Chapter III: Part 3

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.