by Eric Rutkow
One night in early March that year, while working late to improve the factory’s belt system, Muir lost his grip on a file. The tool flew upward and pierced his right eye, rendering it temporarily blind. “I felt neither pain nor faintness,” Muir explained, “the thought was so tremendous that my right eye was gone—that I should never look at a flower again.” He was compelled to spend several weeks lying in a dark room as he healed (though his right eye remained forever weak). This period of convalescence gave him a chance to reflect on his life thus far, his years of toiling in factory work away from his beloved forests. He determined to break free from the shackles of his mechanical labor and set out to explore the world. He wrote: “This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields. . . . God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.” That September Muir, now “joyful and free,” began his first major ramble, a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico.
In the spring of 1868, Muir’s travels brought him to San Francisco, California. He intended to remain there only a few months before heading to South America, but then he discovered the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, a place that he later named the “Range of Light.” And at the heart of the Sierras was the Yosemite, a sprawling area of sheer rock walls, spectacular waterfalls, and fantastic geological formations. (Yosemite State Park, created with the same 1864 law that protected the Mariposa Grove of big trees, covered only a small portion of the region, the main Yosemite Valley, home to such natural wonders as Yosemite Falls, Cathedral Rock, El Capitan, and Sentinel Rock.) The entire Sierra region captivated Muir like nothing before. He had finally found his home:
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it . . . a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. . . . How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scarce memory enough of old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from!
It was not, however, simply the remarkable geography that attracted Muir, but also the Sierra’s trees. Muir, by all accounts, was a self-professed tree lover. Charles Sprague Sargent, the don of American trees, who later became Muir’s close friend, said of him: “Few men whom I have known loved trees as deeply and intelligently as John Muir.” And the forests of the Sierra were something of a tree utopia. Muir, over the course of his life, would fill countless pages and write dozens of articles explaining their character. His descriptions remain unmatched in their elegance:
No other coniferous forest in the world contains so many species or so many large and beautiful trees,—Sequoia gigantean, king of conifers, “the noblest of a noble race,” as Sir Joseph Hooker well says; the sugar pine, king of all the world’s pines, living or extinct; the yellow pine, next in rank, which here reaches most perfect development, forming noble towers of verdure two hundred feet high; the mountain pine, which braves the coldest blasts far up the mountains on grim, rocky slopes; and five others, flourishing each in its place, making eight species of pine in one forest, which is still further enriched by the great Douglas spruce, libocedrus, two species of silver fir, large trees and exquisitely beautiful, the Paton hemlock, the most graceful of evergreens, the curious tumion, oaks of many species, maples, alders, poplars, and flowering dogwood, all fringed with flowery underbrush, manzanita, ceanothus, wild rose, cherry, chestnut, and rhododendron.
Though Muir preferred to devote all his time to exploring the region’s natural wonders and its trees, he nonetheless needed some employment to support his minimal wants. During his first eighteen months he took a series of odd jobs, including two stints as a sheepherder in the Sierra Nevada Mountains—these experiences convinced him that sheep, which ate all the young forest growth, were “hoofed locusts” destined to destroy the trees if left unregulated. In the fall of 1869, Muir finally received an offer of permanent work from James Hutchings, the same California pioneer and promoter who had published the best-known account of the giant sequoia discovery. Hutchings contracted with Muir to construct and operate a local sawmill, in which he would be free to reside as well. Muir, sensitive to the frailty of his new habitat and unwilling to kill any living trees, agreed on the condition that the operation only cut downed wood. This sawmill was where Muir first met Emerson, in 1871. It was also where Muir began his career as a writer—his first published piece, “Yosemite Glaciers,” appeared in the New York Tribune in December 1871 and argued that the Yosemite Valley was formed through glacier movement, a controversial though largely correct theory that clashed with the prevailing view that the magnificent natural features had resulted from earthquakes.
In 1876 Muir first lent his voice publicly to the cause of forest preservation. The Sacramento Daily Record-Union, a newspaper in Northern California, published an editorial of his on February 5 of that year calling for government protection of all the forests of the Sierra Nevada’s giant sequoia belt. The article was called “God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests.” The provocative title was an allusion to a well-known 1825 blank-verse poem, “A Forest Hymn,” written by the famed poet and nature lover William Cullen Bryant—it began, “The groves were God’s first temples.” This literary reference reflected Muir’s belief that the nation’s trees possessed a dynamic, spiritual dimension worthy of protection for its own sake. His philosophy of preservation thus differed from that of many other early voices, including those who fought for the Adirondack park primarily out of concerns over the Hudson River. A subsequent article made this distinction clear: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
In some respects, Muir’s philosophy echoed transcendentalism, the movement founded by Emerson, but the Californian also broke from the views of his New England predecessors. Nature was wild, uncertain, vast, dynamic, and sublime, divine for its own sake, not its reflection of the afterlife. While Muir greatly admired Thoreau, he occasionally scoffed at what his intellectual forebear accepted as “wilderness.” One of his articles chafed at those who “[l]ike Thoreau . . . see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush, and oceans in ponds and drops of dew.”
By the time the “God’s First Temples” editorial appeared in 1876, Muir was thirty-eight years old, already the preeminent expert on the California mountains and widely respected for his writings. But he had yet to settle down, and a life of solitude was beginning to weigh on him. Two years earlier he had met Louie Wanda Strentzel, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of a prosperous immigrant orchardist. She shared Muir’s love of botany, and they formed a close bond, culminating in their marriage in April 1880, when Muir was forty-two. His first daughter was born the following spring and a second appeared five years later. Throughout the 1880s, the responsibilities of supporting a family consumed much of his time, but Muir’s wife, sensing her husband’s need for wilderness, urged him to return to his travels and writing.
Up to this point, Muir, aside from his appeals in “God’s First Temples,” had largely remained outside politics. But he was about to be thrust into the center of a national movement for forest preservation.
In May 1889, he met Robert Underwood Johnson, the well-connected associate editor of the influential Century Magazine. Johnson was in San Francisco for a story on gold hunting and had called on Muir to accompany him for a side trip into the Sierra Nevada—Muir supposedly got lost in the corridors of Johnson’s hotel and cried out, “I can’t make my way through these confounded artificial cañons.” While in the mountains, Johnson noticed that the spectacular waterfalls and verdant meadows he’d read about in Muir’s articles seemed to disappear outside the confines of the limited area within the Yosemite State Park. Muir explained to h
is companion—in an argument that seemed ripped from the pages of Man and Nature—how unrestricted sheep grazing had destroyed the underbrush and trees, leaving nothing to hold the winter snows and regulate the summer water flow. Johnson responded, “Obviously the thing to do is to make a Yosemite National Park around the Valley on the plan of the Yellowstone.” (Johnson, here, was using the term “Yosemite” to describe the much larger area of intense geological formations.) This proposal initially failed to impress Muir, who doubted that there was sufficient political will. But the editor persisted: If Muir was willing to write two articles for the Century Magazine describing a proposed park, Johnson would spearhead a lobbying effort in Washington, D.C. By the time the two men descended from the Sierras, Muir had agreed to the plan.
The obstacles, however, were enormous. The sheepmen and lumbermen, who made their living exploiting the forests, sharply opposed any efforts to curb their operations. Many Californians also objected to any encroachments by the federal government as a matter of principle. But the largest hurdle was the federal government itself. Though it owned hundreds of millions of acres throughout the West, official policy was to alienate the lands as quickly as possible. Partly this was a revenue-generating issue and partly it was a reflection of the laissez-faire policies that dominated nineteenth-century thinking. The federal government’s only prior direct effort to reserve land with the main purpose of protecting trees had been for naval purposes—starting in 1799, the government had purchased or set aside certain southern lands covered in live oak, a tree considered especially useful in ship construction, but this practice was abandoned with the shift to metal hulls in the 1860s. The only federal land that had ever been preserved for its own sake (not for economic or security reasons) was in Yellowstone almost twenty years earlier, but this was, in many respects, a poor analog: That land had less commercial potential than the Yosemite forests, and the Yellowstone National Park had been sponsored in part as a tourism ploy for a major railroad with a right of way through the region.
While attitudes about the regulation of public lands were beginning to soften—especially among eastern congressmen—it would take a powerful voice to persuade the general population and the federal government of the need for a new national park.
The Yosemite campaign began in earnest the following summer. Muir drafted a “proposed boundary” for the national park, and Johnson set about persuading his contacts at the Committee of Public Lands of the House of Representatives. Then, in August 1890, Muir’s first article appeared. Titled “Treasures of the Yosemite,” it included the “proposed boundary” map and discussed Muir’s lifetime of experiences with the region’s innumerable geological wonders and its unrivaled conifer forests. Interestingly, the article’s only explicit rationale for preservation involved the sequoia forests: “These king trees, all that there are of their kind in the world, are surely worth saving.” As a naturalist, Muir wanted all the land preserved for its own sake; as a pragmatist, he understood that trees, more than rocks, required actual protection and might spur the public to action.
With Muir’s first article as a propaganda piece, Johnson was able to cajole some sympathetic legislators into producing a National Parks Bill. The following month appeared Muir’s second article, “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park.” This one focused exclusively on the natural wonders located outside the state park, particularly the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a rival in grandeur to the Yosemite Valley itself. Once again, Muir used the region’s trees as the main reason to encourage protection: “[T]he bill cannot too quickly become law. Unless reserved or protected the whole region will soon or late be devastated by lumbermen and sheepmen, and so of course be made unfit for use as a pleasure ground. . . . [W]hen the region shall be stripped of its forests the ruin will be complete.”
The fight to protect Yosemite achieved its desired end in early October 1890 with the passage of the National Parks Bill. The new act not only carved out a park that corresponded generally to Muir’s map, it also preserved two other nearby stands of giant sequoias, designating them General Grant National Park and Sequoia National Park. Johnson appreciatively wrote to Muir on October 3, “[T]he Yosemite bill is of course the result of your very outspoken reference to the depredations in that region, and practically to your sketch of the limits.” Thanks in great part to Muir’s pen, trees for the first time enjoyed federal protection for more than just their economic value.
After the Yosemite victory, Muir devoted much of his remaining twenty-five years to the cause of forest protection. He authored countless books and articles on the subject, his name a frequent byline in Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the Century. In 1892 he helped found the Sierra Club, an organization devoted to the preservation cause, and was elected its president, a post that he held for twenty-two years. Under Muir’s leadership, this organization championed an expansion of the national park system, winning major victories in 1899 with the creation of King’s Canyon National Park in California and in 1905 when the poorly administered Yosemite State Park was transferred to the federal government. And among all of this preservation activity Muir interspersed voyages to Alaska, South America, and Africa, including a world tour of trees that he undertook with Sargent.
On Christmas Eve 1914, at the age of seventy-six, Muir died as a titan of the country’s intellectual and political life. The day after his passing, the New York Times ran an editorial to accompany his obituary that aptly summarized his impact on the nation: “To John Muir more than to any other man or body of men the citizens of the United States owe the preservation of their great natural parks in the Far West.” But Muir’s ultimate legacy was much greater than this: He would become the guiding spirit of environmental movements throughout the twentieth century, a visionary for a new balance between nature and Americans.
Nonetheless, Muir’s ideas about preservation were not the only ones of importance for Americans concerned about the fate of the nation’s trees. Many considered them too radical and impractical for a nation dependent on timber. The best solution, some argued, was not to lock up trees from the threats of man, but to teach Americans how to exploit the forests without destroying them. This new mantra would explode onto the national consciousness around the turn of the century.
“How Would You Like to Be a Forester?”
ONE MORNING IN late August 1885, as twenty-year-old Gifford Pinchot was making the final preparations for his freshman year at Yale University, his father, James, pulled him aside and offered a curious suggestion: “How would you like to be a forester?” The younger Pinchot did not realize it at that time, but this simple question would guide much of his life. In turn, it would set off a chain of events that forever altered America as well as the fate of its trees.
The Pinchots were among the most prominent and influential families in the eastern United States. Gifford’s maternal grandfather, Amos Eno, had made a fortune in New York City land speculation and had become one of the wealthiest Americans, his Manhattan real estate holdings alone reaching $25 million. Pinchot’s father, James, was a prosperous businessman in his own right. While not possessing wealth on the scale of Eno’s, he had been so successful as a merchant in New York City that he was able to retire in 1865, the same year that Pinchot was born. As for Pinchot’s mother, Mary, she was not only a well-connected socialite who moved in the highest New York circles but also a woman with a strong social conscience—her influence would help usher her son toward a life of public service.
Gifford, scion of this esteemed family, was a natural leader. Bright, talented, and fiercely independent, he carried himself with a patrician demeanor and an innate air of authority. He stood six feet two, with a trim but sturdy frame, handsome features, and an ever-present mustache, which he had already cultivated by the time he was readying himself for Yale.
James’s proposal that his son take up forestry, while unexpected, was not wholly without antecedents. The elder Pinchot had been the son of a minor Pennsylvania lumber baro
n and, likely in reaction to this, had developed an appreciation for the importance of protecting America’s trees. His son’s first name, in fact, had been chosen to honor Sanford Gifford, a famous Hudson River School painter—the artist’s renowned work Hunter Mountain, Twilight (1866), which conveyed the devastation that the tanning industry had brought to the Catskill region, hung in the Pinchot family home. James’s interest in the well-being of the nation’s forests exerted a profound influence on Gifford. “I loved the woods and everything about them,” he wrote. “As a boy it was my firm intention to be a naturalist.” In 1882, seeking to foster this interest, Pinchot’s parents even presented him a copy of Marsh’s Man and Nature. Nonetheless, it was very atypical that a wealthy, influential New York merchant might urge his son to abandon commerce for nature.
But James’s suggestion of forestry as a career was radical in a second, more profound sense. What truly made it, in Pinchot’s words, “an amazing question for that day and generation” had little to do with the family’s elevated social and financial position. Professional forestry—the ideas of treating timber as a crop, harvesting trees without destroying the underlying environment, and managing forests to encourage sustainable-yield practices and to minimize waste—existed exclusively in European countries, where limits in forest resources had necessitated its development. In America, by contrast, the concept of managing forests was, according to Pinchot, “something far outside the field of practical affairs.” There was, at the time, not a single American forester to be found anywhere, nor a single acre of trees administered according to the tenets of forestry. Pinchot’s father was thus coaxing his son toward a field that he would need to create largely from the ground up.