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Sierra Club Bulletin 



whom he piloted about and above the Yosemite Valley — Emer- 

 son, Sir Joseph Hooker, Torrey, and many others of an older 

 day or of late years, including presidents Roosevelt and Taft. 



Muir was clever at story-telling, and put into it both wit and 

 sympathy, never failing to give, as a background, more delight- 

 ful information about the mountains than a professor of ge- 

 ology would put into a chapter. With his one good eye — for the 

 sight of the other had been impaired in his college days in Wis- 

 consin by the stroke of a needle — he saw every scene, in detail 

 and in mass. This his conversation visualized until his imagina- 

 tion kindled the imagination of his hearer. 



Adventures are to the adventurous. Muir, never reckless, was 

 fortunate in seeing nature in many a wonderful mood and as- 

 pect. Who that has read them can forget his wonderful de- 

 scriptions of the windstorm in the Yuba which he outrode in a 

 treetop, or of the avalanche in the Yosemite, or of the spring 

 floods pouring in hundreds of streams over the rim of the Val- 

 ley? And what unrecorded adventures he must have had as pi- 

 oneer of peak and glacier in his study of the animal and vegeta- 

 ble life of the Sierra. Did any observer ever come nearer than 

 he to recording the soul of Nature? If "good-will makes intelli- 

 gence," as Emerson avers, Muir's love of his mountains amount- 

 ed to divination. What others learned laboriously, he seemed to 

 reach by instinct, and yet he was painstaking in the extreme and 

 jealous of the correctness of both his facts and his conclusions, 

 defending them as a beast defends her young. In the Arctic, in 

 the great forests of Asia, on the Amazon and in Africa at 

 seventy-three, wherever he was, he incurred peril, not for "the 

 game," but for some great emprise of science. 



But Muir's public services were not merely scientific and liter- 

 ary. His countrymen owe him gratitude as the pioneer of our 

 system of national parks. Before 1889 we had but one of any 

 importance — the Yellowstone. Out of the fight which he led for 

 the better care of the Yosemite by the State of California grew 

 the demand for the extension of the system. To this many per- 

 sons and organizations contributed, but Muir's writings and en- 

 thusiasm were the chief forces that inspired the movement. All 

 the other torches were lighted from his. His disinterestedness 

 was too obvious not to be recognized even by opponents. To a 



