The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [9]
Throughout the six-month Arctic cruise, to contribute to glacial science, Muir kept a daily record of the landscape he encountered. He also discussed the history of New England whalers, who had plied Alaskan waters since 1848. There were approximately 100,000 glaciers in Alaska; his fieldwork was endless. He wrote a handful of letters to be published in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. His botanical reports on the flora found in the Arctic were elegant and pioneering. In 1883, the U.S. Treasury Department printed Muir’s botanical investigation as Document No. 429. “I returned a week ago from the polar region around Wrangell Land and Herald Island,” Muir wrote to the great protégé of Charles Darwin, Asa Gray, on October 31, 1881, “and brought a few plants from there which I wish you would name as soon as convenient, as I have to write a report on the flora for the expedition. I had a fine time and gathered a lot of exceedingly interesting facts concerning the formation of the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and the configuration of the shores of Siberia and Alaska. Also, concerning the forests that used to grow there, etc., which I hope some day to discuss with you.”
Near Cape Thompson, Muir discovered a new species of Erigeron. Asa Gray was astounded. The asteraceous plant resembled a daisy and grew in clusters of three. Muir reported that it was abundant in the Arctic—confusing people who thought that the northern latitudes were a wasteland of ice. Gray classified it as Erigeron muirii (known to botanists as Muir’s fleabane). A decade earlier, Gray had challenged Muir to discover a new flower. “Pray, find a new genus, or at least a new species, that I may have the satisfaction of embalming your name, not in glacier ice, but in spicy wild perfume.”53
Although not published until 1917, The Cruise of the Corwin, Muir’s account of the Arctic trip, became one of his signature books. Unlike Travels in Alaska, which was primarily about glaciers, this new memoir expressed Muir’s deep compassion for animals. When members of the Corwin’s crew shot at a nearby harbor seal (Phoca vitulina), Muir flinched, writing that the creature had “large, prominent, human-like eyes,” and therefore it was “cruel to kill it.”54 When a steamer owned by the Western Fur and Trading Company pulled up next to the Corwin, Muir sadly inspected the huge bundles of black and brown bearskins, marten, mink, beaver, lynx, wolf, and wolverine. “They were vividly suggestive of the far wilderness whence they came,” Muir wrote, “its mountains and valleys, its broad grassy plains and far-reaching rivers, its forests and its bogs.”55 In The Cruise of the Corwin, Muir presented himself as an advocate of wildlife protection. Chapters were titled “Caribou and a Native Fair,” “The Land of the White Bear,” and “Tragedies of the Whaling Fleet.”
IV
Twenty years after Muir’s first visit to Alaska, the tycoon E. H. Harriman, owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, assembled a group of elite scientists and Thoreauvian naturalists for a ten-week cruise on the custom-built steamer George W. Elder to Glacier Bay and other Alaskan landmarks; the steamboat was, as Muir called it, “a floating university.”56 The entire party—including the ship’s crew and officers, and servants—added up to 126 persons from both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts.57 This was Muir’s seventh trip to Alaska. After boarding in Seattle, the sixty-one-year-old Muir would get to visit Victoria, Fort Wrangell, Juneau, Glacier Bay, Sitka, Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, Unalaska, and Saint Lawrence Island—and to play the distinguished glaciologist and resident wise man on the 9,000-mile voyage. He didn’t get back to Martinez, California, until late August. Never before had he seen such a variety of glaciers and ever-craggier peaks in such a short time span; the Chugach Mountains and Prince William Sound made him incredibly happy.