John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt above Yosemite Valley
About 25 years ago, I got very interested in the life and writings of John Muir, a fruit grower in Martinez, California, who became better known as the sage of the Sierra and a founder of the modern conservation movement. I digested what were then the standard biographies, read most of Muir’s own graceful published writings, and wrote and published at least one essay based on that research. (The little grey cells do not remember like they used to.)
Would that we had then what we have now—more than 6,500 letters to and from the famous environmentalist, part of a larger archive of scanned and posted Muir material on the website of the University of the Pacific. Apparently, the letters became available in November, but I only learned of them from several posts on the web over the last few days.
It’s fascinating stuff. In 1867, while Muir was working as a factory engineer in Indianapolis, he was temporarily blinded when a tool struck him in the eye —a life-changing experience that propelled him toward wilderness—and I stumbled upon a letter from Muir to his friend Jeanne Carr in which he diagrams the location of the injury.
And because I am now wading through Douglas Brinkley’s interesting and weighty biography of Theodore Roosevelt as wilderness advocate, I used the search function of the Muir archive to find letters between Muir and the nation’s premier preservation president.
“Dear Mr. President, I am anxious that Yosemite National Park may be saved from all sorts of commercialism and marks of man’s work other than the roads, hotels etc. required to make its wonders and blessings available,” Muir wrote to Roosevelt in September, 1907. He hoped to elist TR’s support in his effort to prevent the damming of the park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley for San Francisco’s water supply—an effort that ultimately failed.
It seems ironic that the same march of technologies that has given us access to these letters, many in Muir’s own flowing hand, also brought us the telephone, email, and the delete button, making it less likely that much of today’s personal communication will survive for a moment, a month, or a year, much less for a century. But because Muir lived at a particular time, his correspondence was preserved and we can all read it without traveling to the University of Pacific library in Stockton, California—which is nothing against Stockton, but a good thing nonetheless.
