by Heacox, Kim
To this day he continues to challenge us to see what he saw and do what he did, and more.
He became our patron saint of flowers and birds, glaciers and bears, wilderness and wolves. By far the most vocal nature preservationist in a young nation hell-bent on making money, Muir became our corrective lens, our better conscience. He spoke for the wild places and gave them credible value. He showed us an Alaska as a New World’s new world, a place to reimagine what remained of America, and our destiny in it.
THE GLACIERS Muir found in Alaska were larger and more dynamic and robust than anything he had ever seen or imagined. They were his abacus, his new ruler and measuring stick that made all remaining wild lands down south seem small and vulnerable. They were his metaphor, flowing through the land, yes, but also through his open heart and mind, and through time and events and all things until he transcended the mentality of separateness and reductionism.
Muir would then experience man and nature as one, the wholeness outside continuous with a healthy inside.
These great ice rivers, tumbling down mountains and into the sea, birthed icebergs and blended as a single essence with the snow, which in turn, blended with what Muir called “the invisible breath of the sky.” They inspired him to preach his “gospel of glaciers,” an awareness and red-hot activism that would burn on and carry him through the rest of his days, even consuming him in his later years. By sheer force of their power and beauty, the glaciers of Alaska would help give birth to the modern American conservation movement.
They were the ice that started a fire.
PART ONE
1879–1880
CHAPTER ONE
the heaven right here
HE TRUNDLED down the gangplank in Fort Wrangell, Alaska, fresh off the steamship California, different from other men. Standing apart in his long shabby gray coat and Scotch cap, Muir watched, bemused, as a young missionary, Samuel Hall Young, greeted a gaggle of distinguished Presbyterians (and their dutiful wives) who had sailed with Muir. They had not taken well to him, as he had not to them. “That wild Muir,” they called him. The men represented the Board of Native Missions. Foremost among them was Dr. Sheldon Jackson, Young’s supervisor and head of the mission.
Fort Wrangell was a rough-and-tumble Indian village on the edge of a bog, and the missionaries had come to Alaska, as they went everywhere, to Christianize the natives—clean them up, teach them English and scripture, save their souls, ban their language and customs and dress. It no doubt made Muir uncomfortable. Raised by a strict Calvinist father, he was prejudiced against proselytizing, unless it was the doctrine of Nature, the teachings of wild things. Unless it was the writings of Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist and pioneering glaciologist, or Charles Lyell, the father of the modern science of geology, or William Wordsworth, the English Romantic poet and cultural contrarian, or the wisest—and only American—among them, the author of the illuminating essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Muir had met in Yosemite eight years earlier, in 1871.
Reverend Young extricated himself from his stuffy clerical guests and approached the “lean, sinewy man” in the long shabby coat, who was introduced as “Professor Muir, the naturalist.” A hearty grip of the hand, Young would later recall, “and we seemed to coalesce at once in a friendship which, to me at least, has been one of the very best things I have known in a life full of blessings.”
Fort Wrangell (also spelled Fort Wrangel) in the late 1800s
Photo courtesy of the Alaska State Library
“From cluster to cluster of flowers he ran,” Young described Muir in Fort Wrangell that July, “falling on his hands and knees, babbling in unknown tongues, prattling a curious mixture of scientific lingo and baby talk, worshiping his little blue-and-pink goddesses.” Muir loved flowers and, at this point, considered himself first and foremost a botanist. But after this watershed trip to Alaska, what he would come to love most, what he would worship more than anything else in the natural world, were rivers of ice. Glaciers.
Before embarking on their great canoe journey north, Muir joined Young on the river steamer Cassiar to make forays into Tlingit country around the Stickeen River (today’s Stikine River). One morning, with the steamer docked, the two men set off on an all-day climb of nearby Glenora Peak. Though Muir was already forty-one, more than nine and a half years older than Young, he could easily out-hike him. As they approached the summit, they reached a narrow chasm that Muir scrambled up. Young attempted to follow, lost his footing, fell, and yelled. Muir climbed back down and found the missionary on the edge of an abyss, feet hanging over midair, his chin dug into the treacherous shale slope, hands over his head, useless, both shoulders dislocated, his entire body slipping inch by inch as he held his breath. “Hold fast,” Muir told him, “I’m going to get you out of this . . . keep cool.”
Muir disappeared, whistling “The Blue Bells of Scotland” and chattering to himself as his voice receded. And suddenly he was back, below Young this time, having somehow reached the other side. He told the missionary to lower himself slowly. While using his own hands to hold on to the cliff, Muir caught the missionary by his shirt collar, using his teeth, and pulled him to a ledge. “How he did it, I know not,” Young would later write.
The miracle grows as I ponder it. The wall was almost perpendicular and smooth. My weight on his jaws dragged him outwards. And yet, holding me by his teeth as a panther would her cub and clinging like a squirrel to a tree, he climbed with me straight up ten or twelve feet, with only the help of my iron-shod feet scrambling on the rock. It was utterly impossible, yet he did it.
The sun had gone down. Muir pulled Young to safety, set one shoulder, and aided him down the mountain, at times carrying him on his back. Young later wrote:
All that night this man of steel and lightning worked, never resting a minute, doing the work of three men, helping me along the slopes, easing me down the rocks, pulling me up cliffs, dashing water on me when I grew faint with the pain; and always cheery, full of talk and anecdote, cracking jokes with me, infusing me with his own indomitable spirit.
On the return trip on the Cassiar, while Young convalesced on board, Muir once again set off up the same mountain. This time, fleet-footed and with no one to slow him down, he reached the top.
John Muir on the steamer Cassiar shortly before his first epic canoe journey in the fall of 1879
Photo courtesy of the Alaska State Library-Historical Collections
BY EARLY OCTOBER, they were ready to leave Fort Wrangell on their epic journey, but problems arose. The wife of Chief Toyatte, owner and captain of the canoe, said a sea monster might get them, or a storm, or hostile tribes. To paddle a canoe far north into cold, dangerous country was a death wish. For all their artistry, grace, and generosity, all the bounty of foods that surrounded and sustained them on land and in the sea, the Tlingit could be a fierce and revengeful people. They occasionally warred between clans, took slaves, and staked captives on tide flats to let them drown.
The mother of Kadashan, who would serve as interpreter, told Reverend Young that if anything happened to her son on this crazy journey, she would steal Young’s next newborn child.
Reading letters from his fiancée back in California, Muir found her pining for him:
O Friend Beloved, if ever the dear Lord leads you out from the depths of those blue glacier caves, and will let me once more look upon your face, that I may know you are not become only a white wraith of the northland—there will be no happier woman than I in all the world . . . fate seems to have willed only punishment for me because I was not patient . . . I shiver with every thought of the dark cruel winter drifting down, down—and never a beam of sunshine on that wide land of mists . . .
She wanted him home for Thanksgiving, probably never wanted him gone in the first place. Proposing marriage as he did, as if it were a requirement, then fleeing north, Muir migh
t have found her domestic desires tedious and confining. She made her desperations too obvious, as did the Tlingit women now in Fort Wrangell, upset by the imminent departure of the men they loved. Muir’s fiancée had more in common with these dark-faced women than would meet the eye. As Muir biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe wrote, they were “sisters under the skin.”
“Surely you would not have me away from this work,” Muir wrote back before leaving,
dawdling in a weak-willed way on your lounge, dozing and drying like a castaway ship on the beach.
On the day of the departure from Fort Wrangell, as the Tlingit women wept and waved good-bye to their husbands and sons, Muir wrote to his fiancée, “Leave for the north in a few minutes. Indians waiting. Farewell.”
HER NAME was Louie Wanda Strentzel. Raven-haired and gray-eyed, she had attended Miss Atkins’ Young Ladies Seminary (later Mills College in Oakland) and learned to play the piano so well she could have become a concert performer and basked in what she called “the world’s prizes.” She chose the country life instead, living with her parents on their large orchard in Martinez, a pastoral existence, almost Mediterranean, near where the Sacramento River flowed like honey into San Francisco Bay. “Round-faced and plain,” wrote biographer Stephen Fox, “she disliked facing the camera. A few extant photographs show her to bad advantage, unsmiling and uncomfortable.”
Louie dabbled in astronomy and followed politics and current events. She loved going about town in her horse-drawn buggy, yet she seldom visited the big city of San Francisco thirty-five miles away. Yosemite was a foreign land to her until she met John Muir, and even then she had no desire to go. Alaska must have seemed as cold and far away as Siberia. In 1879, Louie Strentzel was thirty-two (nine years younger than Muir), bordering on spinsterhood, and not happy about it. Her father, an exile from Poland who’d come west in the 1849 Gold Rush, was astute and hardworking, one of the first scientific horticulturalists in California. From him, Louie learned gardening, botany, and a keen sense of business, as she came to oversee the hiring and payment of many work hands. Each year, the Strentzel family ranch produced and shipped hundreds of tons of fruit.
It was a smooth life, sweet and soft, like the domesticated fruit it orbited around. A universe of peaches, cherries, and apricots, far removed from the rough-cut granites and glacial ice that Muir loved. He would have to get used to it . . . when he got back home.
But not yet, not here, not in wild Alaska.
Once the canoe was out of sight and earshot from the wailing women back on shore, leaving behind what Muir called “the doleful, domestic dumps” of civilization, the men whooped “like a lot of truant boys on a lark.” They were feral and free, as if playing a part in Mark Twain’s new novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a band of roustabouts making mischief and breaking out of church. God wasn’t in there, he was out here.
“So truly blind is lord man;” Muir wrote, “so pathetically employed in his little jobs of town-building, church-building, bread-getting, the study of the spirits and heaven, etc., that he can see nothing of the heaven he is in.”
EARLIER THAT SUMMER, while traveling up the Alaska coast en route from Puget Sound to Fort Wrangell, Muir had described “new scenes . . . brought to view with magical rapidity.” His eye, “called away into far-reaching vistas, bounded on either side by headlands in charming array, one dipping gracefully beyond another and growing fainter and more ethereal in the distance.” He called it his “high altar.” The islands, rivers, mountains, and clouds folded together in wild perfection, water everywhere, as if the land itself were made of water, all painfully beautiful, untouched, undefiled, like a garden, an Eden. Could it always stay so?
“Not a leaf stirring;” Muir wrote one windless morning, “one bird, a thrush, singing sweetly, lancing the silence . . . the whole blessed scene coming into one’s heart as to a home prepared for it. We seem to have known it always.”
The thrushes were gone now, having migrated south. It was October, the rainiest month of the year, and getting cold. Muir and his canoe mates no doubt accepted the conditions without much complaint. Standing in the stern at the end of each day, cedar paddle in his hand, old Toyatte, an imposing figure, would survey the shore to find the best campsites, as often as possible moving the canoe with the weather, not against it. Kadashan, the son of a Chilkat chief, would offer his counsel, chosen as he was for his keen knowledge of Indian lore and powers of oratory, and his expertise in Tlingit etiquette. Kadashan was “chief of protocol for the party,” in the words of writer/photographer Dave Bohn.
Steady at the other paddles were Sitka Charley, who as a boy had hunted seals up north where they were headed, in a mythical place John Muir called “the big ice-mountain bay,” and Stickeen John, who acted as a second interpreter. All four Tlingits belonged to a race of people who had lived in this liquid rain forest world for a long time. Tough, resourceful, and weather-wise, they were extensions of the sea. They knew canoes and ocean currents like the Sioux knew horses and the wind. Early white explorers into this country had all reported the same thing: The Tlingits hunted and fished with great skill, and moved like poetry on water, as if they’d been born with canoe paddles in their hands. They learned by storytelling, and told about their history and myths—as they did now with John Muir and Reverend Young—how Raven created the world, how everything they ever needed to know could be learned from the animals and their spirits, the wisdom in the woods.
Muir listened with interest and acknowledged their deep regard for the natural world. He told a few stories of his own about his early childhood in Scotland and Wisconsin. He’d been an inventor in his youth, he said, coming up with all kinds of clever mechanical devices. After two years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison he found work in an Indianapolis carriage factory. One night, while working late to unlace a belt joining, a metal file flew from his hands and pierced the cornea of his right eye. Stunned, he held his hand under the socket as the aqueous humor flowed out and left the eye sightless. Soon the other eye went blind in sympathetic nervous shock. For three days he could not eat or drink. For a month he could not see. He lay still in a dark room and hardly moved, waiting, hoping, praying for his sight to return.
He made a vow. If his sight did return, he would not squander it; he would dedicate the rest of his life to God’s creation. Not Christianity. Not a religion. Not a church. Those were all inventions of men. He would dedicate his life to the beauty of nature, the wild earth, the original church, the one God made.
“God has to nearly kill us sometimes,” Muir noted, “to teach us lessons.”
Nature was what made him joyful. Slowly his sight returned, first in one eye, then the other, and he set off. Never mind the workaday world. “All drawbacks overcome,” he wrote, “joyful and free . . . I chose to become a tramp.”
His rationale was simple. If he walked through his life joyful, walked until he found his new home, not Wisconsin or Indiana or any other overfarmed patch of America, but something wild, then he’d do his best work and be his best self; he’d find his new home and make people around him more joyful. Was this not the greatest task before us, to find a passion and live it with great deliberation, and make the world a better place?
He returned to Wisconsin to help with the harvest at the Muir home on Hickory Hill, and to say good-bye to his family. With the harvest in, according to biographer Gretel Ehrlich, “He appeared at his brother David’s store in Portage, Wisconsin, shoeless, wild-haired, dressed in ragged clothes. David, now a successful merchant and embarrassed by his brother’s appearance, tried to find him a pair of shoes . . .”
Here was his older brother, John, twenty-nine, delinquent yet also wise in some ineluctable way, once a promising inventor, always smart and good with his hands, like their father, now a scarecrow bum. John spoke as if he wouldn’t come back for a long time, if ever. Their father, Daniel, demanded that John pay for his room and board fo
r the weeks he’d lived at home during the harvest. “Dutifully but resentfully,” wrote Ehrlich, “John paid.”
He was nearly penniless and uncertain where to go. He’d read about Alexander von Humboldt in South America, and Charles Darwin on the Beagle. He’d read about the granite cathedrals of a place called Yosemite, in California. He didn’t know how to get there, other than by “the wildest, leafiest, least trodden way.” On the inside cover of his journal, he wrote, “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.”
His pilgrimage had begun.
That same season, in the fall of 1867, as young John Muir set off on his thousand-mile walk to find a new life, Secretary of State William H. Seward, a strident abolitionist and expansionist who had served President Lincoln and retained his job under President Andrew Johnson (after Lincoln’s assassination), completed the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, roughly two cents an acre. An obvious good deal today, in the wake of a devastating Civil War, it seemed absurdly expensive. Faced with the huge task of rebuilding itself, how could the traumatized United States of America squander that kind of money on a frozen wasteland? “Seward’s Folly,” the press called it. “Seward’s Icebox.” The Russians had taken all the sea otter pelts. What more could Alaska have of any value?
