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

by Heacox, Kim

  John and Louie were married on April 14, 1880, one week before he turned forty-two. She was thirty-two. For the occasion, John cut his hair and borrowed a nice coat and a white shirt, and even considered hiring a second preacher, in case the first failed to show. Many of his friends, upon learning later of the marriage, were astonished by the news, as if a glacier had been corralled.

  The next day John went to work in the fruit orchards, a changed man.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  we must risk our lives in order to save them

  THE MONTHLY MAILBOAT, California, pulled into Fort Wrangell in early August 1880, and S. Hall Young stood on the wharf with everybody else. Waving eagerly from the boat rail was a familiar figure in a long, gray Ulster and Scotch cap. Young waved back. The California tied up, and John Muir bounded down the gangway, youthful and fleet-footed as ever. He embraced Young and said, “When can you be ready?”

  Young, a bit befuddled, inquired about Muir’s wife; he knew the exuberant naturalist had gotten married in April.

  “Man,” Muir said, “have you forgotten? Don’t you know we lost a glacier last fall?”

  Yes, they had left many glaciers unexplored, Young recalled. Muir would not be satisfied until he crawled into the blue sapphire heart of each one and touched its soul, learned its secrets. To Muir, glaciers were living beings, winter’s children, the offspring of tall mountains and deep snow.

  Muir explained, “My wife could not come . . . Get your canoe and crew and let us be off.”

  Muir was, in fact, concerned about his wife. He had left Louie pregnant and bedridden, her morning sickness lasting all day during the hottest time of the year. Yet she had insisted he go north. It would be good for him after nearly one hundred days of wearisome toil in the fruit fields.

  As he sailed up the British Columbia coast, deeper and deeper into wild country, Muir’s letters to her were more loving than a year earlier. “I shall make haste to you and reach you ere you have time to grieve and worry . . . I have been alone, as far as the isolation that distance makes, so much of my lifetime that separation seems more natural than absolute contact, which seems too good and indulgent to be true.”

  Hurry home, she told him, so together they could wait for their baby, what she called, “our own Precious Hope.”

  Once Muir arrived in Alaska, however, his letters to Louie stopped. He belonged again to the glaciers.

  Reverend Young had sad news. In early January, Chief Toyatte, a man of peace, the man Muir had called “the noblest old Roman of them all,” was shot and killed trying to mediate a dispute between two drunken bands of Tlingits. Toyatte had offered all his blankets to assuage the angered parties, asking them to put away their guns and go home. Young had stood with his hand on Toyatte’s shoulder when the shooting began, and the great man fell with a bullet through his heart.

  Years later, Young would recall “the darkest day of my life,” when Toyatte, “one of the simplest and grandest souls I ever knew, fell dead at my feet, and the tribe was tumbled back into barbarism; and the white man, who had taught the Indians the art of making rum, and the white man’s government, which had afforded no safety guard against such scenes, were responsible.”

  Muir was stunned and saddened to lose such a friend who, “never under any circumstances did I ever see him do anything, or make a single gesture, that was not dignified, or hear him say a word that might not be uttered anywhere.”

  Young introduced Muir to a Tlingit named Lot Tyeen, who was ready with a swift canoe, twenty-five feet long (ten feet shorter than Toyatte’s), five feet at the beam, with two small sails to be manned by the able crew: Lot Tyeen’s son-in-law, Hunter Joe, and a half-breed, Smart Billy.

  They took off in mid-August, eager for adventure. The Indians, in Muir’s words, welcomed “the work before them, dipping their oars in the exact time with hearty good will as we glided past island after island . . .”

  RIDING ALONG WAS a sixth member of the party, an indifferent little dog named Stickeen, a silky mutt—more terrier than anything, white and black, with tan on the face, almost smug in his standoffish manner. He contributed nothing to the expedition that Muir could see. Muir had never been a champion of domestic animals, preferring instead their wild cousins that lived free of men’s harsh and frivolous dominion. Self-­contained and aloof, Stickeen didn’t amuse others by fetching a stick or frisking about. He never sought to win favor, be petted, or share a blanket. He never obeyed an order.

  Young’s wife had received him as a wedding present, the missionary told Muir. Insisting that the little dog could swim like a seal and climb like a bear, Young made out a list of attributes so long that it implied the little dog would be, according to Muir, “the most interesting member of the party.”

  Muir agreed to bring him, a profound decision that would affect the rest of his life. The dog would give Muir his best adventure story ever, and one day Stickeen would help him settle into his own aging and growing domesticity.

  Stickeen often rode in the canoe with his head on the bowsprit, detached yet circumspect, wise in his own quiet way, keenly aware of everything that was about to happen. Whenever the canoe approached land, he would jump into the cold water and scamper ashore and into the forest to investigate things, disappearing for hours. When it came time to leave, the others would call for him and finally set off, assuming he was lost, only to see him swimming out to meet them from a distant point, far from where they had landed.

  After a few days, Muir stopped comparing Stickeen to other dogs he’d known.

  THEY EXPLORED the glaciers of Sumdum Bay, Taku Inlet, and Stephens Passage. So many, all alike yet each different in detail, all shapers of the land but also shaped by the land, hand and glove with the topography. All glaciers moved, Muir knew, and as they did they exerted tremendous forces on the land. He sketched and made notes based on his careful observations, how glaciers advanced and retreated, eroded and deposited. Every inlet, he could see, was a flooded Yosemite Valley, where the ocean had reclaimed topography previously occupied by ice. His canoe party was floating through a mountain range, the Coast Range of Alaska, where everything was in flux and changing into something else.

  In a huge way Alaska confirmed Muir’s theory that glaciers—not catastrophic down-faulting (as championed by Josiah Whitney)—had shaped the Sierra Nevada and its centerpiece, Yosemite Valley. Tectonics did raise mountains over many millions of years, but glaciers added the finishing touches; they were the chisel, the sandpaper, the lathe. As Muir saw it, you had to be open-minded, unblinded by rigid doctrine. Science and faith were inseparable. The best science wasn’t just quantitative, built on numbers; it was also qualitative, built on intuition. It demanded head knowledge, to be sure, but also heart and—most important—imagination. Alaska provided the natural laboratory and wild church of John Muir’s dreams, the place that held the answers to questions he’d not yet considered.

  Furthermore, he immediately recognized that indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures had a deep spiritual bond with the natural world, how they saw themselves as citizens—not masters—of the earth. This was part of his attraction to the Tlingits of southeast Alaska. They possessed great humility, courage, wisdom, and wit. They were authentic, grounded, tough, and deeply wise in the outdoors; they gave him his chance to be a true explorer, a Catlin, Bartram, or Audubon, those early artists and natural historians who saw the original America before it was subjugated and tamed. By 1849, when Daniel Muir brought his family to Wisconsin from Scotland, and John was just eleven years old, Audubon’s America was already gone.

  THE SCHISM between one way of thinking and another—a reverence for nature versus its subjugation—was easy to trace in Muir’s time (and still is today). On November 10, 1619, René Descartes, a French mathematician, had a revelation. Then only twenty-three, he was lying on the banks of the Danube River when he saw himself rise above the earth, a disembodied int
ellect, separate, supreme, while everything else below—all physical and biological processes, all organisms other than himself and his fellow man—worked according to precise mechanical laws. Nothing else had conscious thought.

  Man alone, Descartes convinced himself, was above nature; he was its master. Everything else was a vast treasure of inanimate resources we can—and should—exploit. Nature should be subdued; feelings suppressed. Years later, as a professor, Descartes would instruct his students to dissect live animals and pay no attention when the animals screamed. After all, they were just machines breaking down.

  In 1644 Descartes published Principia Philosophicae and cemented his stature as a premier thinker, declaring men as “lords and possessors of nature.” Four hundred years earlier, Thomas Aquinas had said man could kill animals “without any injustice,” and Francis Bacon, only one generation before Descartes, said, “the world is made for man, not man for the world.”

  These bookish men were products of their time; they saw nature as a beastly impediment to humankind’s improvement. Standing as they did with one foot still in the dark ages, they knew nothing about genetics, geology, ecology, or evolution, how the world worked, had evolved, was evolving. They had no way to know, and little reason to ponder, how everything in nature was interconnected. Man’s footprint on the earth back then was small, a tiny fraction of what it is today. The world was big and dangerous; people were small and vulnerable. Life was short and often rife with hardship. The flower was beautiful, the forest frightening. Best to cut it down.

  This was the slow-to-change culture in which John Muir found himself in his own time, trapped, a hopeless bleeding heart in a civilization enamored with money and machines.

  Muir knew Descartes was wrong. But to convince others, so proud of their progress, would be an uphill battle he’d fight for the rest of his life—a fight still being fought.

  MUIR had already proved himself capable of standing up to cruel authority. He had walked away from his father to find his own path and a better definition of goodness and success, one where nature could be his salve, not his slave, where the woods would preach to him a gentle sermon—not of dominion, but of harmony.

  A century before, philosopher David Hume, a member of the Scottish Enlightenment, had said sympathy was fundamental to one’s humanity, and a “feeling for the other” was central to one’s ethics and moral grounding. Planting seeds of insurrection, Hume added that one must distinguish between “what is” and “what ought to be.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau said the same thing: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

  Then came Darwin, announcing, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wondrous have been, and are being, evolved.”

  Like Copernicus and Galileo, Darwin broke the castle mirror; he took us out of the ivory tower and put us in the forest. Any crackpot could easily find a previous crackpot whose philosophical mutterings confirmed what he already thought to be true. By going deep into the mountains of California, and later Alaska, John Muir sidestepped the mutterings of men and forced upon himself the harsh realities of what it meant to be free of civilization’s chains and society’s mirrors, where philosophy meant little, and a man could go back to the original text: the wind, rain, and weather of a beautiful yet unforgiving place, the wildness we all came from.

  Years earlier, while hiking in Canada, he had dropped to his knees and cried upon discovering the perfection of a single flower, a calypso orchid; he’d grown still with admiration watching a water ouzel work the streams of the Sierra Nevada. But coastal rain forest Alaska, with its brown bears and blue ice, was something else entirely. Muir’s brightest benediction would be to find good company in the cold glaciers other men bypassed en route to the goldfields and timber mills. If America were to find—or invent—another vision of itself, it would have to be here, and now, on the far side of the continent. Muir could wait for a revolution, or he could be the revolution.

  When he walked away from Wisconsin and his overbearing father, young John walked away from everything: religion, society, culture, the rules of progress, the rules of the game. Just as a society handed down its rules to any individual, parents handed down rules to their children, and the children accepted them—even if the rules didn’t feel right or make any sense at all.

  Children are not critical thinkers; they cannot bear to identify the all-powerful parent as the source of their confusion and pain. They assume the problem is within them, and if damaged, they grow up wounded, losing faith in themselves and others around them.

  It’s not easy for children to reject their parents, just as it’s not easy for each new generation to reject its civilization.

  The more we are removed from nature, the more we are denied our birthright to play in forests, climb mountains, follow streams, and fall in love with meadows, to become creative, self-actualized, deeply intuitive. We come to rely on civilization to tell us what’s good and bad, what’s right, wrong, and essential to our success. The march of progress is a great thing, we are told; it’s the best thing, our destiny. Get on board. Go for a ride. Invest now.

  Railroads and steam engines, stock markets and canned foods, feathered hats and fur farms. Everything was possible in the promised future of 1880, the year John Muir paddled into the ice age with four men and a little dog.

  One day we’ll civilize all of North America, the boomers kept saying. It’s our manifest destiny. We’ll invent machines to provide us with everything. We’ll achieve a grand technological utopia, a material paradise and a universal wealth cleverly extracted from the inexhaustible forces of nature around us. We’ll live forever, above it all, and find eternal abundance and happiness. One day, any day, real soon.

  AGAIN AND AGAIN, the canoeists paddled late into the night, passing good campsites, beckoned on by Muir and his unquenchable desire to see glaciers. This voyage, beginning in mid-August, was two months earlier than the previous year’s epic, and Muir reveled in the fine summer weather. He and Young sat forward and paddled, while Lot Tyeen commanded from behind, sitting high in the stern. In the middle, Joe and Billy pulled on oars, Joe their cook and hunter, an excellent oarsman; Billy, only seventeen, their interpreter and Joe’s assistant. They put in long days and covered many miles, “against the protest of our Indians,” observed Reverend Young, “whose life of infinite leisure was not accustomed to such rude interruption. They could not understand Muir at all, nor in the least comprehend his object in visiting icy bays where there was no chance of finding gold and nothing to hunt.”

  Muir was tireless, relentless, rapturous, the ice-chief once again.

  “What a plucky little giant,” he effused, upon finding a tidewater glacier in Sumdum Bay, its icy features a marvelous deep blue, compressed by sheer granite walls on both sides, nothing like the broad-faced white giant glaciers of Glacier Bay. He went on: “To think of his shouldering his way through the mountain range like this! Samson, pushing down the pillars of the temple at Gaza, was nothing to this fellow. Hear him roar and laugh.”

  Muir named the glacier Young Glacier, for which Young, years later, wrote:

  [R]ight proud was I to see that name on the charts for the next ten years or more . . . but later maps have a different name. Some ambitious young ensign on a surveying vessel, perhaps, stole my glacier, and later charts gave it the name of Dawes. I have not found in the Alaskan statute books any penalty attached to the crime of stealing a glacier, but certainly it ought to be ranked as a felony of the first magnitude, the grandest of grand larcenies.

  According to Young, they spent days of “unmixed pleasure” among the glaciers. Muir loved it, scampering about like a mountain goat with little Stickeen at his heels, “unfussy as a
tree.” Not for another ten years would Muir once again be among the glaciers of Alaska, as the next decade would find him dedicated to his new life as a father, fruit farmer, and businessman.

  Northbound, the canoe party visited Taku Inlet and proceeded up Stephens Passage. Camped on the east side of Douglas Island, on Gastineau Channel, Muir found a streambed that promised gold, something he’d report to authorities in Sitka at the end of this canoe trip.

  Two prospectors, Joe Juneau and Richard Harris, would soon confirm Muir’s suspicions when, under the guidance of a Tlingit (who cajoled them upslope into today’s Silver Bowl Basin), they made a huge discovery. Thirty years later, the towns of Juneau and Douglas, facing each other across Gastineau Channel, would be home to the richest gold mines in the world, and Juneau would be the bustling new capital city of the territory of Alaska.

  S. Hall Young as he appeared as a young missionary in Alaska

  Photo courtesy of Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific

  WEST OF DOUGLAS ISLAND, the canoeists entered Icy Strait and visited Pleasant Island, where again Stickeen ran wild. Only after the canoe party pushed off did the dog come swimming after them, otterlike. Muir ordered them to turn around to pick him up. Hauled into the canoe, soaking wet, the little dog passed by everybody until he was between Muir’s knees, then shook himself dry. Muir pretended to give him a disapproving kick.

  They camped that night in a driving rain in Taylor Bay, near Cross Sound and the open Gulf of Alaska. To the north, Brady Glacier ascended into the wintry heart of the Fairweather Range, one of the highest coastal mountain ranges in the world. Immediately above the glacier, rising more than ten thousand feet above sea level, Mount La Perouse gathered snow in the storm. The French explorer Jean-Francois­ de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse had visited this region in 1786, and despite warnings from the local Tlingits to avoid certain treacherous areas, he lost two longboats in the vicious tide rips of Lituya Bay. Beneath a stone marker, the grieving Frenchman left a note, “At the entrance of this harbour perished twenty-one brave seamen. Reader, whoever thou art, mingle thy tears with ours.”