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.
