by Heacox, Kim
Something amazing was happening.
In the final decade of a century that saw a blistering expansion of civilization, the accumulation of great wealth and urbanization of abject poverty, a stupendous growth in industry, and the accelerated plundering of natural beauty from coast to coast, America held up a mirror and asked some hard questions. It began to save the best of itself. Just in time. This was no insignificant act, moralists knew. They wondered: Could this nation, still young and bountiful, stand before that bounty and practice restraint? Leave the apple unpicked? Improve on the progress of man?
No, said one writer.
Yes, said another.
CHAPTER SEVEN
moneyfest destiny
ALWAYS A PROVOCATEUR, Mark Twain, Muir’s contemporary, called it like he saw it. The truth about America was not the glittering patriotism, prosperity, and virtuous hard work so often cherished and recited by businessmen and civic leaders. The real deal was darker, he said: a tawdry, opportunistic land-grab money-grub dressed up by boosters and boomers as righteous manifest destiny. “Truth is stranger than fiction,” Twain famously quipped, “but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
Muir biographer Donald Worster observed that Twain’s novel The Gilded Age (coauthored with Charles Dudley in 1873, a book that would give the second half of the century its name) portrayed America’s noble experiment in liberal democracy as “a farce,” wherein the authors, “poked wicked fun at the something-for-nothing attitude that seemed to have driven out all virtue and sincerity.” Mark Twain was the quintessential writer-as-critic: witty, wry, wise, lyrical, bitter, and unapologetic, challenging America’s cherished myths. For that’s all they are, he said: myths.
America’s favorite novelist didn’t wade into the shallow end of the pool of truth where others made a sport of self-congratulation; he dove into the deep end that had no hard bottom and swam to the unpopular conclusion that mankind was not so kind. Man was, in fact, “not made for any useful purpose, for the reason that he hasn’t served any; that he was most likely not even made intentionally; and that his working his way up out of the oyster bed to his present position was probably [a] matter of surprise and regret to the Creator.”
Twain’s bitterness would grow when he lost his beloved daughter Susy to meningitis when she was just twenty-four. “It’s one of the mysteries of our nature,” he would write, “that a man, totally unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live.”
John Muir never suffered such loss. Where Mark Twain saw hopelessness—even despair in his later years—Muir saw hope. The successful campaigns of 1890 to create Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks were beacons of inspiration. Think of it: A magazine story appears in August, citizens write letters, Congress responds and passes a bill in September; the president signs it into law in October. Man could and would improve upon himself, Muir believed. Though, in a sobering paradox of his own making, it would not happen until his back was against the wall and he faced destruction on all sides.
But last-minute revelations and resolutions were better than none at all. According to historian William Cronon, Muir was “a kind of ecstatic holy man” who found God in nature and goodness in men. Not all men, but enough of them. What society needed every so often was a catalyst, a Wordsworth, Emerson, or Thoreau to turn things around. Little did Muir know that his name would one day belong in that same pantheon, that he too would speak for the voiceless and change the way we see the world.
IN SOME RESPECTS John Muir never left Scotland, and this benefited him; it gave him emotional distance from the more unsavory aspects of America, something Mark Twain, raised in Missouri, never had. All his life Muir held dear his childhood home in Dunbar, on the Firth of Forth, roughly forty kilometers east of Edinburgh. He’d confess, “My love of my own Scottish land seems to grow with every pulse so that I cannot see the name or hear it but a thrill goes through every fibre of my body.”
According to Muir biographer Steven J. Holmes:
Muir’s notes on Scotland contain very little reference to agriculture, which would have been the dominant influence on the landscape around Dunbar. Although this omission was partly grounded in the relative weight of his childhood impressions, it also probably reflected his own impatience with and rejection of the farming life he had experienced in Wisconsin. Scotland could function as a powerful symbol and ideal for Muir only if it were not associated with the pains and struggles of the present—but it still had to carry the power and emotion of the past.
The highlands and the coast, the historic castles and winding roads and Edinburgh itself, seat of the Scottish Enlightenment and its great university (which once had more students than Oxford and Cambridge combined)—this was Muir’s Scotland, a vanishing point, a place where he could disappear into the mists of time.
This affinity for his homeland de-Americanized him enough to reject militarism in general and the American Civil War in particular. A young pacifist with no fixed identity in the grinding world of machines and men, he had buried himself in his university studies in Wisconsin, then went to Canada for two years.
Before the war, Emerson said:
[W]e valued ourselves as cool calculators; we were very fine with our learning and culture, with our science that was of no country, and our religion of peace;—and now a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church. It is the day of the populace.
Muir cared little for “the populace.” Wisconsin in the 1860s was a sleepy western nebulae compared to New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, those tight bustling spiral galaxies of the known eastern universe where young men picked up arms and onlookers jumped into carriages, and they headed off to Bull Run as if to partake in a sporting event.
Back then, the war excited Muir not at all; he didn’t even want to talk about it. What excited him was Emerson’s science of no country. God’s splendors. Nature without borders.
Rather than take the entire curriculum at Madison, Muir said he “picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world to me, and a little Greek and Latin and Botany and Geology, and when I got apparently all I could get from the University, I quietly walked off without saying anything about a diploma—without graduating.”
Twain, two and a half years older than Muir, walked away as well. After enlisting in a local Confederate unit in Missouri in 1861, he lasted only two weeks and headed west to California, apparently charmed not one bit by others’ zeal for fighting and boasting.
PRIOR TO THE CIVIL WAR, America’s self-identity was largely measured by how the new nation distanced itself from Europe and European influences. The war fractured that image into many sharp pieces to create a new America, war-torn but ambitious, John Muir’s America. It was a nation still in search of what it was and could be, flexing new muscles, evangelical and egalitarian, reaching west into the frontier, inventive and insatiable, enamored with industrial progress yet also shaken and looking back to ask what exactly happened, and why.
The Civil War was—and to this day remains—the most traumatic and transformational event in US history. More than 625,000 dead. Families and communities ravaged. An entire Southern culture and way of life, gone, in some places burned to the ground. And in the aftermath, a time called the “reconstruction,” a nation attempted to rebuild.
“In the devastated South,” author David Von Drehle would observe, “writers and historians kindled comforting stories of noble cavaliers, brilliant generals and happy slaves, all faithful to the glorious lost cause.” People everywhere seemed to forget what Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address: the entire nation, North and South, profited greatly from slavery and then paid for it. Slaves in 1860 contributed more to the US economy than America’s railroads, f
actories, banks, or ships. In what the South called “The War of Northern Aggression,” an entire economy was brought to its knees because it was based on something immoral; built on the subjugation of one race by another. It had to end.
The Founding Fathers knew they had planted a time bomb in the US Constitution when they failed to address slavery. It took seventy-five years to explode. And now a nation ravaged by war was expanding west and casting itself anew, displacing tribes and stringing barbed wire and calling it good, getting something for nothing. The nation was warming itself yet again, Mark Twain would say, with comfortable stories of savage Indians and innocent pioneers. All lies.
EVERY TEN YEARS, beginning in 1790, the Superintendent of the Census counted the US population and mapped areas of “settlement” from east to west. Beyond those areas lay the “frontier,” delineated by a line running north–south. In the beginning the frontier stretched all the way to the Pacific. Exactly how far, nobody knew. This was sixteen years before Meriwether Lewis would return from his epic expedition and confer with Thomas Jefferson in the White House, astonishing the president with William Clark’s “memory map,” drawn to within 1 percent accuracy for distance. To qualify as a “settled area,” the land needed six people or more per square mile, all “tax-paying non-Indians.”
In 1800 the frontier began along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1810 it retreated west beyond the Ohio River Valley. In 1850 it lay entirely west of the Mississippi River. By 1880 it began in western Nebraska and Kansas. And in 1890, a century after the census began, the map showed no more frontier, due in large part to a growing spider-work of railroads and, according to the census, “to towns and cities that occur regularly enough to disrupt the appearance of a clear, unbroken line separating the generally settled area from the frontier.” In effect, the American frontier was gone. The land was settled.
What did this mean?
Prior to 1890 there had always been another horizon to chase, a new field to plow, a valley to settle, virgin forests to fell. This “next ridge syndrome,” as some historians have called it, gave Americans a great sense of opportunity, even urgency, as they moved west. While some wanted to just “get by,” many wanted to “get rich.” How exactly? “Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must,” wrote Mark Twain in a scathing newspaper essay lamenting the loss of morality in America.
More than a few thinkers, writers, artists, and educators deplored the elimination of wilderness from the American landscape, but they did little to stop it. The economic juggernaut was too powerful and immense, always expanding, growing and feeding on everything, including itself. Americans routinely patted themselves on the back with one hand while swinging an axe with the other, convinced they were doing the right thing, making the world a better place, a utopia perhaps, Thomas Jefferson’s pastoral ideal, a place without poverty and hunger.
MORE THAN one hundred years earlier, political economist Adam Smith had introduced his notion of “the invisible hand of the market”—each man out to maximize his own gains would benefit society as a whole. This central justification of laissez-faire economic philosophy said self-interest would generate socially desirable ends through fair competition, lower costs, and better markets. Vigorous Economic Growth Forever became the great American secular religion. Never mind that the world was only so big, or that economies grow while ecosystems do not. Economists would find a way around that.
John Muir called it the “gobble, gobble school of economics,” and added that “nothing dollarable is safe.”
Muir’s fellow critic Mark Twain was more sarcastic and direct: “Money is God. Gold and greenbacks and stock—father, son, and the ghost of the same—three persons in one: these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.”
While Mark Twain wrote his best novels in the 1880s and would later have financial difficulties of his own, John Muir amassed significant wealth getting his hands dirty growing and selling fruit. By the end of 1890, back from Alaska, with the national park campaigns behind him, according to historian Donald Worster,
[Muir] wanted to spend the remainder of his days teaching Americans to take a new attitude toward nature. He hoped to bring greed under the control of ethics, aesthetics, and enlightened self-interest, and his strategy for doing so was to join the movement to conserve nature and natural resources, one of the great reforms of the so-called “Gilded Age” that Twain neither acknowledged nor appreciated.
IN 1891, with urging from influential members of the Boone and Crocket Club (a New York City–based organization of gentlemen hunter/naturalists founded by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell), an amendment to a general land law glided through Congress authorizing the president to create “forest reserves” by withdrawing federal land from public domain. President Benjamin Harrison immediately put the law to work.
In May of 1892, two professors at the University of California, Berkeley, organized a meeting in an attorney’s office in San Francisco and sent out invitations “for the purpose of forming a ‘Sierra Club.’ Mr. John Muir will preside.” They would model themselves after the Appalachian Mountain Club. While Muir typically shied away from formal leadership, he accepted the title of president, a position he would hold the rest of his life. He returned home ecstatic, where a supper guest said, “I had never seen Mr. Muir so animated or happy before. Hitherto, his back to the wall, he had carried on his fight to save the wilderness. In the Sierra Club he saw the crystallization of the dreams and labor of a lifetime.”
In less than a month the Sierra Club was fighting a bill financed by the timber industry to open more forests to commercial logging by reducing the boundaries of Yosemite National Park. Muir complained, “this formal, legal, un-wild work is out of my line.” But the stakes were too high for him to ignore. This was his new life: making appointments, calling meetings, writing letters, winning votes. The glaciers of Alaska would have to wait.
Soon Muir’s little club had two-hundred-plus members and was on its way to becoming one of the largest and most effective conservation organizations in the world. Muir would exhort his troops to marshal on, for this was the good fight, “part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it.” This, too, was a war about moral justice, one worth fighting. For John Muir, the greedy destruction of the natural world was just as criminal as slavery, perhaps more so.
Rudolf Diesel patented his new internal combustion engine that same year; Walt Whitman and Alfred Lord Tennyson, two literary giants, died. Tchaikovsky wrote The Nutcracker, and a Swedish physicist/chemist named Svante Arrhenius began to speculate on the “hydrocarbon problem”: the worldwide effects of burning coal, and later, oil. He spoke of Europeans “evaporating our coal mines into the air” since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1700s. Would such burning, increasing every year with population and industrialization around the world, add to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere? And would that atmospheric CO2 act as a greenhouse gas to trap long-wave solar energy (as heat) and raise the surface temperature of the Earth?
Arrhenius thought it might.
HARRY FIELDING REID returned to Glacier Bay that summer and occupied Camp Muir for two months, the cabin still standing. Accompanied by two hired hands, he explored the west arm of the bay where John Muir, S. Hall Young, and five Tlingits traveled by canoe in 1879. Since then, Grand Pacific Glacier had retreated roughly four miles on its eastern face to unveil most of Russell Island, and eight miles on its western flank, where it had separated into a second glacier that Reid named for his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.
The trip was not without adventure. Reid and his party lost their boat three times to twenty-foot tides that floated it away; each time somebody had to swim for it in ice-choked waters barely above freezing. The rain seldom relented. “It is now half-past nine and raining pretty hard,” Reid wrote. “We have concluded that there are m
any infallible signs of rain in this region. If the sun shines, if the stars appear, if there are clouds or if there are none; these are all sure indications. If the barometer falls, it will rain; if the barometer rises, it will rain; if the barometer remains steady, it will continue to rain.”
Schooled in math and physics but deeply interested in the dynamics of glaciers, Reid created dozens of detailed sketches, made many photographs, and over time would produce twenty-four notebooks of his fieldwork in Glacier Bay. He closely measured the rates of ice flow, and he developed a theory on how tidewater glaciers maintained their terminal shapes while losing mass. He explored areas of ice loss along the eastern flank of Muir Glacier (that would one day open into Adams Inlet) and did measurements on rates of flow that disagreed so widely with G. F. Wright’s work of 1886 that Reid called them “irreconcilable . . . either that one set [of measurements] was in error or that there was a remarkable change in the motion of the glacier between our visits.”
Inspired by the writings of John Muir, many scientists and photographers visited Glacier Bay in the 1880s and 1890s, documenting the positions of glaciers. They created records that today are an important contribution to our understanding of glacial history in Alaska.
Photo courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center
Reid consulted with Captain Carroll, who visited Muir Glacier every summer. Carroll said, “For the years 1890, 1891, and 1892 there was more ice coming from Muir Glacier than there was in any of the seven years previous to 1890. I never saw so much ice coming from the glacier, before or since, as there was in that year (1890).”
