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

by Heacox, Kim

  In Grasmere village, in the Lake District of England, he visited the gravesite of William Wordsworth, buried next to his beloved sister, Dorothy. Again, deep emotions washed over Muir. He wrote in his journal of the poet’s unpretentious resting place, the simple headstones while “maple, yew, pine and ash hold boughs over them. A robin came and sang on the maple as I stood with damp eyes and lump in my throat. What a pity it is that Wordsworth, with his fine feeling for nature, died without knowledge of the glacial gospel.”

  IF ANY ONE MAN could wear the mantle of first expressing the need for public lands that would belong to everybody and nobody, a new space to protect nature and renew the human spirit, it would not be a priest, a scientist, or a politician, but a poet: William Wordsworth. In 1805 he described the Lake District as a “sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.”

  Likewise in America, the first call for establishment and protection of public lands came from an artist, George Catlin. In 1832, while traveling up the Missouri River and witnessing depraved white men pay Mandan Indians whiskey money for buffalo hides, Catlin, his heart breaking, wrote of saving “by some great protecting policy of government . . . a magnificent park . . . A nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty.”

  Forty years later, we had Yellowstone. That was just the beginning. A century after that we’d have Earth Day, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and, most remarkable of all, the Endangered Species Act.

  As a young man Muir had written that all the inventors of letters “receive a thousand-fold more credit than they deserve. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains . . . all that is required is exposure, and purity of material. The pure heart shall see God.” This sentiment echoed the opening lines of Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” And yet words did have undeniable influence and power. Jeanne Carr had said so, as had Emerson.

  Standing at Wordsworth’s simple headstone, Muir knew what he had to do. He had to write. Not write to say something, but write because he had something to say. Write to make things right, if only by small degrees. The world changed slowly, but it did change. It would be hard work, writing; he’d never shied away from hard work, physical, mental, spiritual. He’d been raised on it, toughened to it. And he’d prospered. He had to write, and write more after that . . . and more after that.

  In mainland Europe he admired the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps and loved seeing old people hiking alpine trails; he visited the haunts of Louis Agassiz and found evidence of glaciers in retreat as they were in America, the world appearing to warm up year by year. He spoke French so poorly, he said, “Even the dogs didn’t understand it as I speak it and refuse to wag their tails at my ‘Bon chien, bon chien.’”

  In the Italian Alps, he carefully observed Lake Como “hemmed in by lofty sharp glaciated mountains . . . the depth [of the lake] is governed by the down-thrust of many small glaciers . . . not a single glacier is visible now from the lake . . . once there were hundreds.” He marveled at the beautiful dark-eyed children and women who dressed with “exquisite taste.”

  Back in England, London flummoxed him with what biographer Donald Worster would describe as, “a synthetic wilderness of intricate streets, clubs, and social classes that he could not read or navigate . . . traveling alone, feeling like an inferior provincial in the seat of world empire, a Scots-American who belonged on the margins of civilization, Muir was eager to leave the place behind.”

  It was the same for him in all large cities. Get away.

  He wrote to seven-year-old Helen that Westminster Abbey was “A grand church full of curious-looking, old fashioned people made out of stone,” and the Tower of London was “a huge grim castle full of guns and swords and shields and armor and a thousand queer things I have no room to write about.”

  The famous Kew Gardens pleased him, especially in the warm hospitality of his old friend Sir Joseph Hooker. But he longed to be home. He recrossed the Atlantic, and after more time with his champion, Robert Underwood Johnson, and a quick visit to Washington, DC, to lobby for Yosemite, he took a train west and arrived in Martinez in mid-October. The fall harvest was easy work compared to pulling together his magazine articles and field notes and two new essays for his book.

  As an editor Johnson rode him hard, telling him to steer away from rhapsody. And no manuscript left the house before being approved by Louie, his toughest critic.

  Published in 1894 and called The Mountains of California, Muir’s first book focused on the Sierra Nevada Range but also wandered, as the author once had, north to the glaciers and forests of Alaska. He wrote lyrically on the beauty of snow and ice, from the smallest snowflakes and ice crystals (“snowflowers”) to the largest glacier (“a current of ice derived from snow”), how they shaped and reshaped the land, enriched the soil, fed the rivers, colored the meadow, and played a grand role in the great cycle and connectedness of all things.

  We only need baptize ourselves in the glory of the natural world, he said, to see it and understand it, and from that understanding will come reverence and respect, an abiding regard, a deep peace. He encouraged readers to find joy and love in the wilderness, and to express it. He warned of entire worlds, millennia in the making, now disappearing before “the fire and steel of man.”

  Muir may have been the first naturalist to ascribe glacial retreat to global warming. He wrote:

  The glaciers of Switzerland, like those of the Sierra, are mere wasting remnants of mighty ice-floods that once filled the great valleys and poured into the sea. So, also, are those of Norway, Asia, and South America. Even the grand continuous mantles of ice that still cover Greenland, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembia, Franz-Joseph Land, parts of Alaska, and the south polar region are shallowing and shrinking. Every glacier in the world is smaller than it once was. All the world is growing warmer . . .

  In other words, he said, “the crop of snow-flowers is diminishing . . .” Where once it snowed, now it rained.

  Muir made no pretense at being a neutral journalist. His first book was a paean to God’s creation, a polemic to some degree, and a preview of things to come. According to biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe, the book “met with immediate and far-reaching success. It rallied and solidified the conservation sentiment for the entire nation, leading directly to a new upsurge of determination to preserve the forests . . . It also aroused the opposition, and during the nineties the care and protection of the forest reserves became an increasingly sore problem.”

  In Washington, DC, commissions formed and lobbyists lobbied while out west corporations employed rackets of cover men to assert fake forest claims on large tracts that would be logged to the last tree. America was full of scoundrels, Mark Twain had warned. John Muir was about to learn just how full.

  BUT PREMONITIONS came first. Early one June morning John had a sudden urge to return to Wisconsin to see his mother. This had happened before, with his father, in 1885, when Louie was pregnant with Helen. John felt that the old man was dying. Long separated from John’s mother and the rest of the family so he could go evangelizing in Canada, Daniel Muir was old and frail and living with Joanna, the youngest of the Muir children. She had written to John, “He will not listen to reason . . . he must have his way about every thing.”

  For three months John traveled by stagecoach and rail, first to Yellowstone National Park, then Wisconsin to see his mother and siblings and other relations (for the first time in eighteen years), then to Kansas City, where Joanna had moved with her family. When John greeted his father, now enfeebled in bed, the old man didn’t recognize him. John spoke “broad Scotch” and Daniel responded, “O yes, my dear wanderer.” Joanna told John that earlier that year their father had expressed regrets about his harsh words and manner back
when John was a boy. Daniel advised Joanna to treat her own children better than he’d treated his, raise them with devotion and love. A picture of forgiveness, John lay down beside the old preacher and held his hand for long hours, and he stood over him with six of his brothers and sisters, teary-eyed, when he died.

  Now eleven years later his mother was dying. Nobody had to tell him, by letter or telegram. John just knew, as he had with his father. “Oh, John,” his sister Sarah cried upon seeing him arrive in Portage, “surely God has sent you. Mother is terribly ill!” After half a day with John in her presence, telling her stories of his time in Scotland, she revived to where she could sit up. Soon John had her laughing. Feeling she was out of danger, he left for Harvard to receive an honorary degree. While back east, he received word that she had died in her sleep. He immediately returned home for her funeral.

  Louie’s mother had died the year before, leaving her parentless as well. Such a turn of fate. The onetime wanderer and tramp who befuddled his siblings with a casual disregard for money was now more financially solvent than all of them. He’d inherited a ranch and estate worth $235,000, much of it due to his hard labors and keen business acumen throughout the 1880s. He and Louie belonged to the landowning elite of the Alhambra Valley, but John was seldom there. He traveled often and campaigned hard for conservation.

  Through his high-voltage magazine articles and leadership in the Sierra Club, his connections back east, and his influence on an important forestry commission tasked with surveying specific forests and making recommendations for their protection and use, John perched alone as the nation’s preeminent voice in wild lands protection. When an editor at Atlantic Monthly asked Charles Sprague Sargent, Harvard botany professor and chairman of the Forestry Commission, who best to hire to write a series of articles on forest conservation, Sargent replied, “There is but one man in the United States who can do it justice, and his name is John Muir.”

  He was America’s nature prophet, a bird with a song in his heart and thorn in his chest.

  Soon after his mother’s funeral, Muir met the Forestry Commission in Chicago. They traveled to Yellowstone, the Black Hills, Idaho, and Washington State, then Crater Lake, where they witnessed meadows devastated by sheep grazing; grasses and perennial flowers chewed down to nothing by “hoofed locusts,” said Muir. In California they found entire mountains stripped of trees, blackened stumps as far as the eye could see; “the work of ruin going on.” At the Grand Canyon, Muir cautioned Gifford Pinchot against killing a tarantula; it had as much right to be alive as they did.

  At first the two men got along well. Each admired the other’s love of the outdoors. Pinchot described Muir as “in his late fifties, tall, thin, cordial, and a most fascinating talker.” An avid fisherman, Pinchot was amazed that Muir “never carried even a fishhook with him on his solitary explorations. He said fishing wasted too much time.” Muir’s role on the commission was in an ex officio capacity of his own choosing, but he had the ear and sympathy of Charles Sargent.

  After much hard-nosed debate, a good portion of it between Pinchot and Sargent, the commission made its recommendations in early 1897 that 1) fraudulent timber and mining laws be repealed; 2) new forest reserves be established; 3) the nation’s forests be managed scientifically (protected by the military or a new federal agency); and, 4) new national parks be established.

  President Grover Cleveland responded by executive order and set aside twenty-one million acres of forest reserves in eight states in the American West.

  According to Linnie Marsh Wolfe:

  [T]he lumber, stock and mining syndicates . . . flew into a mighty rage. Wires sizzled with telegrams. Congress was bombarded with screaming “memorials” . . . The “Cowboy Senators,” hearing from their masters, assembled in hysterical turmoil to undo this “outrage.” Wildly they bleated that the whole idea was promoted by “a few zealots, Harvard professors, sentimentalists and impractical dreamers.”

  For two days they worked to impeach the outgoing president but dropped the matter when Congress recessed.

  John Muir’s 1897 article in Atlantic Monthly began: “The American Forests, however slighted by man, must surely have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.”

  Robert Underwood Johnson might have discouraged Muir to write such a rhapsodic lead, but according to biographer Gretel Ehrlich, Muir’s rhapsody “turned to elegy and elegy to polemic in this smoldering essay.”

  Muir outlined his plan to save the forests of America, and ended: “Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed—chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.”

  Muir found time to visit Alaska in the summers of 1896 and 1897, first traveling with Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, and second with Charles Sargent and fellow botanist William M. Canby. Both times were on the steamer Queen, with Captain Carroll commanding. Both times included a visit to Glacier Bay, where Muir noted the terminus of his namesake glacier shrinking back each year. He offered lively lectures to the guests but rested as much as anything else, exhausted from his duties as an outspoken critic of “Those western corporations with their shady millions,” as he’d written to Johnson . . . those moneymen that “seem invincible in the Senate. But the fight must go on!”

  Gold fever was hot and heavy beginning the summer of 1897, helping to lift the nation out of a staggering depression. In July, steamships arrived in San Francisco and Tacoma carrying rags-to-riches prospectors with suitcases stuffed with gold. “GOLD, GOLD, GOLD, A Ton of Gold from the Klondike!” exclaimed one newspaper. Tens of thousands of men (and a few women) dropped their lives to go north and start over. Salesclerks left their counters, doctors left patients, preachers abandoned their pulpits. Within four days, a dozen members of the Seattle police force were headed north. The mayor of Seattle wired in his resignation, and a former Washington governor quit a senatorial race.

  “North to Alaska, the Last Frontier,” announced storefront signs. “North to the Future.”

  America suddenly had another frontier.

  In heavy rains that summer, Muir visited the gold mines of Juneau and Douglas, near where he had camped in 1880 and later passed along his suspicions that gold could be found in great quantities. He was right. The Treadwell Mine alone was producing ten million dollars per year; Muir wanted none of it. He could have made millions, but to him all gold was fool’s gold. In Skagway he watched desperate men—“a wild, discouraging mess”—struggle through the mud to make their way over the mountains and into the Klondike. The rush was on.

  Homeward bound, Muir happened upon Gifford Pinchot in a Seattle hotel lobby and confronted him. The young forester, for whom forestry was not just a science but a religion (he always capitalized Forestry), had been quoted in newspapers saying that sheep grazing in Crater Lake did no substantial damage to the meadows, forests, and soils. Muir thrust the printed page in front of him and asked, “Are you correctly quoted here?”

  Pinchot admitted he was.

  “Then if that is the case,” Muir said, his Scotch ire rising, “I don’t want anything more to do with you. When you were in the Cascades last summer, you yourself stated that the sheep did a great deal of harm.”

  From this single flash point, historians have mapped the beginning of a great rift in conservation in America. On the one side stood Pinchot with his tenets of utilitarianism, first articulated a century earlier by the British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, and summed up in the maxim, “The greatest good for the greatest number.” Forests were to be used, Pinchot argued. The notion of a preserved wilderness was not compatible with productive forest management.

 
On the other side stood Muir with his preservation principle of “Let it be.” Nobody can improve upon a tree. Need was one thing, but greed was something else. Follow the money. Who did the powerful speak for in America? The people, or themselves?

  While Pinchot echoed political economist Adam Smith’s belief that each man’s self-interest would benefit those around him, Muir shook his head and echoed Thoreau: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” Pinchot winced at intangibles; Muir marveled in them. Where Pinchot saw economics, Muir saw aesthetics; where Pinchot saw lines, Muir saw cycles and flow, everything on its way to being something else. Where Pinchot capitalized Forestry, Muir capitalized Nature.

  Where Pinchot saw trees as timber to be managed for the wise use and greatest benefit to the people, Muir saw trees as a forest temple of greater value left standing than felled. Each man begged the question: Who are the forests for? And each was about to discover that the other could be an effective publicist and formidable adversary.

  In Harper’s Weekly, Muir wrote,

  Much is said on questions of this kind about “the greatest good for the greatest number” . . . but the greatest number is too often found to be number one. It is never the greatest number in the common meaning of the term that make the greatest noise and stir on questions mixed with money . . . Complaints are made in the name of poor settlers and miners, while the wealthy corporations are kept carefully hidden in the background.