John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

by Heacox, Kim

  Muir was about to discover what La Pérouse had learned ninety-four years earlier, and what the Tlingit Indians had known for centuries: The north country, while beautiful, can be dangerous. It swallows people. The ice inspires, and the sea provides, but neither shows mercy.

  The next morning, August 30, while the others slept, Muir rose early and left camp. The weather remained dour, with steady wind and rain, yet Muir pushed on, tempting fate. He had a glacier to explore. Suddenly at his heels was little Stickeen.

  “Go back,” Muir commanded. But the dog, imperturbable, would not obey. “Small and worthless,” Muir had said of him earlier. “This trip is not likely to be good for toy-dogs.” But Stickeen was not a toy or a pet. It was hard to say what he was.

  Man and dog climbed the east flank of the mighty glacier, a vast plateau of ice broken into a bewitching maze of crevasses. They worked their way north. Muir kept telling the dog to be careful, but Stickeen, according to Muir, “showed neither caution nor curiosity, wonder nor fear, but bravely trotted on as if glaciers were playgrounds. His stout muffled body seemed all one skipping muscle.”

  Man and dog gained confidence from the other, and soon they were deep into the glacial maze, beyond the point of an easy return. In every direction was an ocean of ice. The sky darkened with heavy clouds and gave only an occasional hint of the position of the sun, a signpost back to camp. The rain turned to wet, blinding snow. The temperature fell, and Stickeen trotted on with his usual aplomb.

  Muir made guesswork of which way to go. For hours they jumped many smaller crevasses and winnowed their way through obstacles. But then they came upon a crevasse so deep and wide they were forced to move a mile to the left, then a mile to the right, each time without success. The only route home, Muir knew, was over a long sliver of ice, like a suspension cable, that bridged the chasm. It began ten feet below the brink and ran seventy feet across to the other side, ending again ten feet below the brink. A sobering prospect, rife with peril.

  Wet and shivering and smart enough to know the fix they were in, Stickeen whimpered while Muir used his ice axe to cut steps down to the ice bridge, then across it, careful not to look down as his “other self” took over: “At such times one’s whole body is eye, and common skill and fortitude are replaced by power beyond our call or knowledge.” Muir notched steps on the other side and hauled himself up.

  Stickeen ran back and forth on the opposite side, howling with despair. He stopped and stared at the task before him, the impossibility of it, and cried more. The day was ending, the light fading. It was now or never. Down on his knees, Muir encouraged Stickeen from the other side. Again, the dog howled with despair. Then slowly he took one step down where Muir had cut a notch, and another, easing his trembling body one step at a time, doing his best, suspended above a sudden frozen death.

  “Hush your fears, my boy,” Muir said. “We will get across safe, though it is not going to be easy. No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.”

  PART TWO

  1888–1898

  CHAPTER FIVE

  old friends, new friends

  IN THE SPRING of 1888, more than seven years after he’d last been among the glaciers of Alaska, John Muir was busy in the fruit fields of his California orchard, picking and boxing cherries, when an old friend came calling. Muir had always been good with his hands, building, improvising. He planted, picked, and shipped fruit and oversaw those he employed. With Scottish shrewdness, he bartered uncompromisingly with agents and buyers, checked his ledgers, and made his own deposits, driving his horse-drawn buggy into town, his right leg dangling out the side, carrying cash in a big white bag marked “laundry.” Biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe wrote, “In the ten years he gave to more or less intensive ranching, it is said he laid away in that local bank a savings account of $50,000 which he never touched in his lifetime.”

  For all his aversions to the humdrum workaday world, Muir was a keen businessman. He knew how to play the game and knew it was a game, a folly of sorts. “Through want of enterprise and faith,” Thoreau had written, “men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like serfs.”

  This was no way to live, but neither was it a bad way to make a living.

  He had a stable, loving marriage, and he adored his daughters, Wanda, born in 1881, reserved like her mother, and little Helen, just a wisp, born in 1886, frail yet animated like him, or like he used to be. It was all so long ago, his life in Yosemite and the California high country, tramping from peak to peak, making field sketches and notes, sating his curiosity about everything, sailing north to Alaska, eating hardtack (dried biscuits made of water, flour, and salt) and dried salmon in a cedar canoe, befriending Tlingit Indians and hearing their stories about Trickster Raven, telling a few of his own; getting lost and found on glaciers, and lost again, and found.

  Summer tourists ferry ashore off the City of Topeka steamship in Glacier Bay.

  Photo courtesy of the Alaska State Library-Historical Collections

  Not anymore.

  He was a farmer now, a businessman.

  On this particular May day, a voice called, and Muir looked up from picking cherries to see S. Hall Young approaching. He dropped everything to greet the Alaska missionary. “Ah! My friend . . .,” he exclaimed. “You have come to take me on a canoe trip . . . have you not?”

  They retired for cool drinks and for hours reminisced deep into the night about canoe journeys and Chilkat Tlingits; the little bighearted dog Stickeen, and the steamships Idaho, Queen, Spokane, and City of Topeka now visiting Glacier Bay every summer, carrying tourists keen on seeing tidewater glaciers. All because of Muir’s stories in newspapers and national magazines, which had also gained him a following.

  Since the appearance of his first published article in 1871 in the New-York Tribune—wherein he compared Yosemite’s glaciers to an old book (weathered and worn but still easy to read)—his writing had given voice to the voiceless and touched thousands of readers. Even his letters were lyrical. To his sister Sarah he’d written in 1873 about a hike into the High Sierra with friends who ate their packed lunches of beef and bread while John sat alone and munched on a dry crust: “To dine with a glacier on a sunny day is a glorious thing and makes common feasts of meat and wine ridiculous. A glacier eats hills and drinks sunbeams.”

  He hadn’t been to Alaska since 1881 (his third of what would be seven trips total) when he voyaged on the Revenue Marine vessel Thomas Corwin all the way to the Bering Sea, Chukchi Peninsula, and Arctic Ocean, leaving home only two months after Wanda’s birth in 1881. Asa Gray, the famed Harvard botanist, had written to Muir, “Pray find a new genus, or at least a new species, that I may have the satisfaction of embalming your name, not in glacier ice, but in spicy wild perfume.”

  On the Arctic shore of Alaska, near Cape Thompson, Muir found an aster now called Erigeron muirii. It was a bright footnote, given the purpose of the Corwin’s voyage: to rescue the men of the scientific expeditionary steamer Jeanette, two years gone and presumed lost in the Arctic ice. While the rescue mission was unsuccessful, and there were, eventually, a few survivors, Muir’s writings for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin were some of his best.

  But now his muse was gone. He’d written nothing of significance in years. Reading, yes. He read voraciously every night until he fell asleep, tired from his days in the fields. So while busy and productive, and up every morning at six sharp, being an attentive businessman, husband, and father, he didn’t look or feel well.

  “This is a good place to be housed in during stormy weather . . .,” he once told a friend of his house in Martinez, “but it is not my home.”

  The high country was his home. Yosemite. The Sierra Nevada.

  “I am degenerating into a machine for making money,” Muir told Young as he motioned toward his cherries. “Condemned to penal servitude w
ith these miserable little bald-heads! Boxing them up, putting them in prison! And for money.”

  To Young, John Muir was a shell of who he’d once been. The man he’d met nearly nine years ago in Fort Wrangell, happy and childlike among flowers, strong in the mountains, at home among rough-cut granite and shimmering glaciers, was gone.

  Anybody who knew him well could see that Muir needed to move, to climb, ramble, and scramble again.

  As Goethe had advised: “Keep not standing, fixed and rooted. Briskly venture, briskly roam.”

  HOW ANIMATED Muir became, his voice rising, Scottish brogue in full swing, when he recounted for Young his “big glacier adventure” with little Stickeen, the dog inching his way across the icy sliver of a bridge, using the steps Muir cut, encouraged by his you-can-do-it persuasions. The frisky terrier perched over the yawning crevasse, facing the last icy pitch, seeming to memorize the steps before him. Then in a sudden rush he bounded up to safety and ran in crazy circles, so happy to be alive.

  Muir would later write:

  He flashed and darted hither and thither as if fairly demented, screaming and shouting, swirling round and round in giddy loops and circles like a leaf in a whirlwind, lying down, and rolling over and over, sideways and heels over head . . . and launched himself at my face, almost knocking me down, all the time screeching and screaming and shouting as if saying, “Saved! Saved! Saved!”

  For the rest of the 1880 canoe journey, Stickeen was Muir’s faithful shadow.

  S. Hall Young had a story as well. While Muir and his new dog friend were out on the Brady Glacier, working their way back to camp over crevasses, through the dying light of day’s end, Young was asked to visit a Huna Tlingit subchief in his summer fishing camp near the terminus of the glacier. Surrounded by his salmon weirs and many wives, the chief, using his best oratorical skills, compared Young to “the many great things of the universe,” saying he was not only the father to all the Hunas, “he was the sun, the stars, the moon . . .”

  Young stopped him and asked what it was he wanted.

  “I wish you to pray to your God,” the chief replied.

  “For what do you want me to pray?”

  Wrapped in a Chilkat blanket, the old man rose to his feet and motioned his arm toward the nearby advancing glacier: “Do you see that great ice mountain? Once I had the finest salmon stream upon the coast . . . to spear them or net them was very easy; they were the fattest and best salmon among all these islands. My household had abundance of meat for the winter’s need. But the cruel spirit of that glacier grew angry with me. I know not why, and drove the ice mountain towards the sea and spoiled my salmon stream. A year or two more and it will be blotted out entirely. I have done my best. Have prayed to my gods. Last spring I sacrificed two of my slaves—members of my household, my best slaves, a strong man and his wife—to the spirit of that glacier to make the ice mountain stop; but it comes on; and now I want you to pray to your God, the God of the white man, to see if he will make the ice mountain stop.”

  Young was displeased to hear about the sacrificed slaves. He abhorred slavery and shamanism. He felt it his duty to end both among the Tlingits, to bring them into the fold of Christianity, teach them English, the King James Bible; show them a loving God, put them on a righteous path to eternal salvation. His boyhood hero had been Abraham Lincoln, who preserved the union and abolished slavery.

  This was Young’s calling, a focus second to none: ending slavery, saving souls. There was no greater work.

  And it was not unprecedented.

  WHEN COLUMBUS and other explorers reported the presence of savages in the New World, European clerics were intrigued. This New World, this so-called America, did it have wheat for bread and grapes for wine? Did it—could it—produce the body and blood of Christ? This was important. If it did, or could, then the savages who lived there were children of God, and they must be saved. If it did not, the savages were heathens and could be slaughtered. This question vexed the Catholic Church well into the sixteenth century, through the trial of Martin Luther and into the Great Schism, the Protestant Reformation. Many sallow-faced monks spent their lives on wooden benches within cold monastic stone walls, folded over thin soup and well-worn Bibles, making arguments for and against.

  With the Age of Enlightenment, scientific truths began to challenge those of the church, and Voltaire clucked, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

  If anybody knew the Bible, Muir did. His father had pounded it into him. But like so many others, young John interpreted scripture to fit his own ideals. Once while in a sequoia grove in his beloved Sierra, he noted birds and flowers, the musical sounds of water and wind all around him, and wrote “Everything busy, as if hearing the command ‘Increase and multiply and replenish the earth.’” In so writing, Muir turned Genesis on its head, according to biographer Stephen Fox, “for in the Bible it ordered man to multiply and then ‘subdue’ the world to his own purposes, to establish ‘dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” In Muir’s version, all natural organisms were to reproduce for their own purposes, not to serve man alone.

  “In his pantheism,” Fox wrote, Muir “sensed a corresponding affinity with their [Tlingit] religious ideas. Freed of Christianity’s human conceits, they prayed to nature gods and allowed nonhuman creatures—like Stickeen—into their heaven. ‘Indian dogs,’ he noted with approval, ‘go to the Happy Hunting Grounds with their master—are not shut out.’”

  After their time on the Brady Glacier, the canoeists paddled into Glacier Bay and spent the first few days of September on shore next to the massive tidewater face of the glacier that in a few years would be Muir’s namesake.

  John scrambled over it long and far and found it a great prairie of ice, magical, complex, alive like other glaciers in Glacier Bay, shrinking back to unveil a new, ice-chafed land.

  From Glacier Bay they paddled south across Icy Strait to the village of Hoonah, and down to Port Frederick, where they portaged through to Tenakee Inlet, then through Peril Strait and down Olga Strait to Sitka, where Muir said good-bye. He caught a steamer home while the others, including Stickeen, traveled on by canoe to Fort Wrangell. Three years later, in the summer of 1883, the little dog was stolen off the docks by a tourist and never seen in Alaska again.

  Map courtesy of the Alaska State Library–Historical Collections

  THESE WERE the stories they told in 1888, John Muir and S. Hall Young, a Druid priest and a Presbyterian missionary who had found friendship in Alaska, and rekindled it in California, guarding their differences while sharing common ground. How good it felt. Young’s visit was just the medicine Muir needed, the spark to light his fire. It was time to get into the mountains again, get back north, be among the glaciers of Alaska, get off the farm. His beloved wife, Louie, knew it. She in fact encouraged it. The wilderness wasn’t her place—they had made one trip together to Yosemite, in 1884, and it didn’t go well.

  But the wilderness was his place, no question; that’s where he needed to go. She wanted him to write again. She had fallen in love with him because he was such a good writer, so passionate about how things are and ought to be. Not that writing came easy to him; it didn’t. But she had come to almost despise the ranch for how it had tamed and dispirited him. She wanted him to sink his teeth again into words, paragraphs, polemics, the fertile ground of language and lyrical persuasion. He had a legacy to create, a world to defend. Timbermen were felling the forests of California as if noble trees were blades of grass. It had to stop, and her John could stop them.

  “The Alaska book and the Yosemite book, dear John, must be written, and you need to be your own self, well and strong, to make them worthy of you. There is nothing that has the right to be considered beside this except the welfare of our children.”

  THROUGHOUT the 1880s, while Muir was busy picking and shipping fruit, Robert Underwood
Johnson, the editor of Century magazine in New York City, had contacted him and asked for article ideas. Muir always demurred. No more. Soon after Young’s visit, John and Louie began to sell off pieces of the farm. And when Johnson visited San Francisco, Muir went calling.

  “Johnson, Johnson,” he shouted in the maze of hotel corridors, looking for the distinguished editor in his room. John of the Mountains, who never got lost in the wilderness, always got lost in the city. Friends said he had a hell of a time finding Golden Gate Park.

  “Muir is of my height,” Johnson would write,

  slender, thin in the leg, a farmer-looking man, black, curly hair, full long brown beard, graying near the ears where it is more closely kept. A keen gray eye, deep-set, a nose of graceful and delicate profile and with sensitive lines in the high forehead and about the eyes. His temples are rather hollow. He has quite a Scotch air in a fatigue suit of blue with a black slouch hat, and his movements are rather meditative, but show enthusiasm on occasion.

  Well-connected and possessing a high eastern degree, Johnson was accustomed to fine company. Muir stunned him with his authenticity and knowledge, his effervescence and wit. The lean Scotsman had attended only two years of university, in Madison, but he was the real deal; he’d learned to go alone into the wilderness, as Thoreau had, to slow down, look, and listen, become a keen observer, a critical thinker. Muir saw himself as a scientist more intuitive than reductive. Breaking knowledge and nature into smaller and smaller pieces didn’t interest him. His specialization was generalization: rocks, flowers, trees, glaciers, the grand interconnectedness he found everywhere and in everything. He wanted to celebrate them unabashedly. He made no apologies.