John Muir Newsletter, Winter 1993/1994

John Muir Newsletter winter 1993-94 university of the pacific volume 4, number 1 JOHN MUIR IN RUSSIA PART TWO by William H. Brennan (The second of a three-part series) During the reign of the Empress Catherine the Great, who lived over a century before Muir\u27s journey to Old Russia, a curious incident occurred. The Empress, noted for being near-sighted, had prepared a boat excursion for a group of European royalty. She had wanted to show them the countryside with its prosperity and happy peasants. Her one-time lover and now chief advisor, Gregory Potemkin, knew that the visitors were bound to see a far different reality. To avoid embarrassing the Tsarina, he ordered the construction of facades to hide peasant villages along the river route. As the boat passed by, Catherine showed her distinguished guests a pleasant pastoral scene. The royal tourists, not fooled, were astonished that a modern sovereign would go this far to create a false impression. Thereafter Potemkin\u27s Village became synonymous with autocratic attempts to create images that were designed both to hide the unpleasant realities of Russian life and to keep foreign eyes from detecting them. In an ironic way, John Muir confronted this odd dynamic almost as soon as he left St. Petersburg and turned to the countryside. There he discovered some of the most glaring contradictions of life in the Empire. What he had seen in the cities and palaces of Old Russia had interested him but not overly so. His journal entries reveal a hint of impatience and uneasiness with strange scenes of opulence intermingled with barbarism. When the opportunity came to travel through the Russian countryside, he felt much more comfortable. His notes took on more detail, and, at times, his observations became philosophical. The hinterlands were what he had come to see, and yet they seemed to have astonished him. He may not have known it, but he was glimpsing the other side of Potemkin\u27s Village. On July 4th, Muir\u27s party entered Finland, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. He fell in love with the country immediately. Traveling by rail, foot and carriage, he took note of the wild nature of the terrain. The land here was flat and the soil sandy and saturated with water. While it was capable of sustaining agriculture — he noted patches of rye, potatoes and other vegetables — its dominating features were the thick forest and the many bogs that reminded him of Alaska. He was impressed by the government\u27s controlled clearing of trees in an area of constantly draining swamps.1 One can easily imagine him relishing the rugged beauty. In the midst of this pastoral scene he abruptly came upon what he described as ...the tallest and most uniform patch of manufactured forrest [sic] I have seen. Pine trees towering 100 to 140 feet in the air and three feet in diameter had been planted in neat, straight rows about twenty feet apart. He described their bark as rough and their branches and leaves as pale and feathery. This was not merely a clean pine forest; it was filled with very grand spruce and other varieties of trees and plants with a wealth of boughs. The ground cover was a lush grass tall enough for the scythe. To complete the scene, fire breaks had been carefully cleared through the trees.2 It was a most impressive, if highly manicured, landscape. Moving on, Muir noted the quaint reception his (continued on page 6) STRENTZEL, SWETT AND MUIR: A REMINISCENCE Transcribed by Robert Shellenberger, San Joaquin Co. Historical Society, 1993 (Transcriber\u27s Notes: This excerpt is from the remarkable reminiscences ofMyra Honegger. The original was handwritten on lined paper in about 1984 when she was already in her mid-eighties. The total document consists of 27 typed pages and is rich in family histoiy, local lore, and details of farm life in the first half of the century Myra Agnes Holliday was born August 13, 1897, the fourth and last child of William Beverly Holliday and Leonora Hall Dukes Holliday, in a ranch house built entirely of redwood from the Moraga Redwood Grove. It was located three miles south of Martinez. She married Arthur Honegger soon after World War I and moved to an almond ranch near Oakley where she raised her family of four and lived out her life. The original manuscript is owned by Mrs. Honegger\u27s daughter, Myra Harrison. Her address is P. O. Box 16, Knightsen, CA 94548). Excerpt from the Reminiscences of Myra Honegger Written about 1984 Each year, a day or two before Christmas, Wanda Strenzel Muir would ride her horse to our house with oranges from the trees at the Adobe , litchi nuts and other little remembrances. The Strenzel and Holliday families had been close friends for many years. Grandpa and Grandma had six children who were playmates with Louie Strenzel, the only child of Dr. and Mrs. Strenzel. In these years, John Swett, a man of distinction in the educational field in the State of California, bought a ranch in Alhambra Valley and there came to spend his later years away from the anxiety and tension of life in San Francisco and the responsibilities that went with his work. Needless to say, he had many visitors of renown come to visit him and among these was the noted naturalist, John Muir. Other callers came and went, but John Muir, for the first time in his life became enamored-with Louie Strenzel, and so they were married. Dr. and Mrs. Strenzel had built a lovely big home on a small knoll on the outskirts of Martinez—the building which now is a shrine to John Muir—and there the Muirs lived. Two daughters were born of this union, Helen and Wanda. They saw very little of their father for the Call of the Great Outdoors was in John Muir\u27s blood and he would suddenly disappear to be gone for many months at a time, to return unannounced when he had completed his expedition. Louie was loved as always, by her friends, but the local people looked upon John Muir as a ne\u27er-do-well who neglected his family. My father had many dealings with Mr. Muir because both were lovers of things that grow. Papa had a nursery and Mr. Muir had need of his advice and his nursery stock. I remember [of] going with Papa when he had business there and remember so well Mr. Muir\u27s cluttered desk, tables and chairs. I have often wondered how he could write such inspiring words in such confusion. When Mr. Muir died in 1914, he was buried under a big Eucalyptus tree on the banks of Alhambra Creek. Bud Weaver sang in a quartet at his funeral shortly before he married my sister Ruth and became my brother-in-law. AUTHOR\u27S QUERY In the course of writing a book about San Francisco\u27s environmental impact on its hinterland, I find that the Hetch Hetchy system, as initially sold to the voters in 1910, makes little technical or economic sense. Did John Muir or any of his lieutenants in the Hetch Hetchy controversy suspect hat the system might have been conceived principally as a tool of land speculators? Was there any connection between the Sierra Club opponents and William S. Tevis\u27 Bay Cities Water Company, and how viable was the latter proposal to bring water from the American River? Please contact Gray Brechin at U.C. Department of Geography, UC Berkeley, 94720 or 510/204-9607. E- mail address grbechin@uclink.berkeley.edu. JOHN MUIR NEWSLETTER. VOL. IV, #1 (NEW SERIES) WINTER, 1993-94 Published quarterly by the John Muir Center for Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 Staff Editor Center Director Sally M. Miller R.H. Limbaugh o This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. 1993 MUIR GLORIOUS WRITING CONTEST WINNERS This year our panel of experts had difficulty ranking the following entries, so they decided both were equally meritorious in the Old Yosemite (adult) category. Congratulations to our co-winners, and to all who supported our contest. TIDE POOL By Kimberly Borrowdale This small pool, only a foot across and the same deep, holds nearly incomprehensible quantities of life. Anemones are abundant: most of them pink or red, many living in clusters. Also fastened tightly to the rocks are barnacles of different sizes; encrusting sponges, some brightly colored, some of quieter hues; and limpets of varying sizes. Snails wander through the water and across the rocks, most with their spiral shells; a few without: the purple and orange of the tentacled Spanish shawl;the salted dorid with its many white spots and fleshy horns. These sea slugs seem to fly lazily through their pool, like underwater butterflies. There are many organisms with a plant-like appearance: green, brown and red algae, and billowy tufts of hydroids and bryozoans. Various tube worms extend their feathery or flower-like appendages to filter food. Tunicates, often grouped together, pump water through their vase-shaped bodies to gather their food. Small purple sea urchins extend their wriggling tube feet between their spines; a brittle star scuttles by, also with tube feet extended. Sea stars drape themselves over the rocks. Some of the normally sessile plant-like forms move about—they grace the back of a decorator crab that placed these organisms on its body to help camouflage itself. Other crabs also move along in their sideways fashion and wave their oral appendages to collect nourishment. In the depths of a small crevice, a large eye peers out from its round head. The tiny octopus, intelligent and shy, waves a graceful tentacle, then retreats. And what of the life that is not visible to my eye? Plankton, perhaps larvae of various organisms, and all manner of microorganisms...not visible to man but nevertheless a very important part of the teaming community of the tidal pool. TALUS SLOPES by John P. Crevelli For those who have learned to walk the established paths of meadows and forests, the soft carpets of sandy earth or fallen needles, a new experience of uneven, rough, sometimes shifting rocky terrain is a challenge. Every fiber of body must learn new lessons of balance, momentum, movement, direction and destination. On talus slopes the eye and mind work in union. The eye darts in a dozen directions, chooses a rock target, possible alternatives, and moves on to the next stepping stones toward some ultimate destination. The mind calculates distance, the amount of energy required to push the body, the effect of momentum in moving beyond the target. Eye, mind, heart, body,muscle—all work in unison, in complete communion with the terrain as if some cosmic force is at work bringing foot and rock together for a millisecond while the talus scrambler becomes one with this universe of stone. With growing proficiency, the talus traveler wants to move faster. There is triumph in moving swiftly without misstep. There is satisfaction in feeling all faculties used to full capacity. The act of fearlessly crossing a rock debris slope entails a concentration required by few other endeavors. Humans do those things which make them feel most fully alive. For years I have celebrated my aliveness on talus slopes. If one day I may misstep, it will be to rest there among the stones which have buoyed my travels all these years. Long after we are gone the rocks will remain with the spirit of many who have felt the call to test their aliveness in the range of light. My footprints are there in the register of time as are those of John Muir. It is good company we keep on the talus slopes. \u27SNEWS JOHN FISKE of Coulterville, who re-discovered John Muir\u27s Altar Rock some years ago, has led a number of visitors to the stone and to other notable Muir sites in Southern Tuolumne County. Recently a party of Japanese journalists visited John and were delighted by his gracious hospitality and his intimate knowledge of the area. He has prepared a narrative that traces the route of Muir\u27s 1869 summer trip from Delaney Bottoms to Tuolumne Meadows, and that details the changing topography and the flora and fauna. A copy is available at the John Muir Center, and excerpts may be published in future Newsletter issues. CMC Mill VIEWS To the Chukchi Peninsula and To the Tlingit Indians, 1881/1882: Journals and Letters by Aurel and Arthur Krause. Translated by Margot Krause McCaffrey. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1993. Table of Contents, Editor\u27s Note, Introduction, Forward, Appendix, End Notes, photos, maps, drawings. Aurel and Arthur Krause were not anthropologists but geographers, well-trained scientists with a humane outlook just as John Muir was a humane observer in Alaska. The result of their 1880s expedition there was their superlative Die Tlinkit-Indianer. Professor Erna Gunther, the distinguished anthropologist who translated the brothers\u27 master work during the 1950s believed their achievement had not been superseded by any modern ethnography. The publication of their journals and letters provide us valuable additional information on native life in Alaska, Americanization, and the environmental changes it was inducing. Translator Margot Krause McCaffrey has organized the Krause manuscript materials into ten chapters, the first two of which deal with the brothers\u27 travel experiences from Berlin to their arrival in the Bering Sea aboard the bark Legal Tender. Shortly after arriving in the United States en route to Sitka, they voiced their fascination with pluralistic America: Almost half the inhabitants are black (Potomac region, May 1881), although most of them work in low positions as waiters, barbers, shoeblacks, etc. People here do not seem to have too favorable an opinion about the developmental possibilities of this race. One cannot deny that this race has considerable energy and capability for adaption. (p. 5) The Germans were pleasantly surprised at the lack of restrictions on their railroad trip from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco: The considerable freedom of movement enjoyed in American railroad cars is a great advantage. During the trip one can walk through several cars. Nobody prohibits the use of the outside platform. Warning signs are posted on the door only to protect the company against liability in case of accidents. . . . We made ample use of this freedom. . . (pp. 11-12) For their voyage north they preferred their wind- driven bark to a steamer. For all their objectivity, the scribbling geographers were romantics. The slower speed allows better observations of oceanic fauna. . . the vessel\u27s motion is much calmer than that of a steamer which is constantly trembling because of the engine\u27s activity. (p. 21) After more than four weeks trying to push their way north through foul weather, the benefits of steam technology were patent. Finally on July 31 they entered the Bering Sea. The brothers reported that coastal traders were prohibited from dealing in alcohol, breech-loader guns, and cartridges. Every year or two revenue cutters are sent there to look for ships with such illegal items aboard. (p. 27) Arthur Krause\u27s resignation proved justified. Although this will not suppress the trade, so destructive for the Natives, especially with alcohol, it is at least kept within bounds. (p. 27) In Chapter Three of McCaffrey\u27s translation, the Krauses explore the coasts of the Chukchi Peninsula. For the first time (August 6, 1881) we saw the natives in their peculiar clothing tastefully made of seal and reindeer skin. (p. 41) It is the custom of many captains of whalers and trading vessels to invite the chiefs of the \u27Indians\u27, as all Natives on either side of the Bering Strait are called, into their cabins for a meal. (p. 45) Although Aurel may not have received any formal training as a field anthropologist, he quickly learned how to behave like one. We always got along well with the people from Nuniamo, but were somewhat annoyed by their curiosity. . . Its chief . . . was a young, strong man with a surly expression, who tried to provoke a wrestling match with me. He threw me ... . Gradually he calmed down and shook hands with me. I thought it best to consider the matter a joke. (p. 47) Nowhere did the brother find traces of a political community; only the head of the family exercises power over its members. (p. 69) On numerous occasions they noted externally-induced change; among the most worrisome was the decline in the walrus and whale population. By November the two geographers were back in San Francisco. Chapters Four through Nine include their writings generated while working among the Tlingit; here and there are glimpses of the Americans living and working among them. The Natives easily earn more than they need for themselves with wood carvings and basket weaving as well as through services at the dock and in stores. (p. 112) At the new mining community of Juneau City they observed an uncustomary situation. The Indians here do not withdraw from the white people; they rather seek contact with them. The English language, however, has not been accepted by them. Traders and miners speak the language of the Natives more or less. It is easier for them to learn Indian because many of them live with Indian women whom they purchase according to local custom. Fifty dollars is the usual price. (pp. 115-116) There really is little to criticize in this carefully- printed addition to our primary source holdings on late- nineteenth century Alaska. An index would have been useful. The maps are expertly done, the reproductions of the Krause sketches are as clear as the typographers\u27 art can achieve, while the clarifying notes are quite satisfactory. As with the other excellent scholarly volumes published in the Rasmuson Library Historical Translation Series, this one is a mandatory acquisition for any institution seriously devoted to our understanding of Alaska\u27s past. Susan H. Koester University of Alaska Southeast Nunaga, by Duncan Pryde. New York: Bantam Books, 1973 (c 1971). Nunaga is a poetic account of the Scotsman Duncan Pryde\u27s ten year stay with the Inuit peoples of the Canadian Arctic. He, like John Muir ninety years earlier, grew to understand them and became one with them, having the right to say Nunaga, my country. Pryde gives us lush descriptions of the Arctic reminiscent of The Cruise of the Corwin, collated by William F. Bade after Muir\u27s death. Here is a sample of Pryde\u27s remarkable depiction of Bathurst Inlet: Heather, a blanket of fragrant whiteness spread low all over the ground and climbing part way up the hills behind the harbour, put me right back in Scotland. Flowers were everywhere of every colour-bright red, brilliant yellow, gay little Arctic poppies nodding in the breeze, a blue blossom of some sort, the masses of white cotton flowers, fine blossoms smaller than a man\u27s little fingernail, but in great profusion. The Arctic in summer bloom is exceedingly colorful (p. 210). His descriptions of arctic moonlight are equally alluring: There are [a] few more beautiful sights in the world than a full moon shining down on a little camp on a small island beset by shimmering ice floes (p 273). But the most significant aspect of the book is its concern for contemporary social problems of the Inuit people brought on by contact with the Europeans. He suggests that instead of welfare and alcoholism as inevitabilities, we must pressure government for enlightened changes. Schools must be brought to Inuit villages, and not Inuit children to schools hundreds of miles away. We must encourage the Inuit\u27s re- involvement with the land by herding of caribou as a meat source for the South, by developing fisheries industries in the North, by utilizing musk oxen fur by shearing in sheep fashion. Inuits must not be forced to exist as technicians, grease monkeys,and department store clerks, but as viable hunters, trappers, fishermen and musk oxen shepherds. Their languages and folkways should be emphasized in arctic schools and not just English and Anglo history. John Muir emphasized similar measures in his letters to 777£ San Francisco Evening Bulletin from aboard the Corwin:: Unless some aid be extended by our government which claims these people, in a few years at most every soul of them will have vanished from the face of the earth; for, even where alcohol is left out of the count, the few articles of food, clothing, guns, etc., furnished by the traders, exert a degrading influence, making them less self-reliant, and less skillful as hunters. They seem susceptible of civilization, and well deserve the attention of our government (p. 122). Two Scotsmen, Muir and Pryde, clearly took pride in the people and land of the fascinating Arctic. —Richard F. Fleck, Dean of Arts & Humanities, Community College of Denver 47TH ANNUAL CALIFORNIA HISTORY INSTITUTE CALIFORNIA AND THE PACIFIC RIM THIS YEAR\u27S THEME The theme of this year\u27s Institute reflects the global significance of California\u27s modern economy, and it also stresses the historic development of California\u27s commercial ties to the Pacific rim countries. History demonstrates that the Pacific Rim economy has already entered its fifth century. It began with a huge swap of Spanish-American silver for Asian products during the late sixteenth century, and has slowly evolved to include today\u27s complex exchange of people, products and ideas. The Institute is committed to exploring all aspects of Pacific Rim history in order to better appreciate and understand the nature of this complex relationship. It will bring together an international cast of scholars, students, business and professional representatives, and interested California citizens in an open forum for the exchange of ideas. Because of the high level of interest and the diversity of participants, concurrent sessions have been arranged on such topics as M