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

by Heacox, Kim

  It would be an idealistic tramp, a lover of glaciers, a student of all things wild, who would show America another side of Alaska, and of America itself, one that found value in beauty without utility.

  NORTHBOUND from Fort Wrangell, the six men found their canoe ran true, and in a few days they were in Icy Strait, off the northeast coast of Chichagof Island. At Pleasant Island they stopped to collect firewood. Muir carried with him a copy of an eighty-five-year-old chart made by Lieutenant Joseph Whidbey of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, when he served under Captain George Vancouver on board HMS Discovery in 1794. The lieutenant had commanded three longboats (dispatched from the ship, the men at the oars, sometimes with small sails aloft) through tricky currents and the iceberg-filled waters of Icy Strait, while the sickly Vancouver remained back on Discovery, anchored safely at Port Althorp, near present-day Elfin Cove. Whidbey’s chart showed a bay about five miles from head to back, emptying into Icy Strait from the north, blocked at its head by “compact solid mountains of ice,” according to Vancouver, who wrote the expedition log so he could take full credit with the Admiralty back in London.

  In simpler terms, a massive tidewater glacier stood at the head of the bay.

  Given the geography then and now, the terminus—or tidewater face—of the glacier must have been an astounding sight: eight miles across and nearly three hundred feet high. All that ice, a single glacier filling the entire bay, backdropped by what Vancouver said were “stupendous” mountains. He called the ice wall a “barrier,” underscoring his desire, the desire of every British mariner since Frobisher, Hudson, and Cook, to find the fabled Northwest Passage, a commercially viable sailing route over the top of North America that would unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Such a route would make the British Empire’s dominion over the world’s oceans even greater.

  Vancouver, like the men who served under him, probably assumed that the massive ice sheet, being so large, must extend hundreds if not thousands of miles from the north, all the way from the Arctic perhaps, and the North Pole.

  It did not.

  It was an alpine glacier roughly one hundred miles long, fed by heavy snowfall in some of the highest coastal mountains in the world, the Fairweather Range and the St. Elias Mountains, peaks climbing to twelve, fifteen, and eighteen thousand feet above sea level. Layer upon layer the snow would accumulate and re-crystallize into dense ice, and begin to flow as glaciers that coalesced into one great glacier that moved with such vigor it advanced forward and buried an entire bay.

  From a few miles south of the tidewater face of the glacier (about where Rush Point is today), Whidbey and his men had no idea what they were seeing or talking about. No Englishman did when it came to glaciers. They were an island people who hailed from green, flat, rainy terrain. They had never been exposed to a deep history of intense mountain geography and glaciation; they knew little if anything about what glaciers were, how they worked, how they eroded and deposited and shaped entire landscapes, how they advanced and retreated, and why. It was the French and Swiss and other mainland Europeans, living in and near the Alps, who first explored the anatomy and behavior of glaciers, and explained them with just those kinds of terms—“anatomy” and “behavior”—as if the blue ice rivers were alive. It was a language John Muir loved. The French nouns remain with us to this day: glacier, arête, moulin, serac, crevasse.

  Whidbey’s chart, accurate in 1794, was no longer so in 1879. The “compact solid mountains of ice” were gone. The glacier had retreated, and in its place was a newborn bay roughly eight miles wide, framed by tall mountains, running north, shaking off its icy tomb, a fine temptation. Muir could hardly stand it. He saw floating ice all around, pieces shaped like castles and birds.

  Onward, he beckoned his companions. Onward. To the glaciers.

  They made camp that first night near the mouth of the bay, on what Muir called, “a desolate, snow-covered beach in stormy sleet and darkness.” He continued:

  At daybreak I looked eagerly in every direction to learn what kind of place we were in; but gloomy rain-clouds covered the mountains, and I could see nothing that would give me a clue, while Vancouver’s chart, hitherto a faithful guide, failed us altogether.

  It failed them because they were in waters that didn’t exist in Vancouver’s time, waters filling in a geography that until recently was occupied by a glacier.

  Tensions mounted. Sitka Charley, brought along as a guide because he had spent time here as a boy, was lost. The land looked nothing like he remembered it from many years ago. Everything had changed. Everything was changing.

  What kind of place was this?

  Early that morning they saw smoke. The group approached a camp and were greeted by the very thing Toyatte’s wife had feared: gunshots fired over their heads.

  A band of Huna Tlingits stood on shore, one man with a rifle, his face painted black. No doubt alarmed by the approach of strangers in a canoe, the black-faced man shouted, “Who are you?”

  “Friends,” Stickeen John shouted back, “and the Fort Wrangell missionary.”

  For a tense moment, nobody spoke.

  CHAPTER TWO

  a skookum-house of ice

  THEY PADDLED in close, heads low. Again, Stickeen John identified himself and his party, and Kadashan, the son of a Chilkat chief, boldly rebuked the black-faced man for greeting a missionary with a loaded gun.

  The Huna Tlingits said they meant no harm; they invited the Fort Wrangell men ashore.

  Inside a nearby shelter (Muir called it a “bark hut”), relations eased. He wrote, “It seemed very small and was jammed full of oily boxes and bundles . . . and heavy, meaty smells . . . a circle of black eyes peering at us through a fog of reek and smoke.” Their hosts were “seal-hunters laying in their winter stores of meat and skins.”

  Stickeen John said the two white men had good hearts; that Muir, the blue-eyed friend of the missionary, was the one who came to this country seeking ice mountains (glaciers).

  The Huna Tlingit had heard of the missionary, and couldn’t imagine why he was here so late in the season. Did he intend to preach to the seals and gulls?

  Kadashan offered the Huna Tlingits rice, tea, and tobacco, after which, Muir wrote, “they began to gain confidence and to speak freely. They told us . . . that there were many large ice-mountains in the bay, but no gold mines; and the ice-mountain they knew the best was at the head of the bay, where more of the seals were found.”

  Muir was eager to push on, but Sitka Charley, their guide, was uneasy in the much-changed land. So many new islands had been born, so much ice had vanished. He wanted a Huna Tlingit seal hunter to accompany them.

  After much discussion, one of them consented to go. His wife prepared dried salmon, strips of seal meat, a blanket, and a piece of cedar matting for him to sleep on. She accompanied them down to the shore and said with a pretty smile as they pushed off, “It is my husband you are taking away. See that you bring him back.”

  If this plea stirred in Muir any misgivings or guilt or desires to return to the woman who loved him back in California, he kept them to himself.

  At midday they passed their first large ice-mountain, to the west. Muir wrote, “Its lofty blue cliffs, looming through the draggled skirts of the clouds, gave a tremendous impression of savage power.” He named the glacier after the Scottish geologist James Geikie.

  Two hours later, farther up the bay to the northwest, they made camp. The minister wished to stay back the next day, since it was Sunday, and the Indians did because of the weather. Muir set off on his own to see what he could see.

  “Wet, weary and glad” is how he described himself when he returned to camp at dusk. He had climbed some fifteen hundred feet up a ridge into swirling clouds and a cold rain, conditions that would dispirit most men. At one point the clouds had opened to where he could see “the imposing fronts of five huge glaciers” flowing into “t
he berg-filled expanse of the bay.” Such a grand adventure—his first real view of Glacier Bay. He was thrilled. Yet the Tlingits shared none of his enthusiasm. In his absence, they had grown mutinous. If Muir kept up this crazy ice-mountain­ chasing, they would all die.

  Young told Muir that the Tlingits had been asking all day about why he climbed mountains when storms were blowing. When Young had explained that Muir was seeking knowledge, Toyatte announced, “Muir must be a witch to seek knowledge in such a place as this, and in such miserable weather.” It was time, he said, to turn around and go home.

  Muir poured himself some coffee and joined the Tlingits at their campfire. The Tlingits, according to Muir,

  [B]ecame still more doleful, and talked in tones that accorded well with the wind and waters and growling torrents about us, telling sad old stories of crushed canoes, drowned Indians, and hunters frozen in snow-storms. Even brave old Toyatte, dreading the treeless, forlorn appearance of the region, said that his heart was not strong, and that he feared his canoe, on the safety of which our lives depended, might be entering a skookum-house (jail) of ice, from which there might be no escape; while the Hoona guide said bluntly that if I was so fond of danger, and meant to go close up to the noses of the ice-mountains, he would not consent to go any farther.

  The affable Muir said he understood their concerns, but they had nothing to fear. He had wandered among mountains and storms for ten years and more. Good luck always followed him.

  WE can only guess the specifics of Muir’s campfire oratory, but it must have been compelling. Did he tell of his accident in the Indianapolis Carriage Factory, when he lost his eyesight for a month? Of his thousand-mile walk from Kentucky to Florida? Inspired by Humboldt and Darwin, “in the vine tangles, cactus thickets, sunflower swamps, and along the shore among the breakers,” Muir had hoped to sail to South America. He got as far as Cuba, and from there by fast schooner to New York City, where he felt “completely lost in the vast throngs of people, the noise of the streets, and the immense size of the buildings.” Then south again, by steerage to Panama, and across the isthmus by train, and north by ship to California, a twist of fate that would forever change the maps of wild America.

  Did he tell of landing in San Francisco that momentous March of 1868, one month before he turned thirty? The vibrant city went about its business, growing and growing, and Muir, charmed by none of it, stopped on Market Street to ask a local carpenter the quickest way out of the city.

  “But where do you want to go?” the carpenter replied.

  “Anywhere that is wild.”

  Did he tell of his walk across California’s Central Valley when it was knee-high wildflowers as far as he could see? One vast “bee-garden,” he called it. And his first sighting of the Sierra? And Yosemite Valley? Since his arrival in the Sierra, he had climbed many mountains in storms, and to the tops of great conifers as they swayed in the wild wind. He’d gone for days on little food, and frozen his foot on Mount Shasta, and stranded himself on cliffs. Every time he survived, and more—he thrived. He’d been more alive in those moments than at any other time. They defined him. They enriched him. We are not here to exist; we are here to live, to face death and stare it down. We are here to trust in God and to embrace this world in all its quiet and violent beauty, to break down the walls of our own prejudices and believe in something greater than ourselves. We are here to paddle into our worst fears and come out the other side to discover glaciers, to meet them face-to-face, and to celebrate a sense of wonder and God’s plan that we find only in Nature.

  We don’t know what Muir said to the Tlingit. But whatever it was, it worked.

  When Muir finished, Kadashan acknowledged that he liked sailing with “good luck people.” Toyatte stood and said his heart was strong again. Muir was a “great ice chief,” and Toyatte would take him where he needed to go. If the canoe became crushed in the ice, then Toyatte would have a good companion to wrap his arms around and travel with into the next world.

  REVEREND YOUNG could see that Muir was more than fearless; he was passionate yet serene, an inspiration to others. He would have made a brilliant preacher, a successful capitalist, or a great salesman, getting people to buy all sorts of things they didn’t need. But money didn’t interest him.

  The day after lecturing at a conference in Yosemite Valley earlier that year, where Muir had shared the stage with Young’s Presbyterian supervisor, Sheldon Jackson, it was Muir, not Jackson, who had one hundred people follow him on a hike—he called it a “saunter”—up Eagle Point Trail. Jackson had spoken on the heaven up there while Muir had rhapsodized on the heaven right here, the earth at our feet. And it was Muir, the charismatic naturalist, who won the most disciples.

  Young also saw in Muir a wild child who despite his talents as a perfect instrument of God would suffocate inside a church. “Muir was a devout theist,” he wrote:

  The Fatherhood of God and the Unity of God, the immanence of God in nature and his management of all the affairs of the universe, was his constantly reiterated belief. He saw design in many things which the ordinary naturalist overlooks, such as the symmetry of an island, the balancing branches of a tree, the harmony of colors in a group of flowers, the completion of a fully rounded landscape.

  John Muir knew his scripture. His father, Daniel, had pounded the Bible into him and his seven brothers and sisters, sparing none. A so-called “preaching elder,” Daniel was a stern and imposing disciple of a religious sect that railed against the professional clergy of Wisconsin, those “reverend dandies,” he called them. Arriving at a schoolhouse in his black suit and chimney pot hat, children in tow, he would lead families in Sunday service, singing hymns and delivering his sermon and praying for forty-five minutes straight, his head up and eyes closed as if in a trance.

  “The Muirs all sacrificed much to the cause of making money to carry on the Lord’s work,” wrote biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe, referring to life on the family farm, “but beyond question the children paid the greatest price. John as the eldest son bore the brunt of the toil.” He had barely turned twelve, in 1850, when his father put him to work behind a plow. “Tis dogged as does it,” John would say, using the Scottish folk adage to help him get through the backbreaking day, his sweaty head barely rising above the plow handles.

  When the hired men complimented him on his straight furrows, his efficiency and speed, John savored their praise, something he never got from his father. Four years later, when Daniel bought a half-section (320 acres) to build their new home at Hickory Hill, and make good money raising wheat for the Crimean War, John protested. War profiteering was wrong, he said. Men should occupy small tracts of land to make a living, not large tracts to make a killing.

  Daniel would hear none of it. The money would help build orphan asylums, hospitals, and schools, and fund missionary work. While he studied his Bible in the parlor downstairs, preparing like Abraham to sacrifice his own son if need be, Daniel’s three skinny boys, John, David, and Dan Junior, would rise each winter morning, slip their cold feet into frozen boots, and go to work all day in the frigid Wisconsin air. Years later, David would write to his older brother:

  John, do you remember our bedroom at Hickory Hill, on the north side—never smelt fire or sun, window none too tight, three in a bed, Dan in the middle, and quilts frozen about our faces in the morning, and how awful cold it was to get up . . . and dress and go down to the kitchen barefooted. Oo-oo-oo, it makes me shiver to think of it, and going to Portage with loads of corn, running behind the wagon to keep warm and having to eat frozen bread for lunch.

  John recalled, “No pains were taken to diminish or in any way soften the natural hardships of this pioneer life.”

  When it came time to dig a well, Father refused to use the new explosive called dynamite, and instead put his children to work digging by hand. As the hole deepened, John found himself in the shaft using a chisel against hard sandstone. At one
point, eighty feet down, he grew faint and called out in a weak voice. Father yelled from above to get into the bucket. By the time they hauled him up, John was unconscious.

  “Old Man Muir works his children like cattle,” the neighbors said.

  A few days later John was back down in the dark shaft. He dug ten more feet and struck good water.

  A PRISONER of his own convictions, Daniel Muir believed that struggle and misery unlocked the door to everlasting salvation. Paradise was not an earthly kingdom; it awaited us in heaven, but only if we suffered down here doing daily obedience to God’s commandments. Whenever he headed down a Wisconsin road to save a soul or rebuke a sinner, his children, free of his long shadow, would launch into mischief. John was the most spirited; he would dance about, his limber body fluid and strong, his mind quick to make up a ballad, or to pretend to play the bagpipes and do a jig while his sisters giggled, and his mother, Ann, smiled as she knit by the stove.

  Once Father returned, dour-faced and pious, the house became solemn again.

  They had no fireplaces, only the single wood cookstove in what John called “a barren empty shell” of a home. Despite its severity, this is where he first discovered his inventiveness in things mechanical, and more important, in ways of thinking, seeing, and being. “His inventive genius was in conflict with his spiritual longings,” wrote Gretel Ehrlich:

  He was pulled by passions he had just begun to define, yet he had to make his way in the world. How could he find a profession that did not harbor this conflict—the factory versus the wilderness, spirituality versus practicality? He wanted to make a contribution to society somehow, but it had to be on his own terms—that is, outside the conventions of a civilization that he felt showed no real concern for the happiness and well-being of living things and no regard for the world’s beauty.