The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [339]
Leaving Mariposa Grove, the Roosevelt party headed to Yosemite’s south entrance by carriage, through a handsome glen. As he got out of the carriage, Roosevelt asked for his valise—he didn’t like being separated from his personal belongings. When told that the Yosemite Park Commission had brought his baggage to a banquet lunch, he grew enraged. “Get it!,” he shouted. According to Muir the two words, barked with an authoritarian air, were like bullets being fired.104 Although reporters sometimes portrayed Muir as a misanthrope, he made friends quickly. There was never a moment of awkwardness with Roosevelt. Really, the only strange thing about Muir was that he had never once shaved in his life.105
On May 15 Roosevelt and Muir mounted horses and trotted off into the vast sequoia lands near the Sunset Tree. The strength and beauty of Yosemite were undeniable. Somehow, there was a summery fragrance in the air even though there was snow. Roosevelt praised the cinnamon-colored sequoias’ enduring beauty. Roosevelt recalled in An Autobiography, “The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn.”106 That evening they built a campfire; continually feeding it wood, they talked until the fire drew down to coals. It was the most famous campfire ever in the annals of the conservation movement. Over the popping and crackling logs Roosevelt and Muir talked about forest good and slept soundly without a tent.
At sunrise on May 16 Roosevelt and Muir decided to forgo the day’s official itinerary and ride horseback by themselves through the melting snow along an old Indian trail to Glacier Point. There is a marvelous photograph of Roosevelt and Muir standing on a ledgerock overlooking the valley, a respectable 3,200 feet high, with Yosemite Falls thundering at their backs. On close inspection, patches of diminishing snow are noticeable on the thawed ground. Roosevelt looks ready to draw a weapon; Muir is seemingly relaxed, hands behind his back. Over the decades this photograph has become an icon promoting American national parks, for the Sierra Club and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service alike. It has been reproduced on book jackets and in magazines. According to historian Donald Worster of the University of Kansas, Roosevelt and Muir had good reason to look so satisfied in each other’s august company. “They have just agreed that ownership of the much-abused valley below should revert to the federal government and become part of Yosemite Park,” he notes in an analysis of the photograph. “Politically, they have forged a formidable alliance on behalf of nature.”107
Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Mariposa Grove in California.
T.R. and Muir at Mariposa Grove. β (Courtesy of the National Park Service)
Through a blinding snowstorm, Roosevelt and Muir footslogged to Sentinel Dome, a few miles from Glacier Point Hotel. Five feet of snow already lay on the ground. A little base camp was chosen sheltered from the frost heave and glaze ice.108 Muir built a marvelous bonfire that second evening and made a bed of ferns and cedar boughs. “Watch this,” Muir said. Grabbing a flaming branch from the campfire he lit a dead pine tree on a ledge. With a roar, as if a squirt of gasoline had been administered, the flame shot up the dead branches. Suddenly Muir did a Scottish jig around the pine torch. Such ritualistic acts were right up Roosevelt’s alley. Leaping to his feet he hopped around the flaming tree, shouting “Hurrah!” over and over again into the night sky. “That’s a candle,” Roosevelt told Muir, “it took 500 years to make. Hurrah for Yosemite! Mr. Muir.”109
Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21, 1838. When he was eleven his family emigrated from Glasgow to Marquette County, Wisconsin. Throughout his adolescence he toiled on his father’s farm and tinkered with clocks, barometers, hydrometers, and table saws.