the john muir exhibit - life - in the yosemite
In The Yosemite with John Muir
By Clara Barrus
The Craftsman,
volume 23, number 3 (December 1912), pp. 324 - 335
(New York: Craftsman Publishing Company)
John Muir of California, poet,
naturalist philosopher, friend:
from his latest photograph.
|
John Muir, born in Scotland, reared in America, a wanderer in
nearly every country on the globe, seventy-four years of age and
hale and canny, is doubtless one of the most picturesque figures
in our country today. Scot to the backbone, yet America claims
him as her own, so earnestly has he studied our trees and
mountains, so closely is he identified with the wonders of the
great West, so loyally has he labored to preserve our natural
beauties when from time to time there have been those of our own
countrymen who would have wrested them from us.
It is
fitting that the mighty Alaskan glacier he discovered bears his
name, and that a noble forest of California redwoods is called
The Muir Woods, and it is likewise fitting that a little mountain
daisy is his namesake, for with all his enthusiasm for mountain
and glacier and noble sequoia, his love for "the bonnie wee
blossoms of the wild" is one of his abiding passions.
"To
any place that is wild," is the reply Mr. Muir made in eighteen
hundred and sixty-eight to a man on the streets of San Francisco
of whom he inquired the nearest way out of town.
"But
where do you want to go?" the stranger asked. Imagine his
surprise on receiving this reply: "To any place that is wild!"
But he directed the seeker after the wild to the Oakland ferry,
and thence he and another young man made their way on foot
through the great flowery central valley of California, walled in
on the east by the mighty Sierra range, on through the deep
Sierra canyon without knowledge of the topography of the country,
and with the snows so deep that the blazed trails were all
covered; and after many adventures they reached their goal--the
famous Yosemite.
"Any place that is wild" seems always to
have been the watch-word of this wanderer who started out from
Indiana more than forty years ago, journeying alone and afoot to
the Gulf of Mexico, then to Florida and Cuba, intending to go to
South America. Weakness from Southern fever and failure to get a
ship for South America prevented him just then from carrying out
his plans, so he took the Panama steamer, arrived in San
Francisco, and after one day in that city, set out, as before
stated, for the Yosemite. But, as I heard him say this spring, he
usually gets to the place he starts for, and doesn't mind a delay
of forty years or more, so long as he can explore other
wildernesses by the way. Now in nineteen hundred and twelve he
returns from South America and South Africa!
"You see I
got there," he said triumphantly on his return.
Recently his book on the Yosemite--the result of ten or more
years in the Valley in the early seventies-has come from the
press. Assuredly Mr. Muir is not to be hurried. Like the enduring
rocks, the slow-moving glaciers, and the many centuried sequoias,
he believes in the amplitude of time. How pityingly he speaks of
"Time-poor" persons who never spare enough of their scanty store
to wander leisurely in some of the world's wildernesses!
In reading Mr. Muir's book on the Yosemite, or, in truth, any
of his books, one gets but a partial view of his character. The
enthusiastic nature lover, the tireless student, the adventurous
explorer--these characteristics stand out on every page, but to
know the man one should camp and tramp with him in the Yosemite,
as I did in nineteen hundred and nine, in company with Mr. John
Burroughs, Mr. Francis Browne and a few others. There we saw the
many-sided Muir--the man one sees in his books, and also the
teasing, fun-loving Muir, the arbitrary, the devout, the modest,
the assertive Muir--an exasperating, lovable, complex
personality.
On first meeting him he fell naturally into
telling us about himself; of his boyhood in Scotland, and his
early years in the "beautiful wilderness of Wisconsin," where his
family first settled on coming to America. He spoke of his stern,
soldier-like father, a strict disciplinarian and an enthusiast in
religion, with much native intelligence and marked inventive
ability, but with little schooling; of his gentle and
gentler-bread mother, well educated for her time--she could
paint, read poetry and was an ardent lover of natural scenery. He
told how she tried to second the father's sternness, and to scold
the mischievous lads into decorum, but could never really scold
however hard she tried.
If allowed to talk on
uninterruptedly, Mr. Muir regales his hearers with a monologue of
exceptional range and raciness, but, intrude a question, or
venture an opinion, and the smoothly-flowing stream of talk is
impeded; and if it happen when a choice bit of description is in
progress, the chances are you will never hear that to completion,
though you may hear something exceedingly diverting instead.
Confess ignorance and seek enlightenment from him, and you will
more than likely be met with bantering ridicule; yet he will on
occasion volunteer the most minute and painstaking information. I
recall how, as we neared the Yosemite, Mr. Muir took great pains
to teach me about the different trees in the Sierra, indicating
their diagnostic points and the distribution of the various
belts--object-lessons in tree-lore one was exceptionally
fortunate to have from such a teacher. But when Mr. Burroughs
raised some questions about the geology of the
Yosemite over which he was puzzling, and earnestly asked Mr. Muir
for a solution, the Yosemite student replied:
"Aw, Johnny, ye may tak' all your geology and tie it in a bundle and
cast it into the sea, and it wouldna' mak' a ripple," and that is
all the satisfaction one could get out of him.
Arbitrary in conversation, Mr. Muir's is the attitude of the
fencer, ever delighted to give a thrust; caring little for the
point of view of another, he catches at conversational straws, is
sure which way the wind blows in the speaker's mind, and enlarges
on this when, perhaps, the opinions he is ridiculing are as
foreign to the speaker as to the Scot himself. One wonders how
much of this disputatiousness is racial and how much individual,
how much due to his belief that you are what he charges you with
being, and how much to his perverse inclination to tease. But his
hectoring is always from a fun-loving motive; his nature is
essentially kindly. I once heard him say: "There is one thing I
hate with a perfect hatred--cruelty for anything or anybody."
Mr. Muir has been in nearly every land under the sun; his
descriptions are vivid; his anecdotes inimitable. Occasionally he
uses the broad dialect of the Scot.
Though so full of wit
and humor, a pathetic look often comes in his face as he speaks
of lonely mountain and glacier explorations, although he had so
much delight in them. At such times one thinks of him as the
"Beloved Wanderer;" again, as the other side comes uppermost, and
one sees his opinionatedness, sees him tripping up his
companions, meeting their opinions with gibe and hectoring
remark, one is moved to dub him the "Beloved Egotist;" although a
description of this side alone would give a biased impression of
his character.
How keen is our mountaineer's
susceptibility to beauty--the beauty of wild and remote places,
the grandeur of storms, the ecstasy of pine trees, the roar and
plash of rain, the wild leaps of waterfalls! Concerning some of
these sights he said that not only his soul but also his whole
body drank in the beauty, and he prayed for a bigger body, for
more bulk, that his delight might be the greater. Absorbing it in
his pores, he sighed for more pores for absorption, more blood
vessels to carry the joyous blood, more nerves to be thrilled,
for life more and abundant--so intoxicated was he with the
wonders of the mountain fastnesses.
After being alone on
the heights for a season, on coming down among men, he was
preternaturally keen to impressions; he could see
deeper and clearer into the hearts and motives of people, and was
often pained by the revelations experienced. The sensitiveness
wore off as he mingled more with men.
The look that comes
in Mr. Muir's mobile face as he tells of miles and miles of
beauty traversed, and his reverent reference to certain
excursions as "glorious seasons of forest grace," make one aware
of his unspeakable experiences, for with all his engaging
loquacity he is shy about disclosing his deeper feelings. He told
us how through the long summer nights he used to lie under the
stars upon a bed of pine needles at the edge of a daisy and
gentian meadow; again how he gloried in being "magnificently
snow-bound in the Lord's Mountain-House"--those regions in the
high Sierra. Sometimes hungry and often cold, yet he was drunk
with the beauty of it all. Some of his descriptions have a
religious exaltation; he is always hearing the still, small voice
in nature; never tires of trying to make others aware of "God's
wild blessings," speaks of snow and rock crystals as "God's
darlings;" experiences a "baptism of light" on icy Shasta, and
regards the "divine alpenglow" as one of the most impressive of
the terrestrial manifestations of God.
Such glimpses of him made one feel that practical man, inventor, geologist,
botanist, explorer that he is, beyond and above all these he is
the mystic. His studies in the Sierra, earnestly as they were
pursued, were only secondary--his rapt admiration of the dawn and
the alpenglow, of majestic trees that wave and pray, of rejoicing
waters, and the sacred, history-bearing rocks, of night and the
stars on lonely moutain tops, reveal the soul of the mystic.
How this apostle of beauty scorns the fleshly apathy of the
ordinary tourist who walks or rides emotionless through the
sublimity of the Yosemite! He told many a tale of the
indifference and callousness of the soulless ones whom he
conducted through the Valley in the years when he acted as guide
to parties. But to offset these, there were memorable hours with
Asa Gray, Sir Joseph Hooker, LeConte and other scientists, and
there was Emerson's all too brief sojourn there when he sauntered
under the big trees with Mr. Muir, "as serene as a sequoia, his
head in the empyrean."
It was particularly gratifying to Mr. Muir to show Mr.
Burroughs the glories of the Yosemite and make him admit that he
had nothing like it in Esopus Valley, or in the Catskills. He had
conducted Colonel Roosevelt to his mountains a few years before,
and not many weeks after we were there, President Taft saw the
Yosemite and the Big Trees under the guidance of Mr. Muir, yet
neither the earlier nor later experiences effaced from his
recollection the wondrous spectacle as he viewed
it for the first time when he and his young companion tramped in
there all the way from San Francisco. After crossing innumerable
boulder-choked canyons, scrambling through chapparal, and
wallowing through snow, they at last stood upon the heights and
looked down to the floor of the Valley which lay nearly a mile
below them, and across to the opposite wall of the chasm, half a
mile distant:
"Great God! Have we got to cross that
gulch, too?" ejaculated his intrepid companion whom Mr. Muir
had led at such a lively pace all the way thither.
Thereafter for many years Mr. Muir wintered and summered in
Yosemite, tracing the waterfalls to their sources, examining each
basin, observing the fauna and flora, making sketches of the
rocks, tracing the courses of the ancient glaciers, and
discovering the glaciers that still lingered there.
He showed us the site of his old saw-mill, told us how he built it
and kept it in repair, and how he used to sit and sketch until he
saw the great logs nearing the end, when he would stop and start
another log on its way, and resume sketching. He spoke of his
inventive ability which showed itself in boyhood, and old us of
the several ingenious devices which he has patented, which have
yielded him tangible financial returns. With engaging frankness
he said he was so smart he could not help making money whenever
he ceased his wanderings for a spell.
He used to make
Sunday raids on the heights above the Yosemite, starting out at
daybreak and tracing Pohono or some other wild waterfall to its
source, walking all night among the moon shadows, and descending
the perilous cliffs in the darkness, reaching his cabin at
daybreak to begin work at the mill.
"Ah! How many
glorious Sundays were mine!" he mused. And here he roamed, loving
the wilderness, glorying in storms, in the roar of waterfalls,
even in the thunder of earthquakes and the relentless speed of
avalanches. He told of one wild ride on an avalanche: He had been
climbing all day hoping to reach a certain summit in time to see
the sunset, but stepping inadvertently on the trampled snow, he
started an avalanche, and in the twinkling of an eye was swished
down to the foot of the canyon, the avalanche lurching and
plunging, the snow particles flying in a blinding mist around
him. The next instant he picked himself up unharmed, gloriously
exhilarated by the astounding experience.
When his cabin
would rock and creak during an earthquake, this imperturbable
student would sit unmoved making his notes, registering the
desire that some day he could go to South America and study
earthquakes. In those days he was so engrossed
with his studies that he red the glacial tracings in his dreams,
followed the lines of cleavage, and struggled all night with the
things that puzzled his waking hours.
He told us how he
drifted about the Valley and on the heights above, and said that
it was only by resting on the rocks as the ice had done that he
was able to absorb and arrive at the truths about them. And when
the great geologic truths about the formation of the Valley burst
upon him, and he found the proofs piling up as a result of his
unwearied research, he was fairly beside himself with admiration
of the Power that had achieved such stupendous results. Pushed on
by his thirst for more and more knowledge, he became so oblivious
to his health and safety that his friends feared for his life;
but he laughed at their fears, and only asked that they find him
some concentrated food so he could carry a year's provisions and
thus pursue his studies in those almost inaccessible heights,
without the interruption of coming down the mountains to get
bread. Still as a young man he was much more dependable upon
friendship than one might gather, and during those years of
lonely wandering in the high Sierra he came down from the
snow-line to the bread-line quite as often for the nourishment he
found in friendly letters as to replenish his bread sack and tea
can.
"When I was in college," he said, "I nearly starved;
I lived on fifty cents a week, and used to count the crackers and
jealously watch the candles, but I didn't mind after I got in
here--no bell that rang meant me; I was free to go and come, and
here were things that were bread and meat to me--things to fatten
my soul, and all free as the air. Ah! But I've had a blessed time
in here. But I did wish the ravens would come and feed me,
so I could keep at my studies."
It was often amusing to hear him recount hairbreadth escapes and in the same breath
disclaim recklessness. We wondered to what lengths a reckless
person would have gone; but there seem to have been certain rules
he observed, such as never taking a step forward when scaling
cliffs, unless he was sure that from that point he would be able
to take a step backward; and never to gaze about him, no mater
how glorious the view, until he had made sure his footing was
secure.
 A study of
John Muir in the Yosemite. Those who know him well
will recognize a characteristic
pose of this lover of
nature.
|
On the long dusty stage ride from El Portal into the Yosemite,
Mr. Muir diverted us much by his bantering talk with a sprightly
elderly woman on the seat with him. She did not know who he was,
or that on the other seats of the coach were other men of
note also, although later in the forenoon on
hearing more of Mr. Muir's talk she got an inkling and asked,
"Who are you, anyhow, that you know so much about all these
things?" He forebore enlightening here, but burst a bomb at her
feet by asking her if she knew the works of John Burroughs, then
telling her that that was the man sitting two seats ahead of her.
She nearly jumped out of the wagon. Later she learned who Mr.
Muir was himself, and still later, in coming upon Mr. Browne, she
naively asked, "Won't you tell me if you are not
somebody--somebody in particular, I mean." But I'm afraid the
able editor of The Dial disclaimed being anybody but
"plain Mr. Browne of Chicago."
"What is that lavender
flower up there?" innocently asked this vivacious little woman of
nobody in particular, soon after the coach had started.
"That, madam," said Mr. Muir, "is the coeanothus
integerrimus."
"Mercy! But hasn't it any other name?"
"Yes, coeanothus integerrimus, buckthorn,
deer-brush, California lilac, bearberry--take your pick," said
the Scot.
"But you give me so many--I can't tell any of
them," she complained.
"But, madam, I gave you first the
one it is known by the world over, and you would have none of
it."
On seeing a huge boulder, which had been cleft from
the face of the rock above, lying in the roadway so that the road
had to be turned aside for it, the loquacious lady exclaimed,
"My! But why didn't it go further?" Then the Scot rallied her
thus:
"So you are not satisfied, madam, with the place
the Lord gave it? He made quite a job of it as it is." Then he
drew her into an argument as to whether the Lord had planned and
placed every boulder in the spots where they lie, telling her
that as a good Presbyterian she was going back on her religion
unless she believed this, and exasperating her by declaring that
it was presumptuous in us to criticise His work, laughing in his
sleeve at her earnestness all the time. Later when we came to a
mammoth boulder which had gone clean down into the roaring
Merced, Mr. Muir queried, "Did that go far enough to suit
you, madam?"
That Mr. Muir thoroughly enjoys witnessing
one's discomfiture when the distress is only comical was seen
when he told us of a well-known lecturer's trip into the Valley
many years ago with a body of scientific men. The lecturer having
crammed on Whitney's geology, had started out with the intention
of worsting Mr. Muir in his arguments in favor of the tremendous
importance of glaciers in the formation of the Valley. Through
talking glibly at first, he was soon at a
disadvantage, having no well-grounded knowledge of these things;
while Mr. Muir was able to prove to the audience that what he
affirmed was first-hand knowledge. After the discussion, the
lecturer trotted up to Mr. Muir as they were about to start for a
walk up one of the trails where he was to show some of the
convincing evidences of glaciation, and asked, "If there were
glaciers here, Mr. Muir, where are the moraines?"
"You better ask, "Where could the moraines have rested in the Valley,"
retorted the Scot. Then he explained that if the lecturer had
known a moraine when he saw it, he could have recognized a large
lateral moraine, covered with trees and underbrush, at the
beginning of the Valley. Presently, they came to a place where
the old glaciers had made it very slippery. The stout defender of
the Ice-gods warned the guest: "Look out here, Doctor, it is
pretty dangerous, you better take my hand." But saying airily
that he was all right, Mr. A. went his way. The next instant out
went his feet and down he fell on the slippery rocks, striking on
the ice-polished granite with a force that made him pale long
afterward. He sprawled about, and finally tottered to his feet,
his clothes dripping. For the rest of the way he was willing to
take Mr. Muir's hand.
"Now are you ready to accept
the glacial theory?" mercilessly asked the stout defender of it.
"Yes, I capitulate to the Hugh Miller of the Sierras,"
humbly answered the dripping disputant.
"I thought you
would," added Mr. Muir. "God works in a mysterious way. His
wonders to perform--He almost has to kill some people to get the
truth into them." Then he chuckled as he recalled how comical the
stout little man had looked when on returning to the hotel he had
walked about into someone's trousers much too short for him,
while his own were being made presentable again.
But many a man thinks Mr. Muir goes too far in attributing so much of the
formation and sculpturing of the Yosemite to glaciers, though
unquestionably they have done their part. Mr. Burroughs had many
a tilt with him on this score, and said of his claims: "Muir
rides his ice-hobby til the tongue of the poor beast hangs out,
and he is ready to lie down and give up the ghost. Ice is by no
means the only agency at work here." This much to the scorn of
Mr. Muir; but the two men were one in their admiration of the
beauties and wonders of the Valley.
Mr. Muir shows a
marked indifference to creature comforts, especially to food.
After long tramps, when the rest of the party would almost devour
luncheon, he would sit and play with a piece of
dry bread, and keep up a steady stream of talk. Place a sandwich
close to his hand, or shell an egg for him, and a courteous
"thank you" is forthcoming, but more often than not a mere nibble
is all the attention he pays to your efforts, and the talk flows
on. Not that one wants it to stop, but one feels guilty at being
so entertained at the expense of the entertainer. He declares
that bread is about the only food that he needs, and insists that
through some temperamental quality he can get out of bread more
than any chemical analysis can show--if his spirit is pitched in
the right key. "Eat bread in the mountains," he said, "and with
love and adoration in your soul you can get a nourishment that
food experts have no conception of."
He is equally careless as to rest and sleep if there is
something he wants to see, or some one at hand to talk to. One
night in the Yosemite after a most fatiguing day, when most of us
were ready to sleep on going to our rooms, the indefatigable
Scot, finding himself rooming with the editor of The Dial,
who is a veritable repository of Golden Poems and who knows his
Burns as well as Mr. Muir himself, could not resist the
temptation to quot and quote, matching Mr. Browne's favorites
with favorites of his own. The walls of the room were thin so
that his debauch of poetry was enjoyed by the occupants of
adjoining rooms as well, until out of prudence and fear that the
lack of sleep would unfit us all for the long day's tramp on the
morrow, we arrested the Burns' devotees in their quotations by a
warning knock on the partition and the entreaty:
"O, try and sleep, ye waukrif rogues,
.
. . . .
. .
Now, bairnies, cuddle doon!"
The introduction of another poet in place of their beloved
Bobby had the desired effect, and the wakeful "bairnies cuddled
doon."
The Scot has a way when he wishes to call your
attention to anything in nature, of taking you by the shoulder,
arresting your attention for an instant as he indicates the
object, then as abruptly giving you a little push from him, as
much as to say, "Go! It rests with you whether you are worthy to
behold it." In like manner he put his hand on my shoulder and
pointing to Half Dome said"
"There! Take a look at my
darling--it is nearly five thousand feet from this valley floor,
and nearly nine thousand from the level of the sea--look at its
sublime tranquillity, its repose, the solemn, god-like calm that
rests on that rock!" And then the push away as he walks on
silently contemplating the majestic rock which of all others in the Valley seems nearest his heart. It seems a
bit uncanny for a man to give up so large a place in his heart to
a rock, a glacier or a tree, however sublime it may be, but his
devotion is not to be questioned.
One day on our return
to the hotel after a tramp up one of the canyons, the sprightly
seat-mate of Mr. Muir, above referred to, told him that she and
her friend had been to Mirror Lake. "We might know you would go
where there is a mirror," he taunted, but a moment later he said
contritely, "I am ashamed of myself for attempting to jest in
here."
Many of his associations with the Valley are
naturally of a serious and solemn nature--the months of
loneliness and hardship, the narrow escapes from accident and
death, the years of consecration to his work, the wild and
terrible beauty he has often witnessed, the overflowing peace he
has experienced in traversing glacier meadows, the ecstasy on
remote mountain heights--almost mountains of transfiguration to
him--these have combined to make of the place almost holy ground.
Perhaps the most idyllic of our Yosemite days was when we
tramped to the Nevada and Vernal Falls, a distance of fourteen
miles, returning to Camp Ahwahnee at night weary almost to
exhaustion, but strangely uplifted by the beauty and sublimity in
which we had moved. Our brown tents stood hospitably open and out
in the great open space in front we sat around a huge campfire
under the noble spruces and firs, the Merced flowing softly on
our right, the mighty Yosemite Falls thundering away in the
distance; the moon rising over Sentinel Rock on our left, lending
a touch of ineffible beauty to the scene. Nor was the charm of
melancholy missing for on the morrow we were to leave the Happy
Valley.
Source: The Craftsman,
Volume 23, number 3 (December 1912), pp. 324 - 335
(New York: Craftsman Publishing Company)
[Converted to HTML,
from a copy in the University of California, San Diego Library,
by Daniel E. Anderson, 2000.]
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