by Heacox, Kim
The famed naturalist’s tempest-tossed exploration of Glacier Bay confirmed his geologic theories. But in the following week, Muir was forced to re-examine his understanding of humanity, wild or civilized, as he witnessed the fortitude of an unconquered people. For four nights Muir delivered the only sermon of his life to a thousand or more Chilkat and Chilkoot Tlingits.
Warriors told him they were preparing to travel south to collect blankets as blood money for a Chilkat woman who had died drinking whiskey supplied by Hootsenoo Tlingits on Admiralty Island. It might get nasty, and turn to killing. They asked Young and Muir to pray for them.
Muir gave five talks altogether, but he didn’t speak on Christ and salvation as Young did. For his entire adult life, Muir would keep his views on formal religion largely to himself. He spoke instead on brotherhood and respect and getting along, on the brutality of war and the terrible cost of slavery that had befallen the United States, and on the strengths and weaknesses of all men, the importance of finding common good in the gifts of Nature and the wild earth.
When Muir finished the last of his talks, an old Tlingit shaman stood and said that for many years he’d heard white men speak as if on another side of a loud river from the Tlingits; white men always wanting gold, furs, the best deal for the least amount of money, seeking only their own good—until now. For the first time, with Muir and Young, the shaman said, “the Indian and the white man are on the same side of the river, eye to eye, heart to heart.”
As more men spoke, Muir watched an attractive slave girl bring Chief Sathitch food and light his pipe. The next morning, as Muir and the others prepared to travel south, Stickeen John overheard Sathitch tell the slave girl that after hearing the sermons of Muir and Young, he intended to send her to school and dress her well and raise her in every way like a daughter.
REVEREND YOUNG may have intrigued the Tlingits, but John Muir charmed and dazzled them; he was the better speaker, by far. They wanted to keep the ice-chief, to have him live among them so they might know God and all his gifts, how better to live and die. If Muir stayed, the Chilkats told him they would always obey him; they would build him a church and a school, pick up stones from his paths to make them smooth for his feet, and give him as many wives as he desired.
Muir and company considered paddling upriver to visit the fierce Tlingits of Klukwan, where the whiskey was flowing and the guns loaded for a warm welcome. But due to a perceived insult to a Chilkat chief a few months earlier, Toyatte was not welcome there. Muir decided to head south. “Just as we were leaving,” he wrote, “the chief who had entertained us so handsomely requested a written document to show that he had not killed us, so in case we were lost on the way home he could not be held accountable in any way for our death.”
They left on a Saturday morning and made good time all that day, while the next day, being Sunday, they stayed in camp, “though the wind was fair and it is not a sin to go home,” wrote a frustrated Muir. The next day Reverend Young wished to stop and preach to the Auke Tlingits, but Toyatte feared the Aukes, called them a “bad lot.” They were the same tribe that had given chase to Lieutenant Whidbey and his men in 1794.
Muir wanted to inspect every glacier, as if each were a book like the others, similar in general characteristics yet distinctive in its specifics. Some were a deep, compelling blue, others pale and white. Some were heavy with overburden, others clean and gleaming. Some were steep and twisted and tortured by crevasses as they spilled down tight mountain valleys; others ran straight and on a gentle gradient that enabled them to wear few wrinkles, as if they’d had an easier life.
Early field sketches by John Muir show a keen interest in glaciers and glacial topography. His sketches from California (in the early and mid-1870s) reveal pocket glaciers hidden high in the mountains, while those from Alaska (shown here) reveal large glaciers that run for tens of miles and dominate entire valleys.
Reproductions courtesy of Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific
ANY MAN with imagination could see that glaciers had sculpted coastal Alaska and been much larger once, in the past, maybe many times in the past; they had shaped everything from mountain summits to the shore. The Alaska John Muir found in 1879 was a mountainous geography punctuated by ice, while in the past it must have been an icy geography punctuated by mountains. All of Lynn Canal, Stephens Passage, and Chatham Strait—the primary waterways of northern Southeast Alaska—were filled by rivers of ice thousands of years ago, thousands of feet thick. More recently, only hundreds of years ago, ice had filled all of Glacier Bay. The scale might change, but the processes remained the same. Ice had been shaping this land for a long time, and—on a smaller scale—was shaping it still.
Muir found kame terraces on the mountainsides and recessional moraines along the shore, telltale signatures of glaciers. In the forest he found erratics—boulders carried by glaciers from high in the mountains and deposited at lower elevations. He’d found them years before at Olmsted Point and elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada, his “Range of Light”; he surmised, as Louis Agassiz had in the Alps, that the entire region owed its morphology to glaciers.
Rubbish, said Josiah Whitney, chief geologist for the state of California. What does this Muir know, this man with no academic or scientific credentials, this “mere sheepherder,” an “ignoramus.” Muir at the time, in the early 1870s, was living a handyman existence in Yosemite Valley, taking whatever work he could find. Whitney insisted that the valley had been created by catastrophic down-faulting. Not glaciers.
How did Muir respond? Go see for yourself, he told Whitney. With two good legs and two good lungs you too can hike high into the mountains and find their secrets. You’ll see striations everywhere, the grooves in granite bedrock where rocks embedded in the flanks of the glaciers were dragged along by glacial action, scouring parallel lines that still showed the direction of ice flow, as readable as fox prints in fresh snow.
Agassiz had found striations and erratics all over Europe, from Switzerland to Scotland, and later, after he became a professor at Harvard, in the United States. The name erratic comes from the Latin errare, to wander, which to Muir made perfect sense.
As they flow downslope and undercut mountain flanks, glaciers collect boulders and rocks that roll onto them and go for a ride, sometimes for hundreds of miles, until the glaciers encounter warmer conditions at lower elevations, melt away, and drop the wanderers.
Though a wanderer himself, John Muir didn’t ride a glacier to Yosemite or Alaska. But in a metaphorical way he did. Raised in northern geographies that harbored the ghosts of glaciers—Scotland and Wisconsin—he became a keen observer. He developed ice age eyes. Even as a boy, he listened to the land in ways others did not. He regarded the long view, the wisdom of rocks. He matured and left behind the factory for the wilderness, the trappings of secure employment for adventure, the seduction of money for freedom. He followed his passion and went looking for that which shaped the places that shaped him—glaciers; in so doing, he made his life extraordinary.
“Man, man, you ought to have been with me” he once said to Reverend Young upon returning to camp after a big adventure on a glacier,
You’ll never make up what you lost today, I’ve been wandering through a thousand rooms of God’s crystal temple. I’ve been a thousand feet down in the crevasses, with matchless domes and sculpted figures and carved ice-work all about me. Solomon’s marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feast my soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What a great death that would be.
YES, WELL, the others in the canoe were not ready to die. Not on this day or any other. It was a sometimes difficult and perilous trip back to Fort Wrangell, beset with strong November winds and cold temperatures. Muir often exhorted the others into “the beyond,” to visit out-of-the-way glaciers, and many t
imes Toyatte had to say no. More than once they nearly fetched up on rocks and lost their canoe.
Around the campfire one night, old Toyatte, his patience growing thin, told of similar adventures in his youth, when his canoe smashed into rocks and he had to swim to shore with a gun in his teeth. Turning to Muir, he asked if the ice-chief could today manage to swim ashore in these cold waters, and if so, could he make a fire without matches? And find his way to Fort Wrangell without food or a canoe?
The next day, as if he’d heard none of Toyatte’s caveat, Muir again beckoned the party into icy waters toward a magnificent tidewater glacier that thundered with icefalls, its tall seracs collapsing into the sea. Toyatte again, concerned for the safety of his canoe and crew, said it would be foolish to take such a risk so close to the end of their journey.
“Oh never fear, Toyatte,” Muir replied. “You know we are always lucky—the weather is good. I only want to see the Thunder Glacier for a few minutes, and should the bergs be packed dangerously close, I promise to turn back and wait until next summer.”
Muir was already planning his return. Never mind his impending marriage to Louie Strentzel in California, whose patience was tested daily.
They got to within two miles of the glacial face, “a blue, jagged ice-wall,” according to Muir, “one of the most imposing of the first-class glaciers I had as yet seen.” Today it’s named after Muir’s geologist friend Joseph LeConte, who supported his theories on glacial history in Yosemite Valley.
To navigate back out, with ice hemming them in on all sides, Toyatte put Kadashan in the bow to point the way. Later, off the mouth of the Stikine River, with everybody exhausted, they ran aground several times on the muddy bottom. Finally, Wrangell Island hove into view, and on November 22 they arrived back. (They had left Fort Wrangell on October 14.) When Reverend Young said he was anxious for news, Muir quipped, “there could be no news of importance about a town.”
As for his Indian companions on this remarkable canoe journey of eight hundred to nine hundred miles in forty days, Muir said “they all behaved well . . . under tedious hardships without flinching for days or weeks at a time; never seemed in the least nonplussed; were prompt to act in every exigency; good as servants, fellow travelers, and even friends.”
The mail steamer had departed eight days before. Muir would have to wait another month for passage south to Portland. He declined an invitation to live with Reverend Young and his family, choosing instead to live alone as he compiled his notes and finished sketches from his epic journey. As winter deepened and the mercury dropped, everything grew still, and Muir basked in his Alaska monastery. He seemed in no great hurry to return to a world busy with its buying and selling, worn down by the feet of too many people.
“YOU MUST BE SOCIAL, JOHN, you must make friends . . . lest your highest pleasures, taken selfishly, become impure.”
More than a few scholars have marveled over the influence Jeanne Carr had on young John Muir while he was a university student in Madison, and later, in California, as he explored the Sierra Nevada and began to blossom into a nationally acclaimed writer, thinker, and environmental activist. Her letters to him were often flattering and encouraging; some were puritanical. She was the one who had matched him with Louie Strentzel, writing Louie, “I want you to meet my John Muir.”
“Write as often as you can,” Jeanne once told John as he set off on another adventure. “Your letters keep up my faith that I shall lead just such a life myself one day.” She never did. Photos show Jeanne Carr as a woman of her time, strong-willed but risk-averse, a conformist despite her curiosity and keen intellect, her hair in a tight bun, her dress Victorian and countenance severe, a chicken in a coop. While everything about Muir—his hair, beard, dress, and eyes—appears feral, playful, a contrarian. A fox on the run.
She once lamented to him that she was “a woman whose life seems always to be used up in little trifling things, never labeled ‘done,’ and laid away as a man’s may be. Then as a woman I have often to consider not the lilies only, in their perfection, but the humble honest wayside grasses and weeds, sturdily filling their places through such repeated discouragements.”
They found a smooth compatibility, Jeanne and John, and seemed to prosper greatly from each other. They shared a deep love of learning and natural history, and a dedication to personal development. According to biographer Stephen Fox:
What she brought Muir was his first prolonged contact with a mind of substantial range and ambition. She told him what to read, introduced him to important people, and extended his horizons in a dozen directions. She reinforced his dawning sense that God was best appreciated in nature. “It is only from our Great Mother,” she proclaimed, “that we really learn the lessons of our Father’s love for us.”
Jeanne’s husband, Professor Ezra Slocum Carr, John’s geology and chemistry teacher at the University of Wisconsin, proved himself a difficult man and got fired. He later found a teaching post at the University of California at Berkeley, where again he’d get fired, but where his wife could continue to shape her favorite project: the genius of John Muir.
She loved it that John loved botany but was horrified by his later infatuation with glaciers, those icy rivers that could turn him distant and cold. John’s father, Daniel, had also condemned geology, saying the young science was blasphemous and contradicted the Bible.
IN 1650, Irish Archbishop James Ussher had divined from scripture that the Earth was close to 6,000 years old, and was in fact fully formed on an October night in the year 4004 BC. Legions of biblical scholars, clerics, and preachers had lined up to teach Ussher’s interpretation. In 1830, with the publication of Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell announced that it was time to wake up and “free the science from Moses.” In 1859, when John Muir was an impressionable twenty-one years old, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species turned the world upside down (or right-side up, depending on one’s sensibilities). It was such a radical idea—evolution by natural selection—that Louis Agassiz, the most famous natural historian in America in the 1860s, never did buy into it. Even Lyell proclaimed, “Darwin goes too far.”
But Jeanne Carr wrote, “Darwin has left us no escape, from the necessity of finding our titles to respect in our own characters and not those of our forefathers.”
People who knew her well—she was a seventh-generation New England Puritan raised with values that honored equality—said she played with black children and invited servants to her wedding. She always wanted to do something remarkable. In John Muir she found her chance.
“You have sent me all my best friends,” Muir once wrote to her. She wanted the world to know him, and him to know the world, not just the beauties of nature but the minds of its best thinkers, that he might shape them as they shaped him. Were it not for Jeanne Carr, Muir never would have met Ralph Waldo Emerson, the “Great Man from the East,” who in 1871, at age sixty-eight, visited Yosemite with a gaggle of Boston literati. John at the time was thirty-three. Reserved at first, Muir stood back as others surrounded Emerson, eager to hear what he had to say. As the days went by, Muir built up his courage, knowing that Emerson had been told about him. When finally they met, they talked at length and savored every minute. Muir showed Emerson his books, field notes, and sketches, and his humble lodgings in a cracker-box room above a lumberyard.
Emerson no doubt understood the value of a young man paying tribute to—and learning from—an older man. He’d done it himself, in 1825, when he journeyed to Braintree to visit John Adams, second president of the United States; Emerson wanted to glean whatever wisdom he could just before the old man died. Now it was time to pass the torch. He spoke to Muir about his famous disciple, Henry David Thoreau (who’d died nine years before, in 1862, at age forty-four) and transcendentalism. Muir had yet to read Thoreau’s Walden, but he’d read Emerson’s essays, filling their margins with dissenting arguments. For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insuff
iciently wild; they thought from the head down, not the feet up.
When it came time for Emerson to leave the mountains and travel by horseback down to a world of noisy hotels, Muir begged him to stay and sleep on the ground, in the grove of big trees. “You are yourself a Sequoia,” he told the old man. “Stop and get acquainted with your brethren . . . It will do you good.” But Emerson’s acolytes, always worried about the old man’s health, prevailed; Emerson rode away. He later added John Muir to his list of the most inspiring people he’d ever met, the list he called “My Men.”
NOT UNTIL late December did Muir leave Fort Wrangell, telling S. Hall Young to be ready for next summer, with a good canoe and a crew. He’d be back. There were more glaciers to explore.
Louie Strentzel, his fiancée, had hoped he’d be home by Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then New Year’s. “O John, John,” she had written, “do not stay too long. Surely you can go again next year with the new summer . . .” And she added, “Ah me, what a blessed Thanksgiving.”
But it was a sad Thanksgiving. She received no letters, and knew of John’s whereabouts only through articles he sent to the San Francisco Bulletin. “For his lonely fiancée,” wrote Stephen Fox, “it was a distressing, even humiliating situation. Lost in his glaciers he was—even if unintentionally—hurting her grievously. The reaction of his future in-laws may be imagined. Six years had passed since Jeanne Carr first suggested the match.”
In early January he broke a three-month silence with a dispassionate letter from Portland saying he’d be home soon, after exploring the Columbia River Gorge and giving lectures to satisfy last-minute requests. While her letters to him brimmed with love, his were cool, distant, matter-of-fact. The reluctant suitor, he arrived in San Francisco and kept to himself and close friends for several weeks, and finally showed up at the Strentzel house in mid-February. Despite his heel-dragging, it was, by all accounts, a happy reunion, and things thereafter went well.
