Years after their Alaskan adventures, Hall Young visited Muir’s successful California fruit farm where he found his friend chafing in his harness. “I am losing the precious days,” lamented Muir; “I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must get out into the mountains and learn the news.” Muir’s obsessive attention to farmwork also wore down his health. Alaska trips revived him both physically and spiritually, renewing his enthusiasm for Nature. Farm profits enabled him to return his attention to experiencing and writing about Nature.70
Muir’s writings attracted the attention of Robert Wood Johnson, editor of the prestigious New York magazine Century, who acted as a powerful ally in the wilderness preservation movement. Johnson journeyed to California in 1889 and asked Muir to continue writing nature preservation articles for Cen-tury. They visited Toloumne Meadows in the Yosemite Valley and witnessed the damage being done by logging, mining, and grazing. They decided to launch a campaign to preserve Yosemite and its surroundings. Muir would write sup-portive articles and Johnson would contact members of Congress and the Har-rison administration. In October 1890 their plan succeeded.71 The resultant Yosemite National Forest Preserve, later named Yosemite National Park, sur-rounded Yosemite Valley, which had been ceded to California as a park in 1864.
Five days before the Yosemite vote and almost certainly influenced by the efforts of Johnson and Muir, Congress created the reserve that evolved into Sequoia National Park. Publicity generated by the Yosemite effort spurred the imple-mentation of the 1891 Forest Reserves Act that enabled President Benjamin Harrison to set aside 13 million acres, including the Afognak reserve in Alaska.
Muir and Johnson, among others, co-founded the Sierra Club (1892), dedi-cated to the enjoyment and preservation of the Sierras. Muir served as president until his death.72
Muir increasingly assumed the character of public figure and political activ-ist. Alarmed at the razing of forests by private interests, he assisted the efforts of utilitarian conservationists to create reserves for the public benefit. Like the Progressives coming to prominence, he fought against the social Darwinist idea that natural competition required conquest of Nature and that government
should facilitate the process by minimizing regulation. Muir argued that citi-zens should be educated to appreciate Nature and government should protect it. Uncontrolled exploitation of Nature, such writers as George Perkins Marsh warned, would be disastrous for humans as well. When in 1896 a federal For-estry Commission of scientists chosen to evaluate forest policy invited Muir to participate as an ex-officio member, he accepted. No comprehensive policy had been written for federal wildlands, and Muir and Johnson recognized the opportunity to set a precedent by establishing protection as a goal. Muir acted as unofficial publicist for the commission’s activities, expressing spiritual val-ues but cautiously avoiding a preservationist stance. The commission recom-mended corrective measures, including a ban on grazing, and President Grover Cleveland reserved 21 million acres before he left office in 1897. But the new McKinley administration withheld the report from the public, and Congress passed and McKinley signed a bill removing protective restrictions from the reserves and encouraging commercial development.73
Preservationists called on Muir to defend Cleveland’s forest reservation de-cree, under heavy attack from Western senators beholden to logging, grazing, and mining interests. In a pair of Atlantic Monthly articles he fought back:
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away, and if they could they would still be destroyed—chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their black hides, branching horns or magnificent bole backbones. . . . Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees . . . but he can-not save them from fools. Only Uncle Sam can do that.
Public opposition swelled and a bill to abolish the reserves, having passed the Senate, died in the House.74
Muir had befriended and supported Gifford Pinchot, a member of the Forestry Commission and the leading exponent of utilitarian values who later served as Theodore Roosevelt’s first chief of the Forest Service. Eventually it dawned on Muir that utilitarianism meant loss of the forests’ wilderness charac-ter. Hearing of Pinchot’s advocacy of sheep grazing in the reserves, Muir person-ally confronted him in 1897. Their friendship entered a downward course from which it never recovered. From what he had seen in the mountains, Muir re-garded sheep as “hoofed locusts,” and “[a]s sheep advance, flowers, vegetation, grass, soil, plenty, and poetry vanish.”75 Muir’s break from Pinchot, the prime mover of the federal utilitarian conservation effort, constituted both symbol and substance of the division between conservationists and preservationists last-ing through the 20th Century.
Only preservation made sense to a thinker so convinced of the spiritual and ecological values of Nature. Yet preservation on public lands could not easily be
achieved even on a minor scale. Any restriction on exploitation by Euro-Americans would have to overcome trenchant resistance from corporate interests or set-tlers. It would have to mobilize significant elements of a public either apathetic or sympathetic toward exploitative behavior. And it would require a variety of compromises. Accordingly, Muir somewhat reluctantly accepted a public role of heroic nature philosopher as a means of generating public influence. He hosted numerous tourists in Sierra parks in hopes that they would gain a love for Nature and support future parks. To these ends, Muir and the Sierra Club even advocated the construction of numerous trails and roads in wild areas.76
Although he did not win all his battles, Muir grew increasingly prominent.
Both Roosevelt and Taft, while serving as president, visited him during trips to California. Roosevelt described his time alone with Muir, when they camped out in Yosemite during a snowy night in 1903, as “the grandest day of my life.”
He made a greater concession when Muir asked him, “When are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things . . . are you not getting far enough along to leave that off?” Replied the world’s best-known hunter, “Muir, I guess you are right.” Muir’s efforts helped make possible Roosevelt’s designation of 148 million acres of forest reserves, including the Grand Canyon, between 1902 and 1909.77
Muir participated in the Harriman Expedition, a grand finale for the natu-ralists’ 19th-Century Alaska trips. Paid for and headed by railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman, the expedition combined an exotic vacation and an elite scientific undertaking. A handpicked coterie of 23 top natural scientists—in ad-dition to artists, photographers, and others—boarded a comfortably outfitted ship, the George W. Elder, and sailed Alaskan waters from the Southeast to the Arctic and Siberian coasts during the summer of 1899. The plan succeeded in providing a unique experience for all and reinforcing a network of influentials.78 Harriman’s other purposes for the trip achieved mixed success. Like some other wealthy adventurers of the period, he shot a brown bear. He gained temporary status in New York society, but his hope of linking the hemispheres by a railroad tunnel under the Bering Strait fell by the wayside.79 The expedition’s ensuing books and articles expanded awareness of Alaska and its resources, although not especially toward resource conservation.
Muir’s ties to Harriman, president of the politically influential Southern Pacific Railroad, paid dividends in the campaign to add Yosemite Valley to the surrounding national preserve.80 California governor James Pardee had accom-panied Muir and Roosevelt on the 1903 Yosemite outing. He promised Sierra Club member William Colby, also in the group, that he would sign a bill to return Yosemite Valley to national control if it could pass the legislature. Muir and Colby made nine lobbying trips to Sacramento, and the Sierra Club–led effort paid off. Another lobbying campaign, supported by the Union Pacific
Railroad over which Harriman also presided, culminated in a congressional vote to accept the property in 1906.81
As much as he loved Alaska, Muir never returned after the 1899 trip. Em-broiled in the fight to save Yosemite, he devoted his time to politics and the education of public opinion. The Yosemite success preceded a long and acri-monious conflict over Hetch Hetchy Valley to the north. In late 1913 Congress approved the dam that would drown the valley. Muir had lost the contest and exhausted himself in the process. He died in December 1914. In addition to the glacier, Muir is remembered by Muir Inlet and Muir Point in Glacier Bay National Park and Mt. Muir in the Chugach Range.82
John Muir exercised a powerful, if mainly indirect, impact on Alaska, in the first instance by drawing attention to its natural beauty. His writings stimulated ecotourism and ultimately bore fruit in the establishment of Glacier Bay Na-tional Park (Chapter 8). Had he lived longer, he would certainly have approved of this and other Alaskan parkland designations. It is difficult to determine, but John Muir (right) and John Burroughs at St. Matthew Island, 1899. By Edward Curtis.
Harriman coll. RBD 0201-118, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. Through his writings and political work, Muir made lasting contributions to en-vironmental protection in Alaska.
doubtful, that by attracting people to Alaska for aesthetic purposes he enhanced the environmental values of settlers.
Muir perceived no significant environmental threat to Alaska, not project-ing impacts to a time when visitors and technology would be multiplied. He did not address the question of whether subsistence uses of the land by Natives or others could be considered natural and compatible with wildland preserva-tion. Beyond making his preservation sentiments known, as in the case of polar bear killing, he did not directly participate in Alaskan resource disputes.
In the long run, as an icon of nature preservation, Muir substantially ad-vanced environmental awareness and values in Alaska and elsewhere. The terri-tory held six of the reserves created by Roosevelt, persuaded in some degree by Muir. The Sierra Club evolved into a significant participant in Alaskan environ-mental issues after statehood. It played a central role in the Alaska lands settle-ment legislation of 1971 and 1980, two of the most important environsettle-mental events in 20th-Century North America. It took the lead in protecting the Ton-gass National Forest from logging that bid fair to destroy it and participated in nearly all the environmental disputes that marked the statehood period. One of its members, Stephen T. Mather, became the first director and builder of the National Park Service, promoting the establishment of national monuments and parks in Alaska and elsewhere.
Like George Bird Grinnell and Henry W. Elliott, Muir pioneered national publicity and lobbying campaigns for natural resource preservation. In doing so, he won a reputation as the nation’s leading spokesperson for wilderness. Per-haps most important, he gave force to an idea that reappeared in the thinking of environmentalists and their public following: that wilderness and its creatures possess beauty, dignity, and merit as elements of the community of life; that humans must learn to see themselves not as owners or conquerors but as fellow citizens of that community.
As a precursor or founder of the modern environmental community, Muir modeled and articulated many of its key values: ecosystem sustainability, non-consumptive uses of Nature, corporate and government accountability, and public participation in resource disputes. Far ahead of his time, he believed in a holistic relationship of humans to nonhumans, including animal and species rights. He relied more on poetic appeals than on scientific data, although he excelled as a self-trained scientist and, when the need arose, as a political ad-vocate. At the same time, his utopian concept of spiritual fulfillment through immersion in Nature would prove eternally difficult to translate into environ-mental policy. Nevertheless, he shifted the nation’s environenviron-mental agenda closer to nature preservation.