The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2000

volume 10, Number 1 ^%4Km§-Winter 2000 NEWSLETTER Some Writings and Words of John Muir Compared with Writings of Henry David Thoreau by Stan Hutchinson, Sierra Madre, California ohn Muir\u27s earliest exposure to the writings of Henry D. Thoreau probably occurred in the home of Dr. and Mrs. Ezra S. Carr while he was a student it the Wisconsin State University, Madison, from ■ [lebruary, 1861, to June, 1863. The Carrs were keenly interested in the works of Emerson and Thoreau, and had (granted Muir access to their library. It is reasonable to presume his reading matter included Thoreau\u27s Walden published some eight years earlier. Had Muir not read Walden during his college days, it seems probable that he jjtould have mentioned his later reading of this unique book somewhere in his extensive correspondence with Mrs. Carr which began in 1865; such a letter has not come to light. It is also likely that he had opportunities to read §ne or more of Thoreau\u27s essays, particularly those published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly beginning in June, 1862. H A copy of Walden was sent to Muir in Yosemite in 1872, and his receipt of the book is documented in a surviving letter.1 There is no confirmation that he first read it lit that time, but this gift would have allowed him to per- Wse and study Walden from a new perspective after a decade of personal wilderness experiences far removed §§om Madison. The earliest reference to Muir\u27s reading of ffhoreau is found in his letter to Jeanne Carr written from Yosemite, May 29, 1870, advising her that he had been reading Thoreau\u27s \u27Maine Woods\u27 a short time ago. 2 fjjhe first mention of Thoreau by Muir in his published writings was apparently in his article, Hetch-Hetchy Valley, published in the March 25, 1873 issue of the Boston Weekly Transcript; therein he praised the pure ibul of Thoreau. 3 Houghton Mifflin published The Writings of Henry I J. Thoreau in 1906 in a twenty volume edition, fourteen volumes of which were Thoreau\u27s Journal. Muir acquired his set in December of the following year.4 Assuming Muir delved into the various books, Thoreau\u27s personality, philosophy and creative genius were more fully revealed to Muir, greatly increasing his admiration for the individual and his work.5 There can be little doubt that Thoreau\u27s nature- oriented writings invigorated and inspired Muir in his own efforts. Similarities in Muir\u27s writings and philosophy to those of Thoreau are not rare and are occasionally encountered when reading one or the other, suggesting Thoreau\u27s subtle influence on Muir. Thoreau would have been pleased. The following examples of Muir\u27s affinity to Thoreau range from those which are perhaps more imagined than real to deliberate paraphrasing. The majority of Thoreau\u27s quotations are from Walden.6 Of the Muir quotations cited, only the first was ever intended by him for publication. Without reservation, Henry David Thoreau proclaimed the purpose of his second book on the title page of Walden, first published in 1854 by Ticknor and Fields, Boston. I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. A sentence of John Muir\u27s journal entry for July 12, 1869, written while en route to the Tuolumne Meadows with Pat Delaney\u27s sheep, appears to be a paraphrase of Thoreau\u27s statement quoted above. One must keep in mind that Muir\u27s 1869 Sierra journal was rewritten several times before it was published in 1911 as My First Summer in the Sierra. His paraphrase of Thoreau may have appeared in the original 1869 journal proving he had read (continued on page 3) T V OR page 1 F» A. C I F I C News & Notes A great deal of John Muir-related activity is happening these days, proof once again of the worldwide impact of Muir\u27s life on our time. A new CD has been issued called the John Muir Tribute; proceeds from sales will go to support a planned new education and visitors center at the John Muir National Site in Martinez. To order, send your check, payable to John Muir Memorial Association for $29.00 ($25.00 donation plus $4.00 postage and handling) to: John Muir Memorial Association (JMMA) c/o Jill Harcke 9 Lone Oak Pleasant Hill, CA 94523 Contents of the CD include: No Scottish boy that I ever knew. .. read by Graham White; Skylarks recorded at John Muir Country Park in Dunbar, Scotland; Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness. .. read by Millie Stanley; At my feet lay the great central valley of California, read by Galen Rowell; The Range of Light sung by Walkin\u27 Jim Stolz, Montana singer; We are now in the mountains. . . read by Ron Limbaugh; Snow Avalanche Story performed by Lee Stetson; On my lonely walks I have often... read by Harold Wood - webmaster of the John Muir exhibit; Ye Banks and Braes sung by Dougie MacLean, singer and songwriter in Scotland; I must return to the mountains.. . read by Allison Lincoln, John Muir\u27s great-great granddaughter; In God\u27s wilderness lies the hope of the world. .. read by Walter Muir, John Muir\u27s grandson; Walk the Sequoia woods... read by Stan Hutchinson, Yosemite historian; Stickeen read by Gerald Pelrine, Wisconsin actor; Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.. . read by Shirley Sargent - author and historian. September 1999, Ranch Days, a 2-day fund raiser for the John Muir National Historic Site, was held in Martinez. It included several music events, and featured Ross Hanna, a Muir grandson, in a jazz concert. For future, a Muir musical is being planned for the Concord Pavilion. Details will be announced as they become available. There is talk of a movie about Muir, who might be played by fellow Scotsman, Sean Connery. Stay tuned. . . The California History Institute\u27s 52nd annual conference will be held April 29, 2000, at the University of the Pacific. The topic of the conference is Religion and Education in California History. Presentations will trace the impact of organized religion on California\u27s educational development. Specific presentations will focus on such topics as the first amendment and teaching on religion in public schools, liturgical music in early California, Rockwell Hunt and Napa Collegiate Institute and the mission of the founders of the College of the Pacific, as well as other topics. Plan to preregister and attend the one-day conference. Contact Pearl Piper at (209) 946-2527. The John Muir Center still has available copies of its new book, John Muir in Historical Perspective, edited by Sally M. Miller and published by Peter Lang Publishing. This illustrated book contains 13 essays on John Muir and is available for $29.95 plus shipping and handling. Please contact Pearl Piper to order your copy. NEWSLETTER Volume 10, Number 1 Winter 2000 Published quarterly by The John Muir Center for Regional Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 ♦ Staff ♦ 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-Hanna Trust. This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. page 2 Some Writings and Words of John Muir Compared with Writings of Thoreau, by Stan Hutchinson Walden prior to that date. Alas, that journal no longer exists. Eating, walking, resting, seem alike delightful, and one feels inclined to shout lustily on rising in the morning like a crowing cock.\u27 In the opening pages of Economy, the first chapter Valden, Thoreau presents his readers with a basic tenet he book, noting the I, or first person.. .will be retained. . . throughout the text. And it was. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else in I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the iirowness of my experience.8 On July 31, 1875, Muir wrote Jeanne Carr from ick\u27s Hotel in Yosemite Valley. In this mostly light- ■ .rted letter, the similarity of his comment about himself SmXh that of Thoreau may be purely coincidental. Then ftlgain, he may have been very deliberately paraphrasing Walden. All this letter is about myself, and why not when I\u27m the only . on in all the wide world that I know anything about - Keith . . . not excepted.5 Both Thoreau and Muir listened to owls during solitary excursions through dark or dimly lit woods and commented on their call. From the Sounds chapter of \u27 Iden comes Thoreau\u27s unusual and somewhat puzzling reflection on owls. I rejoice that there arc owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men.10 Muir very briefly mentioned owls three times in his Sequoia journals of 1875, describing their call as beery, the bird as broad voiced and, in a manner U miniscent of Thoreau, their sanity as questionable. An owl, prince of lunatics. Health in his soft, anglelcss too- whoo-hoo-hoo. Thoreau\u27s essay Walking was first published in the • - \u27antic Monthly for June, 1862, a month after his death. He created the final form of this essay from two of his . \u3est popular lectures of the 1850s, Walking and The Wild. 12 The final version of Walking contains one of \u3ereau\u27s most famous and well-known passages. The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and it I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preserva- H of the World.13 Various journal fragments from Muir\u27s 1890 Alaska trip were later utilized in chapters XVII and XVIII of Travels in Alaska, 1915. The journal entry for July 11, ■■ 90, which contained one of his now most oft-quoted itements was not included. Muir apparently confined the phrase to his private journal, never intending it for publication perhaps because of the similarity to Thoreau. I vas first published, posthumously, in 1938. In God\u27s wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware.14 Thoreau related his views on hunting and fishing in the Higher Laws chapter of Walden. He was hopeful that youths inclined to hunt would soon outgrow it. This was rather unrealistic on Thoreau\u27s part, for in mid-nineteenth century America the bison and passenger pigeon still awaited their respective decimation or extinction by maturing hunters. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.\u275 In mid-May, 1903, John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt spent three days together in Yosemite. During the evening of May 16, they were in camp near Glacier Point apparently enjoying every aspect of roughing it. Muir\u27s opinions on hunting mirrored those of Thoreau, and when Roosevelt turned the conversation to his own hunting exploits the unpolitic Muir proceeded to chastise him. A portion of that conversation was related by Muir to William Colby and Robert Underwood Johnson. Mr. Roosevelt, when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things. . .are you not far enough along to leave that off? [To which the President supposedly responded, perhaps biting his tongue with those formidable teeth.] Muir, I guess you are right. [Of course, six years later TR blasted his way across Africa, ignoring Muir\u27s admonition.]16 Thoreau\u27s dissertation of the history of sauntering, also from Walking, 1862, reflects his typically thorough research on a subject. The excerpt quoted here also illustrates his remarkable and possible unequaled virtuosity with the comma. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understands the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, - who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, There goes a Sainte-Terrer, a Saunterer, a Holy Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks. . . are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels. An interesting small book, The Mountain Trail and Its Message, was prepared by Albert W. Palmer from his mountaineering journals and diaries and was published in 1911 by The Pilgrim Press. Palmer was an early member of the Sierra Club and participated in several club outings. The most memorable for him may have been that of July, page 3 Some Writings and Words of John Muir Compared with Writings of Thoreau, by Stan Hutchinson 1908, to the Kern River Canyon when on July 1 he shared a campsite near John Muir. Palmer noted in his diary that the famous naturalist has spread his blankets just below mine under this great old yellow pine. All in all it is a jolly crowd.. . \u278 Several days later while resting along the trail, Palmer was overtaken by Muir. He stopped, they began to talk, and a portion of their ensuing conversation was recorded by Palmer in his diary. He later questioned whether the derivation of saunter Muir gave me is scientific or fanciful, suggesting he was not familiar with Thoreau\u27s commentary on the word. Muir apparently was.19 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\u27t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not \u27hike!\u27 Do you know the origin of that word \u27saunter?\u27 It\u27s 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, \u27A la saint terre,\u27 \u27To the Holy Land.\u27 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 \u27hike\u27 through them.20 In another well-known quotation from the Economy chapter of Walden, Thoreau described some of the more important duties he had performed in the service of his fellow man. For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.2\u27 Late in life Muir deliberately paraphrased Thoreau\u27s inspector statement. Perhaps while rereading Walden, Thoreau\u27s Journal, or just reflecting on his own years of solitude and discovery, he scribbled out these brief and meaningful words (conjectural within brackets). [For many years I was a] self appointed inspector of gorges, gulches, and glaciers.22 Edward Abbey, a student of both Thoreau and Muir, brought these latter thoughts of the two writer-naturalists into the fourth quarter of the twentieth century and continued something of a tradition with them when he wrote, Saving the world was merely a hobby. My vocation has been that of inspector of desert waterholes. 23 ENDNOTES 1. Abba G. Woolson letter to John Muir, March 21, 1872, Boston, Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California. Cited in J. Parker Huber, John Muir and Thoreau\u27s Maine, The Concord Saunterer, New Series, 3 (Fall 1995): 111. 2. William Frederick Bade, The Life and Letters of John Muir (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1924), Vol I, p. 223. 3. Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), p. 83 and note, p. 395. Fox\u27s date for this issue of the Boston Weekly Transcript, March 21, 1873, is at variance with Kimes, which dates the issue as March 25, 1873. See William F. Kimes and Maymie B. Kimes, John Muir: A Reading Bibliography (Palo Alto, California, William P. Wreden 1977), p. 7. 4. J. Parker Huber, The Concord Saunterer ( Fall, 1995): p. 113, and note 37, p. 118. 5. For a discussion of Muir\u27s annotation in his set of Thoreau\u27s Journals and Thoreau\u27s influence on Muir\u27s later writings, see Richard F. Fleck, John Muir\u27s Homage to Henry David Thoreau. The Pacific Historian, 29, (Summer/Fall 1985), special double issue, John Muir: Life and Legacy, pp. 55-64. 6. For this and all subsequent quotations from Walden, I have utilized Walden, An Annotated Edition, with foreword and notes by Walter Harding (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston), 1995. 7. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1911), p. 106. 8. Walden, p. 1. 9. Bade, The Life and Letters of John Muir, 1925, Vol. II, p. 55. Keith is William Keith, artist and friend of Muir. 10. Walden, p. 122. 11. John Muir, John of the Mountains, the Unpublished Journals of John Muir, edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1938), p. 215. 12 Great Short Works of Henry Thoreau, edited by Wendell Glick (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982), p. 294. 13. Henry David Thoreau, The Natural History Essays, introduction and notes by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith Publisher, Peregrine Smith Books, 1980), p. 112. 14. Muir, John of the Mountains, p. 317. 15. Walden, p. 207. 16. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1945), p. 292. 17. Thoreau, The Natural History Essays, p. [93J-94. For the first occurrence of the sauntering passages see The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, [Reprint edition, introduction by Walter Harding. Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., Peregrine Smith Books, Salt Lake City, 1984], Vol. 2, Jan. 10, 1851), pp. 140-141. 18. Albert W. Palmer, The Mountain Trail and Its Message (The Pilgrim Press, [no place], 1911. Second edition with introduction and commentary by Charles Palmer Fisk. Sixth Street Press, Fresno, California, 1997), p. 14. 19. Ibid., p. 42. 20. Ibid., pp. 41-42. 21. Walden, p. 16. For the first occurrence of the inspector passages, see Thoreau\u27s Journal, Peregrine Smith reprint edition, 1984, Vol. I [1845-1847], p. 434. 22. Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California. Cited in Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison, Wl, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 350. 23. Edward Abbey, Vox Clamantis in Deserto (Rydal Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Clark Kimball, Publisher, 1989 [Second edition, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Vox Clamantis in Deserto, Notes from a Secret Journal. St. Martin\u27s Press, New York, no date, p. 46]). page 4 Book Reviews Environmental Ethics: Duties To And Values In The Natural World By Holmes Rolston III Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988 Reviewed by Steven C. Anderson Stockton, CA To state the obvious, environmental concerns have been growing for the past several decades. This has dted from, in large part, the perception that human- luced changes in the environment have had direct • pacts on everyone. This concern has been bolstered by ncreased scientific understanding of nature in an ilutionary and ecological context. The impact has been to a combination of rapid population growth, increased irations, expectations, and demands on resources tered by contemporary economic systems and doctrines that result in ever more growth and consumption, all of fueled by the growth of an enabling technology. Perhaps the most influential plea to extend traditional lies to the environment itself was the call for a land !;.etliic in the widely read Sand County Almanac of Aldo ipold, first published in 1949: A thing is right when it Is to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the Abiotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. thing, Leopold meant human action, and subsequent owledge of the nature of communities has persuaded ecologists that integrity and stability have to be considered n the context of the dynamic of change that is part of the ^history of every ecosystem. Leopold\u27s simple, elegant iement has since generated an academic cottage indus- Ihe subdiscipline of environmental ethics, seeking to . • onalize and explain what many have intuited since their . i recognition of environmental degradation. Rolston has n an important contributor to this burgeoning literature. Although Rolston does not lay out his assumptions in llteipreface or an introductory chapter, the reader soon infers that they are the standard humanistic assumptions rights and ethics are secular constructs and that we are ffo proceed rationally from this precept. There are no . rills present in the wild before human assignment. But les (interests, desires, needs satisfied; welfare at stake) / be there apart from human presence (p. 52). But