4

John Muir and the Land

“IN GOD’S WILDNESS LIES THE HOPE OF THE WORLD—THE GREAT FRESH UNBLIGHTed, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware.”¹ So wrote John Muir, paraphrasing his intellectual forebear Thoreau, in his journal during a climbing trip around the glacier later to bear his name. Muir (1838–1914), a founder of the wilderness preservation movement, may have had the most important indirect influence on Alaska of all its conservation activists. His ideas ultimately bore fruit in protective land designations in Alaska and elsewhere. Yet like many others of his time and afterward, he perceived the territory as so large and isolated that its wilderness character could not be threatened.

Muir learned a love of Nature as a small boy in Scotland where his grandfather took him for walks. He and his brother David liked to roam the countryside and see how many bird nests they could find. They thrilled when the family emigrated to the United States in 1849 and settled in the “glorious Wisconsin wilderness.” Muir pursued his interest in Nature in the rare intervals between the chores of a harsh pioneer life on the frontier. As an older child he had to do a man’s share of the farmwork, and he once hand-dug a well 90 feet down through sandstone using hammer and chisel, working for months from dawn to dark. On one occasion he barely escaped death by carbonic acid gas poisoning at the bottom of the shaft.

Muir attended the University of Wisconsin between 1861 and 1863, taking courses that interested him, but he had no desire to complete a degree. A pacifist, he went to Canada to avoid the likelihood of being drafted. He traveled, studied plants, and worked in a sawmill until the Civil War ended. His mechanical genius landed him a job as a mechanic in Indianapolis. A shop accident temporarily blinded him in his late twenties, redoubled his appreciation of Nature, and caused him to rethink his priorities. Setting off on a “Thousand Mile Walk” in 1867, he visited Florida and then took a boat from New York to California, arriving in 1868. There he explored and observed the Sierra Nevadas intensely and guided people on wilderness trips. An extraordinarily eloquent and insightful man, Muir deeply impressed others with his discourses about Nature. Friends urged him to publish his views, and he did so beginning in 1871. He wrote of the beauty of Nature and the need for conserving it through better management and the creation of parks. In 1876 he began a long career in public speaking on Nature and conservation.²

Travels through time and space took Muir on a parallel philosophical journey. Observations of Nature during his youth caused him to reject his father’s fundamentalist view of Nature as an alien, if not evil, force to be conquered. Reading Emerson and other transcendentalist thinkers while at the University of Wisconsin, he moved toward the conception of Nature as God’s work created for the benefit of humans. Further reflection, deepened by his experiences in the Canadian woods, the Thousand Mile Walk, and trips into the Sierras, convinced him of the divinity and interrelatedness of all existence. He now saw God as the substance and process of Nature, and humans as an integral part not possessing the right to dominate or destroy the other parts. Humans had the responsibility and the privilege of living in the universe as citizens, respecting and appreciating other living and nonliving elements. Muir held this biocentric, essentially ecological understanding of life decades before its time as a contending view, although he did not attempt to explicitly develop it in his writings. In the words of environmental historian Max Oelschlaeger,

Muir recognized that whatever humankind might be, one’s essential human beingness could be known only in relation to the nonhuman other. Thus Muir’s mature idea of wilderness eradicated the boundaries between wilderness and civilization. The flowing whole of nature was the ultimate reality, the process in which life and death (and all other human conceptualizations) were merely part of everything else.³

MUIR IN ALASKA

As a lover of mountains and glaciers Muir took an interest in Alaska, making seven trips between 1879 and 1899.⁴ They started when Alaska missionary Sheldon Jackson met Muir at a Presbyterian Church convention at Yosemite in the summer of 1879 and alerted him to the departure of a mail steamer in ten days. Muir boarded the ship and went to Alaska.⁵ In unbounded enthusiasm he set out, usually alone, on mountain- and glacier-climbing trips. Carrying little food or equipment, he often hiked and camped overnight in rain or snowstorms. He and his 1879–1880 traveling companion, Reverend S. Hall Young, a Presbyterian missionary at Wrangell, became the first non-Natives to fully explore and map Glacier Bay, featuring the great glacier later named for Muir. Twice they journeyed 700 miles from Wrangell to the bay and back by dugout canoe, guided by Tlingit Indians. In a daring rescue following a near-fatal mountain-climbing accident, Muir used his necktie, which he always wore in the wild, to bind Young and pull him from the edge of an abyss.⁶ Young’s dog Stickeen accompanied Muir on an exploring trip that climaxed in a death-defying crossing of a narrow 70-foot ice bridge on Brady Glacier. The plucky little mutt so impressed Muir that he won abiding fame as the hero of Stickeen, the best selling of Muir’s several books on Alaska. A tourist stole Stickeen in 1883 and bore him away on a steamer.⁷

Muir’s purpose in visiting Alaska involved more nature appreciation than science, although he promulgated theories of glacial movement and carefully recorded a wide variety of natural phenomena. Science, he thought, achieved its highest value by aiding spiritual understanding of Nature. Compared to California, Alaska offered a more perfect place to experience the harmony of Nature because of its unspoiled wild character. Glaciers in particular, in their advances and retreats, displayed what Muir interpreted as Nature’s harmonic cycles.⁸

Belief in the spiritual healing power of Nature, and the desire to protect Nature, moved Muir to write. He made vigorous efforts to impress his reading public, believing that, once directly acquainted with natural beauty, people would be motivated to respect and preserve it. Following his 1879 trip through the Inside Passage he wrote, “Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description. . . . [T]he whole is so tender, so fine, so ethereal, any penwork seems coarse and unavailing.”⁹ By 1897 he had risen to the challenge: “To the lover of wilderness Alaska offers a glorious field for either work or rest: landscape beauty in a thousand forms, things great and small, novel and familiar, as wild and pure as paradise.” This he followed by a 192-word sentence extolling the scenic grandeur of Southeast Alaska.¹⁰

Sheldon Jackson and John Muir produced the first literature designed to publicize and attract people to Alaska—Muir highlighting natural beauty and Jackson the educational and spiritual needs of the Natives. In an 1880 letter to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin Muir asserted, “Alaska is full of food for man and beast, body and soul, though few are seeking it as yet. Were one-tenth of the attractions this country has to offer known to the world, thousands would come every year, and not a few of them would stay and make homes.”¹¹ His descriptions of Glacier Bay persuaded the Pacific Coast Steamship Company to offer large-scale tourist visits to the Southeast, carrying 5,000 passengers annually by 1890. Publicity also attracted hunters and mountain climbers to Southeast Alaska, helped to counter impressions of the territory as a land of ice and cold, and tied it more closely to the rest of the nation.¹² Historian Frank Buske said of Muir, “His magazine articles confirmed his reputation as an Alaskan expert, and conservation efforts with regard to Alaska at the turn of the century had his support. Alaska’s reputation as a treasure house of natural beauty and resources began with his reports.”¹³

John Muir’s Alaska writing may also be seen as part of the process of extending the American frontier. In this context, after Americans conquered and acquired land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, some looked northward to continue the pursuit of their perceived Manifest Destiny. Muir’s “discovery” and descriptions of natural wonders and Native culture constituted a form of appropriation that helped fulfill the desire for American expansion.¹⁴ He showed little recognition of this aspect of his work and criticized various impacts of Western civilization on Alaska Natives.

Muir’s aesthetic appreciation of the northern land did not necessarily extend to its urban vistas, exponents of the destructive intrusion of civilization. Of Wrangell he wrote,

It was a lawless draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling about the boggy shore of the island for a mile or so without the slightest subordination to the points of the compass or to building laws of any kind. . . . The ground in general was an oozy, messy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed potholes. . . . The domestic animals were represented by chickens, a lonely cow, a few sheep, and hogs of a breed well calculated to deepen and complicate the mud of the streets.¹⁵

Muir strongly disapproved of sport hunting and any other unnecessary form of killing. While visiting prospectors during the 1879 canoe trip Young complained of the lack of meat. Asked by a prospector why they had failed to bag lots of ducks, chief Toyatte replied, “Because the duck’s friend won’t let us . . . when we want to shoot, Mr. Muir always shakes the canoe.”¹⁶ In 1881 Muir traveled through the Bering Sea and into the Arctic Ocean on the revenue cutter Corwin, sent to search for the survivors of the cutter Jeanette, lost in the Arctic ice. He did not like all that he saw. Having watched the Corwin crew shoot three swimming polar bears from the deck as the ship chased them, he expressed disgust:

They had no chance whatever for their lives, and the whole affair was as safe and easy a butchery as shooting cows from the roof of a barn. . . . The Eskimos hunt and kill them for food, going out to meet them on the ice with spears and dogs. This is merely one savage living on another. But how civilized people, seeking for heavens and angels and millenniums [sic], and the reign of universal love, can enjoy this red, brutal amusement, is not so easily accounted for. Such soft, fuzzy, sentimental aspirations, and the frame of mind that can reap giggling, jolly pleasure from the blood and agony and death of these fine animals, with their humanlike groans, are too devilish for anything but hell. Of all the animals man is at once the worst and the best.¹⁷

Although he occasionally ate meat, Muir opined that, ideally, “people should learn to put their fellow mortals in their hearts instead of . . . their dinners.” He valued all creatures including snakes, lizards, spiders, and even flies. He rejected popular notions, overwhelmingly accepted in his time, that animals could be classified as good or bad, moral or immoral.¹⁸

Muir believed that wild animals, unlike tame ones, could teach humans valuable lessons about life. While trying to avoid anthropomorphizing the creatures and losing the respect of scientists, he saw in wild animals qualities of beauty, grace, and self-reliance from which humans could benefit if they were to appreciate and understand Nature. He contrasted the intelligent, clean, and vigorous mountain sheep to the stupid, dirty, defenseless beast of domestic flocks. He chose not to dwell on the violence inherent in predator-prey relationships and possessed a limited understanding of the connection between population and food supply. In essence he held an animistic philosophy, even though he used the term God to describe a causal force behind the evolutionary process.¹⁹

He rejected the mechanistic Darwinian focus on survival as the most significant aspect of Nature but accepted the concept of evolutionary change and viewed Nature as flowing like a river. He abhorred the notion of Nature as a bank of resources to be conquered, improved upon, and consumed for human benefit. To him the process of manipulating Nature degraded it and humans as well. Wilderness held a store of superior knowledge and wisdom developed through evolution, and its destruction removed the possibility of higher development in humans. As Muir scholar Michael P. Cohen summarized it, “Muir wanted civilized Man to improve his spiritual condition by immersing himself in the flow, not transcending it.”²⁰

While climbing Muir Glacier the philosopher mused:

The wilderness, I believe, is dear to every man though some are afraid of it. People load themselves with unnecessary fears, as if there were nothing in the world but snakes and bears who, like the Devil, are going restlessly about seeking whom they may devour. The few creatures there are really mind their own business, and rather shun humans as their greatest enemies. But men are like children afraid of their mother. Like the man who, going out on a misty morning, saw a monster who proved to be his own brother.

A reflection later that day: “There is love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.”²¹

Like nearly all Americans of his time, Muir did not ponder whether Natives, as distinct from the United States, might rightfully own Alaska. Yet as he did for trees and wild animals, Muir felt sympathy toward and spiritual unity with Alaska Natives. He questioned the taking of totem poles for museums. The degrading effects of Euro-American culture on wildlife and the Natives reinforced his view of civilization as an aggressive and pernicious force. He witnessed liquor dismantling the culture and vitality of Native life.²² In 1879 Muir attended a Tlingit dance depicting deer, porpoise, and bear. He admired the performance but noted the speech given by a dancer: “Dear Brothers and Sisters, this is the way we used to dance. We liked it long ago when we were blind, we always danced this way, but now we are not blind. The Good Lord has taken pity on us and sent his son, Jesus Christ, to tell us what to do. We have danced today only to show you how blind we were to dance in this foolish way. We will not dance any more.”²³

Principled missionaries (“common-sense Christian teachers”) merited Muir’s favor, and he felt such a relationship with the Tlingits. He found the Tlingits more virtuous than Christians in atonement for their sins and admired the depth of their spiritual thinking. His friend Kadachan exemplified what Muir believed to be their ecological perspective. According to scholar Richard Fleck, the Tlingits “taught Muir that happiness in one’s original environment is a true key to wisdom. To be happy in a place is to be at one with it.” Muir admired the simplicity and joie de vivre of the Eskimos, whom he regarded as brave and capable. He saw the coming of the white man as a disruption of the Natives’ harmonious adjustment to Nature.²⁴

Muir made little effort to publicize the lessons Native life might have to offer Euro-American culture, reserving that honor for nonhuman creatures or for Nature as a whole. In his posthumously published Travels in Alaska Muir stated of the Tlingits: “[I]n all my travels I never saw a child, old or young, receive a blow or even a harsh word,” and “the young are fondly indulged without being spoiled.” Crying is rarely heard.”²⁵ But his writings showed no awareness of the legacy of Native warfare and slavery or the brutality and degradation women commonly experienced in traditional cultures of Alaska.

The repeating rifle, Muir judged, encouraged the Natives to waste game. Hall Young told of seeing Muir “furiously angry for the first and last time in my acquaintance with him.” Noticing mountain goats on the hills above yet-to-be-named Muir Glacier, Young asked their Tlingit companion to “go up and get us a kid.” At length the young man returned carrying a goat, explaining, “I picked the fattest and most tender of those that I killed.” Astonished, Hall queried, “What! You killed more than one?” The Indian raised fingers to count to eleven. At that, “Muir’s face flushed red, and with an exclamation that was as near to an oath as he ever came, he started for Joe. Luckily for that Indian he saw Muir and fled like a deer up the rocks, and would not come down until he was assured that he would not be hurt.”²⁶

While Muir lamented the corrupting influences of Euro-American culture on the Natives, he lacked a full understanding of the latter in their relationship to Nature. He interpreted Tlingit fears and superstitions as evidence of separation, whereas the Tlingits viewed themselves as integrally related to Nature. Muir’s preservationist conception did not include Native subsistence living as part of an ecosystem. National Park Service philosophy tended to incorporate Muir’s concept, encountering little difficulty in the states where, in nearly all cases, Native Americans had been removed from lands that became parks.²⁷ But in Alaska, notably in Glacier Bay, the continuing use of wildlands by Natives generated conflict that went on through the 20th Century. It centered on questions of “subsistence” rights: Who should be permitted to use natural resources, for what purposes, and by what means of harvest? Should hunting for sport or commercial profit, or by modern technology, be classified as subsistence? At what point should modernization of lifestyle render a person or a group ineligible for subsistence privileges? Should any lands be closed to harvest? These and related issues bore implications for the management of public wildlands and for the philosophies of those supporting environmental protection.

THE GOLD RUSH ERA

John Muir played a minor part in the Gold Rush. Crossing into Canada through the Stikine River Valley in 1879, he made the acquaintance of miners. In a January 1880 letter in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin he wrote from Sitka, he speculated that most of Alaska contained gold, that the mountains geologically resembled California. Although he expressed doubt that Alaska goldfields would be as rich as those in the States, his mention of seeing nuggets up to 40 ounces may well have fired the imaginations of would-be prospectors.²⁸

Muir chanced to be traveling in Alaska in the summer of 1897 and encountered the driven hordes bound for the Klondike. A newspaper asked him to accompany the gold seekers as commentator. “Do they think I’m daft?” he exclaimed. “When I go into that wild it will not be in a crowd like this or on such a sordid mission.” During a brief stay at Skagway and Dyea he wrote articles describing the Chilkoot, White, Chilkat, Taku, and Stikine passes over which the gold seekers traveled into Canada on their way to the Bonanza Creek region. Of the quest for Klondike gold he commented, “The way to Heaven is less anxiously looked for.” He adopted a tolerant stand toward gold seeking, considering it preferable to “the mildewed inaction of crowds of purposeless people in big towns.” Few would become wealthy, he thought, but each would gain “knowledge better than gold” and attract to Alaska others who would increase their appreciation of Nature. Minimal injury could be done to the land because the cold climate would discourage development. He predicted that abundance of wildlife would allow the Klondikers to exist for years “living off the country as free as a bird.”²⁹ As for himself, Muir asserted, “I never wasted a minute hunting goldmines, knowing that gold dust in one’s eyes prevents one from seeing all else. Gold digging is only a dull chore, and no sane man will allow it to blind him and draw him away from the real blessings of existence.”³⁰

The Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush of the late 1890s and early 1900s highly stimulated public interest in Alaska. World attention focused on the Klondike in Canada’s Yukon, although much of the Klondike activity and several other gold strikes took place in Alaska. To the public the Gold Rush signified adventure, trial, freedom, and the vision of instant wealth. Written accounts and tales told by participants, and the fiction of such writers as Jack London, Robert Service, and Rex Beach, elevated the Gold Rush to permanent mythical status. Nature prepared a harsh setting where wits and physical and moral capacities could be tested, fortunes made and lost, legends born. It invited both reader and adventurer to extend the vanishing frontier.³¹

A less noble reality greeted the vast majority of gold seekers. By the time they reached the goldfields nearly all the desirable sites had been claimed. Most men found it necessary to work for claim owners, an arrangement similar to the industrial system they hoped to escape. As historian Kathryn Morse observed, “[W]hatever gold mining was supposed to be, it quickly turned into a familiar round of hirings and firings and bosses, and always too many men for too few jobs.” She assessed gold mining as “one of the most unproductive, unpredictable, and generally unpleasant occupations anyone could have chosen.”³²

Misery and danger supplemented drudgery in the pursuit of gold. Miners picked their way through the bodies of scores of horses and mules on White Pass, and more than 50 miners died in an 1898 avalanche on Chilcoot. Survivors again risked their lives in the river rapids descending to the Klondike. Many died of starvation and disease attempting to reach the goldfields through the Copper River Valley. Others braved the North Pacific in aged boats to ascend the Yukon. All but a few arrived too late to realize significant gains.³³

Miners indeed rarely suffered from “mildewed inaction.” In the early days they traveled primarily on foot in the summer and by snowshoe in winter, carrying their supplies by backpack. Sourdough and later U.S. marshal Lynn Smith told of an 1899 incident wherein his boat became frozen in the Yukon ice below Woodchopper Creek. Hearing of a gold strike fifteen miles inland, he set out carrying two days’ food but forgot to take extra matches. After walking all day he met his own snowshoe tracks and realized he had lost his way. Encountering a moose, he shot it and used his last match to start a fire. He cooked and ate some of the moose but could not keep the fire going because he had misplaced his hatchet. As a last resort he cleaned out the moose and crawled inside it to sleep. He awoke the next day to find the moose frozen and himself entombed. After two more days he heard a pack of wolves. They approached and tore at the moose. As Smith lay still he could see a black wolf chewing a hole six inches away from him. Eventually the wolves opened up the moose enough for Lynn to force his way out. Perhaps fearing attack, he killed the black wolf and wounded at least four others. The weather had cleared up, and Smith made his way back to the Yukon River.³⁴

Placer miners on American Creek. Core coll. PCA 01-4508, Alaska State Library. Left to right: Charlie Gay, Libby, Allen, Civil War veteran “Dod” Gardner, Jack Coulter. Pole of telegraph line visible at left ran from Eagle (twelve miles away) to Valdez. The Gold Rush era brought a flood of adventurers, and even small-scale mining operations could create long-term environmental impacts.

Muir, who disdained pretentiousness, would probably have approved of the 1896–1897 social arrangements at Circle City detailed by Arthur Walden, who freighted supplies between mining towns by dogsled: “Here was a town made up of men from all parts of the world, intelligent men all. I knew an Oxford man, a younger son, married to a squaw who had blondined her hair: he could quote Greek poetry by the hour when he was liquored up. Another man, raised in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, never drank and didn’t have a squaw, and taught himself to read and write.” In Circle City, Walden recalled, “if you look for a fool you find only one.”³⁵ The town of 300–400

had no taxes, courthouse or jail; no post-office, church, schools, hotel or dog pound; no rules, regulations or written law; no sheriff, dentist, doctor, lawyer or priest. Here there was no murder, stealing or dishonesty, and right was right and wrong was wrong as each individual understood it. . . . No firearms were carried for protection; no prayers were said for the dead; but money was raised for the widow. The Indians were treated fairly and squarely and were honest, as no liquor was sold to them. A man could be as wet or dry as he liked, and there were as many dries as in any community. Every man had a right to his own opinions, and was not taunted for them if he did not try to force them on others. There were no hypocrites in Circle City, and there was no need for them. . . . No man was a hero, no matter what he did, and no man was a saint, no matter how good he was.³⁶

Stores took payments in gold dust, and one customarily turned one’s back while the clerk weighed the poke. Before 1898, Miners’ Meetings dispensed justice, operating by consensus. Then, “after the gold rush of ’98 conditions here and elsewhere on the Yukon changed. Civilization, with religion, laws, disorder, stealing, education, murder, social life, commercial vice, comforts, and broken pledges, crept in; justice cost money and disease raged.”³⁷

U.S. Geological Survey officer Josiah Edward Spurr recounted a Circle City dance held in the late 1890s: “The couples gyrated in eccentric curves around in obedience to the cries; the candles flickered in the draft from the open door; and a row of miners too bashful to dance, or who could find no partners, sat on boxes next to the wall, hunched up their legs and spit tobacco juice until the middle of the floor was a sort of island. In short it was the most brilliant affair Circle City ever witnessed.”³⁸ The town emptied almost overnight when it heard news of the Klondike gold strike. Local traders sold the mining supplies upriver for higher profits, so Circle City miners resorted to hijacking steamboats and seizing supplies, although making full payment.³⁹

Indians, who sold moose, caribou, and salmon to the gold seekers, paid a fearful price. Introduced diseases including measles, smallpox, diphtheria, influenza, and typhoid fever cut deeply into their numbers. Disease often weakened them to the point where they could not carry out food gathering, causing starvation. Traders sometimes shifted their business to higher-paying miners, leaving Indians without supplies of blankets and ammunition. Market hunting undermined traditional communal patterns of gathering and contributed to shortages of moose and caribou on which the Indians depended for food.⁴⁰

Gold seekers exerted a greater impact on the land than Muir anticipated. In the early years, prospectors dug up streambed gravel in the summer and channeled water into rockers or sluices to settle out the placer gold. By the mid-1890s they worked through the winter, burning piles of wood to thaw holes down to bedrock and then digging laterally, a process called drift mining. When individual gold seekers exhausted the readily accessible placer deposits in the first decades of the 20th Century, companies brought in heavy machinery to dig deeper. They burned wood to heat boilers and piped the steam into the ground to melt the permafrost, enabling them to continue deep subsurface work all summer. As mining advanced in scale and industrial organization, some mining operations applied hydraulic hoses and dredges.⁴¹ When the government raised the price of an ounce of gold from $20.67 to $35 in 1933, Alaskan gold production rose from 469,286 ounces in 1933 to 749,933 ounces in 1940, escalating the environmental impact.⁴²

Hydraulic miners wielded high-pressure hoses to remove soil covering gold-bearing deposits. The hoses washed away the organic material, silt, and fine gravel, called the overburden, and flushed it into nearby streams and rivers. Material below the water table could be forced out through an inclined pipe and elevated aggregations torn down. Some gold deposits existed in benches well above the valley floor. At Cripple Creek in the Fairbanks region in 1939, strippers removed hills as high as 140 feet and muck as deep as 140 feet below ground level. Following the hydraulic hoses, a giant dragline dug out nearly 12,000 cubic yards of gravel daily. Stripping commonly prepared the way for dredging operations. Dredging worked best in relatively level areas such as the Yukon and Tanana valleys and the Nome beaches, where gold had settled in large-scale gravel sediments.⁴³

After hydraulic hoses tore down the riverbanks and hillsides, gold dredges sifted through the material and converted the valleys into piles of discarded gravel. At Chatanika north of Fairbanks in the mid-1930s the Fairbanks Exploration Company, biggest of its kind in the region, ran a hydraulic gold mining operation. Pipes forced water into the frozen ground to thaw it, and giant hoses blasted away the top layers of soil. Then

the big dredges follow up and dig out the gold-bearing gravel clear down to bed rock, which is anywhere from twenty to seventy-five feet below the washed surface. . . . They follow the sluicing operation around the valley—up one side and down the other, digging up the whole valley floor in the process. . . . [T]hey are made like barges and float on a pond dug by themselves as they go. . . . A big endless chain of digging buckets projects from the front. By cables fastened to each side of the pond and running over winches in the dredge, it is constantly kept swinging from side to side along a two-hundred-foot front. . . . This digging outfit is a regular four-story factory with engine room and control room, operated on electricity from the $5,000,000 power station in Fairbanks. . . . The dredge was never stopped, night or day, except for repairs.⁴⁴

Hydraulic mining operation on Dan Creek, a tributary of Nizina and Chitina rivers in the Wrangells. Alaska files 8268, University of Washington Archives. Hydraulic mining escalated the impact on the land.

Fairbanks Exploration Co. dredge on Cripple Creek, twelve miles from Fairbanks. Alaska files 8272, University of Washington Archives. Such large-scale operations could permanently alter an entire valley.

Historian Clark Spence characterized the gold dredge as “a marvelous invention, able to do the work of an army of men and to make a profit where none existed before,” yet “the seemingly insatiable leviathans wreaked havoc with the environment as few other types of mining have done, leaving behind a wake of desolation and ruin.” The Fairbanks Exploration Company furthered natural science in at least one way, donating to the University of Alaska the remains of mammoths and other prehistoric creatures found in the muck.⁴⁵

Extensive removal of trees and topsoil disrupted the ecology of stream valleys, normally among the most biologically productive interior zones. Studies eventually showed that soil loss changed vegetation and that silt from mining could diminish populations of grayling and other fish. Loss of root structures and topsoil, and destruction of mossy wetlands—the latter done in part to discourage mosquitoes—contributed to flooding and loss of evened water flow needed for mining operations.⁴⁶ By damaging the environment, miners hurt their own immediate interests as well as those of the Indians and wildlife.

Hard-rock mining for gold seemed even less romantic than hydraulic mining. A visitor to Juneau in the 1890s wrote, “Within two miles of Juneau are the famous Treadwell Mines, the largest in the world. Columns of dense smoke could be seen arising from these great works, surrounding which are mountains, grown white with the timber bleached under the poisonous smoke that comes from the burning of that ore, which cannot be separated from the gold by batteries.” Another writer’s impression of Douglas during operation of the gold ore crushers: “Nearly two thousand tons of quartz rock are crushed daily at these mills, and the roar made by the eight hundred or more stamps . . . in pulverizing this rock, dwarfs all other rackets I ever heard.”⁴⁷

By the end of the 20th Century, regulation had reduced the impact of gold mining in Alaskan lands and waters, but the permissive 1872 mining law, allowing easy access to most federal lands, remained in force.

INTERIOR FORESTS

Alaska’s forests felt the impact of gold mining. In contrast to the rainy coastal region familiar to Muir, the interior featured warm and dry summers. Largely because of the Gold Rush, forest fires burned continually. Miners used fire to clear woods and thaw permafrost for prospecting, and wood fueled steamships on the Yukon and other rivers.⁴⁸ Miners deliberately set forest fires to scorch and dry out trees to make them more useful as fuel. In the course of a winter a pair of miners might consume 30 to 60 cords of wood. Average-sized steamboats needed 30 cords daily, large ones 50 cords. Between St. Michael on the lower Yukon and Dawson across the Canadian border, a paddle wheeler used 150 to 1,000 cords. At the height of activity after the turn of the century, about 250 steamers plied the Yukon.⁴⁹

In addition to mining operations, white settlers employed fire for camping, signaling, protection from insects, and killing green trees to provide firewood and clear land for agriculture. An 1899 view of the Yukon River above Circle City: “Smoke on all sides fills the air, as camp-fires are built and not extinguished, and the flames slowly climb the mountainside, destroying the much-needed wood, and spoiling the picture otherwise so beautiful.”⁵⁰ Whites copied some practices from Alaska Natives, who used fire for many purposes, from signaling and driving game to entertainment. Both Natives and whites exercised little care to maintain control of their fires. Escaping or deliberately freed fires had rendered interior Alaska in part an unnatural environment prior to Euro-American contact.⁵¹

Lightning caused fires in the interior and, before the end of the 19th Century, Indians probably set most of the fires. The Gold Rush accelerated burning. Geologist Alfred H. Brooks observed in 1911 that

TABLE 4.1. Forest Acreage Burned in Alaska, 1940–1970

Source: (1940–1954): Harold J. Lutz, Ecological Effects of Forest Fires in the Interior of Alaska. USDA Tech. Bull. No. 1133. Washington, DC: March 1956, 14; (1955–1970): U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Alaska Fire Service, 1992 Fire Statistics. Fairbanks: 1993, 21.

Note: Nearly all acreage is in interior Alaska. Low and high figures reflect reduced activity in war years and climate variations.

hundreds of square miles of timber have been burned off the Yukon Basin during the last decade. This burning of timber is in part done purposely by both whites and natives in order to get rid of insect pests or to improve the growth of grass near their habitations, and is in part due to carelessness. . . . [T]he amount of timber destroyed by the natives is small compared with that for which the whites are responsible. Many a white man has deliberately started a forest fire which has swept over miles of country solely that he might obtain a few acres of dry wood for winter use. If this willful waste does not stop, the time is not too far distant when there will be a scarcity of timber even for local use.

Settlers commonly believed that fire improved the country by increasing grass and moose browse, killing insects, and easing prospecting. They could see scant use for spruce forests except as fuel and construction material.⁵²

An unknown but vast acreage burned between 1898 and 1939, when the Alaska Fire Control Service originated. A fire that started along the Valdez-Eagle trail at Mosquito Fork Flat in 1922 burned a swath 48 miles long by 30 miles wide. Construction workers started fires that consumed more than 100,000 acres at Chatanika River in 1926 and 128,000 acres at Copper River in 1927. A trapper, probably by accident, is believed to have set the Sheenjek River fire that blackened 312,320 acres in 1937. After the Fire Control Service became effective in 1942, aided by reduced activity in the forests, burned acreage dropped precipitously except in dry years (Table 4.1).⁵³

Wood consumption rose in the interior as population grew and mining operations became more mechanized. Sawmills cut spruce in the river valleys for lumber and to support World War II construction. Mining operations, especially dredges, continued to consume great quantities of firewood. One gold dredge used up 1,500 cords annually between 1913 and 1947.⁵⁴ Steamboats, homes, placer mines, railroads, and other businesses required large volumes. Until mid-century, Fairbanks heated itself primarily by burning wood, directly or in a steam-producing plant.⁵⁵ Settled in 1901, the town had to send woodcutters 33 miles to the Salcha River for its supply in 1909. By 1916 the town needed 100,000 cords annually, enough to create a pile 4 feet high and deep, 152 miles long. Mining consumed more than 70 percent of the wood, and heating and power generation about 12 percent each.⁵⁶ For great distances around populated or industrial sites, hills stood shorn of trees. When introduction of coal and fuel oil reduced woodcutting, the forests recovered some of their natural character by statehood, nearly a half-century after Muir’s death.⁵⁷

In the Southeast, Russians operated sawmills to build ships and other facilities, primarily near their capital, Sitka. Canneries, fish traps, housing, and railroad construction required larger amounts of wood in the American period, as did heating. World Wars I and II called for wood from the Southeast to be used in aircraft and military facilities. Attempts to launch a pulp industry failed between 1913 and the mid-1920s⁵⁸ but succeeded in 1954 at Ketchikan and 1959 at Sitka.⁵⁹ International demand for pulp and, to a lesser extent, lumber from the Southeast rapidly increased at the time of statehood. Massive clearcutting wrought such violence on old-growth forests and wildlife that environmentalists (including, prominently, John Muir’s Sierra Club) and wildlife managers organized to oppose it, setting in motion a struggle that lasted out the century.⁶⁰

Interior forests, while frequently ravaged by fire, did not lend themselves to large-scale cutting for lumber and pulpwood after statehood. Relatively small in diameter and found along scattered river valleys seldom reached by roads, they cost too much to harvest. Only a small market for the wood existed locally, and that need could be met by lumber from Canada or the Pacific Northwest, delivered by the Alaska Railroad.⁶¹ Although fires continued to burn considerable acreage after statehood, the interior suffered only slight habitat degradation and fragmentation from logging roads.

Loss of trees degraded stream valleys, and broader environmental changes followed forest fires. White spruce, the dominant upland tree, burned readily. Aspen and paper birch usually replaced it, and a full return to the white spruce climax stage required about 160 years. Fire tended to kill small furbearers, especially martens, weasels, foxes, and lynx. In that respect it worked a disproportionate hardship on Indians, who relied on trapping for income. Birch and aspen growth favored moose, at least until the trees grew taller. Loss of white spruce and the lichens growing on them and on the forest floor had a direct detrimental effect on caribou. Recovery of lichens took 40 years or more. The Gold Rush, perhaps supplemented by climatic warming, almost certainly reduced caribou populations in subarctic Alaska. Burning added nutrients to the soil but depleted the supply of timber needed for economic development.⁶²

Wood yard at Tanana River Railway, ca. 1905–1910. Cole coll. 76-38-20, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. The railroad burned wood in its locomotives, used it for railroad ties, and delivered it to mining sites. Added to forest fires, the use of wood for mining, steamboats, railroads, heating, and power generation stripped many hills and valleys of trees.

Neither Muir nor others of his time could foresee the effects of global warming to be manifested in the 21st Century. Alaska’s average temperature rose about 4 degrees F from 1960 to 2000 and promised to continue. A warmer climate favored the spread of bark beetles and fire, reducing the white spruce forests of the interior and associated populations of caribou and marten. Melting permafrost would cause large-scale land erosion, siltation of watercourses, and further loss of spruce forests. Tundra would be progressively converted to steppe. Release of carbon by fire and permafrost melting would increase atmospheric carbon dioxide, accelerating the changes. Rising sea levels would destroy coastal habitat for great numbers of waterfowl and other creatures. Higher ocean temperatures would diminish populations of salmon and affect sea mammals. In the Arctic, sea ice melting would jeopardize the survival of seals and polar bears. Many or most of the glaciers so loved by Muir could disappear.⁶³ The ecological impact of global warming might well exceed all the depredations of pre-statehood eras.

COAL, COPPER, AND AGRICULTURE

Twentieth-Century development stimulated the use of coal, resulting in both positive and negative effects on the environment. Found in small deposits of varying quality in widely scattered locations around Alaska, coal served the Natives, Russians, prospectors, and settlers. Most frequently burned for residential and mining purposes, it also helped fuel steamships offshore and on the Yukon River. Discovery of large deposits in the Matanuska Valley and south of Nenana appeared to justify building an Alaska Railroad from Seward to Fairbanks, completed in 1923. The railroad, intended to support mining in the interior for economic development, could burn the coal as well as deliver it. Locomotives utilized coal until the late 1940s when they converted to diesel fuel. Coal heated some buildings throughout the territorial period and generated electricity for civilian and military use. Only the Usibelli coal mine at Healy operated after 1971.⁶⁴ Coal had taken the pressure off interior forests, and, to a large degree, oil and natural gas replaced coal. Marginal deposits and moderate exploitation of coal permitted Alaska to avoid the pervasive land scarring and water poisoning typical of coal mining regions in the Lower 48.

Next to gold, copper accounted for the most mining activity in Alaska. Natives had used it for centuries, and white prospectors began to look for it in the late 1890s. They found the most productive and accessible lodes in south-central Alaska near Prince William Sound. Among 200 sites along the sound, 8 produced substantial volumes of ore. In 1900, prospectors Clarence Warner and Jack Smith discovered what became the Kennecott Company’s Bonanza mine 50 miles up the Copper River from Cordova. The Guggenheim group and others tried to build a railroad to it from Valdez and Katalla, but mountainous territory foiled the attempts. A railway from Cordova, constructed between 1906 and 1911, succeeded. Mining rapidly exhausted the most valuable deposits. Bonanza, the last large mine, closed in 1938. Between 1900 and 1930, Alaska had produced $212 million of copper compared to $400 million of gold.

Copper mining had minimally affected the Alaskan environment, considering that most of the ore went to Washington for smelting. Boosters had hoped the Copper River and Northwestern Railway would be extended into the interior and open it up to settlement and economic development. But the railway folded in 1938 when the mine closed. Copper had not set off a rush as gold did, and the small towns it created either withered away or turned to enterprises such as fishing.⁶⁵

TABLE 4.2. Agricultural Activity in Alaska, 1940–1969

Source: Orlando W. Miller, The Frontier in Alaska and the Matanuska Colony. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975, 223–224.

Agriculture, the primary source of environmental degradation in the States, bore far less economic potential in Alaska. Aided by federal funds during the Depression, settlers established commercial farms in the relatively small Matanuska Valley north of Anchorage. Similarly, the Tanana River Valley near Fairbanks produced some commercial crops. Suitable land existed along the west coast of the Kenai Peninsula. Kodiak Island and parts of the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands could support cattle or sheep grazing to a degree. A few types of vegetables for personal use could be grown in many areas, including the lower Arctic. But commercially viable farming faced numerous obstacles: cool air and ground temperatures; short growing seasons; unfavorable soils; high operating costs including land preparation, processing, transportation, and winter maintenance of livestock; and price competition from food shipped from the States.⁶⁶

Notwithstanding the limits imposed by location, Alaska boosters insisted that the territory possessed the agricultural potential to support large numbers of people, millions by some calculations. If only the federal government would subsidize farm settlement, they believed, agriculture would open up the territory to development. The American pioneer spirit would conquer the wilderness in the name of progress. Besides underwriting the Matanuska Colony, government policy resulted in scattered settlement elsewhere. But agriculture attained only a weak and uncertain position in Alaska’s economy (Table 4.2). As historian Orlando Miller described the workings of the frontier myth,

Local pride, a belief that growth and size mean progress, and an awareness of the gains to be made from rising property values and increased retail trade explain the boosting activities, but in addition promoters, journalists, and politicians swayed to their own incantations. . . . [T]hey eagerly awaited the urban and industrial development that Americans outside sometimes nostalgically regretted and hoped to escape in Alaska. . . . In the postwar period continued frontierism was a means of blinking away complex economic and social problems that could not be escaped in the wilderness. For all but an eccentric or unusual few, pioneer settlement meant not opportunity but poverty.⁶⁷

Matanuska Colony farm, Palmer, 1937. Drawbaugh coll. 89-128-151, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. Agriculture made limited inroads into wildlife habitat because of cold, unsuitable soils, and transportation costs.

By the time of statehood only 367 farms, most worked by part-time farmers, produced 14,500 acres of crops, much of it grasses for livestock. A handful of families from the Matanuska Colony still farmed full-time. The Matanuska Valley and its environs produced 70 percent of Alaskan agricultural value. Few, if any, of the conditions inhibiting agriculture improved after statehood.⁶⁸

John Muir committed an oft-to-be-repeated error in assuming that the Gold Rush and related settlement could not hurt Alaska’s environment. One dramatic example suggested otherwise: in 1898, prospectors endured weeks or months of the most exhausting and dangerous trials of their lives to reach the remote goldfields of the Klondike. By mid-1900, thanks to the White Pass and Yukon Railway and steamboats in Canada, one could ride in comfort from Seattle to Dawson in less than a week.⁶⁹ Other stimuli as powerful as gold—such as war or oil—might similarly break down the barriers to Alaskan wilderness.

Followers of John Muir and other advocates of wilderness preservation have often perceived wilderness as a state of Nature unaltered by humans. The fact that many wildlands have been lastingly influenced by set fires or other human activities has suggested the need for a more flexible concept of wilderness. But what degree of temporary or permanent disruption should make a wild area unworthy of protection? Does the constant change in Nature, with or without human intervention, render the notion of “preservation” meaningless? Should consumptive uses, such as those claimed as subsistence rights, be considered natural or be allowed in protected ecosystems? These questions became part of the debates over disposal of natural resources in Alaska.

MUIR AS POLITICAL ACTIVIST

Years after their Alaskan adventures, Hall Young visited Muir’s successful California fruit farm where he found his friend chafing in his harness. “I am losing the precious days,” lamented Muir; “I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must get out into the mountains and learn the news.” Muir’s obsessive attention to farmwork also wore down his health. Alaska trips revived him both physically and spiritually, renewing his enthusiasm for Nature. Farm profits enabled him to return his attention to experiencing and writing about Nature.⁷⁰

Muir’s writings attracted the attention of Robert Wood Johnson, editor of the prestigious New York magazine Century, who acted as a powerful ally in the wilderness preservation movement. Johnson journeyed to California in 1889 and asked Muir to continue writing nature preservation articles for Century. They visited Toloumne Meadows in the Yosemite Valley and witnessed the damage being done by logging, mining, and grazing. They decided to launch a campaign to preserve Yosemite and its surroundings. Muir would write supportive articles and Johnson would contact members of Congress and the Harrison administration. In October 1890 their plan succeeded.⁷¹ The resultant Yosemite National Forest Preserve, later named Yosemite National Park, surrounded Yosemite Valley, which had been ceded to California as a park in 1864. Five days before the Yosemite vote and almost certainly influenced by the efforts of Johnson and Muir, Congress created the reserve that evolved into Sequoia National Park. Publicity generated by the Yosemite effort spurred the implementation of the 1891 Forest Reserves Act that enabled President Benjamin Harrison to set aside 13 million acres, including the Afognak reserve in Alaska. Muir and Johnson, among others, co-founded the Sierra Club (1892), dedicated to the enjoyment and preservation of the Sierras. Muir served as president until his death.⁷²

Muir increasingly assumed the character of public figure and political activist. Alarmed at the razing of forests by private interests, he assisted the efforts of utilitarian conservationists to create reserves for the public benefit. Like the Progressives coming to prominence, he fought against the social Darwinist idea that natural competition required conquest of Nature and that government should facilitate the process by minimizing regulation. Muir argued that citizens should be educated to appreciate Nature and government should protect it. Uncontrolled exploitation of Nature, such writers as George Perkins Marsh warned, would be disastrous for humans as well. When in 1896 a federal Forestry Commission of scientists chosen to evaluate forest policy invited Muir to participate as an ex-officio member, he accepted. No comprehensive policy had been written for federal wildlands, and Muir and Johnson recognized the opportunity to set a precedent by establishing protection as a goal. Muir acted as unofficial publicist for the commission’s activities, expressing spiritual values but cautiously avoiding a preservationist stance. The commission recommended corrective measures, including a ban on grazing, and President Grover Cleveland reserved 21 million acres before he left office in 1897. But the new McKinley administration withheld the report from the public, and Congress passed and McKinley signed a bill removing protective restrictions from the reserves and encouraging commercial development.⁷³

Preservationists called on Muir to defend Cleveland’s forest reservation decree, under heavy attack from Western senators beholden to logging, grazing, and mining interests. In a pair of Atlantic Monthly articles he fought back:

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away, and if they could they would still be destroyed—chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their black hides, branching horns or magnificent bole backbones. . . . Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees . . . but he cannot save them from fools. Only Uncle Sam can do that.

Public opposition swelled and a bill to abolish the reserves, having passed the Senate, died in the House.⁷⁴

Muir had befriended and supported Gifford Pinchot, a member of the Forestry Commission and the leading exponent of utilitarian values who later served as Theodore Roosevelt’s first chief of the Forest Service. Eventually it dawned on Muir that utilitarianism meant loss of the forests’ wilderness character. Hearing of Pinchot’s advocacy of sheep grazing in the reserves, Muir personally confronted him in 1897. Their friendship entered a downward course from which it never recovered. From what he had seen in the mountains, Muir regarded sheep as “hoofed locusts,” and “[a]s sheep advance, flowers, vegetation, grass, soil, plenty, and poetry vanish.”⁷⁵ Muir’s break from Pinchot, the prime mover of the federal utilitarian conservation effort, constituted both symbol and substance of the division between conservationists and preservationists lasting through the 20th Century.

Only preservation made sense to a thinker so convinced of the spiritual and ecological values of Nature. Yet preservation on public lands could not easily be achieved even on a minor scale. Any restriction on exploitation by Euro-Americans would have to overcome trenchant resistance from corporate interests or settlers. It would have to mobilize significant elements of a public either apathetic or sympathetic toward exploitative behavior. And it would require a variety of compromises. Accordingly, Muir somewhat reluctantly accepted a public role of heroic nature philosopher as a means of generating public influence. He hosted numerous tourists in Sierra parks in hopes that they would gain a love for Nature and support future parks. To these ends, Muir and the Sierra Club even advocated the construction of numerous trails and roads in wild areas.⁷⁶

Although he did not win all his battles, Muir grew increasingly prominent. Both Roosevelt and Taft, while serving as president, visited him during trips to California. Roosevelt described his time alone with Muir, when they camped out in Yosemite during a snowy night in 1903, as “the grandest day of my life.” He made a greater concession when Muir asked him, “When are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things . . . are you not getting far enough along to leave that off?” Replied the world’s best-known hunter, “Muir, I guess you are right.” Muir’s efforts helped make possible Roosevelt’s designation of 148 million acres of forest reserves, including the Grand Canyon, between 1902 and 1909.⁷⁷

Muir participated in the Harriman Expedition, a grand finale for the naturalists’ 19th-Century Alaska trips. Paid for and headed by railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman, the expedition combined an exotic vacation and an elite scientific undertaking. A handpicked coterie of 23 top natural scientists—in addition to artists, photographers, and others—boarded a comfortably outfitted ship, the George W. Elder, and sailed Alaskan waters from the Southeast to the Arctic and Siberian coasts during the summer of 1899. The plan succeeded in providing a unique experience for all and reinforcing a network of influentials.⁷⁸ Harriman’s other purposes for the trip achieved mixed success. Like some other wealthy adventurers of the period, he shot a brown bear. He gained temporary status in New York society, but his hope of linking the hemispheres by a railroad tunnel under the Bering Strait fell by the wayside.⁷⁹ The expedition’s ensuing books and articles expanded awareness of Alaska and its resources, although not especially toward resource conservation.

Muir’s ties to Harriman, president of the politically influential Southern Pacific Railroad, paid dividends in the campaign to add Yosemite Valley to the surrounding national preserve.⁸⁰ California governor James Pardee had accompanied Muir and Roosevelt on the 1903 Yosemite outing. He promised Sierra Club member William Colby, also in the group, that he would sign a bill to return Yosemite Valley to national control if it could pass the legislature. Muir and Colby made nine lobbying trips to Sacramento, and the Sierra Club–led effort paid off. Another lobbying campaign, supported by the Union Pacific Railroad over which Harriman also presided, culminated in a congressional vote to accept the property in 1906.⁸¹

John Muir (right) and John Burroughs at St. Matthew Island, 1899. By Edward Curtis. Harriman coll. RBD 0201-118, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. Through his writings and political work, Muir made lasting contributions to environmental protection in Alaska.

As much as he loved Alaska, Muir never returned after the 1899 trip. Embroiled in the fight to save Yosemite, he devoted his time to politics and the education of public opinion. The Yosemite success preceded a long and acrimonious conflict over Hetch Hetchy Valley to the north. In late 1913 Congress approved the dam that would drown the valley. Muir had lost the contest and exhausted himself in the process. He died in December 1914. In addition to the glacier, Muir is remembered by Muir Inlet and Muir Point in Glacier Bay National Park and Mt. Muir in the Chugach Range.⁸²

John Muir exercised a powerful, if mainly indirect, impact on Alaska, in the first instance by drawing attention to its natural beauty. His writings stimulated ecotourism and ultimately bore fruit in the establishment of Glacier Bay National Park (Chapter 8). Had he lived longer, he would certainly have approved of this and other Alaskan parkland designations. It is difficult to determine, but doubtful, that by attracting people to Alaska for aesthetic purposes he enhanced the environmental values of settlers.

Muir perceived no significant environmental threat to Alaska, not projecting impacts to a time when visitors and technology would be multiplied. He did not address the question of whether subsistence uses of the land by Natives or others could be considered natural and compatible with wildland preservation. Beyond making his preservation sentiments known, as in the case of polar bear killing, he did not directly participate in Alaskan resource disputes.

In the long run, as an icon of nature preservation, Muir substantially advanced environmental awareness and values in Alaska and elsewhere. The territory held six of the reserves created by Roosevelt, persuaded in some degree by Muir. The Sierra Club evolved into a significant participant in Alaskan environmental issues after statehood. It played a central role in the Alaska lands settlement legislation of 1971 and 1980, two of the most important environmental events in 20th-Century North America. It took the lead in protecting the Tongass National Forest from logging that bid fair to destroy it and participated in nearly all the environmental disputes that marked the statehood period. One of its members, Stephen T. Mather, became the first director and builder of the National Park Service, promoting the establishment of national monuments and parks in Alaska and elsewhere.

Like George Bird Grinnell and Henry W. Elliott, Muir pioneered national publicity and lobbying campaigns for natural resource preservation. In doing so, he won a reputation as the nation’s leading spokesperson for wilderness. Perhaps most important, he gave force to an idea that reappeared in the thinking of environmentalists and their public following: that wilderness and its creatures possess beauty, dignity, and merit as elements of the community of life; that humans must learn to see themselves not as owners or conquerors but as fellow citizens of that community.

As a precursor or founder of the modern environmental community, Muir modeled and articulated many of its key values: ecosystem sustainability, nonconsumptive uses of Nature, corporate and government accountability, and public participation in resource disputes. Far ahead of his time, he believed in a holistic relationship of humans to nonhumans, including animal and species rights. He relied more on poetic appeals than on scientific data, although he excelled as a self-trained scientist and, when the need arose, as a political advocate. At the same time, his utopian concept of spiritual fulfillment through immersion in Nature would prove eternally difficult to translate into environmental policy. Nevertheless, he shifted the nation’s environmental agenda closer to nature preservation.