John Muir Newsletter, May/July 1984
Holt-Atherton Pacific Center \\/ / University of the Pacific for Western Studies \ / Stockton, Calif 95211 VOLUME 4 MAY/JULY 1984 NUMBER 3 EDITORIAL STAFF: RONALD H. UMBAUGH, KIRSTEN E. LEWIS PROJECT UPDATE Remember us? Sorry we have kept you waiting for news, but we have a good excuse: we're s...
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Scholarly Commons
1984
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| Online Access: | https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn/18 https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=jmn |
| Summary: | Holt-Atherton Pacific Center \\/ / University of the Pacific for Western Studies \ / Stockton, Calif 95211 VOLUME 4 MAY/JULY 1984 NUMBER 3 EDITORIAL STAFF: RONALD H. UMBAUGH, KIRSTEN E. LEWIS PROJECT UPDATE Remember us? Sorry we have kept you waiting for news, but we have a good excuse: we're swamped! Since May 1 we have: - completed processing all remaining Muir papers scheduled for filming. This means the University of the Pacific collection is completely reorganized and controlled, and the incoming copies in other repositories incorporated into the filming sequence. The preliminary inventory has been replaced by a card system that is indexed by author, title (or recipient if correspondence), date, place of preparation, and subject (if photograph of drawing). Control cards also provide bibliographical information on each document. Users now have a seven-way finding aid to every Muir-generated item located by the Project staff since 1981. The control system will form the basis of the index which will be published by Chadwyck-Healey, Inc. in early 1985 as part of the Guide to the John Muir Papers. - completed filming and publication arrangements. After two years of negotiations with six different firms, we have selected Chadwyck-Healey, Inc. as our micropublisher. This firm, headquarted in London, has an expanding American branch office in Alexandria, Virginia which will coordinate the filming and publish the final product. Two sub-contractors, The Mark Larwood Company of Sacramento, California, and Commercial Microfilms of Bellevue, Washington, will do the actual filming. Larwood has already begun filming Muir journals, and will start on manuscripts by August 1. Commercial Microfilms is scheduled to begin preparing master fiche of all photographs and Muir drawings in August. All work is being done at the subcontractors' labs, with a Muir staff member on hand to assist camera operators with particularly difficult filming sequences. The filming phase of the project, which includes extensive testing to ensure quality control, is expected to take six months. - completed the secondary document search. As expected the elaborate procedures used in effort to locate missing Muir documents had mostly negative results, although we did discover one previously unknown cache of Muir letters in Virginia. Virtually every likely source of documents or information, public or private, has now been contacted at least once. - reached the advanced stages of our legal search. In a previous issue we discussed the question of literary rights and permissions, as well as the impact of the new copyright law. With careful guidance of a copyright attorney, we have taken all reasonable steps to identify and secure permission from heirs or claimants to literary property subject to publication. Much remains to be done, and we are scrambling to wrap up most of the routine clerical work before two of our assistants, Joanne Tashima and Kate MacPherson, leave us in late July. But we are on schedule and looking toward publication early in 1985. Keep your fingers crossed. FROM THE MUIR COLLECTION (Editor's Note: F. Bailey Millard, Hearst journalist and magazine editor for the San Francisco Examiner, prepared this "funny sketch"-—as Muir himself described it—after interviewing Muir at Millard's Tamalpais home. Probably published about 1905, it was found in an undated envelope in the Muir UOP collection.) Scientist Who Doesn't Come in When It Rains JOHN MUIR is the first free man I ever met, says Morrison Pixley in the "Golden Hinde. " The rest of us are slaves to our backs and bellies, which is the summing up of all our troubles. Some people live to eat. Some others eat to live. John Muir lives. He can do the Yosemite trip for a dollar. One dollar lawful money of the United States to him in hand paid is sufficient for all his traveling expenses and provisions, including, we will say, a week's stay in the valley. How? Now listen carefully or you will think you have missed something. He takes for the camp outfit, supplies, bedding, blankets, cooking utensils and provisions. One floursack full of bread. With that strapped over his shoulder and his ordinary clothes on he is off for a two weeks ' trip. Mind you, now, he has no circular letter of credit, no guns or fishing tackle. He has no overcoat or blankets. He has a tin cup and a package of tea in his pocket. Tea, he admitted, was his worst vice; but he added apologetically that he did not drink it at home—only when on his long trips to glacier's head and mountain peak. When John Muir wants to travel he fills his sack with bread, puts his package of tea and his tin cup in his pocket, puts one foot before the other, then the other before the one, and so on ad infinitum of the trip. "Breakfast is always ready when I pull the string," he said, referring to the knot on the mouth of the bread sack. Camp is made by building a fire. The bread is set up in front of the fire to dry the first night. "It loses nearly one-third of its weight," he explains, "and I save carrying that much water. " After that the bread in its sack serves for a pillow, and his staff of life supports him day and night, while he also insures himself that it will not be stolen by the wild animals of the wood. ? Is there no danger to himself unarmed': "No," he says, "no animal of the woods will touch a sleeping man"; and he knows, for he has lived in the high Sierras for ten years of his life. All the night through he sleeps blanketless on the ground. If he gets cold, he awakens and replenishes the fire. The device for keeping warm is perfectly automatic and is not patented. The way that John Muir got his freedom is a story in itself. As a boy he was a slave ten times more than the rest of us. He had a strict father who thought that leisure was bad for boys, and John was worked good and hard from 4 a.m. until 8 p.m. The other eight hours of the twenty-four he was considerately allowed to sleep. "Not ten minutes a year did I have to myself for reading," he said. "I wanted more time. I tried to get it by sitting up at night to read and study. That was against the rules, but my father said I could get up as early in the morning as I wished. I took him at his word and got up at 1 o'clock. " Every morning Muir kept this up. His workshop was under his father's bedroom, and from 1 o'clock till breakfast time his busy hammer kept the old gentleman awake. For two weeks the elder man stood it. Then his patience gave out. "How long?" he asked. John said: "You promised that I might get up as early as I wished. " That ended it. The honest old Scotchman held to his given word. And young John was a freeman. He was free from the slavery of Morpheus. He soon found that he could shake off all other physical craving. The first thing he did was to make an ingenious clock-work machine which would let the foot of his bed fall and. tip him out on the floor and at the same time strike a light at any time of night. In this hard way, and still keeping up his farm work from 4 a.m. till 8 p.m. he got his education. What terror can life have for such a man? Can he fear the lack of money when a couple of dollars a month will support him? He has no fear of disease, for he goes out and sleeps, sans blanket, by the glacier's side, warmed, only by a fire of pine cones, for weeks at a time "to cure a cold. " He cannot fear disaster, for his sinewy, elastic legs leap him over the cravasses of the glaciers—blue cracks a thousand feet in depth—and he feels safe as the cricket that leaps on the log. John Muir speaks contemptuously—no, I should not say that, for he is not contemptuous of anything—but I meant that he speaks with humorous deprecation and just a bit of the ever-present pity in his tone of "people who have the "house habit. '" His is the biggest house in the world. He has the sky for a roof, the earth for his floor, a glacier for his refrigerator, a river for the water spigot, the ocean his bathtub, and no rent to pay. He can live like a god on Olympus for a couple of dollars a month. John Muir does not know enough to come in when it rains. He says so himself. Speaking of one day in Alaska when a gale was howling thunder loud, and every foot of the precipitous walls of the valley in which he was camped was a continuous line of torrential Yosemite falls, he said: "It was raining too hard for me to want to stay in the camp, so I thought I would go out in the storm. " " I thought I might learn something. " Now go right to the library, join it, if you don't belong, and get John Muir's book, "The Mountains of California," and read it. THE JOHN MUIR NEWSLETTER The Holt-Atherton Pacific Center for Western Studies University of the Pacific Stockton, California 95211 https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmn/1017/thumbnail.jpg |
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