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

by Heacox, Kim

  Again and again, when members of the expedition returned from their hunting forays with dead birds or foxes, Muir was disheartened. In all his time in the Sierra Nevada, when he made many field trips over many years to learn about flowers, trees, and animals, he’d never killed a thing.

  “I DON’T GIVE A DAMN if I never see any more scenery,” Harriman grumbled as the George W. Elder passed the Fairweather Range en route south. Rather than take deck chairs facing the mountains, as others had, Harriman and his wife took a pair facing west, on the seaward side of the steamer. Merriam had sought him out to tell him about the view, the best of the trip. But by now the railroad man was missing his exciting world of big business and corporate deal-making. He wanted to be back in New York.

  Despite his differences from John Muir, the two men had come to respect each other. After hearing of Muir’s claim that he (Muir) was richer because he had all the money he’d ever want and Harriman did not, the railroad man found Muir one night after dinner to respond. “I never cared for money except as power for work,” Harriman explained. “What I most enjoy is the power of creation, getting into partnership with Nature in doing good, helping to feed man and beast, and making everybody and everything a little better and happier.”

  Biographer/historian Donald Worster would write:

  [Harriman] did not accept the notion that there should be a limit to acquisitiveness, but he gave capitalism a moral purpose—promoting­ the welfare of both nature and humanity. His expanding railroad network, in his eyes, was intended to enhance the earth as well as make the nation bigger and better. Muir sensed that his host was quite sincere, and from that moment on, bear hunter though he might be, Harriman was seen as a well-meaning friend and potential ally of the conservation movement.

  Critics feed on the rich, and Harriman was prime rib. Although the New York Daily Tribune called the trip “an entire success,” Harriman’s Alaska expedition would be seen by some as an escapade, a junket, a feasibility study for a grand railroad scheme. To prove otherwise, Harriman subsidized the production of thirteen scientific monographs. When the steamship docked in Seattle on July 30, having covered nearly 9,000 nautical miles in two months, parts of the expedition were just beginning. Many of the participants had much writing and summarizing to do; Merriam would spend the next dozen years organizing, compiling, and overseeing the publication of the monographs into the most comprehensive official report of its kind, a scientific treasure.

  Discovered on the slopes of Mount Rainier and tagged to come along at the last moment by George Bird Grinnell, the young photographer Edward Curtis would become a giant in his field. Bernhard Fernow, the Cornell forester trained in Europe, as Pinchot had been, would be proven wrong when he predicted that the temperate rain forests of southeast Alaska, being so remote, would never be heavily harvested. One hundred years later, those same forests would be checker-boarded with clear-cuts, with some cuts down to the shoreline and along stream edges, leaving no buffer zones for salmon protection.

  The single most significant contribution would be in glaciology, and it would come not from Muir but Grove Karl Gilbert, the tall, bearded, methodical scientist with the US Geological Survey. Like Muir, he was passionate about glaciers and glacial ice, but he expressed himself differently. Steeped with experience in the Rocky Mountains, he saw ice as an expression of water, and glaciology as another branch of hydrology. The temperature of the ocean, more than the air, he said, dictates the change in climate and behavior of coastal glaciers. Multiple causation was the key. Many small, complex sets of variables come into play with each glacier, some that cancel each other, some that compound each other, all of which can be seen only by the empirical observer. General theory, Gilbert said, should be applied with great caution. He even reconstructed an ice age landscape and performed experiments to determine how large masses of moving ice behaved in salt water. According to Goetzmann and Sloan, “Gilbert’s work was really the exemplification of a team effort: he needed Harriman’s boat and library; Gannett’s maps; Muir’s experience; and the photographs of Curtis, Merriam and others.”

  In the century ahead, not only would glaciers become living barometers in a changing world, but glacial ice itself would provide a looking glass into the past in ways not even Gilbert could predict.

  As for John Muir, he’d never see Alaska again. Yet his influence in the American conservation movement had yet to peak. Soon, the new president would come calling.

  CHAPTER TEN

  bully

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT had his own way of doing everything.

  He became president of the United States in September 1901 when a crazed anarchist shot and killed President William McKinley in Buffalo. He had never cared much for McKinley, a tactless, ruthless man, but the assassin’s act enraged Roosevelt as “an assault on representative government and civilized order,” according to biographer Edmund Morris. Roosevelt had been a six-year-old boy when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; he’d watched the funeral procession from his upper-story apartment window in New York City. Such a sight: thousands of somber people dressed in black, grieving the great man who’d preserved the union and freed the slaves. It made a strong impression on the boy, one he’d never forget.

  Considering McKinley’s assailant, and his own imminent ascent to supreme responsibility, Vice President Roosevelt claimed: “If it had been I who had been shot, he wouldn’t have gotten away so easily . . . I’d have guzzled him first.”

  “Theodore Rex,” writer Henry James would call the new president.

  He’d grown up a sickly, asthmatic child, and overcame every obstacle, Roosevelt said of himself, by “practicing fearlessness.”

  He embraced life with both hands, both fists. “Experiences had flashed by him in such number,” Morris would write of Roosevelt’s early years, “that he was obviously destined to travel a larger landscape of life than were his fellows.” At eighteen, he’d been a published author; at twenty-two a husband; at twenty-three a respected historian and New York State Assemblyman; at twenty-five a father and widower; at twenty-six a rancher, hunter, and horseman in the Dakotas; at twenty-seven a candidate for mayor of New York City; at twenty-eight a husband again; and at thirty a Civil Service Commissioner of the United States. “By then,” Morris would add, “he was producing book after book, and child after child, and cultivating every scientist, politician, artist and intellectual of repute in Washington.”

  One of those scientists was George Bird Grinnell, nine years Roosevelt’s senior. Grinnell was the editor of Forest and Stream, and he would found the National Audubon Society, help establish Glacier National Park in Montana, and be labeled by the New York Times as America’s “father of conservation.” Grinnell had reviewed and commended Roosevelt’s book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) for its “freshness, spontaneity, and enthusiasm,” but then damned him with faint praise:

  Mr. Roosevelt is not well known as a sportsman, and his experience of the Western country is quite limited, but this very fact in one way lends an added charm to this book. He has not become accustomed to all the various sights and sounds of the plains and the mountains, and for him all the difference which exists between the East and the West are still sharply defined . . . We are sorry to see that a number of hunting myths are given as fact, but it was after all scarcely to be expected that with the author’s limited experience he could sift the wheat from the chaff and distinguish the true from the false.

  Stung by the review, Roosevelt stormed into the offices of Field and Stream and demanded a meeting with Grinnell. Always a gentleman, Grinnell assuaged Roosevelt’s ego, engaged him in lively banter—not difficult with the young sportsman—and soon the two men found themselves talking natural history in great detail. They would go on to form a friendship that would serve each other well for decades.

  Grinnell wrote of Teddy Roosevelt:

  Though chiefly interested in big game and its hu
nting, and telling interestingly of events that had occurred on his own hunting trips, Roosevelt enjoyed hearing of the birds, the small mammals, the Indians, and the incidents of travel of early expeditions on which I had gone. He was always fond of natural history, having begun, as so many boys have, with birds; but as he saw more and more of outdoor life his interest in the subject broadened and later it became a passion with him.

  The same could be said of John Muir. As a Wisconsin teenager, birds were what interested him most. In his twenties, while footloose in Canada, and during his thousand-mile walk to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, botany was his love. As he moved west into the high country of California, and later north to Alaska, glaciers became his obsession.

  Grinnell started with birds as well. How could he not? When he was seven, his family moved into Audubon Park, the magnificent thirty-acre estate in upper Manhattan that had been the great ornithologist’s last home. Here young Grinnell found the walls adorned with paintings and hunting trophies, the old barn filled with specimens, the nearby Hudson and Harlem Rivers rich with eagles and other birds. As an undergraduate at Yale, he had suffered in the classroom just as Roosevelt had at Harvard; both longed to be outdoors.

  “This cannot last,” John James Audubon had written in 1843, lamenting the slaughter of buffalo during his journey up the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. “What a terrible destruction of life, as if it were for nothing . . . as the tongues only were brought in, and the flesh of these fine animals was left to beasts and birds of prey, or to rot on the spots where they fell. The prairies are literally covered with the skulls of the victims.”

  Audubon’s lament became Grinnell’s call to action. For Roosevelt, it was his ranch time in the Dakota Territory in the 1880s that gave him the same sense of urgency. Only strict and immediate government conservation policies could save the American landscape and its rich panoply of wildlife.

  ROOSEVELT STORMED into the White House just as he’d entered Grinnell’s office sixteen years earlier, with equal parts bluster, charm, and pluck. He quickly caused a national sensation by inviting Booker T. Washington as an official dinner guest to the White House—the first time a black man had been given the honor. He spearheaded landmark antitrust legislation, infuriated Wall Street (where he was labeled “an extremely dangerous man”), liberated Cuba, determined the route of the Panama Canal (so the United States could have a two-ocean navy), mediated the great Anthracite Strike, and secretly defused a crisis in Venezuela that likely prevented war between the United States and Germany. Bold moves for a man who had not been elected to the presidency.

  But his greatest legacy had yet to begin. In the spring of 1903, shortly after he’d established by executive order the nation’s first bird preserve in Florida, the indefatigable Roosevelt embarked on an unprecedented 25-state, 14,000-mile cross-country tour (that would see him give 5 major speeches and 260 stump speeches) to better understand how to save America from foolish, greedy Americans without jeopardizing the nation’s moral and economic progress. Could he balance pro-growth with pro-preservation? He aimed to give it a try.

  With his good friend John Burroughs, who lobbied him not once during the trip, he visited Yellowstone, where the year before he’d won an appropriation to make the park’s bison wards of the federal government; this time, to the dismay of his handlers, he spent a Sunday hiking by himself. Like Jefferson and Lincoln, Roosevelt sat a horse well and wrote his own material. He was a thinker, a scholar, a lover of history and keenly aware of his place in it.

  Inspired and rejuvenated yet again in the world’s first national park, he wrote:

  Every man who appreciates the majesty and beauty of the wilderness and of wild life, should strike hands with the far-sighted men who wish to preserve our material resources, in the effort to keep our forests and game-beasts, game-birds, and game-fish—indeed all the living creatures of prairie and woodland seashore—from wanton destruction. Above all, we should recognize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement. It is entirely within our power as a nation to preserve large tracts of wilderness, which are valueless for agricultural purposes and unfit for settlement, as playgrounds for rich and poor alike . . . But this end can only be achieved by wise laws and by a resolute enforcement of the laws.

  The Grand Canyon, which would not become a national park until 1919, stunned him. “I don’t know exactly what words to use in describing it. It is beautiful and terrible and unearthly.” Upon hearing that the Santa Fe Railroad had declined to build a hotel on the rim, he beseeched his listeners, “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it—keep it for your children, and your children’s children, and for all who come after you.”

  California beguiled him with its trees, flowers, and pretty girls. When he saw a stately redwood with calling cards and posters pinned to its trunk, giving it an “air of the ridiculous,” he complained; the clutter was quickly removed, the tree restored to its original majesty. “There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty,” Roosevelt declared the next day at Stanford University. “I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates.”

  But where exactly Roosevelt would land in the debate between preservation and utilitarianism in the sticky, tricky issues ahead, with Gifford Pinchot whispering in his one ear and George Bird Grinnell in the other, remained to be seen. The president was a study in contrasts, a hunter who loved animals, an imperialist who brokered peace, an expansionist who believed, according to historian Douglas Brinkley, that national parks “were the rightful trophies of expansionism.” At a dinner overlooking the California coast he vowed, “the aboriginal American spirit toward the wilderness had to flourish in the twentieth century. Nature was the great replenisher for the American people.”

  His next stop was Yosemite, where he’d asked for the company of only one man.

  WITH THE NEW CENTURY John Muir could feel his life changing; he likened himself to a glacier, breaking into smaller pieces. The writing process, he said, was one long grind. In 1901, Houghton-Mifflin published his second book, Our National Parks, after Muir complained to Harvard botanist Charles Sargent that Robert Underwood Johnson, while a good mentor and friend, edited him with a heavy hand. Sargent recommended that Muir change publishers, which he did. Losing Muir, Johnson would say, was like having a child abducted.

  No sooner had Muir and Sargent arranged a grand botany trip around the world (Europe, Russia, and Australia) when a message arrived in March 1903 from Washington. The president, an admirer and good friend of John Burroughs, had heard much about one Johnny from the other, and from Grinnell and Merriam as well, and was now coming to Yosemite. He wanted the incomparable John Muir for a guide. “I do not want anyone with me but you,” TR wrote, “and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you.”

  With blessings from Sargent, Muir changed his travel plans. In mid-May he was headed to San Francisco, where the most powerful man in America would arrive by train. Muir bought a new suit, too short in the arms and legs, and a new tie, and told reporters of his intentions with the president. “It is only a little trip,” he said. “You can’t see much of the Sierras in four days . . . after we get to the valley, the President and I will get lost.” Meaning Muir intended to get TR away from all the bustle and prattle.

  “NOW, THIS IS BULLY,” Roosevelt exclaimed as he breathed in the smell of hot coffee over an open fire on Glacier Point, high above Yosemite Valley. The previous night he and Muir had camped beneath the great sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, with Roosevelt announcing he was “as happy as a boy out of school.” The next morning, when the rest of the party departed in coaches for the valley, the two men dropped the official itinerary and rode horses up an old Indian trail, accompanied by two park ranger
s, two packers, and three mules. Five feet of snow still lay on the ground in some places.

  Muir made beds of ferns and cedar bows, built a fire (with help from the rangers, who made themselves as invisible as possible), and bantered with Roosevelt late into the night. One of the rangers discreetly observed that both men wanted to do all the talking. It was East meets West; Boone and Crockett Club meets Sierra Club; hunter-conservationist meets biosphere activist. Roosevelt hoped to absorb some of Muir’s prophetic aura; Muir hoped to make political hay, mostly on issues of forest preservation. They agreed on everything except on Gifford Pinchot, with Roosevelt’s admiration far exceeding Muir’s, and on sport hunting, which Roosevelt found “ideal training for manhood,” and Muir found vulgar, a “murder business.”

  “Mr. Roosevelt,” he asked, “when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things . . . are you not getting far enough along to leave that off?”

  “Muir,” the president replied in an uncharacteristically soft voice, “I guess you’re right.”

  Roosevelt was reportedly astounded to find that Muir, while a keen observer of trees and rocks, offered little commentary on common birdsong. But the old Scot, twenty-one years Roosevelt’s senior, might have lost some of his higher-frequency hearing. Regardless, he could read landscapes like a book, and this impressed the president. According to Douglas Brinkley, “Muir had an ethereal quality and his erudition was simultaneously bold and profound. Roosevelt immediately admired him. Muir’s eyes were deep blue . . . and his attitude was life-affirming. While Roosevelt thought in terms of Americanism in nature, Muir thought about the planet in peril.”