Essential Muir (Revised), page 1
ESSENTIAL
MUIR
Originally published in conjunction with Santa Clara University as part of the California Legacy series.
Introduction © 2021, 2006 by Fred D. White
Foreword © 2021 by Jolie Varela
All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Muir, John, 1838- author. | White, Fred D., 1943- editor.
Title: Essential muir : a selection of John Muir’s best (and worst) writings / edited with an Introduction by Fred D. White ; foreword by Jolie Varela.
Description: Berkeley : Heyday, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021017975 (print) | LCCN 2021017976 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597145503 (paperback) | ISBN 9781597145541 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Muir, John, 1838-1914. | Natural history--United States. | Naturalists--United States--Biography. | Conservationists--United States--Biography.
Classification: LCC QH31.M9 A3 2021 (print) | LCC QH31.M9 (ebook) | DDC
508.73--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017975
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017976
Cover Design: Ashley Ingram
Interior Design: Philip Krayna, PKD, Berkeley
Typesetting: Lorraine Rath
Published by Heyday
P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, California 94709
(510) 549-3564
heydaybooks.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Terry Beers and Malcolm Margolin,
for believing I could do this
To my wife, Therese, for her inspiration
And to the spirit of John Muir
Contents
FOREWORD BY JOLIE VARELA
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: THE VISIONARY INVENTOR
“Knowledge and Inventions,” from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
“The World and the University,” from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
PART TWO: THE WANDERING MINSTREL
“Kentucky Forests and Caves and Through the Cumberland Mountains,” from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
“The River Country of Georgia, Through Florida’s Swamps and Forests, and across Florida to Cedar Keys,” from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
PART THREE: THE NATURE SCRIBE AND RHAPSODE
“In Camp on the North Fork of the Merced,” from My First Summer in the Sierra
“The Mono Indians of Bloody Cañon,” from My First Summer in the Sierra
“A Near View of the High Sierra,” from The Mountains of California
“A Windstorm in the Forest,” from The Mountains of California
“A Yosemite Earthquake,” from The Yosemite
“Yosemite Falls at Midnight,” from The Life and Letters of John Muir
“Nut Time in Squirrelville,” from The Life and Letters of John Muir
“Yosemite Glaciers,” New York Tribune, Dec. 5, 1871
“Indian Tribes in the Yosemite Valley,” from The Yosemite
PART FOUR: THE GLOBAL ADVENTURER
“Eskimos and Walrus,” from The Cruise of the Corwin
“Stickeen vs. the Glacier,” from Stickeen
“Voyage to East Africa,” from John Muir’s Last Journey
PART FIVE: THE PLANET STEWARD
“God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?” Sacramento Daily Record-Union, Feb. 5, 1876
“The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1897
“Thoughts upon National Parks” (ca. 1895), from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
SOURCES
MAJOR WORKS OF JOHN MUIR
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Foreword
JOLIE VARELA
I started up the Rock Creek trail enjoying the sun and anticipating the seven-mile hike ahead. Just a few feet up I saw a family scrambling for a photo in front of the John Muir Wilderness sign. They watched me approach and I already knew they would ask me to take their photo in front of the sign—a sign that I feel erases my people’s history in the so-called Sierra Nevada. To understand the history, we have to go back, and I mean way back. Before John Muir, and before the mountains were renamed the Sierra Nevada by Padre Pedro Font, a Spanish colonizer.
I am Nüümü, better known by our government name as Paiute. My people have lived among the mountains for thousands and thousands of years. Before the mountains were called the Sierra Nevada by colonizers, they were called Pamidu Toiyabe—meaning “the western mountains”—by my ancestors. From the valley we call home, the mountains sit to the west of us. Payahuunadü eventually came to be known as Owens Valley, after Richard Owens, who never actually set foot there. Today, people come from all over the world to recreate on our homelands, but Payahuunadü, “the place of flowing water,” is home to our creation. My relatives were born in places like the Buttermilk area and the Owens River Gorge, which are now commonly recognized as climbing destinations. No matter how colonizer names have tried to replace and erase our histories, these lands are our homelands. These new colonial names can’t sever ancient connections.
My people, along with those from neighboring tribes, would travel the Pamidu Toiyabe for trade and ceremony. Each tribe would have a name in its own language for the trails and mountains. What is more commonly known as the John Muir Trail today is sprinkled with artifacts from this time. You can find arrowheads and chipped obsidian all along the trail. I’ve seen grinding stones and abalone as well. In an act of reclamation and responsibility to tell the true story of the trail, we call the trail the Nüümü Poyo, which means “the people’s trail.” John Muir followed trails that were already there. Even though we, as people Indigenous to these lands, know this truth, it is a truth that many John Muir enthusiasts would vehemently deny. John Muir’s legacy as “the Father of Our National Parks” erases the stewardship and connection that Indigenous people, my people, have had on the land for millennia. I would also dare to say that, because of John Muir’s views of Native peoples as “dirty,” “lazy,” and having no place in the pristine wilderness, he is in part responsible for the removal and genocide of the Indigenous people throughout the so-called Sierra Nevada. The stories I’ve heard about John Muir are a lot different than the stories most people read about in books. Our stories are passed on by word of mouth and not written down anywhere. Many people would argue that this doesn’t help with credulity, but English is not my people’s first language, and we have always passed down our knowledge and stories through oral tradition. Many people believe that Muir went off into the woods with nothing but “a loaf of bread and a pound of tea.” A Native elder shared stories she had heard as a child that tell a very different story. Muir relied heavily on the Indigenous people of the Pamidu Toiyabe. Not only did he follow our trails, he traded for our food, and I’m told that at times he even stole it.
When I was asked to write the foreword for this book I thought, “Oh great, another book about Muir.” Aren’t there enough John Muir quotes floating around in the world? John Muir quotes are like the live laugh love of the conservation world. “The mountains are calling,” says nearly every outdoor enthusiast’s Instagram bio. When I was told this book would be both the best and worst of Muir, however, I was intrigued. Muir is usually painted as this mystical gray-bearded old man roaming the Sierra Nevada with nothing but a loaf of bread and a walking stick, and people romanticize the hell out of that image. I’m writing this foreword because it allows me to tell the true history of the trail, my people’s history, which existed long before Muir.
Muir was racist. It’s all right there in his own writing. A common argument is that Muir was a product of his time. But during that time there were also a lot of people who understood that racism was bad.
I started Indigenous Women Hike in 2017 as an act of reclamation—not only reclaiming land and names but also sacred spaces inside of ourselves. Connecting to our lands has been an incredibly healing experience for myself and other women involved. In 2018, we traveled the Nüümü Poyo without permits, because we don’t need permission to travel lands we have been and will always be a part of. While we are reminded constantly by wilderness signs that our lands are colonized and our Indigenous names have been changed, we know the truth and we hold the history in our DNA.
I got closer to the sign, and the man I assumed was the grandfather asked me to take his family’s photo, just as I had expected. As I was taking their photo I told them I was also going to give them a short history lesson. I told them that John Muir actually followed trails that were already there. These are trade routes that have been used by Indigenous people for thousands of years. These trails were made by my Nüümü ancestors, more commonly known as Paiutes, as well as by other tribes in these mountains who also still exist today. John Muir didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about my ancestors. I handed back the phone and the man told me that he had been coming to the Sierra for thirty years and had no idea about these truths, but that they made so much sense. The people thanked me for the history lesson and I set off on the trail to enjoy my hike on my homelands.
Introduction
Determining what is “essential” among a major author’s works might just be a classic exercise in f
Muir once described himself as a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist.” It sounds whimsical, yes, but it nicely reflects his desire to fuse rational and investigative sensibilities with aesthetic and spiritual ideas—to be both naturalist and nature celebrant. Why should scientific scrutiny of natural phenomena not be in harmony with worshiping nature’s beauty, mystery, and power? Like Thoreau, Muir shrugged off the trappings of materialistic living and pursued his own experiment in living simply and deliberately, according to his internal moral compass.
Everywhere he looked, nature revealed its glory. (“Glorious” was Muir’s favorite word; it was used to excess, many would agree, but it best captured his exalted feelings about the wild.) Like the Bible, nature conveyed to him sacred revelations, as when he climbed a giant yellow ponderosa pine in the Yosemite Valley:
Climbing these grand trees, especially when they are waving and singing in worship in wind-storms, is a glorious experience. Ascending from the lowest branch to the topmost is like stepping up stairs through a blaze of white light, every needle thrilling and shining as if with religious ecstasy.1
Muir ascending—whether trees, mountains, or glaciers—is Muir in his essence: a man who rejected established religious paths to Heaven, such as the one traveled by his father (who followed the Disciples of Christ2), and chose instead to ascend to Heaven via wild nature’s path. In choosing this new path to salvation, Muir was not rejecting his Christian faith but extending it, much the way Emerson extended his Christian faith by stepping down as a Unitarian minister and preaching, through poetry and essays, his Transcendentalist credo of finding one’s own path to God. As Emerson asserted in his famous (and at the time, notorious) address to the graduating Harvard Divinity School students in 1837:
Let me admonish you . . . to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. . . . Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.3
At a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in January 1916, Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor and longtime friend of Muir, described Muir’s religious beliefs this way:
The love of nature was his religion, but it was not without a personal God, whom he thought as great in the decoration of a flower as in the launching of a glacier. The old Scotch training persisted through all his studies of causation, and the keynote of his philosophy was intelligent and benevolent design.4
Muir’s view of nature as infused with spirit, as the very analog of Heaven, is apparent throughout his oeuvre. The tree-climbing passage above is one example; here is another, straight from one of his earliest Yosemite journals. Moved by the power of a waterfall, he records the sublime moment of transport:
One stupendous unit of light and song, perfect and harmonious as any in heaven. . . . If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit wings . . . I should study Nature’s laws.5
It is tempting to regard Muir’s wilderness quest as a religious quest. However, it may have been, initially, a reaction to his father’s unyielding orthodoxy, which included intolerance for intellectual curiosity. Any derelictions of duty brought down the whip. Daniel Muir put his son to the plow at age twelve, forcing him to work sixteen hours a day, six days a week, even when John was ill with the mumps and unable to swallow anything except milk. Only when he contracted pneumonia, as Muir explains in his autobiography, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), was he allowed to remain in bed; but no doctor was called in, “for father . . . believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors.”6 Muir’s assessment of that credo was blunt: “We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry.” It wasn’t just “over-industry” but deprivation of liberty as well. Perhaps in his ecstatic responses to finding himself in the wild—he often leaped about, singing, with open arms—Muir was demonstrating, if only to himself, that for the soul to flourish it must break free of all restraint. His siblings, he realized, experienced a similar craving for freedom. When his artist-sister Mary wrote to him in distress after their father had flung her drawings into the mud “to save her soul,” Muir promptly sent her enough money to leave home.
What must have been most hurtful to Muir was Daniel’s contempt for his son’s wilderness explorations. After reading his son’s account of a snowstorm atop Mt. Shasta in 1874, Daniel wrote the following to him:
I knew it was not God’s work [you were doing], although you seem to think you are doing God’s service. If it had not been for God’s boundless mercy you would have been cut off in the midst of your folly. . . . I know that the world and the church of the world will glory in such as you, but how can they believe which receive honor of one another and seek not the honor that cometh from God only[;] John 5,44. You cannot warm the heart of the saint of God with your cold icy-topped mountains.7
Daniel concludes the letter by saying it would be better that John burn his book rather than continue working on it and publishing it, “and then it will do no more harm either to you or to others.”
Muir’s genius as a nature writer has forged in the public mind the majesty of Sierra and Alaskan wilderness. The mere mention of his name conjures up those majestic emblems of Yosemite—Half Dome, El Capitan, the giant sequoias, the California condor—which in turn conjure up the idea of California itself, as the California state quarter, minted in 2005, attests. However, these associations alone cannot do justice to the polymath and autodidact whose genius also had a technical, mechanical, and rigorously scientific side as well. Long before he began writing, Muir loved inventing—machines that were as practical as they were fanciful. He avidly studied botany and the embryonic sciences of geology and glaciology. And we should not overlook the fact that Muir was from his earliest years also a humanist and a person of compassion—but unfortunately, not always to Indigenous peoples or people of color.
His compassion extended to animals. In fact, some of his most poignant childhood memories involved animals, such as Nob, “the most faithful, intelligent, playful, affectionate, human-like horse I ever knew.” He even loved the little black water bugs that congregated on their farm’s Fountain Lake—“Their whole lives seemed to be play,” he writes in his autobiography, “skimming, swimming, swirling, and waltzing together in little groups.”8 The moral lesson here is that animals are to be respected as kindred spirits: “Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have neither mind nor soul, have no rights that we are bound to respect.”9
Muir’s humanism and compassion for others, however, had some significant shortcomings, largely overlooked by his biographers. In stark contrast to his acute attentiveness to the natural world and to his devotion to the protection of wilderness areas, Muir expressed indifference to, and even at times contempt for, Native peoples. For example, in The Mountains of California, Muir alludes to the Indians dwelling at Mono Lake as “mostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous.” We will take a closer look at this flaw in Muir’s humanistic views in a moment.
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