Obrázky stránek
PDF
ePub
[ocr errors]

JOHN MUIR

NATURALIST, GEOLOGIST, INTERPRETER OF NATURE

BY

FRENCH STROTHER

Na Sunday afternoon in 1900, the vessel bearing the Harriman Alaska Expedition steamed into sight of the Stikine Mountains, gloriously tinted with the alpenglow. Below decks, most of the party drowsed through chapel services. On the bridge, John Burroughs watched the beauties of the northern sunset flung from the sky to the rainbow peaks. Spying John Muir pacing the deck below, he called down to him:

"John Muir, you should have been up here twenty minutes ago, enjoying this, instead of sleeping down there in your bunk in the cabin!"

"John Burroughs," Mr. Muir called back, "you should have been up here twenty years ago, enjoying this, instead of sleeping down there in your cabin on the Hudson!"

Mr. Muir's retort contains a suggestion of an epitome of his own life. He has preceded most people by about twenty years in the knowledge and the enjoyment of the things in which he takes delight. Twenty years before the lure of gold made Alaska a familiar land, he had explored its glaciers and described its floral beauties. Before the world knew much about the Sierra Nevada, except that it was heavy with gold and that it was the scene of Bret Harte's best tales, John Muir had lived amongst its peaks for ten years to study its plant life and forests, and to trace its history through geologic ages.

To-day, yet young-hearted as a boy, he knows the Sierra Nevada better than any other man. As a scientist, he has contributed perhaps more than any other to the accurate knowledge of glaciers and of their action in hewing out mountains and filling in valleys. His work to preserve the trees that protect our streams and valleys is primarily responsible for the reservation by the Federal Government of our vast system of national parks and forest reserves. And now, after a long career of fruitful scientific research and practical, helpful work for the country, he stands among the

vines of his ranch in the foothills of Contra Costa County, in California, and wonders that men labor years to buy fine houses to shelter them, and fine raiment to cover their bodies. For he has lived a lifetime under the open sky and the stars, and has found Nature always kind in providing for his comfort, and has won from his study of the earth a richness of intellectual experience, and a serenity of mind that few men possess. "This is well enough as a place to earn a living for my family," he says, indicating the fertile valley around him, "but yonder," sweeping his arm toward the Sierra, "they are home."

In 1849, his father, Daniel Muir, brought him to Wisconsin from Dunbar, Scotland. Here, on a backwoods clearing, the boy worked for years at farm tasks. His father's ideas of discipline denied him much recreation during the day. But he learned that his will was master of his mind, so nightly he set a mental alarm clock that waked him at one o'clock every morning. Then, for four hours, by candle light in the comparative warmth of the cellar, he read Shakespeare, "Pilgrim's Progress," and Scott's novels, studied botany and mathematics, and worked out some ingenious inventions. Though he had never seen the mechanism of a clock, he carved one of wood that kept time, struck the hours, and indicated the moon's phases.

The neighboring farmers admired the boy's inventions so much that they persuaded him to take them to a state fair at Madison. There they attracted much attention, and the friendly interest of some people in Madison incited him to enter the University of Wisconsin. He worked his way, taking a special course in chemistry, botany, and mathematics, and left without his classical degree.

He was very methodical in his habits at college, and devised a machine to facilitate his routine. This device, operated by clockwork, lit the fire in his stove in the morning, rang an

alarm bell to wake him up, and automatically brought up his text books, one at a time, on a study-shelf, in the order and at the hour that he preferred to study each.

From college, Mr. Muir explored alone the region of the Great Lakes. His special interests were botany and geology. After this trip he had trouble with his eyes and was threatened with total blindness. He determined to see as much of the beauty of the world as he could before he should lose the power to see. He started tramping again, sleeping in the open wherever night overtook him, and gathering botanical specimens as he went. At Indianapolis, he ran out of funds. For a year he managed a wood-working shop in the absence of the owner. When the owner returned, he found his shop producing as much as ever with about half the former force of men, because of several inventions that Muir had installed. He offered Muir a partnership, but the offer was refused. Mr. Muir continued his tramp through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. At Tampa he embarked for Cuba, intending to go on to South America to explore the Amazon. But after an attack of Cuban fever he sailed, by way of the Isthmus, to California.

He landed in San Francisco in 1873. The city was gay and prosperous, and he was almost penniless. But one day of town was enough for him. The next morning he asked a man in the street, "Where is the Sierra Nevada ?"

"Over yonder," replied the man, pointing east. And Mr. Muir started to walk to the Sierra, a hundred miles away. He was soon in the San Joaquin Valley, alone except for the occasional companionship of antelope. In his "Mountains of California," he has described the scene through which he passed:

"The Great Central Plain was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castilleias, and innumerable compositae were so closely crowded together that, had ninety-nine per cent. of them been taken away,

the plain would still have seemed to any but Californians extravagantly flowery. The radiant, honeyful corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky-one sheet of purple and gold, with the bright Sacramento pouring through the midst of it from the north, the San Joaquin from the south, and their many tributaries sweeping in at right angles from the mountains, dividing the plain into sections fringed with trees."

Through this plain he walked to the Sierra, which he has ever since called home. For thirty years he has lived among these mountains, exploring one huge section of them so minutely that there is scarcely a single peculiar rock formation or tree of unusual size that is not recorded in his note-books. For one period of ten years he saw white men almost as rarely as a New Yorker sees a blanket Indian on Broadway. During these years he proved scientifically that the Yosemites were formed by glacial erosion, and not by a prehistoric cataclysm, as scientists before him had contended. He traced the course of nearly every glacier that, ages ago, carved out the mountains and canyons of the Sierra, and he discovered nearly every one of the remnant glaciers on the higher range. He gave to science its first accurate knowledge of the Big Trees. He discovered one of the greatest glaciers in the world, in Alaska-named the Muir Glacier by Commander G. C. Hanus, then of the United States Coast Survey. He has written books and articles for newspapers and magazines that are the highest authority on the greatest mountain range in North America and on the greatest forests in the world. He recently discovered two "petrified forests" in Arizona that had never been recorded before. And now, nearing seventy, he regrets that his years do not permit as active a life of investigation as he has lived. But the task now presses on him to sit down to collate, from the stacks of note-books he has filled, the mature knowledge of his long life of independent research in Nature's own laboratory.

The patience and hardihood required by his method of investigation are astonishing. Years ago he refused several offers of professorships of botany and geology in Eastern colleges. "No," was his reply, "there are already too many men teaching things they have got out of books. What are needed are original investigators to write new books." Therefore he has devoted his life to research. He has gone alone into unexplored wildernesses, carrying practically no luggage and using no pack animal. For years his camp equipment in the mountains, summer and winter, consisted of a tin cup, a packet of tea, a sack of bread, and a hand-axe. He never carries arms, tent, or even blankets. He has therefore been able to go where only goats have been before him, and to live for weeks where only the birds have before found sustenance.

[ocr errors]

He first earned the money to buy this simple equipment by coming out of the mountains in midwinter and doing a month or two's manual labor on a farm-just enough to net him $50 for another year's supplies. After he had settled in the Yosemite Valley, he managed a sawmill there during the summer months, so that he need never leave the mountains. All the lumber that the mill cut was from fallen trees, for Mr. Muir has never cut down a healthy tree, even for scientific purposes. He lived the year round, now, in a little suite of rooms over the mill. Here he kept his books and specimens, and added to his income by writing articles for the newspapers, especially several series for the San Francisco Bulletin. Here he entertained Asa Gray, the great botanist, and Emerson, and other distinguished visitors to the Yosemite. Every one went away astonished at his scientific knowledge, and they carried his fame to every part of the world. The fruit of a few years of this life was $500 saved-so goes the story that he does not contradict. Now he would be free. That $500 would pay his expenses for ten years of mountaineering and study.

He quit his job, and went to San Francisco to lay in supplies. There he met and married Miss Louise Strentzel, the daughter of Dr. John Strentzel, a famous Polish refugee and physician. The bridal journey was a trip to the Yosemite. At the end of the honeymoon the $500 was gone. "And the moral of that is," says Mr. Muir, "never take your bride to the Yosemite."

That was in 1880. In 1881 the Corwin expedition was organized to search for the lost Jeannette, containing the De Long Arctic exploration party. Mr. Muir went with the expedition, and later wrote "The Cruise of the Corwin," a series of articles for the Bulletin describing their work.

In 1889, he accompanied Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, the associate editor of the Century Magazine, to the Yosemite Valley. Mr. Johnson was much interested in Mr. Muir's sorrow that the beauty of the valley and its surrounding country was being threatened by the inefficient state control of the valley.

Mr. Muir's suggestion for a remedy was that the National Government might set apart a forest reserve which should entirely encircle the state reserve of the Yosemite, with the hope that an efficient administration of the national reserve would either shame the state into an

equally good administration of the valley, or result in the taking over of the national reserve. Mr. Johnson offered to coöperate in this scheme, and arranged for a series of articles by Mr. Muir, to appear in the Century, to start the movement. When these When these articles appeared, Mr. Johnson appeared before Congress. In October, 1890, a bill was passed to set apart the reserve. The effect of Mr. Muir's original impulse and unceasing later work can hardly be overestimated in its productiveness of good in the preservation of the forests and the scenic parks of the country.

In 1893, Mr. Muir traveled through Norway and Sweden to study their glaciers. In 1900 he started around the world with Professor Sargent, the great authority on trees, stopping in Siberia, Palestine, Ceylon, India, the Philippines, and Australia, to study their forests. On this latter expedition Mr. Muir walked hundreds of miles alone to reach forests inaccessible by established modes of travel.

Though he prefers to be alone in his researches, that he may go where he will, when he will, he is not a recluse. On the Harriman expedition he organized many parties for side excursions, of which he was the guide and most entertaining philosopher. In a company, he usually leads the conversation. As a teller of stories from his own experiences, he has a world-wide reputation amongst his acquaintances. His description of his dog "Stickine," whom he coaxed to cross a crevasse on a narrow bridge of ice, is a fit companion of "Rab and His Friends" and "Bob, Son of Battle." He has been president since its organization of the Sierra Club, the California mountaineering society which he leads every summer to some part of the range.

Mr. Muir often complains that the writing of his books is a most difficult struggle to make the words express the beauties he wishes to describe. But few men have so suggestively expressed their own observation of Nature as he. In his "Mountains of California," the clean odor of pines, the majesty of the mountains, the music of the streams are brought surely to the senses of the reader. He addresses his writings to "every lover of fine wildness," and with him the reader may "wade out into the grassy sun-lake, feeling yourself contained in one of Nature's most sacred chambers, withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the

[ocr errors]

universal beauty." Or he may see with him trees like the "grand old patriarch that has enjoyed five or six centuries of storms, and attained a thickness of ten or even twelve feet, living on undecayed, sweet and fresh in every fibre," with wood that "is deliciously fragrant, and fine in grain and texture; . of a rich cream-yellow, as if formed of condensed sunbeams." And, by the grace of God, he may even come to a faith in the serene philosophy of Mr. Muir that "these mountain mansions are decent delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilization."

His native Scotch wit has matured into a fund of gentle, clean humor. Some one asked him last year what he thought of Walt Whitman as a poet.

"He had big ideas," said Mr. Muir, "unusual ideas But his verse reminds me of an experience I once had with Tom Magee. Magee is a real estate dealer in San Francisco. For several years he had been after me to take him out and give him some practical lessons in mountaineering. So I telegraphed him one day to meet me at Truckee, near Lake Tahoe. He showed up promptly, and proudly displayed a pair of skees he had brought along.

"I want to learn how to use these,' he said.

'Alright,' said I, 'I'll show you.'

"We started off over the snow, and I explained to him how he must slide along, and how to steady himself with an alpenstock. Pretty soon we struck a beautiful hillside, with a clean slope about three-quarters of a mile long. About half a mile down, there was a level shelf to one side of the incline. I told Magee to go ahead and that I'd watch him and criticize his performance later. But he insisted on seeing how I did it first. After cautioning him particularly to keep his feet parallel when he followed, I started down.

"When I got to that level shelf two-thirds of the way down, I turned over to it and stopped to watch Magee. Here he came, traveling like an express train, and going well, too. But just before he got to me his toes got crossed, and he turned a double somersault about fifteen feet in the air and went down head first into the snow, with just his legs showing. I shot on down to the bottom of the hill, and by the time I could look back he had righted himself and was zigzagging his way on down,

'Wel', Magee,' I called out, ‘how do you like skeeing?'

"He thought I hadn't seen his tumble, so he called back:

""Fine! Fine! Why it's the poetry of motion.'

'Poetry of motion! Humph!' said I. 'If you could have seen yourself writing your name on the sky with your feet you'd have thought it looked like the poetry of motion. You must mean Walt Whitman's kind of poetry.'"

The spirit of eternal youth is in Mr. Muir's unflagging zeal to learn, to find out from any, however humble, source new facts about the wonderful organization of Nature whose unfolding mysteries have been the delight of his life. By chance I rode with him last year through Arizona Arizona and California on an almost empty railroad train. In the smoking compartment of the sleeping car Mr. Muir spent hour after hour in recounting to two of us the adventurous incidents of his pursuit of knowledge. At length the news agent on the train, a dreamy eyed boy who had come West from Philadelphia for his health, after successive failures to sell us oranges, chocolate, and the latest magazines, laid aside his tray and sat down to listen to Mr. Muir. The conversation was about the pleasures of the wilderness. The news agent broke in.

"O, I've tried that business of tramping through the mountains. through the mountains. Another fellow and I did it last year when I had to get out for my health. We took a couple of pack horses and started to walk a hundred miles between two towns, and it nearly killed us."

Mr. Muir's gentle rebuke was this:

"You made your mistake in the first place in taking the pack animals. They are enough bother to spoil any trip. And your other mistake was in starting out to 'get somewhere.' That is the mistake of most people. The true way to enjoy the mountains is to start out to walk, not to a particular destination in a certain time, but as you happen to feel like walking. When you get tired, stop and make camp. If you like the looks of a side trip, take it, and when you have exhausted the pleasure of it, go on again toward your destination. But forget time. Take it easy until you are used to longer distances, and in the delay you will enjoy enough beauties to pay up for the lost hours."

The conversation drifted on to the mountains

through which we were passing. The news agent, ignorant of Mr. Muir's fame as a geologist, described at length the geologic formations about us. Mr. Muir was all attention, asked questions, and gave all deference to the answers, though I think with some sly humor at the moment that he was being told things he had discovered. But in two days' But in two days' journey no hint of this was thrown out to the boy, and he and Mr. Muir continued boon companions for the rest of the trip, exchanging ideas and facts about the rivers, mountains, desert and varying flora which the train passed. And it cannot be doubted that somewhere in those two days Mr. Muir caught some new glimpse of truth for which he was grateful. I know the newsboy did.

Mr. Muir's work has produced a rich addition to the scientific knowledge of botany and geology. He has also produced a real literature of nature that is sound scientific knowledge, besides being most delightful reading. His example in research has given a great impetus to the method of scientific study

by independent investigation of natural phenomena. In its practical aspect-practical in the workaday sense of the word his work for the preservation of the forests is an incalculably great service to the United States. He has lived a clean life of hard work for worthy ends, indifferent to material reward. He has influenced many thousands of men to appreciate the livable beauties of Nature without descending to an ignorant or meaningless sentimentality over them. Nature has also been to him a means of approach to a solution of the spiritual problems of men. He has brought back from the majestic solitudes of the mountains only peace and gentleness and kindly wisdom and a stronger sense of fellowship with humanity.

In each of five homes in the United States there is a "John Muir room." They are never used except when he knocks at the door and is welcomed as if he were a member of the family just returned from a journey. That is one measure of John Muir's quality as a

man.

SOME BOOKS ON GEOGRAPHY AND

W

TRAVEL

A READING JOURNEY FROM AFRICA TO THE ARCTIC

BY

CYRUS C. ADAMS

E MAY be sure that many a European geographer is already looking beyond the library and the classroom to plan a little for his summer play spell. He will take a change of air, in the physical sense, but he has no mind to get out of the atmosphere geographical that always envelops him. Where is the little island whose study may yield a plum or two; the lake not yet sounded, measured, or tested for transparency and chemical constitutents; the valley, plain, or mountain that may newly illustrate the relations between forms of life and their geographical environment? Scores of savants, next summer, will be enjoying such a play spell. If we had been with Dr. Sapper, a while ago, when he gave twenty-five days to mapping one of the Canary Islands and part of another, and to studying their geology, land forms, and streams, we

should have thought his absorbing amusement unpleasantly resembled hard work. But it was the breath of life to him, and his few weeks of clambering bore results that contribute to the geographical knowledge of those islands.

Though geography and travel description are the inspiration of many books, much of the best geography, the very essence of it, often appears first in modest papers or monographs buried in scientific periodicals or government reports. It comes into book form only when it filters in, at second hand, because it is approximation of the truth that cannot be ignored. Many an explorer never wrote a book. Among recent examples are de Brazza, the founder of the French Congo, and Delcommune and Grenfell, the most extensive travelers in the Congo basin; these men have never appeared in publishers' lists, though their work has largely

« PředchozíPokračovat »