STEEP TRAILS – California-Utah-Nevada-Washington-Oregon-The Grand Canyon
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EDITOR’S NOTE
The papers brought together in this volume have, in a all-purpose way, been arranged in chronological sequence. They span a period of twenty-nine years of Muir’s life, during which they appeared as letters and articles, for the most part in publications of limited and local circulation. The Utah and Nevada sketches, and the two San Gabriel papers, were contributed, in the form of letters, to the San Francisco Evening Bulletin toward the end of the seventies.
Written in the meadow, they preserve the clearness of the leader’s first impressions of persons regions. Much of the material in the chapters on Mount Shasta first took similar shape in 1874. Subsequently it was rewritten and much expanded for inclusion in Pictorial California, and the Region West of the Rocky Mountains, which Muir started to edit in 1888. In the same work appeared the description of Washington and Oregon. The charming small essay “Wild Wool” was written for the Overland Monthly in 1875. “A Geologist’s Winter Walk” is an extract from a letter to a friend, who, appreciating its fine literary quality,
took the responsibility of sending it to the Overland Monthly lacking the leader’s knowledge. The concluding chapter on “The Grand Gap of the Colorado” was published in the Century Magazine in 1902, and exhibits Muir’s powers of description at their maturity.
Some of these papers were revised by the leader during the later years of his life, and these revisions are a part of the form in which they now appear. The chapters on Mount Shasta, Oregon, and Washington will be establish to contain occasional sentences and a few paragraphs that were included, more or less verbatim, in The Mountains of California and Our National Parks. Being an vital part of their present context, these paragraphs could not be omitted lacking impairing the unity of the leader’s descriptions.
The editor feels confident that this volume will meet, in every way, the high expectations of Muir’s readers. The recital of his experiences during a stormy night on the summit of Mount Shasta will take rank among the most thrilling of his records of adventure. His observations on the dead towns of Nevada, and on the Indians gathering their harvest of pine nuts, recall a phase of Western life that has left few traces in American literature. Many, too, will read with pensive interest the leader’s glowing description of what was one time called the New Northwest. Nearly inconceivably fantastic have been the changes wrought in that region during the past generation. Henceforth the landscapes that Muir saw there will live in excellent part only in his writings, for fire, axe, plough, and gunpowder have made away with the supposedly infinite forest wildernesses and their teeming life.
William Frederic Bade
Berkeley, California
May, 1918
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John Muir, the most passionate naturalist in print. Lacking his
writing and political activism back in the l800’s we’d not have
the Sierra Club, Yosemite National Park, etc. etc.
Our nation owes this wonderful man a fantastic deal of gratitude.
He writes like an angel. I am reading several of his books. Check also
into one of the greatest dog tales I’ve ever read: Stickeen.
Also read: The Mountains of California. Read everything he wrote.
He is poetic, he is a brilliant botantist, he is very much spiritual.
Read his boyhood biography. He memorized the whole New Tribute by the
time he was 13…word for word!
His Dad was permanently beating him so he retreated to the wilderness
and watched the birds, learned the latin names of the flowers, and
hiked the mountains with a hard roll, no jacket, and no sleeping bag….
A name should make a movie about him.
Read any of his books and become a John Muir fan.
I camped in Yosemite many times in my 20’s and learned his writings
then. Its a joy to read them again and be as tickled 40 years later!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5