Forty years ago John Muir wrote to a friend; “I am hopelessly and
forever a mountaineer. . . . Civilization and fever, and all the
morbidness that has been hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial eyes,
and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s
loveliness.” How gloriously he fulfilled the promise of his early
manhood! Fame, all unbidden, wore a path to his door, but he always
remained a modest, unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the greatest
of his time, sought him out, even in his mountain cabin, and felt
honored by his friendship. Ralph Waldo Emerson urged him to visit
Concord and rest awhile from the strain of his solitary studies in the
Sierra Nevada. But nothing could dislodge him from the glacial problems
of the high Sierra; with passionate interest he kept at his task. “The
grandeur of these forces and their glorious results,” he once wrote,
“overpower me and inhabit my whole being. Waking or sleeping, I have no
rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow
lines of cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some
extraordinary rock-form.”
There is a note of pathos, the echo of an unfulfilled hope, in the
record of his later visit to Concord. “It was seventeen years after our
parting on Wawona ridge that I stood beside his [Emerson’s] grave under
a pine tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow. He had gone to higher
Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in friendly
recognition.” And now John Muir has followed his friend of other days
to the “higher Sierras.” His earthly remains lie among trees planted by
his own hand. To the pine tree of Sleepy Hollow answers a guardian
sequoia in the sunny Alhambra Valley.
In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous
living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled him to
verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he returned to
this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest of the
tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon this book
of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen departure,
John Muir expended the last months of his life. It was begun soon after
his return from Africa in 1912. His eager leadership of the ill-fated
campaign to save his beloved Hetch-Hetchy Valley from commercial
destruction seriously interrupted his labors. Illness, also, interposed
some checks as he worked with characteristic care and thoroughness
through the great mass of Alaska notes that had accumulated under his
hands for more than thirty years.
The events recorded in this volume end in the middle of the trip of
1890. Muir’s notes on the remainder of the journey have not been found,
and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded the volume if
he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the fascinating
description of the Northern Lights without feeling a poetical
appropriateness in the fact that his last work ends with a portrayal of
the auroras—one of those phenomena which elsewhere he described as “the
most glorious of all the terrestrial manifestations of God.”
Muir’s manuscripts bear on every page impressive evidence of the pains
he took in his literary work, and the lofty standard he set himself in
his scientific studies. The counterfeiting of a fact or of an
experience was a thing unthinkable in connection with John Muir. He was
tireless in pursuing the meaning of a physiographical fact, and his
extraordinary physical endurance usually enabled him to trail it to its
last hiding-place. Often, when telling the tale of his adventures in
Alaska, his eyes would kindle with youthful enthusiasm, and he would
live over again the red-blooded years that yielded him “shapeless
harvests of revealed glory.”
For a number of months just prior to his death he had the friendly
assistance of Mrs. Marion Randall Parsons. Her familiarity with the
manuscript, and with Mr. Muir’s expressed and penciled intentions of
revision and arrangement, made her the logical person to prepare it in
final form for publication. It was a task to which she brought devotion
as well as ability. The labor involved was the greater in order that
the finished work might exhibit the last touches of Muir’s master-hand,
and yet contain nothing that did not flow from his pen. All readers of
this book will feel grateful for her labor of love.
I add these prefatory lines to the work of my departed friend with
pensive misgiving, knowing that he would have deprecated any discharge
of musketry over his grave. His daughters, Mrs. Thomas Rea Hanna and
Mrs. Buel Alvin Funk, have honored me with the request to transmit the
manuscript for publication, and later to consider with them what
salvage may be made from among their father’s unpublished writings.
They also wish me to express their grateful acknowledgments to Houghton
Mifflin Company, with whom John Muir has always maintained close and
friendly relations.
WILLIAM FREDERIC BADÈ.
Berkeley, California,
_May_, 1915.
