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"THE last rays of the setting
sun are shining into our window at the Palace Hotel and perhaps it is the
last sunset we shall ever see in this city of the Golden Gate. I could not
think of leaving the Pacific Coast without saying good-bye to you who so
much love all the world about here. California, you may say, has made you,
and you in return have made California, and you are both richer for having
made each other." The concluding sentence of this parting message of former
travel companions, sent to John Muir in 1879 when he was exploring the
glaciers of Alaska, has grown truer each succeeding decade since then.
Intimately as his name was
already identified with the natural beauty of California in 1879, the
service which Muir was ultimately to render to the nation was only beginning
at that time. Then there was only one national park, that of the
Yellowstone, and no national forest reserves at all. Amid such a wealth of
beautiful forests and wildernesses as our nation then possessed it required
a very uncommon lover of nature and of humanity to advocate provision
against a day of need. But that friend of generations unborn arose in the
person of John Muir. Before he or any one had ever heard of national parks
the idea of preserving some sections of our natural flora in their unspoiled
wildness arose spontaneously in his mind.
It was a lovely carex meadow
beside Fountain Lake, on his father's first Wisconsin farm, that gave him
the germinal idea of a park in which plant societies were to be protected in
their natural state. During the middle sixties, as he was about to leave his
boyhood home forever, he found unbearable the thought of leaving this
precious meadow unprotected, and offered to purchase it from his
brother-in-law on condition that cattle and hogs be kept securely fenced
out. Early correspondence shows that he pressed the matter repeatedly, but
his relative treated the request as a sentimental dream, and ultimately the
meadow was trampled out of existence. More than thirty years later, at a
notable meeting of the Sierra Club in 1895, he for the first time made
public this natural park dream of his boyhood. It was the national park idea
in miniature, and the proposal was made before even the Yellowstone National
Park had been established.
This was the type of man who
during the decade between 1879 and 1889 wrote for "Scribner's Monthly" and
the "Century Magazine" a series of articles the like of which had never been
written on American forests and scenery. Such were Muir's articles entitled
"In the Heart of the California Alps," "Wild Sheep of the Sierra,"
"Coniferous Forests of the Sierra Nevada," and "Bee-Pastures of California."
There was also the volume, edited by him, entitled "Picturesque California,"
with numerous articles by himself. The remarkably large correspondence which
came to him as a result of this literary activity shows how deep was its
educative effect upon the public mind.
Then came the eventful summer
of 1889, during which he took Robert Underwood Johnson, one of the editors
of the "Century," camping about Yosemite and on the Tuolumne '1eadows,
where, as Muir says, he showed him how uncountable sheep had eaten and
trampled out of existence the wonderful flower gardens of the seventies. We
have elsewhere shown how the two then and there determined to make a move
for the establishment of what is now the Yosemite National Park, and to make
its area sufficiently comprehensive to include all the head-waters of the
Merced and the Tuolumne. This was during President Harrison's
administration, and, fortunately for the project, John W. Noble, a faithful
and far-sighted servant of the American people, was then Secretary of the
Interior.
One may imagine with what
fervor Muir threw himself into that campaign. The series of articles on the
Yosemite region which he now wrote for the "Century" are among the best
things he has ever done. Public-spirited men all over the country rallied to
the support of the National Park movement, and on the first of October,
1890, the Yosemite National Park bill went through Congress, though bitterly
contested by all kinds of selfishness and pettifoggery. A troop of cavalry
immediately came to guard the new park; the "hoofed locusts" were expelled,
and the flowers and undergrowth gradually returned to the meadows and
forests.
The following year (1891)
Congress passed an act empowering the President to create forest reserves.
This was the initial step toward a rational forest conservation policy, and
President Harrison was the first to establish forest reserves - to the
extent of somewhat more than thirteen million acres. We cannot stop to go
into the opening phases of this new movement, but the measure in which the
country is indebted to John Muir also for this public benefit may be
gathered from letters of introduction to scientists abroad which influential
friends gave to Muir in 1893 when he was contemplating extensive travels in
Europe. "It gives me great pleasure," wrote one of them, "to introduce to
you Mr. John Muir, whose successful struggli for the reservation of about
one-half of the western side of the Sierra Nevada has made him so well known
to the friends of the forest in this country."
During his struggle for the
forest reservations and for the establishment of the Yosemite National Park
Muir had the effective coöperation of a considerable body of public-spirited
citizens of California, who in 1892 were organized into the Sierra Club, in
part, at least, for the purpose of assisting in creating public sentiment
and in making it effective. During its long and distinguished public service
this organization never swerved from one of its main purposes, "to enlist
the support and coöperation of the people and the government in preserving
the forests and other features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains," and when
that thrilling volume of Muir's, "My First Summer in the Sierra," appeared
in 1911, it was found to be dedicated "To the Sierra Club of California,
Faithful Defender of the People's Playgrounds."
The assistance of this Club
proved invaluable when Muir's greatest opportunity for public service came
in 1896. It was then that our Federal Government began to realize at last
the imperative necessity of doing something at once to check the appalling
waste of our forest resources. Among the causes which led up to this
development of conscience was the report of Edward A. Bowers, Inspector of
the Public Land Service. He estimated the value of timber stolen from the
public lands during six years in the eighties at thirty-seven million
dollars. To this had to be added the vastly greater loss annually inflicted
upon the public domain by sheepmen and prospectors, who regularly set fire
to the forests in autumn, the former to secure open pasturage for their
flocks, the latter to lay bare the outcrops of mineral-bearing rocks. But
the most consequential awakening of the public mind followed the appearance
of Muir's "Mountains of California" in 1894. All readers of it knew
immediately that the trees had found a defender whose knowledge, enthusiasm,
and gift of expression made his pen more powerful than a regiment of swords.
Here at last was a man who had no axes to grind by the measures he advocated
and thousands of new conservation recruits heard the call and enlisted under
his leadership. One remarkable thing about the numerous appreciative letters
he received is the variety of persons, high and low, from whom they came.
The reader will recall that,
as early as 1876, Muir had proposed the appointment of a national commission
to inquire into the fearful wastage of forests, to take a survey of existing
forest lands in public ownership, and to recommend measures for their
conservation. Twenty years later, in June, 1896, Congress at last took the
required action by appropriating twenty- five thousand dollars "to enable
the Secretary of the Interior to meet the expenses of an investigation and
report by the National Academy of Sciences on the inauguration of a national
forestry policy for the forested lands of the United States." In pursuance
of this act Wolcott Gibbs, President of the National Academy of Sciences,
appointed as members of this Commission Charles S. Sargent, Director of the
Arnold Arboretum; General Henry L. Abbot, of the United States Engineer
Corps; Professor William H. Brewer of Yale University; Alexander Agassiz;
Arnold Hague of the United States Geological Survey; and Gifford Pinchot,
practical forester. It should be said to the credit of these men that they
all accepted this appointment on the understanding that they were to serve
without pay.
It is not surprising, in view
of the circumstances, that Charles S. Sargent, the Chairman of the newly
appointed Commission, immediately invited John Muir to accompany the party
on a tour of investigation, and it was fortunate, as it turned out
afterwards, that he went as a free lance and not as an official member of
the party. During the summer of 1896, this Commission visited nearly all of
the great forest areas of the West and the Northwest, and letters written to
him later by individual members testify to the invaluable character of
Muir's personal contribution to its work.
A report, made early in 1897,
embodied the preliminary findings and recommendations of the Commission, and
on Washington's Birthday of that year President Cleveland created thirteen
forest reservations, comprising more than twenty-one million acres. This
action of the President created a rogues' panic among the mining, stock, and
lumber companies of the Northwest, who were fattening on The public domain.
Through their subservient representatives in Congress they moved unitedly
and with great alacrity against the reservations. In less than a week after
the President's proclamation they had secured in the United States Senate,
without opposition, the passage of an amendment to the Sundry Civil Bill
whereby "all the lands set apart and reserved by Executive orders of
February 22, 1897," were "restored to the public domain. . . the same as if
said Executive orders and proclamations had not been made." To the lasting
credit of California let it be said that the California reservations were
expressly exempted from the provisions of this nullifying amendment at the
request of the California Senators, Perkins and White, behind whom was the
public sentiment of the State, enlightened by John Muir and many like-minded
friends.
The great battle between the
public interest and selfish special interests, or between "landscape
righteousness and the devil," as Muir used to say, was now joined for a
fight to the finish. The general public as yet knew little about the value
of forests as conservers and regulators of water-flow in streams. They knew
even less about their effect upon rainfall, climate, and public welfare, and
the day when forest reserves would be needed to meet the failing timber
supply seemed far, far off.
But there is nothing like a
great conflict between public and private interests to create an atmosphere
in which enlightening discussion can do its work, and no one knew this
better than John Muir. "This forest battle," he wrote, "is part of the
eternal conflict between right and wrong.... The sooner it is stirred up and
debated before the people the better, for thus the light will be let into
it." When traveling with the Forestry Commission he had on one occasion seen
an apparently well-behaved horse suddenly take a fit of bucking, kicking,
and biting that made every one run for safety. Its strange actions were a
mystery until a yellow jacket emerged from its ear!
Muir seized the occurrence
for an explanation of the sudden and insanely violent outcry against forest
reservations. "One man," he said, "with a thousand-dollar yellow jacket in
his ear will make more bewildering noise and do more effective kicking and
fighting on certain public measures than a million working men minding their
own business, and whose cash interests are not visibly involved. But as soon
as the light comes the awakened million creates a public opinion that
overcomes wrong however cunningly veiled."
He was not mistaken, as we
shall see, though for a time wrong seemed triumphant. The amendment
nullifying the forest reservations died through lack of President
Cleveland's signature. But in the extra session, which followed the
inauguration of President McKinley, a bill was passed in June, 1897, that
restored to the public domain, until March 1, 1898, all the forest
reservations created by Cleveland, excepting those of California. This
interval, of course, was used shamelessly by all greedy forest-grabbers,
while Congress was holding the door open! Emboldened by success, certain
lumbermen even tried to secure Congressional authority to cut the wonderful
sequoia grove in the General Grant National Park.
But John Muir's Scotch
fighting blood was up now. Besides, his friends, East and West, were calling
for the aid of his eagle's quill to enlighten the citizens of our country on
the issues involved in the conflict. "No man in the world can place the
forests' claim before them so clearly and forcibly as your own dear self,"
wrote his friend Charles Sprague Sargent, Chairman of the Commission now
under fire. "No one knows so well as you the value of our forests - that
their use for lumber is but a small part of the value." He proposed that
Muir write syndicate letters for the public press. "There is no one in the
United States," he wrote, "who can do this in such a telling way as you can,
and in writing these letters you will perform a patriotic service."
Meanwhile the public press
was becoming interested in the issue. To a request from the editor of
"Harper's Weekly" Muir responded with an article entitled "Forest
Reservations and National Parks," which appeared opportunely in June, 1897.
The late Walter Hines Page, then editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," opened to
him its pages for the telling contribution entitled" The American Forests."
In both these articles Muir's style rose to the impassioned oratory of a
Hebrew prophet arraigning wickedness in high places, and preaching the
sacred duty of so using the country we live in that we may not leave it
ravished by greed and ruined by ignorance, but may pass it on to future
generations undiminished in richness and beauty.
Unsparingly he exposed to
public scorn the methods by which the government was being defrauded. One
typical illustration must suffice. "It was the practice of one lumber
company," he writes, "to hire the entire crew of every vessel which might
happen to touch at any port in the redwood belt, to enter one hundred and
sixty acres each and immediately deed the land to the company, in
consideration of the company's paying all expenses and giving the jolly
sailors fifty dollars apiece for their trouble."
This was the type of
undesirable citizens who, through their representatives in Congress, raised
the hue and cry that poor settlers, looking for homesteads, were being
driven into more hopeless poverty by the forest reservations - a piece of
sophistry through which Muir's trenchant language cut like a Damascus blade.
The outcries we hear against
forest reservations [he wrote] come mostly from thieves who are wealthy and
steal timber by wholesale. They have so long been allowed to steal and
destroy in peace that any impediment to forest robbery is denounced as a
cruel and irreligious interference with "vested rights," likely to endanger
the repose of all ungodly welfare. Gold, gold, gold! How strong a voice that
metal has!. . . Even in Congress, a sizable chunk of gold, carefully
concealed will outtalk and outfight all the nation on a subject like
forestry . . . in which the money interests of only a few are conspicuously
involved. Under these circumstances the bawling, blethering oratorical stuff
drowns the voice of God himself. . . Honest citizens see that only the
rights of the government are being trampled, not those of the settlers.
Merely what belongs to all alike is reserved, and every acre that is left
should be held together under the federal government as a basis for a
general policy of administration for the public good. The people will not
always be deceived by selfish opposition, whether from lumber and mining
corporations or from sheepmen and prospectors, however cunningly brought
forward underneath fables of gold.
He concluded this article
with a remarkable peroration which no tree-lover could read without feeling,
like the audiences that heard the philippics of Demosthenes, that something
must be done immediately.
Any fool [he wrote] 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 bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few
that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting
back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man's life only
saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees -tens of centuries old
-that have been destroyed. It took more than three thousand years to make
some of the trees in these Western woods - trees that are still standing in
perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the
Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time
and long before that - God has cared for these trees, saved them from
drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests
and floods; but He cannot save them from fools - only Uncle Sam can do that.
The period of nine months
during which the Cleveland reservations had been suspended came to an end on
the first of March, 1898. Enemies of the reservation policy again started a
move in the Senate to annul them all. "In the excitement and din of this
confounded [Spanish-American] War, the silent trees stand a poor show for
justice," wrote Muir to his friend C. S. Sargent, who was sounding the
alarm. Meanwhile Muir was conducting a surprisingly active campaign by post
and telegraph, and through the Sierra Club. At last his efforts began to
take effect and his confidence in the power of light to conquer darkness was
justified. "You have evidently put in some good work," wrote Sargent, who
was keeping closely in touch with the situation. "On Saturday all the
members of the Public Lands Committee of the House agreed to oppose the
Senate amendment wiping out the reservations." A large surviving
correspondence shows how he continued to keep a strong hand on the helm. On
the eighth of July the same friend, who was more than doing his own part,
wrote, "Thank Heaven! the forest reservations are safe. . . for another
year." As subsequent events have shown, they have been safe ever since. One
gets directly at the cause of this gratifying result in a sentence from a
letter of John F. Lacey, who was then Chairman of the Public Lands Committee
of the House. In discussing the conflicting testimony of those who were
urging various policies of concession toward cattle and sheep men in the
administration of the reserves he said, "Mr. Muir's judgment will probably
be better than that of any one of them."
We have been able to indicate
only in the briefest possible manner the decisive part that Muir played in
the establishment and defence of the thirty-nine million acres of forest
reserves made during the Harrison and Cleveland administrations. But even
this bare glimpse of the inside history of that great struggle reveals the
magnitude of the service John Muir rendered the nation in those critical
times.
There were not lacking those
who charged him with being an advocate of conservatism without use. But this
criticism came from interested persons - abusers, not legitimate users and
is wholly false.
The United States Government
[he said] has always been proud of the welcome it has extended to good men
of every nation seeking freedom and homes and bread. Let them be welcomed
still as nature welcomes them, to the woods as well as the prairies and
plains. .. . The ground will be glad to feed them, and the pines will come
down from the mountains for their homes as willingly as the cedars came from
Lebanon for Solomon's temple. Nor will the woods be the worse for this use,
or their benign influences be diminished any more than the sun is diminished
by shining. More destroyers, however, tree-killers, spreading death and
confusion in the fairest groves and gardens ever planted, let the government
hasten to cast them out and make an end of them. For it must be told again
and again, and be burningly borne in mind, that just now, while protective
measures are being deliberated languidly, destruction and use are speeding
on faster and farther every day. The axe and saw are insanely busy, chips
are flying thick as snowflakes, and every summer thousands of acres of
priceless forests, with their underbrush, soil, springs, climate, scenery,
and religion, are vanishing away in clouds of smoke, while, except in the
national parks, not one forest guard is employed.
Stripped of metaphor, this
moving appeal of John Muir to Uncle Sam was an appeal to the intelligence of
the American people, and they did not disappoint his faith in their
competence to deal justly and farsightedly with this problem. Great as was
the achievement of rescuing in eight years more than thirty-nine million
acres of forest from deliberate destruction by sheeping, lumbering, and
burning, it was only an earnest of what awakened public opinion was prepared
to do when it should find the right representative to carry it into force.
That event occurred when Theodore Roosevelt came to the Presidency of the
United States, and it is the writer's privilege to supply a bit of unwritten
history on the manner in which Muir's informed enthusiasm and Roosevelt's
courage and love of action were brought into coöperation for the country's
good. In March, 1903, Dr. Chester Rowell, a Senator of the California
Legislature, wrote to Muir confidentially as follows: "From private advices
from Washington I learn that President Roosevelt is desirous of taking a
trip into the High Sierra during his visit to California, and has expressed
a wish to go with you practically alone.. . . If he attempts anything of the
kind, he wishes it to be entirely unknown, carried out with great secrecy so
that the crowds will not follow or annoy him, and he suggested that he could
foot it and rough it with you or anybody else."
John Muir had already engaged
passage for Europe in order to visit, with Professor Sargent, the forests of
Japan, Russia, and Manchuria, and felt constrained to decline. But upon the
urgent solicitation of President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, and following the
receipt of a friendly letter from President Roosevelt, he postponed his
sailing date, writing to Professor Sargent, "An influential man from
Washington wants to make a trip into the Sierra with me, and I might be able
to do some forest good in freely talking around the campfire."
By arrangement Muir joined
the President at Raymond on Friday, the fifteenth of May, and at the
Mariposa Big Trees the two inexorably separated themselves from the company
and disappeared in the woods until the following Monday. Needless to say
this was not what the disappointed politicians would have chosen, but their
chagrin fortunately was as dust in the balance against the good of the
forests.
In spite of efforts to keep
secret the President's proposed trip to Yosemite, he had been met at Raymond
by a big crowd. Emerging from his car in rough camp costume, he said:
"Ladies and Gentlemen: I did not realize that I was to meet you to-day,
still less to address an audience like this! I had only come prepared to go
into Yosemite with John Muir, so I must ask you to excuse my costume." This
statement was met by the audience with cries of "It is all right!" And it
was all right. For three glorious days Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir were
off together in Yosemite woods and on Yosemite trails. Just how much was
planned by them, in those days together, for the future welfare of this
nation we probably never shall fully know, for death has sealed the closed
accounts of both. But I am fortunately able to throw some direct light upon
the attendant circumstances and results of the trip.
While I was in correspondence with Theodore Roosevelt in 1916 over a book I
had published on the Old Testament, he wrote, "Isn't there some chance of
your getting to this side of the continent before you write your book on
Muir? Then you'll come out here to Sagamore Hill; and I'll tell you all
about the trip, and give you one very amusing instance of his quaint and
most unworldly forgetfulness."
In November of the same year
it was my privilege to go for a memorable visit to Saga- more Hill, and
while Colonel Roosevelt and I were pacing briskly back and forth in his
library, over lion skins and other trophies, he told about the trip with
John Muir, and the impression which his deep solicitude over the destruction
of our great forests and scenery had made upon his mind. Roosevelt had shown
himself a friend of the forests before this camping trip with Muir, but he
came away with a greatly quickened conviction that vigorous action must be
taken speedily, ere it should be too late. Muir's accounts of the wanton
forest-destruction he had witnessed, and the frauds that had been
perpetrated against the government in the acquisition of redwood forests,
were not without effect upon Roosevelt's statesmanship, as we shall see. Nor
must we, in assessing the near and distant public benefits of this trip,
overlook the fact that it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between
these two men. By a strange fatality Muir's own letter accounts of what
occurred on the trip went from hand to hand until they were lost. There
survives a passage in a letter to his wife in which he writes: "I had a
perfectly glorious time with the President and the mountains. I never before
had a more interesting, hearty, and manly companion." To his friend Merriam
he wrote: "Camping with the President was a memorable experience. I fairly
fell in love with him." Roosevelt, John Muir, the Big Trees, and the lofty
summits that make our "Range of Light"! - who could think of an association
of men and objects more elementally great and more fittingly allied for the
public good? In a stenographically reported address delivered by Roosevelt
at Sacramento immediately after his return from the mountains, we have a
hint of what the communion of these two greatest outdoor men of our time was
going to mean for the good of the country.
I have just come from a four
days' rest in Yosemite [he said], and I wish to say a word to you here in
the capital city of California about certain of your great natural
resources, your forests and your water supply coming from the streams that
find their sources among the forests of the mountains. . . No small part of
the prosperity of California in the hotter and drier agricultural regions
depends upon the preservation of her water supply; and the water supply
cannot be preserved unless the forests are preserved. As regards some of the
trees, I want them preserved because they are the only things of their kind
in the world. Lying out at night under those giant sequoias was lying in a
temple built by no hand of man, a temple grander than any human architect
could by any possibility build, and I hope for the preservation of the
groves of giant trees simply because it would be a shame to our civilization
to let them disappear. They are monuments in themselves.
I ask for the preservation of
other forests on grounds of wise and far-sighted economic policy. I do not
ask that lumbering be stopped. . . only that the forests be so used that not
only shall we here, this generation, get the benefit for the next few years,
but that our children and our children's children shall get the benefit. In
California I am impressed by how great the State is, but I am even more
impressed by the immensely greater greatness that lies in the future, and I
ask that your marvelous natural resources be handed on unimpaired to your
posterity. We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last
through the ages.
Let us now recall Muir's
modest excuse for postponing a world tour in order to go alone into the
mountains with Theodore Roosevelt -that he "might be able to do some forest
good in freely talking around the camp-fire." It was in the glow of those
camp-fires that Muir's enlightened enthusiasm and Roosevelt's courage were
fused into action for the public good. The magnitude of the result was
astonishing and one for which this country can never be sufficiently
grateful. When Roosevelt came to the White House in 1901, the total National
Forest area amounted to 46,153,119 acres, and we have already seen what a
battle it cost Muir and his friends to prevent enemies in Congress from
securing the annulment of Cleveland's twenty-five million acres of forest
reserves. When he left the White House, in the spring of 1909, he had set
aside more than one hundred and forty-eight million acres of additional
National Forests - more than three times as much as Harrison, Cleveland, and
McKinley combined! Similarly the number of National Parks was doubled during
his administration.
But the Monuments and
Antiquities Act, passed by Congress during Roosevelt's administration, gave
him a new, unique opportunity. During the last three years of his presidency
he created by proclamation sixteen National Monuments. Among them was the
Grand Cañon of the Colorado with an area of 806,400 acres. Efforts had been
made, ever since the days of Benjamin Harrison, to have the Grand Cañon set
aside as a national park, but selfish opposition always carried the day.
Sargent and Johnson and Page had repeatedly appealed to Muir to write a
description of the Cañon. "It is absolutely necessary," wrote Page in 1898,
"that this great region as well as the Yosemite should be described by you,
else you will not do the task that God sent you to do." When in 1902 his
masterly description did appear, it led to renewed, but equally futile,
efforts to have this wonder of earth sculpture included among our national
playgrounds. Then Muir passed on to Roosevelt the suggestion that he
proclaim the Cañon a national monument. A monument under ground was a new
idea, but there was in it nothing inconsistent with the Monuments and
Antiquities Act, and so Roosevelt, with his characteristic dash, in January,
1908, declared the whole eight hundred thousand acres of the Cañon a
National Monument and the whole nation smiled and applauded. Subsequently
Congress, somewhat grudgingly, changed its status to that of a national
park, thus realizing the purpose for which Roosevelt's proclamation reserved
it at the critical time.
The share of John Muir in the
splendid achievements of these Rooseveltian years would be difficult to
determine precisely, for his part was that of inspiration and advice -
elements as imponderable as sunlight, but as all- pervasively powerful
between friends as the pull of gravity across stellar spaces. And fast
friends they remained to the end, as is shown by the letters that passed
between them. Neither of them could feel or act again as if they had not
talked "forest good" together beside Yosemite camp-fires. "I wish I could
see you in person," wrote Roosevelt in 1907 at the end of a letter about
national park matters. "I wish I could see you in person; and how I do wish
I were again with you camping out under those great sequoias, or in the snow
under the silver firs!"
In 1908 occurred an event
that threw a deep shadow of care and worry and heart-breaking work across
the last six years of Muir's life - years that otherwise would have gone
into books which perforce have been left forever unwritten. We refer to the
granting of a permit by James R. Garfield, then Secretary of the Interior,
to the city of San Francisco to invade the Yosemite National Park in order
to convert the beautiful Hetch-Hetchy Valley into a reservoir. In Muir's
opinion it was the greatest breach of sound conservation principles in a
whole century of improvidence, and in the dark and devious manner of its
final accomplishment a good many things still wait to be brought to light.
The following letter to Theodore Roosevelt, then serving his second term in
the White House, is a frank presentation of the issues involved.
To Theodore Roosevelt
[MARTINEZ, CALIFORNIA
April 21, 1908]
DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:
I am anxious that the
Yosemite National Park may be saved from all sorts of commercialism and
marks of man's work other than the roads, hotels, etc., required to make its
wonders and blessings available. For as far as I have seen there is not in
all the wonderful Sierra, or indeed in the world, another so grand and
wonderful and useful a block of Nature's mountain handiwork.
There is now under
consideration, as doubtless you well know, an application of San Francisco
supervisors for the use of the Hetch-Hetchy Valley and Lake Eleanor as
storage reservoirs for a city water supply. This application should, I
think, be denied, especially the Hetch-Hetchy part, for this Valley, as you
will see by the inclosed description, is a counterpart of Yosemite, and one
of the most sublime and beautiful and important features of the Park, and to
dam and submerge it would be hardly less destructive and deplorable in its
effect on the Park in general than would be the damming of Yosemite itself.
For its falls and groves and delightful camp-grounds are surpassed or
equaled only in Yosemite, and furthermore it is the hail of entrance to the
grand Tuolumne Cañon, which opens a wonderful way to the magnificent
Tuolumne Meadows, the fo-. cus of pleasure travel in the Park and the grand
central camp-ground. If Hetch-Hetchy should be submerged, as proposed, to a
depth of one hundred and seventy-five feet, not only would the Meadows be
made utterly inaccessible along the Tuolumne, but this glorious cañon way to
the high Sierra would be blocked.
I am heartily in favor of a
Sierra or even a Tuolumne water supply for San Francisco, but all the water
required can be obtained from sources outside the Park, leaving the twin
valleys, Hetch-Hetchy and Yosemite, to the use they were intended for when
the Park was established. For every argument advanced for making one into a
reservoir would apply with equal force to the other, excepting the cost of
the required dam.
The few promoters of the
present scheme are not unknown around the boundaries of the Park, for some
of them have been trying to break through for years. However able they may
be as capitalists, engineers, lawyers, or even philanthropists, none of the
statements they have made descriptive of Hetch-Hetchy dammed or undammed is
true. but they all show forth the proud sort of confidence that comes of a
good, sound, substantial, irrefragable ignorance.
For example, the capitalist
Mr. James D. Phelan says, "There are a thousand places in the Sierra equally
as beautiful as Hetch-Hetchy: it is inaccessible nine months of the year,
and is an unlivable place the other three months because of mosquitoes." On
the contrary, there is not another of its kind in all the Park excepting
Yosemite. It is accessible all the year, and is not more mosquitoful than
Yosemite. "The conversion of Hetch-Hetchy into a reservoir will simply mean
a lake instead of a meadow." But Hetch-Hetchy is not a meadow: it is a
Yosemite Valley. . . . These sacred mountain temples are the holiest ground
that the heart of man has consecrated, and it behooves us all faithfully to
do our part in seeing that our wild mountain parks are passed on unspoiled
to those who come after us, for they are national properties in which every
man has a right and interest.
I pray therefore that the
people of California be granted time to be heard before this reservoir
question is decided, for I believe that as soon as light is cast upon it,
nine tenths or more of even the citizens of San Francisco would be opposed
to it. And what the public opinion of the world would be may be guessed by
the case of the Niagara Falls.
Faithfully and devotedly yours
JOHN MUIR
O for a tranquil camp hour
with you like those beneath the sequoias in memorable 1903!
Muir did not know at the
time, and it was a discouraging shock to discover the fact, that Chief
Forester Gifford Pinchot had on May 28, 1906, written a letter to a San
Francisco city official not only suggesting, but urging, that San Francisco
"make provision for a water supply from the Yosemite National Park." In the
work of accomplishing this scheme, he declared, "I will stand ready to
render any assistance in my power." Six months later he wrote again to the
same official, saying: "I cannot, of course, attempt to forecast the action
of the new Secretary of the Interior [Mr. Garfield] on the San Francisco
watershed question, but my advice to you is to assume that his attitude will
be favorable, and to make the necessary preparations to set the case before
him. I had supposed from an item in the paper that the city had definitely
given up the Lake Eleanor plan and had purchased one of the other systems."
It was not surprising that
his forecast of an action, which he already stood pledged to further with
any means in his power, although he knew other sources to be available,
proved correct. Neither Mr. Pinchot nor Mr. Garfield had so much as seen the
Valley, and the language of the latter's permit shows that his decision was
reached on partisan misrepresentations of its character which were later
disproved in public hearings when the San Francisco authorities, unable to
proceed with the revocable Garfield permit, applied to Congress for a
confirmation of it through an exchange of lands. To take one of the two
greatest wonders of the Yosemite National Park and hand it over, as the New
York "Independent" justly observed, "without even the excuse of a real
necessity, to the nearest hungry municipality that asks for it, is nothing
less than conservation buried and staked to the ground. Such guardianship of
our national resources would make every national park the back-yard annex of
a neighboring city."
Muir's letter to Roosevelt
showed him that his official advisers were thinking more of political favor
than of the integrity of the people's playground; that, in short, a mistake
had been made; and he wrote Muir that he would endeavor to have the project
confined to Lake Eleanor. But his administration came to an end without
definite steps taken in the matter one way or another. President Taft,
however, and Secretary Ballinger directed the city and county of San
Francisco, in 1910, "to show why the Hetch-Hetchy Valley should not be
eliminated from the Garfield permit." President Taft also directed the War
Department to appoint an Advisory Board of Army Engineers to assist the
Secretary of the Interior in passing upon the matters submitted to the
Interior Department under the order to show cause.
In March, 1911, Secretary
Ballinger was succeeded by Walter L. Fisher, during whose official term the
city authorities requested and obtained five separate continuances,
apparently in the hope that a change of administration would give them the
desired political pull at Washington. Meantime the Advisory Board of Army
Engineers reported: "The Board is of the opinion that there are several
sources of water supply that could be obtained and used by the City of San
Francisco and adjacent communities to supplement the near-by supplies as the
necessity develops. From any one of these sources the water is sufficient in
quantity and is, or can be made suitable in quality, while the engineering
difficulties are not insurmountable. The determining factor is principally
one of cost."
Under policies of National
Park protection now generally acknowledged to be binding upon those who are
charged to administer them for the public good, the finding of the army
engineers should have made it impossible to destroy the Hetch-Hetchy Valley
for a mere commercial difference in the cost of securing a supply of water
from any one of several other adequate sources. But, as Muir states in one
of his letters, "the wrong prevailed over the best aroused sentiment of the
entire country."
The compensating good which
he felt sure would arise, even out of this tragic sacrifice, must be sought
in the consolidation of public sentiment against any possible repetition of
such a raid. In this determined public sentiment, aroused by Muir's
leadership in the long fight, his spirit still is watching over the people's
playgrounds. |
