Abstract
On March 5, 1867, while working at the Osgood, Smith & Co. carriage materials factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, John Muir (1838–1914) was injured in an industrial accident that left him temporarily blind in his right eye. Within days, nerve shock caused his eyesight to also fail in his left eye. Four weeks of bedrest in a darkened room provided Muir with the opportunity to think about the South American voyage of German scientific explorer Alexander von Humboldt, as well as California’s Yosemite Valley, and this pause set him on a new professional and intellectual trajectory.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1857, Clark was the first Anglo-American to enter the Mariposa Grove, and was dedicated to its preservation. He was later appointed the first Guardian of the Yosemite Grant.
- 2.
Also in 1869, Major John Wesley Powell led the first Anglo-American expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers, and through the Grand Canyon (see Chapter 6).
- 3.
In the heat of the Hetch Hetchy campaign in the early-twentieth century, Muir would be accused of being a hypocrite in seeking to halt industry in Yosemite National Park, but the timber from the sawmill was sourced only from trees uprooted in storms—there was no hand-felling (Badè 1924a; Cohen 1984; Turner 2000; Wolfe 2003; Colwell 2014).
- 4.
Soon after Hutchings hired Muir and Randall at his sawmill, he left Yosemite Valley for Washington, DC, not returning until May 1870—embroiled in a legal fight with co-claimants James C. Lamon and two others for compensation for his land under preemption laws following the signing of the 1864 Yosemite Grant. Hutchings had acquired the hotel just six weeks before the Yosemite Grant was signed. He appealed first against the Yosemite Board of Commissioners, then the Supreme Court in Hutchings v. Low, but his claims were denied in 1872. Hutchings was formally evicted in May 1875 (and again in the fall, after a last stand) (Badè 1924a; Fox 1981; Runte 1990; Wilkins 1995; Turner 2000; Simpson 2005; Worster 2008; Duncan 2013; Binnewies 2015).
- 5.
Muir was awarded an honorary degree from UW-Madison 34 years after he left, in June 1897. (He also received honorary degrees from Harvard in June 1896, Yale in June 1911, and UC Berkeley in May 1913.)
- 6.
Muir visited Concord 22 years later, with Century editor Robert Underwood Johnson, in June 1893. The pair had dinner with Emerson’s son Edward, and visited Old North Bridge, Author’s Ridge in Sleepy Hollow cemetery where Emerson and Thoreau are buried, Walden Pond, and the former homes of several Transcendentalists, including Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, before Muir departed for a three-month trip to Scotland, England, and continental Europe (Badè 1924b; Muir 2018a, also Fox 1981; Wilkins 1995; Turner 2000; Simpson 2003; Wolfe 2003; Colwell 2014).
- 7.
Muir’s Our National Parks, published in 1901 (reprinted as Muir 2018a), is a collection of 10 articles that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly between 1897 and 1901, and will be the default reference for these articles henceforth.
- 8.
When Muir wrote this article, American forestry was still in its infancy. The Forestry Division of the Department of Agriculture was established the same year.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Yellowstone was the U.S.’s—and the world’s—first national park, designated by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872, a decade after Thoreau’s death, and eight years on from Congress setting aside Yosemite and granting it to the state of California. When designated in Wyoming Territory, with no state status (Wyoming joined the Union in July 1890), the park came under federal responsibility. At more than 2 million acres, it was bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined—and more than 50 times bigger than the Yosemite Grant in California.
- 12.
Almost a decade earlier, in the fall and winter of 1881, Muir had been invited to join with members of the California Academy of Sciences to help draft two bills to be presented before Congress—one to expand the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove grant, the other to create a national park in the southern Sierra to protect sequoia groves (what is now protected by the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks). Both stalled in the Senate public lands committee (Cohen 1984; Wilkins 1995; Ehrlich 2000; Wolfe 2003; Simpson 2005).
- 13.
But Muir could not replicate his conservation momentum in Yosemite back on his family’s first homestead in Wisconsin—Fountain Lake Farm. Before Muir left for Canada in 1864, he attempted to purchase 40 acres of sedge meadow beside Fountain Lake from his sister Sarah and brother-in-law David Galloway (who bought the farm from Daniel Muir in 1856—and sister Margaret and brother-in-law John Reid purchased Hickory Hill Farm from Daniel Muir when the family moved to Portage), to be set aside for conservation, illustrative of the plants, wildflowers familiar to pioneers, but it was sold for pastureland in 1865 and 1866, to the Ennis brothers (who renamed the lake Ennis Lake). Muir repeated his offer from Yosemite in 1871, and again in 1896, but was unsuccessful. Muir also tried to preserve Fern Lake on Mound Hill Farm, where the Galloways moved after selling Fountain Lake Farm. Fern Lake was protected for as long as the Galloways owned Mound Hill Farm. Sam Ennis demanded too high a fee for the Fountain Lake acreage (Muir 1896; Badè 1924a, b; Leopold 1968; Cohen 1984; Holmes 1999; Wolfe 2003; Worster 2008; Nash 2014; Root 2017). In an address to the Sierra Club in San Francisco on November 23, 1895, Muir spoke of his regret at being unable to keep the Fountain Lake Farm ‘untrampled’ (in Root 2017). During his early years in California, Muir also tried to protect Twenty Hill Hollow, near Snelling. It would be another Wisconsin conservation iconoclast who would eventually step in to protect Muir’s Fountain Lake—Aldo Leopold, who in the mid-1930s bought a sand farm near Baraboo, just 15 miles from the farmstead (Wilkins 1995; Simpson 2003). Leopold lectured in wildlife management and land conservation at Muir’s alma mater, UW-Madison, in the 1930s and 1940s (see Chapter 4). John Warfield Simpson notes an April 14, 1948 letter from Leopold to Ernest Swift, the director of the Wisconsin Conservation Department, proposing the establishment of a state park incorporating at least one of the Muir family farms (Simpson 2003). But Leopold passed away one week later, after a heart attack while tackling a wildfire on a neighbor’s property. Community groups took on Leopold’s campaign, and after much political haranguing, the John Muir Memorial Country Park was established in 1957, and, almost a quarter-century after Leopold’s proposal, the Department of Natural Resources established the Muir Park State Natural Area (within the boundaries of the country park) in March 1972 (Simpson 2003).
- 14.
Kings Canyon National Park (shortened from a proposed John Muir-Kings Canyon National Park) was eventually designated 49 years later on March 4, 1940 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (on Muir’s and later the Sierra Club’s campaign to secure the national park, see Cohen 1988; Wilkins 1995; Wolfe 2003; Worster 2008; Duncan 2013; Binnewies 2015).
- 15.
While the San Francisco-Hetch Hetchy battle was unfolding, an analogous battle was commencing elsewhere in California—in Los Angeles, over the watershed of the Owens Valley.
- 16.
The Yosemite (Muir 2003b) is dedicated to Johnson, the ‘originator of the Yosemite National Park.’
- 17.
RHH interview, April 7, 2016. RHH online interview, July 20, 2020.
- 18.
RHH interview, April 7, 2016.
- 19.
RHH interview, April 7, 2016.
- 20.
RHH online interview, July 20, 2020.
- 21.
RHH online interview, July 20, 2020.
- 22.
RHH online interview, July 20, 2020.
- 23.
YNP online interview, August 3, 2020.
- 24.
YNP online interview, August 3, 2020.
- 25.
YNP online interview, August 3, 2020.
- 26.
YNP online interview, August 3, 2020.
- 27.
YNP online interview, August 3, 2020.
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Smith, L. (2022). ‘No Holier Temple’: John Muir, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, and Restore Hetch Hetchy. In: Ecological Restoration and the U.S. Nature and Environmental Writing Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86148-3_3
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