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

by Heacox, Kim

  “Aye,” Muir fired back, “and you, Johnny, ought to have been up here fifteen years ago, instead of slumbering down there on the Hudson.”

  ALWAYS ready with an opinion, especially on matters of natural history, Muir antagonized those around him even more than they antagonized him. Jeanne Carr had introduced him thirty years ago by saying, “He is as modest as he is gifted.” But he was sixty-one now, more like his proselytizing father than he probably cared to admit, a battle-hardened activist who wouldn’t hold his tongue in the company of educated men who offered no hard position on conservation, though they considered themselves conservationists; or worse, in the company of greedy men everywhere who, while deaf to the forest music of birds and trees, could hear a dollar bill fall on pavement.

  Muir worried aloud that gold prospecting—followed by large-scale industrial mining—would soon despoil Alaska as it had California, ravage streams and mountainsides, poison water, and bring out the worst in men.

  According to historians Goetzmann and Sloan, the Harriman Expedition sailed in “an age of strange binocular vision that was at times replete with irony;” the participants “saw two Alaskas—one, the stunning, pristine land of forests and mountains and magnificent glaciers, the other, a last frontier being invaded by greedy, rapacious, and sometimes pathetic men, often living out a false dream of success.”

  Muir would echo Thoreau by writing of “A fearful smell, a big, greasy cannery,” and claiming, “Men in the business are themselves canned.”

  Himself a study in contrasts, Muir could be playful too, as in Wrangell, when he spotted botanist Alton Saunders probing along Tlingit dugout canoes at low tide, hunting for algae specimens. “Seaweed Saunders,” he called him.

  Muir’s cabinmate, California poet Charles Keeler, described Wrangell as a “dirty, miserable” town. But his spirits brightened—everybody’s did—when the ship transited Wrangell Narrows and offered clear views of Patterson Glacier spilling down from the Stikine Icefield. But here again Muir irritated his shipmates by boasting in yet another spontaneous lecture that what they were seeing was nothing compared to what awaited them: his own glacier, Muir Glacier, nestled in Glacier Bay, so large it contained more ice than all the glaciers in Switzerland combined.

  PRIOR to their arrival in Juneau, the Harriman participants heard an onboard lecture from Coloradoan Walter Devereux on mining technology, how new equipment enabled companies to extract world-famous profits—three to four dollars per ton of rock—from previously low-grade, gold-bearing quartz. Juneau had roughly two thousand residents, most of them Indians, and was growing fast. In another seven years it would become the territorial capital of Alaska. A few gift shops catered to the expeditioners, while across Gastineau Channel, in the town of Douglas, the Treadwell Mine boomed and thundered. At one point a single blast was so loud that Dellenbaugh, in his stateroom, thought somebody had fired a cannon on the upper deck. Upon visiting the mine, he and his shipmates found it unbearable, the miners so far below, miniscule, at times knee-deep in water and mud, toiling hard for three dollars a day while the corporation made millions. And the noise, the dust, the filth . . .

  Many in the Harriman party left early. Some were stunned and saddened to see men ravaging the forest and despoiling clean water for a soft yellow metal that made nice jewelry and not much else. It was as disheartening as the destructive millinery industry in the eastern states, where men killed egrets and robbed heron rookeries by the thousands for feathers to make fashionable women’s hats. Among well-educated men such as these, more than a few burdened by an ecological conscience, it triggered questions asked to this day: When does an environmental issue become a social justice issue? And who writes the definitions of progress?

  UP LYNN CANAL, the gold-fevered boomtown Skagway offered further testimony to the transformational power of gold. Here every man was for himself. No corporation, no big boss, no steady paycheck, small though it may be. Men dreamed big as they slogged their way over the mountains, following great silt-laden rivers into the interiors of Canada and Alaska. Two years before, as news of “Gold in the Klondike” had burst upon the world, all the best claims were already staked. Still, men came. Fathers, brothers, and sons, a young writer named Jack London, a future shoe and clothing merchant named John Nordstrom.

  Finding no good color in the Klondike, many would move on to other promising strikes in Fairbanks, Kantishna, Eagle, Iditarod, and finally Nome. Rumors said gold nuggets lay scattered in Nome like confetti on the beaches of the Bering Sea. Those in Skagway who fared best mined the miners: clothing and equipment merchants, boot repairmen, saloon and hotel owners, prostitutes, and scoundrels. A wild, unruly town where street boys shouted out hotel costs and women flaunted themselves in billowy “bicycle suits,” Skagway was nothing like Metlakatla. John Burroughs and others stared with astonishment through their eastern sensibilities.

  John Muir dreaded seeing Skagway again but also looked forward to a reunion with his friend, S. Hall Young, whom he last saw here in 1897. With so much depravity found in gold-rush towns, Young felt his calling was to move north to help protect downtrodden Tlingits and other victims indentured into semi-servitude by gold fever, many toiling in the rutted streets or lawless slipshod businesses for low wages and no respect. Muir had described the scene to Young as “a nest of ants taken into a strange country and stirred up by a stick,” an impression that remained unchanged, though Skagway was larger and slightly more orderly than before.

  The narrow-gauge White Pass Railroad had been completed to the top of the pass, and Harriman secured passage for himself and his distinguished guests. As the little train chugged upslope, the tracks biting into bedrock, Burroughs noted how recent dynamite blasting had revealed the “ribs of the earth.” Soon the railroad would reach all the way to Lake Bennett, providing a much easier and safer route into the Klondike. But by then the rush would be over; Nome would be the new El Dorado.

  On the return downhill trip, the train passengers witnessed solitary stampeders trudging upslope, burdened by massive packs, their expressions tired, wistful. Only just beginning and late for any promise of gold, they put one foot in front of the other and climbed nonetheless into the great unknown with their thinning hopes for a better life.

  While the entire scene disgusted Muir, the contemplative Dall puffed away on his pipe and predicted that the railroad, while late for the gold rush, would one day contribute to another economic boom: tourism. People will come to Alaska in great numbers, he said, to see the country, the history, the authenticity. Gannett agreed: “Alaska’s grandeur is more valuable than gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exhausted. This value, measured by direct returns in money received from tourists, will be enormous.”

  Gannett further wrote:

  There is one word of caution and advice to be given those intending to visit Alaska for pleasure, for sight-seeing. If you are old, go by all means; but if you are young, wait. The scenery of Alaska is much grander than anything else of the kind in the world, and it is not well to dull one’s capacity for enjoyment by seeing the finest first.

  For the one Yosemite of California, Gannett concluded, Alaska has hundreds. Little wonder that John Muir kept coming back.

  MUIR GLACIER was indeed large—its icy terminus roughly two hundred feet high and two miles across—and had a lot to say the day the George W. Elder arrived off its face to search for good anchorage. It thundered with massive icefalls and frightened the Harriman children. Burroughs described it as a “new kind of Niagara,” saying nothing about the cheap commercialism that had recently defiled the Niagara Falls, a loss that could have been prevented had he worked to make it a national park, as Muir and Johnson had done with Yosemite. This was Muir’s new political realism: In the face of gobble-gobble economics, Nature cannot take care of itself. It needs defenders. It needs strident writer-activists and activist-writers.

  Muir noted that the tidew
ater face of his glacier had retreated about four miles since his first visit in 1879. If the terminus were to retreat to where it no longer had a stabilizing anchorage on an underwater recessional moraine at the mouth of Muir Inlet, then Muir Glacier would back off into deeper water, destabilize, and in years ahead enter a phase of catastrophic retreat and calve ice faster than it already was.

  THE EXPEDITION spent five days in Glacier Bay, by far the most time in any one location. Harriman wanted to bag a bear. John Muir had just the place for him. “Howling Valley,” he said with the rueful grin, where wolves howled by the hundreds and you’d find big game . . . magnificent bears and such. He’d traveled there alone and pulled a sled over his glacier, and found it so wild and healing that he’d kicked a bad bronchial cough. He’d also returned snow-blinded, bruised, hungry, and wet—information he did not share.

  All business, Harriman took Muir’s recommendation and organized a hunting party fit to slay a mammoth. Six packers left first, carrying camping and cooking equipment, followed by Harriman with Merriam and Grinnell and the ship’s physician and his assistant, plus Captain Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly, a former cavalry scout for General Custer. All six men carried Winchester rifles.

  As Muir watched them move over the icy terrain and shrink into the distance, other members of the expedition explored Camp Muir—the 1890 cabin still standing and in good shape—and walked the rudimentary boardwalks built over the moraine for the benefit of summer tourists. Eager to get the best photos possible, Edward Curtis used a canoe to access multiple angles and vistas. All that night, the glacier calved and the George W. Roller rocked everybody in and out of a fitful sleep.

  The next day Muir hiked with the Harriman girls and regaled them with Alaska stories, while the indefatigable Curtis and his assistant canoed off the face of the glacier. Several times they paddled for their lives into massive percussion waves created by large calvings, their little boat rising cork-like over the crests, surrounded by floating ice, pieces large and small. To the astonishment of others watching, the two men survived; some of Curtis’s large-format photographic plates, soaked in salt water, did not.

  Edward Curtis’s assistant approaches the tidewater face of Muir Glacier before a large icefall sends him rocking in June 1899.

  Photo by Edward Curtis, courtesy of the Alaska State Library-Historical Collections

  After twenty-four hours, the big-game hunters returned from Howling Valley exhausted, blistered, battered, cold, and—as Muir had hoped—empty-handed. Eighteen miles out and eighteen back. This would have bothered Muir little, if at all, were it not for the sight of Merriam, his benefactor, the gentleman-biologist who’d invited him on this expedition, hobbling down the beach, knees stiff by arthritis, hands cut and bruised by rock and ice. Muir and two others hurried out to take his pack and help him. That night the hunters fell into bed. Hearing of their woes, of the vast stretches of snow and ice, of them having to rope up to cross crevasses, and slipping and falling and sleeping hardly at all, and seeing no sign of bears or any other big game, Burroughs wondered if “all the howling” had been only in Muir’s imagination.

  At their farthest point out, the hunters had stood atop a ridge and looked into a valley silent and still. One hundred years later Alaskan Nancy Lord would write:

  The comforts of the ship were far behind. The men were surrounded by wilderness still locked in winter, dangerous and unforgiving. I imagine a chill passing through them, through even the experienced packers and old scout. There was no romance to be found in the obscurity of white, in the cold. A person didn’t stroll about here and admire the views; a person stood in awe, had to feel his smallness, his insignificance. He had to know there was something greater than himself, beyond all his control.

  Perhaps this is what Muir wanted. In lieu of big game, let them find human smallness, humility. Not that he had mastered it himself. It was a journey, a lifetime endeavor, longer for some than for others. Of the hunters’ failure, Muir would only write, “No bears, no bears, O Lord! No bears shot. What have thy servants done?”

  Harriman would get his bear elsewhere.

  The remaining three days in Glacier Bay found the expedition participants scattered about, eager in their pursuits. At Point Gustavus, in the lower bay, scientists collected birds and plants and were visited by Tlingits who taught them their own names for each species. In the upper bay, Curtis and Merriam photographed Tlingit sealing camps, Burroughs and Keeler climbed high for panoramic views; with help from Harriman’s daughters, Gannett set up his plane table and made measurements. Dellenbaugh sketched a distant Mount Fairweather while Fuentes, the bird artist, hiked into a spruce forest in search of a bird he could hear but not see; it called and called, he said, like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, pulling him deeper into another world.

  Muir, Gilbert, and Harvard mineralogist Charles Palache (who’d been intrigued by the Treadwell Mine) hiked and camped on the glaciers of Hugh Miller and Reid Inlets, and no doubt talked geology; Muir, the least credentialed, did most of the talking. As the George W. Elder approached to pick them up, an amused Muir watched his shipmates stand atop an iceberg and wave, “wild to get on the steamer.” Three days wasn’t enough time in the wilderness for Muir, who in a letter to S. Hall Young would lament that he “longed to break away from the steamboat and its splendid company, get a dugout canoe and crew of Indians and, with you as my companion, poke into the nooks and crannies of the mountains and glaciers which we could not reach from the steamer.”

  MORE GLACIERS presented themselves in stunning majesty up the coast, first in Yakutat and Disenchantment Bays, where beneath the St. Elias Range, some of the highest coastal mountains in the world, Harriman failed again to get a bear, and in Prince William Sound, where again, no bear, but glaciers cascaded down from their mountain battlements. The expedition members named College Fjord and its many glaciers after their alma maters. Captain Doran consulted his chart and said the shore was solid bedrock and glaciers. Yet a thin dogleg inlet, visible from a certain angle, suddenly opened into a mysterious place no white man knew. Getting the 250-foot-long steamship in there would be a risk. A safety-minded guest-captain whom Harriman had invited on board agreed; it is not the purpose of a fine steamship to charge recklessly into “every little fish pond.” One uncharted rock could sink the George W. Elder in less than an hour. As if the physical world like the business world was his to will into obedience, Harriman insisted they push on. He’d take full responsibility. The rocks could move.

  Tlingit sealers in their dugout canoe. Muir and other members of the 1899 Harriman Expedition admired the dignity and resourcefulness of the Huna Tlingit, and their connection to Glacier Bay as an ancient homeland.

  Photo by Edward Curtis, courtesy of the Alaska State Library-Historical Collections

  Like most of his gambles, this one paid off. The fjord was a magic kingdom of glaciers and peaks unknown and unnamed, ribbons of ice flowing from mountaintops into the sea. Dazzled and charmed, the scientists insisted that the new fjord, and the large glacier at its head, be named for their patron. It would be the expedition’s most important discovery.

  In time they left behind the tall coastal peaks of the Fairweather Range, and the St. Elias, Wrangell, and Chugach Mountains, and approached the long arc of the Aleutian Chain, known more for its fierce winds and live volcanoes than lofty realms of ice and snow.

  On Kodiak Island, Harriman got his bear, more by guile than stealth. While several members of the expedition surrounded Harriman and waited at the bottom of a narrow draw with rifles, others above drove a mother bear and her cub into the trap. Harriman shot the oncoming mother, Yellowstone Kelly shot the cub, and everybody was happy, almost. Upon seeing the dead bears stuffed into a rowboat, Muir called them “mother and child.”

  Fourth of July in the little Russian-flavored town of Kodiak lifted spirits. The graphophone belted out John Phil
ip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Brewer spoke on America as a beacon for humanity and freedom around the world while Keeler, the iconoclastic poet and Muir’s cabinmate, condemned recent acts of American imperialism. Canoe races followed, with much whooping and shouting. The entire time Muir sat apart and visited with an old mountaineer and glacier lover who’d sought him out to share stories.

  Down the Alaska Peninsula and into the Bering Sea, the expedition headed for the mysterious Russian Far East, driven, many suspected, by Harriman’s grand vision to build a tunnel under— if not a bridge across—the Bering Strait; to encircle the world with a railroad. Change “Seward’s Icebox” into “Harriman’s Crossroads.” Now that he had his bear, it was time for Harriman to get back to railroads, venture capitalism at its best.

  After visiting the Shumagin Islands and Bogoslof Island, they visited the Pribilofs, where the slaughter of northern fur seals brought to mind the fate of bison in the American West. The expedition then landed at Plover Bay, in Siberia, “the most barren and desolate place of its size,” Merriam said he had ever seen. In ferocious winds beneath a gray, undertaker sky, he and his colleagues were greeted by an image from the Pleistocene: Chukchi in reindeer-skin parkas and sealskin boots, little changed from their ancestors of ten thousand years ago.

  AFTER A SHORT VISIT to Port Clarence, their northernmost stop, the expedition turned south on July 13. While hiking on St. Lawrence Island, the Harriman girls shouted “Bears!” at white spots in the distance. Their father headed over the windswept tundra, shotgun ready, his dutiful hunting guides tagging along, only to discover the strange animals were swans. On St. Matthew Island, the expedition members found old sod houses and heard a story from William Dall about Russian hunters living through the winter there, going crazy, and killing each other.