The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2001/2002
Volume 12, Number 1 NEWSLETTER John Muir's Travels to South America and Africa by Michael P. Branch, University of Nevada, Reno (Continued from the Summer/Fall issue. Excerpted from Michael Branch's new book, John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa; Unpublishe...
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| Summary: | Volume 12, Number 1 NEWSLETTER John Muir's Travels to South America and Africa by Michael P. Branch, University of Nevada, Reno (Continued from the Summer/Fall issue. Excerpted from Michael Branch's new book, John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa; Unpublished Journal and Selected Correspondence. Copyright © 2001 by Island Press. Published by Island Press/Shearwater Books, Washington, D.C, and Covelo, California. All rights reserved. Hardcover $27.50. ISBN 1-55963-640-8. To order John Muir's Last Journey, please call Island Press at (800) 828-1302, or place your order at the Island Press website, www.islandpress.org ve had a most glorious time on this trip, dreamed of nearly half a century — have seen more than a thousand miles of the noblest of Earth's streams and gained far more telling views of the wonderful forests than I ever hoped for. — John Muir to Katharine Hooker, written from the Amazon delta, September 19, 1911 V. "The Most Fruitful Year of My Life" During his eight-month journey to South America and Africa, Muir recorded his observations in three pocket- sized travel journals, with a fourth small journal book devoted to notes gleaned from his reading of books and pamphlets about the botany, zoology, and geology of the "two hot continents." Like his earliest extant journal, which records the thousand-mile walk to the Gulf, this last of Muir's sixty extant journals was carried with him through forest and field, and includes both precise scientific observations and general philosophical ruminations. In addition to written descriptions of flora, fauna, and landscapes both wild and domestic, the journals are also replete with field drawings of the mountains, sunsets, and, especially, the rare trees Muir felt so privileged to witness during his journey; here, in delicate pencil sketches that are sometimes as small as a thumbnail and rarely larger than a playing card, Muir has left minute renderings of towering peaks, sweeping savannas, and gigantic ancient trees. That his techniques of observation and engagement with nature were visual as well as textual is suggested by the number of sketches included — more than 160 — and by their organic relationship to the text: the journal pages typically combine written and pictorial representations in referential association. These journals allow us to travel with Muir as he journeys up the great Amazon, into the jungles of Southern Brazil, to the snowline in the Andes, through South and Central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study. In their words and images, Muir's journals provide us a rare opportunity not only to see what Muir sees, but also to see how he sees — to glimpse not only the wild and domestic landscapes of the southern continents, but also to see how the fully mature John Muir observed, considered, and represented the beauty of the equatorial and subequatorial regions to which he made his final pilgrimage. Despite their tremendous value and importance, Muir's 1911-12 travel journals have received very little attention, and until now this material has remained unpublished. Why have we ignored Muir's international travels, and how do the journals from his South America and Africa voyage help us to achieve a more complete and more nuanced view of Muir's life and character? One important reason we have largely ignored Muir's travels may be that we like to think of Muir as someone whose wanderings imaginatively chart our American wilderness. While this identification with Muir as an (continued on page 3 ) U N I V E R S I T Y OF page 1 P A C I F I C News & Notes Editor's Note: With this issue we inaugurate volume 12 ' of the John Muir Newsletter. Readers should note that volume 11 was completed in Fall 2001 with a double issue, as we combined #3 and #4. Apologies for our failure to indicate that fact clearly. MUIR BIRTHPLACE TRUST REPLIES TO ITS CRITICS The John Muir Newsletter received a letter in November, 2001, after our critical e-mail to the Trust in response to published reports concerning its plans for Muir's boyhood home. The letter from the Trust reads in part as follows: Allow me to reassure you that we do not propose the destruction of an historic interior. You may not be aware of the extent to which [the building] was gutted in 1980 — all of the floors of the old building were removed and replaced in new positions and a steel frame was inserted to support the new internal structure. . The top floor museum was created in 1980 using modern materials. As there was no historical infonnation on which to base a reconstruction, the top floor museum space was given the appearance of a domestic interior of the nineteenth century. When considering how we should develop the whole house for the 21s1 century, the John Muir Birthplace Trust decided that constructing what could be called 'mock heritage' would be misleading and would do little to inform visitors about who John Muir was and why his work was so important. What we decided to do is to take out all of the modern interior inserted in 1980 to expose whatever features of the original 18th Century building could be found. . . .our focus will be on telling the story of John Muir, his boyhood in Dunbar, his work in America and his legacy for the future. Our commitment to this approach dates back to the founding of the Trust and has been clearly outlined in all of our fundraising literature. One of our reasons for choosing an approach other than the construction of a typical period home is the surprising extent to which John Muir is unknown in the country of his birth. Whilst those who already know about John Muir might prefer to see something with the appearance of a nineteenth century home, this would not allow us to tell the story of Muir, his ideas and the importance of his legacy to those who have no prior knowledge of him. Communicating with the people of Scotland is our main concern and the need to engage and excite the interest of our core audience was a key consideration when deciding on the approach to be taken. We will use some modem technology to achieve this just as Muir did when developing his own ingenious machines. But we will also use a range of other media including simple techniques and lo-tech interactive exhibits. . . I hope this further information is of interest to you and provides you with a better insight into our aims and objectives. . .Further detailed infonnation is available at our website atjmbt.org.uk which will be updated as the project progresses; the Trust can be contacted by e-mail: trust@jmbt.org.uk ON A MUIR DESCENDANT John Muir's great-grandson, Michael Muir, 49, has lately made the news. He is the founder of Driving for the Disabled, an organization headquartered in Maryland. Michael Muir has been afflicted with multiple sclerosis since he was a teen, and he is by profession a horse breeder. He has combined those facts, and spearheaded an organization which introduces the sport of driving horses to those who are physically unable to ride a horse. The sport of "combined driving" involves maneuvering a horse-drawn carriage through three types of courses. To publicize the sport, he and two friends spent most of the year 2001 driving across the United States in a horse-drawn carriage pulled by two Stonewall sport horses. They completed the trip in November in Washington, D.C, although Michael Muir was hospitalized a couple of times along the way due to M.S. flare-ups. The expenses of the journey were handled by some donations and the remainder was paid by Muir himself. He is hoping to raise funds for such a drive across the British Isles this year, starting in southern England, driving up to John Muir's birthplace, and ending in the Muir Wilderness area of Scotland. Michael Muir has been unable to ride a horse for over a decade now, but he was a bronze medalist for the United States at the 1998 Drivers With Disabilities World Championships in Germany. "I've always been restless in one place," he said. "I'm like my great-grandfather in that respect. It's important for me to get out and explore. I like to be a part of the big world (continued page 8) NEWSLETTER Volume 12, Number 1 Winter 2001/02 Published quarterly bv The John Muir Center for Environmental Studies University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 ♦ Staff ♦ 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's Travels to South America and Africa by Michael P. Branch American nature writer, explorer, and preservationist is understandable, Muir's international travels and nature studies remind us that his allegiance was not to Wisconsin, California, or America, but to Earth. Even before the South America and Africa journey Muir's literary ambitions encompassed his international travels, and he affirmed in a letter of March, 1911 that among the books he earnestly planned to write were "two or three on travels abroad." As the inscription to the first extant travel journal of "the wanderer" — as Muir often called himself— so powerfully reminds us, his address was not Yosemite Valley, California, but "John Muir, Earth - planet, Universe." The journals of Muir's last journey clearly show that his appreciation for natural beauty and his desire to study plants in their native habitats transcended national borders. So, too, his environmental concern, as when he laments that the Andean forests "are being rapidly destroyed" by comparing the effects of irresponsible timber practices in Chile to those he has seen in other parts of the world. "Dry limbs and brush are piled around every tree and the burning goes on until nothing but black monuments are left of all the flowery leafy woods," he wrote. "Only on a small scale can even New Zealand show equal tree desolation." And so, too, his work as a natural scientist, for Muir so loved rocks and ice and trees that he would seek them in any wilderness, including the "noble palmy ice land" of the subequatorial jungle. The various and precise tree studies contained in these journals demonstrate that Muir was an accomplished botanist whose impressive expertise and passion led to successful botanical studies far beyond the Range of Light. It is also likely that those interested in Muir have hesitated to examine the 1911-12 materials because they are the record of an old man's experiences. Societal preference for youth and vigor has perhaps predisposed us to freeze Muir in visions of a young man who scaled cliffs and rode avalanches. Although Muir was almost thirty when he first saw Yosemite, in his mid-fifties when he founded the Sierra Club and published his first book, and even older during several of his voyages to Alaska, we persist in imagining him primarily as the indefatigable mountaineer, crucified on the face of Mt. Ritter or meditating in freezing sublimity on Mt. Shasta. When we do tell the story of the older Muir, our narrative is too often limited to the Hetch Hetchy battle, and to a narrow account of that battle which martyrs Muir to the cause of wilderness preservation by attributing his death to the loss of the treasured valley. Perhaps it is to Muir's credit that he has achieved a form of eternal youth in our collective imagination. Like Thoreau, Muir often appeals to the idealized part of each us that would be strong, wild, independent, holy, and free of the corruption — if not also the responsibility — of civilized life. It is also the case that our preference for the image of a youthful Muir is conditioned by Muir's own oeuvre, since the books he published during his lifetime — including, notably, his autobiography — are based primarily upon experiences and journals of the young Muir. Nevertheless, picturing Muir only on summits and in treetops endorses a cult of youth that deprives us of a full understanding of his accomplishments as a person, writer, and naturalist. Even if we prefer not to think of it, Muir did travel in trains, steamships, and automobiles, and he did grow old and feel the weakening in his body, and he did suffer from the loss of his wife and the death of many of his closest friends. But one of the lessons of Muir's 1911-12 journals and correspondence is that he also bore up under the weight of these losses and troubles with remarkable strength of body and character. That the seventy-three- year-old Muir chose to undertake this ambitious voyage to South America and Africa alone — and that he did so with such vigor, passion, pleasure, and success — suggests a courage and independence every bit as impressive as the youthful strength we are more accustomed to associating him with. The South America and Africa journals help us to see Muir as a different kind of hero, one whose endurance and intellectual curiosity carried him into far fields of adventure even as he aged. Corollary to our hesitancy in thinking of Muir as an old man is our hesitancy in thinking of him as a social man — a person whose connections with family and friends were deep and earnest. For many, the name John Muir conjures visions of a man who preferred to be alone, who loathed to leave the woods for the defilement of civilization, and who, with a blanket and a little bread and tea, could exist apart from and above the emotional connections that bind humanity together. One of the contributions of Muir's South America and Africa journals — and, especially, his correspon- dence — from the voyage is that they remind us of what a loving man Muir was, how genuinely he missed his family and worried about their well-being, how deeply attached he was to his daughters and his grandchildren, how generous he was with the many people for whom he cared. Muir did travel alone on his last voyage, but he also met and befriended many fellow travelers whose company and hospitality he enjoyed. He did value solitary nature study, but he also frequently admitted that he felt lonely and far from home. Muir's late journals and correspondence re- humanize Muir by reminding us that he was a brother, husband, father, grandfather, friend, neighbor, orchardist, and businessman, as well as a scientist, adventurer, and writer — not just an iconic representative of American wilderness but a fully developed human being with genuine affections, ambitions, and fears. These South America and Africa journals also make a valuable contribution to our understanding of Muir's literary style and aesthetic sensibility, and they introduce a provocatively-wide range of literary subjects. Although — and in part because — the 1911 -12 j ournals were never finally crafted for publication, they demonstrate the spontaneous energy and insight of Muir's field observa- page 3 John Muir's Travels to South America and Africa by Michael P. Branch tions. Written from train cars and steamer decks, houses and hotels, parks and botanical gardens, and the deep jungles, forests, and swamps that Muir described as places "according to my heart," these daily observations and sketches show us Muir in the field rather than at his desk — in the moment rather than in the mode of literary retrospection that so frequently characterizes his often heavily revised published work. The Haiku-like compression and intensity of some of Muir's brief journal notes often suggests an aesthetic and literary sensibility that differs provocatively from that of the effusive wilderness psalmist of the early Sierra journals. The 1911-12 journals also expand Muir's literary subject, for they provide us an unusual opportunity to examine his impressions of tropical rather than temperate flora, equatorial rather than northern glacial geology, and human culture rather than strictly natural history. He delights in the fecundity and impenetrable verdure of the Amazonian rainforests, despite the fact that his contemporaries associated the region primarily with malaria and man-eating reptiles. He remarks on the kindness of the South American people, and is constantly appreciative of the generosity of the traveling companions he meets along his way. As a glaciologist and geologist he expresses his joy at finding "so clear and noble a manifestation of ice- work at sea level so near the Equator," where he is thrilled to discover "glacier domes feathered with palms instead of hemlocks and spruces and pines." In Africa he hunts not for big game, as did his friend Theodore Roosevelt, but for the bigger game of the rare, immense baobab tree, noting appreciatively after having at last found a representative of the species, that he had enjoyed "one of the greatest of the great tree days of my lucky life." The various ocean voyages that were part of Muir's last journey also give us an opportunity to read Muir's descriptions of seascapes rather than landscapes, the latter of which comprise the vast majority of his nature writing. His descriptions of dolphins, whales, seals, seabirds, flying fish, and ocean waves, light, and storms provide interesting insights into his nautical travel experiences and the aesthetic sensibility through which he understood and represented those experiences. VI. Traveling the Milky Way When he set out for the Amazon in the summer of 1911, Muir commented to friends that "[t]he world's big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark" (Wolfe, Son 331). And near the end of his journey, he unequivocally affirmed that "I've had the most fruitful time of my life on this pair of hot continents." As for the landscapes, plants, and animals he felt so privileged to have seen on his journey, he wrote happily that "the new beauty stored up is far beyond telling." When John Muir arrived back in New York in late March, 1912, he had been away for seven and a half months, during which time he had traveled 40,000 miles, sailed for 109 days, crossed the equator six times, and studied the rivers, jungles, forests, plains, mountains, and rare trees of the southern continents he had longed to see. "We all travel the milky way together, trees and men," Muir once wrote, after riding out a Sierra windstorm in the wildly pitching crown of a towering Douglas Fir. "Trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense," he philosophized. "They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much" {Mountains 256). Muir, a man who traveled to trees and who felt trees travel, thought of his own wanderings as a motion as natural and exhilarating as the tossing of a spruce crown in the wind; his own tree-wavings had taken him through the wilds of South America and Africa and brought him home safely to California on his seventy-fourth birthday. Less than three years after reUrrning from his last journey, John Muir's long, productive life came to an end; and when he died, peacefully, on Christmas Eve, 1914, some of his voluminous unpublished manuscripts lay within his reach. When Muir left Indianapolis in September, 1867, with his sight restored and his vision of life clarified, he was bound for the Amazon. When he arrived there in September, 1911, after the forty-four year detour that became most of his adult life, he at last fulfilled a very dear and nearly lifelong dream. And if the first of his extant journals had begun with the orienting declaration, "John Muir, Earth - planet, Universe," his final journal, here excerpted for the first time, affirms that the pledge Muir once made in blindness was faithfully kept, and that he remained, until the end, a student, lover, and citizen of Earth. Works Cited Note: All undocumented quotations are from John Muir's Last Journey. Clarke, James Mitchell. The Life and Adventures of John Muir. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979. Bade, William Frederic, ed. Introduction to A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, by John Muir. 1916. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1992. Branch, Michael P., ed. Introduction to John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa. Washington, D.C: Island, 2001. Muir, John. John Muir's Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa. Ed. Michael P. Branch. Washington, D.C: Island, 2001. — The Mountains of California. 1894. New York: Dorset, 1988. — The Stoiy of My Boyhood and Youth. 1913. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1989. — A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. Ed. William Frederic Bade. 1916. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1992. Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1945. page 4 Muir at Hazel Green By Howard R. Cooley "From the cool breezy heights you look abroad over a boundless waving sea of evergreens, covering hill and ridge and smooth-flowing slope as far as the eye can reach." John Muir, Our National Parks, 1901 Historically, local place names have often been applied to general geographic regions as well. For example, in California the name Mariposa (Spanish for butterfly) originally described a vast territory south of the Merced- Tuolumne divide within the Central Valley. Later, it was used to name a foothill gold-rush town and then a county.1 Near Yosemite, the name Hazel Green has been applied to a dividing ridge at an elevation of 5,665 feet. In My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), John Muir wrote that upon departing camp on the North Fork of the Merced River below Pilot Peak on July 8, 1869, the sheep herders with whom he was overseeing as a hired hand, headed, "Up through the woods," toward Hazel Green. Muir devoted only a few paragraphs to Hazel Green in two of his books. But the area so impressed him that he seems to be going out of his way to mention it while giving a general description of Yosemite in Our National Parks (1901). Undoubtedly he returned to Hazel Green many times, for it is situated at the crossroads of several old Yosemite trails. And his brief descriptions convey not only the ecology and scenery of the region but its very ambiance. The stage stop named Hazel Green opened on the Coulterville Road in 1874, but clearly the area was named before it was deeded to James Halstead. Geographic and local place names were probably fixed by the Whitney Surveys of 1863 and 1867. The Hazel Green stage stop was on the old Coulterville Road on the west side of the divide, a bit north of the Merced Grove of Giant Sequoias. As described by Muir, Hazel Green is, "on the summit of the dividing ridge between the basins of the Merced and Tuolumne."2 This is not a narrow- edged alpine ridge, but a relatively flat foothill-like plateau. In fact, in the same journal on July 8, Muir finds manzanita growing in a "flat" portion of the ridge. And a little farther to the east, at about 6,000 feet, Muir wrote, "Our course today was along the broad top of the main ridge to a hollow beyond Crane Flat."3 Upon approaching Hazel Green, Muir entered in his journal: "there is a small brook flowing through hazel and dogwood thickets beneath magnificent silver firs and pines. . Here the sugar pine reaches its fullest development. . .filling every swell and hollow and down- plunging ravine almost to the exclusion of other species. A few yellow pines are still to be found as companions, and in the coolest places silver firs. . . ."4 Headwaters of Moss Creek flow south from the old Hazel Green stage stop, through yellow pine forest, toward Merced Grove. If it were Moss Creek to which Muir referred, surely he would have mentioned the Merced Grove, as he did the nearby Tuolumne Grove on July 9; "about a mile from the north end of [Crane Flat]."5 Furthermore, the Coulterville Trail did not extend beyond the head of Moss Creek toward Yosemite Valley until the road was blasted through solid granite in 1872; the shepherds took a higher route from Hazel Green toward Crane Flat. And Hazel Green Creek flows from headwaters on the north side of the divide, through pine and fir forest, toward the South Fork Tuolumne. Later on July 8, Muir added to his journal, "Hazel Creek at its topmost springs has a voice like a bird."6 In fact, the head of Hazel Green ravine is 2.1 miles south of Big Oak Flat entrance to Yosemite National Park and is marked as Bl 1—North Country View. This is the roadside stop with the vista of the distant peaks, but presently overgrown with young conifers. Muir described the view "from the top of the Merced and Tuolumne divide near Hazel Green" as one of the best general views to be had of the forest.7 Probably few tourists associate this view with the Tuolumne Grove in the hollow below, and the Old Big Oak Flat Road down there. Muir wrote that, "the ground is mostly open and inviting to walkers. The fragrant chamaebatia is outspread in rich carpets miles in extent; the manzanita in orchard-like groves. . grows in openings facing the sun, hazel and buckthorn in the dells; warm brows are purple with mint, yellow with sunflowers and violets; and tall lilies. . . around the borders of meadows and along the ferny, mossy banks of the streams.8 Exploring this area revealed much the opposite of what I had anticipated. These areas are very spread out, the topography difficult to examine because the ridges are dense with trees and brush, and there are no distinct floral transitions from west to east of the dividing ridge. I saw yellow pine, sugar pine, white fir, and incense cedar at Merced Grove as well as at Hodgdon Meadow, with a mix of red fir and dogwood. Several huge sugar pines still can be seen around Crane Flat. But whether at Crane Flat, Hodgdon Meadow, Hazel Green, or Moss Creek, each remains now as it was in Muir's time, ". a good place quietly to camp and study."9 Thanks in large part to Muir himself, who fostered and championed the notion that, "Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public parks. . . ."10 ENDNOTES 1. Lafayette H. Bunnell, Discovery of the Yosemite in 1851 (Olympic Valley, CA: Outbooks, 1971; first published in 1880 by L.H. Bunnell), pp. 11, 174- 175. page 5 2. Muir, First Summer (any edition), July 8, 1869. 3. Ibid., My 9. 4. Ibid., July 8. Note: Red Fir {Abies magnified). 5. Ibid., July 9. 6. Ibid., July 8. 7. Muir, Our National Parks (London: Diadem Books, 1992; 1901), p. 491. 8. Ibid., Notes: Mountain Misery {Chamaebatia foliolosa), Rose family; Manzanita {Arctostaphy- los), Heath family; Buckthorn {Rhamnus), Grape family; Hazel {Corylus), Birch family. 9. Ibid. 10. Muir, Journal entry, 1895, in Wolfe, Linnie Marsh, John Of The Mountains (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938), pp. 350-351. My Connection with Environmental Studies By W. R. Swagerty, Director, John Muir Center for Environmental Studies I grew up in northeastern New Mexico in a region hard hit during the Dust Bowl. My paternal grandparents had migrated to New Mexico Territory in 1911 looking for better opportunities than those afforded in Oklahoma, where they had met. My maternal grandparents came from Alabama and headed west on doctor's orders to seek good air and the heat of the Southwest's deserts, a common prescription for tuberculosis in the years immediately following World War I. My parents grew up together and were eyewitnesses to the dust storms of the 1930s that picked up two or more feet of topsoil and deposited it several states away, leaving a parched and forbidding landscape without forage or hope for many thousands of animals and their owners. Horses, cows and sheep were shot or shipped to Louisiana and south Texas, where they did poorly, eating indigestible grasses up to their bellies in high humidity and enduring steady rainstorms. The people left behind fared better thanks to FDR and the many programs of the New Deal, but at least half folded and headed west to California or back to where they originated. Both sets of my grandparents stuck it out. My Thomas ancestors from Alabama lost their farm, their livestock and their interest in ever trying agriculture again. My paternal side diversified, providing the community with an alternative to cash-and-carry with their Swagerty Trading Company, which accepted barter and trade-in- kind in lieu of money or livestock, a carryover from an earlier America. As homesteads and ranches were abandoned, the Swagertys acquired small tracks of land that were combined into one large ranch by 1940, providing continuity in a region forever changed by overgrazing and faith in the old adage, "rain follows the plow." By the time I was in high school, Union County boasted more cattle-per-capita than any county in New Mexico, but each cow needed fifty acres in order to prevent a repeat of the dust storms of the 1930s. Some ranchers respected the necessity of the new reality; others did not, pinning their hopes on feedlots and feeder operations that could make up for abused land and overworked natural resources or sprinkler and windmill operations that could bring water to the land. When resources became competitive between native herds of antelope and deer versus larger and larger herds of Hereford and Angus cattle, the cows won out over wildlife. Wild herds of antelope that had prompted creation of adjacent Kiowa National Grasslands were literally slaughtered without restraint by the National Guard and private citizens in the interest of "fence maintenance" and "deprivation hunting." William Kittredge reminds us in his eloquent reminiscence, Owning It All, that during the twentieth century, ranchers and orchardists in his native Oregon, in adjacent California, and on the plains of Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico all shared a common assumption that more land under cultivation is better; higher production means more prosperity and progress. In the long run, those who shared this utilitarian attitude have paid a high price for their insistence that technology and economies- of-size can make up for sensible water consumption and sustainable animal-to-land ratios. This was my introduction to "environmental studies," a field I did not know existed until I arrived at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1973 to begin graduate studies in history. As an undergraduate at Colorado College, my focus had been music and history. My folks followed many other relatives to California in he early 1970s, leasing out our ranch to a larger concern. I did not look back to the windswept grasslands of northern New Mexico but retained a deep interest in the Native Americans of the state, especially the Navajo and the Pueblo Indians, who had survived for millennia in a land of little rainfall. I also had fond memories of weekends spent in the mountains on the Cimarron River, where I helped my dad build a cabin when I was a teenager, exploring canyons and learning much about the local Ute Indians whose land it once had been. My dissertation under the late Wilbur R. Jacobs satisfied the questions I had concerning Native American response to European exploration and colonization of the Southwest, and I had the good fortune to be assigned as teaching assistant to Professor Roderick Nash. Nash had just published his important study of Wilderness and the American Mind and he came to Santa Barbara to organize a program in Environmental Studies. For the next three years I worked with large classes in Nash's "Wilderness and Man: History, Meaning and Management" and (continued on page 8) page 6 Book Review The Mountains of My Life By Walter Bonatti, translated and edited by Robert Marshall (New York: Random House, ISBN 0-375-75640-X, $14.95) Reviewed by Terry Gifford, University of Leeds, UK John Muir always referred to himself as a mountaineer. Mountaineering historian David Mazel, in his book Pioneering Ascents (Stackpole Books, 1991), says that during the 1870s Muir must have been the leading technical climber in the United States. Certainly Muir has left us some of the most powerful mountaineering writing by a solo climber whose notion of a mountaineer was of one who is completely at home in the mountains. The writing of Walter Bonatti has long been respected for its gripping accounts of his pioneering ascents, often solo, in the European Alps between 1948 and 1965. But more than this, Bonatti's writing about his mountain adventures has, like Muir's, not been about the 'conquest' of mountains, but about self-knowledge in spartan contact with nature that provides what Bonatti call https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn/1066/thumbnail.jpg |
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