Yosemite Valley,
May 15th, 1873.
The robins have eaten too much breakfast this morning, and there is a
grossness in their throats that will require a good deal of sunshine
for its cure. The leaves of many of the plants are badly disarranged,
showing that they have had a poor night’s sleep. The reason of all this
trouble is a snowstorm that overloaded the flowers and benumbed the
butterflies, upon which the birds have breakfasted too heartily.
The grand Upper Yosemite Fall is at this moment (7 A.M.) coming
with all its glorious array of fleecy comets out of a cloud that is laid
along the top of the cliff, and going into a cloud that is drawn along
the face of the wall about half way up. These clouds are shot through and
through with sunshine, forming, with the snowy waters and fresh-washed
walls, one of the most openly glorious scenes I ever beheld. A lady on
Black’s piazza is quietly looking at it, sitting with arms folded in
her chair. A gentleman is pointing at it with his cane, while another
gentleman is speaking loudly and businessly about his “baggage.” “Eyes
have they but they see not.”
Looking up the valley, the cloud effects are yet more lavishly glorious.
Tissiack is mantled with silvery burning mists, her gray rocks appearing
dimly where thinly veiled. Over the top of Washington Column the clouds
are descending in a continuous stream and rising again suddenly from the
bottom like spray from a waterfall. O dear! I wish you were here. I may
write this cloud glory forevermore but never be able to picture it for
you.
Doctor and Priest in Yosemite. Emerson prophesies in similar dialect that
I will one day go to him and “_better men_” in New England, or something
to that effect. I feel like objecting in popular slang that I can’t see
it. I shall indeed go gladly to the “Atlantic Coast,” as he prophesies,
but only to see him and the Glacier Ghosts of the north. Runkle wants
to make a teacher of me, but I have been too long wild, too befogged and
befogged to burn well in their patent high-heated educational furnaces.
[A portion missing.]
I had a good letter from Le Conte. He evidently doesn’t know what to
think of the huge lumps of ice that I sent him. I don’t wonder at his
cautious withholding of judgment. When my mountain mother first told me
the tale, I could hardly dare to believe either, and kept saying “What?”
like a child half awake. Farewell. My love to the Doctor and the boys.
I hope the Doctor will run away from his enormous bundles of duty and
rest a summer with the mountains. I have a great deal to ask him. I have
begun to build my cabin. You will have a _home_ in Yosemite.
Ever thine,
J. MUIR.
[1873.]
My horse and bread, etc., are ready for upward. I returned three days ago
from Mts. Lyell, McClure, and Hoffman. I spent three days on a glacier
up there, planting stakes, etc. This time I go to the Merced group, one
of whose mountains shelters a glacier. I will go over all the lakes and
moraines, etc., there. Will be gone a week or two or so.
Hutchings wants to go with me to “help me,” but I will, etc., etc.
Ink cannot tell the glow that lights me at this moment in turning to
the mountains. I feel strong to leap Yosemite walls at a bound. Hotels
and human impurity will be far below. I will fuse in spirit skies.
Farewell, or come meet in ghost between Red Mountain and Black on the
star-sparkled ice.
Love to all thine and to Moores and Stoddard.
Yosemite Valley,
June 7th, 1873.
I came down last night from the Lyell Glacier, weary with walking in the
snow, but I forgot my weariness and the pain of my sun-blistered face
in the news of your coming.
I would like you to bring me a pair or two of green spectacles to
save my eyes, as I have some weeks of hard work and exposure among the
glaciers this fall. They are sore with my last journey. All of the upper
mountains are yet deeply snow-clad, and the view from the top of Lyell
was infinitely glorious.
Thanking God for thee, I say a short farewell.
Kellogg has not yet appeared, nor any of the other friends you speak of.
Yosemite,
September 17, [1873.]
I am again at the bottom meadow of Yosemite after a most intensely
interesting bath among the outer mountains. I have been exploring the
upper tributaries of the Cascade and Tamarac streams. And in particular
all of the basin of the Yosemite Creek. The present basin of every stream
which enters the valley on the north side was formerly filled with ice,
which also flowed into the valley, although the ancient ice basins did
not always correspond with the present water basins because glaciers can
flow up hill. The _whole_ of the north wall of the valley was covered
with an unbroken flow of ice, with perhaps the single exception of the
crest of Eagle Cliff, and though the book of glaciers gradually dims as
we go lower on the range, yet I fully believe that future investigation
will show that, in the earlier ages of Sierra Nevada ice, vast glaciers
flowed to the foot of the range east of Yosemite and also north and south
at an elevation of 9000 feet. The glacier basins are almost unchanged,
and I believe that ice was the agent by which all of the present rocks
receive their special forms. More of this some other day. Would that I
could have you here or in any wild place where I can think and speak!
Would you not be thoroughly iced? You would not find in me one unglacial
thought. Come, and I will tell you how El Capitan and Tissiack were
fashioned. I will most likely live at Black’s Hotel this winter in charge
of the premises, and before next spring I will have an independent cabin
built, with a special Carr corner where you and the Doctor can come and
stay all summer; also I will have a tent so that we can camp and receive
night blessings when we choose, and then I will have horses enough so
that we can go to the upper temples also. I wish you could see Lake
Tenaya. It is one of the most perfectly and richly spiritual places in
the mountains, and I would like to preëmpt there. Somehow I should feel
like leaving home in going to Hetch Hetchy. Besides, there is room there
for many other claims, and it soon will fill with coarse homesteads, but
as the winter is so severe at Lake Tenaya, very few will care to live
there. Hetch Hetchy is about four thousand feet above sea, while Lake
Tenaya is eight. I have been living in these mountains in so haunting,
soaring, floating a way that it seems strange to cast any kind of an
anchor. All is so equal in glory, so ocean-like, that to choose one
place above another is like drawing dividing lines in the sky. I think I
answered your last with respect to remaining here in the winter. I can
do much of this ice work in the quiet, and the whole subject is purely
physical, so that I can get but little from books. All depends upon the
goodness of one’s eyes. No scientific book in the world can tell me how
this Yosemite granite is put together or how it has been taken down.
Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon
them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which
are graven so lavishly upon them.
Would that I knew what good prayers I could say or good deeds I could
do, so that ravens would bring me bread and venison for the next two
years! Then would I get some tough gray clothes the color of granite,
so no one could see or find me [words missing] would I reproduce the
ancient ice-rivers and [words missing] and dwell with them. I go again
to my lessons to-morrow morning. Some snow fell, and bye-and-bye I must
tell you about it.
If poor good Melancholia Cowper had been here yesterday morning, here
is just what he would have sung:--
The rocks have been washed, just washed in a shower
Which winds in their faces conveyed.
The plentiful cloudlets bemuffled their brows
Or lay on their beautiful heads.
But cold sighed the winds in the fir trees above
And down on the pine trees below,
For the rain that came laving and washing in love
Was followed, alas, by a snow.
Which, being unmetaphored and prosed into sense, means that yesterday
morning a strong southeast wind, cooled among the highest snows of the
Sierra, drove back the warm northwest winds from the hot San Joaquin
plains and burning foothill woods, and piled up a jagged cloud addition
to our valley walls. Soon those white clouds began to darken and to reach
out long filmy edges which, uniting over the valley, made a close, dark
ceiling. Then came rain, unsteady at first, now a heavy gush, then a
sprinkling halt, as if the clouds so long out of practice had forgotten
something, but after half an hour of experimental pouring and sprinkling
there came an earnest, steady, well-controlled rain.
On the mountain the rain soon turned to snow and some half-melted flakes
reached the bottom of the valley. This morning Starr King and Tissiack
and all the upper valley are white.
[1873.]
[Beginning of letter missing.]
I had a grand ramble in the deep snow outside the valley and discovered
one beautiful truth concerning snow-structure and three concerning the
forms of forest trees.
These earthquakes have made me immensely rich. I had long been aware of
the life and gentle tenderness of the rocks, and, instead of walking upon
them as unfeeling surfaces, began to regard them as a transparent sky.
Now they have spoken with audible voice and pulsed with common motion.
This very instant, just as my pen reached “and” on the third line above,
my cabin creaked with a sharp shock and the oil waved in my lamp.
We had several shocks last night. I would like to go somewhere on the
west South American coast to study earthquakes. I think I could invent
some experimental apparatus whereby their complicated phenomena could
be separated and read, but I have some years of ice on hand. ’Tis most
ennobling to find and feel that we are constructed with reference to
these noble storms, so as to draw unspeakable enjoyment from them. Are
we not rich when our six-foot column of substance sponges up heaven
above and earth beneath into its pores? Aye, we have chambers in us the
right shape for earthquakes. Churches and the schools lisp limpingly,
painfully, of man’s capabilities, possibilities, and fussy developing
nostrums of duties, but if the human flock, together with their Rev.’s
and double L-D shepherds, would go wild themselves, they would discover
without Euclid that the solid contents of a human soul is the whole world.
Our streams are fast obtaining their highest power; warm nights and days
are making the high mountain snow into snow avalanches and snow-falls;
violets, blue, white, and yellow, abound; butterflies [flit] through the
meadows; and mirror shadows reveal new heavens and new earths everywhere.
Remember me to the Doctor and all the boys and to McChesney and the
brotherhood.
Cordially,
J. MUIR.
Independence,
October 16th, 1873.
All of my season’s mountain work is done. I have just come down from
Mt. Whitney and the newly discovered mountain five miles northwest of
Whitney, and now our journey is a simple saunter along the base of the
range to Tahoe, where we will arrive about the end of the month or a
few days earlier.
I have seen a good deal more of the high mountain region about the head
of Kings and Kern rivers than I expected to do in so short and so late
a time.
Two weeks ago I left the Doctor and Billie in the Kings River Yosemite,
and set out for Mt. Tyndall and adjacent mountains and cañons. I ascended
Tyndall and ran down into the Kern River Cañon and climbed some nameless
mountains between Tyndall and Whitney, and thus gained a pretty good
general idea of the region. After crossing the range by the Kearsarge
Pass, I again left the Doctor and Bill and pushed southward along the
range and northward and up Cottonwood Creek to Mt. Whitney, then over to
the Kern Cañons again and up to the new “_highest_” peak, which I did
not ascend, as there was no one to attend to my horse. Thus you see I
have rambled this highest portion of the Sierra pretty thoroughly, though
hastily. I spent a night without fire or food in a very icy wind-storm
on one of the spires of the new highest peak by some called Fisherman’s
Peak. That I am already quite recovered from the tremendous exposure
proves that I cannot be killed in any such manner. On the day previous
I climbed two mountains, making over 10,000 feet of altitude.
I saw no mountains in all this grand region that appeared at all
inaccessible to a mountaineer. Give me a summer and a bunch of matches
and a sack of meal, and I will climb every mountain in the region.
I have passed through the Lone Pine and noted the Yosemite and local
subsidences accomplished by the earthquakes. The bunchy bush _Compositæ_
of Owen’s Valley are intensely glorious.
I got back from Whitney this P.M. How I shall sleep! My life
rose wavelike with those lofty granite waves; now it may wearily float
for a time along the smooth, flowery plain.
It seems that this new Fisherman’s Peak is causing some stir in the
newspapers. If I feel writeful, I will send you a sketch of the region
for the “Overland.”
Love to all my friends.
Ever cordially yours,
JOHN MUIR.
[1873.]
After Clark’s departure a week ago we climbed the divide between the south
fork of the San Joaquin and Kings River. I scanned the vast landscape
on which the ice had written wondrous things. After a short scientific
feast I decided to attempt entering the valley of the west branch of the
north fork, which we did, following the bottom of the valley for about
10 miles. Then we were compelled to ascend the west side of the cañon
into the forest. About 6 miles farther down we made out to reënter the
cañon, where there is a Yosemite valley, and by hard efforts succeeded
in getting out on the opposite side and reaching the divide between the
east fork and the middle fork. We then followed the top of the divide
nearly to the confluence of the east fork with the trunk and crossed
the main river yesterday, and are now in the pines again, over all the
wildest and most impracticable portions of our journey. In descending
the divide of the main Kings River we made a descent of near 7000 feet
down, clear down with a vengeance, to the hot pineless foot-hills. We
rose again, and it was a most grateful resurrection. Last night I watched
the writing of the spirey pines on the sky gray with stars, and if you
had been here I would have said, Look, etc.
Last night, when the Doctor and I were bed-building, discussing as usual
the goodnesses and badnesses of boughy mountain beds, we were astounded
by the appearance of two prospectors coming through the mountain rye.
By them I send this note.
To-day we will reach some of the sequoias near Thomas’ Mill (_vide_ map
of Geological Survey), and in two or three more days will be in the cañon
of the south fork of Kings River. If the weather appears tranquil when
we reach the summit of the range, I may set out among the glaciers for
a few days, but if otherwise I shall push hastily for the Owen’s River
plains and thence up to Tahoe, etc. I am working hard and shall not feel
easy until I am on the other side beyond the reach of early snowstorms.
Not that I fear snowstorms for myself, but the poor animals would die
or suffer.
The Doctor’s duster and fly-net are safe, and therefore he. Billy is in
good spirits, apt to teach drawing in and out of season.
Remember me to the Doctor and the boys and Morris and Keith, etc.
Ever yours truly,
JOHN MUIR.
Tahoe City,
November 3rd, [1873.]