HEROES OF TO-DAY
[Illustration: John Muir among his beloved trees]
HEROES OF TO-DAY
JOHN MUIR ⁂ JOHN BURROUGHS ⁂ WILFRED
GRENFELL ⁂ ROBERT F. SCOTT ⁂ SAMUEL
PIERPONT LANGLEY ⁂ EDWARD
TRUDEAU ⁂ BISHOP ROWE ⁂ JACOB A.
RIIS ⁂ HERBERT C. HOOVER
RUPERT BROOKE ⁂ GEORGE
W. GOETHALS
BY
MARY R. PARKMAN
Author of “Heroines of Service,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED WITH
PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917
Copyright, 1916, 1917, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published September, 1917_
TO
MY FATHER
FOREWORD
Once, when I had been telling a group of children some stories of the
heroes of old, one of the number who had always followed the tales with
breathless interest, said:
“Tell us the story of a hero of to-day!”
“There are no heroes to-day, no _real_ heroes, are there?” put in
another. “Oh, of course I know there are great men who do important
things,” he added, “but there isn’t any _story_ to what they do, is
there?--anything like the daring deeds of the knights and vikings, or of
the American pioneers?”
Of course I tried to tell the children that the times in which we live
bring out as true hero stuff as any time gone by. Nay, I grew quite
eloquent in speaking of the many phases of our complex modern life with
its many duties, its new conscience, its new feeling of individual
responsibility for the welfare of all.
Then I told the stories of some of the heroes who are fighting “in the
patient modern way,” not against flesh and blood with sword and spear,
but against the unseen enemies of disease and pestilence; against the
monster evils of ignorance, poverty and injustice. We decided that the
“modern viking,” Jacob Riis, had a story that was as truly adventurous
as those of the plundering vikings of long ago; that Dr. Grenfell, the
strong friend of Labrador, had certainly proved that life might be a
splendid adventure; and that the account of Captain Scott’s noble
conquest of every danger and hardship, and at the last of disappointment
and defeat itself, was indeed an “undying story.” Joyously we followed
the trail of that splendid hero of the heights, John Muir, and of that
gentle lover of the friendly by-paths of Nature, John Burroughs, and
found that there was no spot in woods or fields, among mountains or
streams, that did not have its wonder tale. The stories of those brave
souls--like Edward Trudeau, the good physician of Saranac, and Samuel
Pierpont Langley, the inventor of the heavier-than-air flying-machine,
who struggled undaunted in the face of failure for a success that only
those who should come after them might enjoy, were particularly
inspiring. From them we turned to the heroic figure of the
“prophet-engineer,” General Goethals, who proved that faith and
perseverance can truly remove mountains; and Herbert C. Hoover, master
of mines and of men, whose great talent for organization and efficient
management brought bread to starving millions.
Carlyle has said that “the history of what man has accomplished in this
world is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”
When the real history of our day is written, will it not be seen that
some of its most important and significant chapters are those which have
nothing to do with great cataclysms, such as the wars of nation against
nation? Will it not be seen that the victories of peace are not only “no
less renowned than war,” but that they are, in truth, the most enduring?
These “heroes of to-day”--doctor, naturalist, explorer, missionary,
engineer, inventor, journalist, patriot--workers for humanity in many
places and in many ways, are indeed
“A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time.”
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE LAIRD OF SKYLAND: JOHN MUIR 3
II THE SEER OF WOODCHUCK LODGE: JOHN BURROUGHS 31
III THE DEEP-SEA DOCTOR: WILFRED GRENFELL 53
IV THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL: CAPTAIN SCOTT 81
V A MODERN VIKING: JACOB RIIS 105
VI A PIONEER OF THE OPEN: EDWARD L. TRUDEAU 133
VII “THE PROPHET-ENGINEER”: GEORGE WASHINGTON GOETHALS 163
VIII A SHEPHERD OF “THE GREAT COUNTRY”: BISHOP ROWE 201
IX A HERO OF FLIGHT: SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY 233
X A POET-SOLDIER: RUPERT BROOKE 263
XI A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD: HERBERT C. HOOVER 295
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
John Muir Among His Beloved Trees _Frontispiece_
John Muir and John Burroughs in the Yosemite Valley 25
Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell 55
The Hospital at St. Anthony, Northern Newfoundland 66
Captain Robert F. Scott 87
Jacob A. Riis 110
The Jacob A. Riis Settlement 119
Edward L. Trudeau 146
First Sanitarium Cottage Built 155
Major Goethals 178
The “Man of Panama” at Panama 195
Bishop Peter T. Rowe 213
Samuel P. Langley 248
Rupert Brooke 274
Herbert C. Hoover 300
The Belgian Children’s Christmas Card 317
THE LAIRD OF SKYLAND: JOHN MUIR
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature’s peace will flow into you
As sunshine into trees;
The winds will blow their freshness into you,
And the storms their energy;
While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
JOHN MUIR.
HEROES OF TO-DAY
THE LAIRD OF SKYLAND
A small Scotch laddie was scrambling about on the storm-swept, craggy
ruins of Dunbar Castle. He was not thinking of the thousand years that
had passed over the grim fortress, or of the brave deeds, celebrated in
legend and ballad, that its stones had witnessed. He was glorying in his
own strength and daring that had won for him a foothold on the highest
of the crumbling peaks, where he could watch the waves dash in spray,
and where, with out-flung arms and face aglow with exultation, he felt
himself a part of the scene. Sea, sky, rocks, and wild, boy heart seemed
mingled together as one.
Little John Muir loved everything that was wild. The warnings and
“skelpings” of his strict father could not keep him within the safe
confines of the home garden. The true world was beyond--the salt
meadows, with nests of skylarks and field-mice, the rocky pools along
the shore where one might find crabs, eels, and all sorts of interesting
scaly creatures. But above all, there were the rocky heights where one
might climb.
Sometimes the truant was sent to bed without his supper. But even then
he made opportunities for climbing feats. In company with his little
brother David, John played games of “scootchers” (dares) in which the
boys crept out of their dormer-windows and found congenial
mountaineering exercise on the slate roof, sometimes hanging from the
eaves by one hand, or even--for an instant--by a single finger.
It was only on Saturdays and during vacations, however, that these lads
could taste the delights of roving. Johnnie Muir’s school-days began
when he was not quite three years old. Can you picture the sturdy infant
trudging along, with the sea-wind blowing out behind him like a flag the
little green bag that his mother had hung around his neck to hold his
first book? This infant had already learned his letters, however, from
the shop signs, and it was not long before he passed the first
mile-stone and spelled his way into the second book. When eight years
old, John entered the grammar-school. Here he studied Latin and French,
besides English, history, geography, and arithmetic. In regard to the
methods employed, this doughty Scotchman used to say, with a twinkle:
“We were simply driven pointblank against our books like a soldier
against the enemy, and sternly ordered: ‘Up and at ’em! Commit your
lessons to memory!’ If we failed in any part, however slight, we were
whipped, for the grand, simple, Scotch discovery had been made that
there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that
irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.”
From the school playground the boys loved to watch the ships at sea and
guess where they were bound. In stormy weather, that brought the salt
spume from the waves over the wall, they often saw the brave vessels
tossed against the rocky shore. Many of John’s school-books showed ships
at full sail on the margins, particularly the one that stirred his
imagination most--the reader which told about the forests of America,
with their wonderful birds and sugarmaple trees.
One evening, when John and David were loyally trying to forget dreams of
voyages to magic lands where brave adventure awaited one at every turn,
and master their lessons for the next day, their father came into the
room with wonderful news.
“Bairns,” he said, “you need na learn your lessons the nicht, for we’re
gaen to America the morn!”
How the words sang in their hearts! “America the morn!” Instead of
grammar, a land where sugar-trees grew in ground full of gold; with
forests where myriads of eagles, hawks, and pigeons circled about
millions of birds’ nests; where deer hid in every thicket; and where
there was never a gamekeeper to deny a lad the freedom of the woods!
Only their grandfather looked troubled, and said in a voice that
trembled more than usual: “Ah, puir laddies! Ye’ll find something else
ower the sea forby gold and birds’ nests and freedom frae lessons.
Ye’ll find plenty of hard, hard work.”
But nothing could cast a shadow on their joy. “I’m gaen to Amaraka the
morn!” they shouted to their envying, doubting schoolmates.
It took six weeks and a half for the old-fashioned sailing-vessel to
cross the Atlantic. The father had taken three of the children, John,
David, and Sarah, to help him make a home in the wilderness for the rest
of the family. The spot selected was near Kingston, Wisconsin, then
settled only by a few scattered, hardy pioneers. Here, with the help of
their nearest neighbors, they built in a day a cabin of rough, bur-oak
logs.
This hut was in the midst of the woods which fringed a flowery meadow
and a lake where pond-lilies grew. The boys had not been at home an hour
before they discovered a bluejay’s nest with three green eggs, and a
woodpecker’s hole, and began to make acquaintance with the darting,
gliding creatures of springs and lake.
“Here,” said John Muir, “without knowing it, we were still at school;
every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us.”
Soon farm life began in earnest. Fields were cleared and plowed; a frame
house was built on the hill; and the mother with the younger children
came to join these pioneers. It would seem that the long days of
unceasing toil--planting, hoeing, harvesting, splitting rails, and
digging wells--that retarded the growth of the active lad would have
completely quenched the flickerings of his wild, eager spirit. But he
managed to absorb, in the most astonishing way, the lore of woods and
fields and streams, until the ways of birds, insects, fishes, and wild
plant-neighbors were as an open book to him.
It was not long before his alert mind began to hunger for a real
knowledge of the books which in his childish days he had studied without
understanding. He read not only the small collection of religious books
that his father had brought with him from Scotland, but also every stray
volume that he could borrow from a neighbor.
When John was fifteen, he discovered that the poetry in the Bible, in
Shakespeare, and in Milton could give something of the same keen joy
that a Sunday evening on a hilltop made him feel, when sunset and rising
moon and the hushed voices of twilight were all mingled in one thrilling
delight. All beauty was one, he found.
The noble lines echoed in his memory as he cradled the wheat and raked
the hay. The precious opportunities for reading were stolen five minutes
at a time when he lingered in the kitchen with book and candle after the
others had gone to bed. Night after night his father would call with
exasperated emphasis: “John, do you expect me to call you every night?
You _must_ go to bed when the rest do.”
One night as he descended on the boy with more than usual sternness his
anger was somewhat disarmed when he noticed that the book in question
was a Church history. “If you _will_ read,” he added, “get up in the
morning. You may get up as early as you like.”
That night John went to bed wondering how he was going to wake himself
in order to profit by this precious permission. Though his was the sound
sleep of a healthy boy who had been splitting rails in the snowy woods,
he sprang out of bed as if roused by a mysterious reveille long before
daylight, and, holding his candle to the kitchen clock, saw that it was
only one o’clock.
“Five hours to myself!” he cried exultingly. “It is like finding a
day--a day for my very own!”
Realizing that his enthusiasm could not suffice to keep him warm in the
zero weather, and that his father would certainly object to his making a
fire, he went down cellar, and, by the light of a tallow dip, began work
on the model of a self-setting sawmill that he had invented.
“I don’t think that I was any the worse for my short ration of sleep and
the extra work in the cold and the uncertain light,” he said; “I was far
more than happy. Like Tam o’ Shanter I was glorious--‘O’er all the ills
of life victorious.”
When his sawmill was tested in a stream that he had dammed up in the
meadow, he set himself to construct a clock that might have an
attachment connected with his bed to get him up at a certain hour in the
morning. He knew nothing of the mechanism of timepieces beyond the laws
of the pendulum, but he succeeded in making a clock of wood, whittling
the small pieces in the moments of respite from farm-work. At length the
“early-rising machine” was complete and put in operation to his
satisfaction. There was now no chance that the weary flesh would betray
him into passing a precious half-hour of his time of freedom in sleep.
“John,” said his father, who had but two absorbing interests, his stern
religion and his thriving acres, “John, what time is it when you get up
in the morning?”
“About one o’clock,” replied the boy, tremblingly.
“What time is that to be stirring about and disturbing the whole
family?”
“You told me, Father--” began John.
“I know I gave you that miserable permission,” said the man with a
groan, “but I never dreamed that you would get up in the middle of the
night.”
The boy wisely said nothing, and the blessed time for study and
experimentation was not taken away.
Even his father seemed to take pride in the hickory clock that he next
constructed. It was in the form of a scythe to symbolize Time, the
pendulum being a bunch of arrows to suggest the flight of the minutes. A
thermometer and barometer were next evolved, and automatic contrivances
to light the fire and to feed the horses at a given time.
One day a friendly neighbor, who recognized that the boy was a real
mechanical genius, advised him to take his whittled inventions to the
State Fair at Madison. There two of his wooden clocks and the
thermometer were given a place of honor in the Fine Arts Hall, where
they attracted much attention. It was generally agreed that this
farm-boy from the backwoods had a bright future.
A student from the university persuaded the young inventor that he might
be able to work his way through college. Presenting himself to the dean
in accordance with this friendly advice, young Muir told his story,
explaining that except for a two-month term in the country he had not
been to school since he had left Scotland in his twelfth year. He was
received kindly, given a trial in the preparatory department, and after
a few weeks transferred to the freshman class.
During the four years of his college life John Muir made his way by
teaching school a part of each winter and doing farm-work summers. He
sometimes cut down the expense of board to fifty cents a week by living
on potatoes and mush, which he cooked for himself at the dormitory
furnace. Pat, the janitor, would do anything for this young man who
could make such wonderful things. Years afterward he pointed out his
room to visitors and tried to describe the wonders it had contained. It
had, indeed, looked like a branch of the college museum, with its
numerous botanical and geological specimens and curious mechanical
contrivances.
Although he spent four years at the State University, he did not take
the regular course, but devoted himself chiefly to chemistry, physics,
botany, and geology, which, he thought, would be most useful to him.
Then, without graduating, he started out “on a glorious botanical and
geological excursion which has lasted,” he said, in concluding the story
of his early life, “for fifty years and is not yet completed.”
He journeyed afoot to Florida, sleeping on the ground wherever night
found him. “I wish I knew where I was going,” he wrote to a friend who
asked about his plans. “Only I know that I seem doomed to be ‘carried of
the spirit into the wilderness.’”
Because he loved the whole fair earth and longed to know something of
the story that its rocks and trees might tell, he wandered on and on.
After going to Cuba, a siege of tropical fever, contracted by sleeping
on swampy ground, caused him to give up for a time a cherished plan to
make the acquaintance of the vegetation along the Amazon.
“Fate and flowers took me to California,” he said. He found there his
true Florida (Land of Flowers), and he found, also, what became the
passion of his life and his life work--the noble mountains, the great
trees, and the marvelous Yosemite. Here he lived year after year,
climbing the mountains, descending into the cañons, lovingly, patiently
working to decipher the story of the rocks, and to make the wonder and
beauty which thrilled his soul a heritage for mankind forever.
He lived for months at a time in the Yosemite Valley, whose marvels he
knew in every mood of sunshine, moonlight, dawn, sunset, storm, and
winter whiteness of frost and snow. He would wander for days on the
heights without gun or any provisions except bread, tea, a tin cup,
pocket-knife, and short-handled ax.
Once, on reading a magazine article by an enthusiastic young
mountain-climber, who dilated upon his thrilling adventures in scaling
Mount Tyndall, Mr. Muir commented dryly: “He must have given himself a
lot of trouble. When I climbed Tyndall, I ran up and back before
breakfast.”
At a time when trails were few and hard to find, he explored the Sierra,
which, he said, should be called, not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but
the Range of Light. When night came, he selected the lee side of a log,
made a fire, and went to sleep on a bed of pine-needles. If it was
snowing, he made a bigger fire and lay closer to his log shelter.
“Outdoors is the natural place for man,” he said. “I begin to cough and
wheeze the minute I get within walls.”
Never at a loss to make his way in the wilderness, he was completely
bewildered in the midst of city streets.
“What is the nearest way out of town?” he asked of a man in the business
section of San Francisco soon after he landed at the Golden Gate in
1868.
“But I don’t know where you want to go!” protested the surprised
pedestrian.
“To any place that is wild,” he replied.
So began the days of his wandering in pathless places among higher rocks
“than the world and his ribbony wife could reach.” “Climb the mountains,
climb, if you would reach beauty,” said John Muir, the wild, eager
spirit of the lad who had braved scoldings and “skelpings” to climb the
craggy peaks of Dunbar shining in his eyes.
When his friends remonstrated with him because of the way he apparently
courted danger, he replied: “A true mountaineer is never reckless. He
knows, or senses with a sure instinct, what he can do. In a moment of
real danger his whole body is eye, and common skill and fortitude are
replaced by power beyond our call or knowledge.”
It was not entirely the passion for beauty that took this lover of the
sublime aspects of nature up among the mountains and glaciers--“up where
God is making the world.” It was also the passion for knowledge--the
longing to know something of the tools the Divine Sculptor had used in
carving the giant peaks and mighty cañons.
“The marvels of Yosemite are the end of the story,” he said. “The
alphabet is to be found in the crags and valleys of the summits.”
Here he wandered about, comparing cañon with cañon, following lines of
cleavage, and finding the key to every precipice and sloping wall in the
blurred marks of the glaciers on the eternal rocks. Every boulder found
a tongue; “in every pebble he could hear the sound of running water.”
The tools that had carved the beauties of Yosemite were not, he
concluded, those of the hidden fires of the earth, the rending of
earthquake and volcanic eruption, but the slow, patient cleaving and
breaking by mighty glaciers, during the eons when the earth’s surface
was given over to the powers of cold--the period known as the Ice Age.
“There are no accidents in nature,” he said. “The flowers blossom in
obedience to the same law that keeps the stars in their places. Each
bird-song is an echo of the universal harmony. Nature is one.”
Because he believed that Nature reveals many of her innermost secrets in
times of storm, he often braved the wildest tempests on the heights. He
spoke with keen delight of the times when he had been “magnificently
snowbound in the Lord’s Mountain House.” He even dared to climb into the
very heart of a snow-cloud as it rested on Pilot Peak, and it seemed
that the experience touched the very springs of poetry in the soul of
this nature-lover. He found that he had won in a moment “a harvest of
crystal flowers, and wind-songs gathered from spiry firs and long,
fringy arms of pines.”
Once in a terrible gale he climbed to the top of a swaying pine in order
to feel the power of the wind as a tree feels it. His love for the
trees was second only to his love for the mountains. His indignation at
the heedless destruction of the majestic Sequoias knew no bounds.
“Through thousands and thousands of years God has cared for these
trees,” he said: “He has saved them from drought, disease, avalanches,
and a thousand straining and leveling tempests and floods, but He cannot
save them from foolish men.”
It was due mainly to his untiring efforts that the “big trees” of
California, as well as the wonderful Yosemite Valley, were taken under
the protection of the Nation to be preserved for all the people for all
time.
He discovered the petrified forests of Arizona, and went to Chile to see
trees of the same species which are no longer to be found anywhere in
North America. He traveled to Australia to see the eucalyptus groves, to
Siberia for its pines, and to India to see the banyan-trees. When asked
why he had not stopped at Hong Kong when almost next door to that
interesting city, he replied, “There are no trees in Hong Kong.”
In order to make a livelihood that would permit him to continue his
studies of nature in the mountains, Mr. Muir built a sawmill where he
prepared for the use of man those trees “that the Lord had felled.” Here
during the week he jotted down his observations or sketched, while he
watched out of the tail of his eye to see when the great logs were
nearing the end of their course. Then he would pause in his writing or
sketching just long enough to start a new log on its way.
Sometimes he undertook the work of a shepherd, and, while his “mutton
family of 1800 ranged over ten square miles,” he found time for reading
and botanizing.
A very little money sufficed for his simple needs. Indeed, Mr. Muir once
declared that he could live on fifty dollars a year.
“Eat bread in the mountains,” he said, “with love and adoration in your
soul, and you can get a nourishment that food experts have no conception
of.”
He spoke with pitying scorn of the money-clinking crowd who were too
“time-poor” to enjoy the keenest delights that earth can offer.
“You millionaires carry too heavy blankets to get any comfort out of
the march through life,” he said; “you don’t know what it is you are
losing by the way.”
When there was a home and “bairnies” to provide for, he managed a
fruit-ranch; but he was often absent in his beloved mountains weeks at a
time, living on bread, tea, and the huckleberries of cool, glacial bogs,
which were more to his taste than the cherries or grapes that he had to
return in time to harvest.
Mr. S. Hall Young, in his interesting narrative “Alaska Days with John
Muir,” gives a graphic account of the way John o’ Mountains climbed:
Then Muir began to _slide_ up that mountain. I had been with
mountain-climbers before, but never one like him. A deer-lope over
the smoother slopes, a sure instinct for the easiest way into a
rocky fortress, an instant and unerring attack, a serpent glide up
the steep; eye, hand, and foot all connected dynamically; with no
appearance of weight to his body--as though he had Stockton’s
negative-gravity machine strapped on his back.
In all his mountain-climbing in the Sierras, the Andes, and the high
Himalayas, he never knew what it was to be dizzy, even when standing on
the sheerest precipice, or crossing a crevasse on a sliver of ice above
an abyss of four thousand feet. He said that his simple laws of health
gave him his endurance and his steady nerves; but when we think of the
wee laddie in Scotland, hanging from the roof by one finger, or
balancing himself on a particularly sharp crag of the black headland at
Dunbar, we believe that he was born to climb.
“I love the heights,” he said, “where the air is sweet enough for the
breath of angels, and where I can feel miles and miles of beauty flowing
into me.”
He never ceased to marvel at the people who remained untouched in the
presence of Nature’s rarest loveliness. “They have eyes and see not,” he
mourned, as he saw some sleek, comfortable tourists pausing a moment in
their concern about baggage to point casually with their canes to the
Upper Yosemite Falls, coming with its glorious company of shimmering
comets out of a rainbow cloud along the top of the cliff, and passing
into another cloud of glory below.
All of Mr. Muir’s books--“The Mountains of California,” “Our National
Parks,” “My First Summer in the Sierra,” and “The Yosemite”--are
splendid invitations to “climb the mountains and get their good
tidings.” “Climb, if you would see beauty!” every page cries out. “If I
can give you a longing that will take you out of your rocking-chairs and
make you willing to forego a few of your so-called comforts for
something infinitely more worth while, I shall have fulfilled my
mission.”
Read his story of his ride on the avalanche from a ridge three thousand
feet high, where he had climbed to see the valley in its garment of
newly-fallen snow. The ascent took him nearly all day, the descent about
a minute. When he felt himself going, he instinctively threw himself on
his back, spread out his arms to keep from sinking, and found his
“flight in the milky way of snow-stars the most spiritual and
exhilarating of all modes of motion.”
In “The Yosemite,” also, we learn how a true nature-lover can meet the
terrors of an earthquake. He was awakened at about two o’clock one
moonlit morning by a “strange, thrilling motion,” and exalted by the
certainty that he was going to find the old planet off guard and learn
something of her true nature, he rushed out while the ground was
rocking so that he had to balance himself as one does on shipboard
during a heavy sea. He saw Eagle Rock fall in a thousand
boulder-fragments, while all the thunder he had ever heard was condensed
in the roar of that moment when it seemed that “the whole earth was,
like a living creature, calling to its sister planets.”
“Come, cheer up!” he cried to a panic-stricken man who felt that the
ground was about to swallow him up; “smile and clap your hands now that
kind Mother Earth is trotting us on her knee to amuse us and make us
good.”
He studied the earthquake as he studied the glaciers, the scarred
cliffs, and the flowers, and this is the lesson that it taught him:
All Nature’s wildness tells the same story: the shocks and
outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring waves, and
floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every
sort--each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of
Nature’s heart.
Read about his adventure in a storm on the Alaska glacier with the
little dog, Stickeen. You will note that he had eyes not only for the
ice-cliffs towering above the dark forest and
[Illustration: _Photo by F. P. Clatworthy_
John Muir and John Burroughs in the Yosemite Valley]
for the mighty glacier with its rushing white fountains, but also for
the poor “beastie” who was leaving blood-prints on the ice when the man
stopped to make him moccasins out of his handkerchief. As you read you
will not wonder that this man who could write about Nature’s loftiest
moods could also write that most beautiful and truly sympathetic of all
stories of dog life.
The last years of John Muir’s long career were, like the rest, part of
“the glorious botanical and geological excursion,” on which he set out
when he left college. The names that he won--“John o’ Mountains,” “The
Psalmist of the Sierra,” “The Father of the Yosemite”--all speak of his
work. Remembering that he found his fullest joy in climbing to the
topmost peaks, we have called him “The Laird of Skyland.” Going to the
mountains was going home, he said.
The Muir Woods of “big trees” near San Francisco and Muir Glacier in
Alaska are fitting monuments to his name and fame. But the real man
needs no memorial. For when we visit the glorious Yosemite, which his
untiring efforts won for us and which his boundless enthusiasm taught
us rightly to appreciate, we somehow feel that the spirit of John Muir
is still there, in the beauty that he loved, bidding us welcome and
giving us joy in the freedom of the heights.
THE SEER OF WOODCHUCK LODGE: JOHN BURROUGHS
In every man’s life we may read some lesson. What may be read in
mine? If I see myself correctly, it is this: that the essential
things are always at hand; that one’s own door opens upon the
wealth of heaven and earth; and that all things are ready to serve
and cheer one. Life is a struggle, but not a warfare; it is a day’s
labor, but labor on God’s earth, under the sun and stars with other
laborers, where we may think and sing and rejoice as we work.
JOHN BURROUGHS.
Some farm-boys were having a happy Sunday in the woods gathering black
birch and wintergreens. As they lay on the cool moss, lazily tasting the
spicy morsels they had found and gazing up at the patches of blue sky
through the beeches, one of the boys caught sight of a small, bluish
bird, with an odd white spot on its wing, as it flashed through the
trembling leaves. In a moment it was gone, but the boy was on his feet,
looking after it with eyes that had opened on a new world.
So “Deacon Woods,” the old familiar playground that he thought he knew
so well, where blue-jays, woodpeckers, and yellow-birds were every-day
companions, contained wonders of which he had never dreamed. The older
brothers knew nothing and cared nothing about the unknown bird. What
difference did it make, anyway? But the little lad of seven who followed
its flight with startled, wondering eyes seemed to have been born
again. His eyes were opened to many things that had not existed for him
before.
Do you remember the story of the monk of long ago who, while copying in
his cell a page from the Holy Book, chanced to ponder on the words that
tell us that a thousand years in God’s sight are but as a day? As the
monk wondered and doubted how such a thing might be, he heard through
his window the song of a strange, beautiful bird, and followed it
through the garden into the woods beyond. Wandering on and listening,
with every sense alive to the delights about him, it seemed that he had
spent the happiest hour he had ever known. But when he returned to his
monastery, he found himself a stranger in a place that had long
forgotten him. He had been wandering for a hundred years in the magic
wood, listening to the song of the wonderful bird.
In somewhat the same way John Burroughs followed where the gleam of the
little bluish warbler led him through woods and fields for more than
seventy years. That is why Time missed him out of the great reckoning.
One who listens to the song of life knows nothing of age or change. So
it is that the boy John never slipped away from Burroughs, the man. So
it is that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge is eighty years young.
Do you know what it means to be a seer? A seer is one who has seeing
eyes which clearly note and comprehend what most people pass a hundred
times nor care to see. He looks, too, through the outer shell or
appearance of things, and learns to read something of their hidden
meaning. He has sight, then, and also insight. He looks with his
physical eyes and also with the eyes of the mind and spirit.
We always think of a seer as an old man, but little John Burroughs--John
o’ Birds, as some one has called him--began to be “an eye among the
blind” that Sunday in the woods when he was a lad of seven. He led a
new, charmed life as he weeded the garden and later plowed the fields.
He saw and heard life thrilling about him on every side, and all that he
saw became part of his own life. He drank in the joy of the bobolink and
the song-sparrow with the air he breathed, as the warm sunshine and
good, earth smell of the freshly turned furrow entered at every pore.
Another day almost as memorable as that which brought the flash of the
strange bird was the one which gave him a glimpse into the unexplored
realm of ideas. A lady visiting at the farm-house noticed a boyish
drawing of his, and said, “What taste that boy has!” Taste, then, might
belong to something besides the food that one took into one’s mouth. It
seemed that there were new worlds of words--and thoughts--of which his
farmer folk little dreamed.
Again, one day when watching some roadmakers down by the school-house
turn up some flat stones, he heard a man standing by exclaim, “Ah, here
we have, perhaps, some antiquities!” Antiquities! How the word rang in
his fancy for days! Oh, the magic lure of the world of words!
It seemed that school and books might give him the freedom of that
world. He went to the district school at Roxbury, New York, summers
until he was ten, when his help was needed on the farm. After that, he
was permitted to go only during the winters. In many ways he was the
odd one of the family, and his unaccountable interest in things that
could never profit a farmer often tried the patience of his hard-working
father.
One day the boy asked for money to buy an algebra. What was an algebra,
anyway, and why should this queer lad be demanding things that his
father and brothers had never had? John got the algebra, and other
precious books beside, but he earned the money himself by selling maple
sugar. He knew when April had stirred the sap in the sugar-bush a week
or more before any one else came to tap the trees, and his early harvest
always found a good market.
And what a joyous time April was! “I think April is the best month to be
born in,” said John Burroughs. “One is just in time, so to speak, to
catch the first train, which is made up in this month. My April chickens
are always the best.... Then are heard the voices of April--arriving
birds, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the
middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes
at sun-down, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising
from the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny
slopes. April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight
and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable
charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of the first
birds--like that of the phœbe-bird or of the meadow-lark.”
The keen joy in the feel of the creative sunlight and springing
earth--the eager tasting of every sight and sound and scent that the
days brought--were not more a part of his own throbbing life than the
desire to know and understand. When he was fifteen he had the promise
that he might go to the academy in a neighboring town. That fall, as he
plowed the lot next the sugar-bush, each furrow seemed to mark a step on
the way.
When the time drew near, however, it proved as strange and unusual a
desire as that for the algebra. The district school had been good enough
for his brothers. So he put his disappointment behind him as he went for
another winter to the Roxbury school. “Yet I am not sure but I went to
Harpersfield after all,” said Mr. Burroughs; “the long, long thoughts,
the earnest resolve to make myself worthy, the awakening of every part
and fiber of me, helped me on my way as far, perhaps, as the
unattainable academy could have done.”
The next year found the youth of seventeen teaching a country school for
eleven dollars a month and “board around.” How homesick he felt for the
blue hills at home, for the old barn, with the nests of the swallows and
phœbe-birds beneath its roof, for the sugar-bush, and the clear,
laughing trout-streams. He could see his mother hurrying through her
churning so that she might go berrying on the sunny slope of Old Clump,
and he knew what she brought back with the strawberries--dewy dreams of
daisies and buttercups, lilting echoes of bobolinks and meadow-larks.
In October the long term was over and he went home with nearly all his
earnings,--over fifty dollars,--enough to pay his way at the Hedding
Literary Institute for the winter term.
In the spring of 1855 he went to New York City for the first time,
hoping to find a position as teacher. He was not successful in this
quest, but the trip was memorable for a raid on the second-hand
book-stalls. He reached home some days later “with an empty pocket and
an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books.”
Always attracted chiefly to essays, the works of Emerson influenced him
greatly. He absorbed their spirit as naturally and completely as he had
absorbed the sights and sounds of his native hill-country. His first
article--an essay called “Expression,” which was printed without
signature in _The Atlantic Monthly_--was by many attributed to Emerson.
Lowell, who was at that time editor of _The Atlantic_, told, with much
amusement, that before accepting the contribution he had looked through
all of Emerson’s works expecting to find it and confound this
plagiarizing Burroughs with a proof of his rascality.
While teaching school near West Point he one day found, in the library
of the Military Academy, a volume of Audubon--and entered upon his
kingdom. Here was a complete chart of that bird world which he had never
ceased to long to explore since that memorable day when he had seen the
little blue warbler. There was time, too, for long walks, time to live
with the birds--to revive old ties as well as to make new friends.
In speaking of his study of the birds, Mr. Burroughs once said:
“What joy the birds have brought me! How they have given me wings to
escape the tedious and deadly. Studied the birds? No, I have played with
them, camped with them, summered and wintered with them. My knowledge of
them has come to me through the pores of my skin, through the air I have
breathed, through the soles of my feet, through the twinkle of the
leaves and the glint of the waters.”
At once he felt a longing to write something of the joy he was gaining
through this comradeship with his feathered friends. There was nothing
that spoke of Emerson or any other model in his pages now. He had found
his own path. He was following the little blue bird into a world of his
own.
A chance came to go to Washington to live. For several years, while
working as a clerk in the Treasury, he spent all his spare moments with
the birds. He knew what nests were to be found near Rock Creek and along
Piney Branch. It seemed that he heard the news as soon as a flock of
northbound songsters stopped to rest for a day or two in the Capitol
grounds.
While watching a vault where great piles of the Nation’s gold lay
stored, he lived over in memory the golden days of his boyhood spent in
climbing trees, tramping over hills, and through grassy hollows, or
lying with half-shut eyes by the brookside to learn something of the
life-story of the birds. There were leisure afternoons which brought no
duty save that of sitting watchful before the iron wall of the vault. At
such times he often tried to seize some of the happy bits that memory
brought, a twig here, a tuft there, and now a long, trailing
strand--stray scraps of observation of many sorts--which he wove
together into a nest for his brooding fancy. And we, too, as we read
those pages hear the “wandering voice” of the little bird of earth and
sky, who wears the warm brown of one on his breast and the blue of the
other on his wings; we see the dauntless robin a-tilt on the sugar-bush;
we catch the golden melody of the wood-thrush--and “the time of singing
birds” has come to our hearts. He has not only seeing eyes, but an
understanding heart, this seer and lover of the birds, and so his bits
of observation have meaning and value. He called the book in which these
various bird-papers were gathered together “Wake Robin,” the name of a
wild-flower that makes its appearance at the time of the return of the
birds.
This book was well named, not only because it suggested something of the
spirit and feeling of the essays, but also because it was the herald of
several other delightful volumes such as “Signs and Seasons,” “Winter
Sunshine,” “Birds and Poets.”
Do you remember how Emerson says in his poem “Each and All”
I thought the sparrow’s note from Heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home in his nest at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.
When John Burroughs writes about the birds, he brings with their life
and song the feeling of the “perfect whole”--the open fields, the
winding river, the bending sky, and the cool, fragrant woods. For he
always gives, with the glimpses of nature that he culls, something of
himself, something of his own clear-seeing, open-hearted appreciation.
The ten years spent in Washington were memorable not only for his first
success as a nature writer, but also for the experiences brought through
the Civil War and his friendship with the “good gray poet,” Walt
Whitman. Years after, Mr. Burroughs said that his not having gone into
the army was probably the greatest miss of his life. He went close
enough to the firing-line on one occasion to hear “the ping of a
rifle-bullet overhead, and the thud it makes when it strikes the
ground.” Surely there should be enough of the spirit of his grandfather,
who was one of Washington’s Valley Forge veterans, to make a soldier!
How well he remembered the old Continental’s thrilling tales as they
angled for trout side by side, graybeard and eager urchin of nine! How
well he remembered the hair-raising stories of witches and ghosts that
made many shadowy spots spook-ridden. He had learned to stand his ground
in the woods at nightfall, and at the edge of the big black hole under
the barn, and so to put to flight the specters before and the phantoms
behind. But when, that night on the battle-field, he saw a company of
blue-coated men hurrying toward a line of rifle-flashes that shone
luridly against the horizon, he concluded that his grandfather had
“emptied the family powder-horn” in those Revolutionary days, and that
there was no real soldier stuff in the grandson.
If his failure to enlist in the army was the greatest miss of his life,
his friendship with Whitman was its greatest gain. They took to the open
road together, the best of boon companions, and Burroughs came to know
the poet as he knew the birds. His essay “The Flight of the Eagle,” is
one of the most spirited and heartfelt tributes that one great man ever
paid another.
One should, however, hear Mr. Burroughs talk about the poet and watch
his kindling enthusiasm. He had been teaching us how to roast shad under
the ashes of our camp-fire one day when a chance remark put him in a
reminiscent mood. We all felt that evening as if we had come in actual
touch with the poet.
“You see,” our host concluded, “Whitman was himself his own best poem--a
man, take him all in all. Do you remember how George Eliot said of
Emerson, ‘He is the first man I have ever met’? Many people felt that
way about Whitman.”
As I looked at Whitman’s friend I found myself thinking, “Surely here is
a man, take him all in all--a man in whom the child’s heart, the youth’s
vision, the poet’s enthusiasm, the scientist’s faithfulness, and the
thinker’s insight, are all wonderfully blended.”
After the years in Washington, his work as a bank examiner made Mr.
Burroughs seek a place for his home near New York City. The spot
selected was a small farm on the Hudson, not far from Poughkeepsie,
which he called Riverby. Here, in his eager delight over the planting of
his roof-tree, he helped, so far as his time permitted, in the building,
placing many of the rough-hewn stones himself. He tells with some relish
a story of the Scotch mason, who, on looking back one evening as he was
being ferried across to his home on the east shore of the river, saw, to
his great anger another man at work on his job. Returning in fury to
see why he had been supplanted, he surprised the owner himself in the
act of putting in place some of the stones for the chimney.
“Weel, you are a hahndy malm!” he exclaimed.
The big river never appealed to Mr. Burroughs, however, as the friendly
Pepacton and the other silver-clear streams where he had caught trout as
a boy. It brought too close the noise of the world, the fever of getting
and spending. Besides, its rising and ebbing tides, its big steamers and
busy tugs, its shad and herring, were all strange to him; his boyhood
home had known nothing of these things.
He built for himself a bark-covered retreat some two miles back from the
river in a bowl-shaped hollow among the thickly wooded hills.
“Slabsides,” as he called this human bird’s-nest, was a two-story shack
of rough-hewn timbers.
“One of the greatest pleasures of life is to build a house for one’s
self,” he said; “there is a peculiar satisfaction even in planting a
tree from which you hope to eat the fruit or in the shade of which you
hope to repose. But how much greater the pleasure in planting the
roof-tree, the tree that bears the golden apples of hospitality. What is
a man’s house but his nest, and why should it not be nest-like, both
outside and in, snug and well-feathered and modeled by the heart
within?”
Many guests climbed the steep, rocky trail and enjoyed the hospitality
of this retreat, among others President Roosevelt and his wife. The
naturalist, whom Colonel Roosevelt affectionately called “Oom John,”
cooked the dinner himself, bringing milk and butter from his cave
refrigerator, broiling the chicken, and preparing the lettuce, celery,
and other vegetables which grew in the rich black mold of the hollow. As
he prepared and served the meal with all the ease of a practised camper
there was never a halt in the talk of these two great lovers of the
outdoor world. If the poet-sage who deplored that
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind
could have spent a day with John Burroughs, he would have found one
man, at least, who never knew the tyranny of possessions, and so was
never possessed by them. He is the type of the sane, happy human being
who, while journeying through life, has taken time to live by the way.
He knows the enchanting by-paths of existence, the friendly trails that
wind over meadows and hills.
“I am in love with this world,” he says; “I have nestled lovingly in it.
It has been home. I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvests,
I have waited upon its seasons, and always have I reaped what I have
sown. While I delved, I did not lose sight of the sky overhead. While I
gathered its bread and meat for my body, I did not neglect to gather its
bread and meat for my soul.”
Though the whole wide out-of-doors is home to John Burroughs, there is
one spot that is more than any other the abiding-place of his
affections. This is the country of his childhood in the Catskills. Here
he spends his summers now at Woodchuck Lodge, a cottage about half a
mile from the old homestead. Here he is happy in a way that he can be
nowhere else. The woods and fields are flesh of his flesh, the
mountains are father and mother to him.
A day with John Burroughs at Woodchuck Lodge will always seem torn from
the calendar of ordinary living, a day apart, free, wholesome, and
untouched by petty care. His world is indeed “so full of a number of
things” that all who come within the spell of its serene content are “as
happy as kings.”