[Letter to Charles Warren Stoddard.] No. 5 (May)

• Main Author: San Francisco: The Book Club of California
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1935
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; pamphlets; journal articles; speeches; writing; annotation; Canada; glacier; glacier*; glaciers; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/436; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmb/article/1435/viewcontent/372.pdf

THERE WERE two major objectives in John Muir's life. The first was to worship at nature's shrine; the second, to influence others to do likewise. His tireless wanderings on ,,„ foot, from the Wisconsin farm to which his Scotch parents had taken him as a boy, first r^J^ into the wilds of Canada, then south to Florida, were but preparing the way for his explorations in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, in the wilds of Alaska, and later of South America, Australia and other remote lands. r§^S> Consequently all his writings were directed not merely toward entertaining his readers with wilderness lore, but had the ulterior purpose of enticing them to go to the mountains and love them as he did. He was a missionary seeking to make converts to his passionate devotion to granite crags, with snow banners skyward tossed, to glaciers sculpturing the mountains, to forests of fragrant singing spruce and pine, and to all the inhabitants thereof. r&^> It was my rare privilege to know him in my young manhood and to grow closer to him with advancing years. We occupied a stateroom together on the Harriman Alaska Expedition and I have wandered alone with him over the Muir Glacier and on poppy strewn tundras of the islands of Behring Sea. I have been with him in Kings River Canyon and Yosemite in California and have spent many happy days at his home, and other rare days when he visited at my home. He was always the same, unceasingly absorbed in nature and her lore, ever eager for a listener to whom he could unburden his pent up soul with the storied richness of a life spent in adoration of the wilderness. r&§& Another friend of my young days was Charles Warren Stoddard. Before good fortune carried me on a year's pilgrimage to Tahiti, Samoa and Hawaii, I had read Stoddard's Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes and had caught the magic of those tropic South Sea Islands from his deft pen. The years he spent in Polynesia were the inspiration for glamorous essays collected in his South Sea Idyls. He was a poet ...