I will begin my long mountain excursion soon, for the snow is mostly
gone from the high meadows.
I have been guiding a few parties and will take a few more if they are
of the right kind, but I want my mind kept free and sensitive to all
influences excepting human business.
I need a talk with you more than ever before. Mrs. Hutchings is always
kind to me, and the clearness of her views on all spiritual things is
very extraordinary. She appreciates your friendship very keenly, and I
am glad to think you will soon know each other better. Her little Casie
(Gertrude) is as pure a piece of sunbeam as ever was condensed to human
form.
Hoping that Ned will be able to come here to the mountain waters for
perfect healing and that you will also find leisure for the satisfying
of your thirst for beauty, I remain ever
Your friend,
JOHN MUIR.
My love to Doctor and all the boys.
Yosemite Valley,
August 5th, 1872.
Your letter telling me to catch my best glacier birds and come to you
and the coast mountains only makes me the more anxious to see you, and
if you cannot come up, I will have to come down, if only for a talk.
My birds are flying everywhere,--into all mountains and plains, of all
climes and times,--and some are ducks in the sea, and I scarce know
what to do about it. I must see the coast ranges and the coast, but I
was thinking that a month or so might answer for the present, and then,
instead of spending the winter in town, I would hide in Yosemite and
write; or I thought I would pack up some meal and dried plums to some
deep wind-sheltered cañon back among the glaciers of the summits, and
write there, and be ready to catch any whisper of ice and snow in these
highest storms.
You anticipate all the bends and falls and rapids and cascades of my
mountain life, and I know that you say truly about my companions being
those who live with me in the same sky, whether in reach of hand or only
of spiritual contact, which is the most real contact of all.
I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever
seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.
[Part of letter missing.]
the valley was vouchsafed a single drop.
After the splendid blessing, the afternoon was veiled in calm clouds, and
one of intensely beautiful pattern and gorgeously _irised_ was stationed
over Eagle Rock at the sunset.
Farewell. I’ll see you with my common eyes, and touch you with these
very writing fingers ere long.
Remember me cordially to Mrs. Moore and Mr. and all your family, and I
am as ever
Your friend,
JOHN MUIR.
Yosemite Valley,
September 13, 1872.
Yours of Aug. 23rd is received. Le Conte writes me that Agassiz will
not come to the valley.
I just got down last evening from a fifteen-day ramble in the basins
of Illilouette and Pohono, and start again in an hour for the summit
glaciers to see some cañons and to examine the stakes I planted in the
ice a month ago.
I would like to come down to see Agassiz, but now is my harvest of rocks
and I cannot spare the time.
I shall work in the outer mountains incessantly until the coming of the
snow [rest of letter missing].
Yosemite Valley,
October 8th, 1872.
Here we are again, and here is your letter of Sept. 24th. I got down last
evening, and boo! was I not weary after pushing through the rough upper
half of the great Tuolumne Cañon? I have climbed more than twenty-four
thousand feet in these ten days, three times to the top of the glacieret
of Mt. Hoffman, and once to Mts. Lyell and McClure. I have bagged a
quantity of Tuolumne rocks sufficient to build a dozen Yosemites; stripes
of cascades longer than ever, lacy or smooth and white as pressed snow;
a glacier basin with ten glassy lakes set all near together like eggs
in a nest; then El Capitan and a couple of Tissiacks, cañons glorious
with yellows and reds of mountain maple and aspen and honeysuckle and
ash and new indescribable music immeasurable from strange waters and
winds, and glaciers, too, flowing and grinding, alive as any on earth.
Shall I pull you out some? Here is a clean, white-skinned glacier from
the back of McClure with glassy emerald flesh and singing crystal blood
all bright and pure as a sky, yet handling mud and stone like a navvy,
building moraines like a plodding Irishman. Here is a cascade two hundred
feet wide, half a mile long, glancing this way and that, filled with
bounce and dance and joyous hurrah, yet earnest as tempest, and singing
like angels loose on a frolic from heaven; and here are more cascades
and more, broad and flat like clouds and fringed like flowing hair, with
occasional falls erect as pines, and lakes like glowing eyes; and here
are visions and dreams, and a splendid set of ghosts, too many for ink
and narrow paper.
I have not heard anything concerning Le Conte’s glacier lecture, but
he seems to have drawn all he knows of Sierra glaciers and new theories
concerning them so directly from here that I cannot think that he will
claim discovery, etc. If he does, I will not be made poorer.
Professor Kneeland, Secretary Boston Institute of Technology, gathered
some letters I sent to Runkle and that “Tribune” letter, and hashed them
into a compost called a paper for the Boston Historical Society, and
gave me credit for all of the smaller sayings and doings and stole the
broadest truth to himself. I have the proof-sheets of “The Paper” and
will show them to you some time. But all of such meanness can work no
permanent evil to any one except the dealer.
As for the living “glaciers of the Sierras,” here is what I have learned
concerning them. You will have the first chance to steal, for I have
just concluded my experiments on them for the season and have not yet
cast them at any of the great professors, or presidents.
One of the yellow days of last October, when I was among the mountains
of the “Merced Group,” following the footprints of the ancient glaciers
that once flowed grandly from their ample fountains, reading what I could
of their history as written in moraines and cañons and lakes and carved
rocks, I came upon a small stream that was carrying mud I had not before
seen. In a calm place where the stream widened I collected some of this
mud and observed that it was entirely mineral in composition and fine
as flour, like the mud from a fine-grit grindstone. Before I had time
to reason I said, Glacier mud, mountain meal.
Then I observed that this muddy stream issued from a bank of fresh
quarried stones and dirt that was sixty or seventy feet in height. This I
at once took to be a moraine. In climbing to the top of it I was struck
with the steepness of its slope and with its raw, unsettled, plantless,
newborn appearance. The slightest touch started blocks of red and black
slate, followed by a rattling train of smaller stones and sand and
a cloud of the dry dust of mud, the whole moraine being as free from
lichens and weather stains as if dug from the mountain that very day.
When I had scrambled to the top of the moraine, I saw what seemed a huge
snow-bank four or five hundred yards in length by half a mile in width.
Imbedded in its stained and furrowed surface were stones and dirt like
that of which the moraine was built. Dirt-stained lines curved across
the snow-bank from side to side, and when I observed that these curved
lines coincided with the curved moraine and that the stones and dirt
were most abundant near the bottom of the bank, I shouted, “A living
glacier.” These bent dirt lines show that the ice is flowing in its
different parts with unequal velocity, and these embedded stones are
journeying down to be built into the moraine, and they gradually become
more abundant as they approach the moraine because there the motion is
slower.
On traversing my new-found glacier, I came to a crevass, down a wide and
jagged portion of which I succeeded in making my way, and discovered that
my so-called _snow-bank_ was clear green ice, and, comparing the form
of the basin which it occupied with similar adjacent basins that were
empty, I was led to the opinion that this glacier was several hundred
feet in depth.
Then I went to the “snow-banks” of Mts. Lyell and McClure and believed
that they also were true glaciers and that a dozen other snow-banks seen
from the summit of Mt. Lyell crouching in shadow were glaciers, living
as any in the world and busily engaged in completing that vast work of
mountain-making, accomplished by their giant relatives now dead, which,
united and continuous, covered all the range from summit to sea like a
sky.
I’m going to take your painter boys with me into one of my best sanctums
on your recommendation for holiness.
Emerson has sent me a profound little book styled “The Growth of the
Mind,” by Reed. Do you know it? It is full of the fountain truth.
I’m glad your boys are safely back. Perhaps Ned and I may try that Andes
field together.
I would write to Mrs. Moore but will wait until she is better. Tell her
the cascades and mountains of upper Hetch Hetchy [ ].
I hope I may see you a few days soon. I had a pretty letter from old
Dr. Torrey, and from Gray I have heard three or four times. I am ever
Cordially.