by Heacox, Kim
Upon his return to Washington, he appointed a board of engineers to investigate Lake Eleanor as an alternate site to supply San Francisco with adequate drinking water. But water had never been the sole issue, even the biggest issue. San Francisco wanted the higher elevation site of Hetch Hetchy for its hydroelectric potential. Taft also discharged Pinchot from the directorship of the US Forest Service. According to one account, Pinchot responded with “attacks more violent than before.”
In a 1909 review of an updated version of Muir’s book Our National Parks, the New York Times wrote:
It is all well enough to talk about preserving our natural resources, reforesting our plains and denuded mountainsides, and refilling our empty river basins; but we doubt very much that the masses of our people are vitally concerned in that aspect of conservation, which really seems most irrelevant to their interests. It is the sentimentalist like Muir who will rouse the people rather than the materialist.
In other words, according to historian Stephen Fox, “Pinchot spoke for political opinion. Muir spoke for public opinion.”
While the well-moneyed stated their case for building the dam, letters poured into Washington, and a congressional minority committee report concluded, “there has been an exceedingly widespread, earnest, and vigorous protest voiced by scientists, naturalists, mountain climbers, travelers, and others in person, by letters and telegrams, and in newspaper and magazine articles.” As a result, the House killed the bill. Again the promoters lashed out. The San Francisco Chronicle called the preservationists “hoggish and mushy esthetes,” while in 1910, with the debate going into its fifth year, city engineer Marsden Manson wrote that the opposition was composed of “short-haired women and long-haired men.”
What was the world coming to?
MARK TWAIN died that year, as he’d predicted, going out with Halley’s Comet as he’d come in seventy-five years before. Glacier National Park was established in Montana, in large part through the efforts of Muir’s friend George Bird Grinnell, while a massive fire burned through the forests of the American West, unprecedented in its intensity and scope. And glaciers around the world continued to recede. The next summer a heat wave pounded New England and the British Isles. New Hampshire recorded 106 degrees Fahrenheit, London reached an until-then-unimaginable 100 degrees. Droughts seemed more severe, winds stronger, rains heavier. So-called “century events” were beginning to happen every twenty or thirty years, as everywhere the weather became more unpredictable.
John Muir found valuable summertime months to return to his beloved Sierra to rest and heal. Again and again he’d inspire his Sierra Club friends with his compassion for all living things, and irritate them by refusing to sleep in a tent. Instead, he’d curl onto the ground, wrap himself around a rock or tree, with only his coat for a blanket, and cough through the night. He’d defeated a lowland microbe once before by sleeping on his namesake glacier in Alaska; perhaps he thought he could do it again. He shied away from formal leadership and public speaking until friends (or his daughters, who loved to camp with him) coaxed him into a campfire story.
He’d start out slow, as if intending to speak for only a minute, then gain momentum and soon be on his feet, animatedly moving about, his voice rising and falling as he held his audience rapt. An elder now, fencepost thin, his hair white, beard long, he remained a powerful orator, more than a shadow of the mighty ice-chief he’d been back when ferocious Chilkat and Chilkoot Tlingits put down their differences and sat atop their rooftops to hear his every word.
While staying with the Harriman family at their summer lodge on Pelican Bay, on Klamath Lake, in southern Oregon, Muir had proved himself such an engaging storyteller (his book Stickeen, about his “glacier adventure” with the little dog, had just been published) that Edward Harriman assigned his stenographer to follow Muir around and record everything. Muir wrote to Helen, “I’ve . . . been kept so busy, dictating autobiographical stuff, I’m fairly dizzy most of the time, and I can’t get out of it, for there’s no withstanding Harriman’s stenographer under orders. I’ve never been so task-driven in a literary way before. I don’t know when I’ll get away from this beneficent bondage . . .”
The result would be a first draft, more than a thousand pages long, of a book he never intended to write but now felt compelled to cut and shape into The Story of My Boyhood and Youth.
The book that was most important to him, however, had yet to be written: the Alaska book. It pulled on him like a strong flooding tide in Glacier Bay, the wildest place he’d ever been; he had to get it just right. Louie had encouraged him to write it for twenty years, knowing the longer he waited the more it would vex him.
As usual, she was right.
John Muir at age seventy-one, in 1909, the year Houghton-Mifflin published his book about the little dog, Stickeen
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
Under the Taft Presidency, the Hetch Hetchy debate cooled, and Muir took the time to organize his notes. He had wanted to write a dozen books or more, perhaps as many as twenty. Now he’d do well to finish three or four before his time ran out. He could feel the curtain coming down, “the dark ahead,” he called it. He had so much he wanted to do, and he was running out of time. He wanted to see the mighty Amazon River as Alexander von Humboldt had, feasting on every mysterious detail; he’d dreamed of this for fifty years, since before his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico.
Then came news that Edward Harriman had died. And soon other friends were gone, including William Keith, a great loss for Muir. He wrote to Helen, “I wonder if leaves feel lonely when they see their neighbors falling.”
In April 1911 John Muir traveled by train to New York, where again Robert Underwood Johnson greeted him warmly and ushered him from one prestigious event to another. Muir campaigned for Hetch Hetchy and received many awards, including membership into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an honorary doctorate from Yale. Squirreled away for months in friends’ homes, he finished up a couple book projects and cut handsome royalties for himself from his publisher. All that remained unwritten was Alaska. Tired after so much politicking and deal-making, he sailed for Brazil in August, seventy-three years old and alone, determined to “vanish in the wilderness of the other America.” Helen had suggested that her husband accompany him, should anything go wrong and he need assistance. Muir said no.
An amateur botanist once again, he boated up the Amazon River to Manaus, buried deep in the heart of the richest assemblage of species in the world: plants, insects, and birds of outrageous color and design. Trees interested him most as he made his way from tropical jungles to grassy tablelands to glaciated landscapes where men cut down entire forests and shipped them away. He traveled to Africa via the Canary Islands, and down the west coast to Cape Town, where everybody talked of diamonds and gold, as if money ruled the world. Which it did, of course. Muir could see that now.
He found a baobab tree that to him was the spirit of Africa, thousands of years old, all by itself where recently it had stood in the company of others. More than a tree, it was an ecosystem unto itself, its bark, he wrote, “like the skin of an elephant.” Muir asked many questions and received eager, gracious answers from dark, smiling faces. So much toil and sweat. Here was imperialism and raw human industry on a much larger scale, larger than he had ever seen.
IN EUROPE, America, and parts of Asia, powerful nations faced what they regarded as a straightforward choice in the new century: modernize or be marginalized. Grow or die. Produce energy or control in some manner those who do. In London the new first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had an ambitious goal: revamp the powerful British Royal Navy by making coal-burning ships into oil-burning ships, a huge and risky undertaking. England had lots of coal, and no oil. So why switch? Because burning a pound of fuel oil produced twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. Oil was the future, Churchill knew;
wars would be fought over it. And the future had to be won. Otherwise it made a dangerous enemy. Soon biplanes would be replaced by Spitfires, Harriers, and Boeing 747s, and entire empires would collapse and be partitioned and renamed to satisfy the appetites and whims of the victors.
Muir returned home nearly a year after he’d left. As with his previous trips overseas, he’d collected plant specimens and made new friends but acquired no material or ideas for a book. The “hot continents,” as he called them, were fascinating but not his place. Instead, he buckled down to write about “the great thundering crystal world” of tidewater glaciers and Tlingit canoes: Alaska.
Teddy Roosevelt returned to politics in 1912 to challenge President Taft in his quest for a second term. The two Republicans cancelled each other and enabled the election of Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton University and the first Democrat to occupy the White House in twenty years. When Wilson appointed as his secretary of the interior Franklin Lane, a San Francisco attorney and good friend of former mayor James D.Phelan, the Hetch Hetchy debate seemed lost. California congressman John Raker introduced a bill that gave San Francisco everything it wanted.
Muir fought on; he suffered a serious blow when several prominent members of the Sierra Club (including a cofounder) voted on behalf of the city. Gifford Pinchot, who had worked hard on the Roosevelt campaign, jumped back into the debate with full force; Robert Underwood Johnson would later comment that without Pinchot’s influence the Raker Bill would probably have died.
It lived and gained momentum as the debate split California down the middle.
According to Donald Worster, “No one of substantial fortune came to the valley’s rescue. All or Muir’s moneyed friends either stayed indifferent or went over to the other side.”
Teddy Roosevelt expressed sympathy for Muir and his allies but made no strong stand. John Burroughs wrote in favor of the dam, saying, “Grand scenery is going to waste in the Sierras—let’s utilize some of it.”
The Raker Bill passed through Congress in December 1913. President Wilson’s signature would make it law. Robert Underwood Johnson beseeched him to veto it, saying, “God invented courage for just such emergencies. The moral effect of a veto would be immense.”
Wilson signed.
“It is hard to bear,” Muir told friends.
He would not live to see the valley drowned, or the new century descend into semipermanent war.
THE NEXT SUMMER, a Bosnian Serb freedom fighter assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, and madness consumed Europe. Nation after nation declared war on its neighbors. A pacifist all his life, Muir equated one tragedy with another: men at war with Nature akin to men at war with each other. He called it “desolation work.” On both sides, young recruits entered the fray as if joining a sporting event, thinking they’d return home in weeks, victorious. What they found instead was hell on earth, an end of innocence, war on a scale nobody could have conceived, with poisonous gases, aerial dogfights, armored tanks, submarines, trench fighting, and shell-shocked field officers sending tens of thousands to their slaughter again and again, boys cut down like grass. “The Great War,” people would call it. Great only in carnage and destruction.
Perhaps most egregious, the war would presage the rest of the new century with other massive conflicts and loss of life, a world Muir couldn’t imagine if he wanted to or wouldn’t want to if he could. The “war to end all wars” would end with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, what one journalist called, “a peace to end all peace.” It shattered liberal ideals about the inevitability of progress, ideals dear to Muir and those before him, men of the Scottish Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions who resisted feudalism and church authority; men who believed humankind would always improve itself through organized labor, universal education, due process, women’s rights, and other just causes.
The war instead consolidated state and corporate power over economic, political, cultural, and social affairs; it created mass propaganda and the consumer society, the beginning of what critics would describe as the “cult of the self.” In America the concentration of wealth and the rise of the corporate elite began to erode the liberal class that for decades had been the strongest defense against the worst excesses of power. Liberalism as founded by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke more than two centuries earlier would fade away.
As the war in Europe only grew worse, people settled into the drumbeat of despair. Not only did illusions die. So did the last passenger pigeon, in a Cincinnati zoo, bringing to extinction a species that had once colored the skies of Audubon’s America. All news, it seemed now, was bad news.
Muir kept his head down, writing. He knew he had little time left. His former editor at Atlantic Monthly, Walter Page Hines, wrote to him, “California and Alaska will be here a long time after we’re gone; but your books must be got ready for the long life that awaits them, for they must live as long as the country remains safe from the final clash of things . . .”
It was hard work, as always. How to capture Alaska without hyperbole and the syrupy language Johnson had criticized him of years before? He didn’t have to say Alaska was magnificent; just say Alaska. The name itself was another language, another time, when risk was daily bread and he remembered drinking the cool air like water, and the glaciers—always the glaciers—grand rivers of ice that textured his mind with their crevasses and seracs. How frisky and rambunctious he’d been back then, forty-one going on fourteen, still boyish, a tramp, curious about everything, imaginative, free.
Busy now in his scribble den, he received valuable editorial assistance from a neighbor, Marion Randall Parsons, who reported in Muir “no trace of pessimism or despondency” after the Hetch Hetchy defeat. What wore him down, she said, was the “intense physical fatigue” brought on by the task of writing for long hours, day after day, month after month.
John Muir at his desk in his “scribble den,” in Martinez, California. His home today is part of the John Muir National Historic Site, administered by the US National Park Service.
Photo courtesy of Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific
Fall brought a cool dampness that worsened. A week before Christmas, he gathered up his research and went south to stay in the desert with Helen. The dry air helped until the cough developed into pneumonia, his lungs filling with fluid. Helen sent him to a hospital in Los Angeles, accompanied by her husband. Muir went, but not without complaint. His two daughters joined him a few days later. On Christmas Eve, as both women stepped out of the room and no nurse was in attendance, the old naturalist, activist, and pacifist slipped away. On the table next to his bed was his last manuscript shaped into a book: Travels in Alaska.
Eulogies would pour in from Robert Underwood Johnson, S. Hall Young, and many others. For the New York Evening Mail, Charles L. Edson wrote a poem:
John of the Mountains camps today
On a level spot by the Milky Way;
And God is telling him he has rolled
The smoking earth from the iron mold,
And hammered the mountains till they were cold
And planted the Redwood trees of old.
THE SAME NIGHT Muir died, halfway around the world, battle-fatigued soldiers on the western front put down their weapons to celebrate a moment of peace. It began with German troops erecting Christmas trees topped with candles that caught the attention of the British, who shouted and clapped. Each side began lobbing chocolate cake and other treats over to the other side. Commanding officers, white flags in hand, met in no-man’s land and agreed to a cease-fire, and soon thousands of men covering hundreds of miles came out of their trenches to share stories, food, and drink. The Germans sang “Stille Nacht (Silent Night)”; the British sang “O Come All Ye Faithful.” One report called it an “unprecedented fraternization between enemy forces that has never been repeate
d on an equivalent scale.” In some places it lasted only one night; in other places, up to a week.
The old pacifist would have smiled.
MORE THAN A FEW Muir scholars and biographers have written about his “cosmic connection” to family, friends, and the natural world; that he knew, somehow, when his father and mother were about to die, how he dropped everything to travel great distances to be with them; how his children received his greatest love and attention when they most needed it. Others have commented on his sensitivities to Native American spirituality and ways of life. They point to once-noble Tlingit Indians that Muir said were made “dirty” by white men’s corruptible influences during the Klondike gold rush. They point as well to Cape Fox Village, a final stop on the Harriman Alaska Expedition, where Muir’s shipmates assumed the village was abandoned, and so carried away a large number of totem poles and other collectibles while Muir stood back and called it a “robbery.” The village was not abandoned, he knew; the residents were merely away, out in their summer fishing camps.
As Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, born like Muir in the 1830s, happened along at the perfect time to make their fortunes and change American business and industry, Muir came along to change conservation and save the American landscape. He could have been a great inventor and made a lot of money, but he dedicated himself instead to saving Nature as a community to which we belong, not as a commodity we own. His timing, by luck or design, was perfect; his voice, unique. He knew what people wanted to hear, what they needed to see. Nature’s beauty was not a side dish, he said; it was the main meal, the best nutrition out there. You didn’t find God in Nature. God was Nature.
The loss of Hetch Hetchy created a “never again” chant among Muir’s allies and disciples. Sierra Club members who had voted against the dam formed an ad hoc group, the Society for the Preservation of National Parks, and soon began to talk of a new federal agency to safeguard the best of America’s public lands.
