The John Muir Newsletter, Summer 1998
John Muir On Mount Ritter: A New Wilderness Aesthetic by Philip G. Terrie (Editor's note: Philip G. Terrie is Professor of English and f American Studies at Bowling Green State University, and author •f Forever Wild: Environmental Aesthetics and the Adirondack wporest Preserve (1985). This arti...
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| Summary: | John Muir On Mount Ritter: A New Wilderness Aesthetic by Philip G. Terrie (Editor's note: Philip G. Terrie is Professor of English and f American Studies at Bowling Green State University, and author •f Forever Wild: Environmental Aesthetics and the Adirondack wporest Preserve (1985). This article first appeared in The Pacific Historian (1987), and is reproduced here by permission.) hile John Muir has been the subject of considerable scholarly scrutiny in recent years, we have yet to arrive at a complete understanding of his response to nature.1 One on is that we are often too eager to portray him as a radical, ||te twentieth century environmentalist; radical he was, but in his §fme and place. Another problem — and the one to be addressed lere — is the failure to put his narratives into the context of nine- llenth century American wilderness literature, of which there is a .'i stantial canon. Muir was writing in the framework of an established tradition, and one of the more radical features of his own larratives is the way they depart from the conventions of that jfadition. Except for the 1984 study by Michael P. Cohen, I know If no serious effort to understand Muir in the larger context of iineteenth-century wilderness literature. Beginning in the early decades of the nineteenth century, iterate Americans showed an increasing fascination with their wilderness. Eventually this interest evolved its own distinct literature, which existed on both a popular and an elite cultural level. mples of these would be Joel T. Headley's The Adirondack: Or, Life in the Woods, published in 1849, a book which was re- ||sued, reprinted, expanded, and plagiarized in numerous editions Iver a period of some thirty-five years, and Thoreau's The Maine Woods, published in 1864.1 have written elsewhere about the con- - H lions of this literature and cannot describe them in much detail fere, but it is important to summarize their aesthetic traditions ffccause this article argues that John Muir was intentionally departing from the accepted, and was thus adding an imaginative and 'iically new dimension to wilderness literature and aesthetics.2 II A key element of the romantic response to wilderness was ||e characteristically turgid reaction to scenery. Invoking the INthetic vocabulary of Edmund Burke, romantic travelers used Burke's categories of the sublime and the beautiful to reduce the American wilderness to something familiar that they could appreciate.3 The Burkean aesthetic, in its emphasis on the scenic and pictorial, encouraged a distinction between scenery and wilderness. When romantic travelers encountered landscapes which failed to fit the Burkean scheme of the sublime and the beautiful or the later distillation of these under the rubric of the picturesque, their disgust at discovering phenomena such as thick woods, dead trees, swamps, or barren mountains emphasizes how the appeal of the cult of scenery was its usefulness in mediating between the romantic consciousness and the reality of nature. Romantics were searching for scenes, for certain arrangements of water, rocks, or trees. When they found what they were looking for, they responded enthusiastically. But when the reality of nature disappointed them, they were often dismayed and disoriented. Romantics were especially dispirited by the omnipresence of death in nature, by the usually unacknowledged implication that nature was constantly changing. Unlike scenes, which were static, nature was in process. Hence even so sensitive a romantic as Thoreau could be horrified by the sense of the inhos- pitality of nature he perceived on Mount Katahdin. Thoreau's disorientation stemmed from his discovery that nature was indeed in flux and not permanent and scenic.4 Thoreau, at least, honestly confronted his feelings at finding untrammeled nature to be something considerably more complex, not to say threatening, than the two-dimensional nature of mere scenery, and he showed his loss of psychological equilibrium in the broken syntax of his well- known description of the Katahdin wilderness. But most other romantics either denied the reality of nature by converting it to word pictures or simply rejecting it altogether when they deemed it lacking. Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail supplies a typical example of the romantic response to nature as scenery. Greatly excited by the wilderness of the West, Parkman filled this famous travel narrative with detailed, magnificently composed word- pictures. But they are little more than that. To Parkman nature is to be appreciated in terms of what appeals to the eye and to visual associations, but it is never a dynamic combination of geological, biological, and other processes. Thus on a valley of the Arkansas River, Parkman reduces the reality of nature to a two-dimensional picture: there he encounters "a beautiful scene, and doubly so to (continued on page 3) UNIVERSITY OR R A C I R I C page 1 News Notes A HALF-CENTURY OF THE CALIFORNIA HISTORY INSTITUTE, AND BEYOND ■ The California History Institute, first organized after World War II, held one of its largest and most successful conferences in April of this year. It focused on one of its recent themes, the Pacific Rim, and was the third in its series of Pacific Centuries conferencea. Two dozen sessions were held over three days. Sessions were on China in World History and also Russia and the Pacific. A series of sessions focused onChinos and Filipinos as immigrants to Mexico and the United States, Japanese and Okinawan immigration, forced relocation and migration, race, immigration and labor, and migration and memory in the visual arts. Other sessions were on responses to environmental disasters, the history and politics of timber, Africans in the Pacific, and gold rushes in the U.S. and the South Pacific in fact and in fiction. Another series of sessions was concerned with galleons, merchantmen and geopolitics, money and banking and the China connection, exports from the Americas, money and the Philippines in the colonial Mexican era, the Philippines in 1898, transnationalism in the Pacific Islands, and religion, race and imperialism. Finally, other sessions were concerned with such topics as international voluntary services in wartime Indochina, modern youth culture across the Pacific, history through biography, and contemporary issues in the North Pacific. A keynote address by Jerry H. Bentley of the University of Hawaii was on alternatives to national history. Another keynote session was led by Robert Monagan of the World Trade Council and Chair of the UOP Board of Regents. It featured Tapan Munro of Pacific, Gas and Electric Co. who discussed the importance of heritage, community and quality of life for business. A concert of music from across the Pacific concluded Saturday's full academic events. The 150 participants in the conference hailed not only from California and many other states, but also from other countries. Participants came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, France, the Netherlands, and formerly independent Hong Kong. This was one of the most successful conferences ever held by the California History Institute. It is anticipated that a volume featuring some of the most outstanding presentations will be published. ANOTHER MUIR ANTHOLOGY SOON AVAILABLE FROM THE JOHN MUIR CENTER As announced in a recent issue, the Center staff has been preparing a volume on John Muir which is based on the presentations made to the California History Institute in 1996. Entitled John Muir in Historical Perspective, the volume is being published by Peter Lang Inc., a New York firm, and will be available in early 1999. This is a volume of fourteen essays on aspects of John Muir's life and work that readers of this newsletter will want to read. The Center hopes to secure a supply of discounted copies. The next newsletter issue will announce details on price and availability of the volume. PUBLICATION NOTES J. Parker Huber's article, "John Muir and Thoreau's Cape Cod," appeared in The Concord Saunterer, New Series, V (Fall, 1997), 133-54. Parker writes that he is working on a selection of Thoreau's writings on mountains for future publication. Mountaineering Essays, by John Muir, edited and with an introduction by Richard Fleck. Paper, $10.95. The University of Utah Press recently announced the reprinting of this collection of eleven Muir essays. For further information contact Aimee Ellis, Marketing Manager, University of Utah Press, 1795 E. South Campus Drive, Room 101, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, (801) 585-9786; FAX (801) 581-3365. BBC SCOTLAND DEVELOPING MUIR SERIES A six-part series of radio programs is being developed by BBC Scotland for broadcast this fall, according to Anna Magnusson, BBC producer who visited the Holt-Atherton Library and Yosemite this summer. The broadcast will include interviews and perspectives on Muir's global impact. For further information contact the producer at her e-mail address anna.magnusson@bbc.co.uk . OHN NEWSLETTER Volume 8, Number 3 Summer 1998 Published quarterly by The John Muir Center for Regional Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 * Staff o Editor Sally M. Miller Production Assistants . Marilyn Norton, Pearl Piper All photographic reproductions are courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Libraries. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. page 2 John Muir on Mount Ritter: A New Wjilderness Aesthetic (continued.) our eyes, so long accustomed to deserts and mountains. Tall woods lined the river, with green meadows on either hand; and high bluffs, quietly basking in the sunlight, flanked the narrow valley." A Mexican and a herd of cattle "made a very pleasing feature in the scene."5 For Parkman the search for pleasing scenes constitutes part of >vii:>i draws a genteel traveler like himself to the western wilderness id file first place. Every gentleman learns the proper response to nery along with Latin and aristocratic manners. But when the *v< i icm landscape fails to satisfy conventional aesthetics, the nlveler finds it deficient, or even repugnant. Overlooking a valley 1 ie Platte, a disappointed Parkman declares the view to have "not < •! picuiiesque or beautiful feature; nor had it any of the features of " .udeur, other than its vast extent, its solitude and its wilderness. For league after league, a plain as level as a frozen lake, was out < ,ad beneath us; here and there the Platte, divided into a dozen thread-like sluices, was traversing it, and an occasional clump oi d, rising in the midst like a shadowy island, relieved the monotony of the waste." Parkman goes on to add that some positive •, * ciations are to be found in this place, but they are a function of the virtues of rugged individualism putatively fostered by life in i.iii!) a destitute landscape and not of the inherent appeal of an mini hed wilderness. Later, on the high prairie, in another landscape for which conventional aesthetics have not prepared him, Parkman declares, I a curse had been pronounced upon the land, it could not have 'i»n an aspect of more dreary and forlorn barrenness." Similarly, hi lie mountains near Laramie, Parkman again condemns the , i - nery for failing to satisfy the criteria of the cult of the sublime. ' 'i i -if was nothing in their appearance cither grand or picturesque, h -ugh they were desolate to the last degree, being mere piles of k and broken rock, without trees or vegetation of any kind."6 Parkman's response to the wilderness reflected the taste of .ulture. Similar depictions can be found in virtually any of the Iffilidreds of popular travel narratives written in the nineteenth century. They vary in the degree of the honor experienced on - . fronting wild scenery that was neither sublime nor beautiful, i heir fundamental insistence on either reducing the reality of landscape to a subject for aesthetic appreciation or dismissing Mis useless is pervasive. That Parkman repeatedly finds such ! ^'scapes "dreary," "forlorn," or "desolate," moreover, illustrates lift romantic tendency to reject those features of the wilderness suggesting mortality; the absence of the cheerful, georgic, and ti i nslaining qualities perceived along the Arkansas make the ■it or prairie or barren peak especially unappealing. In the same , romantic travelers encountering swamps or bogs, where dead : and an oppressive sense of process characterized the scene, n withdrew in horror and used the same vocabulary: the words - ary" and "desolate" were applied to both deserts and swamps - anything failing to be conventionally scenic. It was against this tradition that John Muir was rebelling. ur's intellectual debt to the romantics, chiefly Emerson, is well known. He never abandoned the Emersonian belief in the transience to be found in nature. But what is to be emphasized here i. how Muir rejected the romantic inclination to dwell on scenes -mii suggested instead that the truly transcendent appreciation of nuiine occurred only when one opened his or her perceiving tlties to all of nature. Muir often pointed out the inadequacy of i-Cdnycntional aesthetics in appreciating the true meaning of the derness. In describing the various landscapes of the California Iderness, Muir frequently lamented that a desert or a bog or ic other scene would be ignored by most people. Writing about the high glacial lakes, he says, "At first sight, they seem pictures of pure bloodless desolation, miniature arctic seas, bound in perpetual ice and snow." Phrases like "at first sight" appear over and over again in Muir: in each case he avers that the untrained eye, dictated to by conventional aesthetic standards, misses much of nature. Describing the high passes, he declares that the ordinary traveler would find them "cold, dead, gloomy," but that the person who truly sees finds them to be among "the finest and most telling examples of Nature's love." "At first sight," writes Muir of Red Lake, "it seems rather dull and forbidding."7 Muir's message was that we should learn to appreciate all of nature and not be shackled by convention. The wilderness aesthetic advanced by Muir is a liberating way of perceiving nature.8 It permits us to find pleasure in forms of nature hitherto despised. Of course, Muir continued to insist on the kind of transcendent value in nature which had appealed to the romantics of the previous generation. His narratives are full of reveries and transcendental moments inspired by the divinity of nature. But to this Muir added the further perception and appreciation of nature's processes. To Muir the discovery of process was the key to the transcendental experience. Muir explicitly argued that the clearest perception of nature combined the spirituality of the transcendentalist with the discriminating eye of the scientist. Much of the Sierra consists of spectacular scenery quite within the conventions of traditional aesthetics. But here, too, Muir declared, new eyes, new ways of perceiving the landscape led to deeper understandings. One of the best examples of this is his often-anthologized and much-discussed description of the view from Mount Ritter. In this chapter of The Mountains of California, Muir describes the events of a period of a few days in October in the early 1870s. At the outset, he is descending from one of his expeditions in the high country, pondering the wonders of the landscape. He then encounters two artists looking for the picturesque, leads them to a high meadow, and sets out for a solo climb of Mount Ritter. The title of the chapter on Mount Ritter, "A Near View of the High Sierra," announces Muir's intention to emphasize aesthetics and the importance of reexamination of the way we perceive nature, with the words "Near View" suggesting the need to look at nature more closely. "To artists," he says, implying the inadequacy of current values in appreciating the true glories of the California mountains, "few portions of the High Sierra are, strictly speaking, picturesque." Artists miss the total meaning of nature by trying to compartmentalize it: "The whole massive uplift of the range is one great picture, not clearly divisible into smaller ones."9 To underscore yet further his intention to develop a new aesthetic, Muir describes himself early in the chapter responding to a particular view as if he too were a merely pictorial artist: "Pursuing my lonely way down the valley, I turned again and again to gaze on the glorious picture, throwing up my arms to enclose it as in a frame. After long ages of growth in the darkness beneath the glaciers, through sunshine and storms, it seemed now to be ready for the elected artist, like yellow wheat for the reaper; and I could not help wishing that I might carry colors and brushes with me on my travels, and learn to paint." But as he goes on to demonstrate, it is not via paint and brushes that one truly captures the landscape; it is through the deeper acceptance of nature's processes. In the rest of the episode he shows that he is indeed the "elected artist," and he further shows the irrelevance of accepted aesthetic norms by introducing immediately after the scene just quoted a pair of artists seeking scenery "suitable for a large painting." By thus displacing the urge to capture the scene in a painting onto the artist, Muir thus explicitly sets up a contrast page 3 John Muir on Mount Ritter: A New Wjilderness Aesthetic (continued.) between their perceptions and his, and suggests that his response to nature is an evolving one while theirs is static.10 Muir agrees to guide the artists back into the high country and wastes little time in showing the superiority of his perceptions to theirs. He rapturously describes the autumn colors: "the intense azure of the sky, the purplish grays of the granite, the red and browns of dry meadows, and the translucent purple and crimson of huckleberry bogs." None of this satisfies the unnamed artists, however, who find the scenery "disappointing" and lament that they see " 'nothing as yet at all available for effective pictures.'"" When Muir and his painters finally come upon a truly startling view, their respective responses reveal profoundly different attitudes toward nature: the artists scurry about "choosing foregrounds for sketches," while Muir decides to undertake a perilous mid-October ascent of a previously unclirnbed peak. The artists are trapped in a sense of nature as scenery, while Muir embraces an opportunity to enter into nature. The anticipated dangers of such an adventure "only exhilarate the mountaineer," and early the "[njext morning, the artists went heartily to their work and I to mine."12 During the two days it takes Muir to reach Ritter, he describes the scenery in conventional vocabulary. To the south at one point, he spots a group of "savage peaks." The twilight renders a "sublime scene," while that night "[sjomber peaks, hacked and shattered, circled half-way around the horizon, wearing a savage aspect." Invoking a Ruskinian vocabulary, he describes a "wilderness of crumbling spires and battlements."13 Shortly before reaching the summit, Muir endures a memorable scrape with death. Trying to scale a sheer cliff, he finds himself suddenly unable to locate another hand-hold: "After gaining a point about half-way to the top, I was suddenly brought to a dead stop, with arms outspread, clinging close to the face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down. My doom appeared fixed. I must fall." Then a burst of new energy rushes through him: "I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense." With renewed vigor he scrambles to the summit. The language of the entire affair suggests that this brief encounter with his own mortality has been a truly spiritual experience. There he is, hugging the cliff as if crucified, fearing his own imminent death, when "The other self, bygone experiences, instinct, or Guardian Angel, — call it what you will, — came forward and assumed control. Had I been home aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete."14 In addition to other possibilities, this episode seems to encapsulate Muir's argument favoring the need for new perceptions, responses to nature moving beyond the conventions of romantic wilderness literature. The essential ingredient in the new response is ^'JM!^'- Mt. Ritter, by John Muir an acceptance of nature's processes, of which the death of the individual creature is the most profound and the most difficult to embrace.'5 Muir uses this episode to indicate what he already knows: that death is ubiquitous in nature and that one of the reasons why conventional aesthetics failed to comprehend all of nature was the reluctance of romantics to acknowledge the inevitability of transience and process. The epiphanic nature of the experience explains the radical change in vocabularly and overall response adopted soon after he reaches the top. Once on the summit, he retreats momentarily to a Ruskinian vocabulary emphasizing architectural detail: one peak is a "gigantic castle with turret and battlement," another a "Gothic cathedral more abundantly spired than Milan's." He quickly drops this stock vocabulary and notes yet again how the scenery hides its deepest meanings from the untrained eye. Neither mysticism nor conventional aesthetics is enough to elicit the truth of the landscape. The eye of empiricism provides the ingredient needed for total perception, and the process of glaciation explains the hitherto unintelligible. In the following long quotation, a reader may note the emphasis on accurate perception and on the glacier as the chief symbol of the natural processes creating the landscape. [W]hen looking for the first time from an all-embracing standpoint like this, the inexperienced viewer is oppressed by the incomprehensible grandeur, variety, and abundance of the mountains rising shoulder to shoulder beyond the reach of vision; and it is only after they have been studied one by one, long and lovingly, that their far-reaching harmonies become manifest. Then, penetrate the wilderness where you may, the main telling features, to which all the surrounding topography is subordinate, are quickly perceived, and the most complicated clusters of peaks stand revealed harmoniously correlated and fashioned like works of art — eloquent monuments of the ancient ice-rivers that brought them into relief from the general mass of the range. The canons, too, some of them a mile deep, mazing wildly through the mighty host of mountains, however lawless and ungovernable at first sight they appear, are at length recognized as the necessary effects of causes which followed each other in harmonious sequence Nature's poems carved on tables of stone — the simplest and most emphatic of her glacial compositions. '6 The glacier, then, the crucial symbol in Muir's aesthetic, produces the geological process which unifies and explains the landscape, and contemplating it leads to a moment of supreme transcendence. It is interesting to note that Muir was the first to suspect the existence of living glaciers in the Sierra, and that he page John Muir on Mount Ritter: A New Wjilderness Aesthetic (continued.) deduced their existence on the basis of his personal examination of the landscape.17 When he did discover actual glaciers, they confirmed the value of his empirical powers. The landscape makes sense only in terms of the glacier; grasping this explanation in turn leads to a discovery of "Nature's poems," the imaginative correlation of Nature's harmonies. Muir goes on to contemplate further the significance — both topical and mystical — of the glacier. Thinking about the cons . mired for glacial action to produce the landscape before him, he • iscends ordinary time: Could we have been here to observe during the glacial od, we should have overlooked a wrinkled ocean of ice as tinuous as that now covering the landscapes of Greenland; ' nig every valley and cation with only the tops of the fountain i He/ peaks rising darkly above the rock-encumbered ice-waves li, r islets in a stormy sea — those islets the only hints of the nous landscapes now smiling in the sun. Standing here in the p brooding silence all the wilderness seems motionless, as if ■ i work of creation were done. The shift in tense and mood here is critical. The passage S's beneath them.18 inspired spiritually by contemplation of one of nature's most • -, ,,ome processes, Muir speeds up time so that a glacier seems to ve like water.19 The imagination, properly aware of process, ■ sieplies the understanding of the landscape unavailable to conven- . .ul aesthetics. Elevating his imagined account of the shaping of ■ . landscape even further, Muir embraces the transience of the .• ne before him, finding in that very mutability the essence of all , iiture's meaning. The lakes are lapping their granite shores and wearing them f'M'iiy, and every one of these rills and young rivers is fretting the ■ into music, and carrying the mountains to the plains. Here are >ots of all the life of the valleys, and here more simply than ';.'where is the eternal flux of nature manifested. Ice changing to i, lakes to meadows, and mountains to plains. And while we thus contemplate Nature's methods of landscape creation, and, iding the records she has carved on the rocks, reconstruct, how- i imperfectly, the landscapes of the past, we also learn that as e we now behold have succeeded those of the pre-glacial age, th.ey in turn are withering and vanishing to be succeeded by 'i s yet unborn.20 In Muir's descriptions of the Sierra, the function of the glacier achieved divine status. The existence of glaciers, either in the > sent or in the remote geological past, explained everything. All formations, from the tiniest striations to the grandeur of ■ Semite's Half Dome, were "glacier monuments." Whenever til employed the Ruskinian vocabulary of Gothic architecture, iculptor was the glacier. In addition to determining the location of lakes, meadows, and streams, the courses of ancient I ciers also accounted for the distributions of such apparently dated phenomena as certain tree species and a particular kind i nountain squirrel. Indeed, insisted Muir, "The key to this hi dutiful harmony [meaning all the perfection of animate and mmate nature] is the ancient glaciers." The glacier was Muir's to beginnings and ends, to the endless cycles of life and death. The essential lesson of the glacier is that nature is never static, that all things visible eventually pass away to be succeeded by subsequent forms or generations. Muir, in a way impossible for the antebellum romantic traveler, accepted process and by implication accepted the concept of cyclical time. Whereas the romantic thought in terms of linear time which began at the creation and proceeded toward a divinely appointed end, Muir was able to imagine time in terms of endlessly repeating cycles. Muir's sense of time, in other words, was more natural, based on a keen observation of how natural process dictates a reality wherein life depends on death and decay. In nearly all his descriptions of the natural phenomena of the Sierra, Muir advanced this notion of cycles. He dwelt on how the cycles of the year are both beautiful and, simultaneously, dependent on death. At a glacial meadow: In June small flecks of the dead, decaying sod begin to appear, gradually widening and uniting with one another, covered with creeping rags of water during the day, and ice by night, looking as hopeless and unvital as crushed rocks just emerging from the darkness of the glacial period. The ground seems Mice dead. Nevertheless the annual resurrection is drawing near. The lakes themselves go through a similar cycle of life, decay, and death: . . . while its shores are being enriched, the soil-beds creep out with incessant growth, contracting its area, while the lighter mud particles deposited on the bottom cause it to grow constantly shallower, until at length the last remnant of the lake vanishes, — closed forever in ripe and natural old age. And now its feeding- stream goes winding on without halting through the new gardens and groves that have taken its place.21 In contrast, the notion of a lake turning boggy was repugnant to the romantic traveler. With Muir, as with Emerson, vision is the crucial faculty. Like most romantics Emerson believed that children, uncorrupted by worldly concerns, have a purer, more honest perception of nature than adults have. "Few adult persons," insisted Emerson, "can see nature," and he further declared that any disaster was tolerable except the loss of sight.22 But Muir was thinking of a way of seeing purer than that attributed by Emerson even to children. Muir was able to see both the transcendent essence of nature as well as the objective reality. Indeed, it was his fascination with all the details and processes of nature which led him to his transcendent moments. In a passage reminiscent of Emerson's "transparent eyeball" conceit, Muir emphasizes the importance of the faculty of sight, stresses both the mystic and the substantive, and suggests how sight properly exercised leads to a moment of unity with nature: exploring a glacial meadow, "notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem dissolved in it, yet everything about you is beating with warm, terrestrial human love and life substantial and familiar You are all eye, sifted through and through with light and beauty."23 Returning from Ritter to his neglected painters, Muir notes one final time how their response to nature falls short of his. Upon their first seeing him, "They seemed unreasonably glad to see me." They have been fretting about Muir's safety, uncomfortable with the possibility of death in the wilderness. Their apprehensions have ruined their tranquility and prevented them from appreciating their opportunity to immerse themselves in the wilderness. Once their guide is safely back with them, Muir notes, with some condescension, "their curious troubles were over." As they prepare to descend from the mountains, he adds, now with overt sarcasm, "They packed their precious sketches."24 page 5 John Muir on Mount Ritter: A New Wtilderness Aesthetic (continued.) NOTES 1. Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1981); Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: John MUir in His Time and Ours (New York, NY: Viking, 1985). On the need for more work on Muir, see Frederick Turner, "Toward Future Muir Biographies, Problems and Prospects," Pacific Historian 29 (Summer/Fall, 1985): 157-66. 2. Joel T. Headley, The Adirondack; Or, Life in the Woods (New York, NY: Baker and Scribner, 1849); Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Philip G. Terrie, Forever Wild: Environmental Aesthetics and the Adirondack Forest Preserve (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985), pp. 44-67. See also, among others, Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 30-53, 71- 104; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1983), pp. 44-66; Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagra Falls:Icon of the American Sublime (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 41-125. 3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1958). 4. Thoreau, The Maine Woods, pp. 69-71. For a good analysis of Thoreau's experience on Katahdin, see James Mcintosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 179-215. 5. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (New York, NY: The Penguin American Library, 1982), p. 378. This edition of Parkman's narrative follows the original 1849 version, published by George P. Putnam. 6. Parkman, pp. 105-106, 228, 333. 7. John Muir, The Mountains of California (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1977), pp. 258-79, 285. 8. The wilderness aesthetic advanced by Muir bears a striking resemblance to Aldo Leopold's land ethic; see J. Baird Callicott, "The Land Aesthetic," Environmental Review 7 (Winter 1983): 345-58. 9. Muir, p. 49. 10. Muir, pp. 50, 51; Cohen, pp. 70-80, 242-43, discusses in detail Muir's account of the ascent of and https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn/1053/thumbnail.jpg |
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