Contents
Preface
Part I. The Trip of 1879
I. Puget Sound and British Columbia
II. Alexander Archipelago and the Home I found in Alaska
III. Wrangell Island and Alaska Summers
IV. The Stickeen River
V. A Cruise in the Cassiar
VI. The Cassiar Trail
VII. Glenora Peak
VIII. Exploration of the Stickeen Glaciers
IX. A Canoe Voyage to Northward
X. The Discovery of Glacier Bay
XI. The Country of the Chilcats
XII. The Return to Fort Wrangell
XIII. Alaska Indians
Part II. The Trip of 1880
XIV. Sum Dum Bay
XV. From Taku River to Taylor Bay
XVI. Glacier Bay
Part III. The Trip of 1890
XVII. In Camp at Glacier Bay
XVIII. My Sled-Trip on the Muir Glacier
XIX. Auroras
Glossary of Words in the Chinook Jargon
Preface
Forty years ago John Muir wrote to a friend; "I am hopelessly and
forever a mountaineer. . . . Civilization and fever, and all the
morbidness that has been hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial
eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's
loveliness." How gloriously he fulfilled the promise of his early
manhood! Fame, all unbidden, wore a path to his door, but he always
remained a modest, unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the
greatest of his time, sought him out, even in his mountain cabin, and
felt honored by his friendship. Ralph Waldo Emerson urged him to
visit Concord and rest awhile from the strain of his solitary studies
in the Sierra Nevada. But nothing could dislodge him from the glacial
problems of the high Sierra; with passionate interest he kept at his
task. "The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results," he
once wrote, "overpower me and inhabit my whole being. Waking or
sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial
writing, or follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the
difficulties of some extraordinary rock-form."
There is a note of pathos, the echo of an unfulfilled hope, in the
record of his later visit to Concord. "It was seventeen years after
our parting on Wawona ridge that I stood beside his [Emerson's] grave
under a pine tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow. He had gone to
higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in
friendly recognition." And now John Muir has followed his friend of
other days to the "higher Sierras." His earthly remains lie among
trees planted by his own hand. To the pine tree of Sleepy Hollow
answers a guardian sequoia in the sunny Alhambra Valley.
In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous
living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled
him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he
returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest
of the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon
this book of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen
departure, John Muir expended the last months of his life. It
was begun soon after his return from Africa in 1912. His eager
leadership of the ill-fated campaign to save his beloved Hetch-Hetchy
Valley from commercial destruction seriously interrupted his
labors. Illness, also, interposed some checks as he worked with
characteristic care and thoroughness through the great mass of Alaska
notes that had accumulated under his hands for more than thirty years.
The events recorded in this volume end in the middle of the trip of
1890. Muir's notes on the remainder of the journey have not been
found, and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded the
volume if he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the
fascinating description of the Northern Lights without feeling a
poetical appropriateness in the fact that his last work ends with a
portrayal of the auroras - one of those phenomena which else where he
described as "the most glorious of all the terrestrial manifestations
of God."
Muir's manuscripts bear on every page impressive evidence of the
pains he took in his literary work, and the lofty standard he set
himself in his scientific studies. The counterfeiting of a fact or of
an experience was a thing unthinkable in connection with John Muir.
He was tireless in pursuing the meaning of a physiographical fact,
and his extraordinary physical endurance usually enabled him to trail
it to its last hiding-place. Often, when telling the tale of his
adventures in Alaska, his eyes would kindle with youthful enthusiasm,
and he would live over again the red-blooded years that yielded him
"shapeless harvests of revealed glory."
For a number of months just prior to his death he had the friendly
assistance of Mrs. Marion Randall Parsons. Her familiarity with the
manuscript, and with Mr. Muir's expressed and penciled intentions of
revision and arrangement, made her the logical person to prepare it
in final form for publication. It was a task to which she brought
devotion as well as ability. The labor involved was the greater in
order that the finished work might exhibit the last touches of Muir's
master-hand, and yet contain nothing that did not flow from his pen.
All readers of this book will feel grateful for her labor of love.
I add these prefatory lines to the work of my departed friend with
pensive misgiving, knowing that he would have deprecated any
discharge of musketry over his grave. His daughters, Mrs. Thomas Rea
Hanna and Mrs. Buel Alvin Funk, have honored me with the request to
transmit the manuscript for publication, and later to consider with
them what salvage may be made from among their father's unpublished
writings. They also wish me to express their grateful acknowledgments
to Houghton Mifflin Company, with whom John Muir has always
maintained close and friendly relations.
William Frederic Bade.
Berkeley, California,
May, 1915.
Part I
The Trip of 1879
Travels in Alaska
Chapter I
Puget Sound and British Columbia
After eleven years of study and exploration in the Sierra Nevada of
California and the mountain-ranges of the Great Basin, studying in
particular their glaciers, forests, and wild life, above all their
ancient glaciers and the influence they exerted in sculpturing the
rocks over which they passed with tremendous pressure, making new
landscapes, scenery, and beauty which so mysteriously influence every
human being, and to some extent all life, I was anxious to gain some
knowledge of the regions to the northward, about Puget Sound and
Alaska.
