Bay and of the other unmapped bays and inlets that we had entered. At
their request, from Muir's notes and our estimate of distances by our
rate of sailing, and of directions from observations of our little
compass, we drew a rough map of Glacier Bay. This was sent on to
Washington by these officers and published by the Navy Department. For
six or seven years it was the only sailing chart of Glacier Bay, and two
or three steamers were wrecked, groping their way in these uncharted
passages, before surveying vessels began to make accurate maps. So from
its beginning has Uncle Sam neglected this greatest and richest of all
his possessions.
Our little company separated at Sitka. Stickeen and our Indian crew were
the first to leave, embarking for a return trip to Wrangell by canoe.
Stickeen had stuck close to Muir, following him everywhere, crouching
at his feet where he sat, sleeping in his room at night. When the time
came for him to leave Muir explained the matter to him fully, talking to
and reasoning with him as if he were human. Billy led him aboard the
canoe by a dog-chain, and the last Muir saw of him he was standing on of
the canoe, howling a sad farewell.
Muir sailed south on the monthly mail steamer; while I took passage on a
trading steamer for another missionary trip among the northern tribes.
So ended my canoe voyages with John Muir. Their memory is fresh and
sweet as ever. The flowing stream of years has not washed away nor
dimmed the impressions of those great days we spent together. Nearly all
of them were cold, wet and uncomfortable, if one were merely an animal,
to be depressed or enlivened by physical conditions. But of these
so-called "hardships" Muir made nothing, and I caught his spirit;
therefore, the beauty, the glory, the wonder and the thrills of those
weeks of exploration are with me yet and shall endure--a rustless,
inexhaustible treasure.
THE MAN IN PERSPECTIVE
JOHN MUIR
He lived aloft, exultant, unafraid.
All things were good to him. The mountain old
Stretched gnarled hands to help him climb. The peak
Waved blithe snow-banner greeting; and for him
The rav'ning storm, aprowl for human life,
Purred like the lion at his trainer's feet.
The grizzly met him on the narrow ledge,
Gave gruff "good morning"--and the right of way.
The blue-veined glacier, cold of heart and pale,
Warmed, at his gaze, to amethystine blush,
And murmured deep, fond undertones of love.
He walked apart from men, yet loved his kind,
And brought them treasures from his larger store.
For them he delved in mines of richer gold.
Earth's messenger he was to human hearts.
The starry moss flower from its dizzy shelf,
The ouzel, shaking forth its spray of song,
The glacial runlet, tinkling its clear bell,
The rose-of-morn, abloom on snowy heights--
Each sent by him a jewel-word of cheer.
Blind eyes he opened and deaf ears unstopped.
He lived aloft, apart. He talked with God
In all the myriad tongues of God's sweet world;
But still he came anear and talked with us,
Interpreting for God to listn'ing men.
[Illustration: JOHN MUIR IN LATER LIFE]
VII
THE MAN IN PERSPECTIVE
The friendship between John Muir and myself was of that fine sort which
grows and deepens with absence almost as well as with companionship.
Occasional letters passed from one to the other. When I felt like
writing to Muir I obeyed the impulse without asking whether I "owed" him
a letter, and he followed the same rule--or rather lack of rule.
Sometimes answers to these letters came quickly; sometimes they were
long delayed, so long that they were not answers at all. When I sent him
"news of his mountains and glaciers" that contained items really novel
to him his replies were immediate and enthusiastic. When he had found
in his great outdoor museum some peculiar treasure he talked over his
find with me by letter.
Muir's letters were never commonplace and sometimes they were long and
rich. I preserved them all; and when, a few years ago, an Alaska
steamboat sank to the bottom of the Yukon, carrying with it my library
and all my literary possessions, the loss of these letters from my
friend caused me more sorrow than the loss of almost any other of my
many priceless treasures.
The summer of 1881, the year following that of our second canoe voyage,
Muir went, as scientific and literary expert, with the U.S. revenue
cutter _Rogers_, which was sent by the Government into the Arctic Ocean
in search of the ill-fated De Long exploring party. His published
articles written on the revenue cutter were of great interest; but in
his more intimate letters to me there was a note of disappointment.
"There have been no mountains to climb," he wrote, "although I have had
entrancing long-distance views of many. I have not had a chance to visit
any glaciers. There were no trees in those arctic regions, and but few
flowers. Of God's process of modeling the world I saw but
little--nothing for days but that limitless, relentless ice-pack. I was
confined within the narrow prison of the ship; I had no freedom, I went
at the will of other men; not of my own. It was very different from
those glorious canoe voyages with you in your beautiful, fruitful
wilderness."
A very brief visit at Muir's home near Martinez, California, in the
spring of 1883 found him at what he frankly said was very distasteful
work--managing a large fruit ranch. He was doing the work well and
making his orchards pay large dividends; but his heart was in the hills
and woods. Eagerly he questioned me of my travels and of the "progress"
of the glaciers and woods of Alaska. Beyond a few short mountain trips
he had seen nothing for two years of his beloved wilds.
Passionately he voiced his discontent: "I am losing the precious days. I
am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing
in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the
mountains to learn the news."
In 1888 the ten years' limit which I had set for service in Alaska
expired. The educational necessities of my children and the feeling that
was growing upon me like a smothering cloud that if I remained much
longer among the Indians I would lose all power to talk or write good
English, drove me from the Northwest to find a temporary home in
Southern California.
I had not notified Muir of my coming, but suddenly appeared in his
orchard at Martinez one day in early summer. It was cherry-picking time
and he was out among his trees superintending a large force of workmen.
He saw me as soon as I discovered him, and dropping the basket he was
carrying came running to greet me with both hands outstretched.
"Ah! my friend," he cried, "I have been longing mightily for you. You
have come to take me on a canoe trip to the countries beyond--to Lituya
and Yakutat bays and Prince William Sound; have you not? My weariness of
this hum-drum, work-a-day life has grown so heavy it is like to crush
me. I'm ready to break away and go with you whenever you say."
"No," I replied, "I am leaving Alaska."
"Man, man!" protested Muir, "how can you do it? You'll never carry out
such a notion as that in the world. Your heart will cry every day for
the North like a lost child; and in your sleep the snow-banners of your
white peaks will beckon to you.
"Why, look at me," he said, "and take warning. I'm a horrible example.
I, who have breathed the mountain air--who have really lived a life of
freedom--condemned to penal servitude with these miserable little
bald-heads!" (holding up a bunch of cherries). "Boxing them up; putting
them in prison! And for money! Man! I'm like to die of the shame of it.
"And then you're not safe a day in this sordid world of money-grubbing
men. I came near dying a mean, civilized death, the other day. A
Chinaman emptied a bucket of phosphorus over me and almost burned me up.
How different that would have been from a nice white death in the
crevasse of a glacier!
"Gin it were na for my bairnies I'd rin awa' frae a' this tribble an'
hale ye back north wi' me."
So Muir would run on, now in English, now in broad Scotch; but through
all his raillery there ran a note of longing for the wilderness. "I want
to see what is going on," he said. "So many great events are happening,
and I'm not there to see them. I'm learning nothing here that will do me
any good."
I spent the night with him, and we talked till long after midnight,
sailing anew our voyages of enchantment. He had just completed his work
of editing "Picturesque California" and gave me a set of the beautiful
volumes.
Our paths did not converge again for nine years; but I was to have,
after all, a few more Alaska days with John Muir. The itch of the
wanderlust in my feet had become a wearisome, nervous ache, increasing
with the years, and the call of the wild more imperative, until the
fierce yearning for the North was at times more than I could bear.
The first of the great northward gold stampedes--that of 1897 to the
Klondyke in Northwestern Canada on the borders of Alaska--afforded me
the opportunity for which I was longing to return to the land of my
heart. The latter part of August saw me on _The Queen_, the largest of
that great fleet of passenger boats that were traversing the thousand
miles of wonder and beauty between Seattle and Skagway. These steamboats
were all laden with gold seekers and their goods. Seattle sprang into
prominence and wealth, doubling her population in a few months. From
every community in the United States, from all Canada and from many
lands across the oceans came that strange mob of lawyers, doctors,
clerks, merchants, farmers, mechanics, engineers, reporters,
sharpers--all gold-struck--all mad with excitement--all rushing
pell-mell into a thousand new and hard experiences.
As I stood on the upper deck of the vessel, watching the strange scene
on the dock, who should come up the gang-plank but John Muir, wearing
the same old gray ulster and Scotch cap! It was the last place in the
world I would have looked for him. But he was not stampeding to the
Klondyke. His being there at that time was really an accident. In
company with two other eminent "tree-men" he had been spending the
summer in the study of the forests of Canada and the three were
"climaxing," as they said, in the forests of Alaska.
Five pleasurable days we had together on board _The Queen_. Muir was
vastly amused by the motley crowd of excited men, their various outfits,
their queer equipment, their ridiculous notions of camping and life in
the wilderness. "A nest of ants," he called them, "taken to a strange
country and stirred up with a stick."
As our steamboat touched at Port Townsend, Muir received a long telegram
from a San Francisco newspaper, offering him a large sum if he would go
over the mountains and down the Yukon to the Klondyke, and write them
letters about conditions there. He brought the telegram to me, laughing
heartily at the absurdity of anybody making him such a proposition.
"Do they think I'm daft," he asked, "like a' the lave o' thae puir
bodies? When I go into that wild it will not be in a crowd like this or
on such a sordid mission. Ah! my old friend, they'll be spoiling our
grand Alaska."
He offered to secure for me the reporter's job tendered to him. I
refused, urging my lack of training for such work and my more important
and responsible position.
"Why, that same paper has a host of reporters on the way to the Klondyke
now," I said. "There is ----" (naming a noted poet and author of the
Coast). "He must be half-way down to Dawson by this time."
"---- doesn't count," replied Muir, "for the patent reason that
everybody knows he can't tell the truth. The poor fellow is not to blame
for it. He was just made that way. Everybody will read with delight his
wonderful tales of the trail, but nobody will believe him. We all know
him too well."
Muir contracted a hard cold the first night out from Seattle. The hot,
close stateroom and a cold blast through the narrow window were the
cause. A distressing cough racked his whole frame. When he refused to go
to a physician who was on the boat I brought the doctor to him. After
the usual examination the physician asked, "What do you generally do for
a cold?"
"Oh," said Muir, "I shiver it away."
"Explain yourself," said the puzzled doctor.
"We-ll," drawled Muir, "two or three years ago I camped by the Muir
Glacier for a week. I had caught just such a cold as this from the same
cause--a stuffy stateroom. So I made me a little sled out of spruce
boughs, put a blanket and some sea biscuit on it and set out up the
glacier. I got into a labyrinth of crevasses and a driving snowstorm,
and had to spend the night on the ice ten miles from land. I sat on the
sled all night or thrashed about it, and had a dickens of a time; I
shivered so hard I shook the sled to pieces. When morning came my cold
was all gone. That is my prescription, Doctor. You are welcome to use it
in your practice."
"Well," laughed the doctor, "if I had such patients as you in such a
country as this I might try your heroic remedy, but I am afraid it would
hardly serve in general practice."
Muir and I made the most of these few days together, and walked the
decks till late each night, for he had much to tell me. He had at last
written his story of Stickeen; and was working on books treating of the
Big Trees, the National Parks and the glaciers of Alaska.
At Wrangell, as we went ashore, we were greeted by joyful exclamations
from the little company of old Stickeen Indians we found on the dock.
That sharp intaking of the breath which is the Thlinget's note of
surprise and delight, and the words _Nuknate Ankow ka Glate Ankow_
(Priest Chief and Ice Chief) passed along the line. Death had made many
gaps in the old circle of friends, both white and native, but the
welcome from those who remained warmed our hearts.
From Wrangell northward the steamboat followed the route of our canoe
voyage of 1880 through Wrangell Narrows into Prince Frederick Sound,
past Norris Glacier and Holkham Bay into Stevens Passage, past Taku Bay
to Juneau and on to Lynn Canal--then on the track of our voyage of 1879
up to Haines and beyond fifteen miles to that new, chaotic camp in the
woods called Skagway.
The two or three days which it took _The Queen_ to discharge her load of
passengers and cargo of their outfits were spent by Muir and his
scientific companions in roaming the forests and mountains about Skagway
and examining the flora of that region. They kept mostly off the trail
of the struggling, straggling army of _Cheechakoes_ (newcomers) who
were blunderingly trying to get their goods and themselves across the
rugged, jagged mountains on their way to the promised land of gold; but
Muir found time to spend some hours with me in my camp under a hemlock,
where he ate again of my cooking over a camp-fire.
"You are going on a strange journey this time, my friend," he admonished
me. "I don't envy you. You'll have a hard time keeping your heart light
and simple in the midst of this crowd of madmen. Instead of the music of
the wind among the spruce-tops and the tinkling of the waterfalls, your
ears will be filled with the oaths and groans of these poor, deluded,
self-burdened men. Keep close to Nature's heart, yourself; and break
clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the
woods. Wash your spirit clean from the earth-stains of this sordid,
gold-seeking crowd in God's pure air. It will help you in your efforts
to bring to these men something better than gold. Don't lose your
freedom and your love of the Earth as God made it."
In 1899 it was my good fortune to have one more Alaska day with John
Muir at Skagway. After a year in the Klondyke I had spent the winter of
1898-99 in the Eastern States arousing the Christian public to the needs
of this newly discovered Empire of the North; and was returning with
other ministers to interior and western Alaska. The White Pass Railroad
was completed only to the summit; and it was a laborious task, requiring
a month of very hard work, to get our goods from Skagway over the thirty
miles of mountains to Lake Bennett, where we could load them on our
open boat for the voyage of two thousand miles down the Yukon.
While I was engaged in this task there came to Skagway the steamship
_George W. Elder_, carrying one of the most remarkable companies of
scientific men ever gathered together in one expedition. Mr. Harriman,
the great railroad magnate, had chartered the steamer, and had invited
as his guests many men of world reputation in various branches of
natural science. Among them were John Burroughs, Drs. Merriam and Dahl
of the Smithsonian Institute, and, not least, John Muir. Indeed he was
called the Nestor of the expedition and his advice followed as that of
no other.
The enticing proposition was made me by Muir, and backed by Mr.
Harriman's personal invitation, that I should join this distinguished
company, share Muir's stateroom and spend the summer cruising along the
southern and western coasts of Alaska. However, the new mining camps
were calling with a still more imperative voice, and I had to turn my
back to the Coast and face the great, sun-bathed Interior. But what a
joy and inspiration it would have been to climb Muir, Geicke and Taylor
glaciers again with Muir, note the rapid progress God was making in His
work of landscape gardening by means of these great tools, make at last
our deferred visits to Lituya and Yakutat bays and the fine glaciers of
Prince William's Sound, and renew my studies of this good world under my
great Master.
A letter from Muir about his summer's cruise, written in November, 1899,
reached me at Nome in June, 1900; for those of us who had reached that
bleak, exposed northwestern coast and wintered there did not get any
mail for six months. We were fifteen hundred miles from a post-office.
In his letter Muir wrote: "The voyage was a grand one, and I saw much
that was new to me and packed full of interest and instruction. But, do
you know, I longed to break away from the steamboat and its splendid
company, get a dugout canoe and a crew of Indians, and, with you as my
companion, poke into the nooks and crannies of the mountains and
glaciers which we could not reach from the steamer. What great days we
have had together, you and I!"
This day at Skagway, in 1899, was the last of my Alaska days with John
Muir, except as I bring them back and live them over in my thoughts. How
often in my long voyages, by canoe or steamer, among the thousand
islands of southeastern Alaska, the intricate channels of Prince
William's Sound, the great rivers, and multitudinous lakes of the
Interior, and the treeless, windswept coasts of Bering Sea and the
Arctic Ocean; or in my tramps in the summer over the mountains and
plains of Alaska, or in the winter with my dogs over the frozen
wilderness fighting the great battle with the fierce cold or spellbound
under the magic of the Aurora--how often have I longed for the presence
of Muir to heighten my enjoyment by his higher ecstasy, or reveal to me
what I was too dull to see or understand. I have had inspiring
companions, and my life has been blessed by many friendships inestimably
precious and rich; but for me the World has produced but one John Muir;
and to no other man do I feel that I owe so much; for I was blind and
he made me see!
Only once since 1899 did I meet him, and then but for an hour at his
temporary home in Los Angeles in 1910. He was putting the finishing
touches on his rich volume, "The Story of My Boyhood and Youth." I
submitted for his review and correction the article which forms the
first two chapters of this book. With that nice regard for absolute
verity which always characterized him he pointed out two or three
passages in which his recollection clashed with mine, and I at once made
the changes he suggested.
Muir never grew old. After he was sixty years of age (as men count age)
some of his most daring feats of mountain climbing and some of his
longest journeys into the wilds were undertaken. When he was past
seventy he was still tramping and camping in the forests and among the
hills. When he was seventy-three he made long trips to South America and
Africa, and to the very end he was exploring, studying, working and
enjoying.
All his writings exult with the spirit of immortal youth. There is in
his books an intimate companionship with the trees, the mountains, the
flowers and the animals, that is altogether fine. Surely no such books
of mountains and forests were ever written as his "Mountains of
California," "My First Summer in the Sierra," "The Yosemite" and "Our
National Parks." His brooks and trees are the abode of dryads and
hamadryads--they live and talk.
And when he writes of the animals he has met in his rambles, without any
attempt to put into their characters anything that does not belong to
them, without "manufacturing his data," he somehow manages to do much
more than introduce them to you; he makes you their intimate and
admiring friends, as he was. His ouzel bobs you a cheery good morning
and sprays you with its "ripple of song"; his Douglas squirrel scolds
and swears at you with rough good-nature; and his big-horn gazes at you
with frank and friendly eyes and challenges you to follow to its
splendid heights, not as a hunter but as a companion. You love them all,
as Muir did.
As an instance of this power in his writings, when I returned from the
Klondyke in 1898 the story of Stickeen had been published in a magazine
a few months before. I met in New York a daughter of the great Field
family, who when a child had heard me tell of Muir's exploit in rescuing
me from the mountain top, and who had shouted with delight when I told
of our sliding down the mountain in the moraine gravel. She asked me
eagerly if I was the Mr. Young mentioned in Muir's story. When I said
that I was she called to her companions and introduced me as the Owner
of Stickeen; and I was content to have as my claim to an earthly
immortality my ownership of an immortalized dog.
I cannot think of John Muir as dead, or as much changed from the man
with whom I canoed and camped. He was too much a part of nature--too
natural--to be separated from his mountains, trees and glaciers.
Somewhere, I am sure, he is making other explorations, solving other
natural problems, using that brilliant, inventive genius to good effect;
and some time again I shall hear him unfold anew, with still clearer
insight and more eloquent words, fresh secrets of his "mountains of
God."
The Thlingets have a Happy Hunting Ground in the Spirit Land for dogs as
well as for men; and Muir used to contend that they were right--that the
so-called lower animals have as much right to a Heaven as humans. I
wonder if he has found a still more beautiful--a glorified--Stickeen;
and if the little fellow still follows and frisks about him as in those
old days. I like to think so; and when I too cross the Great Divide--and
it can't be long now--I shall look eagerly for them both to be my
companions in fresh adventures. In the meantime I am lonely for them and
think of them often, and say, with _The Harvester_, "What a dog!--and
what a MAN!!"
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