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

by Heacox, Kim

  We can imagine Reid applying his mathematical mind to the dynamics of Muir Glacier, any glacier for that matter. Why did rivers of ice retreat and advance at inconsistent rates, speed up, slow down, speed up again? Did it have to do with weather, climate, topography, bathymetry? Why did tidewater glaciers actively calve ice on some days but not on others? Did it have to do with temperature, tides, rainfall? Did ice waves pulse through a glacier? If so, at what speed? And what propagated them? Why did glaciers rule much of the terrestrial high latitudes long ago, cover most of Canada and mainland Europe, then retreat only to advance again, and retreat again, and advance and retreat over and over many times? Why these cycles? These oscillations?

  What excited Reid and other scientists about glaciers was elemental: They were beautiful, dynamic, mysterious, and perhaps sensitive; they responded to things we couldn’t see or fully understand. They had their own language, rhythms, and behavior; their own secrets to tell. Secrets about our world and how it worked. Secrets too compelling to ignore.

  ONE THING was certain, John Muir and his glacier had changed America’s image of Alaska from one of a frozen wasteland to that of a shimmering beauty. Aside from Muir himself, no single person was more responsible for this than Captain James Carroll. Already successful at transporting fish, lumber, mining equipment, gold ore, and liquor (most of it smuggled) between the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, Carroll had read Muir’s early magazine stories of Glacier Bay, consulted with Muir, and decided to add excursionists to his list.

  When in July 1883 he sailed the steamship Idaho into Glacier Bay, bringing people face-to-face with a living ice age, landing them on shore and naming the great gleaming glacier for John Muir, he effectively launched a new industry in Alaska: tourism. A little more than a century later, Southeast Alaska, crowned by Glacier Bay with its glaciers, whales, and bears, would be the most popular cruise ship destination in the world, with some vessels carrying as many as four thousand people.

  In 1884 Carroll steered the side-wheel steamer Ancon into Glacier Bay but the paddle wheels got “badly smashed” by the floating ice. Thereafter he mostly used the magnificent 330-foot Queen. Historian Theodore Catton would write, Captain Carroll, “brought more excursionists in subsequent years, and built a small dock in Muir Inlet and boardwalk over the moraine to the glacier’s surface . . .” where guests could climb up and walk atop the ice river dressed in their Victorian finery. By the early 1890s,

  [T]he Pacific Coast Steamship Company had three vessels, George W. Elder, City of Topeka, and Queen, sailing fortnightly from Tacoma and Portland to southeast Alaska during the excursion season of May through September. The package tour included a night in Victoria, followed by twelve days on the steamer. The highlight of the trip was Glacier Bay where the excursionists came “face to face with Muir Glacier.”

  According to author/photographer Dave Bohn, Captain Carroll was noted as a genial host who “constantly regaled his passengers with stories of the bay and his narrow escapes from collisions with icebergs . . .”

  When Carroll picked up Harry Fielding Reid at Camp Muir in September 1892, Reid told him about the retreat of Grand Pacific Glacier in the west arm of the bay, Russell Island emerging from under the ice, and Johns Hopkins Glacier, once a tributary of Grand Pacific, now spilling down from the highest peaks of the Fairweather Range, standing on its own and calving ice like crazy. Always up for an adventure, Carroll sailed the Queen into uncharted waters, naming today’s Queen and Rendu Inlets, and proving, according to Catton, “that large passenger vessels could maneuver in the confining fiords.”

  Missing on the Queen that trip was one of Captain Carroll’s favorite guests, journalist/adventurer Eliza Scidmore, who at age twenty-six first sailed with him to Glacier Bay on the momentous trip of July 1883, and again in 1884, and three more times after that. She would become the first female writer/editor at a new magazine called National Geographic, and over the next four decades she would travel the world, living at times in Switzerland and Japan. Her writings had done much—second only to John Muir—to warm the American public to a new, inviting Alaska.

  At Muir Glacier she had written:

  The crashes of falling ice were magnificent at that point and in the face of keen wind that blew over the icefield we sat on the rocks and watched the wondrous scene. The gloomy sky seemed to heighten the grandeur, and billows of gray mist, pouring over the mountains on either side, intensified the sense of awe and mystery.

  On her final trip in 1891, she had occupied the cabin at Camp Muir (the summer after it was built) and brought a female companion, an artist, a sportsman, a small boy and his dog, a Russian hunter, and a maid. All were awakened by icefalls throughout the night. And every day, Scidmore filled her journal with vivid impressions.

  She wasn’t alone. Sometime in the mid-1880s Muir Glacier had been established as a wonder of the world, and according to Dave Bohn, “descriptions of it became more and more complicated and ponderous. In other words, Scidmore’s evaluations had been mild and straightforward compared to what followed.”

  Alaska was for sale and other steamship companies were about to cash in, if they could. But this was nothing compared to the rush that would soon transform Alaska forever, when gold was discovered on the Klondike River, an upper tributary of the mighty Yukon that flowed 1,400 miles from Canada across Alaska into the Bering Sea.

  But that was later. By this point Alaska remained in the past, an afterimage of the ice age, beautiful, alluring, but in the past nonetheless. Though it had tough competition: the future.

  From about 1,800 feet up the western slope of Mount Wright, Muir Glacier in 1893 makes an impressive sight. Over the next one hundred years it will retreat thirty-plus miles. The site of Muir’s cabin, built in 1890, is barely visible far below, near where icebergs are stranded on Muir Point.

  Photo by Frank LaRoche, courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center

  A steamship off Muir Glacier. The adjacent slopes, recently deglaciated in 1896 when this photo was taken, are today covered in a forest dominated by Sitka spruce.

  Photo by Winter and Pond, courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center

  Summer tourists stand atop Muir Glacier enjoying what journalist Eliza Scidmore called “the wondrous scene.”

  Photo courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center

  NOWHERE was America’s industrial optimism and emerging exceptionalism on greater display than in Chicago in the summer of 1893, at the World’s Columbian Exposition to commemorate four hundred years of progress since the European discovery of the New World. The “Chicago World’s Fair,” as it was called, introduced people to a new sandwich called a hamburger, a new music called ragtime (played by young pianist Scott Joplin), and a belly dancer named “Little Egypt” doing the hootchy-kootchy. People could ride camels, donkeys, and a breathtaking, 264-foot-tall new machine called a Ferris wheel.

  A dazzling blend of education and entertainment, the fair rose like a dream on the shore of Lake Michigan, a city within itself, the so-called “White City,” as many of the buildings were made of white stucco and designed the way a city should be, said architect Daniel Burnham. Along with landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, cocreator of New York City’s Central Park, Burnham aimed for the beaux arts principles of design, using French neoclassical architecture based on symmetry, balance, and splendor. Covering more than 600 acres with 200 buildings, canals, and lagoons, and hosting 50,000 exhibits from 46 nations, the fair was magic. More than twenty-seven million people attended from May through October.

  One of them was John Muir.

  Dear Louie . . . I have been at the [World’s] Fair every day, and have seen the best of it, though months would be required to see it all.

  You know I called it a ‘cosmopolitan rat’s nest,’ containing much rubbish and commonplace stuff as well as things novel and precious. Wel
l, now that I have seen it, it seems just a rat’s nest still, and what do you think was the first thing I saw when I entered the nearest of the huge buildings? A high rat’s nest in a glass case about eight feet square, with stuffed wood rats looking out from the mass of sticks and leaves, etc., natural as life. So you see, as usual, I am “always right.”

  I most enjoyed the art galleries. There are about eighteen acres of paintings by every nation under the sun, and I wandered and gazed until I was ready to fall down from utter exhaustion . . . The view outside the buildings is grand and also beautiful . . . Last night the buildings and terraces and fountains along the canals were illuminated by tens of thousands of electric lights arranged along miles of lines of gables, domes, and cornices, with glorious effect . . .”

  He went on to say how much he wished Louie and the girls could be with him, though little Helen, always frail, might “have been made sick with excitement . . .”

  This was the new world, illuminated not by General Electric’s prohibitively expensive direct current, but by Nikola Tesla’s alternate current, made available by George Westinghouse at less than one-fourth the cost. For many people who attended the Chicago World’s Fair, it became a touchstone they would remember the rest of their lives, informing their values and faith in the future. Among them were a young L. Frank Baum, who’d one day create an Emerald City in the Land of Oz, and Walt Disney, who’d create his theme parks, and Henry Ford, who upon seeing an internal combustion engine dreamed of creating something truly outrageous: a horseless carriage affordable for the average man, one per family, maybe two.

  Miles away, in the brown Chicago tenements, soot-faced children collapsed after working fourteen hours a day, six days a week, in coal-fired factories and meatpacking plants.

  A smallpox epidemic originated at the fair and spread through the city; it coincided with an economic panic with working-class people sinking into urban poverty and starving in the streets—not just in Chicago, but in gritty, dirty cities around the country—all while corporate captains gained wealth and power. Two days before the fair ended, the mayor of Chicago was assassinated, and the closing ceremonies became a memorial. Then a fire swept through the fairgrounds (started by disgruntled workers) and destroyed most of the buildings.

  Nowhere in the entire fair was there a single tribute to wild nature, or any overt mention of the “cost” of four hundred years of progress, as though there was none. Nowhere was there an accounting of the continent-wide destruction of habitat and wildlife, the poisoning of water and soil, the displacement of rich cultures, entire nations; the fencing of open space. One man, however, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner, as bold and original as Thoreau forty-two years earlier, did present a thesis that would have scholars talking for a long time: With the American frontier gone, Turner asked, who are we? What will we become?

  John Muir caught a train to New York City, so he missed Turner’s presentation. Had he heard it, we can only imagine the letter he would have written to Louie.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  that masterful grasp of material things

  FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, thirty-one years old, fiercely intelligent, neatly dressed, and wearing a nicely trimmed moustache, looked every bit the young academic when he stood before the American Historical Association’s annual meeting at the Chicago World’s Fair. He was there to deliver a provocative essay he called, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”; today, it is known simply as “Turner’s Frontier Thesis.”

  Born to a newspaper family in Portage, Wisconsin, Turner had no doubt walked the same muddy boardwalk streets in his youth as John Muir did after Muir’s father gave up farming and moved his family there. Turner had earned his doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University and returned to Madison to begin teaching at the University of Wisconsin. He would later move east to Harvard and there finish his academic career.

  The West, not the East, he said, was where the unique American character was forged in a fluid, exciting margin between civilized settlement and savage wilderness. Here a new citizen emerged, as if by alchemy, made of strength and individuality, a can-do spirit and resourcefulness that would color the world. The farther west the American moved, Turner said, the less he relied on European traditions, institutions, and ideas. Here, in the mountains, canyons, deserts, grasslands, and plains were golden opportunities masquerading as insurmountable problems.

  Early in his thesis, Turner quoted John C. Calhoun’s 1817 appraisal of a young United States, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” Where better to grow and expand than to the west.

  “So long as free land exists,” Turner said, meaning the frontier, “the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits.”

  Free land doesn’t last forever. Frontiers close, they disappear, as this one had, in 1890. The bottomless basket had a bottom after all. Turner asked: Would the best of America disappear with it, “that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy . . .?”

  WHILE TURNER and his academic colleagues looked west, John Muir went east by train to New York City. He was astounded at the receptions he received by creative, inventive, intelligent people, most of them wealthy; they treated him as a peer, a celebrity, even. This was a far cry from his penniless walk to the Gulf of Mexico when he slept on the ground and befriended former slaves. Now, bathed in adulation, he wrote to Louie, “I had no idea that I was so well known considering how little I have written.”

  Robert Underwood Johnson, prestigious editor of Century magazine, who in Muir’s later life had become what Jeanne Carr was in his earlier life—Muir’s ambassador to the learned world—ushered Muir from one social gathering to another: dinners and parties in Washington Square, West Point, and Gramercy Park; animated, impromptu meetings in the offices of Century, where Muir thought he’d do some writing but was too busy to do so. Everywhere he regaled listeners with stories garnished with his Scottish accent, most notably his adventure with the little dog, Stickeen, on the Brady Glacier. As the story progressed, audiences would grow to where hotel and restaurant staff would tarry and listen from behind serving doors, not wanting to miss a word.

  Muir met John Burroughs, the celebrated nature writer, and found in him a kindred spirit, a lover of botany and birds, white-haired and white-bearded like himself. The “two Johnnies” they’d be called six years later on a remarkable journey north, Burroughs’s first and only trip to Alaska, Muir’s seventh and last.

  Muir also met Nikola Tesla (in his laboratory), Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and lumber merchant James Pinchot and his son Gifford, who’d recently returned home from studying forestry in Europe. An ambitious young man, then age twenty-seven, with his own emerging ideas about conservation, Gifford Pinchot would soon antagonize Muir unlike anybody else had.

  With a little free time, Muir squirreled himself off to Central Park. He found glacial erratics there that thrilled him; some were marked by striations, like the granite boulders of the High Sierra he’d once used to deduce the geologic processes that shaped Yosemite Valley. Obviously, a glacier had once occupied the Hudson River Valley, flowing from north to south, and must have terminated far down the valley.

  From New York, Johnson ushered his prized author to Boston for more dinners and stories among the intellectual elite: scientists, professors, historians, authors, and philosophers. In Concord, as if on a pilgrimage, Muir visited the gravesites of Emerson and Thoreau, and he made his way to Walden Pond, where in the mid-1840s Thoreau had renounced the commercial serfdom of civilization and live
d alone for twenty-six months. “I’d rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” Thoreau had said, “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

  Nearly fifty years later, the pumpkin was still there; Muir loved it, the relative tranquility, the power of Thoreau’s words, ideas, and deeds. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau and most of the distinguished people he’d met on this trip east, Muir had never received a formal school education. He had had the Bible pounded into him by his father, and he’d learned to read literature at his mother’s side, which he did with great intensity. Now he would embark on his next big challenge: to be a good writer.

  It didn’t come easy. Crumpled pieces of manuscripts often littered his “scribble den” in his Martinez home as he worked and reworked a paragraph. His magazine pieces had proven wildly successful, first in the Overland Monthly in the 1870s, with feature articles on his early theories on glaciology, and later in Century, in the 1890s, as a voice for wild lands appreciation and conservation. Now it was time to write a book, Johnson told Muir. You have it in you. Cobble together your early magazine work and field notes, and some new material. Muir wanted to spend more time in Concord, but his companions whisked him away, not without irony—Emerson had been whisked away from Muir’s company in a sequoia grove twenty-two years earlier.

  He crossed the Atlantic for the first time since coming to America in 1849, landed in Liverpool, and headed straight for Edinburgh and Dunbar, his homecoming, keen on reclaiming his Scottish identity. The gray skies and blooming heather reminded him of Alaska, though not as wild—sans bears, wolves, mountains, and glaciers. He stayed in Dunbar for ten days, visited long-ago family friends who’d read his articles in Century, and walked the crumbling castle grounds and wild coast and breathed deeply the cool sea breeze. He wrote to Wanda, “The waves made . . . grand songs, the same old songs they sang to me in my childhood, and I seemed a boy again . . .”