by Heacox, Kim
He had added to his herbarium, his stock of impressions, his long list of friends and colleagues, but he came home with no new large insights into nature or society. Nothing in his journal suggests that travel had helped him see the world, himself, or his adopted country more profoundly. Had he walked the whole distance, it might have been different.
FOR ALL HIS passion and vigor, Muir often sniffled and coughed his way through winter. Built like a heron, thin and slight, he carried no fat on his lean frame. He could work and worry himself into a tizzy, fretting over his daughters or some conservation issue, a difficult-to-write book chapter, a magazine article. These traits, together with his keen intellect and love of words, he’d passed on to Helen, which vexed him but also excited him; he thought she might one day carry the mantle of activist/writer when he was gone.
Now almost twenty, his younger daughter had grown into a willful woman who regardless remained frail and homebound while her older sister Wanda attended the University of California at Berkeley. Now with another damp winter upon them, Helen was again pale and short of breath. She, her father, and her sister had recently visited the Grand Canyon and fallen in love with the colorful rimrock and dry heat of the desert southwest. While Louie stayed home, as always, to tend her flowers, John and Wanda took Helen back to Arizona, where her health improved immediately.
But then came dire news from Louie. She was gravely ill.
John Muir, his wife Louie, and his daughters Wanda (l) and Helen (r) at their Martinez home
Photo courtesy of Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific
Muir had experienced earthquakes in his life, figurative ones: leaving his Wisconsin home without his father’s blessing, losing his eyesight in the Indianapolis carriage factory, getting malaria in Florida. And literal ones: shaken out of bed in 1872 in Yosemite Valley, running around praising the power and beauty of Nature—shouting “a noble earthquake, a noble earthquake”—while massive granite boulders tumbled off the high cliffs. And in late summer 1899, a couple months after he’d departed Glacier Bay for the last time, a massive earthquake had rattled the glaciers and filled the bay with so much floating ice that for many years steamships could no longer approach the glaciers, killing the Alaska tourism industry. Muir Glacier began an accelerated retreat that during the next century would see it surrender its entire inlet to the sea, shrinking back to where it is today, only a small fraction of its original size, no longer tidewater.
Losing Louie was another earthquake. After a brief battle with lung cancer, she died at fifty-eight in August 1905. Muir was devastated and wracked with guilt by all the time he’d spent away from home, traveling afar, climbing glaciers, collecting plants. It all seemed trivial now, self-indulgent. Louie had given him two wonderful daughters, a path to financial security, and the freedom for him to travel in older age. According to Gretel Ehrlich, “She had learned that his love could be won only by letting him go his own wild way. In return he was loyal and grateful, an adoring father and husband, though an unwilling householder. She had been his critic, editor and helpmate, but she could never share his mountain joy.”
President Roosevelt knew what it was to lose a wife. He wrote to Muir, “get out among the mountains and the trees, friend, as soon as you can. They will do more for you than either man or woman can.” Muir went to Arizona instead, to soak in the heat with Wanda and Helen. He poked around the desert and let the intense sun dry his sorrows as he discovered pieces of petrified wood, reptile bones, and Indian ruins. He loved this desert time and enjoyed watching Helen’s health improve. Back home, however, the tremors persisted. The next spring, California convulsed, unleashing an earthquake that would raise the stakes for everything: not just conservation policy in America, but Muir’s own personal well-being.
PART FOUR
1906–1980
CHAPTER ELEVEN
a temple drowned
FOR MANY San Franciscans it was the longest moment of their lives, and for some, the last. The Great 1906 Earthquake, felt as far away as Germany, ruptured the San Andreas Fault just before five o’clock on Wednesday morning, April 18, catching people still in bed. An estimated 28,000 buildings were destroyed, if not by the earthquake that pancaked them to the ground, then by fires that ensued for three days and created their own wind, feeding on the ruins. More than half of the city’s 400,000 residents were made homeless; 700 to 800 died, perhaps more. “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed.” Jack London reported in Collier’s magazine,
San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling-houses on its outskirts. Its industrial section is wiped out. Its business section is wiped out. Its social and residential section is wiped out. The factories and warehouses, the great stores and newspaper buildings, the hotels and the palaces of the nabobs, are all gone.
In Martinez, in the Alhambra Valley, at the north end of San Francisco Bay, the Strentzel house lost all five of its chimneys but remained intact, its foundation strong. Muir supervised repairs on the house but could feel cracks in the walls of his own life as time marched on. His beloved wife had died; for months he seemed lost, aimless. Wanda would soon marry a civil engineer he didn’t much care for. Helen, for the sake of her health, would return to the desert again and again until finally settling there for good.
While still living at home and often struggling for a good deep breath, Helen convinced her father to take a much-needed vacation to the Sierra with his dear friend, the artist William Keith. She would stay back with their house servant, Ah Fong, to manage her cough and tend to chores as a capable horsewoman and buggy driver (like her older sister). En route to Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite National Park, Muir wrote to her, “The glory of the woods hereabouts now is the color of dogwood, glorious masses of red and purple and yellow . . . I can’t get the sound of that cough out of my ears . . .”
The two men had a good time as they tromped about for a week and felt the wonder of their youth flood back into them. Of his friend, Muir wrote, “. . . after making about forty sketches, [he] declared with enthusiasm that although its walls were less sublime in height, in picturesque beauty and charm Hetch Hetchy surpassed even Yosemite.”
On his return, Muir’s heart sank. Helen had sent him away for his own health—like her mother, she knew when her father needed mountains—but her cough had worsened. John immediately summoned a specialist, who said Helen must move to a drier, warmer climate for two years, perhaps longer. It would be the beginning of the rest of her life. Always attentive, her father built her a sturdy cabin near the town of Doggett, in the Mojave Desert. Linnie Marsh Wolfe would write:
Finding her a nurse and companion in the person of a Miss Stafford, whom he promptly nicknamed “Miss Sassafras,” he left Helen comfortably settled, and returned to the lonely old house, now bereft for a second time of all cheer. Unable to resist the pleading eyes of her dog, Stickeen, he sent both him and her riding pony, Sniffpony, south to keep her company.
Like many fathers, Muir had harbored high hopes for his daughters, thinking they might follow his lead and become naturalists and writers, defenders of the defenseless. But those hopes, like so much else, slipped away as the girls chose more conventional paths. Wanda married the civil engineer who specialized in irrigation; Helen would follow her fortune-seeking husband into one scheme after another in the advertising business.
Being back in the “dismal old” Strentzel house, with its sixteen vacant rooms, gave Muir little comfort, working as he did in his scribble den, living alone with Ah Fong. “O dear these lonely days!!” he would write to his daughters as they all too quickly became independent women, “I must either get into consuming hard work or go up a canon.”
SIX WEEKS after the earthquake, Gifford Pinchot, the nation’s new chief forester, wrote to Marsden Manson, a San Francisco city water engineer, “I hope sincerely
that in the regeneration of San Francisco its people may be able to make provision for a water supply from the Yosemite National Park . . . I will stand ready to render any assistance which lies in my power.”
Plagued by water issues for decades, San Francisco found itself even thirstier as it rose from the ashes. Local politicians and water engineers had long coveted the snowpack of the Sierra, where high mountain basins could give their growing city a steady, year-round supply of drinking water and hydroelectric power. Top on the list was Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite National Park. Twice in the early 1900s, San Francisco had applied for the rights to dam the Tuolumne River and flood Hetch Hetchy, and twice Ethan Hitchcock, secretary of the interior, had said no. Soon after the earthquake, Pinchot’s friend James Garfield replaced Hitchcock. That summer of 1906, while the Sierra Club leadership was in the mountains on its annual outing, Garfield blindsided them by holding a hearing in San Francisco filled with one-sided testimony.
With help from Robert Underwood Johnson, Charles Sprague Sargent, William Colby, and others, Muir got busy and wrote to President Roosevelt, saying of the dam proponents, “They all show forth the proud sort of confidence that comes of a good sound substantial irrefragable ignorance.” If people across the country knew the facts, Muir said, “nine tenths or more” would oppose damming the Tuolumne River and drowning Hetch Hetchy. Roosevelt passed his sentiments along to Pinchot and Garfield and wrote back to Muir that in his experience the opposite was true; everybody he’d spoken to appeared to be in favor of the plan. He added, “and I have been in the disagreeable position of seeming to interfere with the development . . . p.s. How I do wish I were again with you camping out under those great sequoias or in the snow under the silver firs.”
This fight, Muir confided to Johnson, “promises to be the worst ever.”
Underpinning it all was a rift in the conservation community as deep as the San Andreas Fault: utility versus preservation, harness nature or let it run wild, dam a river or defend it. It all came down to money, Muir said. Men might speak of higher ideals, but don’t be fooled; it’s a ruse to mask simple greed. Little was said of the hydropower potential of Hetch Hetchy, where the big money was. The dam proponents wanted to avoid discussions of a generator plant and power lines that together with a massive concrete plug would further deface California’s most famous national park. They harped instead on the drinking-water argument as if they were good guys coming to rescue the homeless of San Francisco. Such was the practiced art of Pinchot and others: to wrap the bitter pill of self-interest in the sweet butter of higher moral purpose. So as not to appear callous to the well-being of the people of San Francisco, Muir carefully proposed alternative sites (that would cost more but do less damage) and ascribed the Hetch Hetchy scheme to a few “mischief-makers and robbers of every degree.”
It didn’t work.
The mayor of San Francisco, James D. Phelan, wrote to Garfield, “John Muir loves the Sierras and roams at large, and is hypersensitive on the subject of the invasion of his territory. The 400,000 people of San Francisco are suffering from bad water and ask Mr. Muir to cease his aesthetic quibbling.”
IF JOHN OF THE MOUNTAINS ever thought he’d turn seventy and look back over his life’s accomplishments with satisfaction and a sense of ease, he was wrong. He was living alone and in the fight of his life to defend his spiritual home, the sister valley to Yosemite Valley, not as popular but every bit as enchanting. The wilds of Alaska must have seemed many thousands of miles away, something ethereal. Another lifetime when Tlingit Indians paddled dugout cedar canoes and rivers ran free and forests stood undefiled. The men who opposed Muir over Hetch Hetchy seemed to regard only one thing as sacred: progress. And who wrote the definitions of progress? Men in power. And what paved the path to power? Money.
A few voices cried in protest, Muir’s the most compelling among them. But the juggernaut was rolling. Every environmental defeat was final, every victory, provisional. A stay of execution. The dam might be defeated, but the dam site would still be there, whispering its temptations. That Muir’s twilight years should find him with his back to the wall, according to biographer Stephen Fox, “made an ironic denouement to his life’s work.”
In May 1908, after Gifford Pinchot pronounced that damming Hetch Hetchy would in no way lessen the scenic quality of the Sierra, Secretary Garfield signed over to San Francisco the rights to develop the site. Only two hurdles remained: congressional approval and the president’s signature.
Soon thereafter a “Conservation Conference” took place at the White House with neither John Muir nor Robert Underwood Johnson in attendance. They weren’t invited, despite the fact that Johnson had proposed the conference months before, which Pinchot at the time called “impracticable.” Now as the conference convened, President Roosevelt gave full credit to Pinchot, saying at one point, “In all forestry matters I have put my conscience in the keeping of Gifford Pinchot.”
Muir was passionate and eloquent, but not a political player. He didn’t horse-trade or smooth talk. He’d been a shrewd businessman in his day, but never greedy or easy prey to the subtle machinations of others. Money brought him his greatest pleasure when he gave it away to help relieve the troubles of his neighbors, even strangers. “He could squeeze a penny in a business deal as hard as the next Scotchman,” Linnie Marsh Wolfe would write, “but he gave with prodigality. His files are filed with letters of gratitude from organized charities, relatives, friends, and needy people he had merely heard of.”
Upon hearing of a woman who’d lost her husband and was struggling to feed and clothe her children, he traveled by buggy to deliver a small sack of heavy coins to get her through the winter. Again and again he did this sort of thing, and asked for nothing in return. Old Toyatte, the captain of his canoe in 1879, had told Muir of the Tlingit potlatch tradition: It isn’t what we own that makes us rich, it’s what we give away.
NOT ALL NEWS on the conservation front was dispiriting in Muir’s final years. In 1906 Congress passed the American Antiquities Act, called by some “the greatest conservation act that nobody’s ever heard of.” Masterminded by Congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa, working closely and in private with President Roosevelt, the act gave the president the power to create national monuments by executive order, without congressional approval. Just a stroke of the pen, lickety-split.
While the act was designed to quickly protect small archeological sites from vandals and thieves, Roosevelt took it and ran with it, to Muir’s delight. Many national monuments established by TR would later become national parks, and they were anything but small. Some were huge, such as 600,000-acre Mount Olympus National Monument (later Olympic National Park) and 800,000-acre Grand Canyon National Monument. Roosevelt took sharp criticism for this, but didn’t care. Also in the mix was Petrified Forest National Monument, in Arizona, a favorite of Muir’s after spending time there with Wanda and Helen; many times he’d lobbied Washington to preserve the area from the bottomless pockets of vandals. In the decades ahead, beyond Muir’s life, other presidents would invoke the Antiquities Act to safeguard spectacular amounts of wild acreage, most notably in Alaska.
To measure a man’s influence is no easy task. Drop a pebble into a pool and the ripples run to every shore, some near, some far. Muir’s correspondence in his final years, written while he fought bronchial coughs and terrible headaches, often speaks to his ongoing, never-ending struggle to preserve wild Nature, and the full benefits that can only be measured in the years ahead. The future is out there, he said, looking back and judging us, asking hard questions about our worst habits, our insatiable appetites, our addiction to growth and always wanting more, and yes, our strokes of genius and compassion, our caring for other human beings and other species, our deep regard for the beauties of Nature and all life caught in the travail of time.
In early 1909 James D. Phelan, the former mayor of San Francisco, looking dapper and sounding suave, testif
ied before Congress that as a new arrival in Yosemite Valley many years earlier, Muir “began his career . . . as an operator in a sawmill. Verily ‘the lover of the tree destroyeth the tree.’ . . . He is a poetical gentleman. I am sure he would sacrifice his own family for the preservation of beauty. He considers human life very cheap, and he considers the works of God superior . . .”
Such attacks appeared to upset Muir’s friends more than they did Muir. To William Colby, he wrote, “Never mind, dear Colby, the present flourishing triumphant growth of the wealthy wicked, the Phelans, Pinchots and their hirelings, will not thrive forever . . . We may lose this particular fight, but truth and right must prevail at last. Anyhow we must be true to ourselves.”
When William Howard Taft won the White House in 1908 and visited Yosemite the next year, Muir accompanied him with a gaggle of newsmen. A big, sweaty man who loved to tease and provoke others, Taft announced loudly that Hetch Hetchy Valley would make a good place for a farm, and there, at the entrance, would be a good place for a dam. Taking the bait, Muir said adamantly, “A dam! Yes . . . but the man who would dam that would be damning himself.” Muir then caught himself and calmly explained that the valley was God’s creation. Isn’t a man allowed to lose his temper now and then as Jesus did upon finding moneychangers in the temple?
Muir shared with the president his detailed plan to promote tourism in the park via roads and trails designed to link four major features, Hetch Hetchy being one. This would work only if the valley remained in its pristine state, he said. Think of the pleasure it will bring all Americans for centuries to come. Taft quietly agreed.