The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960

by Douglas Brinkley

  Glacier Bay was a touchstone landscape to Muir. The Tlingit, who had lived around Glacier Bay for 8,000 years, called the region Sitakaday (“the bay where the ice was”).25 Muir had spent 1861 to 1862 at the University of Wisconsin learning about glaciers from his geology professors. Hiking around the Sierra Nevada, Muir had been able to study the effects of the glacial process. But now, in October 1879, with four Tlingit Indian guides—experts at catching all five species of Pacific salmon (sockeye, king, coho, pink, and chum)—he was experiencing the glacial ice firsthand. The geologic force of ice, he was convinced anew, shaped Alaska and the canyon lands and peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Glaciers, he decided, were truly the divine spirit of nature writ large, more priceless than gold, able to carry away entire mountains, “particle by particle, block by block and cast them into the sea.”26 One of the Tlingit guides complained to Young that Muir “must be a witch” to “seek knowledge” in “such a place” as Glacier Bay, especially in the “miserable weather” of a blinding snowstorm.27

  Muir admired the prowess of the Tlingit with their handcrafted thirty-foot dugout canoes carved from cedar, which had twin sails, allowing them to stealthily cover vast distances in good time. By the campfire, he enjoyed hearing their trickster stories about ravens, known to lead bears to their prey and even to play hide-and-seek with wolves. With a keen eye for masks, paddles, and jewelry art, Muir studied Tlingit totem poles. He chuckled, however, at ancient Native American superstitions regarding glaciers as supernatural or extraterrestrial or weird natural phenomena. For all of Muir’s high-octane romanticism and use of tropes about scenic wonders, he was a botanist-naturalist-glaciologist addicted to scientific fact. Tlingit folklore went only so far with him. The Tlingit, for their part, didn’t care that Muir was an encyclopedia of literature about moraines (both medial and terminal). Generally speaking, First Nation people interested Muir less than the glaciers; he still saw them as “savage.” In First Summer, for example, Muir wrote that the “uncleanliness” of Sierran Indians bothered him tremendously. If Young, the missionary, was going to help the Tlingit prosper, Muir thought hygiene had to come first.

  At night while the Tlingit guides stayed at camp, the ecstatic Muir would climb up the glacial slopes to feel the full power of phantasmagoric geology at work. During the summer months it stayed light almost all night long in Alaska. This worked to Muir’s favor. At a glance Muir knew if a glacier was advancing or retreating, or whether the precipitation during any given year had caused the ice to surge.28 Like Michelangelo measuring luminosity in the Sistine Chapel, Muir studied the Inside Passage as light struck the dense glacial ice. Every shade of blue in the spectrum dominated by a wavelength of roughly 440 to 490 nanometers miraculously appeared, scattered by the crystalline ice; and the blue glow was dispersed and refracted in such a subtly distinguished array of tints that no words existed for them in Webster’s Dictionary.29 Unlike the Alaska Range, which lay in the district’s interior, and where the glacial process was slowed by the fierce cold, the Fairweather Range and Coast Mountains, where temperatures were mild yet there was lots of compact snow, were an ideal setting for glaciers to develop. A layer of snow could transmute into glacial ice in a few decades. For the study of glaciers, the Inside Passage was like Greenland, a hypernatural landscape that seared itself forever in Muir’s fervent imagination.

  For Young, keeping up with Muir’s glacier terminology could be frustrating. Absolute verity was essential to everything Muir did. When the professor espoused the gospel of glaciers, Young was reduced to listening. There was a glossary of Muir’s terms to understand: hanging glacier (above a cliff or mountainside); kettle pond (created when a massive iceberg melted, leaving behind a water-filled hollow); firn (grainy ice, which is formed from snow about to become glacial ice). Before traipsing around Glacier Bay with Muir, Young hadn’t realized that in 1794 the British explorer George Vancouver (British Columbia’s fantastic city is named after him) had demarcated the entire Glacier Bay area as a single ice mountain, which then separated into the twelve smaller ones. For Young every moment with the great Muir was like being taught by Charles Darwin or Thomas Huxley. Naturally inquisitive about the Glacier Bay, Young asked his naturalist friend a lot of questions. The world’s authority on glaciers—John Muir—was canoeing with him for hours at a time in Alaska, espousing the glacial gospel like a preacher at a revival meeting.30

  Instead of being self-centered, Muir at Glacier Bay was life-centered. Feeling he belonged to wild Alaska, a child of the tidal flat, Muir understood anew that the whole Earth was a watershed, just one giant dewdrop. He thanked God for such a magnificent plan. To get around the Alexander Archipelago, Muir used a reprint of George Vancouver’s old nautical charts to help him navigate.31 At Glacier Bay he filled his journals with vibrant writing about his canoe trips, the maritime currents, and the ice features. Ice chunks drifted all around them as they canoed; they felt minuscule. Wave-sculptured pieces of ice floated by blue-green runaway rafts with a mind of their own. Alaska—whose name derived from the Aleut word aláxsxaq, meaning, roughly, “great land”—truly came as advertised. And glaciers spanned the entire southern perimeter of the colossal territory, from just north of the Canadian border in the southeastern region to midway along the Aleutian Islands chain. Less than 0.1 percent of the nearly 100,000 Alaskan glaciers had a name. “I stole quietly out of the camp, and climbed the mountain that stands between the two glaciers,” Muir wrote from the Coast Mountains. “The ground was frozen, making the climbing difficult in the steepest places, but the views over the icy bay, sparkling beneath the stars, were enchanting. It seemed then like a sad thing that any part of so precious a night had been lost in sleep.”32

  Muir ended up publishing numerous articles in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin about the Inside Passage, where “ice and snow and newborn rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious” had engulfed him. An outpouring of theological emotion about Alaska emanated from the great naturalist. All these Inside Passage glaciers regularly thawed and refroze as they muscled and ground downslope. Nothing lasted forever in glacier country. Using religious language, Muir declared the glaciers God’s temples, the theology of ice, frozen temples. Many of the glaciers seemed to have a heavenly blue lantern light glowing from within. Even in wild weather, with “benumbed fingers,” Muir had eagerly investigated the “shifting avalanche slopes and torrents.” With so much weird, picturesque, sublime ice all around him, Muir could barely sleep at night. Every minute he paddled around the Inside Passage, even with constant foggy precipitation, he felt “wet and weary and glad.”33

  Regularly, Muir shouted “God Almighty!” and “Praise God!”34 when confronted with a spectrum, or crazy quilt, of icy green-blue hues. The colors of the bay were his stained-glass altar. With his narrow attentiveness to every detail of glacial ice, Muir might as well have had a full-immersion baptism in the Gulf of Alaska. In the surrounding waters Muir continued watching humpback whales showing their flukes, barnacles visible on their sleek backs. Nearly all of Alaska’s glaciers were within six hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean, so there was plenty of whale watching for fun.35 There was a glassy tranquillity to the currents of the Inside Passage that Muir hadn’t expected, adding to the spiritual aura. According to Young, Muir was a “devoted theist” at Glacier Bay, melodramatically paying homage to the “immanence of God in nature [and] His management of all affairs of the universe.”36

  In the fall of 1879, Muir left Alaska a changed man. En route back to California, he first traveled around the Pacific Northwest, journeying up the Columbia River, preaching the gospel of the glaciers to anybody who would listen. Just a few months later, he married Louise Stenzel, the daughter of a wealthy agriculture businessman. As a wedding gift, Stenzel’s father gave the Muirs a ranch house with a twenty-acre orchard—including a lot of pear and cherry trees—in Martinez, California. Working as a fruit farmer now, Muir nevertheless remained committed to preserving the integrity, stability, and beauty of Alask
a’s glacier community. When picking fruit and filling baskets for market, Muir daydreamed about Alaska, wishing he could slide down an ice sheet on his back, as he had done on a toboggan during his youth in Wisconsin.

  II

  The following summer of 1880, Muir returned to Alaska’s tidewater glacier land. The Reverend S. Hall Young, recently married to a fellow missionary, was very excited to see his naturalist friend. “When can you be ready?” Muir said upon greeting him in Fort Wrangell, cutting to the chase; “get your canoe and crew and let us be off.”37 Young hired three Tlingit guides in Fort Wrangell—the ones he had been Christianizing—to help him get around the Inside Passage. On this trip Muir, anxious to observe the summer moods, visited by dugout canoe Sum Dum Bay and its maze of tributaries, Taku Inlet, Glacier Bay, and Taylor Bay.38 Glaciers are particularly stunning when viewed from the water level of a canoe or kayak. And the arrogance of sightseers is likely to be squelched by the feeling of smallness that a boat’s-eye view induces. Sailing through glacial fjords was the outdoors thrill of a lifetime for Muir and the others. “Every passage between the islands,” Young wrote in Alaska Days, “was a corridor leading into a new and more enchanting room of Nature’s great gallery.”39

  When hiking in Taylor Bay by himself, with only his mutt Stickeen as a companion, Muir had a hair-raising near-death experience. The higher they climbed, the less hemlock and spruce forest there was; then there was no plant life at all. Muir had brought with him only an ice ax and half a loaf of bread. Foolishly he had left his gun, rain gear, blankets, and matches back at camp. Impetuous enthusiasm had its shortcomings. A sense of doom now fell over the outing from the first. Stickeen was limping. A thunderstorm soaked them. Muir was determined to find Taylor (now Brady) Glacier, even in the rain. But then ominous darkness started to close in on man and dog. It was clearly time to head back down to camp.

  Both Muir and Stickeen did a lot of fancy footwork, leaping across crevasses like Dall sheep in search of lichens. When a forty-foot crevasse manifested itself in front of him, Muir feared death. Somehow they had gotten themselves stuck in an ice maze. Muir was not a man prone to panic. But the only way out of his predicament was to cross an ice bridge eight feet below him. Muir dropped down, somehow managing not to slip—a slip would have meant instant death. The warm rain was creating a melting effect. Using his ax pick, Muir now made his way across the bridge, inch by inch. Poor Stickeen was terrified, howling and barking in fear of being left behind. Muir coaxed his dog to muster courage and follow his path. Eventually the frightened dog scaled down the glacier and somehow managed an acrobatic walk across the ice bridge. Muir and Stickeen embraced each other with a kind of shivering born-again love. “The joy of deliverance burned in us like a fire, and we ran without fatigue,” Muir wrote, “every muscle with immense rebound glorying in its strength.”40

  Once back from the trip, Muir fleshed out the story to publish as an article for Century and eventually as an essay-length book, Stickeen. When it finally was published in 1909, it became a solid best seller. Besides using his journal notes, Muir had drawn on George Romanes’s Animal Intelligence, published in 1881, to include new scientific data on the psychology of nonhumans.41 “The spread of evolutionary thinking, animal-welfare legislation, bird-watching, and other challenges to homocentrism all gave this story of an ordinary-looking but brave little dog a deeper significance,” the biographer Donald Worster explained in A Passion for Nature, “exactly as Muir had hoped.”42

  The Tlingit had made Muir an honorary chief during this visit in 1880; they called him “Great Ice Chief.” The indomitable Muir routinely camped alone to study the calving glacier more closely.43 Crouching to study the ice for hours at a time, he gleefully started naming landmarks around Muir Glacier as if they were boyhood friends dyed blue: Black Mountain (5,130 feet), Tree Mountain (2,700 feet), Snow Dome (3,300 feet), and Howling Valley—all part of today’s Muir Glacier, which is a feature in Glacier Bay.44 He drove stakes into the ice so that he could take measures on future trips. Young tells a comical story about what a powerful whim it was for Muir to designate nameless features. One afternoon Muir named an entire area after his Presbyterian friend. “Without consulting me, Muir named this ‘Young Glacier,’ and right proud I was to see that name on charts for the next ten years or more,” Young recalled in Alaska Days. “But later maps have a different name. Some ambitious young ensign of a surveying vessel, perhaps, stole my glacier, and later charts give it the name of Dawes.”45

  Pilgrimages to Glacier Bay became Muir’s Alaskan trademark. After his second trip in 1880, he returned to Alaska four more times, longing for the ethereal highs of Glacier Bay, the life-affirming crisp gray weather, the no-man’s-land of wingspread mountains unfolding seemingly forever.46 With imaginative leaps Muir’s Alaskan journals sang Whitmanesque rhapsodies about the dazzling “thunders of plunging, roaring icebergs,” surrounded by avalanche chutes and ice fields. And then there were frozen granite wilderness places—like Tracy Arm, Misty Fjords, and South Prince of Wales—which Muir embraced with the same love he held for Yosemite. Travels in Alaska was published in 1915, the year after he died. It’s a valentine to Glacier Bay.

  On all of his trips to Alaska, Muir sketched glaciers with pencil or ink in his journals. Some of the drawings—housed in the Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, the primary depository for Muir’s papers—stand alone on single sheets. Considering that many were drawn from a canoe or in the rain, they are quite remarkable.47 Little has been written on Muir as a visual artist, but his drawings of glaciers were impressive. (By contrast, whenever he included humans in an Alaskan landscape, they looked like mere doodles, stick figures, or silhouettes.) What fun it is to study thirty-plus drawings of glaciers sketched between 1879 and 1899. There are pictures of glaciers at Kachemak Bay, Chugach National Forest, and Prince William Sound. But his most loving studies are of Muir Glacier at Glacier Bay, drawn from many different angles.48

  After two summers in Alaska inspecting glacial motion—essentially, a study of velocity—Muir returned to northern California a changed man. The American West held a highball fascination for him, and Glacier Bay joined Yosemite as his obsession. “I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer,” he wrote to a friend. “Civilization and fever, and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.”49 Modest, self-effacing, and with a permanent twinkle in his intense eyes, Muir was nevertheless zealous in his approach to everything wild. His enthusiasm for Alaska was so intelligently real that even his critics never tried to belittle him by calling him fanatical about glaciers. “Waking and sleeping, I have no rest,” Muir wrote. “In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of cleavage or struggle with the difficulty of some extraordinary rock-form.”50

  Spoiled by Alaska’s wild wonders, Muir had a hard time readjusting to living in Martinez, California. Domestic life had all the appeal of being chloroformed. Stuck with paying bills, operating an orchard, and answering an ever-increasing amount of correspondence, Muir constantly dreamed of Glacier Bay. He regularly complained to Young, who was doing missionary work in southeastern Alaska, about being stuck in California, and he was desperate for news about his beloved glaciers. Celebrity in America had its strains. Muir was constantly grappling with editors while trying to manage land tracts. Politically active in the saving of Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Kings Canyon, Mount Rainier, and other treasured American landscapes, Muir missed being a wandering glaciologist, working in the glacier lands of Alaska and mastering the art of not fatally slipping. One afternoon Young, who was in the San Francisco Bay area on church business, unexpectedly dropped in on Muir. The naturalist was out in the fields, supervising cherry picking, holding a basket full of fruit. “Ah! My friend,” Muir exclaimed like a wistful prisoner hoping to be freed. “I have been longing mightily for you. You have come t
o take me on a canoe trip to the countries beyond—to Lituya and Yakutat bays and Prince William Sound; have you not?”51

  III

  In May 1881, Muir expanded his Alaskan knowledge base by joining the USS Corwin on an expedition up the Arctic coast to search for the missing steamer Jeannette. This voyage afforded Muir the chance to explore the Bering Sea while simultaneously doing a good deed. Muir’s primary goal was to study the ice on the frostbitten islands in the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait. The Jeannette had disappeared off Point Barrow when Muir had first traveled up the Inside Passage. Muir, on the Corwin, now got to expand his field studies to the Pribilof Islands (the largest fur seal rookery in North America) and Kotzebue Sound (home to polar bears and a wide variety of birds). The Lower Forty-Eight had less than 200 square miles of glaciers, in nine states: Washington, Wyoming, Oregon, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Montana, and Nevada. All those glaciers, taken together, didn’t equal a single large one in Alaska. Further expanding his sightseeing, Muir became one of the first humans to set foot on rocky Wrangell Island (between the Chukchi and East Siberian seas at meridian 180). This island had the highest density of polar bears in the world and was believed to be the last place on Earth inhabited by woolly mammoths. “How cold it is this morning!” Muir wrote to his wife from aboard the Corwin. “How it blows and snows!”52

  Throughout the six-month Arctic cruise, to contribute to glacial science, Muir kept a daily record of the landscape he encountered. He also discussed the history of New England whalers, who had plied Alaskan waters since 1848. There were approximately 100,000 glaciers in Alaska; his fieldwork was endless. He wrote a handful of letters to be published in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. His botanical reports on the flora found in the Arctic were elegant and pioneering. In 1883, the U.S. Treasury Department printed Muir’s botanical investigation as Document No. 429. “I returned a week ago from the polar region around Wrangell Land and Herald Island,” Muir wrote to the great protégé of Charles Darwin, Asa Gray, on October 31, 1881, “and brought a few plants from there which I wish you would name as soon as convenient, as I have to write a report on the flora for the expedition. I had a fine time and gathered a lot of exceedingly interesting facts concerning the formation of the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and the configuration of the shores of Siberia and Alaska. Also, concerning the forests that used to grow there, etc., which I hope some day to discuss with you.”