Letter from [John Muir] to Louie [Strentzel], 1879 Oct 9.

• Main Author: Muir, John
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1879
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; correspondence; letters; Rip; glaciers; Ice Sheet; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/muir-correspondence/503; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/muir-correspondence/article/1502/viewcontent/muir03_1159_md_1.pdf

Fort Wrangel, Alaska Oct 9th 1879. Oct 14th noon Leave for the North in a few minutes Indians [ waiting?] FarewellDear Louie. Your letter of Aug. 12th has just now reached me, forwarded from Port Townsend. It seems every summer my gains from Gods wilds grow greater. This last seems the greatest of all. For the first few weeks I was so feverishly excited with the bounders exuberance of the woods, & the wilderness of great ice floods, & the manifest scriptures of the ice-sheet that modeled the lovely archipelagoes along the coast, that I could hardly settle down to the steady labor required in making any sort of truth ones own. But I’m working now, & feel unable to leave the field. Had a most glorious time of it among the stick[illegible] glaciers, which in some shape or other will reach you. Surely you would not wave me away from this work, dawdling in a weak wilted way on your Counge dozing & drying like a castaway ship on the beach. The charmed line you want you now receive safe & well. Im fully at home here now. Little Anna Vanderbilt, two years old is the heart kernel of this home. She often makes me think of Helen – A dainty white dot of a lass, dink as a daisy, fair as any flower in the dew – our little Doctor of Divinity, preaching precious bits of love. Rocking & toddling over the Carpet like a canoe in a tide-rip with sturdy z[illegible] of will, half angle half angel, celestial & terrestrial happily blended.