John Muir
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John Muir (1838-1914) is as close to a patron saint as the EC movement has. His passion for the wilderness was contagious and came through in his written work. He traveled widely, but his primary impetus was protecting the Sierra Nevada range in California; he steered the EC movement towards a critical focus on wilderness protection generally and National Parks specifically. He was friendly with and influenced many of the key environmental leaders and thinkers of his day, from Emerson to Roosevelt. And he was a key founder and leader of the Sierra Club, the largest and perhaps most influential of the US-based conservation organizations.
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Muir is often pitted as the preservation/protectionist foil to Gifford Pinchot, who was the leader of the "conservationist" movement, which was focused less on protection for its own sake and more on sustainable resource use. The truth is somewhat more nuanced.
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Muir was a wanderer. He was born in Scotland where he lived until he was eleven, when his family emigrated to America because Muir's father Daniel found the Church of Scotland to be not strict enough in its religious practices and beliefs. They settled in Wisconsin to start a farm near Portage. Muir was initially exceedingly religious, and never renounced his faith, although it became increasingly less of a driving force. His father saw to it that he had memorized much of the bible as a boy, using beatings to motivate him. Muir's father was a harsh man and clearly a bit of a kook - he ultimately left his family and became an itinerant fire and brimstone preacher.
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Muir was a tinkerer and inventor - he whittled and constructed elaborate wooden mechanisms, one of which got him a prize at the Wisconsin State Fair and led to his opportunity to leave home to attend the University of Wisconsin in Madison - a move (like all his subsequent adventures and achievements) of which his father did not approve. Muir's mechanical aptitude served him well in as he was easily employable despite a peripatetic lifestyle for his first ten years.
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Muir did not graduate from college, but while studying there in 1861 he met Jeanne and Ezra Carr. Ezra was an MD and professor of chemistry and natural history - his classes helped spur Muir's lifelong interest in science. But it was Jeanne who became perhaps the most influential person in his life. An amateur botanist described by Worster (p. 79) as "intelligent, well read and talented" but denied by her gender the ability to pursue her scientific passions formally, she was a religious yet forward-thinking and progressive individual who saw Muir as a "protege...a cultural force, a prophet leading people to value nature and to worship the spirit behind it." (Worster p. 158)
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Jeanne and Muir corresponded throughout much of their lives. Muir regarded her as his "spiritual mother" according to his daughter Wanda in a preface to Letters to a Friend (1915), a limited-edition book consisting of a selection of letters sent by Muir to Carr during the mid-1860's and 1870's, which Wanda published in 1915, shortly after Muir's death. Jeanne Carr's influence on Muir cannot be overstated, although they began losing touch after Muir married. Worster writes unequivocally: "His first book [The Mountains of California (1894)] should have been dedicated to her (he made no dedication), for more than anyone else she had encouraged him to write down his thoughts and share his passion for nature with the public." [p.346]. Letters was described in a 4/18/1915 NYT review: "It is truly a wonderful and inspiring book, containing some of the finest and loveliest pages ever written by John O'Mountains, and it is difficult to lay aside or to cease from quoting."
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Muir left school after six terms without getting a degree but having acquired a love of natural sciences and the outdoors from Prof. Carr and others. In his biography of Muir, Worster attributes his departure to "painful indecision over questions of career, religious faith, and life's purpose." (p. 85). It was also the depths of the Civil War and there is no question Muir did not wish to fight in it - in fact he hightailed it to Canada, where he lived and worked until the war ended.
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After the war, Muir moved to the burgeoning city of Indianapolis where his mechanical aptitude got him a good job. A work accident nearly cost him his sight however, and caused him to rethink his path. His goal was to follow Alexander von Humboldt to South America to explore - he began that intended journey by walking from Indianapolis to Florida, a journey recounted in the posthumously published A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916). As he continued to do all his life, he spent the trip botanizing - he carried a plant press in his pack. He also carried a notebook inscribed with name and address: John Muir - Earth Planet - Universe.
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The walk was certainly instructive - most of it was through the war-ravaged South during Reconstruction - and he found both the land and the (white) people frequently unpleasant and often inhospitable. In Savannah he nearly starved before a packet of money sent by family found him. He took a boat to the Georgia-Florida border, walked SW across Florida to the gulf coast north of Tampa and then boarded a boat to Cuba (like Humboldt before him). However, before leaving Florida he was struck by a severe bout of malaria - he was nursed back to health by one of the many women who made such a difference in his life. The effects of malaria continued in Cuba and he ultimately realized he could not handle the climate. He saw an ad promoting cheap fares to California and promptly hopped a freighter (with no documents) from Havana to New York, from whence he made his way to San Francisco, where he reports that someone asked him if he needed directions and he responded that he did, to anyplace wild, or words to that effect.
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Muir lived the balance of his life in central California, although he traveled frequently. Initially he lived in and around Yosemite Valley, including as a shepherd for a season. He worked for a time for James Hutchings, an early settler, promoter and exploiter of Yosemite (see Hutchings' books Scenes of Wonder... (1861) and In the Heart of the Sierras (1886)). Muir may well have enjoyed unauthorized extracurricular activities with Hutchings' wife Elvira for a time. Either way, Hutchings was an interesting guy and the Catalogue entries about him are well worth a detour to read.
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Anyway, eventually Muir married into a wealthy family which lived and farmed not far away and ultimately took over management of the substantial operation. He was away from home a lot - traveling around the western U.S. and Alaska, or back into the Yosemite. His wife Louise Strentzel by all accounts understood and encouraged his need to immerse himself in nature. But when he was home, he generally dedicated himself in improving the farm and, eventually, doting on his two daughters, Wanda and Helen.
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Muir was an interesting cat. By all accounts he was engaging and made and kept friends easily, but he was equally comfortable being alone. His unbridled enthusiasm and passion for nature came through clearly in his writing - it was this quality that endeared him to readers and really launched him into unparalleled position as a spokesman for the virtues of wilderness. But in many ways, he was a bit of babe in the woods - almost literally. For example, one of Muir's most popular books was Stickeen (1909), about an eponymous dog who accompanied Muir and a companion on an ill-conceived hike across an Alaskan glacier. The book highlights a notable fact about Muir - that despite spending significant chunks of time in the wilderness, he "knew less about camping than almost any man I have ever camped with," according to C. Hart Merriam [quoted in Worster p. 261]. Muir had an innocent faith in the essential benevolence of nature, and would put himself in situations with little food or shelter, confident that he would come out the other side. He always did, but there was certainly more than a little luck involved at times. The similarity to his disciple Enos Mills, discussed in a later chapter, is striking.
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As a naturalist, Muir's primary areas of interest were geology (specifically glaciers and glaciation) and botany. He was perhaps the first to recognize the role that glaciation played in the formation of the Yosemite Valley and in fact many of his first published articles were about glaciation. Seven of those articles were gathered by the Sierra Club in a book called Studies in the Sierra (1950), many years after Muir's death. Muir was passionate about glaciers - his friend John Burroughs, early in his official narrative of the 1899 Harriman expedition to Alaska (Harriman Alaska Expedition (1901-4)), introduces the various members of the party, getting in a sly dig: "In John Muir we had an authority on glaciers, and a thorough one - so thorough that he would not allow the rest of the party to have an opinion on the subject." (Harriman Alaska Expedition - Vol. 1 - p. 18).
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Muir's first article was published in Harper's New Monthly in 1875, on "Living Glaciers of California." By 1882 was publishing several per year, in Harpers, Scribner's, Overland Monthly and The Century Magazine. Per Worster, "[U]rban readers from coast to coast felt a need to connect with the outdoors. Backed by major publishing houses, the editors of elite magazines - Richard Watson Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson of Scribner's and the Century in particular - aimed at reconciling a still divided [post-Civil War] nation, uplifting the civilized virtues (including nature appreciation), and freeing the American mind of narrow utilitarianism." [p. 241]. Johnson in particular became Muir's lifelong friend and patron - Muir dedicated his 1912 book The Yosemite to him - "Faithful Lover and Defender of our Glorious Forests and Originator of The Yosemite National Park".
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[Parenthetically, and as discussed in the Overview to this EC History section, I feel compelled to reemphasize the incredible contribution that Johnson had on the progress of environmental conservation during the two decades leading up to the Hetch-Hetchy controversy. In addition to championing and publishing Muir and using Century as a leading voice on environmental issues, Johnson worked tirelessly on the conservation issues of the day, lobbying, writing letters, etc. One is struck when reading various histories of the conservation movement of the time just how important he was. His work is discussed in Ken Burns' documentary on the National Parks, and in 2017 a plaque was erected in Yosemite celebrating his work with Muir. He published many books but none specifically on environmental issues (most were actually poetry). His name does not leap to most tongues when discussing leaders of the EC movement during the years either side of 1900 - but I am hard pressed to name anyone more important.]
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[Addendum - repeated from Introduction: In March 2023 there appears a very positive NYT review of Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite by Dean King about Muir's relationship with Johnson and the importance of their partnership - Muir the western author and outdoorsman, Johnson the urbane, eastern publisher and lobbyist who brought the fight into the halls of power and ultimately saved Yosemite - although alas not Hetch-Hetchy.]
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Muir's initial foray into environmental advocacy came about in response to the rapid deforestation occurring in California due to land clearing for agriculture and timber harvesting - particularly the harvesting of giant sequoias, and the havoc wreaked by sheep grazing. The deforestation combined with river degradation from hydraulic mining techniques in the Sierra foothills was causing the death of rivers, as discussed by Marsh in Man and Nature. Muir published articles in local newspapers.
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In addition to newspaper and magazine articles, Muir edited and wrote six essays for Picturesque California, a series of elaborately illustrated "coffee-table" style books sold by subscription in 30 monthly parts in the late 1880's by J. Dewing Publishing, which were subsequently reissued in several other editions of quite large volumes [the copy in the Collection is a massive two-volume set published 1888]. While he is best known for his efforts on behalf of the Yosemite region of the Sierra Nevada's, he also during this time advocated for protection of the Mount Shasta and King's River areas as well.
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Through his writing, Muir became a household name and developed an extensive network of friends, colleagues and acquaintances ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson (who urged him to move to Cambridge and become a professor), Henry George (see 1855-1900 Chapter), Asa Gray, John Burroughs and Joseph Hooker (Darwin's close friend - see 1855-1900 Chapter) to Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot (much more on him to come) and Charles Sprague Sargent. His passionate writings and the fame they brought him, along with his extensive network of friends and acquaintances, became the primary drivers of his environmental leadership.
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Influenced by Henry George's arguments about the evils of private land ownership, Muir was advocating for public protection of wilderness lands. His rationale was grounded in the value of wilderness for its own sake, as opposed to the potential harm to humankind (i.e. due to soil erosion, water source deterioration, etc.) that informed Marsh and which was used to justify the preservation of the Adirondacks. In a nutshell, this is what differentiates Muir from contemporaries like Burroughs and Pinchot, and which has led him to become, effectively, the patron saint of the dominant preservationist wing of the EC movement.
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The use of the term "patron saint" is deliberate. First, Muir never lost the religious intensity which was drummed into him (literally) as a boy, although he did redirect it away from the theoretical god of his father and towards nature as that god's manifestation. He also had a charisma and purity of enthusiasm which came though in his writings as well as in person that was, if not messianic, certainly compelling.
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Nash recounts the story of Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson sitting in the Yosemite Valley - Johnson asks Muir where the meadows and wildflowers of which he had heard were, to which Muir replied they were gone due to overgrazing. Johnson responded that clearly Yosemite should become a national park on the model of Yellowstone, and got Muir to agree to write two articles for Century on the subject. Nash characterizes these 1890 articles as "far more publicity than preservation had ever received before. The greater part of the two essays was descriptive, and in contrast to the original proponents of Yellowstone National Park and the Adirondack reservation, Muir made it clear that wilderness was the object to be protected." [Nash p. 131]. In fact, at the time the Yosemite Valley itself was already owned and controlled by the state of California under a bill signed by President Lincoln in 1864, but the state's stewardship of the area left much to be desired, and what Muir and Johnson were proposing was the creation of a federally protected ring around the valley.
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The 1890 bill establishing the park, consistent with Muir's model, became the "first preserve consciously designed to preserve wilderness" (Nash p. 132). Philippon notes (p. 140) that the "credit for this legislative victory, however, may need to be shared with Daniel K. Zumwalt, a friend of Representative Vandever and a land agent for the Southern Pacific Railroad in the San Joaquin Valley. Though the full truth may never be known, Zumwalt was in Washington at the time and recognized the value of the park for the railroad.... According to historian Richard J. Orsi, Zumwalt seems to have been the invisible hand behind the expanded bill, introducing the legislation through Vandever, lobbying door-to-door for its approval, and orchestrating its passage." [See the Chapter 1855-1890 for further discussion of the impact of the railroads on the environmental movement].
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Towards the end of the 19th century, American timber harvesting companies had essentially clear-cut the northeastern and midwestern regions of the country and were moving south and west. This gave rise to the great debate in the environmental movement, one that continues to this day, between the conservationists, or sustainable use people, and protectionists. The context for the debate was the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which passed "almost unnoticed" as an amendment to a general land use bill. It gave the federal government the right to create forest reserves of public lands. However, the Act was silent as to the purpose of the reserves.
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The early 1890's were a watershed time in the development of the environmental conservation movement. In addition to signing the 1890 bill creating the Yosemite national park and thus protecting the landscape surrounding the Valley, President Benjamin Harrison also set aside some 13 million acres of forest reserves, including the King's Canyon area of the Sierra Nevada, under the Forest Reserve Act. I find it really interesting that Harrison "a Republican from Indianapolis and hitherto not known to be a visionary conservationist," [Worster p. 327] was in fact responsible for creating so much federally protected land. Even today, his name does not leap to mind when identifying key conservationists.
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Worster notes [p. 328]: "The English political philosopher Lord James Bryce later declared that national parks were the best idea Americans ever had. If so, then the national forests might rank as the second-best idea. Together, the two kinds of federal conservation would eventually protect nearly three hundred million acres, reaching from the Everglades of Florida to the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. The birthing of those ideas occurred in the Yellowstone and Sierra regions during the infamous Gilded Age, but especially during the 1890-93 period when it became clear that land conservation had become a legitimate and necessary part of American democracy."
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At this point in time, Robert Underwood Johnson suggested creation of a "Yellowstone and Yosemite defense association." [Nash p. 132]. Muir demurred, but University of California professors Joachim Senger and William Armes had the same idea, and succeeded in organizing the formation in 1892 of the Sierra Club, a monumental step in the development of the EC movement. The Club was formed by 27 men meeting in the San Francisco offices of attorney Walter Olney. Muir was the first and only president of the club for 22 years, until his death. A significant motivating factor in the formation of the Sierra Club was the perceived "need for a nongovernmental organization to play watchdog over the public park and forestlands. Few trusted the politicians to be consistent or clear-headed." [Worster p. 328].
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As mentioned above, the debate about the proper use of the federally reserved forests in particular became the critical issue for Muir and everyone else interested in environmental conservation in America at this time - a debate which continues to this day. The crux of the debate is whether nature is viewed as having "rights" independent of human beings, and deserves protection as such. I will address this debate in various contexts on this site. For Muir, the question drove the biggest fight of his life - the battle to save the Hetch-Hetchy Valley from the City of San Francisco, which wanted to dam it to create a permanent water reservoir. More on this later.
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In 1893 Muir traveled to the world's fair in Chicago and them on to New York and Boston, where Johnson introduced him to all sorts of luminaries, including John Burroughs, "who journeyed down from his hemlock-shaded retreat near the Hudson River, and the two Johns were instantly mated for life." [Worster, p. 334]. He dined at the homes of James Pinchot (father of Gifford) and Henry Fairfield Osborn, the long-time president of the AMNH and father of Fairfield Osborn, author of Our Plundered Planet (1948) and long-time president of the NY Zoological Society. Muir also met historian Francis Parkman (1849) and Charles Sprague Sargent, forestry expert and director of the Arnold Arboretum (see his Report on the Forests of North America (1884) in Govt Publications). He and Sargent would become close friends and later travel extensively together. He made the pilgrimage to Walden Pond and the graves of Thoreau and Emerson.
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From New York he traveled to Europe, reconnecting with his Scottish roots, visiting the graves of Robert Burns and William Wordsworth, the latter a poet who had "shaped his own passion for nature." [Worster p. 337. See the Overview Chapter for a brief discussion on the influence of the romantic poets on public appreciation for nature.] He spent most of the rest of the time studying glaciers, in Norway and the Alps.
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Muir returned home with a signed book contract with Johnson. He put together The Mountains of California (1894) using mostly older published material edited to create a relatively coherent whole. This was how he ended up putting together most of his other books, but Mountains was "the best of the bunch, an enduring classic in American nature writing.... The Mountains of California, on the whole, was not a conservation tract...although the book's promotion of nature appreciation certainly had political and ethical implications...." [Worster p. 339-41]. In fact, Worster notes that in addition to not being a conservation book, Muir generally minimized his own presence, instead presenting a very detailed factual picture of nature, thus fulfilling the demand of the age for scientific realism. Interestingly, Muir may have modeled his title on William Gladstone Steel's The Mountains of Oregon (1890), a book praised by Muir in a letter to Steel and influential in the fight to protect the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest.
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The latter half of the 1890's saw the opening of the schism in the conservation movement between wise use vs. protection. An 1896 Forestry Commission, led by Charles Sprague Sargent and including Gifford Pinchot, Henry Graves, Bernard Fernow, Alexander Agassiz (son of Louis, the latter a giant in the world of the natural sciences, and also a creationist and proto-white supremacist) and several others, along with Muir as an ex-officio member, was formed to tour the forest reserves and prepare a report recommending an explicit policy for managing the reserves. Muir and Pinchot became close friends while the group visited the reserves. However, the commission could not agree on a final report, with Sargent and Muir advocating preservation and Pinchot and others favoring opening the reserves to "carefully managed economic development." [Nash p. 136].
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Sargent instead went around the commission and made a direct recommendation that led to President Grover Cleveland setting aside an additional 21 million acres of reserves in the waning days of his administration. Western legislators, along with timber and mining interests, went bananas and bills were introduced in Congress which might have killed the entire forest reserve scheme. Muir was recruited to write articles defending the reserves - articles in which he walked a sometimes-wavering line advocating for preservation but granting the need for wise-use and selective harvesting - he specifically credited Pinchot's contributions. Two of the articles referenced were rewritten and constitute the first and last chapters of Muir's second book, Our National Parks (1902). [In my opinion his essay "The American Forests," which is the last chapter of the book, is his best writing of that which I've read.]
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Philippon calls Our National Parks Muir's "most explicitly conservationist work" and quotes a contemporary review in Dial magazine: "No one has done more to draw the attention of the public to the desirability and necessity of forest preservation than Mr. John Muir.... [Our National Parks] "embodies some of his most trenchant appeals for public interest and legislative action." [Philippon p. 149].
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The rift between Pinchot and Muir allegedly happened when the 1897 Forest Management Act was passed, explicitly permitting timber operations and grazing throughout the forest reserves. According to multiple biographies of Muir, Pinchot's explicit support of grazing rights for sheep, which Muir had come to hate and characterize as "hoofed-locusts" for their impact on the environment, led to a final break. Interestingly however, Char Miller in his biography of Pinchot demonstrates that the break as described very likely did not occur, but was instead an apocryphal story that reflected historical perspectives decades later, specifically from Linnie Marsh Wolff's Muir biography Son of the Wilderness (1945). It is notable that after the 1899 Harriman Expedition, Muir, Pichot and C. Hart Merriam traveled together to California in an attempt to save the Calvaras grove of redwoods.
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In any case, by 1898, Muir was publishing articles specifically advocating for the wilderness values and needs of the lands within the forest reserves and national parks.
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In 1903, as Muir was planning to leave on a botanizing trip to Europe with Sargent, he received a request/invitation from President Theodore Roosevelt to go camping together in Yosemite, just the two of them. Muir asked Sargent to delay the trip, saying he believed he could do the nation's forests some good if he had some quality time with TR. The two dusted the other luminaries in their party and, accompanied only by rangers and guides, talked long into the nights around campfires. Earlier in his trip TR had visited Yellowstone with John Burroughs. Per Worster, Roosevelt ranked Muir as a nature writer "'second only to John Burroughs, and in some respects ahead." Muir exuded a 'delightful innocence and good will,' an 'inability to imagine that any one could either take or give offense.'' (Worster p. 368, the internal quotes from a 1915 article by Roosevelt published in Outlook magazine).
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Directly afterwards, Roosevelt gave a very "Muir-like" speech in which he stated that the Sequoias had values that were aesthetic and moral as well as strategic and commercial, and that "it would be a shame to our civilization to let them disappear. They are monuments in themselves." (Philippon, citing Frederick Turner, p. 109).
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The trips with Burroughs and Muir were politically motivated - Roosevelt (who had come into office as a result of McKinley's assassination) wanted some of the mystique of the two great literary naturalists of his (or any other) day. Roosevelt was a true naturalist in his own right with a strong environmental sensibility. He had spent nearly 30 minutes of his first annual message to Congress talking about expanding federal protection, control and improvement (through irrigation, dams and reservoirs) of western lands in particular. He was ultimately elected on his own ticket - through his entire administration he placed 230 million acres under federal protection.
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After camping with Roosevelt, Muir went directly to New York to meet Sargent and his son, with whom he traveled for half of an extraordinary journey of over a year which took him through Europe into Russia, down to the Black Sea, across Asia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, down to China (where he split off from the Sargent's) to India, the Himalayan region, Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, Egypt, Australia and New Zealand. Unsurprisingly there were some very rough patches. Worster describes it as "the worst trip of his life...in some respects.... Its pace and ambitions nearly killed him. No book, or even article, came from it, only a few letters and an unpublished journal." (p. 377).
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In 1905 the Muir and the Sierra Club succeeded in persuading the California government to turn the Yosemite Valley itself over to the federal government to add to the national park formed in 1890. William Colby (more on him below) drafted the bill. Edward Harriman lobbied extensively for the bill, knowing the improvements to the valley under the federal government would benefit his Southern Pacific Railroad. Muir, Colby and the Sierra Club also emphasized the benefits of increased tourism to the park in their lobbying efforts - an early bit of pragmatism from a man (Muir) who had generally mocked tourists earlier in his career.
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The primary environmental activities for the balance of Muir's life involved Sierra Club activities generally and the battle over the damming of the Hetch-Hetchy Valley in particular. The HH Valley fight was a major event in the development of the EC movement in that it was really the first national fight over preserving a basically unscathed natural area for its own sake versus sacrificing it for the sake of human needs.
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HH was sometimes called the twin of Yosemite but was much more remote and relatively unvisited by non-Natives. It was also topographically well suited to be dammed to create a permanent reservoir for the City of San Francisco. The city's initial attempts to get approval for the project failed - HH and the surrounding area had been declared a wilderness preserve in the 1890 act which created Yosemite National Park. In 1908 however, following the massive 1906 earthquake which devastated the city, Teddy Roosevelt's administration in the form of interior secretary James Garfield approved the city's plan.
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Per Nash, the decision troubled Roosevelt but he was told there was no viable alternative, and he told Muir that the cause of parks and preservation would be harmed in the long-term if they were used to hamper the growth of civilization. Pinchot, Roosevelt's friend, head of the U.S. Forestry Service, and primary advisor on environmental matters, also supported the damming - and whether or not Muir and Pinchot had fallen out in 1897, they certainly did at this point.
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The decision aroused a major campaign in support of Hetch-Hetchy and against the dam, which caused several reviews of the decision, with the controversy ultimately lasting five years. The strongest arguments involved the sanctity of national parks and the slippery slope of allowing such preserved land to be used by narrow interests. There was also a religious argument, one which John Muir and many others championed. These arguments highlight the whole theme of nature as manifestation of god (vs. work of god), and the independent value of wilderness vs. humanity.
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Muir end his 1912 book The Yosemite, which was published while the HH controversy was still raging, with a chapter extolling the beauty of the Valley and condemning those who would make it into a lake:
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That any one would try to destroy such a place seems incredible; but sad experience shows that there are people good enough and bad enough for anything. The proponents of the dam scheme bring forward a lot of bad arguments to prove that the only righteous thing to do with the people's parks is to destroy them bit by bit as they are able. Their arguments are curiously like those of the devil, devised for the destruction of the first garden - so much of the very best Eden fruit going to waste; so much of the best Tuolumne water and Tuolumne scenery going to waste. Few of their statements are even partly true, and all are misleading.
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These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man. (Pp. 260-2).
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The HH campaign brought together national environmental and outdoors-focused groups in common cause. Collectively, they solicited support from newspapers and magazines, published articles and lobbied congress. A 32-page pamphlet entitled Prevent the Destruction of the Yellowstone Park (1908) opens with a letter to Congress from Muir, and is stamped "Write to your Congressman and Protest". It lists as supporters seven regional environmental groups including the Sierra Club, the Appalachian Mountain Club and the American Alpine Club. It also has a lengthy essay by Muir about the HH Valley, several pages of photographs, and reprints of letters, editorials and other pieces supporting the campaign to save HH.
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The political pressure brought to bear actually caused Roosevelt to change his stance. Ultimately however, in 1913 under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, the dam was approved and built. But the controversy had a huge impact in elevating the issue of protection of federal lands generally (especially national parks), and wilderness conservation specifically. Per Nash: "The preservationists had lost the fight for the valley, but they had gained much ground in the larger war for the existence of wilderness. A deeply disappointed John Muir took some consolation from the fact that 'the conscience of the country has been aroused from sleep.' Scattered sentiment for wilderness preservation had, in truth, become a national movement in the course of the Hetch Hetchy controversy. Moreover, the defenders of wilderness discovered their political muscles and how to flex them...." [p. 180]
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Worster notes that the "front-line defense against the juggernaut [in favor of damming HH] would fall on the shoulders of....William Colby, secretary of the Sierra Club.....and William Bade...." [There should be an accent over the e in Bade]. Interestingly, not all of the Sierra Club supported the opposition to the dam. Several key members, including founder Walter Olney and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, joined 159 members in supporting the dam in a referendum, against 589 against. One of the leaders of the pro-dam faction described the opposition as "short-haired women and long-haired men," which is an outstanding bit of phraseology and proof that some things never change :)
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Colby was a key member of the Sierra Club - while he was not a founder, he served as Secretary of the club for decades. He also introduced in 1901 the outing programs for which the club is well known, which revitalized what was until then a languishing institution. Muir participated in a number of the early outings, sometimes with members of his immediate family. [Philippon p. 186]. In 1950, the Sierra Club published a volume entitled Studies in the Sierra consisting of seven articles on glaciation by Muir initially published in the mid-1870's - the book is dedicated to and personally inscribed by Colby. The dedication describes him as "[s]econd only to Muir" in his contributions to the Sierra Club.
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The HH controversy showed a sea change in American attitudes about wilderness protection - several decades earlier the proposal would have passed nearly unnoticed. In the congressional votes in favor of the dam, most of the congressmen saw fit to preface their votes with a statement of their support for wilderness and parks generally, notwithstanding their support for the dam in this case. Women's groups became very active in the issue, unleashing a new political conservation force during this time (for more on this see the discussion [still to come] about Enos Mills in the 1890-1915 chapter). Many factors caused this change in public attitude - the closing of the frontier being a significant one. But the ground was plowed and the seed planted by the writers discussed throughout this work - not just Muir but Thoreau and Flagg and Higginson and Powell and King and, especially, John Burroughs.
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At the end of the day Muir was a visionary and largely deserves the pedestal upon which he stands in the EC movement. He was not without contradiction however - he was an uncritical friend of a number of people whose impact on the economy was at best mixed - with Harriman being most prominent. On the one hand, Harriman supported national parks, saved 8,000 acres in the Hudson Valley (now Harriman State Park) from logging and lobbied to save Yosemite. On the other, his drive to expand his railroads involved "improving" critical wildlife habitat to support agricultural development, devastating critical habitats for wildlife and Native Americans both. Overall, Muir had a bit of tunnel vision, focused almost exclusively on the Sierra's and actively ignoring virtually all of the other environmental controversies of his day.
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Muir sought to deemphasize materialistic culture in himself and others. Yet he lauded development - writing a private eulogy for Harriman upon his death that held, as Worster puts it, that "Harriman the capitalist became a natural force, and like nature worked toward a higher harmony and beauty. The comparisons left no room for disapproval, protest or opposition. Capitalism and nature, according to Muir, worked as allies in the shaping of the earth's destiny." (pp.413-4).
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Interestingly, it was Harriman who more or less browbeat Muir into writing his memoirs in publishable form, at a time when Muir's energies were flagging and he was finding the writing process to be excruciating. Muir spent three weeks at Harriman's retreat in Oregon in the summer of 1908 with a secretary accompanying him literally every waking hour, writing as Muir talked - by his own count he dictated over 1,000 pages of manuscript. Several years passed but in 1911 he published My First Summer in the Sierra followed two years later by The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. (The Yosemite, published largely in response to the Hetch-Hetchy fight and consisting of edited material previously published, came out in 1912).
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While Muir is often depicted as the antithesis of the wise-use movement, in fact he was typically supportive. He had "never opposed 'wise use' as part of conservation, including the selective harvesting of trees, the damming of waterways for irrigation, and even the destruction of wildlife habitat for economic development. He had allowed such use, private or public, all over the map." (Worster p. 408). The HH controversy accelerated Muir's evolution from a conservationist to a preservationist focus but he remained more pragmatic than is sometimes remembered - in 1910 he pushed for a major roadway through Yosemite into the HH Valley, a goal somewhat at odds with the idea of a "consecrated temple."
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Some scholars argue that Muir became more pragmatic and less idealistic over time, moving from a nature-centered ethic which posited rights of nature independent of humanity to a more anthropocentric and practical approach, due to political realities and the blunting of the idealistic edge as he grew older and more prosperous. While true, the HH controversy certainly hardened his view regarding the sanctity of wilderness. (Interestingly, at the time of his death Muir was worth some $4-5 million in today's dollars - a fact which his HH adversary The San Francisco Chronicle tried to use to impugn his ideological purity - in fact, he just didn't really care about or spend money. As he grew older however, he was certainly most happy to revel in the lap of luxury provided by various wealthy friends and patrons whom he visited frequently.)
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Writing for publication was notoriously challenging for Muir - he often complained about the effort it required him. At the time of his death, he had published a total of six books, most comprised to a great extent from previously published articles. These were Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901), Stickeen (1909), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Yosemite (1912) and The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913). He also edited and contributed to Picturesque California (1888).
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After Muir's death, his friend and literary executor William Frederic Bade compiled and had published several more books of Muir's writings, including Travels in Alaska (1915 - with Marion Randall Parsons, who had been working with Muir on the manuscript at the time of his death), A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), The Cruise of the Corwin (1917) and Steep Trails (1918). Bade also published in 1924 the two volume The Life and Letters of John Muir. In 1938, Muir biographer Linnie Marsh Wolff edited and published John of the Mountains, a volume of previously unpublished journals of Muir.
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Challenging though the writing process may have been, Muir's writing inspired his readers. He generally (but not always) minimized his self in his writing, focusing the reader on the subject at hand. From the Introduction to Studies in the Sierra by John Buwalda:
The style of Muir's writing was equally unique. It combined scientific precision of expression and rationality of treatment with a grace of statement which afforded much pleasure to the reader. He chose just the right words for each idea....His writings are marked by that simplicity and clarity which is characteristic of men who know a subject very thoroughly and whose minds comprehend the human meaning of the knowledge they have accumulated.
Muir was one of the small group of men of whom America has had far too few, who published scientific knowledge in fascinating but accurate form, not only for the enjoyment and information of the public, but as an inspiration to young men and women who through innate interest might take up careers in more intensive research on problems of Nature to which he had given them such stimulating introductions. [p. ix]
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There is no question that Muir thoroughly deserves his place in the pantheon of American environmentalism. His writing, his influence, his activism and his role in the formation of the Sierra Club demand it. It can't have hurt, too, that he led what would become the largest environmental advocacy group in the country, one that publishes prodigiously and worked conscientiously for years to burnish his legend.
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As then Sierra Club leader James Bryce wrote in his introduction to the club's Bulletin commemorating Muir following his death:
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May I venture to express to you the sorrow with which the news of the death of our fried, the venerable John Muir, has filled me? He was the patriarch of American lovers of mountains, one who had not only a passion for the splendours of Nature, but a wonderful power of interpreting her to men. The very air of the granite peaks, the very fragrance of the deep and solemn forest, seem to breathe round us and soothe our sense[s] as we read the descriptions of his lonely wanderings in the Sierra when their majesty was first revealed. Californians may well honour the service of one who did so much to make known her charms and to shield them from desecration. And you of the Club will cherish the memory of a singularly pure and simple character, who was in his life all that a worshipper of nature ought to be. [p. 1]
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Leaving the last word on Muir (in this Chapter) to Robert Underwood Johnson, from the same Bulletin:
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...Muir's public services were not merely scientific and literary. His countrymen owe him gratitude as the pioneer of our system of National Parks. Out of the fight which he led for the better care of the Yosemite by the State of California grew the demand for the extension of the system. To this many persons and organizations contributed [not least of all Johnson himself], but Muir's writings and enthusiasm were the chief forces which inspired the movement. All the other torches were lighted by his.... John Muir was not a "dreamer', but a practical man, a faithful citizen, a scientific observer, a writer of enduring power, with vision, poetry, courage in a contest, a heart of gold, and a spirit pure and fine. [Pp. 13-15]
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See the December 2023 blog entry on Forestry for some further historical context to the discussion above. The 1855-1890 and 1890-1915 Chapters are also integral.
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Linnie Marsh Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her biography of Muir, Son of the Wilderness (1945). She also edited John of the Mountains (1938), from the unpublished journals of Muir.
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The Collection contains two separate manuscript pages written by Muir, one from The Mountains of California, and one from his journals included in John of the Mountains.