Person of the week: John Muir

“Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.”

♦ Described himself as a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.”

♦ John Muir, born April 21, 1838, was born in Scotland.

♦ When he was 11 his family immigrated to the U.S. and started a farm in Wisconsin.

♦ When he was 22 he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, paying his own way ( Among his favorite classes was botany!)

♦ He never got his degree, instead deciding to transfer to the “University of the Wilderness”.

♦ At the age of 29 he walked from Indianapolis to Florida, over 1,000 miles. He then sailed to Cuba and Panama. He had intended to keep going until he got to South America, but a nasty bout of Malaria that he got in Florida made him change his mind. He headed through the Isthmus of Panama and up the west coast to California.

♦ In March of 1868, he arrived in San Francisco. He took a quick camping trip in Yosemite Valley, a place he’d heard good things about, before taking a job as a ferry operator closer to San Francisco.

♦ When describing his first impressions of the place, he concludes: “No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite”.

♦ When offered a job as a sheep herder in the mountains around Yosemite, he immediately accepted.

♦ He next got a job operating a sawmill in Yosemite Valley. With more ‘permanent’ employment, he built himself a cabin in the valley.

♦ His time following the sheep brought him to the realization that sheep were “hoofed locusts” who destroyed fragile alpine meadows. Several years after his sheep herding job, he published several articles discussing their destruction, and proposed that Yosemite be preserved in the way that Yellowstone was preserved—as a national park.

♦ Congress passed the bill, but didn’t include Yosemite Valley.

♦ John and Gilford Pinchot were close friends until 1896, when Pinchot released an article in a Seattle magazine supporting the grazing of sheep in natural reserves. John decided that he wanted nothing more to do with Pinchot. The falling out led to a schism between environmental supporters of the day into to two camps: the conservationists (Pinchot’s followers) and the preservationists (Muir’s followers).

.♦ John’s position was that nature should be preserved for its spiritual and aesthetic value, not for its commercial value. He also advocated that nature should be preserved “for Nature itself”.

♦ John worked to add Yosemite Valley to the newly formed Yosemite National Park. He and several professors from Berkeley and Stanford started the Sierra Club (he was its first president). "Let us do something to make the mountains glad."

♦ In part, their actions led to the inclusion of Yosemite Valley in the national park two years later. The other part that changed the boundaries for Yosemite was a visit by Theodore Roosevelt, who was convinced by Muir, even before seeing the valley itself, that it ought to be preserved.

♦ He was the first to conclude that the canyon had been carved by glaciers (other famous scientists had concluded it was the result of a giant earthquake). His ideas created much controversy at first, especially because he was an ‘amateur’ geologist. But over time his theories on glacial activity forming the valley of Yosemite become widely accepted.

♦ This fame brought many people out to see him, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Gray, and Joseph LeConte.

♦ In addition to his work in Yosemite, John was integral to the formation of Mount Ranier National Park and Sequoia National Park.

♦ He also traveled considerably in Alaska and throughout the pacific northwest. To see his travels in Google Earth, with excerpts from his books, click here (you need to have a computer with Google Earth loaded on it).

♦ His last major environmental battle was trying to prevent the formation of a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley, in order to provide water to San Francisco. Despite major debates for seven years, an act was passed by Woodrow Wilson to flood the valley in 1913. “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

♦ "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe."

♦ Quoted from a tribute written by Theodore Roosevelt, about J. Muir that is pretty amusing:

“There was a delightful innocence and good will about the man, and an utter inability to imagine that any one could either take or give offense. Of this I had an amusing illustration just before we parted. We were saying good-by, when his expression suddenly changed, and he remarked that he had totally forgotten something. He was intending to go to the Old World with a great tree lover and tree expert from the Eastern States who possessed a somewhat crotchety temper. He informed me that his friend had written him, asking him to get from me personal letters to the Russian Czar and the Chinese Emperor; and when I explained to him that I could not give personal letters to foreign potentates, he said: "Oh, well, read the letter yourself, and that will explain just what I want." Accordingly, he thrust the letter on me. It contained not only the request which he had mentioned, but also a delicious preface, which, with the request, ran somewhat as follows:

"I hear Roosevelt is coming out to see you. He takes a sloppy, unintelligent interest in forests, although he is altogether too much under the influence of that creature Pinchot, and you had better get from him letters to the Czar of Russia and the Emperor of China, so that we may have better opportunity to examine the forests and trees of the Old World."

Of course I laughed heartily as I read the letter, and said, "John, do you remember exactly the words in which this letter was couched?" Whereupon a look of startled surprise came over his face, and he said: "Good gracious! there was something unpleasant about you in it; wasn't there? I had forgotten. Give me the letter back."

So I gave him back the letter, telling him that I appreciated it far more than if it had not contained the phrases he had forgotten, and that while I could not give him and his companion letters to the two rulers in question, I would give him letters to our Ambassadors, which would bring about the same result.”

♦ Quoted from Albert W. Palmer's remembrances of hiking with J. Muir:

“There are always some people in the mountains who are known as "hikers." They rush over the trail at high speed and take great delight in being the first to reach camp and in covering the greatest number of miles in the least possible time. they measure the trail in terms of speed and distance.

One day as I was resting in the shade Mr. Muir overtook me on the trail and began to chat in that friendly way in which he delights to talk with everyone he meets. I said to him: "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't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike!

"Do you know the origin of that word 'saunter?' It's 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, "A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' 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 'hike' through them."

♦ And finally, my favorite story, from Muir’s book “The Yosemite”:

“Few Yosemite visitors ever see snow avalanches and fewer still know the exhilaration of riding them. In all of my mountaineering I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride, and the start was so sudden and the end came so soon I had but little time to think of the danger that attends this sort of travel, though at such times one thinks fast. One fine Yosemite morning after a heavy snowfall, being eager to see as many avalanches as possible and wide views of the forest and summit peaks in their new white robes before the sunshine had time to change them, I set out early to climb by a side canyon to the top of a commanding ridge a little over three thousand feet above the Valley. on account of the looseness of the snow that blocked the canyon I knew the climb would require a long time, some three or four hours as I estimated; but it proved far more difficult than I had anticipated. Most of the way I sank waist deep, almost out of sight in some places. After spending the whole day to within half an hour or so of sundown, I was still several hundred feet from the summit. then my hopes were reduced to getting up in time to see the sunset. But I was not to get summit views of any sort that day, for deep trampling near the canyon head, where the snow was strained, started an avalanche, and I was swished down to the foot of the canyon as if by enchantment. The wallowing ascent had taken nearly all day, the descent only about a minute. When the avalanche started I threw myself on my back and spread my arms to try to keep from sinking. Fortunately, thought the grade of canyon is very steep, it is not interrupted by precipices large enough to cause outbounding or free plunging. On no part of the rush was I buried. I was only moderately imbedded on the surface or at times a little below it, and covered with a veil of black-streaming dust particles; and as the whole mass beneath and about me joined in the flight there was no friction, though I was tossed here and there and lurched from side to side. When the avalanche swedged and came to rest I found myself on top of the crumpled pile without a bruise or a scar. This was a fine experience. Hawthorne says somewhere that steam has spiritualized travel; though unspiritual smells, smoke, et., still attend steam travel. This flight in what might be called a milky way of snow stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all modes of motion I have ever experienced. Elijah’s flight in a chariot of fire could hardly have been more gloriously exciting.”

And in case you have never seen an avalanche and are unsure of what he is going on about, please enjoy the following video, featured at the Banff film festival a few years back, called Out of Ophirica.

Want to read some John Muir? He was a great writer. All of his stuff can be read online here. I recommend the Yosemite, and the Stickeen books (that was his dogs name), but many many of them are very entertaining, enlightening, and educational.