by Heacox, Kim
He loved the freedom of the outdoors and often referred to local ravens, chickadees, and geese as “Wisconsin bird-people.” When Father overworked a favorite family horse, Old Nob, to death, John was devastated. “Too often,” he wrote, “the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have neither mind nor soul, have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were made only for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered, or enslaved.”
This break from Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament that proclaimed man as master of all living things, would in a few years send John down his own long road away from the Muir family farm, not to save others as his father did, but to save himself.
THE SEVEN MEN—five Tlingit Indians, John Muir, and S. Hall Young—made their way farther up the bay, their canoe winnowing through fingers of brash ice, closer and closer to the mighty glacier that stood as a looking glass into another time. Muir found the glacial face,
broken into an imposing array of jagged spires and pyramids, and flat-topped towers and battlements, and many shades of blue, from pale, shimmering limpid tones in the crevasses and hollows, to the most startling, chilling, almost shrieking vitriol blue on the plain mural spaces from which bergs had just been discharged.
He could see that the glacier, while supported on its flanks by the bedrock walls of the bay, was undercut at its tidewater face by the encroaching sea, making it unstable as it calved off pieces of itself. Higher up, the glacier extended far back into the mountains as a blue ice river fed by bountiful snowfall deep in the Fairweather Range.
So much was beginning to make sense, how glaciers advanced and retreated over long periods of time—tens of thousands of years, probably millions of years—and shaped whole geographies, entire continents. Earthquakes shattered landscapes and made mountains rise; water and ice cut them down. Islands came and went. Shorelines shifted. Take any natural process, however slow it might appear, and give it enough time—unfathomable amounts of time—and it would add up to profound change, as Charles Lyell had proposed in his book Principles of Geology, published in 1830. Earth is immeasurably old, he said.
A decade later, in 1840, when John Muir was just a two-year-old boy living in Scotland, Louis Agassiz built a hut on a glacier in the Swiss Alps to study how it moved. He concluded that ice once covered most of mainland Europe (in fact, it had covered Europe many times). In North America, glaciers had shaped northern Wisconsin, excavated the Great Lakes, pushed the Ohio River south to its present position, sculpted Puget Sound, and dropped Plymouth Rock at Cape Cod Bay. The cape itself was a terminal moraine deposited by a glacier. Every large aquifer in the American West was supercharged by ten-thousand-year-old glacial meltwater. Pioneering geologists such as Agassiz, Joseph LeConte, James Geikie, and Hugh Miller—all of whom Muir studied on his own time—had over the past few decades proposed something remarkable: glaciers once ruled the Earth.
They called it the Ice Age.
And now here was this bay, chilling, exciting, not unlike Puget Sound of long ago, emerging from its own little ice age, a land of resilience rising yet again, shaking off its long winter coat.
THE CANOEISTS came ashore and made camp on a rocky beach near the tidewater face of what is today the Grand Pacific Glacier. While the others went about their chores, Muir set off up a mountain. The rain ceased, and before he was a thousand feet up he watched the clouds “lifting their white skirts” to reveal enticing views.
Climbing higher for a still broader outlook, I made notes and sketched, improving the precious time while sunshine streamed through the luminous fringes of the clouds and fell on the green waters of the fiord, the glittering bergs, the crystal bluffs of the vast glacier, the intensely white, far-spreading fields of ice, and the ineffably chaste and spiritual heights of the Fairweather Range, which were now hidden, now partly revealed, the whole making a picture of icy wildness unspeakably pure and sublime.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH would have appreciated Muir’s choice of words. The English Romanticist had been dead for nearly thirty years in 1879, but his poetry was still alive. In nineteenth-century America and Europe, a time before television, telephones, and the Internet, people read real books. They drank literature like water. The literacy rate was not high in some places, but in southern Scotland, along the Firth of Forth, from Dunbar to Edinburgh, where Muir spent his first eleven years, it was higher than 80 percent.
Among those who could read, books were prized possessions. Words on paper were powerful magic, seductive as music, sharp as a knife at times, or gentle as a kiss. Friendships and love affairs blossomed as men and women read to each other in summer meadows and winter kitchens. Pages were ambrosia in their hands. A new novel or collection of poems was something everybody talked about. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Keats, Emerson, Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To read these authors was to go on a grand adventure and see things as you never had before, see yourself as you never had before.
In 1798, the year George Vancouver died and Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his first symphony, William Wordsworth revisited Tintern Abbey on the River Wye, in Wales, on a beautiful July day. He was twenty-eight, the same age as Beethoven. Calmed by the balm of nature, far removed from the coal dust and city industry that seemed to disenchant European life more every year, the young poet penned “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798.” He wrote of his “boyish days,” and lamented, “I cannot paint/What then I was.”
Five years had passed since he was last at the old abbey. In that time, he had split with his French lover and their illegitimate daughter, a heartbreaking good-bye. Napoleon was rampaging through Egypt, and England would soon declare war. The most carefree days of his youth were gone, and with them his youthfulness, a playful way of seeing and being filled with enchantment, wonder, and joy. The grinding complications of adulthood seemed to bleed all innocence from his soul. Deeper into the poem, Wordsworth described a “tranquil restoration” found by the whispering, singing river, a divine inspiration, something “sublime,” how it touched him with a “spirit” that “rolls through things.” Until then this guarded word, sublime, had been reserved for the clergy to describe God’s gifts and wrath through formal doctrine and religious structure.
Wordsworth debunked all that; more than in stuffy little churches or grand cathedrals, he argued, God was in nature. On the banks of a river embroidered with flowers and birdsong, near a stone abbey abandoned for more than 250 years, a young poet, a “worshipper of Nature,” implied that he felt “a far deeper zeal/Of holier love” than he ever had inside stone or wooden walls. We all can, if we slow down and set aside our frantic ambitions, egos, and money-getting.
It was a daring thing to write, heretical to some, but once published there was no going back. It appeared in Lyrical Ballads, a poetry collaborative with Wordsworth’s dear friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Others followed, Romantics and radicals who dared question the prevailing order. Wordsworth permitted them to extol the virtues gained through an intimacy with wild nature, and to question the dark side of industry and progress. He influenced Emerson, who influenced Muir, who one day would influence President Teddy Roosevelt, who in turn would influence his distant cousin, FDR, who would influence President Jimmy Carter, who, in 1980, a century after John Muir made his first two trips to Glacier Bay, would sign a congressional bill creating more than one hundred million acres of new national parks, preserves, monuments, wildlife refuges, and wild and scenic rivers in Alaska.
In his book, Alaska Days with John Muir, Reverend Young, himself a theist, thanks in no small part to his growing friendship with Muir, would note that Muir was fond of quoting Wordsworth:
One impulse from a vernal wood
will teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.
SOUTHBOUND, t
he canoeists sailed down the bay’s eastern shore and sighted a massive tidewater glacier descending from the north. If it was in a stage of dramatic retreat, like the others, it would soon open up an entire new upper inlet of the bay, fed as it was by snowfall not in the Fairweather Range, but the Takhinsha Mountains, peaks of lower elevation. Muir was tempted to explore the glacier that would one day carry his name, but winter was on them. Pan ice covered the upper inlets. Soon much of the bay would freeze over.
At the Huna Indian seal camp, men, women, and children swarmed to greet the canoeists as they dropped off their local guide—his wife happy to see him again. On the evening of the next day, the last of October, after five days in the bay of great glaciers, they arrived at Pleasant Island, in Icy Strait, and made camp. Muir accurately summarized:
Glacier Bay is undoubtedly young as yet. Vancouver’s chart, made only a century ago, shows no trace of it, though found admirably faithful in general. It seems probable therefore, that even then the entire bay was occupied by a glacier of which all those described above, great though they are, were only tributaries . . . That this whole system of fiords and channels was added to the domain of the sea by glacial action is to my mind certain.
Instead of turning south down Chatham Strait for Fort Wrangell, they turned north up Lynn Canal, bound for Chilkat Country, urged on by Reverend Young, who wrote this would be, “The climax of the trip, so far as the missionary interests were concerned.” For here lived “the most northern tribes of the Alexander Archipelago,” a fierce people who answered to
the proudest and worst old savage of Alaska, Chief Sathitch. His wealth was very great in Indian treasures, and he was reputed to have cached away in different places several houses full of blankets, guns, boxes of beads, ancient carved pipes, spears, knives and other valuable heirlooms. He was said to have stored away more than one hundred of the elegant Chilcat blankets woven by hand from the hair of the mountain goat. His tribe was rich and unscrupulous.
And his tribe had little or no idea that nearly two thousand years ago Jesus Christ had died for them on the cross.
That would change. Sheldon Jackson had assigned Young the task of building a mission among the Chilkats, “the most quarrelsome and warlike of the tribes of Alaska,” their villages, according to Young, “full of slaves procured by forays upon the coasts of Vancouver Island, Puget Sound and as far south as the mouth of the Columbia River.”
He meant to Christianize them—a dangerous affair, coming into other people’s homes and telling them how they should live, what they should believe. Consider the apostles. As best we know, most had been martyred—Peter, Andrew, and Philip crucified, James the Greater and Thaddeus cut down by sword, James the Lesser beaten to death as he prayed for his assailants, Bartholomew flayed alive, Thomas and Matthew speared, Matthias stoned to death, and Simon either crucified or sawed in half. Only John died peaceably.
So it was that Reverend Young had with him his own John, a secret weapon, not a traditional Christian in any sense of the word, but an apostle in his own right, a disciple of Nature, a gifted storyteller.
A SHORT DISTANCE from the Chilkat village, they stopped to clean up and make themselves presentable. Muir noted that Toyatte and the other Stickeen Tlingits “sat on boulders and cut each other’s hair, carefully washed and perfumed themselves and made a complete change in their clothing, even to white shirts, new boots, new hats, and bright neckties.” The Huna Tlingits had said that rumors of hostilities among the Chilkats were false, but still, anything could happen. Whenever Muir and Young mentioned other Tlingits they had met on this journey, men from powerful tribes and clans, how interesting they were, Toyatte and his crew had said, “Oh yes, these are pretty good Indians, but wait until you have seen the Chilcats.”
When Joseph Whidbey and his homesick, sallow-faced men had encountered a band of aggressive Auke Tlingits off Point Retreat, at the northern tip of Admiralty Island, they rowed for their lives while the Aukes gave pursuit in their wooden helmets and war canoes, daggers at the ready. The Aukes were ferocious, and yet they too, according to Toyatte, feared the Chilkats.
“Mr. Young also made some changes in his clothing,” Muir observed, upon returning to camp after sketching glaciers, “while I, having nothing dressy in my bag, adorned my cap with an eagle’s feather I found on the moraine, and thus arrayed we set forth to meet the noble Thlinkits.”
They raised an American flag, “as was our custom,” wrote Young, and paddled north. Several miles from the village, they were spotted as they moved into the mouth of a mighty, silt-laden river. A messenger on shore shouted, “Who are you? What are your names? What do you want? What have you come for?”
Muir described his voice as “heavy and far-reaching.”
Stickeen John shouted back, “A great preacher-chief and a great ice-chief have come to bring you a good message.”
The Chilkat caller relayed to another, and him to another, each a quarter mile from the next in succession up the river to where the Chilkat chief sat in camp at his fireside. This was not the first contact between whites and Indians in this area, but for a moment it must have seemed to Muir more than a little pre-Columbian, as if from the fifteenth century, save for the rifles, white shirts, and cold November air. Years later, in his seventies and dying of a broken heart due to a dam that was scheduled to be built on another river, one in his beloved Yosemite National Park, Muir would describe the Chilkat communication system as a “living telephone,” men shouting up and down a river to carry important news, members of a mighty canoe culture thousands of years old that would soon vanish, like so much else.
For the second time in little more than a week, Muir and company were greeted by a salutation of gunfire, what Young called “too warm a reception—a shower of bullets falling unpleasantly around us.” The two white men immediately stopped paddling, but Toyatte and his crew did not.
“Ut-ha, ut-ha,” Toyatte commanded. “Pull, pull.”
And the canoe moved up the river.
CHAPTER THREE
it is not a sin to go home
THE MOMENT the canoe touched shore, everything happened. A dignified young man welcomed them, saying he represented Chief Don-na-wuk, Old Silver Eye. Villagers swarmed about while forty to fifty men—Young called them warriors, Muir called them slaves—charged forward with war cries.
It was “as if,” Young said, “they were going to take us prisoners. Dashing into the water they arranged themselves along each side of the canoe; then lifting up our canoe with us still in it they rushed with excited cries up the bank to the chief’s house and set us down at his door.”
This was a Tlingit way of bestowing honor on their new guests.
Muir noticed how the village children played in a nearby meadow, running races, shooting arrows, and wading in the icy river, “without showing any knowledge of our presence except quick stolen glances.”
Old Silver Eye was apparently called such because he wore a calico shirt, a blanket, and a large pair of silver-bowed eyeglasses he’d gotten from a Russian naval officer. As Muir and the others entered his large cedar plank house, he shook their hands but kept his head down, making no eye contact. In the center of the house, on a square of gravel, a fire burned, the smoke rising through a hole in the ceiling. For a good fifteen minutes, Old Silver Eye stared into it, saying nothing. Finally he offered food: a feast of dried salmon, deer back strap, small Russian potatoes, rose hips, and seal-grease sauce. The food was filling, and the house so warm after days of cold traveling that Muir and the others became drowsy with sleep. They struggled to stay awake as Old Silver Eye, suddenly loquacious, had many questions. Why did the water rise and fall twice a day? What caused an eclipse? Why did white men want gold? What made whiskey?
After some time, Chief Sathitch (“Hard to Kill”) entered the house dressed in a regal chinchilla blanket. Slowly he turned, and Muir and Young were astonished to see
printed on the blanket: “To Chief Sathitch, from his friend, William H. Seward.”
Of course. Ten years ago, in 1869, just two years after concluding the purchase of Alaska from Russia, Seward, then seventy-one and retired from politics, had visited Sitka and the Chilkat Country with his son, Frederick, and the famous scientist-surveyor George Davidson. A total solar eclipse was predicted for early August of that year, and Davidson had selected the Chilkat Country, with its hostile reputation, as the best place to watch it and impress the natives. It worked.
Sathitch told Seward that before the eclipse, the United States had proved itself a superior force, “able to purchase the interests of the Russians and drive away King George’s Men whom we know to be strong.” The eclipse confirmed that power. The United States was indeed mighty; it could make the sun disappear in the middle of the day. Sathitch had responded with a show of his own strength and wealth, and William H. Seward, one of America’s foremost abolitionists, found himself trading gifts with one of the last slaveholders left in the New World, a regal Tlingit Indian chief.
Now here were more white men, this preacher-chief and ice-chief, highly regarded by Toyatte and his crew, having paddled and sailed all the way from Fort Wrangell. They deserved an audience.
Word spread upriver and down, from one valley to the next, and soon Chilkat and Chilkoot Tlingits—members of two feisty tribes often at odds with each other—began to arrive from all over to hear the two men speak, especially the charismatic ice-chief, Muir, his words translated by Stickeen John. Tlingits filled the clan house and packed themselves outside the door, and they climbed onto the roof to listen through the smoke hole. According to author and frontier rhetorician Dan Henry: