LETTERS TO A FRIEND (continued 2)

Next day we worshiped upon high places on the brown cone of Dana and returned to our rock. Next day walked among the flowers and cascades of Bloody Cañon and camped at the lake. Rode next day to the volcanic cone nearest to the lake, and bade farewell to the party and climbed to the highest crater in the whole range south of the Mono Lake. Well, I shall not try to tell you anything, as it is unnecessary. Prof. Le Conte, whose company I enjoyed exceedingly, will tell you all. Ask him in particular to tell you about our camp-meeting on the Tenaya rock. I will send you a few choice mountain plant children by Mrs. Yelverton. If there is anything in particular that you want, let me know. Mrs. Yelverton will not leave the valley for some weeks, and you have time to write. I am

Ever your friend, J. Muir.

Tuolumne River, two miles below La Grange, November 4th, 1870.

Yours of October 2nd reached me a few days since. The Amazon and Andes have been in all my thoughts for many years, and I am sure that I shall meet them some day ere I die, or become settled and civilized and useful. I am obliged to you for all this information. I have studied many paths and plans for the interior of South America, but none so easy and sure ever appeared as this of your letter. I thought of landing at Guayaquil and crossing the mountains to the Amazon, floating to Para, subsisting on berries and quinine, but to steam along the palmy shores with company and comforts is perhaps more practical though not so pleasant. Hawthorne says that steam spiritualizes travel, but I think that it squarely degrades and materializes travel. However, flies and fevers have to be considered in this case. I am glad that Ned has gone. The woods of the Purús will be a grand place for the growth of men. It must be that I am going soon, for you have shown me the way. People say that my wanderings are very mazy and methodless, but they are all known to you in some way before I think of them. You are a prophet in the concerns of my little outside life, and pray, what says the spirit about my final escape from Yosemite? You saw me at these rock altars years ago, and I think I shall remain among them until you take me away. I reached this place last month by following the Merced out of the valley and through all its cañons to the plains above Snelling,—a most glorious walk.

I intended returning to the valley ere this, but Mr. Delaney, the man with whom I am stopping at present, would not allow me to leave before I had plowed his field, and so I will not be likely to see Yosemite again before January, when I shall have a grand journey over the snow.

Mrs. Yelverton told me before I started upon my river explorations that she would likely be in Oakland in two weeks, and so I made up a package for you of lily bulbs, cones, ferns, etc., but she wrote me a few days ago that she was still in the valley.

I find that a portion of my specimens collected in the last two years and left at this place and Hopeton are not very well cared for, and I have concluded to send them to you.

I will ship them in a few days by express, and I will be down myself perhaps in about a year. If there is anything in these specimens that the Doctor can make use of in his lectures, tell him to do so freely, of course.

The purple of these plains and of this whole round sky is very impressively glorious after a year in the deep rocks. People all throughout this section are beginning to hear of Dr. Carr. He accomplishes a wonderful amount of work.

My love to Allie and to the Doctor, and I am ever most

Cordially yours, John Muir.

Address to Snelling for the next few months.

Yosemite, [1871.]

“The Spirit” has again led me into the wilderness, in opposition to all counter attractions, and I am once more in the glory of the Yosemite.

Your very cordial invitation to your home reached me as I was preparing to ascend and my whole being was possessed with visions of snowy forests of the pine and spruce, and of mountain spires beyond, pearly and half transparent, reaching into heavens blue not purer than themselves.

In company with another young fellow whom I persuaded to walk, I left the plains just as the first gold sheets were being outspread. My first plan was to follow the Tuolumne upward as I had followed the Merced downward, and, after reaching the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which has about the same altitude as Yosemite, and spending a week or so in sketching and examining its falls and rocks, to cross the high mountains past the west end of the Hoffman Range and go down into Yosemite by Indian Cañon, passing thus a glorious month with the mountains and all their snows and crystal brightness, and all the nameless glories of their magnificent winter; but my plan went agley. I lost a week’s sleep by the pain of a sore hand, and I became unconfident in my strength when measured against weeks of wading in snow up to my neck. Therefore I reluctantly concluded to push directly for the valley and Tamarac.

Our journey was just a week in length, including one day of rest in the Crane’s Flat Cabin. Some of our nights were cold, and we were hungry once or twice. We crossed the snow-line on the flank of Pilot Peak Ridge six or eight miles below Crane’s Flat. From Crane’s Flat to brim of the valley the snow was about five feet in depth, and as it was not frozen or compacted in any way we of course had a splendid season of wading.

I wish that you could have seen the edge of the snow-cloud which hovered, oh, so soothingly, down to the grand Pilot Peak brows, discharging its heaven-begotten snows with such unmistakable gentleness and moving perhaps with conscious love from pine to pine as if bestowing separate and independent blessings upon each. In a few hours we climbed under and into this glorious storm-cloud. What a harvest of crystal flowers and what wind songs were gathered from the spiry firs and the long fringy arms of the Lambert pine! We could not see far before us in the storm, which lasted until some time in the night, but as I was familiar with the general map of the mountain we had no difficulty in finding our way.

Crane’s Flat Cabin was buried, and we had to grope about for the door. After making a fire with some cedar rails, I went out to watch the coming-on of the darkness, which was most impressively sublime. Next morning was every way the purest creation I ever beheld. The little flat, spot-like in the massive spiring woods, was in splendid vesture of universal white, upon which the grand forest-edge was minutely repeated and covered with a close sheet of snow flowers.

Some mosses grow luxuriantly upon the dead generations of their own species. The common snow flowers belong to the sky and in storms are blown about like ripe petals in an orchard. They settle on the ground, the bottom of the atmospheric sea, like mud or leaves in a lake, and upon this soil, this field of broken sky flowers, grows a luxuriant carpet of crystal vegetation complete and ripe in a single night.

I never before knew that these mountain snow plants were so variable and abundant, forming such bushy clumps and thickets and palmy, ferny groves. Wading waist-deep, I had a fine opportunity for observing them, but they shrink from human breath,—not the only flowers which do so,—evidently not made for man, neither the flowers composing the snow which came drifting down to us broken and dead, nor the more beautiful crystals which vegetate upon them. A great many storms have come to these mountains since I passed them, and they can hardly be less than ten feet; at the altitude of Tamarac still more.

The weather here is balmy now, and the falls are glorious. Three weeks ago the thermometer at sunrise stood at 12 degrees.

I have repaired the mill and dam, and the stream is in no danger of drying up and is more dammed than ever.

To-day has been cloudy and rainy. Tissiack and Starr King are grandly dipped in white cloud.

I sent you my plants by express. I am sorry that my Yosemite specimens are not with the others.

I left a few notes with Mrs. Yelverton when I left the valley in the fall. I wish that you would ask her, if you should see her, where she left them, as Mrs. Hutchings does not know.

I shall be happy to join Stoddard in anything whatever. Mrs. H. had a letter from him lately, part of which she read to me. And now, Mrs. Carr, you must see the upper mountains and meadows back of Yosemite. You have seen nothing as yet, and I will guide you a whole summer if you wish. I am very happy here and cannot break for the Andes just yet.

Squirrel is at my knee. She says, “Tell Mrs. Carr to come here to-morrow and tell her to bring her little boy when she comes.” If you will come, she says that she will guide you to the falls and give you lots of flowers. Mrs. H. tells me to say that she has received a very kind letter from you, which she will answer. Sends thus her kindest regards. If she can find a chance, she will send bulbs of lily by mail.

I have been nearly blind since I crossed the snow.

Give my kindest regards to all your homeful and to my friends.

I am always

Yours most cordially, J. M.

Yosemite,

August 13th, [1871.]

I was so stunned and dazed by your last that I have not been able to write anything. I was sure that you were coming, and you cannot come; and Mr. King, the artist, left me the other day and I am done with Hutchings, and I am lonely. Well it must be wait, for although there is no common human reason why I should not see you and civilization in Oakland, I cannot escape from the powers of the mountains. I shall tie some flour and a blanket behind my saddle and return to the Mono region and try to decide some questions that require undisturbed thought. There I will stalk about on the summit slates of Dana and Gibbs and Lyell, reading new chapters of glacial manuscript and more if I can. Then, perhaps, I will follow the Tuolumne down to the Hetch Hetchy Yosemite; then, perhaps, follow the Yosemite stream back to its smallest source in the mountains of the Lyell group and the Cathedral group and the Obelisk and Mt. Hoffman. This will, perhaps, be my work until the coming of the winter snows, when I will probably find a sheltered rock nook where I can make a nest of leaves and mosses and doze until spring.

I expect to be entirely alone in these mountain walks, and, notwithstanding the glorious portion of daily bread which my soul will receive in these fields where only the footprints of God are seen, the gloamin’ will be lonely, but I will cheerfully pay the price of friendship and all besides.

I suppose that you have seen Mr. King, who kindly carried some flies for Mr. Edwards. I thought you would easily see him or let him know that you had his specimens. I collected most of them upon Mt. Hoffman, but was so busy in assisting Reilly that I could not do much in butterflies. Hereafter I shall be entirely free.

The purples and yellows begin to come in the green of our groves, and the rocks have the autumn haze, and the water songs are at their lowest hushings; young birds are big as old ones; and is it true that these are Bryant’s Melancholy Days? I don’t know, I will not think, but I will go above these brooding days to the higher, brighter mountains.

Farewell.

Cordially ever yours, John Muir.

I shall hope to hear from you soon. I will come down some of the valley cañons occasionally for letters.

I am sorry that you are so laden with University cares. I think that you and the Doctor do more than your share.

Do you know anything about this Liebig’s extract of meat? I would like to carry a year’s provisions in the form of condensed bread and meat, and I have been thinking perhaps all that I want is in the market.

Yosemite,

September 8th, [1871.]

I am sorry that King made you uneasy about me. He does not understand me as you do, and you must not heed him so much. He thinks that I am melancholy and above all that I require polishing. I feel sure that if you were here to see how happy I am and how ardently I am seeking a knowledge of the rocks, you could not call me away but would gladly let me go with only God and his written rocks to guide me. You would not think of calling me to make machines or a home, or of rubbing me against other minds, or of setting me up for measurement. No, dear friend, you would say: “Keep your mind untrammelled and pure. Go unfrictioned, unmeasured, and God give you the true meaning and interpretation of his mountains.”

You know that for the last three years I have been ploddingly making observations about this valley and the high mountain region to the east of it, drifting broodingly about and taking in every natural lesson that I was fitted to absorb. In particular the great valley has always kept a place in my mind. What tools did he use? How did he apply them and when? I considered the sky above it and all of its opening cañons, and studied the forces that came in by every door that I saw standing open, but I could get no light. Then I said: “You are attempting what is not possible for you to accomplish. Yosemite is the end of a grand chapter; if you would learn to read it, go commence at the beginning.” Then I went above to the alphabet valleys of the summits, comparing cañon with cañon, with all their varieties of rock-structure and cleavage and the comparative size and slope of the glaciers and waters which they contained; also the grand congregations of rock-creations was present to me, and I studied their forms and sculpture. I soon had a key to every Yosemite rock and perpendicular and sloping wall. The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results 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. Now it is clear that woe is me if I do not drown this tendency towards nervous prostration by constant labor in working up the details of this whole question. I have been down from the upper rocks only three days and am hungry for exercise already.

Prof. Runkle, president of the Boston Institute of Technology, was here last week, and I preached my glacial theory to him for five days, taking him into the cañon of the valley and up among the grand glacier wombs and pathways of the summit. He was fully convinced of the truth of my readings and urged me to write out the glacial system of Yosemite and its tributaries for the Boston Academy of Science. I told him that I meant to write my thoughts for my own use and that I would send him the manuscript, and if he and his wise scientific brothers thought it of sufficient interest they might publish it.

He is going to send me some instruments, and I mean to go over all the glacier basins carefully, working until driven down by the snow. In winter I can make my drawings and maps and write out notes. So you see that for a year or two I will be very busy. I have settled with Hutchings and have no dealings with him now.

I think that next spring I will have to guide a month or two for pocket money, although I do not like the work. I suppose I might live for one or two seasons without work. I have five hundred dollars here, and I have been sending home money to my sisters and brothers,—perhaps about twelve or fifteen hundred dollars,—and a man in Canada owes me three or four hundred dollars more, which I suppose I could get if I was in need, but you know that the Scotch do not like to spend their last dollar. Some of my friends are badgering me to write for some of the magazines, and I am almost tempted to try it, only I am afraid that this would distract my mind from my work more than the distasteful and depressing labor of the mill or of guiding. What do you think about it?

Suppose I should give some of the journals my first thoughts about this glacier work as I go along and afterwards gather them and press them for the Boston wise; or will it be better to hold work and say it all at a breath? You see how practical I have become and how fully I have burdened you with my little affairs.

Perhaps you will ask, “What plan are you going to pursue in your work?” Well, here it is,—the only book I ever have invented. First I will describe each glacier with its tributaries separately, then describe the rocks and hills and mountains over which they have flowed or past which they have flowed, endeavoring to prove that all of the various forms which those rocks now have are the necessary result of the ice action in connection with their structure and cleavage, etc. Also the different kinds of cañons and lake-basins and meadows which they have made. Then, armed with this data, I will come down to the Yosemite, where all my ice has come, and prove that each dome and brow and wall and every grace and spire and brother is the necessary result of the delicately balanced blows of well-directed and combined glaciers against the parent rocks which contained them, only thinly carved and moulded in some instances by the subsequent action of water, etc.

Libby sent me Tyndall’s new book, and I have looked hastily over it. It is an Alpine mixture of very pleasant taste, and I wish I could enjoy reading and talking it with you. I expect Mrs. H. will accompany her husband to the East this winter, and there will not be one left with whom I can exchange a thought. Mrs. H. is going to leave me out all the books I want, and Runkle is going to send me Darwin. These, with my notes and maps, will fill my winter hours, if my eyes do not fail, and, now that you see my whole position, I think that you would not call me to the excitements and distracting novelties of civilization.

The bread question is very troublesome. I will eat anything you think will suit me. Send up either by express to Big Oak Flat or by any other chance, and I will remit the money required in any way you like.

My love to all and more thanks than I can write for your constant kindness.

Yosemite Valley, February 13, 1872.

Your latest letter is dated December 31st. I see that some of our letters are missing. I received the box and ate the berries and Liebig’s extract long ago and told you all about it, but Mrs. Yelverton’s book and magazine articles I have not yet seen. Perhaps they may come next mail. How did you send them? I sympathize with your face and your great sorrows, but you will bathe in the fountain of light, life, and love of our mountains and be healed. And here I wish to say that when you and Al and the Doctor come, I wish to be completely free. Therefore let me know that you will certainly come and when. I will gladly cut off a slice of my season’s time however thick—the thicker the better—and lay it aside for you. I am in the habit of asking so many to come, come, come to the mountain baptisms that there is danger of having others on my hands when you come, which must not be. I will mark off one or two or three months of bare, dutiless time for our blessed selves or the few good and loyal ones that you may choose. Therefore, at the expense even of breaking a dozen of civilization’s laws and fences, I want you to come. For the high Sierra the months of July, August, and September are best.

As for your Asiatic sayings, I would gladly creep into the Vale of Cashmere or any other grove upon our blessed star. I feel my poverty in general knowledge and will travel some day. You need not think that I feel Yosemite to be all in all, but more of this when you come.

I am going to send you with this a few facts and thoughts that I gathered concerning Twenty Hill Hollow, which I want to publish, if you think you can mend them and make them into a lawful article fit for outsiders. Plant gold is fading from California faster than did her placer gold, and I wanted to save the memory of that which is laid upon Twenty Hills.

Also I will send you some thoughts that I happened to get for poor persecuted, twice-damned Coyote. If you think anybody will believe them, have them published. Last mail I sent you some manuscript about bears and storms, which you will believe if no one else will. An account of my preliminary rambles among the glacier beds was published in the “Daily Tribune” of New York, Dec. 9th. Have you seen it? If you have, call old Mr. Stebbins’s attention to it. He will read with pleasure. Where is the old friend? I have not heard from him for a long time. Remember me to the Doctor and the boys and all my old friends.

Yours, etc., John Muir.

New Sentinel Hotel,

Yosemite Valley, April 23, 1872.

Yours of Apr. 9th and 15th containing Ned’s canoe and colonization adventure came to-night. I feel that you are coming and I will not hear any words of preparatory consolation for the unsupposable case of your non-appearance. Come by way of Clark’s and spend a whole day or two in the sequoias, thence to Sentinel Dome and Glacier Point. From thence swoop to our meadows and groves direct by a trail now in course of construction which will be completed by the time the snow melts. This new trail will be best in scenery and safety of five which enter the valley. It leads from Glacier Point down the face of the mountain by an easy grade to a point back of Leidig’s Hotel and has over half a dozen inspiration points.

I hear that Mr. Peregoy intends building a hotel at Glacier Point. If he does, you should halt there for the night after leaving Clark’s. If not, then stop at the present “Peregoy’s,” five or six miles south of the valley at the Westfall Meadows—built since your visit. You might then easily ride from Clark’s to the valley in a day, but a day among the silver firs and another about the glories of the valley-rim and settings is a “sma’ request.”

The snow is deep this year, and the regular Mariposa Trail leading to Glacier Point, etc., will not be open before June. The Mariposa travel of May and perhaps a week or so of June will enter the valley from Clark’s by a sort of sneaking trail along the river cañon below the snow, but you must not come that way.

You may also enter the valley via Little Yosemite and Nevada and Vernal Falls by a trail constructed last season; also by Indian Falls on the north side of the valley by a trail now nearly completed. This last is a noble entrance but perhaps not equal to the first. Whatever way you come, we will travel all those up and down, and bear in mind that you must go among the summits in July or August. Bring no friends that will not go to these fountains beyond or are uncastoffable. Calm thinkers like your Doctor, who first led me with science, and Le Conte are the kinds of souls fit for the formation of human clouds adapted to this mountain sky. Nevertheless, I will rejoice beyond measure though you come as a comet tailed with a whole misty town.

Ned is a brave fellow. God bless him unspeakably and feed him with his own South American self.

I shall be most happy to know your Doggetts or anything that you call dear.

Good-night and love to all.

I have not seen any of my “Tribune” letters, though I have written five or six. Send copy if you can.

J. Muir.

[1872.]

[Beginning of letter missing.]

Farewell. I’m glad you are to get your Ned again. The fever will soon cool out from his veins in the breath of California.

The valley is full of sun, but glorious Sierras are piled above the South Dome and Starr King. I mean the bossy cumuli that are daily upheaved at this season, making a cloud period yet grander than the rock-sculpturing, Yosemite-making, forest-planting glacial period.

Yesterday we had our first midday shower. The pines waved gloriously at its approach, the woodpeckers beat about as if alarmed, but the hummingbird moths thought the cloud shadows belonged to evening and came down to eat among the mints. All the fire and rocks of Starr King were bathily dripped before.

[1872.]

[Beginning of letter missing.]

they will go on Monoward for Tahoe. I mean to set some stakes in a dozen glaciers and gather some arithmetic for clothing my thoughts.

I hope you will not allow old H. or his picture agent, Houseworth, to so gobble and bewool poor Agassiz that I will not see him.

Remember me always to the Doctor and the boys and to Mrs. Moore, and I am ever yours,

John Muir.

I will return to the valley in about a week, if I don’t get over-deep in a crevass.

Later. Yours of Monday evening has just come. I am glad your boy is so soon to feel mother home and its blessings. I hope to meet Torrey, although I will push iceward as before, but may get back in time. I will enjoy Agassiz, and Tyndall even more. I’m sorry for poor Stoddard. Tell him to come.

I’ll see Mrs. H., perhaps, this evening and deliver your message.

Farewell.

New Sentinel Hotel,

Yosemite Valley, May 31, 1872.

Yours announcing the Joaquin and the Doggetts and more is here. I care not when you come, so that you come calm and timeful. I will try to compel myself down to you in August, but these years and ages among snows and rocks have made me far more unfit for the usages of civilization than you appreciate. My nerves’ strings shrink at the prospect, even at this distance. But if by diving to that slimy town sea-bottom I can touch Huxley and Tyndall and mount again with you to calm months in the Sierras, I will draw a long breath and splash into your fearful muds.

I would rather have you in September and October than at any other time, but a few weeks of this white water would be very glorious. Merrill Moores, who was with me in Wisconsin and at your Madison home, will be here soon to spend a good big block of a while with me. Why can’t you let Allie join him?

For the last week our valley has been a lake and my shanty is in flood. But the walls about us are white this morning with snow, which has checked the free life of our torrents, and the meadows will soon be walkable again. The snow fell last night and this morning. The falls will sing loud and long this year, and the mountains are fat in thick snow that the sun will find hard to fry.

Midnight.

O Mrs. Carr, that you could be here to mingle in this night moon glory! I am in the Upper Yosemite Falls and can hardly calm to write, but, from my thick baptism an hour ago, you have been so present that I must try to fix you a written thought.

In the afternoon I came up the mountain here with a blanket and a piece of bread to spend the night in prayer among the spouts of the fall. But now what can I say more than wish again that you might expose your soul to the rays of this heaven?

Silver from the moon illumines this glorious creation which we term falls and has laid a magnificent double prismatic bow at its base. The tissue of the falls is delicately filmed on the outside like the substance of spent clouds, and the stars shine dimly through it. In the solid shafted body of the falls is a vast number of passing caves, black and deep, with close white convolving spray for sills and shooting comet shoots above and down their sides like lime crystals in a cave, and every atom of the magnificent being, from the thin silvery crest that does not dim the stars to the inner arrowy hardened shafts that strike onward like thunderbolts in sound and energy, all is life and spirit, every bolt and spray feels the hand of God. O the music that is blessing me now! The sun of last week has given the grandest notes of all the yearly anthem and they echo in every fibre of me.

I said that I was going to stop here until morning and pray a whole blessed night with the falls and the moon, but I am too wet and must go down. An hour or two ago I went out somehow on a little seam that extends along the wall behind the falls. I suppose I was in a trance, but I can positively say that I was in the body for it is sorely battered and wetted. As I was gazing past the thin edge of the fall and away through beneath the column to the brow of the rock, some heavy splashes of water struck me, driven hard against the wall. Suddenly I was darkened; down came a section of the outside tissue composed of spent comets. I crouched low, holding my breath, and, anchored to some angular flakes of rocks, took my baptism with moderately good faith. When I dared to look up after the swaying column admitted light, I pounced behind a piece of ice which was wedged tight in the wall, and I no longer feared being washed off, and steady moonbeams slanting past the arching meteors gave me confidence to escape to this snug place where McChesney and I slept one night, where I had a fire to dry my socks. This rock shelf extending behind the falls is about five hundred feet above the base of the fall on the perpendicular rock-face.

How little do we know of ourselves, of our profoundest attractions and repulsions, of our spiritual affinities! How interesting does man become, considered in his relations to the spirit of this rock and water! How significant does every atom of our world become amid the influences of those beings unseen, spiritual, angelic mountaineers that so throng these pure mansions of crystal foam and purple granite!

I cannot refrain from speaking to this little bush at my side and to the spray-drops that come to my paper and to the individual sands of the slope I am sitting upon. Ruskin says that the idea of foulness is essentially connected with what he calls dead unorganized matter. How cordially I disbelieve him to-night! and were he to dwell awhile among the powers of these mountains, he would forget all dictionary differences between the clean and the unclean and he would lose all memory and meaning of the diabolical, sin-begotten term, foulness.

Well, I must go down. I am disregarding all of the Doctor’s physiology in sitting here in this universal moisture.

Farewell to you and to all the beings about us! I shall have a glorious walk down the mountains in this thin white light, over the open brows grayed with Selaginella and through the thick black shadow caves in the live oaks all stuck full of snowy lances of moonlight.

New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley,

July 6th, 1872.

Yours of Tuesday evening telling of our Doggetts and Ned and Merrill Moores has come, and so has the lamp and book. I have not yet tried the lamp, but it is splendid in shape and shines grand as gold. The Lyell is just what I wanted.

I think that your measure of the Doggetts is exactly right—as good as civilized people can be. They have grown to the top of town culture and have sent out some shoots half gropingly into the spirit sky.

I am very glad to know that Ned is growing strong. Perhaps we may see South America together yet. I hope to see you come to your own of mountain fountains soon. Perhaps Mrs. Hutchings may go with us. You live so fully in my own life that I cannot realize that I have not yet seen you here; a year or two of waiting seems nothing.

Possibly I may be down on your coast this fall or next, for I want to see what relations the coast and coast mountains have to the Sierras. Also I want to go north and south along this range and then among the basins and ranges eastward. My subject is expanding at a most unfollowable pace. I could write something with data already harvested, but I am not satisfied.

I have just returned from Hetch Hetchy with Mrs. Moore. Of course we had a glory and a fun—the two articles in about parallel columns of equal size. Meadows grassed and lilies head-high, spangled river-reaches and currentless pools, cascades countless and unpaintable in form and whiteness, groves that heaven all the valley. You were with us in all our joy and you will come again.

I am a little weary and half inclined to truantism from mobs however blessed, in some unfindable grove. I start in a few minutes for Cloud’s Rest with Mr. and Mrs. Moore. I like Mrs. Moore and Mr. first-rate.

My love to the Doctor and all the boys. I hope for Merrill daily.

I am

Ever your friend, J. Muir.

New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite,

July 14th, 1872.

Yours announcing Dr. Gray is received. I have great longing for Gray, whom I feel to be a great, progressive, unlimited man like Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall. I will be most glad to meet him. You are unweariable in your kindness to me, and you helm my fate more than all the world beside.

I am approaching a kind of fruiting-time in this mountain work and I want very much to see you. All say write, but I don’t know how or what, and besides I want to see North and South and the midland basins and the seacoast and all the lake-basins and the cañons, also the alps of every country and the continental glaciers of Greenland, before I write the book we have been speaking of; and all this will require a dozen years or twenty, and money. The question is what will I write now, etc. I have learned the alphabet of ice and mountain structure here, and I think I can read fast in other countries. I would let others write what I have read here, but that they make so damnable a hash of it and ruin so glorious a unit.

I miss the Moores because they were so cordial and kind to me. Mrs. Moore believes in ice and can preach it too. I wish you could bring Whitney and her together and tell me the fight. Mrs. M. made the most sensible visit to our mountains of all the comers I have known. Mr. Moore is a man who thinks, and he took to this mountain structure like a pointer to partridges.

I am glad your Ned is growing strong; then we will yet meet this summer in Yosemite places. Talk to Mrs. Moore about Hetch Hetchy, etc. She knows it all from Hog Ranch to highest sea-wave cascades, and higher, yet higher.

I ought not to fun away letter space in speaking to you. I am weary and impractical and fit for nothing serious until I am tuned and toned by a few weeks of calm.

Farewell. I will see you and we will plan work and ease and days of holy mountain rest. Remember me to Ned and all the boys and to the Doctor, who ought to come hither with you.

Ever your friend, John Muir.

Yosemite Valley, July 27th, 1872.

I want to see you. I want to speak about my studies, which are growing broader and broader and spreading away to all countries without any clear horizon anywhere.

I will go over all this Yosemite region this fall and write it up in some form or other. Will you be here to accompany me in my easier excursions?

I have a good horse for you and will get a tub and plenty of meal and tea, and you will keep house in very old style and you can bring whom you please.

I’ve had a very noble time with Gray, who, though brooded and breaded by Hutchings, gave most of his time to me. I was sorry that his time was so meanly measured and bounded. He is a most cordial lover of purity and truth, but the angular factiness of his pursuits has kept him at too cold a distance from the spirit world.

I know that Mrs. Moore has given you ice in abundance, though even Yosemite glaciers might melt in the warmth of her laughter and sunshine. She handles glacier periods like an Agassiz and has discovered a Hetch Hetchy period that is her own. Don’t you believe all she tells you about the walk and the dark and the dust of Indian Cañon.

I want to get Doggett’s address.

I will begin my long mountain excursion soon, for the snow is mostly gone from the high meadows.

I have been guiding a few parties and will take a few more if they are of the right kind, but I want my mind kept free and sensitive to all influences excepting human business.

I need a talk with you more than ever before. Mrs. Hutchings is always kind to me, and the clearness of her views on all spiritual things is very extraordinary. She appreciates your friendship very keenly, and I am glad to think you will soon know each other better. Her little Casie (Gertrude) is as pure a piece of sunbeam as ever was condensed to human form.

Hoping that Ned will be able to come here to the mountain waters for perfect healing and that you will also find leisure for the satisfying of your thirst for beauty, I remain ever

Your friend, John Muir.

My love to Doctor and all the boys.

Yosemite Valley, August 5th, 1872.

Your letter telling me to catch my best glacier birds and come to you and the coast mountains only makes me the more anxious to see you, and if you cannot come up, I will have to come down, if only for a talk. My birds are flying everywhere,—into all mountains and plains, of all climes and times,—and some are ducks in the sea, and I scarce know what to do about it. I must see the coast ranges and the coast, but I was thinking that a month or so might answer for the present, and then, instead of spending the winter in town, I would hide in Yosemite and write; or I thought I would pack up some meal and dried plums to some deep wind-sheltered cañon back among the glaciers of the summits, and write there, and be ready to catch any whisper of ice and snow in these highest storms.

You anticipate all the bends and falls and rapids and cascades of my mountain life, and I know that you say truly about my companions being those who live with me in the same sky, whether in reach of hand or only of spiritual contact, which is the most real contact of all.

I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.

[Part of letter missing.]

the valley was vouchsafed a single drop.

After the splendid blessing, the afternoon was veiled in calm clouds, and one of intensely beautiful pattern and gorgeously irised was stationed over Eagle Rock at the sunset.

Farewell. I’ll see you with my common eyes, and touch you with these very writing fingers ere long.

Remember me cordially to Mrs. Moore and Mr. and all your family, and I am as ever

Your friend, John Muir.

Yosemite Valley, September 13, 1872.

Yours of Aug. 23rd is received. Le Conte writes me that Agassiz will not come to the valley.

I just got down last evening from a fifteen-day ramble in the basins of Illilouette and Pohono, and start again in an hour for the summit glaciers to see some cañons and to examine the stakes I planted in the ice a month ago.

I would like to come down to see Agassiz, but now is my harvest of rocks and I cannot spare the time.

I shall work in the outer mountains incessantly until the coming of the snow [rest of letter missing].

Yosemite Valley, October 8th, 1872.

Here we are again, and here is your letter of Sept. 24th. I got down last evening, and boo! was I not weary after pushing through the rough upper half of the great Tuolumne Cañon? I have climbed more than twenty-four thousand feet in these ten days, three times to the top of the glacieret of Mt. Hoffman, and once to Mts. Lyell and McClure. I have bagged a quantity of Tuolumne rocks sufficient to build a dozen Yosemites; stripes of cascades longer than ever, lacy or smooth and white as pressed snow; a glacier basin with ten glassy lakes set all near together like eggs in a nest; then El Capitan and a couple of Tissiacks, cañons glorious with yellows and reds of mountain maple and aspen and honeysuckle and ash and new indescribable music immeasurable from strange waters and winds, and glaciers, too, flowing and grinding, alive as any on earth. Shall I pull you out some? Here is a clean, white-skinned glacier from the back of McClure with glassy emerald flesh and singing crystal blood all bright and pure as a sky, yet handling mud and stone like a navvy, building moraines like a plodding Irishman. Here is a cascade two hundred feet wide, half a mile long, glancing this way and that, filled with bounce and dance and joyous hurrah, yet earnest as tempest, and singing like angels loose on a frolic from heaven; and here are more cascades and more, broad and flat like clouds and fringed like flowing hair, with occasional falls erect as pines, and lakes like glowing eyes; and here are visions and dreams, and a splendid set of ghosts, too many for ink and narrow paper.

I have not heard anything concerning Le Conte’s glacier lecture, but he seems to have drawn all he knows of Sierra glaciers and new theories concerning them so directly from here that I cannot think that he will claim discovery, etc. If he does, I will not be made poorer.

Professor Kneeland, Secretary Boston Institute of Technology, gathered some letters I sent to Runkle and that “Tribune” letter, and hashed them into a compost called a paper for the Boston Historical Society, and gave me credit for all of the smaller sayings and doings and stole the broadest truth to himself. I have the proof-sheets of “The Paper” and will show them to you some time. But all of such meanness can work no permanent evil to any one except the dealer.

As for the living “glaciers of the Sierras,” here is what I have learned concerning them. You will have the first chance to steal, for I have just concluded my experiments on them for the season and have not yet cast them at any of the great professors, or presidents.

One of the yellow days of last October, when I was among the mountains of the “Merced Group,” following the footprints of the ancient glaciers that once flowed grandly from their ample fountains, reading what I could of their history as written in moraines and cañons and lakes and carved rocks, I came upon a small stream that was carrying mud I had not before seen. In a calm place where the stream widened I collected some of this mud and observed that it was entirely mineral in composition and fine as flour, like the mud from a fine-grit grindstone. Before I had time to reason I said, Glacier mud, mountain meal.

Then I observed that this muddy stream issued from a bank of fresh quarried stones and dirt that was sixty or seventy feet in height. This I at once took to be a moraine. In climbing to the top of it I was struck with the steepness of its slope and with its raw, unsettled, plantless, newborn appearance. The slightest touch started blocks of red and black slate, followed by a rattling train of smaller stones and sand and a cloud of the dry dust of mud, the whole moraine being as free from lichens and weather stains as if dug from the mountain that very day.

When I had scrambled to the top of the moraine, I saw what seemed a huge snow-bank four or five hundred yards in length by half a mile in width. Imbedded in its stained and furrowed surface were stones and dirt like that of which the moraine was built. Dirt-stained lines curved across the snow-bank from side to side, and when I observed that these curved lines coincided with the curved moraine and that the stones and dirt were most abundant near the bottom of the bank, I shouted, “A living glacier.” These bent dirt lines show that the ice is flowing in its different parts with unequal velocity, and these embedded stones are journeying down to be built into the moraine, and they gradually become more abundant as they approach the moraine because there the motion is slower.

On traversing my new-found glacier, I came to a crevass, down a wide and jagged portion of which I succeeded in making my way, and discovered that my so-called snow-bank was clear green ice, and, comparing the form of the basin which it occupied with similar adjacent basins that were empty, I was led to the opinion that this glacier was several hundred feet in depth.

Then I went to the “snow-banks” of Mts. Lyell and McClure and believed that they also were true glaciers and that a dozen other snow-banks seen from the summit of Mt. Lyell crouching in shadow were glaciers, living as any in the world and busily engaged in completing that vast work of mountain-making, accomplished by their giant relatives now dead, which, united and continuous, covered all the range from summit to sea like a sky.

I’m going to take your painter boys with me into one of my best sanctums on your recommendation for holiness.

Emerson has sent me a profound little book styled “The Growth of the Mind,” by Reed. Do you know it? It is full of the fountain truth.

I’m glad your boys are safely back. Perhaps Ned and I may try that Andes field together.

I would write to Mrs. Moore but will wait until she is better. Tell her the cascades and mountains of upper Hetch Hetchy [ ].

I hope I may see you a few days soon. I had a pretty letter from old Dr. Torrey, and from Gray I have heard three or four times. I am ever

Cordially.

Yosemite, October 14th, [1872.]

I cannot hear from you. There are some souls, perhaps, that are never tired, that ever go steadily glad, always tuneful and songful like mountain water. Not so, weary, hungry me. This second time I come from the rocks for fresh supplies of the two breads, but I find but one. I cannot hear from you. My last weeks were spent among the cañons of the Hoffman range and the Cathedral Peak group east of Lake Tenaya. All gloriously rich in the written truths which I am seeking. I will now go to the wide, ragged tributaries of Illilouette and to Pohono, after which I will mope about among the rim cañons and rock forms of the valley as the weather permits.

Perhaps I have not yet answered all of your last long pages. Here is a quotation from Tyndall concerning the nature and origin of his intense mountain enjoyments. He reaches far and near for a theory of his delight in the mountains, going among the accidents of his own boyhood and those of his remotest fathers, but surely this must be all wrong, and, instead of groping away backwards among the various grades of grandfathers, he should explore the most primary properties of man. Perhaps we owe “the pleasurable emotions which fine landscape makes in us” to a cause as radical as that which makes a magnet pulse to the two poles. I think that one of the properties of that compound which we call man is that when exposed to the rays of mountain beauty it glows with joy. I don’t know who of all my ancestry are to blame, but my attractions and repulsions are badly balanced to-night and I will not try to say any more, excepting farewell and love to you all.

John Muir.

[1872 or 1873.]

[Beginning of letter missing.]

although I was myself fully satisfied concerning the real nature of these ice-masses. I found that my friends regarded my deductions and statements with distrust, therefore I determined to collect proofs of the common measured arithmetical kind.

On the 21st of Aug. last I planted five stakes in the glacier of Mt. McClure, which is situated east of Yosemite Valley, near the summit of the range. Four of these stakes were extended across the middle of the glacier. The first stake was planted about 25 yds. from the east bank of the glacier. The second 94 yards, the third 152, and the fourth 223 yards. The positions of these stakes were determined by sighting across from bank to bank past a plumbline made of a stone and a black horsehair.

On observing my stakes on the 6th of Oct., or in 46 days after being planted, I found that stake No. 1 had been carried down stream 11 inches; No. 2, 18 inches; No. 3, 34; No. 4, 47 inches. As stake No. 4 was near the middle of the glacier, perhaps it was not far from the point of maximum velocity, 47 inches in 46 days, or 1 inch per day. Stake No. 5 was planted about midway between the head of the glacier and stake No. [ ]. Its motion I found to be in 46 days 40 inches.

Thus these ice-masses are seen to possess the true glacial motion. Their surfaces are striped with bent dirt bands. Their surfaces are bulged and undulated by inequalities in the bottom of their basins, causing an upward and downward swedging corresponding to the horizontal swedging as indicated by the curved dirt bands.

The McClure Glacier is about half a mile in length and about the same in width at the broadest place. It is crevassed on the southeast corner. The crevass runs about southwest and northeast and is several hundred yards in length. Its width is nowhere more than one foot.

The Mt. Lyell Glacier, separated from that of McClure by a narrow crest, is about a mile in width by a mile in length.

I have planted stakes in the glacier of Red Mountains also but have not yet observed them.

[No date.]

[Beginning of letter missing.]

In going up any of the principal Yosemite streams, lakes in all stages of decay are found in great abundance, regularly becoming younger until we reach the almost countless gems of the summits with scarce an inch of carex upon their shallow, sandy borders and with their bottoms still bright with the polish of ice. Upon the Nevada and its branches there are not fewer than a hundred of these glacial lakes from a mile to a hundred yards in diameter with countless glistening pondlets not much larger than moons.

All of the grand fir forests about the valley are planted upon moraines, and from any of the mountain-tops the shape and extent of the neighboring moraines may always be surely determined by the firs growing upon them. Some pines will grow upon shallow sand and crumbling granite, but those luxuriant forests of the silver firs are always upon a generous bed of glacial drift. I discovered a moraine with smooth pebbles upon a shoulder of the South Dome, and upon every part of the Yosemite upper and lower walls.

I am surprised to find that water has had so little to do with mountain structure here. Whitney says that there is no proof that glaciers ever flowed in this valley, yet its walls have not been eroded to the depth of an inch since the ice left it, and glacial action is glaringly apparent many miles below the valley.

The bottom portion of the foregoing section, with perpendicular sides, is here about two feet in depth and was cut by the water. The Nevada here never was more than four or five feet deep, and all of the bank records of all the upper streams say the same thing of the absence of great floods.

The entire region above Yosemite and as far down as the bottoms of Yosemite has scarcely been touched by any other inundation than that of ice. Perhaps all of the past glacial inundation of every kind would not average an inch in depth for the whole region.

Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy are lake-basins filled with sand and the matter of moraines washed from the upper cañons. The Yosemite ice, in escaping from the Yosemite basin, was compelled to flow upward a considerable height on both sides of the bottom walls of the valley. The cañon below the valley is very crooked and very narrow, and the Yosemite glacier flowed across all of its crooks and high above its walls without paying any compliance to it, thus: [drawing here]. The light lines show the direction of the ice-current.

Yosemite Valley, March 30, 1873.

Your two last are received. The package of letters was picked up by a man in the valley. There was none for thee. I have Hetch Hetchy about ready. I did not intend that Tenaya ramble for publication, but you know what is better.

I mean to write and send all kinds of game to you with hides and feathers on, for if I wait until all become one, it may be too long.

As for Le Conte’s Glaciers, they will not hurt mine, but hereafter I will say my thoughts to the public in any kind of words I chance to command, for I am sure that they will be better expressed in this way than in any second-hand hash, however able. Oftentimes when I am free in the wilds I discover some rare beauty in lake or cataract or mountain form and instantly seek to sketch it with my pencil, but the drawing is always enormously unlike the reality. So also in word sketches of the same beauties that are so living, so loving, so filled with warm God, there is the same infinite shortcoming. The few hard words make but a skeleton, fleshless, heartless, and when you read, the dead, bony words rattle in one’s teeth. Yet I will not the less endeavor to do my poor best, believing that even these dead bone-heaps called articles will occasionally contain hints to some living souls who know how to find them.

I have not received Dr. Stebbins’ letter. Give him and all my friends love from me. I sent Harry Edwards the butterflies I had lost. Did he get them? Farewell, dear, dear spiritual mother! Heaven repay your everlasting love.

John Muir.

April 1st, 1873.

Yours containing Dr. Stebbins’ was received to-day. Some of our letters come in by Mariposa, some by Coulterville, and some by Oak Flat, causing large delays.

I expect to be able to send this out next Sunday, and with it Hetch Hetchy, which is about ready and from this time you will receive about one article a month.

This letter of yours is a very delightful one. I shall look eagerly for the rural homes.

When I know Dr. Stebbins’ summer address I will write to him. He is a dear young soul, though an old man.

I am “not to write” therefore.

Farewell with love.

I will some time send you “Big Tuolumne Cañon,” Ascent of Mt. Ritter, Formation of Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Lake, Other Yosemite Valleys (one, two, three, four, or more), The Lake District, Transformation of Lakes to Meadows Wet, to Meadows Dry, to Sandy Flats Treeless, or to Sandy Flats Forested, The Glacial Period, Formation of Simple Cañons, of Compound Cañons, Description of each Glacier of Region, Origin of Sierra Forest, Distribution of Sierra Forests; a description of each of the Yosemite falls and of the basins from whence derived; Yosemite Shadows, as related to groves, meadows, and bends of the river; Avalanches, Earthquakes, Birds, Bear, etc., and “mony mair.”

Yosemite Valley, April 13th, 1873.

Indian Tom goes out of the valley to-morrow. With this I send you “Hetch Hetchy.”

Last year I wrote a description of Hetchy and sent it to Prof. Runkle. Not having heard of it since, I thought it lost in some waste-basket, but to-day I received a Boston letter stating that a Hetch from my pen appeared in the “Boston Transcript” of about March 12th, 1873, which may possibly be the article in question. If so, this present H. H. will be found to contain a page or two of the same, but this is about three times as large and all rewritten, etc. That Tuolumne song of five cantos “Nature loves the Number Five” may perhaps be better out. If you think it unfit for the public, keep it to thyself. I never can keep my pen perfectly sober when it gets into the bounce and hurrah of cascades, but it never has broken into rhyme before.

Love to all and “Fare ye well, my ain Jean.”

The kerchiefs have come from Bentons and a package of books from Doggetts.

Yosemite Valley, April 19th, 1873.

The bearer of this is my friend Mr. Black, proprietor of Black’s Hotel, Yosemite. He will give you tidings of all our valley affairs.

I sent off a letter and article for you a week ago. I find this literary business very irksome, yet I will try to learn it.

The falls respond gloriously to the ripe sunshine of these days; so do the flowers.

I hope that you will be able to send me word when you will come, so that I may arrange accordingly. Mr. Black will give all particulars of trails, times, etc. If Moores have not gone ranching, send Mr. Black over to their house. It will do her good. I fondly hope she is growing better.

Love to all.

John Muir.

Yosemite Valley, May 15th, 1873.

The robins have eaten too much breakfast this morning, and there is a grossness in their throats that will require a good deal of sunshine for its cure. The leaves of many of the plants are badly disarranged, showing that they have had a poor night’s sleep. The reason of all this trouble is a snowstorm that overloaded the flowers and benumbed the butterflies, upon which the birds have breakfasted too heartily.

The grand Upper Yosemite Fall is at this moment (7 a.m.) coming with all its glorious array of fleecy comets out of a cloud that is laid along the top of the cliff, and going into a cloud that is drawn along the face of the wall about half way up. These clouds are shot through and through with sunshine, forming, with the snowy waters and fresh-washed walls, one of the most openly glorious scenes I ever beheld. A lady on Black’s piazza is quietly looking at it, sitting with arms folded in her chair. A gentleman is pointing at it with his cane, while another gentleman is speaking loudly and businessly about his “baggage.” “Eyes have they but they see not.”

Looking up the valley, the cloud effects are yet more lavishly glorious. Tissiack is mantled with silvery burning mists, her gray rocks appearing dimly where thinly veiled. Over the top of Washington Column the clouds are descending in a continuous stream and rising again suddenly from the bottom like spray from a waterfall. O dear! I wish you were here. I may write this cloud glory forevermore but never be able to picture it for you.

Doctor and Priest in Yosemite. Emerson prophesies in similar dialect that I will one day go to him and “better men” in New England, or something to that effect. I feel like objecting in popular slang that I can’t see it. I shall indeed go gladly to the “Atlantic Coast,” as he prophesies, but only to see him and the Glacier Ghosts of the north. Runkle wants to make a teacher of me, but I have been too long wild, too befogged and befogged to burn well in their patent high-heated educational furnaces.

[A portion missing.]

I had a good letter from Le Conte. He evidently doesn’t know what to think of the huge lumps of ice that I sent him. I don’t wonder at his cautious withholding of judgment. When my mountain mother first told me the tale, I could hardly dare to believe either, and kept saying “What?” like a child half awake. Farewell. My love to the Doctor and the boys. I hope the Doctor will run away from his enormous bundles of duty and rest a summer with the mountains. I have a great deal to ask him. I have begun to build my cabin. You will have a home in Yosemite.

Ever thine, J. Muir.

[1873.]

My horse and bread, etc., are ready for upward. I returned three days ago from Mts. Lyell, McClure, and Hoffman. I spent three days on a glacier up there, planting stakes, etc. This time I go to the Merced group, one of whose mountains shelters a glacier. I will go over all the lakes and moraines, etc., there. Will be gone a week or two or so.

Hutchings wants to go with me to “help me,” but I will, etc., etc.

Ink cannot tell the glow that lights me at this moment in turning to the mountains. I feel strong to leap Yosemite walls at a bound. Hotels and human impurity will be far below. I will fuse in spirit skies.

Farewell, or come meet in ghost between Red Mountain and Black on the star-sparkled ice.

Love to all thine and to Moores and Stoddard.

Yosemite Valley, June 7th, 1873.

I came down last night from the Lyell Glacier, weary with walking in the snow, but I forgot my weariness and the pain of my sun-blistered face in the news of your coming.

I would like you to bring me a pair or two of green spectacles to save my eyes, as I have some weeks of hard work and exposure among the glaciers this fall. They are sore with my last journey. All of the upper mountains are yet deeply snow-clad, and the view from the top of Lyell was infinitely glorious.

Thanking God for thee, I say a short farewell.

Kellogg has not yet appeared, nor any of the other friends you speak of.

Yosemite, September 17, [1873.]

I am again at the bottom meadow of Yosemite after a most intensely interesting bath among the outer mountains. I have been exploring the upper tributaries of the Cascade and Tamarac streams. And in particular all of the basin of the Yosemite Creek. The present basin of every stream which enters the valley on the north side was formerly filled with ice, which also flowed into the valley, although the ancient ice basins did not always correspond with the present water basins because glaciers can flow up hill. The whole of the north wall of the valley was covered with an unbroken flow of ice, with perhaps the single exception of the crest of Eagle Cliff, and though the book of glaciers gradually dims as we go lower on the range, yet I fully believe that future investigation will show that, in the earlier ages of Sierra Nevada ice, vast glaciers flowed to the foot of the range east of Yosemite and also north and south at an elevation of 9000 feet. The glacier basins are almost unchanged, and I believe that ice was the agent by which all of the present rocks receive their special forms. More of this some other day. Would that I could have you here or in any wild place where I can think and speak! Would you not be thoroughly iced? You would not find in me one unglacial thought. Come, and I will tell you how El Capitan and Tissiack were fashioned. I will most likely live at Black’s Hotel this winter in charge of the premises, and before next spring I will have an independent cabin built, with a special Carr corner where you and the Doctor can come and stay all summer; also I will have a tent so that we can camp and receive night blessings when we choose, and then I will have horses enough so that we can go to the upper temples also. I wish you could see Lake Tenaya. It is one of the most perfectly and richly spiritual places in the mountains, and I would like to preëmpt there. Somehow I should feel like leaving home in going to Hetch Hetchy. Besides, there is room there for many other claims, and it soon will fill with coarse homesteads, but as the winter is so severe at Lake Tenaya, very few will care to live there. Hetch Hetchy is about four thousand feet above sea, while Lake Tenaya is eight. I have been living in these mountains in so haunting, soaring, floating a way that it seems strange to cast any kind of an anchor. All is so equal in glory, so ocean-like, that to choose one place above another is like drawing dividing lines in the sky. I think I answered your last with respect to remaining here in the winter. I can do much of this ice work in the quiet, and the whole subject is purely physical, so that I can get but little from books. All depends upon the goodness of one’s eyes. No scientific book in the world can tell me how this Yosemite granite is put together or how it has been taken down. Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them.

Would that I knew what good prayers I could say or good deeds I could do, so that ravens would bring me bread and venison for the next two years! Then would I get some tough gray clothes the color of granite, so no one could see or find me [words missing] would I reproduce the ancient ice-rivers and [words missing] and dwell with them. I go again to my lessons to-morrow morning. Some snow fell, and bye-and-bye I must tell you about it.

If poor good Melancholia Cowper had been here yesterday morning, here is just what he would have sung:—

Which, being unmetaphored and prosed into sense, means that yesterday morning a strong southeast wind, cooled among the highest snows of the Sierra, drove back the warm northwest winds from the hot San Joaquin plains and burning foothill woods, and piled up a jagged cloud addition to our valley walls. Soon those white clouds began to darken and to reach out long filmy edges which, uniting over the valley, made a close, dark ceiling. Then came rain, unsteady at first, now a heavy gush, then a sprinkling halt, as if the clouds so long out of practice had forgotten something, but after half an hour of experimental pouring and sprinkling there came an earnest, steady, well-controlled rain.

On the mountain the rain soon turned to snow and some half-melted flakes reached the bottom of the valley. This morning Starr King and Tissiack and all the upper valley are white.

[1873.]

[Beginning of letter missing.]

I had a grand ramble in the deep snow outside the valley and discovered one beautiful truth concerning snow-structure and three concerning the forms of forest trees.

These earthquakes have made me immensely rich. I had long been aware of the life and gentle tenderness of the rocks, and, instead of walking upon them as unfeeling surfaces, began to regard them as a transparent sky. Now they have spoken with audible voice and pulsed with common motion. This very instant, just as my pen reached “and” on the third line above, my cabin creaked with a sharp shock and the oil waved in my lamp.

We had several shocks last night. I would like to go somewhere on the west South American coast to study earthquakes. I think I could invent some experimental apparatus whereby their complicated phenomena could be separated and read, but I have some years of ice on hand. ’Tis most ennobling to find and feel that we are constructed with reference to these noble storms, so as to draw unspeakable enjoyment from them. Are we not rich when our six-foot column of substance sponges up heaven above and earth beneath into its pores? Aye, we have chambers in us the right shape for earthquakes. Churches and the schools lisp limpingly, painfully, of man’s capabilities, possibilities, and fussy developing nostrums of duties, but if the human flock, together with their Rev.’s and double L-D shepherds, would go wild themselves, they would discover without Euclid that the solid contents of a human soul is the whole world.

Our streams are fast obtaining their highest power; warm nights and days are making the high mountain snow into snow avalanches and snow-falls; violets, blue, white, and yellow, abound; butterflies [flit] through the meadows; and mirror shadows reveal new heavens and new earths everywhere.

Remember me to the Doctor and all the boys and to McChesney and the brotherhood.

Cordially, J. Muir.

Independence,

October 16th, 1873.

All of my season’s mountain work is done. I have just come down from Mt. Whitney and the newly discovered mountain five miles northwest of Whitney, and now our journey is a simple saunter along the base of the range to Tahoe, where we will arrive about the end of the month or a few days earlier.

I have seen a good deal more of the high mountain region about the head of Kings and Kern rivers than I expected to do in so short and so late a time.

Two weeks ago I left the Doctor and Billie in the Kings River Yosemite, and set out for Mt. Tyndall and adjacent mountains and cañons. I ascended Tyndall and ran down into the Kern River Cañon and climbed some nameless mountains between Tyndall and Whitney, and thus gained a pretty good general idea of the region. After crossing the range by the Kearsarge Pass, I again left the Doctor and Bill and pushed southward along the range and northward and up Cottonwood Creek to Mt. Whitney, then over to the Kern Cañons again and up to the new “highest” peak, which I did not ascend, as there was no one to attend to my horse. Thus you see I have rambled this highest portion of the Sierra pretty thoroughly, though hastily. I spent a night without fire or food in a very icy wind-storm on one of the spires of the new highest peak by some called Fisherman’s Peak. That I am already quite recovered from the tremendous exposure proves that I cannot be killed in any such manner. On the day previous I climbed two mountains, making over 10,000 feet of altitude.

I saw no mountains in all this grand region that appeared at all inaccessible to a mountaineer. Give me a summer and a bunch of matches and a sack of meal, and I will climb every mountain in the region.

I have passed through the Lone Pine and noted the Yosemite and local subsidences accomplished by the earthquakes. The bunchy bush Compositæ of Owen’s Valley are intensely glorious.

I got back from Whitney this p.m. How I shall sleep! My life rose wavelike with those lofty granite waves; now it may wearily float for a time along the smooth, flowery plain.

It seems that this new Fisherman’s Peak is causing some stir in the newspapers. If I feel writeful, I will send you a sketch of the region for the “Overland.”

Love to all my friends.

Ever cordially yours, John Muir.

[1873.]

After Clark’s departure a week ago we climbed the divide between the south fork of the San Joaquin and Kings River. I scanned the vast landscape on which the ice had written wondrous things. After a short scientific feast I decided to attempt entering the valley of the west branch of the north fork, which we did, following the bottom of the valley for about 10 miles. Then we were compelled to ascend the west side of the cañon into the forest. About 6 miles farther down we made out to reënter the cañon, where there is a Yosemite valley, and by hard efforts succeeded in getting out on the opposite side and reaching the divide between the east fork and the middle fork. We then followed the top of the divide nearly to the confluence of the east fork with the trunk and crossed the main river yesterday, and are now in the pines again, over all the wildest and most impracticable portions of our journey. In descending the divide of the main Kings River we made a descent of near 7000 feet down, clear down with a vengeance, to the hot pineless foot-hills. We rose again, and it was a most grateful resurrection. Last night I watched the writing of the spirey pines on the sky gray with stars, and if you had been here I would have said, Look, etc.

Last night, when the Doctor and I were bed-building, discussing as usual the goodnesses and badnesses of boughy mountain beds, we were astounded by the appearance of two prospectors coming through the mountain rye. By them I send this note.

To-day we will reach some of the sequoias near Thomas’ Mill (vide map of Geological Survey), and in two or three more days will be in the cañon of the south fork of Kings River. If the weather appears tranquil when we reach the summit of the range, I may set out among the glaciers for a few days, but if otherwise I shall push hastily for the Owen’s River plains and thence up to Tahoe, etc. I am working hard and shall not feel easy until I am on the other side beyond the reach of early snowstorms. Not that I fear snowstorms for myself, but the poor animals would die or suffer.

The Doctor’s duster and fly-net are safe, and therefore he. Billy is in good spirits, apt to teach drawing in and out of season.

Remember me to the Doctor and the boys and Morris and Keith, etc.

Ever yours truly, John Muir.

Tahoe City,

November 3rd, [1873.]

My dear Friends Dr. and Mrs. Carr,—

I received the news of your terrible bereavement a few moments ago, and can only say that you have my heart sympathy and prayer that our Father may sustain and soothe you.

Dr. Kellogg and Billy Simms left me a week ago at Mono, going directly to Yosemite. I reached this queen of lakes, two days ago and rode down around the shore on the east side. Will continue on around up the west coast homeward through Lake and Hope valleys and over the Sierra to Yosemite by the Virginia Creek trail, or Sonora road if much snow should fall. Will reach Yosemite in about a week.

Somehow I had no hopes of meeting you here. I could not hear you or see you, yet you shared all of my highest pleasures, as I sauntered through the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual. I wish, my dear, dear friends, that you could share this divine day with me here. The soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it enters one’s being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come.

Yosemite Valley, October 7th, 1874.

I expected to have been among the foot-hill drift long ago, but the mountains fairly seized me, and, ere I knew, I was up the Merced Cañon, where we were last year, past Shadow and Merced lakes and our soda springs, etc. I returned last night. Had a glorious storm and a thousand sacred beauties that seemed yet more and more divine. I camped four nights at Shadow Lake, at the old place in the pine thickets. I have ousel tales to tell. I was alone, and during the whole excursion, or period rather, was in a kind of calm, uncurable ecstasy. I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.

How glorious my studies seem, and how simple! I found out a noble truth concerning the Merced moraines that escaped me hitherto. Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. My own special self is nothing. My feet have recovered their cunning. I feel myself again. Tell Keith the colors are coming to the groves.

I leave Yosemite for over the mountains to Mono [?] and Lake Tahoe in a week, thence anywhere,—Shastaward, etc. I think I may be at Brownsville, Yuba County, where I may get a letter from you. I promised to call on Emily Pelton there.

Farewell.

John Muir.

Sissons Station, November 1st, 1874.

Here is icy Shasta fifteen miles away yet at the very door. It is all close wrapt in clean young snow down to the very base, one mass of white from the dense black forest girdle at an elevation of five or six thousand feet to the very summit. The extent of its individuality is perfectly wonderful.

When I first caught sight of it over the braided folds of the Sacramento valley, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone, and weary, yet all my blood turned to wine and I have not been weary since. Stone was to have accompanied me, but has failed of course. The last storm was severe, and all the mountains shake their heads and say impossible, etc., but you know I will meet all its icy snows lovingly.

I set out in a few minutes for the edge of the timber-line. Then upwards, if unstormy, in the early morning. If the snow proves to be mealy and loose, it is barely possible that I may be unable to urge my way through so many upward miles, as there is no intermediate camping-ground. Yet I am feverless and strong now and can spend two days with their intermediate nights in one deliberate, unstrained effort.

I am the more eager to ascend to study the mechanical conditions of the fresh snow at so great an elevation; also to obtain clear views of the comparative quantities of lava inundation northward and southward; also general views of the channels of the ancient Shasta glaciers, etc.; many other lesser problems, besides the fountains of the rivers here and the living glaciers. I would like to remain a week or two and may have to return next year in summer.

I wrote a short letter a few days ago which was printed in the “Evening Bulletin,” which I suppose you have seen.

I wonder how you all are faring in your wilderness educational departmental institutional, etc. Write me a line here in care of Sisson. I think it will reach me on my return from icy Shasta.

Farewell.

Ever cordially yours, John Muir.

Love to all,—Keith and the boys and McChesney, etc.

Don’t forward any letters from the Oakland office. I want only mountains until my return to civilization.

Sissons Station, December 9th, 1874.

Coming in for a sleep and rest, I was glad to receive your card. I seem to be more than married to icy Shasta.

One yellow, mellow morning six days ago, when Shasta snows were looming and blooming, I slept outside the bar-room door to gaze and was instantly drawn up over the meadows, over the forests, to the main Shasta glacier in one rushing cometic whizz, then, swooping to Shasta valley, whirled off around the base like a satellite of the grand icy sun. I have just completed my first revolution. Length of orbit, 100 miles; time, one Shasta day.

For two days and a half I had nothing in the way of food, yet suffered nothing and was finely nerved for the most delicate work of mountaineering both among crevasses and lava cliffs. Now I am sleeping and eating. I found some geological facts that are perfectly glorious, and botanical ones too.

I wish I could make the public be kind to Keith and his paint.

And so you contemplate vines and oranges among the warm California angels. I wish you would all go a-granging among oranges and bananas and all such blazing, red-hot fruits, for you are a species of Hindoo sun fruit yourself.

For me, I like better the huckleberries of cool glacial bogs and acid currants and benevolent, rosy, beaming apples and common Indian-summer pumpkins.

I wish you could see the holy morning’s Alpen glow of Shasta.

Farewell. I’ll be down into gray Oakland some time.

I am glad you are so essentially independent of those commonplace plotters that have so marred your peace, eat oranges and hear the larks and wait on the sun.

Ever cordially, John Muir.

Love to all.

The letter you sent here is also received. Emily’s I will get bye and bye. Love to color Keith.

Sissons Station, December 21st, 1874.

I have just returned from a fourth Shasta excursion and find yours of the 17th. I wish you could have been with me on Shasta’s shoulder last evening in the sun glow. I was over on the head waters of the McCloud; and what a head! Think of a spring giving rise to a river! I fairly quiver with joyous exultation when I think of it. The infinity of Nature’s glory in rock, cloud, and water! As soon as I beheld the McCloud upon its lower course, I knew that there must be something extraordinary in its Alpine fountains, and I shouted, “O where, my glorious river, do you come from?” Think of a spring fifty yards wide at the mouth issuing from the base of a lava bluff with wild songs, not gloomily from a dark cavy mouth, but from a world of ferns and mosses, gold and green.

I broke my way through chaparral tangle in eager vigor utterly unweariable. The dark blue stream sang solemnly with a deep voice, pooling and bowlder-dashing and an a-a-aing in white flashing rapids, when suddenly I heard water notes I never had heard before. They came from that mysterious spring. And then the Elk forest and the Alpine glow and the sunset,—poor pen cannot tell it.

The sun this morning is at work with its blessings as if it had never blessed before. He never wearies of revealing himself on Shasta. But in a few hours I leave this altar and all its——

Well, to my Father I say “Thank you” and go willingly.

I go by stage and rail to Brownsville to see Emily and the rocks there and Yuba. Then, perhaps, a few days among auriferous drifts on the Tuolumne, and then to Oakland and that book, walking across the Coast Range on the way, either through one of the passes or over Mt. Diablo. I feel a sort of nervous fear of another period of town dark, but I don’t want to be silly about it. The sun glow will all fade out of me and I will be deathly as Shasta in the dark, but mornings will come, dawnings of some kind, and if not, I have lived more than a common eternity already.

Farewell, don’t overwork; that is not the work your Father wants. I wish you could come a-beeing in the Shasta honey lands. Love to the boys.

Brownsville, Yuba Co., [Cal.,]

January 19th, 1875.

My dear Mrs. Mother Carr, here are some of the dearest and bonniest of our Father’s bairns,—the little ones that so few care to see. I never saw such enthusiasm in the care and breeding of mosses as Nature manifests among these northern Sierras.

I have studied a big fruitful week among the cañons and ridges of the Feather, and another along the Yuba River living and dead.

I have seen a dead river, a sight worth going around the world to see. The dead rivers and dead gravels wherein lie the gold form magnificent problems, and I feel wild and unmanageable with the intense interest they excite, but I will choke myself off and finish my glacial work and that little book of studies. I have been spending a few fine social days with Emily, but now work.

How gloriously it storms! The pines are in ecstasy, and I feel it and must go out to them. I must borrow a big coat and mingle in the storm and make some studies.

Farewell. Love to all. Emily and Mrs. Knox send love.

How are Ned and Keith? I wish Keith had been with us these Shasta and Feather River days. I have gained a thousandfold more than I hoped. Heaven send him light and the good blessing of wildness. How the rains [?] splash and roar! and how the pines wave and pray!

1419 Taylor St., May 4th, 1875.

Here I am, safe in the arms of Daddy Swett, home again from icy Shasta and richer than ever in dead-river gravel and in snowstorms and snow. The upper end of the main Sacramento Valley is entirely covered with ancient river drift, and I wandered over many square miles of it. In every pebble I could hear the sound of running water. The whole deposit is a poem whose many books and chapters form the geological Vedas of our glorious State.

I discovered a new species of hail on the summit of Shasta and experienced one of the most beautiful and most violent snowstorms imaginable.

I would have been with you ere this to tell you about it and to give you some lilies and pine tassels that I brought for you and Mrs. McChesney and Ina Coolbrith, but alack! I am battered and scarred like a log that has come down the Tuolumne in flood-time, and I am also lame with frost-nipping. Nothing serious, however, and I will be well and better than before in a few days.

I was caught in a violent snowstorm and held up on the summit of the mountain all night in my shirt-sleeves. The intense cold and the want of food and sleep made the fire of life smoulder and burn low. Nevertheless, in company with another strong mountaineer I broke through six miles of frosty snow down into the timber and reached fire and food and sleep and am better than ever with all the valuable experiences. Altogether I have had a very instructive and delightful trip.

The bryanthus you wanted was snow-buried, and I was too lame to dig it out for you, but I will probably be back ere long.

I’ll be over in a few days or so.

Old Yosemite Home, November 3d, 1875.

I’m delighted, in coming out of the woods, to learn that the Doctor is elected to do the work he is so well fitted for.

I’ve had a glorious season of forest grace, notwithstanding the hundred cañons I’ve crossed, and the innumerable gorges, gulches, and avalanchal corrugations.

A day or two of resting and lingering in my dear old haunts, and then down-town work.

I’m sorry about Keith’s stocks. Though of scarce any real consequence, they yet serve to perturb and spoil his best moods and works.

It seems a whole round season since I saw you, but have I not seen the King Sequoia in forest glory?

Love to all.

John Muir.

1418 Taylor St., San Francisco,

April 3, 1876.

We will all be glad to see you. We all heard of the outrage committed on Johnnie and hope it might not be so serious as made to appear in the press. Mr. Swett told me the other day that he met a friend down town who was acquainted with the Whites intimately, who gave it as his opinion that Mr. White was insane, had a brother in the asylum, and he was as jealous of a half-dozen other persons as of Johnnie.

If I knew Ned’s boarding-house, I would visit him, for I know he must feel terribly agitated. The last time I saw him, he was rejoicing over Johnnie’s steady manly development, like an old fond father over some reformed son.

As for the stranded sapless condition of political geology, I care only for the fruitless work expended upon it by friends. The glaciers are not affected thereby, neither am I nor Cassiope.

The first meeting I had with Mr. Moore was at the lecture the other night. He seemed immeasurably astonished to find me in so anti-sequestered a condition, but in the meanwhile he is more changed than I, for he seems semi-crazy on literature, as Mrs. M. is wholly, doubly so on paint.

I will show your letters to Mr. Swett when he comes in, who will doubtless be able to decipher the meaning of heads and tails of your bodyless sentences.

I’m sorry most of all for the destruction of the “Teachers,” thus cutting off the only adequate outlet for your own thought; but hang it! let them decapitate and hang, they cannot hang Cassiope.

Ever yours cordially, John Muir.

1419 Taylor St., San Francisco,

January 12th, [1877.]

John Swett told me how heavy a burden you were carrying of work and sickness. I hope ere this that the Doctor has recovered from his severe attack of rheumatism and that you have had sleep and rest.

Your description of the orange lands makes me more than ever eager to see them,—in particular the phenomenon of a real lover of Nature such as you mention, for one does feel so wholly alone in the midst of this metallic, money-clinking crowd. And so you are going to dwell down there, and how rosily you will write about it! Well, I hope you may realize it all. Independence in quiet life must be delightful indeed, after the battles and the burdens of these heavy years. In any case it is a fine thing for old people who have worked and fought through all kinds of strenuous experiences to have thoughts and schemes so fresh and young as yours. We all hope to see you soon.

Cordially yours, John Muir.

July 23rd, [1877.]

I made only a short dash into the dear old Highlands above Yosemite, but all was so full of everything I love, every day seemed a measureless period. I never enjoyed the Tuolumne cataracts so much. Coming out of the sun land, the gray salt deserts of Utah, these wild ice waters sang themselves into my soul more enthusiastically than ever, and the forests’ breath was sweeter, and Cassiope fairer than in all my first fresh contacts. But I’m not going to tell here. I only write now to say that next Saturday I will sail to Los Angeles and spend a few weeks in getting some general views of the adjacent region, then work northward and begin a careful study of the redwoods. I will at least have time this season for the lower portion of the belt; that is, for all south of here. If you have any messages, you have time to write me. I sail at 10 a.m., or if not you may direct to Los Angeles.

I hope to see Congar, and also the spot you have selected for home. I wish you could be there in your grown fruitful groves, all rooted and grounded in the fine garden nook that I know you will make. It must be a great consolation in the midst of the fires you are compassed with to look forward to a tranquil seclusion in the South of which you are so fond.