir National Historic Site), and the 1,100 seat John Muir Amphitheater was constructed in the Martinez Waterfront Park for the 2001 presentation. Eight performances, most of which were sold out, garnered additional critical acclaim with the critics agreeing that the intimacy of the venue and the waterfront location were indeed welcome additions to the project. What\u27s new in 2002? Mountain Days, returns to the John Muir Amphitheater in August 2002 with 16 performances. Between 6:00 and curtain at 8:00 guests may engage in a variety of activities. Exhibitors and vendors, all in keeping with the Muir vision, will be on site pre-show and during intermission. From 6:30 to 7:30 most evenings, pre-show presentations by individuals such as Garth Gilcrest, Cherry Good, Ross Hanna and Harold Wood will appear. Seating for pre-show presentations will be limited to several hundred. Children\u27s pre-show activities will include readings with Donnel Rubay, Benicia\u27s author of the award winning book, Stickeen, and artistic adventures with Susan Barry, famous for her mountain paintings as well as her creative work involving children and nature. Each night a different activity will take place for children as well as adults. George E. Gruell, a retired federal wildlife photographer, has just published a book in which he matches his own photographs of the Sierra with images he consulted that were produced in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. He photographed the same peaks and boulders from the angles taken in the earlier photographs, sometimes hiking into the areas of interest and sometimes using a helicopter. His project has documented the fact that the forest has filled in so that it is often much denser, and lush growth is much more pronounced now than a century ago. Some wildlife cannot thrive in such dense forests, although in other cases the dense growth is a decided advantage. Factors that caused these changes include heavy livestock grazing that opened up the soil so that seed-lings took root; also logging cleared the way for new growth; a wet climatic cycle; and the decades of anti-fire policies which reduced wildfires. This work, partially subsidized by the logging industry, recommends prescribed burns, and less restrictive limits on logging. Gruell\u27s book is entitled Fire in Sierra Nevada Forest: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849. Whether or not a reader finds the arguments convincing, the photographs are of great interest. NEWSLETTER Volume 12, Number 2 Spring 2002 Published quarterly by The John Muir Center for Environmental Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 ♦ Staff ♦ Editor Sally M. Miller Production Assistants ... Marilyn Norton, Pearl Piper All photographic reproductions are courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Libraries. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. page 2
The Evolution of John Muir: Scientist and Mystic by Mikel Vause, Ph.D., Weber State University Even though A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf was printed in 1916, two years after Muir\u27s death, it still represents his break with conventional society which took place, as Muir himself put it, after leaving the Wisconsin University of the Wilderness. 1 It was during the trek recounted in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf that Muir came to a realization of his love of nature and his hope to live in it forever. In the notebook he carried with him, Muir listed his address as John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe. 2 This walk started in late August of 1867, only seven months after an eye injury when, after a short visit home to the University of Wisconsin, he left Indianapolis, Indiana, for Florida. He then hoped to set off from Florida to South America, but illness in Cuba curtailed that part of this adventure. Muir returned to New York by boat, ill with fever, where he laid over and made a change in his plans. Instead of South America he decided to go to California. ft; By leaving the University of Wisconsin after two years of study of readings in the classics and natural sciences as well as an introduction to Transcendentalism, especially the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, for the University of Wilderness, Muir not only left behind friends and family but also his Calvinistic religious tradition of predestination and hard work for the mystic religion found in the wilderness. Muir\u27s love of freedom, combined with what Fredric Ives Carpenter called Pragmatic Mysticism, are found in Muir\u27s descriptions of landscape which can be referred to as Islands of Ideality. These early illustrations depict a young man, more scientist than transcendentalist, yet one can detect the transcendental seed starting to grow. | An example of this transition illustrates Muir as both scientist and poet, and is used here in the same order and variants as they appear in Muir\u27s own writing: , This cave had an opening about ten feet in diameter, and twenty-five feet perpendicular depth. A ,; strong cold wind issued from it and I could hear the sounds of running water. A long pole was set against its walls as if intended for a ladder, but in some places it was slippery and smooth as a mast and would test the climbing powers of a monkey. The walls and rim of this natural reservoir were finely carved and flowered. Bushes leaned over it ft with shading leaves, and beautiful ferns and mosses were in rows and sheets on its slopes and shelves. Lingered here a long happy while, pressing specimens and printing this beauty into memory.3 Muir leads the reader into this special place first by providing some physical facts regarding the landscape and location of this variant: This cave opening [was] ten feet in diameter and twenty-five feet perpendicular depth and also by furnishing a description of the pole. By using examples of what he felt and saw, and also the description of his physical activity, Muir allows the reader to participate with him in nature. Then comes the Island, beginning with a scientific description containing the basic geological element with one life component, plants and his effective plant-pressing comparison. Pressing this beauty into memory, provides a record of a short transcendence from the actual world of the cave entrance into the ideal world of beauty and harmony. Another interesting illustration of Muir\u27s movement from scientist to poet is found in the following description of Bonaventure graveyard. Muir guides the reader down a desolate, hot, dusty road, and with graphic description causes the reader to participate with him in the harmonious natural beauty he found in the grand old forest graveyard: October 9. After going again to the express office and post office, and wandering about the streets, I found a road which led me to the Bonaventure graveyard. If that burying-ground across the sea of Galilee, mentioned in Scripture, was half as beautiful as Bonaventure, I do not wonder that a man should dwell among the tombs. It is only three or four miles from Savannah, and is reached by a smooth white shell road. There is but little to be seen on the way in land, water, or sky, that would lead one to hope for the glories of Bonaventure. The ragged desolate fields, on both sides of the road, are overrun with coarse rank weeds, and show scarce a trace of cultivation. But soon all is changed. Rickety log huts, broken fences, and the last patch of weedy rice-stubble are left behind, you come to beds of purple liatris and living wild- wood trees. You hear the song of birds, cross a small stream, and are with Nature in the grand old forest graveyard, so beautiful that almost any sensible person would choose to dwell here with the dead rather than with the lazy, disorderly living. Part of the grounds was cultivated and planted with live-oak, about a hundred years ago, But much the greater part is undisturbed. Even those spots which are disordered by art, Nature is ever at work to reclaim, and to make them look as if the foot of man had never known them. The most conspicuous glory of Bonaventure is its noble avenue of live-oaks. They are the most magnificent planted trees I have ever seen, about fifty feet high and perhaps three or four feet in diameter, with broad spreading leafy heads. The main branches reach out horizontally until they come together over the driveway, embowering it throughout its entire length, while each branch is adorned like a garden with ferns, flowers, grasses and dwarf palmettos.4 Muir gives, here, an unusual example of unity and harmony in nature in his description of the graveyard. Muir alludes to the harmonious and powerful effects of nature and the desire it has to maintain harmony. He says, Even those spots which are disordered by art, Nature is ever at work to reclaim, and to make them look as if the foot of man had never touched them. The contrast between the Actual World of man and the Ideal World of Nature is especially interesting in its insistence on the self-restorative energy of page 3
nature and the contrast to the negative, disorderly world of man. Later, in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, Muir discourses on the true harmony of life and earth, concluding that a just appreciation will provide solace and peace: But let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparatable unity, as taught in the woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory for it never fights. All is divine harmony.5 For Muir, Bonaventure represents, in all its Natural beauty, a perfect union of the Actual and Ideal Worlds. Muir next directs the reader into another ideal example of harmonious nature\u27s physical components, i.e. the geological aspect united with the three life components of plant, insect and animal life. The framework is set with an introductory paragraph of lists of plants and measurements; the example itself follows in the language of the poet which is succeeded by a taxonomic listing of factual detail: But of all the parts of these curious tree-gardens the most striking and characteristic is the so-called long Moss (Tillandsia usneoides). It drapes all the branches from top to bottom, hanging in long silvery-gray skeins, reaching a length of not less than eight or ten feet, and when slowly waving in the wind they produce a solemn funeral effect singularly impressive. There is [sic] also thousands of smaller trees and clustered bushes, covered almost from sight in the glorious brightness of their own light. The place is half surrounded by the salt marshes and islands of the river, their reeds and sledges making delightful fringe. Many bald eagles roost among the trees, their screams are heard every morning, joined with the noise of the crows and the songs of the countless warblers, hidden deep in their dwellings of leafy bowers. Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness. The whole place seems like the center of life. The dead do not reign there alone. Bonaventure to me is one of the most impressive assemblages of animal and plant creatures I ever met. I was fresh from the Western prairies, the gardenlike openings of Wisconsin, the beech and maple and oak woods of Indiana and Kentucky, the dark mysterious Savannah cypress forests; but never since I was allowed to walk the woods have I found so impressive a company of trees as the Tillandsia-draped oaks of Bonaventure.6 Muir concludes this illustration with a Whitmanesque listing of trees, states, and other details just as he opens in a lesser sense listing all his surroundings. Both sets of lists bring the reader closer to the actual experiences so important to Muir. Muir made some interesting observations during his thousand-mile walk in regard to the harmony in nature and the status of all living things. After his visit to Bonaventure graveyard, Muir attacks man\u27s lofty conceptions of himself and, by so doing, supports the philosophy represented by the transcendentalists that all is in harmony in the Ideal World and it is necessary that all earthly (actual) things work together in order to bring about the uniting of the Ideal and the Actual. In order to present Muir\u27s attack on the human animal, Muir\u27s own words provide the clearest and most powerful illustration, and are quoted in their entirety: The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are [sic] painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God\u27s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves. They have precise dogmatic insight of the intentions of the Creator, and it is hardly possible to be guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any or than of heathen idols. He is regarded as a civilized law-abiding gentleman in favor either of a republican form of government or of a limited monarchy; believes in the literature and language of England; is a warm supporter of the English constitution and Sunday schools and missionary societies; and is as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater. With such views of the Creator it is, of course, not surprising that erroneous views should be entertained of the creation. To such properly trimmed people, the sheep, for example, is an easy problem - food and clothing for us, eating grass and daisies while by divine appointment for this predestined purpose, on perceiving the demand for wool that would be occasioned by the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden. In the same pleasant plan, whales are storehouses of oil for us, to help out the star in lighting our dark way until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells. Among plants, hemp, to say nothing of the cereals, is a case of evident destination for ships\u27 rigging, wrapping packages, and hanging the wicked. Cotton is another plain case of clothing. Iron was made for hammers and ploughs, and lead for bullets; all intended for us. And so of other small handfuls of insignificant things. But if we should ask these profound expositors of God\u27s intentions, How about those man-eating animals - lions, tigers, alligators - which smack their lips over raw man? Or about those myriads of noxious insects that destroy labor and drink his blood? Doubtless man was intended for food and drink for all these: Oh, no Not at all These are unresolvable difficulties connected with Eden\u27s apple and the Devil. Why does water drown its lord? Why do so many minerals poison him? Why are so many plants and fishes deadly enemies? Why is the lord of creation subjected to the same laws of life as his subjects? Oh, all these things are satanic, or in some way connected with the first garden. Now, it never seems to occur to these farseeing page 4
teachers that Nature\u27s object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insig- : nificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fear-fully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modem civilization cry Heresy on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair\u27s breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned. This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After huma
The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 1996/97
No full textVolume 7, Number 1 NEW °3\u3e f\ND VARWIN God and Evolution in Nature by Shayne Zurilgen (Editor\u27s note: The author, a senior in geology at the University of the Pacific, prepared this paper in the fall of 1996for an undergraduate history class, JohnMuir and the Environment. ) Ifred Lord Tennyson was looking into his microscope one day when he was moved to comment, Strange that these wonders should draw some men to God and repel others. 1 Tennyson was addressing the fervor surrounding Charles Darwin\u27s theory of evolution by natural selection. While he didn\u27t really identify anyone in particular, Tennyson conceivably could have been illustrating the difference between Darwin and John Muir. Muir and Darwin were two men with similar backgrounds and a common love of nature and science. Both were painstaking observers. Darwin\u27s theory of evolution had a tremendous influence on John Muir and is apparent in Muir\u27s writings. However, Muir, like a great many other scientists and naturalists, used general Darwinian notions to support his own ideas of man and nature and their relationship to a divine creator. Both men started out as believers in the one true god of the Christian faith as described in the Bible. When Muir spent the summer of 1869 in the Sierra Nevada mountains he saw God in everything he observed and attributed divinity to all the natural laws at work there. Darwin, on the other hand, was overtaken by a slow growing realization that Christianity and possibly the presence of a divine creator had no place in nature or the science that defined its intricate workings.2 As is well known, John Muir was raised a Calvinist by his strict and often cruel father who did not see purpose in Charles Darwin from Century magazine. developing intellectual pursuits but rather seemed to feel that anything but hard physical work was a distraction from God\u27s plan. Muir believed strongly in God but felt more tribute was paid to Him amidst His works in nature than in the confines of a church constructed by humans. After nearly losing an eye in a machine shop accident that temporarily blinded him, he left home to wander the country in search of answers about the meaning of life and to be as close to his beloved wilderness as a human could possibly be.3 Similarly Darwin had been raised in the church but his early family influences were more balanced. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a product of the Enlightenment, a very open-minded individual who believed in the ability of science to explain natural phenomenon and who despised the human convention of attributing to God that which was yet unknown. His maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgewood, was a Unitarian who had thrown out many of the traditional teachings of Christianity and who held only its most basic religious ideals as truth. This was Darwin\u27s inherited influence, a mixture of free thought and radical Christianity. 4 Both Muir and Darwin shaped their individual views of the natural world and God through intense scientific observation. Both men were the beneficiaries of fortunate circumstances that would allow them to devote their full attention to this task. Darwin was given a job as a naturalist aboard the Beagle, a ship embarking on a journey circumventing the globe with the main purpose of detailing maps. It was a job he appeared sorely unqualified for, having (continued on page 3) UNIVERSITY OF R* A C I F I C
NEWS NOTES: THE BOYHOOD OF JOHN MUIR SOON ON PBS Public televison will soon air The Boyhood of John Muir, a new PBS feature for children by Florentine Films. According to a press release, the film incorporates the key elements in story-telling by developing the essential tension that runs through the plot, articulated in John\u27s relationship with his father. For more information, contact co-producer Diane Garey at 20 Kingsley Avenue, Haydenville, MA 01039, phone 413-268-7934, fax 413-268-8300. L-R. Muir\u27s boyhood home in Wisconsin; and his birthplace and early home in Dunbar, Scotland. WEST COAST LITERATURE THE THEME FOR CHI \u2797 John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, and other celebrated figures in the literary heritage of California and the Pacific Northwest will be discussed at the 50th annual California History Institute, held on the campus of the University of the Pacific, April 18-20. This three-day event features presentations by more than two dozen participants from across the country. The multimedia format will include lectures, exhibits, panel discussions, and a variety of video presentations. The program begins Friday afternoon, April 18, with a session on California Places: Mapping the Terrain. Following a reception and banquet, a keynote panel of prominent California writers concludes the first day\u27s event with a roundtable discussion on Writing California. Saturday, April 19, starts with a breakfast and program sponsored by the Jedediah S. Smith Society, followed by morning sessions on Natural California and California in the Sixties, and afternoon sessions on Representations of California in Popular Culture, and The Western in Cartoon and Cinema. The Institute concludes Sunday, April 20, with sessions on Pacific Northwest Places and Social Utopias in the Far West. According to program co-chairs, Professors Reinhart Lutz and Heather Mayne of the UOP English Department, this conference will focus on literary approaches which reflect the rich ethnic and multicultural diversity of the people, living, dreaming, writing, and reading in California and the Pacific Northwest. Almost from the beginning of its settlement by non-native peoples, said Lutz, California and the Pacific Northwest have inspired literary and fictional responses to this unique part of America. With a wealth of literary texts surviving, and no end in sight to the production of contemporary fiction set in the Golden State of California, or further North on America\u27s Pacific Coast, this conference invites scholarly responses to this wealth of literature. With literary criticism having seen dramatic changes in the 1990s, conference participants will discuss new approaches to classic texts and authors long considered canonical, as well as papers which focus on writers or issues that have shifted to the foreground of contemporary critical awareness. For program details, contact Professor Lutz at the English Department, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211, phone (209) 946-2616; fax (209) 946-2318. For general conference information and registration details, send your name and address to The John Muir Center For Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, 95211. RECENT MUIR BOOK John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings. Ed. and introduced by Terry Gifford. London: Baton Wicks; Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1996.912 p. illus., maps. A densly-packed but highly readable collection of more than 20 books and articles by and about Muir, some previously unpublished. A reprint of Bade s two- volume Life and Letters is included, along with S. Hall Young\u27s effusive Alaska Davs with John Muir. and Muir\u27s essays in Picturesque California. With a spendid eye for visuals, Terry Gifford has added a stunning color photo section as well as line cuts from Muir\u27s journals and manuscripts, and contemporary photos and drawings that ease the eye from the smaller typeface that was required to incorporate so many discrete works into this edition. Along with its earlier companion, John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books, this handsome set makes available the essential Muir, the basic collection of his published works, in a convenient and economical package for the modern reader. r~- N EWSLETTER Volume 7, Number 1 Winter 1996-97 Published quarterly by The John Muir Center for Regional Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 «* Staff •«• Editor Sally M. Miller Center Director R.H. Limbaugh Graphic Designer Beverly Duffy All photographic reproductions are courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections University of the Pacific Libraries. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. This Newsletter is printer! on rmyrlftH paper
R AN ARW God and Evolution in Nature (continued. proved to be only a mediocre student and scientist up to that point. However, he made a good impression on the owner of the ship and got along very well with the captain in spite of their very different and seemingly conflicting backgrounds.5 Muir had been a promising and mostly self-taught student and an inventor. He abandoned a conventional life and in June, 1869 secured a job helping to move sheep from California\u27s Central Valley to the Tuolomne headwaters in the high Sierra above Yosemite Valley. The owner of the flock was very impressed with Muir\u27s talent and enthusiasm for scientific observation. He hired Muir simply to make sure the herders were kept to task and otherwise he would be free to study nature.0 By the time Muir came to California he was very familiar with Darwin\u27s works and theories. Muir often madeiiseofDamimannonffltsinhisbookAf^ ■ First Summer ill the\u27Siena which sprung (42. years later) from the journal detaiiinghis thoughts and observations those months working with the m shepherds When discussing a ■\u27 , particularly aggressive species Of ant that has a painful bite but is the favorite snack of bears he writes, Thus are . the poor biters bitten, like ■\u27, ;^ every other biter, big or httle, in the world\u27i\u27great family.\u27 This reflects his understanding of the survival of the fittest in the Darwinian sense of possessing characteristics, physical or behavioral, that ■increase its chancesof teaching the breeding age. Muir makes sure to note when he refers to big or little that physical ■ strength and size, have little Some of Muir\u27s pencil annotations from the back of Darwin\u27s published journal (courtesy, of the Halt- Atherton Department of Special. Collections. UOP Libraries).\u27\u27 Jm\u27\u27\u27\u27 --\u27 \u27\u27^ \u27\u27 to do with continued existence. Those with traits unfavored in their environment will not survive to pass on these traits, Thus are the poor biters bitten. Further, Muir referred to the differences in captive and wild sheep. He saw that in captivity sheep became dependent on man. They had lost their ability to act on their own and were helpless without man.8 Darwin had made similar observations of domesticated animals in Origin of the Species. He noted, for instance, that most domesticated animals have drooping ears as a result of a loss of alertness brought on by the protection of life in captivity.9 But Muir injected morality into the mix. He despised the sheep and felt that they were corrupted by man. Darwin\u27s theory of natural selection saw no lines of morality, only the struggle between species for a place in the system. Indeed, it was this lack of morality in nature that slowly eroded Darwin\u27s faith and led him to rule out the participation of God in evolution. How could a loving and compassionate God create, for instance, the Venus\u27 Fly Trap that deliberately misleads an insect by playing towards its attraction and what is presumed to be a survival instinct to bring it to its death? It also follows that if the great - \u27: ; successes and beautiful phenomena of nature were the \u27. \u27.\u27 result of divine creation then so were all the failures and imperfect designs. In a book entirely devoted to orchids, Darwin argued that evolved structures that guarantee insect-aided fertilization are thrown together from parts originally used for other purposes. In short, Darwin believed that if there was a God that was omniscient and omnipotent, He would not be the author of cruelties and waste seen in nature or stoop to trifling works of natural engineering, and He would not be bound to creation through natural laws.10 Where Darwin experienced a loss of faith upon investigating nature, Muir\u27s faith was not only confirmed by the same process but magnified tenfold. Muir appeared to side somewhat with the supporters of special creation, Special creation held that god had created each of the lineages of species individually and then let natural page
A N1) A OW J r\ : God and Evolution in Nature (continued. ■ ) laws control them. Darwin was quite outspoken against this theory for theological as much as scientific reasons. Muir took the theory one step further and contended that nature was not only God\u27s creation but that there was a bit of divinity in everything there because of its source. Creation was ongoing rather than limited to a particular moment. Natural selection and geologic processes were the result of a little hold nudge. Nature was the divine manuscript with which, when a close communication is held, one can learn to know God. While many Darwinists used the theory of evolution to continue to place man in a superior position above the lower animals (and even to argue incorrectly for the superiority of individual races of human beings), Muir felt Darwin had brought humans closer to animals. Muir often took to referring to animals as fellow mortals and little people and personified their day- to-day activities. It could be argued that Muir only made these connections through analogy to persuade the reader to value all life and develop an understanding of animal life through familiar terms. However, it becomes increasingly obvious throughout My First Summer in the Sierra that Muir not only feels kinship with the animals but also with the plants and rocks and rivers and other forces of nature. He even goes so far to suggest that there could be a heart like our own beating in every crystal and cell. Muir believed that everything is involved in one great plan with a great system of interdependency and at the helm is God himself. This idea is evident in Muir\u27s support of the Great Chain of Being theory. According to this theory a sequence of organisms from the more lowly and simple at the bottom to God at the pinnacle exists and is predesigned by God himself. Scientific thought began to condemn this theory before 1800 but Muir continued to find it credible.12 This suggests the need for a general statement about John Muir\u27s approach to scientific interpretation. Muir essentially interpreted his observations through a great deal of Romantic preconception. He did not approach science with the objectivity that brings it credibility. While Muir shaped his observations, to some degree, to fit into his view of nature, Darwin followed the scientific method, allowing his observations to shape his ideals, beliefs, and theories. It must be noted, however, that Muir\u27s purpose was different from Darwin\u27s. In order to convince the general public and government officials, both with limited understanding of science, of the worth of animal species and wilderness, Muir found a romantic appeal much more persuasive than direct science. Indeed, it is rarely science that influences government to act on scientific issues. Muir took it upon himself the task of winning their hearts and minds. In Stickeen, John Muir tells the story of a little dog in the effort to make an argument for intelligence and the presence of a soul in animals. The story tells of a pathetic looking little dog Muir encountered on a trip in Southeast Alaska; on a glacier the animal confronts its fear, revealing to Muir his soul. He argues that too much of what he would call intelligence in animals is attributed by scientists to instinct. Muir claims that Stickeen thought, reasoned and reached the same conclusions as he did and this was due to the dog\u27s intelligence rather than instinct or psychological conditioning. What is especially interesting is that Muir often refers to Stickeen\u27s bravery and courage as what appears at first to be a lack of reason or dullness of perception in the dog. Some would immediately perceive that a lack of reason is exactly what drove the little dog. Pure instinct and conditioning has directed the dog to follow its companion. Muir, however, had already credited the dog with an intellect near that of any man. For this reason Stickeen\u27s actions reflected bravery; it confronted and conquered its fear and this elevated Stickeen to a higher plane in Muir\u27s eyes.13 Darwinian theories hold that intelligence is really a product of thought and experience. Since humans have reached a higher level with regard to the evolution of the brain, they have the capacity to retain more memory of experience. For Darwin, this is the real source of intelligence. Darwin believed that in the absence of a personal God and without the promise of an afterlife, humans can only live life according to the influence of their strongest instincts or those that appear best to the individual. Darwin contended that dogs acted this way but did so blindly or without the benefit of significant memory. Humans have the ability to look back on past experience and weigh these experiences in regard to emotion and desire. Acting on social instincts and working for the good of the species to gain their favor is in the individual\u27s best interest. Sometimes, however, the individual\u27s experience and feelings contrast with those of the masses and that person will look to his innermost judge or conscience to lead him. The ability to reason is a direct product of brain capacity and therefore animals with a lesser brain capacity have a lesser ability to reason. Muir\u27s conclusion was that Stickeen had a soul to guide him.\u27 While Muir and Darwin were in agreement on the observed operations of natural selection and evolution, their views diverged on the issue of God. Darwin could find no place for God in such a random process bound only by a few basic rules. Muir on the other hand, went into the wilderness looking to nature for affirmation of God and his own connection in the world and it was there that he found it. NOTES 1.Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, (New York, W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1962), 390. 2. John Muir, My First Slimmer in the Sierra. (New York, Penguin Books, 1987), 1-32. Himmelfarb, Darwinian Revolution. 38(1-411. 3. Muir, My First Summer, vii-xvi. 4. Adrian Desmond & lames Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 5-21. 5. Alan Moorhead, Darwin and the Beagle. (New York, Harper and Row, 1970), 19-36. 6. Muir, My First Summer. 1-32. 7. Muir, My First Summer, 45-46. 8. Muir, Mv First Summer. 56-57 & 96-97. 9. Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species. (New York, Penguin Books, 1958), 31-58. 10. Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation. (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 124-133. 11. Muir, Mv First Summer. 132. 12. Ronald Limbaugh, John Muir\u27s Stickeen and the Lessons of Nature. (Fairbanks, Alaska, University of Alaska Press, 1996), 71-76. 13. John Muir, Stickeen, (The Final Draft of 1887), as taken from Limbaugh, Stickeen and the Lessons of Nature, 115. 14. John Muir, Stickeen (From Limbaugh), 122-125. page 4
Muir and Topography: he Natural Surveyor By Howard R. Cooley unacquainted with the topography of the upper mountains.... 2 Yet, by the third day out he was writing in his journal, The sculpture of the landscape is as striking in its main lines as in its lavish richness of detail; a grand congregation of massive heights with the river shining between, each carved into smooth, graceful folds without leaving a single rocky angle exposed. ..The whole landscape showed design.... 3 And this was only the chaparral covered slopes of Horeshoe Bend in the Sierra foothills! mm n his first rambles only botany was on John Muir\u27s mind. He seemed not yet to have any awareness of topography-wading into the middle of Canadian swamps, rowing against the current of the Wisconsin River, and bushwhacking up steep slippery bluffs. But this is understandable, for a real sense of topography is never learned from books or maps, but is attained from exploring landscapes-following ridges, seeing low passes between cols, the way spur ridges lead upwards and join the rocky spines of main dividing ridges, the meandering ravines forming whole watershed systems with tributaries, headwaters, and opposing slopes. From this a keen observer develops a perception of natural landforms as orderly, and as much a key part of the evolution and ecology of the natural environment as plants and animals and climate. Muir\u27s awareness of topography emerged gradually at first, then matured rapidly, almost as a newly realized revelation. After arriving in California in 1868, Muir and an Englishman, Joseph Chilwell, headed for Yosemite. Hiking up the side of the dividing ridge parallel to the Merced and Tuolumne [Rivers] to Crane Flat...,\u27 they followed a snow-covered trail from which Muir could examine the topography and plan our course. 1 Scouting between headwaters (on ridges) to avoid crossing creeks, he continued; we found our way without the slightest trouble, steering by the topography in a general way along the brow of the canon. From there they pushed eagerly on up the Wawona Ridge to the Mariposa Grove. Like Joseph Walker and John Fremont, Muir scouted his way over the snowy Sierra, but what is important here is that Muir wrote about the topography as well as the trail. Paralleling his studies of plants, animals, and geology was the keystone of all natural environments, topography. Yet this element has not been developed to any degree in the Muir biographies. In the summer of 1869, Muir realized the opportunity before him when Pat Delaney hired him to help drive a band of sheep to the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne Rivers
The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2000
No full textvolume 10, Number 1 ^%4Km§-Winter 2000 NEWSLETTER Some Writings and Words of John Muir Compared with Writings of Henry David Thoreau by Stan Hutchinson, Sierra Madre, California ohn Muir\u27s earliest exposure to the writings of Henry D. Thoreau probably occurred in the home of Dr. and Mrs. Ezra S. Carr while he was a student it the Wisconsin State University, Madison, from ■ [lebruary, 1861, to June, 1863. The Carrs were keenly interested in the works of Emerson and Thoreau, and had (granted Muir access to their library. It is reasonable to presume his reading matter included Thoreau\u27s Walden published some eight years earlier. Had Muir not read Walden during his college days, it seems probable that he jjtould have mentioned his later reading of this unique book somewhere in his extensive correspondence with Mrs. Carr which began in 1865; such a letter has not come to light. It is also likely that he had opportunities to read §ne or more of Thoreau\u27s essays, particularly those published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly beginning in June, 1862. H A copy of Walden was sent to Muir in Yosemite in 1872, and his receipt of the book is documented in a surviving letter.1 There is no confirmation that he first read it lit that time, but this gift would have allowed him to per- Wse and study Walden from a new perspective after a decade of personal wilderness experiences far removed §§om Madison. The earliest reference to Muir\u27s reading of ffhoreau is found in his letter to Jeanne Carr written from Yosemite, May 29, 1870, advising her that he had been reading Thoreau\u27s \u27Maine Woods\u27 a short time ago. 2 fjjhe first mention of Thoreau by Muir in his published writings was apparently in his article, Hetch-Hetchy Valley, published in the March 25, 1873 issue of the Boston Weekly Transcript; therein he praised the pure ibul of Thoreau. 3 Houghton Mifflin published The Writings of Henry I J. Thoreau in 1906 in a twenty volume edition, fourteen volumes of which were Thoreau\u27s Journal. Muir acquired his set in December of the following year.4 Assuming Muir delved into the various books, Thoreau\u27s personality, philosophy and creative genius were more fully revealed to Muir, greatly increasing his admiration for the individual and his work.5 There can be little doubt that Thoreau\u27s nature- oriented writings invigorated and inspired Muir in his own efforts. Similarities in Muir\u27s writings and philosophy to those of Thoreau are not rare and are occasionally encountered when reading one or the other, suggesting Thoreau\u27s subtle influence on Muir. Thoreau would have been pleased. The following examples of Muir\u27s affinity to Thoreau range from those which are perhaps more imagined than real to deliberate paraphrasing. The majority of Thoreau\u27s quotations are from Walden.6 Of the Muir quotations cited, only the first was ever intended by him for publication. Without reservation, Henry David Thoreau proclaimed the purpose of his second book on the title page of Walden, first published in 1854 by Ticknor and Fields, Boston. I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. A sentence of John Muir\u27s journal entry for July 12, 1869, written while en route to the Tuolumne Meadows with Pat Delaney\u27s sheep, appears to be a paraphrase of Thoreau\u27s statement quoted above. One must keep in mind that Muir\u27s 1869 Sierra journal was rewritten several times before it was published in 1911 as My First Summer in the Sierra. His paraphrase of Thoreau may have appeared in the original 1869 journal proving he had read (continued on page 3) T V OR page 1 F» A. C I F I C
News & Notes A great deal of John Muir-related activity is happening these days, proof once again of the worldwide impact of Muir\u27s life on our time. A new CD has been issued called the John Muir Tribute; proceeds from sales will go to support a planned new education and visitors center at the John Muir National Site in Martinez. To order, send your check, payable to John Muir Memorial Association for 25.00 donation plus 29.95 plus shipping and handling. Please contact Pearl Piper to order your copy. NEWSLETTER Volume 10, Number 1 Winter 2000 Published quarterly by The John Muir Center for Regional Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 ♦ Staff ♦ Editor Sally M. Miller Production Assistants ... Marilyn Norton, Pearl Piper All photographic reproductions are courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Libraries. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. page 2
Some Writings and Words of John Muir Compared with Writings of Thoreau, by Stan Hutchinson Walden prior to that date. Alas, that journal no longer exists. Eating, walking, resting, seem alike delightful, and one feels inclined to shout lustily on rising in the morning like a crowing cock.\u27 In the opening pages of Economy, the first chapter Valden, Thoreau presents his readers with a basic tenet he book, noting the I, or first person.. .will be retained. . . throughout the text. And it was. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else in I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the iirowness of my experience.8 On July 31, 1875, Muir wrote Jeanne Carr from ick\u27s Hotel in Yosemite Valley. In this mostly light- ■ .rted letter, the similarity of his comment about himself SmXh that of Thoreau may be purely coincidental. Then ftlgain, he may have been very deliberately paraphrasing Walden. All this letter is about myself, and why not when I\u27m the only . on in all the wide world that I know anything about - Keith . . . not excepted.5 Both Thoreau and Muir listened to owls during solitary excursions through dark or dimly lit woods and commented on their call. From the Sounds chapter of \u27 Iden comes Thoreau\u27s unusual and somewhat puzzling reflection on owls. I rejoice that there arc owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men.10 Muir very briefly mentioned owls three times in his Sequoia journals of 1875, describing their call as beery, the bird as broad voiced and, in a manner U miniscent of Thoreau, their sanity as questionable. An owl, prince of lunatics. Health in his soft, anglelcss too- whoo-hoo-hoo. Thoreau\u27s essay Walking was first published in the • - \u27antic Monthly for June, 1862, a month after his death. He created the final form of this essay from two of his . \u3est popular lectures of the 1850s, Walking and The Wild. 12 The final version of Walking contains one of \u3ereau\u27s most famous and well-known passages. The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and it I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preserva- H of the World.13 Various journal fragments from Muir\u27s 1890 Alaska trip were later utilized in chapters XVII and XVIII of Travels in Alaska, 1915. The journal entry for July 11, ■■ 90, which contained one of his now most oft-quoted itements was not included. Muir apparently confined the phrase to his private journal, never intending it for publication perhaps because of the similarity to Thoreau. I vas first published, posthumously, in 1938. In God\u27s wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware.14 Thoreau related his views on hunting and fishing in the Higher Laws chapter of Walden. He was hopeful that youths inclined to hunt would soon outgrow it. This was rather unrealistic on Thoreau\u27s part, for in mid-nineteenth century America the bison and passenger pigeon still awaited their respective decimation or extinction by maturing hunters. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.\u275 In mid-May, 1903, John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt spent three days together in Yosemite. During the evening of May 16, they were in camp near Glacier Point apparently enjoying every aspect of roughing it. Muir\u27s opinions on hunting mirrored those of Thoreau, and when Roosevelt turned the conversation to his own hunting exploits the unpolitic Muir proceeded to chastise him. A portion of that conversation was related by Muir to William Colby and Robert Underwood Johnson. Mr. Roosevelt, when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things. . .are you not far enough along to leave that off? [To which the President supposedly responded, perhaps biting his tongue with those formidable teeth.] Muir, I guess you are right. [Of course, six years later TR blasted his way across Africa, ignoring Muir\u27s admonition.]16 Thoreau\u27s dissertation of the history of sauntering, also from Walking, 1862, reflects his typically thorough research on a subject. The excerpt quoted here also illustrates his remarkable and possible unequaled virtuosity with the comma. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understands the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, - who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, There goes a Sainte-Terrer, a Saunterer, a Holy Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks. . . are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels. An interesting small book, The Mountain Trail and Its Message, was prepared by Albert W. Palmer from his mountaineering journals and diaries and was published in 1911 by The Pilgrim Press. Palmer was an early member of the Sierra Club and participated in several club outings. The most memorable for him may have been that of July, page 3
Some Writings and Words of John Muir Compared with Writings of Thoreau, by Stan Hutchinson 1908, to the Kern River Canyon when on July 1 he shared a campsite near John Muir. Palmer noted in his diary that the famous naturalist has spread his blankets just below mine under this great old yellow pine. All in all it is a jolly crowd.. . \u278 Several days later while resting along the trail, Palmer was overtaken by Muir. He stopped, they began to talk, and a portion of their ensuing conversation was recorded by Palmer in his diary. He later questioned whether the derivation of saunter Muir gave me is scientific or fanciful, suggesting he was not familiar with Thoreau\u27s commentary on the word. Muir apparently was.19 Mr. Muir, someone told me you did not approve of the word hike. Is that so? His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied: I don\u27t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not \u27hike!\u27 Do you know the origin of that word \u27saunter?\u27 It\u27s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, \u27A la saint terre,\u27 \u27To the Holy Land.\u27 And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not \u27hike\u27 through them.20 In another well-known quotation from the Economy chapter of Walden, Thoreau described some of the more important duties he had performed in the service of his fellow man. For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.2\u27 Late in life Muir deliberately paraphrased Thoreau\u27s inspector statement. Perhaps while rereading Walden, Thoreau\u27s Journal, or just reflecting on his own years of solitude and discovery, he scribbled out these brief and meaningful words (conjectural within brackets). [For many years I was a] self appointed inspector of gorges, gulches, and glaciers.22 Edward Abbey, a student of both Thoreau and Muir, brought these latter thoughts of the two writer-naturalists into the fourth quarter of the twentieth century and continued something of a tradition with them when he wrote, Saving the world was merely a hobby. My vocation has been that of inspector of desert waterholes. 23 ENDNOTES 1. Abba G. Woolson letter to John Muir, March 21, 1872, Boston, Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California. Cited in J. Parker Huber, John Muir and Thoreau\u27s Maine, The Concord Saunterer, New Series, 3 (Fall 1995): 111. 2. William Frederick Bade, The Life and Letters of John Muir (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1924), Vol I, p. 223. 3. Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), p. 83 and note, p. 395. Fox\u27s date for this issue of the Boston Weekly Transcript, March 21, 1873, is at variance with Kimes, which dates the issue as March 25, 1873. See William F. Kimes and Maymie B. Kimes, John Muir: A Reading Bibliography (Palo Alto, California, William P. Wreden 1977), p. 7. 4. J. Parker Huber, The Concord Saunterer ( Fall, 1995): p. 113, and note 37, p. 118. 5. For a discussion of Muir\u27s annotation in his set of Thoreau\u27s Journals and Thoreau\u27s influence on Muir\u27s later writings, see Richard F. Fleck, John Muir\u27s Homage to Henry David Thoreau. The Pacific Historian, 29, (Summer/Fall 1985), special double issue, John Muir: Life and Legacy, pp. 55-64. 6. For this and all subsequent quotations from Walden, I have utilized Walden, An Annotated Edition, with foreword and notes by Walter Harding (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston), 1995. 7. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1911), p. 106. 8. Walden, p. 1. 9. Bade, The Life and Letters of John Muir, 1925, Vol. II, p. 55. Keith is William Keith, artist and friend of Muir. 10. Walden, p. 122. 11. John Muir, John of the Mountains, the Unpublished Journals of John Muir, edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1938), p. 215. 12 Great Short Works of Henry Thoreau, edited by Wendell Glick (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982), p. 294. 13. Henry David Thoreau, The Natural History Essays, introduction and notes by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith Publisher, Peregrine Smith Books, 1980), p. 112. 14. Muir, John of the Mountains, p. 317. 15. Walden, p. 207. 16. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1945), p. 292. 17. Thoreau, The Natural History Essays, p. [93J-94. For the first occurrence of the sauntering passages see The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, [Reprint edition, introduction by Walter Harding. Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., Peregrine Smith Books, Salt Lake City, 1984], Vol. 2, Jan. 10, 1851), pp. 140-141. 18. Albert W. Palmer, The Mountain Trail and Its Message (The Pilgrim Press, [no place], 1911. Second edition with introduction and commentary by Charles Palmer Fisk. Sixth Street Press, Fresno, California, 1997), p. 14. 19. Ibid., p. 42. 20. Ibid., pp. 41-42. 21. Walden, p. 16. For the first occurrence of the inspector passages, see Thoreau\u27s Journal, Peregrine Smith reprint edition, 1984, Vol. I [1845-1847], p. 434. 22. Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California. Cited in Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison, Wl, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 350. 23. Edward Abbey, Vox Clamantis in Deserto (Rydal Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Clark Kimball, Publisher, 1989 [Second edition, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Vox Clamantis in Deserto, Notes from a Secret Journal. St. Martin\u27s Press, New York, no date, p. 46]). page 4
Book Reviews Environmental Ethics: Duties To And Values In The Natural World By Holmes Rolston III Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988 Reviewed by Steven C. Anderson Stockton, CA To state the obvious, environmental concerns have been growing for the past several decades. This has dted from, in large part, the perception that human- luced changes in the environment have had direct • pacts on everyone. This concern has been bolstered by ncreased scientific understanding of nature in an ilutionary and ecological context. The impact has been to a combination of rapid population growth, increased irations, expectations, and demands on resources tered by contemporary economic systems and doctrines that result in ever more growth and consumption, all of fueled by the growth of an enabling technology. Perhaps the most influential plea to extend traditional lies to the environment itself was the call for a land !;.etliic in the widely read Sand County Almanac of Aldo ipold, first published in 1949: A thing is right when it Is to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the Abiotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. thing, Leopold meant human action, and subsequent owledge of the nature of communities has persuaded ecologists that integrity and stability have to be considered n the context of the dynamic of change that is part of the ^history of every ecosystem. Leopold\u27s simple, elegant iement has since generated an academic cottage indus- Ihe subdiscipline of environmental ethics, seeking to . • onalize and explain what many have intuited since their . i recognition of environmental degradation. Rolston has n an important contributor to this burgeoning literature. Although Rolston does not lay out his assumptions in llteipreface or an introductory chapter, the reader soon infers that they are the standard humanistic assumptions rights and ethics are secular constructs and that we are ffo proceed rationally from this precept. There are no . rills present in the wild before human assignment. But les (interests, desires, needs satisfied; welfare at stake) / be there apart from human presence (p. 52). But
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