John Muir Newsletter, Summer 1991

J oh n M u i r N e ws I etter summer, 1991 university of the pacific hew series, volume 1 number 3 CALL FOR PAPERS California Immigrants: People, Plants and Animals CALIFORNIA HISTORY INSTITUTE UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC STOCKTON, CALIFORNIA APRIL 23-25, 1992 California Immigrants: People, Plants and Animals is the theme of the 1992 California History Institute, sponsored by the John Muir Center for Regional Studies at the University of the Pacific. The 500th anniversary of European expansion in the western hemisphere presents an opportunity for deeper reflection and analysis of the interaction between humans and the land. The environmental consequences of the human influx, past or present, positive or negative, is a Subject of growing importance, as Donald Worster recently underscored in summarizing the objectives of environmental history: to deepen our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time, and conversely and perhaps more importantly in view of the present global predicament, how they have affected that environment and with what results. The conference invites proposals on any aspect of the immigrant experience and its impact. Two days of academic sessions, followed by a regional field trip, are open to presenters and participants from all relevant disciplines, including those in agroecology, botany, environmental studies, humanities, social science, technology and other fields. Proposals for papers and sessions should be forwarded, along with a brief resume, to Professor R. H. Limbaugh, History Department, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 by November 15, 1991. THOREAU SOCIETY JUBILEE PROGRAM HELD IN JULY, 1991 The Thoreau Society recently held a two- week Jubilee celebration, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Society and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Thoreau Lyceum of Concord, Massachusetts. Sessions were held in several locations relevant to the life and interests of Henry David Thoreau. This Newsletter reproduces highlights of the program because of the enthusiasm for Thoreau among our readership, based on the kinship of Thoreau\u27s interests to those of John Muir. The various sessions were supplemented by readings and musical presentations as well as exhibits and field trips. The session on \u27 \u27Thoreau and the tradition of nature writing no doubt has particular interest for our readers. Papers included Thoreau\u27s Maine Woods as Travel Literature, by Philip Round; John Muir\u27s Reading of Continued on page 6 JOHN MUIR\u27S WILDERNESS DIET By J. Parker Huber John Muir was raised austerely. Calvinist self- denial and paternal severity disciplined him. His Scottish fare was spartan. Breakfast: simple oatmeal porridge, usually with a little milk or treacle. Lunch: vegetable broth and mutton. Supper: boiled potatoes, tea with milk and sugar, barley scones. We were always hungry, Muir lamented, about as hungry after as before meals. It was at this age that John, William O. Douglas comments, acquired the habit of eating very little - a habit that was to stay with him all his life. His slim stature attested to his spare diet. The most Muir weighed was 148 pounds; the least, 90. Both extremes were recorded while circling the globe in 1903- 1904. Ptomaine poisoning in Russia caused his diminution. Muir\u27s preparation for his wilderness wanderings is legendary. With a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack, he\u27d jump over the back fence. Or, This morning I rolled some bread and tea in a pair of blankets with some.sugar and a tin cup and set off... I cannot find out what kind of tea Muir drank; most likely, it was black tea. It didn\u27t matter to Muir, who knew only two varieties; weak and strong, the stronger the better. Sometimes he\u27d have coffee. When asked what kind of bread he took to the mountains, Muir replied, Just bread. Sometimes he\u27d bake cakes of unleavened flour over the coals. Evidently, he didn\u27t make his own. In Martinez, he\u27d go to the Italian Bakery for sourdough. In Yosemite, he\u27d secure his favorite French Bread at Black\u27s Hotel or soda bread from Degnan\u27s. Always Muir preferred feeding on god\u27s abounding, inexhaustible spiritual beauty bread, Autumn, 1872 saw Muir\u27s near-death on Mt. Ritter (13,157 ft.). After a bread and tea breakfast, he set out for the summit with a crust of bread fastened to his belt. Scaling a cliff, he came to a dead stop, with arms outspread, clinging close to the face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down. My doom appeared fixed. I must fall. He didn\u27t. Preternatural powers saved him and he gained the top. After bread and tea and rest revived him, he joyfully resumed his Sierra Nevada migrations. I as a climber, before a summer ascent of Mt. Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire—10,000 feet lower than Mt. Ritter— fortify myself with a big wooden bowlful of granola, bananas, blueberries, bran, brown rice syrup, lecithin, applesauce, soy milk, and ponder how Muir did it. How did he survive on so little? How did he derive so much stamina from bread and tea? Fasting was part of Muir\u27s explorations. Returning to Yosemite after a heavy dose of civilization (1873), he needed to run out for a while to say my prayers in the higher mountain temples.\u27\u27 Provisions were not important. A fast and a storm and a difficult canon were just the medicine I needed. He climbed Mt. Shasta (14, 165 ft.) on a 2:00 A.M. breakfast of coffee and frozen venison broiled on coals (1875). Though a snowstorm pinned him on the mountain that night, he survived. By 10:30 the next morning, he was safe, but not hungry. We had been so long without food that we cared but little about eating. Two years later (1877), a ramble through the San Gabriel Mountains left him breadless a day before reaching the settlements, but I felt all the fresher and cleaner for the fast. In 1880 in Alaska, Muir traveled with the Rev. Samuel Hall Young and his dog, Stickeen. One morning at five, Muir left to explore Taylor Glacier without the breakfast of bread, beans, venison and coffee, which Young had thoughtfully prepared the night before to aid Muir\u27s early and eager departure. He took only bread with him-and Stickeen. After 10:00 P.M.--17 hours afield- Muir and Stickeen returned, wet and weary. Before telling Young their adventures, Muir ate Young\u27s dinner of clam chowder, fried porpoise, bacon and beans, savory meat\u27 made of mountain kid with potatoes, onions, rice and curry, camp biscuit... Over dessert of wild strawberries and coffee, Muir unfolded the story of Stickeen. Muir could run on almost nothing. \u27 \u27After my twelve-mile walk, in Glacier Bay, Alaska, he tells us, I ate a cracker and planned the camp. His energy was not limitless, however. At Sum Dum Bay, Alaska, he had fasted too long —he does not say how long— to be in very good order for hard work. Nevertheless, he scrambled for two hours through thorny chaparral and across steep JOHN MUIR NEWSLETTER. VOL. I, #3 (NEW SERIES) Published quarterly by the John Muir Center for Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 Editor Center Director Staff ■Q Sally M. Miller R.H. Limbaugh This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. avalanche taluses of rocks and snow, seeking a glacier before breakfast. In my case, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing who fasted every Sunday, I\u27ve followed a similar practice since 1978. My weekly liquid diets—water and fruit and vegetable juices—continue even when travelling: canoeing in Maine for one to two weeks (since 1973); backpacking in the Sierra Nevada for weeks (1982 and 1986); walking twenty-three miles of the Appalachian Trail through the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts (August 27-28, 1989); and bicycling 134 miles from Eastham on Cape Cod to Framingham, Massachusetts (July 20-21, 1990). Generally, I feel invigorated and renewed while fasting. My energy increases. My disposition brightens. I come closer to nature. The intoxication of wilderness and movement combine to uplift me in ways that food never can. And I gain an appreciation of how Muir\u27s abstemious regime could be so nourishing. \u27 \u27When he traveled in the Sierra,\u27\u27 Professor Michael P. Cohen informs, Muir never lived off the land. Since he wasn\u27t a hunter or fisherman, be was frequently hungry. Didn\u27t Muir eat what nature provided? Didn\u27t he ever supplement his bread and tea with wild plants? Teenage John relished the wild bounty of his Wisconsin farms. Strawberries, dewberries, cranberries, huckleberries, apples, honey, hazel and hickory nuts, hickory sap were all consumed. On his 1,000-mile tramp from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867, his boyhood delights were abandoned. Even when faint and giddy from hunger in Savannah, Georgia, he considered feral rice and corn, but instead lived for five days on Soda crackers and water. When his brother\u27s money came, be broke his fast with gingerbread. In the Sierra Nevada, he did dine directly from nature. Autumn 1871, far and high in the mountains with bread gone, be feasted on manzanita berries like a bear.\u27\u27 Another time he followed the example of hummingbirds and sucked nectar from the long tubes of Zauschneria, California fushia. He also savored the sweetness of sugar pine sap, fancying it to maple sugar. In the Nevada forests (October 1878), he observed Indians harvesting pine nuts: Their main dependence— their staff of life, their bread.\u27\u27 His response is matter-of- fact, not his usual rhapsody evoked by plants and trees when he sat down beside them to listen to what they had to say. Alaska was an apotheosis for Muir. Never before in all my travels, north or south, had I found so lavish an abundance of berries as here. The largest and finest-flavored of all the huckleberries and blueberries I ever tasted... Plus, salmonberries, blackberries, raspberries, serviceberries, cranberries and strawberries made up Alaska\u27s cornucopia which Muir enjoyed. Muir does not describe these fruits. He does not share his feelings about them. He does not extol them, nor is he carried to the peak of his passion and prose. He is not swelled with ecstacy and gratitude. They do not release his sensuality. His reports do not transport his readers. They are not epiphany for him. Indian cuisine was de rigueur. He liked their potato-salmon stew. On Admiralty Island, the Indians served turnips, peeled and sliced in a clean dish. These we ate raw as dessert, reminding me of turnip-field feasts when I was a boy in Scotland.\u27\u27 They provided gull eggs- no comment—and wild celery~ The petioles were hollow but crisp, and tasted well.\u27\u27 There were limits to his curiosity. While the Indians eat the hips of wild roses entire like berries, he was laughed at for eating only the outside of this fruit and rejecting the seeds.\u27\u27 Another time, he politely declined the back fat of a deer, preserved in fish oil and seasoned with boiled spruce and other spicy roots.\u27\u27 All great naturalists had their bounds. Even Audubon, who often ate the birds he painted, balked at steamed buffalo brains. Apparently, Muir did not care for herbal teas. In Alaska, when tea ran out, he boiled a common heath, Labrador tea, Ledum groenlandicum, for his companions— a rank-smelling liquor, which he declined. Cruising on the CORWIN along the Alaskan coast to the Arctic Ocean (1881), Muir sampled the sea\u27s smorgasbord. He ate fresh herring. \u27 \u27Those we had for dinner are not nearly so good as those I ate last year at Cross Sound. The Yukon salmon, however, are now in excellent condition, and are the largest by far that I have seen. He discovered seal: The meat proved to be excellent, dark-red, and very tender, with a taste like that of good venison.\u27\u27 He watched natives eat seal liver, walrus, whale skin and blubber, but does not say he partook. In 1899, Muir joined a distinguished community of scientists in exploring Alaska\u27s coast. Railroad magnate, Edward H. Harriman, about whom Muir wrote a slim biography, was the progenitor. Awash in spring fog and rain, they boarded the luxury liner, GEORGE W. ELDER, in Seattle, Washington. Ship dining was sumptuous. Not all disagreeable to Muir, however, who wrote his wife at midpoint, I\u27m getting strong fast, and can walk and climb about as well as ever, and eat everything with prodigious appetite. This country\u27s most famous mountaineer, then, was an pmnivore. Not a. vegetarian or a macrobiotic, he ate what was provided. Never very much. Hive on the fat of the land without getting fat— Muir wrote at home, crackers and claret and a birdpicking of fruit, etc., but this year I\u27m going back to the faith of my fathers~a poke of oatmeal, a luggie of parrtich and bicker of brose... His appetite for wilderness exceeded his for food, his love of nature feeding him more through eye and ear than mouth. MUIR\u27S WISCONSIN HOME A NATIONAL LANDMARK by Arnold R. Alanen (excerpted by permission of Natural Resources Report-) The Wisconsin boyhood home of John Muir, Fountain Lake Farm, was recently designated a National Historic Landmark. The National Historic Landmarks Program, supervised by the National Park Service, gives such status only to a small number of sites or structures that possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating and interpreting the heritage of the nation through history, architecture and culture. Fountain Lake Farm is in Marquette County between Portage and Montello. Muir moved there as a young boy in 1849, immediately after emigrating with his family from Dunbar, Scotland, to Wisconsin. He lived at Fountain Lake until 1857, when the Muir family began to clear another farm ( Hickory Hill ) several miles southeast of the original.site. Muir later moved to Madison to attend the University of Wisconsin before departing from the Midwest for the mountains of California. In his later years Muir often mentioned the important role played by the natural features of Fountain Lake in forming his philosophy of wilderness preservation. He made several unsuccessful efforts to purchase the property. Proposals to recognize and protect the Muir holding date back four decades. In 1948, wildlife ecolo- gist Aldo Leopold recommended that the property be purchased by the Wisconsin Conservation Department. Envisioning the area as an educational institution, Leopold called for restoration of the vegetation as it existed during the Muir period. Leopold\u27s sudden death just one week after issuing his proposal stalled the effort, but local residents managed to secure some forty adjacent acres and have it designated in 1957 as the John Muir Memorial County Park. Subsequent federal open-space grants allowed the county to purchase another seventy-five acres of land, including the meadow, springs, and lake front (now known as Ennis Lake) that had once been part of the Muir property. Wisconsin established the Muir Park Natural Area in 1972, recognizing the natural integrity of the site—especially the spring-fed kettle lake with its marl bottom, and the low prairie, marsh, and fen which sustain diverse vegetation, including rare plants. The 150th anniversary of Muir\u27s birth in 1988 contributed to a greater national awareness of the naturalist\u27s links to Wisconsin. Among those to bring attention to the site and Muir\u27s Wisconsin heritage was Erik Brynildson, who received his B.S. in Natural Resources from the UW-Wisconsin Department of Landscape Architecture. Brynildson purchased the seventeen-acre parcel of land where the original Muir farm buildings once stood, and embarked on a program of landscape and wildlife restoration. His efforts to maintain and protect the integrity of the historic view that one can still observe from the original building site, coupled with the management directives provided by Marquette County and the state, were important factors in securing National Landmark designation. Indeed, the view represents a blending of natural and cultural landscape elements that continue to reflect Muir\u27s legacy. Brynildson and others also were instrumental in the formation in 1989 of a National Park Service team to prepare a feasibility study providing management alternative for upgrading the natural habitat- -wetlands, lowland fens, natural prairie areas, and lake water quality of the park area, which John Muir enjoyed during his boyhood.\u27\u27 Proposals in the report will be discussed by Marquette County\u27s citizens and elected officials, as well as by various state and federal agencies. Inclusion of the site on the National Historic Landmark roster represents an initial and important step in a process which ultimately will give greater recognition to John Muir\u27s Wisconsin connections. Fountain Lake Farm now stands with the two major sites in California that memorialize his achievements: Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County, and the John Muir National Historic Site near Martinez. WORLD CONFERENCE ON SOLAR COOKING AT UOP!! Solar cooking has become a popular subject of interest which that John Muir would no doubt have heartily applauded. Solar cooking is a way to cook without sacrificing the environment and without cost. Extensive use of firewood as cooking fuel has degraded many of the world\u27s forests and led to soil erosion. Using solar energy instead is one way to help restore the quality of life on earth. On June 19-20, 1992, a World Conference on Solar Cooking will take place at the University of the Pacific. Ideas for papers and presentations should be.submitted by November 1. All aspects of the subject may be considered, included solar cooker designs and analysis, cultural, sociological or environmental issues of promoting csolar cooking, health and nutrition issues, case histories of promoting solar cooking, and commercial solar cookers. Submit two copies of an abstract (including any figures) or a letter describing a proposed display or poster to University of the Pacific, 102 Khuory Hall, Stockton, CA 95211. Also contact the above office if you wish to receive a conference program. JOHN MUIR VISITOR AND HERITAGE CENTRE, DUNBAR, SCOTLAND The John Muir Center for Regional Studies has been informed that a John Muir Visitor and Heritagae Centre may be established in Muir\u27s birthplace of Dunbar, Scotland. A feasibility study is going forward now under the auspices of the Scottish Development Agency. The agency, with assistance from an anonymous private donor, has hired a consultant, the Environment and Development Company of Great Britain, which is carrying our the work. The Dunbar Historic Trust is involved as an interested party, and the East Lothian District Council is an advisor to the project. The hope is to establish a \u27 \u27John Muir Environmental World, which would be of regional, national and international significance. The concept for the center is to combine Muir\u27s ideas with an appreciation of today\u27s environmental issues. Ways are to be explored as to providing information to the different types of visitors, both tourists and environmental specialists and scholars. Audiovisual and tactile experiences are projected, as well as the establishment of fellowships. The readers of this Newsletter are invited to submit any suggestions they may have to Bert Winterbottom, Principal, % LDR International, Inc., Quarry Park Place, 9175 Guilford Road, Columbia, MD 21046. Consider what you might like to see the center include in its programs, and send your ideas to the above address. WHAR IS FRENCH BAR? By Bob Manley John Muir referred in My First Summer in the Sierra to the Delanev Ranch to the Delaney Ranch near French Bar, from which he set out on some of his explorations. But where is French Bar? It is about a mile west of the present town of La Grange. In fact, La Grange was originally known as French Bar. Legend has it that a group of French sailors jumped ship in San Francisco in 1849 and rowed a boat south on the San Joaquin River and east up the Tuomumne until they were stranded at FrenchBar where navigable waters ended. The Gold Discovery at French Bar was the second major gold strike in California. A Bar forms on the inside of a sweeping turn of a river as the flowing water loses volocity at that point and deposits its load of sand and silt. Go west through La Grange, and after the four- way stop at Highway 132 and J-59, in another half mile...on the right side of Highway 132 is a small graveyard which is known as the French Cemetery. French Bar is down on the river bottom north of the cemetery. One may continue west to the new bridge, but keep to the south bank of the river by taking Lake Road. All the level ground for almost two miles along both sides of Lake Road and north to the river was known as Delaney Bottoms and was either owned or controlled by Muir\u27s employer during the 1860s and perhaps later. This rich, level river bottom land would have been prime grazing and farming land. It is still beautiful even though portions of it were extensively dredged for gold in the early years of this century. ANNOTATED JOHN MUIR BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FILM LIST AVAILABLE For those interested, the Sierra Club has available for $2.00 the most recent version of Harold W. Wood, Jr.\u27s, John Muir Bibliography and Film List. It is one component of the John Muir Kit, which includes a Muir biographical fact sheet and a Muir bookmark. For members of the Sierra Club, the price is $1.00. Order the above from Sierra Club Public Affairs, 730 Polk St., San Francisco, CA 94109. THANKS TO OUR READERS ONCE AGAIN The Newsletter staff is very grateful for the Muir ma