Chapter 8
Section 8 of Letters to a Friend by John Muir. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Paul Fleischman. Letters from 1873 and 1874. Yosemite Valley, March 30, 1873. Your two last are received. The package of letters was picked up by a man in the valley. There is none for thee. I have hecheche about ready. I did not intend that Tanaya 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 Leconte'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 today. 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. Stubbin's 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 sometime send you big Tuolumne Canyon, ascent of Mount 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 canyons, of compound canyons, 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 mare. Yosemite Valley, April 13, 1873 Indian Tom goes out of the valley tomorrow. With this, I send you Hetch Hetchy.
Last year, I wrote a description of Hetchy and sent it to Professor Runkle. Not having heard of it since, I thought it lost in some wastebasket. but today I received a Boston letter stating that a hatch from my pen appeared in the Boston transcript of about March 12, 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 gene The kerchiefs have come from Benton's
And a package of books from Doggett's Yosemite Valley, April 19, 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 moors 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 15, 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 two-heartedly. 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 halfway 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 they have, but they see not. Looking up the
valley, the cloud effects are yet more lavishly glorious. Tisiak is mantled with silvery burning mists. Her gray rocks appearing dimly were 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. Oh 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 LeConte. 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 Mounts Lyle, 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. We'll 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 that abound. 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 Moors and Stoddard. Yosemite Valley, June 7, 1873. I came down last night from the Lyle 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 Lyle 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 17th, 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 Tamarack 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 uphill. 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 flow to the foot of the range east of Yosemite, and also north and south, at an elevation of 9,000 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 Tisiac 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 car 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 preempt there. Somehow, I should feel like leaving home and going to Hech-Hechi. 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 and so haunting, soaring, floating away, 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 tomorrow morning Some snow fell and by and by I must tell you about it
If poor, good, melancholia Cowper Had been here yesterday morning Here is just what he would have sung The rocks have been washed, just washed in a shower Which winds in their faces conveyed
The plentiful cloudlets be muffled their brows Or lay on their beautiful heads But cold sighed the winds in the fir trees above And down on the pine trees below For the rain that came laving and washing in love
Was followed, alas, by a snow Which, being unmetaphored and prosed in a 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's Star King and Tisiac 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. It is 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? Ay, 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 reverends and double LD 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. Gorgially, J. Muir. Independence, October 16th, 1873. All of my season's mountain
work is done. I have just come down from Mount 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 Billy in the Kings
River Yosemite and set out for Mount Tyndall and adjacent mountains and canyons. I ascended Tyndall and ran down into the Kern River Canyon 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 Mount Whitney, then over to the Kern Canyons 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 windstorm on one of the spires of the new highest peak, by something 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 earthquake. The bunchy bush composite of Owens Valley are intensely glorious. I got back from Whitney this p.m. How I shall
sleep. My life rose wave-like 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 rightful, 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 ten miles. Then we were compelled to ascend the west side of the canyon into the forest.
About six miles farther down, we made out to re-enter the canyon, 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 a 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 7,000 feet down, clear down with a vengeance to the hot, pineless foothills. We rose again, and it was a most grateful resurrection.
Last night I watched the writing of the spiry pines on the sky gray with stars, and if you had been there, I would have said, look, etc. Last night, when the doctor and I were bed-building, discussing as usual the goodnesses and badnesses of Bowie mountain beds, we were astounded by the appearance of two prospectors coming through the mountain rye. By them, I send this note. Today, we will reach some of the sequoias near Thomas's Mill,
V-Day, Map of Geological Survey, and in two or three more days we'll be in the canyon 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 Owens 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 Sims 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. We'll 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. We'll 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 foothill drift long ago but the mountains fairly seized me
and ere I knew I was up the Merced Canyon 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 usual 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 promise to call on Emily Pelton there. Farewell, John Muir. Sisson Station, November 1st, 1874 Here is icy shasta, 15 miles away, yet at the very door. It is all close-wrapped in clean young snow, down to the very base. One mass of white from the dense black forest girdle at an elevation of 5,000
or 6,000 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 timberline, 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, unrestrained 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 barroom door to gaze, and was instantly drawn up over the meadows, over the forests, to the main Shasta glacier, in one rushing, cometic whiz. 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 finally 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 Hindu sun fruit yourself. For me, I like better the huckleberries of cool glacial bogs and acid currents and benevolent rosy beaming apples and common Indian summer pumpkins. I wish you could see the holy morning's alpenglow of Shasta. Farewell, I'll be down into
grey Oakland sometime. 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 By and By. Love to Color, Keith. Sisson 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 headwaters of the McLeod, and what a head. Think of a spring giving rise to 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 McLeod upon its lower course, I knew that there must be something extraordinary in its alpine fountains, and I shouted, Oh, 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 cavey 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 boulder dashing and an eyeing 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 Pin 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 it's 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 Mount 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 being in the Shasta honeylands. Love to the boys. End of section 8.
