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

by Heacox, Kim

  Businessmen, according to historian Stephen Fox, “were concealing their simple greed behind democratic sentiment. The public should not be deceived, said Muir; every acre of the remaining federal forest land not suitable for farming needed permanent protection.”

  A keen political player, Pinchot wanted a top job in Washington and more; he wanted personal control over the nation’s forests. He befriended senators, representatives, and cabinet secretaries and would soon have direct access to the White House. Muir meanwhile had little appetite for politicking. He worked more as a writer and grassroots activist. Upon meeting a Pasadena banker (and amateur nature photographer) interested in joining the Sierra Club, Muir urged him to write to politicians and “make their lives wretched until they do what is right by the woods.”

  British statesman/historian Lord James Bryce had visited America and witnessed industrious men everywhere nearly drunk on the wholesale destruction of nature, busily building this and that. “Gentlemen,” he pleaded,

  why in heaven’s name this haste? You have time enough. No enemy threatens you. No volcano will rise from beneath you. Ages and ages lie before you. Why sacrifice the present to the future, fancying that you will be happier when your fields teem with wealth and your cities with people? In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours, and we are not happy. You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent splendid nature, who first lifted up their axes upon these tall trees and lined these waters with busy wharves. Why, then, seek to complete in a few decades what the other nations of the world took thousands of years . . .? Why do things rudely and ill which need to be done well, seeing that the welfare of your descendants may turn upon them? Why, in your hurry to subdue and utilize nature, squander her splendid gifts? Why allow the noxious weeds of Eastern politics to take root in your new soil, when by a little effort you might keep it pure? Why hasten the advent of that threatening day when the vacant spaces of the continent shall all have been filled, and the poverty or discontent of the older states shall find no outlet? You have opportunities such as mankind has never had before, and may never have again.

  MUIR WAS TIRED and unwell and unable to fully rest at home, busy with obligations in his scribble den. The grippe was back. The bronchial cough, too. His second Atlantic article appeared in early 1898; it dismissed Pinchot’s wise-use utilitarian argument as anything but wise. Muir was the point of the spear, “the authentic voice of conservation,” Linnie Marsh Wolfe would say, “speaking high above the babel of tongues, clearing the public mind of commercial propaganda.” His writing increased the Atlantic’s circulation “enormously,” according to his editor, and would soon help to bring about policy change in President McKinley’s Washington.

  The son of immigrants, Muir was hardly ignorant about the hardscrabble life; he knew what it meant to go hungry and get his hands dirty, to sleep in winter clothes and slip on frozen boots. He acknowledged the abundance and richness of the New World, and the benefits that came from settling it, turning forests into fruit orchards and farms. But must we settle and cultivate it all? Let not selfish people subdue every acre beyond its ability to regenerate, he would say. To which Pinchot would agree.

  But while Pinchot saw forests essentially as tree farms to be carefully managed, Muir did not. Forests to him were churches, some cathedrals, the best God ever made. If busy man can take one day a week and not work, and let deeper, greater values direct him, can he not take one seventh of the land and regard it differently as well, with greater honor and restraint? This “Sabbath for the Land,” as writer Scott Russell Sanders would one day call it, was Muir’s entire point. Why hurry our way into Heaven? It’s right here before us.

  Slow down. Look around. Nature’s beauty is everywhere, as essential as bread.

  Again, he needed mountain nourishment, and he got some with a summer jaunt through Canada, in some places picking up his old draft dodger’s trail, followed by an autumn trip into the “leafy” Appalachians of North Carolina and Tennessee with his good botany friends Charles Sargent and William Canby. The South troubled him, to see it still on its knees and hardly reconstructed, more than thirty years after the Civil War.

  A letter from Louie encouraged John to stop in Washington to speak with President McKinley or with whomever he might gain an audience. “Think of the beautiful woods being left with nothing mightier than Pinchot’s little plan between them and destruction,” she pleaded. The daughter of a botanist and horticulturalist, Muir’s wife was always more fond of flowers and trees than glaciers and rocks. John ended up going to Washington but hurried home by way of Florida and Texas; he was unaware that he’d soon receive two invitations that would give him unprecedented access into America’s corridors of power: one industrial, the other political.

  EDWARD H. HARRIMAN, America’s so-called “New Colossus of Roads,” president of the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Illinois Central Railroads, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and Wells Fargo Express Company, was one of the wealthiest men in the United States at the close of the nineteenth century. Mustering all his energy in the last six years, he’d shaped a sloppy, haphazard national transportation system into a model of efficiency and profitability. But at a cost. Keep working like you are, his doctor said, and you’ll be more rich than you already are, but you’ll fall over dead of a heart attack. The doctor’s advice: take a vacation, a sea cruise perhaps. Fine, Harriman said. Incapable of doing anything in a small way, he charted the steamship George W. Elder for the summer of 1899 and invited a “who’s who” of America’s top scientists, explorers, artists, natural historians, and writers to travel with him and his family and his servants.

  His destination? The future, of course. Alaska.

  PART THREE

  1899–1906

  CHAPTER NINE

  author and student of glaciers

  IN TRUTH, Harriman wanted to shoot a bear.

  Promptly at twelve noon on May 30, 1899, his special train—“the most velvety and superb train I ever saw,” said Muir—arrived in Seattle from New York. John Muir was there to greet him, having traveled up from California with Charles Keeler, a poet and director of the museum of the California Academy of Sciences. A smallish fifty-five-year-old man with a large ginger-colored moustache, Harriman had a high brow and keen, penetrating eyes. Somewhat cold, humorless, and aloof, he could make a poor first impression. But Muir would come to like him, even admire him. “To him I owe some of the most precious moments of my life,” Muir would write.

  Harriman had dropped out of school at age fourteen, gotten work in the New York Financial District, and skyrocketed from there on supreme talent, drive, and business sense.

  Upon first hearing from his doctor that he should take a vacation, Harriman had considered a western hunting adventure, the kind made famous by Teddy Roosevelt in the Dakotas. Then came the even better idea of shooting a famous Alaska brown bear. And if he were already taking a trip to Alaska, why not go all out and make it a grand scientific expedition at his personal expense? Be a philanthropist like Andrew Carnegie.

  In early March, rather than issue the invitations himself, Harriman paid an unannounced visit to Dr. C. Hart Merriam, head of the Biological Survey (today’s US Fish & Wildlife Service). Blowing like a typhoon into Merriam’s office, he told him his plan and asked Merriam if he would recruit scholars for the expedition party. Was this a prank? A man of science, not industry, Merriam had never heard of Harriman. A quick check proved he was real, and serious.

  Follow-up meetings in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Club and Washington’s Cosmos Club quickly cemented the deal. Merriam’s list included: William Healey Dall, paleontologist of the US Geological Survey; Bernhard Fernow, dean of the School of Forestry at Cornell; Henry Gannett, chief geographer of the US Geological Survey; Grove Karl Gilbert, geologist with the US Geological Survey; Ge
orge Bird Grinnell, editor at Forest and Stream; Robert Ridgway, curator of birds at the US National Museum; William E. Ritter, president of the California Academy of Sciences; Frederick Colville, curator of the National Herbarium and botanist of the US Department of Agriculture; Edward Curtis, promising young Seattle photographer; Louis Agassiz Fuertes, bird artist; Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, landscape artist. And others.

  When Muir first heard about the trip, he was skeptical and unwilling to accept any favors that would leave him indebted to a railroad czar. According to historians William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan:

  Only after Merriam explained that the voyage would explore areas of the Alaska coast that even the adventurous, well-traveled Muir had not seen did the seasoned explorer agree to sign on. Muir was not the only guest whose scientific credentials did not conform to the scientific mold. When the pastoral John Burroughs agreed to serve as the expedition’s historian, he lent a sentimental appreciation of nature to the fact-finding mission of the scientists. Burroughs’ many nature books had struck a receptive chord in the American public, and in 1899 he was a popular national figure.

  While the scientists signed the ship’s guest log as distinguished professors and heads of museums and scientific academies and government agencies, Burroughs signed in as “Ornithologist and Author”; Muir signed as an “Author and Student of Glaciers.”

  The two Johnnies resumed their friendship in Seattle. Only one year apart in age, with Burroughs grounded in the East, Muir in the West, they admired and needled each other. Muir felt Burroughs squandered his stature as America’s most beloved nature writer by writing nothing about the destruction of America’s forests and wild lands, and our collective responsibility to protect them. Chagrined at Muir’s love of glaciers, Burroughs called him “Cold Storage Muir,” and added, “He is a poet and almost a seer . . . He could not sit down in the corner of the landscape, as Thoreau did; he must have a continent for his playground.”

  Then would come the needle: “In John Muir we had an authority on glaciers, and a thorough one—so thorough that he would not allow the rest of the party to have an opinion on the subject.” Deep into the expedition, Muir would tease and torment Burroughs about his homesickness and seasickness.

  On the westbound train journey, Harriman and the highbrow scientists had devised a way to manage the expedition activities. An executive committee would be chaired by Harriman, followed by committees on routes and plans, zoology, botany, geology, mining, geography and geographic names, big game, lectures, library, literature and art, music, and entertainment. Muir would chair none of them. Despite his Alaska experience (exceeded only by that of William Dall), he remained something of what he’d always been, an outsider, a tramp.

  THE George W. Elder departed Seattle on the last day of May 1899. In heavy seas she’d be called the “George W. Roller,” and during lectures, a “floating university.” At 1,709 tons and 250 feet long, 38 feet at the beam, black below and trimmed white above, she was a beauty. The ship was refurbished and outfitted at Harriman’s expense with a piano and organ, packhorses and hunting rifles, a library containing more than five hundred volumes, and state-of-the-art audio and visual equipment. Below decks was a full wine and champagne cellar and a stable of animals (steers, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and a milk cow), should the hunting prove unsuccessful. Twin masts stood fore and aft, twice as tall as the central smokestack; lifeboats rested on the upper hurricane deck.

  Beyond the scientific party of 25 were 2 photographers; 2 stenographers; 3 artists; 1 surgeon and his assistant; a trained nurse; a chaplain; 11 hunters, packers, and camp hands; Harriman and 13 others who were members of his extended family, or their servants; and 65 bridge officers, engineers, and crew, for a total compliment of 126.

  The objective: sail the northwest coast from Seattle to Wrangell, Juneau, Glacier Bay, Yakutat Bay, Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, Kodiak, the Aleutian Islands, the remote islands of Bering Sea, and the Russian Far East, and back, all while seeing, documenting, and learning as much as they could.

  “All along the Alaska coast,” Alaskan Nancy Lord would observe,

  there were distances to be measured, tree rings and fish streams to be counted, worms to be collected. There were Indians eating gull eggs and boiled marmot and Eskimos who paddled skin boats. And there were, all around, strange new vistas to admire, photograph, paint and describe . . . Who would not have begged to have been invited on such a trip, to witness Alaska at the century’s cusp, when it and the world were still so new? When so much was possible? It was the age of innocence, still ruled by infectious Victorian optimism, and Alaska in 1899 was—and perhaps still is—a place of promise.

  MUIR wasted no time befriending the five Harriman children. The three older girls, together with their cousin, he called the “Big Four”; the younger two boys, proudly dressed in their sailor suits, he called the “Little Two.” Muir softened toward their father early in the trip upon seeing him play with little Roland, the youngest boy, “the Admiral,” helping him pull a toy train across the spacious decks. The older boy, eight-year-old Averell, poised and self-assured, would one day become US ambassador to the Soviet Union, governor of New York, and one of President Kennedy’s “Wise Men.”

  Something of a perennial child himself, filled with wonder, Muir was forever drawn to young people. During his epic 1879 Alaska canoe journey, when he slept on the ground and paddled in the rain and gloried in blue gleaming glaciers all around, he’d impressed Missionary Young and others when he helped nurse a Tlingit baby back to health with warm milk. And with his own girls, now teenagers (the “Big Two,” he called them), he’d attended to their needs with love and sacrifice, especially little Helen, so frail at birth. While traveling he wrote as many letters to them as he did now to Louie.

  In more recent years, each of his seven siblings had come to depend upon John for financial help and spiritual guidance. Even young Joanna, who’d once criticized him in a letter for saying he found God in the woods. “. . . you naughty bad boy!” she wrote. “What could the world in general do without churches and Sunday schools? You know that they who are not pure in heart cannot see God in his works, they see only sheep and firewood . . . So you must be good, and not talk like that anymore.”

  Now with the Harriman children as his new disciples, and still preaching his glacial gospel, John would offer this: “Kill as few of your fellow beings as possible and pursue some branch of natural history at least far enough to see Nature’s harmony.”

  VANCOUVER ISLAND made for a short but pleasant first port-of-call, where Dall and Grinnell found enough time to discover what they suspected was ancient woolly mammoth dung encased in deep shore ice. They hauled it aboard as the expedition’s first specimen. As the ship moved north through Seymour Narrows everybody fell into casual routines of sightseeing and storytelling. Loquacious as ever, Muir found keen competition in the yarn-spinning department from Yale meteorologist William Brewer.

  At Lowe Inlet, on the British Columbia coast, they visited a salmon cannery worked hard by local Indians and Chinese, and they walked through the temperate rain forest thick with understory and spongy moss, not a rewarding experience for the expedition artists who attempted to haul their cumbersome gear. They didn’t get far.

  With every nautical mile the ship moved north, the country got more wild and exciting, peopled here and there in little spores of civilization, nothing more, as if it were America all over again, a land of new beginnings. The misty mountains and green, shaggy forests seemed to go on forever, laced with deep inlets and dark-water fjords. Already it felt like a journey through time as much as space.

  Not a churchgoing man, Muir made an exception on the Sunday he and his shipmates spent in New Metlakatla, on Annette Island, their first stop in Alaska. It was there that Muir’s fellow Scot, a short, gray-bearded clergyman named William Duncan, had created what the ship’s chaplain, Dr. George F. Nelson, described as
a unique experiment in “civilizing the savages” that merged religion with capitalism. Formerly of the Episcopal Church of British Columbia, Duncan had gotten in trouble there after he refused to serve wine in the sacrament, saying the taste of alcohol would corrupt the childlike Indians. Refusing to conform, he left Canada with his flock and resettled on Annette Island to supervise the construction—and manage the profits—of a new church, salmon cannery, sawmill, schoolhouse, and town hall.

  Grinnell wrote of the Indians:

  Whatever they are today, Mr. Duncan has made them, and he himself and no other is responsible for the change in the individuals that have been born and lived and died, and still live in this colony during the period of his wise and beneficent influence over them. He has kept them by themselves, teaching them to live as the white man lives, and yet not letting the white man come in among them. They govern themselves in town-meeting fashion, consulting Mr. Duncan frequently as to what they ought to do.

  Grinnell and the others, raised and schooled in Victorian America, enamored with imperialism and the Americanization of Indians, observed Duncan’s accomplishments with fascination. They sat in the church with the Indians to hear Nelson’s preamble followed by Duncan’s fiery sermon.

  Muir slipped away quickly to walk in the woods with Burroughs. Earlier in the trip, when Chaplain Nelson had offered a service in the saloon and few people showed up, Harriman had sent a ship’s steward to herd the scientists and artists into service. The steward found the two Johnnies sunning themselves on an upper deck. “Well,” Burroughs asked his friend, “are you going to obey orders?”

  “No,” Muir said, “I’ll be damned if I do.”

  But Muir did love to sing. After emerging from a hymnal session down below, he ran into Burroughs, who’d been enjoying beautiful alpenglow topside from the bridge. “You ought to have been here fifteen minutes ago,” Burroughs told Muir, “instead of singing hymns in the cabin.”