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them what salvage may be made from among their father's unpublished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.
