The John Muir Newsletter, Fall 1999

TOP 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