John Muir Talks Of His California, And Of How He Adopted It. His Part in Saving the Yosemite Valley as a Public Park-Nowhere in His Many Travels Has He Ever Seen Our Giant Sequoia Outdone for Height or Majesty-Mr. Muir Himself, His Great Knowledge of Nature, and His Personal Charm.

BOSTON EVENING rJ JOHN MUIR TALKS OF HIS CALIFORNIA, AND OF HOW HE ADOPTED IT His Part in Saving the Yosemite Valley as a Public ParkΓÇöNowhere in His Many Travels Has He Ever Seen Our Giant Sequoia Outdone for Height or Majesty ΓÇöMr. Muir Himself, His Great Knowledge of Nature, and His Personal Charm BY JOHN RITCHIE, JR. During his recent flitting through Boston, John Muir, the nestor of American mountaineers, was caught and cornered in a cosy little: nook in the University Club by a group of kindred spirits in Boston. Half a dozen of the presidents of the Appalachian Mountain Club were in the entertaining group, and-others of the members, who, almost without exception had been themselves the guests of the Sierra Club, of which John Muir is the president, in the depths of their own splendid mountains. To speak of such an informal gathering in a public way might almost ho deemed a breach of confidence, were it not for the educational value of the charming informal talk of the master spirit .there, who voiced the principles that have influenced him through life, the preservation of the forests and the carelessness \u3e\u3et commercial interests for such rights of the public. The elder Muir, a sturdy Scotchman of Dunbar, settled in this country near the Fox River in southern Wisconsin, a region of whose geology the guest spoke most lucidly. It\u27 is a flat glacial country with many pond holes, which, as the speaker said, No sooner are they made than they begin to fill. There is a gradual transition from pond to marsh, and from swamp to meadow; in the latter stage there is a profusion of flowers. The\u27 beauty of this country so impressed young Muir that on his determination to go to college, he sought to purchase from his father a lot or two of the flowery land that he might keep it for the benefit of those who would come after him. Even If I should never see it again, he said to his father, it would be a pleasure to me through life to know that I had been the means of preserving\u27 some of God\u27s handiwork for the benefit of the people. But the spirit of the age was against him, and the father persuaded the son that in the restless times of settlement there could be no way of saving such a lot from the trespasses of commerce. A short time later when his father removed to another place, the young man actually had set aside for him a little patch of the field, containing wild flowers and a tiny pool, about which while in school he received occasionally the encouraging note, Yes, John, your mud hole \u27s all right. Thus one may see that this young Scotchman, within his first decade of residence on the American soil, evinced the spirit which has been dominant in his later life, and which has made of him, first, last and always the sturdy protector of American beauty spots and forests. Of the highest interest was President Muir\u27s story of his first coming to California, the land which has been his home for more than half a century. Reaching San Francisco, a single glance at the city was sufficient; he inquired of a passer-by the nearest way to the woods; and then made his first acquaintance with the Or^. land Ferry. He quickly pushed hi/6 way out into the splendid country. He was particularly Impressed with the extraordinary variety and profusion of the wild flowers. He said, I had just come from Florida, the land of flowers, nd here in virgin California they outnv nbered those of the east coast a hundred to one. There was no trouble m selecting a lodging\u27 place for the night. The young scientist stopped where he was, lying on the ground, the wild flowers sprang together over his body, making for JiLm__both....couch and c-anoov-..\u27 A striking picture was then presented by the veteran botanist and geologist of the California of his youth. Standing one day in a minor mountain gap, across the intervening valleys he could see the snow fields of the Sierra Nevada . They were a hundred miles distant, he said, and -yet in that clear air the details of glacier and moraine were strikingly brought forth. It seemed almost as if a man traversing those distant fields of ice could not fail to have been visible. Of another magnificent prospect he noted that from a certain viewpoint more than two hundred and fifty miles in extent of mountain range were visible. There was none of that\u27man-made smoke that contaminates the modern, civilized air, even on this Western shore; no burning forests; no belching locomotives; no artificial fogs of intelligent and cultivated cities. While in this country, when feeling the lure of nature to still wilder haunts he was for moving east into the mountains. Then he tried to persuade the farmer to set aside for him a little square of natural wildness, to fence it and preserve it.. But here again the spirit of the times was against him, and the farmer argued, It would be impossible to keep it fenced against the cattle and the cattlemen. And the farmer doubtless told the truth. The first forest preserve of the country, that about the Yosemite, was saved for the benefit of the people through the initiative of John Muir, and. very graphic was the story of how he convoyed his friend Johnson through the wildness of the Tuolumne, and how Johnson the following year received him in New York, took him to interview the President, and secured the reservation twenty years ago of this splendid piece of American scenery. But even now the struggle is by no means over and the thieves and rascals are trying to cut down its limits for commercial purposes. John Muir speaks with warm words against the constant attempts to encroach on nature by the business world and warned the lovers of the Appalachian forest that these could be preserved to the people only by eternal vigilance. It was a delightful experience to follow this veteran mountaineer, still with the fire of youth in his eyes, in his travels about the world. At Darjeeling, where the j fogs from the Ganges swing in and cover I the country, and the sun then burns a hole through them, through these vistas I may be seen the marvellous prospects of Kiinchinjinga and its neighboring giants. The effect of the fog, he said, Is to raise mountains and bring them near, and here, almost above me, I could see towering glaciers. Then as if by magic the fog is swept away, and the snowy mountains rise in their splendor high into the sky. In the great American desert were rows and rows of\u27 mountains rising from the wastes as if gigantic ash heaps, yet giving to the geologist forms telling of their origin and of their subsequent erosion, and in the sunlight\u27s delightful tintings. Erosion is a process of nature, in which Mr. Muir is enormously interested. He traces back the great valleys of the California mountains to the ice age times, and knows how enormous glaciers scooped out their tremendous hollows. In his visit to New York he saw from the elevated train a glaciated rock surface in the unimproved area of a city house lot, and insisted on leaving the train at the next station to note in the heart of the metropolis the records in the strife that the glaciers left so many thousand years ago. In the New Zealand Alps, in the southern island, it was his delight to note high in the range little pockets, each the work of a slow but industrious glacier. In Kashmir, likewise, where he followed on the traces of the pioneer explorers, he noted many glacier phenomena of importance. In Australia, it was the botanist who studied, trying to determine first of all if the vaunted superiority in height of Australian trees to those of the Yosemite had in it any foundation of truth. For the credit of America, it may be said that Mr. Muir was able to run the published statement back to a mere hearsay report, and today the big redwoods In California are the monarchs of the world. He has had quite a qnest for the original noma of the Sequoia, not yet discovered of man. We thought wa had it iperhaps in. Japan, where there are giant Cryptomeria, and then again in. China, but neither proved to be the place. I may find it yet in South America, he added, his footsteps being turned in that direction the coming month. He goes without definite plaa, and makes no trouble about a journey of a few hundred miles, if it brings him to the object that he wishes to see. In Australia he once traveled twenty-six hundred miles to see one certain botanical species. Of the whole botanical story given by John Muir to the little company the other evening, none was more surprising than that of the three-story Australian forest. In this the great tree ferns form the lower structure, rising, perhaps, to a height ot thirty or forty feet; through them shoot up the trunks of the hardwoods, whose tops form a second floor at a. height of eighty to a hundred feet; while in the midst of all these, like the columns of a vast temple, rise the tremendous trunks of the great Eucalyptus, a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in height. But the speaker was still proud of the glories ot his adopted country, for he said, referring to the supremacy of the trees: If the redwoods did not exist, California would then possess the monarchs of the forest world in the yellow pine. And these interesting items gathered in many odd corners of the beautiful world formed but a tithe of the delightful, unassuming reminiscences of this quiet naturalist, whose voice has ever been a power in behalf of the conservation for the people of the beauties of forest and mountain that are their natural birthright. a┬╗https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/1625/thumbnail.jp