Chapter 4

Yosemite, October 14th, [1872.]

I cannot hear from you. There are some souls, perhaps, that are never tired, that ever go steadily glad, always tuneful and songful like mountain water. Not so, weary, hungry me. This second time I come from the rocks for fresh supplies of the two breads, but I find but one. I cannot hear from you. My last weeks were spent among the cañons of the Hoffman range and the Cathedral Peak group east of Lake Tenaya. All gloriously rich in the written truths which I am seeking. I will now go to the wide, ragged tributaries of Illilouette and to Pohono, after which I will mope about among the rim cañons and rock forms of the valley as the weather permits.

Perhaps I have not yet answered all of your last long pages. Here is a quotation from Tyndall concerning the nature and origin of his intense mountain enjoyments. He reaches far and near for a theory of his delight in the mountains, going among the accidents of his own boyhood and those of his remotest fathers, but surely this must be all wrong, and, instead of groping away backwards among the various grades of grandfathers, he should explore the most primary properties of man. Perhaps we owe “the pleasurable emotions which fine landscape makes in us” to a cause as radical as that which makes a magnet pulse to the two poles. I think that one of thepropertiesof that compound which we call man is that when exposed to the rays of mountain beauty it glows withjoy. I don’t know who of all my ancestry are to blame, but my attractions and repulsions are badly balanced to-night and I will not try to say any more, excepting farewell and love to you all.

John Muir.

[1872 or 1873.]

[Beginning of letter missing.]

although I was myself fully satisfied concerning the real nature of these ice-masses. I found that my friends regarded my deductions and statements with distrust, therefore I determined to collect proofs of the common measured arithmetical kind.

On the 21st of Aug. last I planted five stakes in the glacier of Mt. McClure, which is situated east of Yosemite Valley, near the summit of the range. Four of these stakes were extended across the middle of the glacier. The first stake was planted about 25 yds. from the east bank of the glacier. The second 94 yards, the third 152, and the fourth 223 yards. The positions of these stakes were determined by sighting across from bank to bank past a plumbline made of a stone and a black horsehair.

On observing my stakes on the 6th of Oct., or in 46 days after being planted, I found that stake No. 1 had been carried down stream 11 inches; No. 2, 18 inches; No. 3, 34; No. 4, 47 inches. As stake No. 4 was near the middle of the glacier, perhaps it was not far from the point of maximum velocity, 47 inches in 46 days, or 1 inch per day. Stake No. 5 was planted about midway between the head of the glacier and stake No. [ ]. Its motion I found to be in 46 days 40 inches.

Thus these ice-masses are seen to possess the true glacial motion. Their surfaces are striped with bent dirt bands. Their surfaces are bulged and undulated by inequalities in the bottom of their basins, causing an upward and downward swedging corresponding to the horizontal swedging as indicated by the curved dirt bands.

The McClure Glacier is about half a mile in length and about the same in width at the broadest place. It is crevassed on the southeast corner. The crevass runs about southwest and northeast and is several hundred yards in length. Its width is nowhere more than one foot.

The Mt. Lyell Glacier, separated from that of McClure by a narrow crest, is about a mile in width by a mile in length.

I have planted stakes in the glacier of Red Mountains also but have not yet observed them.

[No date.]

[Beginning of letter missing.]

In going up any of the principal Yosemite streams, lakes in all stages of decay are found in great abundance, regularly becoming younger until we reach the almost countless gems of the summits with scarce an inch of carex upon their shallow, sandy borders and with their bottoms still bright with the polish of ice. Upon the Nevada and its branches there are not fewer than a hundred of these glacial lakes from a mile to a hundred yards in diameter with countless glistening pondlets not much larger than moons.

All of the grand fir forests about the valley are planted upon moraines, and from any of the mountain-tops the shape and extent of the neighboring moraines may always be surely determined by the firs growing upon them. Some pines will grow upon shallow sand and crumbling granite, but those luxuriant forests of the silver firs are always upon a generous bed of glacial drift. I discovered a moraine with smooth pebbles upon a shoulder of the South Dome, and upon every part of the Yosemite upper and lower walls.

I am surprised to find thatwaterhas had so little to do with mountain structure here. Whitney says that there is no proof that glaciers ever flowed in this valley, yet its walls have not been eroded to the depth of an inch since the ice left it, and glacial action is glaringly apparent many miles below the valley.

The bottom portion of the foregoing section, with perpendicular sides, is here about two feet in depth and was cut by the water. The Nevada herenever wasmore than four or five feet deep, and all of the bank records of all the upper streams say the same thing of the absence of great floods.

The entire region above Yosemite and as far down as the bottoms of Yosemite has scarcely been touched by any other inundation than that of ice. Perhaps all of the past glacial inundation of every kind would not average an inch in depth for the whole region.

Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy are lake-basins filled with sand and the matter of moraines washed from the upper cañons. The Yosemite ice, in escaping from the Yosemite basin, was compelled to flow upward a considerable height on both sides of the bottom walls of the valley. The cañon below the valley is very crooked and very narrow, and the Yosemite glacier flowed across all of its crooks and high above its walls without paying any compliance to it, thus: [drawing here]. The light lines show the direction of the ice-current.

Yosemite Valley, March 30, 1873.

Your two last are received. The package of letters was picked up by a man in the valley. There was none for thee. I have Hetch Hetchy about ready. I did not intend that Tenaya ramble for publication, but you know what is better.

I mean to write and send all kinds of game to you with hides and feathers on, for if I wait until all become one, it may be too long.

As for Le Conte’s Glaciers, they will not hurt mine, but hereafter I will say my thoughts to the public in any kind of words I chance to command, for I am sure that they will be better expressed in this way than in any second-hand hash, however able. Oftentimes when I am free in the wilds I discover some rare beauty in lake or cataract or mountain form and instantly seek to sketch it with my pencil, but the drawing is always enormously unlike the reality. So also in word sketches of the same beauties that are so living, so loving, so filled with warm God, there is the same infinite shortcoming. The few hard words make but a skeleton, fleshless, heartless, and when you read, the dead, bony words rattle in one’s teeth. Yet I will not the less endeavor to do my poor best, believing that even these dead bone-heaps called articles will occasionally contain hints to some living souls who know how to find them.

I have not received Dr. Stebbins’ letter. Give him and all my friends love from me. I sent Harry Edwards the butterflies I had lost. Did he get them? Farewell, dear, dear spiritual mother! Heaven repay your everlasting love.

John Muir.

April 1st, 1873.

Yours containing Dr. Stebbins’ was received to-day. Some of our letters come in by Mariposa, some by Coulterville, and some by Oak Flat, causing large delays.

I expect to be able to send this out next Sunday, and with it Hetch Hetchy, which is about ready and from this time you will receive about one article a month.

This letter of yours is a very delightful one. I shall look eagerly for the rural homes.

When I know Dr. Stebbins’ summer address I will write to him. He is a dear young soul, though an old man.

I am “not to write” therefore.

Farewell with love.

I will some time send you “Big Tuolumne Cañon,” Ascent of Mt. Ritter, Formation of Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Lake, Other Yosemite Valleys (one, two, three, four, or more), The Lake District, Transformation of Lakes to Meadows Wet, to Meadows Dry, to Sandy Flats Treeless, or to Sandy Flats Forested, The Glacial Period, Formation of Simple Cañons, of Compound Cañons, Description of each Glacier of Region, Origin of Sierra Forest, Distribution of Sierra Forests; a description of each of the Yosemite falls and of the basins from whence derived; Yosemite Shadows, as related to groves, meadows, and bends of the river; Avalanches, Earthquakes, Birds, Bear, etc., and “mony mair.”

Yosemite Valley, April 13th, 1873.

Indian Tom goes out of the valley to-morrow. With this I send you “Hetch Hetchy.”

Last year I wrote a description of Hetchy and sent it to Prof. Runkle. Not having heard of it since, I thought it lost in some waste-basket, but to-day I received a Boston letter stating that a Hetch from my pen appeared in the “Boston Transcript” of about March 12th, 1873, which may possibly be the article in question. If so, this present H. H. will be found to contain a page or two of the same, but this is about three times as large and all rewritten, etc. That Tuolumne song of five cantos “Nature loves the Number Five” may perhaps be better out. If you think it unfit for the public, keep it to thyself. I never can keep my pen perfectly sober when it gets into the bounce and hurrah of cascades, but it never has broken into rhyme before.

Love to all and “Fare ye well, my ain Jean.”

The kerchiefs have come from Bentons and a package of books from Doggetts.

Yosemite Valley,April 19th, 1873.

The bearer of this is my friend Mr. Black, proprietor of Black’s Hotel, Yosemite. He will give you tidings of all our valley affairs.

I sent off a letter and article for you a week ago. I find this literary business very irksome, yet I will try to learn it.

The falls respond gloriously to the ripe sunshine of these days; so do the flowers.

I hope that you will be able to send me word when you willcome, so that I may arrange accordingly. Mr. Black will give all particulars of trails, times, etc. If Moores have not gone ranching, send Mr. Black over to their house. It will do her good. I fondly hope she is growing better.

Love to all.

John Muir.

Yosemite Valley,May 15th, 1873.

The robins have eaten too much breakfast this morning, and there is a grossness in their throats that will require a good deal of sunshine for its cure. The leaves of many of the plants are badly disarranged, showing that they have had a poor night’s sleep. The reason of all this trouble is a snowstorm that overloaded the flowers and benumbed the butterflies, upon which the birds have breakfasted too heartily.

The grand Upper Yosemite Fall is at this moment (7a.m.) coming with all its glorious array of fleecy comets out of a cloud that is laid along the top of the cliff, and going into a cloud that is drawn along the face of the wall about half way up. These clouds are shot through and through with sunshine, forming, with the snowy waters and fresh-washed walls, one of the most openly glorious scenes I ever beheld. A lady on Black’s piazza is quietly looking at it, sitting with arms folded in her chair. A gentleman is pointing at it with his cane, while another gentleman is speaking loudly and businessly about his “baggage.” “Eyes have they but they see not.”

Looking up the valley, the cloud effects are yet more lavishly glorious. Tissiack is mantled with silvery burning mists, her gray rocks appearing dimly where thinly veiled. Over the top of Washington Column the clouds are descending in a continuous stream and rising again suddenly from the bottom like spray from a waterfall. O dear! I wish you were here. I may write this cloud glory forevermore but never be able to picture it for you.

Doctor and Priest in Yosemite. Emerson prophesies in similar dialect that I will one day go to him and “better men” in New England, or something to that effect. I feel like objecting in popular slang that I can’t see it. I shall indeed go gladly to the “Atlantic Coast,” as he prophesies, but only to see him and the Glacier Ghosts of the north. Runkle wants to make a teacher of me, but I have been too long wild, too befogged and befogged to burn well in their patent high-heated educational furnaces.

[A portion missing.]

I had a good letter from Le Conte. He evidently doesn’t know what to think of the huge lumps of ice that I sent him. I don’t wonder at his cautious withholding of judgment. When my mountain mother first told me the tale, I could hardly dare to believe either, and kept saying “What?” like a child half awake. Farewell. My love to the Doctor and the boys. I hope the Doctor will run away from his enormous bundles of duty and rest a summer with the mountains. I have a great deal to ask him. I have begun to build my cabin. You will have ahomein Yosemite.

Ever thine,J. Muir.

[1873.]

My horse and bread, etc., are ready for upward. I returned three days ago from Mts. Lyell, McClure, and Hoffman. I spent three days on a glacier up there, planting stakes, etc. This time I go to the Merced group, one of whose mountains shelters a glacier. I will go over all the lakes and moraines, etc., there. Will be gone a week or two or so.

Hutchings wants to go with me to “help me,” but I will, etc., etc.

Ink cannot tell the glow that lights me at this moment in turning to the mountains. I feel strong to leap Yosemite walls at a bound. Hotels and human impurity will be far below. I will fuse in spirit skies.

Farewell, or come meet in ghost between Red Mountain and Black on the star-sparkled ice.

Love to all thine and to Moores and Stoddard.

Yosemite Valley,June 7th, 1873.

I came down last night from the Lyell Glacier, weary with walking in the snow, but I forgot my weariness and the pain of my sun-blistered face in the news of your coming.

I would like you to bring me a pair or two of green spectacles to save my eyes, as I have some weeks of hard work and exposure among the glaciers this fall. They are sore with my last journey. All of the upper mountains are yet deeply snow-clad, and the view from the top of Lyell was infinitely glorious.

Thanking God for thee, I say a short farewell.

Kellogg has not yet appeared, nor any of the other friends you speak of.

Yosemite,September 17, [1873.]

I am again at the bottom meadow of Yosemite after a most intensely interesting bath among the outer mountains. I have been exploring the upper tributaries of the Cascade and Tamarac streams. And in particular all of the basin of the Yosemite Creek. The present basin of every stream which enters the valley on the north side was formerly filled with ice, which also flowed into the valley, although the ancient ice basins did not always correspond with the present water basins because glaciers can flow up hill. Thewholeof the north wall of the valley was covered with an unbroken flow of ice, with perhaps the single exception of the crest of Eagle Cliff, and though the book of glaciers gradually dims as we go lower on the range, yet I fully believe that future investigation will show that, in the earlier ages of Sierra Nevada ice, vast glaciers flowed to the foot of the range east of Yosemite and also north and south at an elevation of 9000 feet. The glacier basins are almost unchanged, and I believe that ice was the agent by which all of the present rocks receive their special forms. More of this some other day. Would that I could have you here or in any wild place where I can think and speak! Would you not be thoroughly iced? You would not find in me one unglacial thought. Come, and I will tell you how El Capitan and Tissiack were fashioned. I will most likely live at Black’s Hotel this winter in charge of the premises, and before next spring I will have an independent cabin built, with a special Carr corner where you and the Doctor can come and stay all summer; also I will have a tent so that we can camp and receive night blessings when we choose, and then I will have horses enough so that we can go to the upper temples also. I wish you could see Lake Tenaya. It is one of the most perfectly and richly spiritual places in the mountains, and I would like to preëmpt there. Somehow I should feel like leaving home in going to Hetch Hetchy. Besides, there is room there for many other claims, and it soon will fill with coarse homesteads, but as the winter is so severe at Lake Tenaya, very few will care to live there. Hetch Hetchy is about four thousand feet above sea, while Lake Tenaya is eight. I have been living in these mountains in so haunting, soaring, floating a way that it seems strange to cast any kind of an anchor. All is so equal in glory, so ocean-like, that to choose one place above another is like drawing dividing lines in the sky. I think I answered your last with respect to remaining here in the winter. I can do much of this ice work in the quiet, and the whole subject is purely physical, so that I can get but little from books. All depends upon the goodness of one’s eyes. No scientific book in the world can tell me how this Yosemite granite is put together or how it has been taken down. Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them.

Would that I knew what good prayers I could say or good deeds I could do, so that ravens would bring me bread and venison for the next two years! Then would I get some tough gray clothes the color of granite, so no one could see or find me [words missing] would I reproduce the ancient ice-rivers and [words missing] and dwell with them. I go again to my lessons to-morrow morning. Some snow fell, and bye-and-bye I must tell you about it.

If poor good Melancholia Cowper had been here yesterday morning, here is just what he would have sung:—

The rocks have been washed, just washed in a showerWhich winds in their faces conveyed.The plentiful cloudlets bemuffled their browsOr lay on their beautiful heads.But cold sighed the winds in the fir trees aboveAnd down on the pine trees below,For the rain that came laving and washing in loveWas followed, alas, by a snow.

The rocks have been washed, just washed in a showerWhich winds in their faces conveyed.The plentiful cloudlets bemuffled their browsOr lay on their beautiful heads.

The rocks have been washed, just washed in a shower

Which winds in their faces conveyed.

The plentiful cloudlets bemuffled their brows

Or lay on their beautiful heads.

But cold sighed the winds in the fir trees aboveAnd down on the pine trees below,For the rain that came laving and washing in loveWas followed, alas, by a snow.

But cold sighed the winds in the fir trees above

And down on the pine trees below,

For the rain that came laving and washing in love

Was followed, alas, by a snow.

Which, being unmetaphored and prosed into sense, means that yesterday morning a strong southeast wind, cooled among the highest snows of the Sierra, drove back the warm northwest winds from the hot San Joaquin plains and burning foothill woods, and piled up a jagged cloud addition to our valley walls. Soon those white clouds began to darken and to reach out long filmy edges which, uniting over the valley, made a close, dark ceiling. Then came rain, unsteady at first, now a heavy gush, then a sprinkling halt, as if the clouds so long out of practice had forgotten something, but after half an hour of experimental pouring and sprinkling there came an earnest, steady, well-controlled rain.

On the mountain the rain soon turned to snow and some half-melted flakes reached the bottom of the valley. This morning Starr King and Tissiack and all the upper valley are white.

[1873.]

[Beginning of letter missing.]

I had a grand ramble in the deep snow outside the valley and discovered one beautiful truth concerning snow-structure and three concerning the forms of forest trees.

These earthquakes have made me immensely rich. I had long been aware of the life and gentle tenderness of the rocks, and, instead of walking upon them as unfeeling surfaces, began to regard them as a transparent sky. Now they have spoken with audible voice and pulsed with common motion. This very instant, just as my pen reached “and” on the third line above, my cabin creaked with a sharp shock and the oil waved in my lamp.

We had several shocks last night. I would like to go somewhere on the west South American coast to study earthquakes. I think I could invent some experimental apparatus whereby their complicated phenomena could be separated and read, but I have some years of ice on hand. ’Tis most ennobling to find and feel that we are constructed with reference to these noble storms, so as to draw unspeakable enjoyment from them. Are we not rich when our six-foot column of substance sponges up heaven above and earth beneath into its pores? Aye, we have chambers in us the right shape for earthquakes. Churches and the schools lisp limpingly, painfully, of man’s capabilities, possibilities, and fussy developing nostrums of duties, but if the human flock, together with their Rev.’s and double L-D shepherds, would go wild themselves, they would discover without Euclid that the solid contents of a human soul is the whole world.

Our streams are fast obtaining their highest power; warm nights and days are making the high mountain snow into snow avalanches and snow-falls; violets, blue, white, and yellow, abound; butterflies [flit] through the meadows; and mirror shadows reveal new heavens and new earths everywhere.

Remember me to the Doctor and all the boys and to McChesney and the brotherhood.

Cordially,J. Muir.

Independence,October 16th, 1873.

Independence,

October 16th, 1873.

All of my season’s mountain work is done. I have just come down from Mt. Whitney and the newly discovered mountain five miles northwest of Whitney, and now our journey is a simple saunter along the base of the range to Tahoe, where we will arrive about the end of the month or a few days earlier.

I have seen a good deal more of the high mountain region about the head of Kings and Kern rivers than I expected to do in so short and so late a time.

Two weeks ago I left the Doctor and Billie in the Kings River Yosemite, and set out for Mt. Tyndall and adjacent mountains and cañons. I ascended Tyndall and ran down into the Kern River Cañon and climbed some nameless mountains between Tyndall and Whitney, and thus gained a pretty good general idea of the region. After crossing the range by the Kearsarge Pass, I again left the Doctor and Bill and pushed southward along the range and northward and up Cottonwood Creek to Mt. Whitney, then over to the Kern Cañons again and up to the new “highest” peak, which I did not ascend, as there was no one to attend to my horse. Thus you see I have rambled this highest portion of the Sierra pretty thoroughly, though hastily. I spent a night without fire or food in a very icy wind-storm on one of the spires of the new highest peak by some called Fisherman’s Peak. That I am already quite recovered from the tremendous exposure proves that I cannot be killed in any such manner. On the day previous I climbed two mountains, making over 10,000 feet of altitude.

I saw no mountains in all this grand region that appeared at all inaccessible to a mountaineer. Give me a summer and a bunch of matches and a sack of meal, and I will climb every mountain in the region.

I have passed through the Lone Pine and noted the Yosemite and local subsidences accomplished by the earthquakes. The bunchy bushCompositæof Owen’s Valley are intensely glorious.

I got back from Whitney thisp.m.How I shall sleep! My life rose wavelike with those lofty granite waves; now it may wearily float for a time along the smooth, flowery plain.

It seems that this new Fisherman’s Peak is causing some stir in the newspapers. If I feel writeful, I will send you a sketch of the region for the “Overland.”

Love to all my friends.

Ever cordially yours,John Muir.

[1873.]

After Clark’s departure a week ago we climbed the divide between the south fork of the San Joaquin and Kings River. I scanned the vast landscape on which the ice had written wondrous things. After a short scientific feast I decided to attempt entering the valley of the west branch of the north fork, which we did, following the bottom of the valley for about 10 miles. Then we were compelled to ascend the west side of the cañon into the forest. About 6 miles farther down we made out to reënter the cañon, where there is a Yosemite valley, and by hard efforts succeeded in getting out on the opposite side and reaching the divide between the east fork and the middle fork. We then followed the top of the divide nearly to the confluence of the east fork with the trunk and crossed the main river yesterday, and are now in the pines again, over all the wildest and most impracticable portions of our journey. In descending the divide of the main Kings River we made a descent of near 7000 feet down, clear down with a vengeance, to the hot pineless foot-hills. We rose again, and it was a most grateful resurrection. Last night I watched the writing of the spirey pines on the sky gray with stars, and if you had been here I would have said, Look, etc.

Last night, when the Doctor and I were bed-building, discussing as usual the goodnesses and badnesses of boughy mountain beds, we were astounded by the appearance of two prospectors coming through the mountain rye. By them I send this note.

To-day we will reach some of the sequoias near Thomas’ Mill (videmap of Geological Survey), and in two or three more days will be in the cañon of the south fork of Kings River. If the weather appears tranquil when we reach the summit of the range, I may set out among the glaciers for a few days, but if otherwise I shall push hastily for the Owen’s River plains and thence up to Tahoe, etc. I am working hard and shall not feel easy until I am on the other side beyond the reach of early snowstorms. Not that I fear snowstorms for myself, but the poor animals would die or suffer.

The Doctor’s duster and fly-net are safe, and therefore he. Billy is in good spirits, apt to teach drawing in and out of season.

Remember me to the Doctor and the boys and Morris and Keith, etc.

Ever yours truly,John Muir.

Tahoe City,November 3rd, [1873.]

Tahoe City,

November 3rd, [1873.]

My dear Friends Dr. and Mrs. Carr,—

I received the news of your terrible bereavement a few moments ago, and can only say that you have my heart sympathy and prayer that our Father may sustain and soothe you.

Dr. Kellogg and Billy Simms left me a week ago at Mono, going directly to Yosemite. I reached this queen of lakes, two days ago and rode down around the shore on the east side. Will continue on around up the west coast homeward through Lake and Hope valleys and over the Sierra to Yosemite by the Virginia Creek trail, or Sonora road if much snow should fall. Will reach Yosemite in about a week.

Somehow I had no hopes of meeting you here. I could not hear you or see you, yet you shared all of my highest pleasures, as I sauntered through the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual. I wish, my dear, dear friends, that you could share this divine day with me here. The soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it enters one’s being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come.

Yosemite Valley,October 7th, 1874.

I expected to have been among the foot-hill drift long ago, but the mountains fairly seized me, and, ere I knew, I was up the Merced Cañon, where we were last year, past Shadow and Merced lakes and our soda springs, etc. I returned last night. Had a glorious storm and a thousand sacred beauties that seemed yet more and more divine. I camped four nights at Shadow Lake, at the old place in the pine thickets. I have ousel tales to tell. I was alone, and during the whole excursion, or period rather, was in a kind of calm, uncurable ecstasy. I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.

How glorious my studies seem, and how simple! I found out a noble truth concerning the Merced moraines that escaped me hitherto. Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. My own special self is nothing. My feet have recovered their cunning. I feel myself again. Tell Keith the colors are coming to the groves.

I leave Yosemite for over the mountains to Mono [?] and Lake Tahoe in a week, thence anywhere,—Shastaward, etc. I think I may be at Brownsville, Yuba County, where I may get a letter from you. I promised to call on Emily Pelton there.

Farewell.

John Muir.

Sissons Station,November 1st, 1874.

Here is icy Shasta fifteen miles away yet at the very door. It is all close wrapt in clean young snow down to the very base, one mass of white from the dense black forest girdle at an elevation of five or six thousand feet to the very summit. The extent of its individuality is perfectly wonderful.

When I first caught sight of it over the braided folds of the Sacramento valley, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone, and weary, yet all my blood turned to wine and I have not been weary since. Stone was to have accompanied me, but has failed of course. The last storm was severe, and all the mountains shake their heads and say impossible, etc., but you know I will meet all its icy snows lovingly.

I set out in a few minutes for the edge of the timber-line. Then upwards, if unstormy, in the early morning. If the snow proves to be mealy and loose, it is barely possible that I may be unable to urge my way through so many upward miles, as there is no intermediate camping-ground. Yet I am feverless and strong now and can spend two days with their intermediate nights in one deliberate, unstrained effort.

I am the more eager to ascend to study the mechanical conditions of the fresh snow at so great an elevation; also to obtain clear views of the comparative quantities of lava inundation northward and southward; also general views of the channels of the ancient Shasta glaciers, etc.; many other lesser problems, besides the fountains of the rivers here and the living glaciers. I would like to remain a week or two and may have to return next year in summer.

I wrote a short letter a few days ago which was printed in the “Evening Bulletin,” which I suppose you have seen.

I wonder how you all are faring in your wilderness educational departmental institutional, etc. Write me a line here in care of Sisson. I think it will reach me on my return from icy Shasta.

Farewell.

Ever cordially yours,John Muir.

Love to all,—Keith and the boys and McChesney, etc.

Don’t forward any letters from the Oakland office. I want only mountains until my return to civilization.

Sissons Station,December 9th, 1874.

Coming in for a sleep and rest, I was glad to receive your card. I seem to be more than married to icy Shasta.

One yellow, mellow morning six days ago, when Shasta snows were looming and blooming, I slept outside the bar-room door to gaze and was instantly drawn up over the meadows, over the forests, to the main Shasta glacier in one rushing cometic whizz, then, swooping to Shasta valley, whirled off around the base like a satellite of the grand icy sun. I have just completed my first revolution. Length of orbit, 100 miles; time, one Shasta day.

For two days and a half I had nothing in the way of food, yet suffered nothing and was finely nerved for the most delicate work of mountaineering both among crevasses and lava cliffs. Now I am sleeping andeating. I found some geological facts that are perfectly glorious, and botanical ones too.

I wish I could make the public be kind to Keith and his paint.

And so you contemplate vines and oranges among the warm California angels. I wish you would all go a-granging among oranges and bananas and all such blazing, red-hot fruits, for you are a species of Hindoo sun fruit yourself.

For me, I like better the huckleberries of cool glacial bogs and acid currants and benevolent, rosy, beaming apples and common Indian-summer pumpkins.

I wish you could see the holy morning’s Alpen glow of Shasta.

Farewell. I’ll be down into gray Oakland some time.

I am glad you are so essentially independent of those commonplace plotters that have so marred your peace, eat oranges and hear the larks and wait on the sun.

Ever cordially,John Muir.

Love to all.

The letter you sent here is also received. Emily’s I will get bye and bye. Love to color Keith.

Sissons Station,December 21st, 1874.

I have just returned from a fourth Shasta excursion and find yours of the 17th. I wish you could have been with me on Shasta’s shoulder last evening in the sun glow. I was over on the head waters of the McCloud; and what a head! Think of a spring giving rise to a river! I fairly quiver with joyous exultation when I think of it. The infinity of Nature’s glory in rock, cloud, and water! As soon as I beheld the McCloud upon its lower course, I knew that there must be something extraordinary in its Alpine fountains, and I shouted, “O where, my glorious river, do you come from?” Think of a spring fifty yards wide at the mouth issuing from the base of a lava bluff with wild songs, not gloomily from a dark cavy mouth, but from a world of ferns and mosses, gold and green.

I broke my way through chaparral tangle in eager vigor utterly unweariable. The dark blue stream sang solemnly with a deep voice, pooling and bowlder-dashing and an a-a-aing in white flashing rapids, when suddenly I heard water notes I never had heard before. They came from that mysterious spring. And then the Elk forest and the Alpine glow and the sunset,—poor pen cannot tell it.

The sun this morning is at work with its blessings as if it had never blessed before. He never wearies of revealing himself on Shasta. But in a few hours I leave this altar and all its——

Well, to my Father I say “Thank you” and go willingly.

I go by stage and rail to Brownsville to see Emily and the rocks there and Yuba. Then, perhaps, a few days among auriferous drifts on the Tuolumne, and then to Oakland and that book, walking across the Coast Range on the way, either through one of the passes or over Mt. Diablo. I feel a sort of nervous fear of another period of town dark, but I don’t want to be silly about it. The sun glow will all fade out of me and I will be deathly as Shasta in the dark, but mornings will come, dawnings of some kind, and if not, I have lived more than a common eternity already.

Farewell, don’toverwork; that is not the work your Father wants. I wish you could come a-beeing in the Shasta honey lands. Love to the boys.

Brownsville, Yuba Co., [Cal.,]January 19th, 1875.

Brownsville, Yuba Co., [Cal.,]

January 19th, 1875.

My dear Mrs. Mother Carr, here are some of the dearest and bonniest of our Father’s bairns,—the little ones that so few care to see. I never saw such enthusiasm in the care and breeding of mosses as Nature manifests among these northern Sierras.

I have studied a big fruitful week among the cañons and ridges of the Feather, and another along the Yuba River living and dead.

I have seen a dead river, a sight worth going around the world to see. The dead rivers and dead gravels wherein lie the gold form magnificent problems, and I feel wild and unmanageable with the intense interest they excite, but Iwillchoke myself off and finish my glacial work and that little book of studies. I have been spending a few fine social days with Emily, but now work.

How gloriously it storms! The pines are in ecstasy, and I feel it and must go out to them. I must borrow a big coat and mingle in the storm and make some studies.

Farewell. Love to all. Emily and Mrs. Knox send love.

How are Ned and Keith? I wish Keith had been with us these Shasta and Feather River days. I have gained a thousandfold more than I hoped. Heaven send him light and the good blessing of wildness. How the rains [?] splash and roar! and how the pines wave and pray!

1419 Taylor St.,May 4th, 1875.

Here I am, safe in the arms of Daddy Swett, home again from icy Shasta and richer than ever in dead-river gravel and in snowstorms and snow. The upper end of the main Sacramento Valley is entirely covered with ancient river drift, and I wandered over many square miles of it. In every pebble I could hear the sound of running water. The whole deposit is a poem whose many books and chapters form the geological Vedas of our glorious State.

I discovered a new species of hail on the summit of Shasta and experienced one of the most beautiful and most violent snowstorms imaginable.

I would have been with you ere this to tell you about it and to give you some lilies and pine tassels that I brought for you and Mrs. McChesney and Ina Coolbrith, but alack! I am battered and scarred like a log that has come down the Tuolumne in flood-time, and I am also lame with frost-nipping. Nothing serious, however, and I will be well and better than before in a few days.

I was caught in a violent snowstorm and held up on the summit of the mountain all night in my shirt-sleeves. The intense cold and the want of food and sleep made the fire of life smoulder and burn low. Nevertheless, in company with another strong mountaineer I broke through six miles of frosty snow down into the timber and reached fire and food and sleep and am better than ever with all the valuable experiences. Altogether I have had a very instructive and delightful trip.

The bryanthus you wanted was snow-buried, and I was too lame to dig it out for you, but I will probably be back ere long.

I’ll be over in a few days or so.

Old Yosemite Home,November 3d, 1875.

I’m delighted, in coming out of the woods, to learn that the Doctor is elected to do the work he is so well fitted for.

I’ve had a glorious season of forest grace, notwithstanding the hundred cañons I’ve crossed, and the innumerable gorges, gulches, and avalanchal corrugations.

A day or two of resting and lingering in my dear old haunts, and then down-town work.

I’m sorry about Keith’s stocks. Though of scarce any real consequence, they yet serve to perturb and spoil his best moods and works.

It seems a whole round season since I saw you, but have I not seen the King Sequoia in forest glory?

Love to all.

John Muir.

1418 Taylor St., San Francisco,April 3, 1876.

1418 Taylor St., San Francisco,

April 3, 1876.

We will all be glad to see you. We all heard of the outrage committed on Johnnie and hope it might not be so serious as made to appear in the press. Mr. Swett told me the other day that he met a friend down town who was acquainted with the Whites intimately, who gave it as his opinion that Mr. White was insane, had a brother in the asylum, and he was as jealous of a half-dozen other persons as of Johnnie.

If I knew Ned’s boarding-house, I would visit him, for I know he must feel terribly agitated. The last time I saw him, he was rejoicing over Johnnie’s steady manly development, like an old fond father over some reformed son.

As for the stranded sapless condition of political geology, I care only for the fruitless work expended upon it by friends. The glaciers are not affected thereby, neither am I nor Cassiope.

The first meeting I had with Mr. Moore was at the lecture the other night. He seemed immeasurably astonished to find me in so anti-sequestered a condition, but in the meanwhile he is more changed than I, for he seems semi-crazy on literature, as Mrs. M. is wholly, doubly so on paint.

I will show your letters to Mr. Swett when he comes in, who will doubtless be able to decipher the meaning of heads and tails of your bodyless sentences.

I’m sorry most of all for the destruction of the “Teachers,” thus cutting off the only adequate outlet for your own thought; but hang it! let them decapitate and hang, they cannot hang Cassiope.

Ever yours cordially,John Muir.

1419 Taylor St., San Francisco,January 12th, [1877.]

1419 Taylor St., San Francisco,

January 12th, [1877.]

John Swett told me how heavy a burden you were carrying of work and sickness. I hope ere this that the Doctor has recovered from his severe attack of rheumatism and that you have had sleep and rest.

Your description of the orange lands makes me more than ever eager to see them,—in particular the phenomenon of a real lover of Nature such as you mention, for one does feel so wholly alone in the midst of this metallic, money-clinking crowd. And so you are going to dwell down there, and how rosily you will write about it! Well, I hope you may realize it all. Independence in quiet life must be delightful indeed, after the battles and the burdens of these heavy years. In any case it is a fine thing for old people who have worked and fought through all kinds of strenuous experiences to have thoughts and schemes so fresh and young as yours. We all hope to see you soon.

Back to Index Next