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# 2018-10-06 - Travels In Alaska by John Muir
(HTM) John Muir resting on a boulder with walking stick in 1907
# Chapter 1, Puget Sound and Alaska
"The scenery of the ocean, however sublime in vast expanse, seems far
less beautiful to us dry-shod animals than that of the land seen only
in comparatively small patches; but when we contemplate the whole
globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and
islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and
shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite
storm of beauty."
The author describes the agricultural excellence of glacial moraine
soil in BC. He discusses the Douglas Fir and its many names in
different regions, plus regional variation in its morphology.
# Chapter 2, ...
The author discusses the glacial origins of the dramatic scenery.
The author describes an experience where he went off into a storm and
built a bonfire 30 to 40 feet high. He accomplished his objective,
lighting up the old-growth trees so he could see how they appeared
and behaved in stormy weather.
# Chapter 3, ...
The author describes Wrangell Island, which was mostly undeveloped
but had an economy as a winter base camp for remote gold mines.
He spent a little time describing his observations of first nations
lifestyles in that time. He mentioned an unparalleled abundance of
berries, including huckleberries half an inch in diameter. He
accompanied a group of 9 first nations people on a berry picking
foray. They ate berries first before setting up camp and working.
They saved the largest berries to hand-feed the toddlers when they
got back. They harvested crab apples to flavor their salmon.
That night the tribal people hosted a dinner. They served Boston
(White) food from cans. They gave traditional dances, followed by
self-effacing disclaimers that they had given up their old ways for
Christianity. Having read John Muir's autobiography, i know that he
was raised in a harsh Calvinist way, and was not treated kindly. So
i season his neutral observations with an imagined grain of salt, an
unwritten sympathy on his part.
# Chapter 4, The Stickeen River
The author gives his version of a fantastic story about rescuing Mr.
Young on a dangerous mountain climb.
"In his mission lectures in the East, Mr. Young oftentimes told this
story. I made no record of it in my notebook and never intended to
write a word about it; but after a miserable, sensational caricature
of the story had appeared in a respectable magazine, I thought it but
fair to my brave companion that it should be told just as it
happened."
# Chapter 5, A Cruise In The Cassiar
But every eye was turned to the mountains. Forgotten now were the
Chilcats and missions while the word of God was being read in these
majestic hieroglyphics blazoned along the sky. The earnest, childish
wonderment with which this glorious page of Nature's Bible was
contemplated was delightful to see. All evinced eager desire to
learn.
One bird, a thrush, embroidered the silence with cheery notes, making
the solitude familiar and sweet, while the solemn monotone of the
stream sifting through the woods seemed like the very voice of God,
humanized, terrestrialized, and entering one's heart as to a home
prepared for it. Go where we will, all the world over, we seem to
have been there before.
... thanking the Lord for so noble an addition to my life as was this
one big mountain, forest, and glacial day.
Standing here, with facts so fresh and telling and held up so vividly
before us, every seeing observer, not to say geologist, must readily
apprehend the earth-sculpturing, landscape-making action of flowing
ice. And here, too, one learns that the world, though made, is yet
being made; and that this is still the morning of creation...
So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure
wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters
little where you go, or how often to the same place. Wherever you
chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best; and
you feel that there can be no happiness in this world or in any other
for those who may not be happy here.
[regarding the construction in a first nations village abandoned 70
years ago]
Their geometrical truthfulness was admirable. With the same tools
not one in a thousand of our skilled mechanics could do as good work.
Compared with it the bravest work of civilized backwoodsmen is
feeble and bungling. The completeness of form, finish, and
proportion of these timbers suggested skill of a wild and positive
kind, like that which guides the woodpecker in drilling round holes
and the bee in making its cells.
[Is this last comment a little condescending and de-humanizing?]
# Chapter 7, Glenora Peak
The setting sun fired the clouds. All the world seemed new-born.
Everything, even the commonest, was seen in new light and was looked
at with new interest as if never seen before. The plant people
seemed glad, as if rejoicing with me, the little ones as well as the
trees...
# Chapter 8, Exploration of the Stickeen Glacier
The curving, out-bulging front of the glacier is about two miles
wide, two hundred feet high, and its surface for a mile or so above
the front is strewn with moraine detritus, giving it a strangely
dirty, dusky look, hence its name "Dirt Glacier," this detritus-laden
portion being all that is seen in passing up the river. A mile or
two beyond the moraine-covered part I was surprised to find alpine
plants growing on the ice, fresh and green, some of them in full
flower. These curious glacier gardens, the first i had seen, were
evidently planted by snow avalanches from the high walls. They were
well-watered, of course, by the melting surface of the ice and fairly
well nourished by humus still attached to the roots, and in some
places formed beds of considerable thickness. Seedling trees and
bushes also were growing among the flowers.
# Chapter 9, A Canoe Voyage To Northward
A Hemlock, felled by Indians for bread-bark, was only twenty inches
thick at the butt, a hundred and twenty feet long, and about five
hundred and forty years old at the time it was felled. The first
hundred of its rings measured only four inches, showing that for a
century it had grown in the shade of taller trees and at the age of
one hundred years was yet only a sapling in size...
We spent the night under his roof, the first we had ever spent with
Indians, and i never felt more at home. The loving kindness bestowed
on the little ones made the house glow.
# Chapter 10, The Discovery of Glacier Bay
They had been asking him what possible motive i would have in
climbing mountains when storms were blowing; and when he replied that
i was only seeking knowledge, Toyatte said, "Muir must be a witch to
seek knowledge in such a place as this and in such miserable weather."
Then, setting sail, we were driven wildly up the fiord, as if the
storm-wind were saying, "Go, then, if you will, into my ice chamber;
but you shall stay in until i am ready to let you out."
We gathered a lot of fossil wood and after supper made a big fire,
and as we sat around it the brightness of the sky brought on a long
talk with the Indians about the stars; and their eager, childlike
attention was refreshing to see as compared with the deathlike apathy
of weary town-dwellers, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched
in toil and care and poor shallow comfort.
Glacier Bay is undoubtedly young as yet. Vancouver's chart, made only
a century ago, shows no trace of it, though found admirably faithful
in general. It seems probable, therefore, that even then the entire
bay was occupied by a glacier of which all those described above,
great though they are, were only tributaries. Nearly as great a
change has taken place in Sum Dum Bay since Vancouver's visit, the
main trunk glacier there having receded from eighteen to twenty five
miles from the line marked on his chart. Charley, who was here when a
boy, said that the place had so changed that he hardly recognized it,
so many new islands had been born in the mean time and so much ice
had vanished. As we have seen, this Icy Bay is being still farther
extended by the recession of the glaciers. That this whole system of
fiords and channels was added to the domain of the sea by glacial
action is to my mind certain.
# Chapter 11, The Country of the Chilcats
It [yellow cedar] is a tree of moderately rapid growth and usually
chooses ground that is rather boggy and mossy. Whether its network
of roots makes the bog or not, i am unable as yet to say.
Just as we were leaving, the chief who had entertained us so
handsomely requested a written document to show that he had not
killed us, so in case we were lost on the way home he could not be
held accountable in any way for our death.
# Chapter 12, The Return To Fort Wrangell
When we were at the camp-fire in Sum Dum Bay, one of the prospectors,
replying to Mr. Young's complaint that they were oftentimes out of
meat, asked Toyatte why he and his men did not shoot plenty of ducks
for the minister. "Because the duck's friend would not let us," said
Toyatte; "when we want to shoot, Mr. Muir always shakes the canoe."
... making a good deal of sport out of my pity for the deer and
refusing to eat any of it and nicknamed me the ice ancou and the deer
and duck's tillicum [friend].
[In the case of the Ancou he's a watchman, he is supposed to keep an
eye on the area, see what's going on, and above all watch out for
those souls who are getting ready to undertake the journey. In order
to accompany them.]
We were out of tea and coffee, much to Mr. Young's distress. On my
return from a walk i brought in a good big bunch of glandular ledum
and boiled it in the teapot. The result of this experiment was a
bright, clear amber-colored, rank-smelling liquor which i did not
taste, but my suffering companion drank the whole potful and praised
it.
[Also known as Labrador Tea. It contains a mild toxin named ledol,
which acts as a stimulant in small doses.]
(HTM) http://paulkirtley.co.uk/2015/labrador-tea-tonic-or-toxic/
# Chapter 14, Sum Dum Bay
The blankets were not to wear, but to keep as money, for the almighty
dollar of these tribes is a Hudson's Bay blanket.
(TXT) Hudson's Bay point blanket @Wikipedia
These cold northern waters are at times brilliantly phosphorescent as
those of the warm South, and as they were this evening in the rain
and darkness, with the temperature of the water at forty-nine
degrees, the air fifty-one. Every stroke of the oar made a vivid
surge of white light, and the canoes left shining tracks.
As we neared the mouth of the well-known salmon-stream where we
intended making our camp, we noticed jets and flashes of silvery
light caused by the startled movement of the salmon that were on
their way to their spawning-grounds. These became more and more
numerous and exciting, and our Indians shouted joyfully, "Hi yu
salmon! Hi yu muck-a-muck!" while the water about the canoe and
beneath the canoe was churned by thousands of fins into silver fire.
After landing two of our men to commence camp-work, Mr. Young and i
went up the stream with Tyeen to the foot of a rapid, to see him
catch a few salmon for supper. The stream ways so filled with them
there seemed to be more fish than water in it, and we appeared to be
sailing in boiling, seething silver light marvelously relieved in the
jet darkness. In the midst of the general auroral glow and the
specially vivid flashes made by the frightened fish darting ahead and
to right and left of the canoe, our attention was suddenly fixed by a
long, steady, comet-like blaze that seemed to be made by some
frightful monster that was pursuing us. But when the portentous
object reached the canoe, it proved to be only our little dog,
Stickeen.
# Chapter 15, From Taku River To Taylor Bay
Before the whites came most of the Thlinkits held, with Agassiz, that
animals have souls, and that it was wrong and unlucky to even speak
disrespectfully of the fishes or any of the animals that supplied
them with food.
Toward evening at the head of a picturesque bay we came to a village
belonging to the Taku tribe. We found it silent and deserted. Not a
single shaman or policeman had been left to keep it. These people
are so happily rich as to have but little of a perishable kind to
keep, nothing worth fretting about. They were away catching salmon,
our Indians said. All the Indian villages hereabout are thus
abandoned at regular periods every year, just as a tent is left for a
day, while they repair to fishing, berrying, and hunting stations,
occupying each in succession for a week or two at a time, coming and
going from the main, substantially built villages. Then, after their
summer's work is done, the winter supply of salmon dried and packed,
fish-oil and seal-oil stored in boxes, berries and spruce bark
pressed into cakes, their trading-trips completed, and the year's
stock of quarrels with the neighboring tribe patched up in some way,
they devote themselves to feasting...
[This chapter contains a charming story about the dog Stickeen
following Mr. Muir on a thrilling adventure across glacier.]
# Chapter 16, Glacier Bay
They seem to prefer being naked. The men also wear but little in wet
weather. When they go out for the day they put on a single blanket,
but in choring around camp, getting firewood, cooking, or looking
after their precious canvas, they seldom wear anything, braving wind
and rain in utter nakedness to avoid the bother of drying clothes.
The very thought of this Alaskan garden is a joyful exhilaration.
Though the storm-beaten ground it is growing on is nearly half a mile
high, the glacier centuries ago flowed over it as a river flows over
a boulder; but out of all the cold darkness and glacial crushing and
grinding comes this warm, abounding beauty and life to teach us that
what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is
creation finer and finer.
# Chapter 17, In Camp At Glacier Bay
Most people who travel only look at what they are directed to look
at. Great is the power of the guidebook-maker, however ignorant.
June 23 - In the old stratified moraine banks, trucks and branches of
trees showing but little sign of decay occur at a height of about a
hundred feet above tidewater. I have not yet compared this fossil
wood with that of the opposite shore deposits. That the glacier was
once withdrawn considerably back of its present limit seems plain.
Immense torrents of water had filled in the inlet with stratified
moraine-material, and for centuries favorable climatic conditions
allowed forests to grow upon it.
# Chapter 18, My Sled-Trip On The Muir Glacier
To shorten the return journey i was tempted to glissade down what
appeared to be a snow-filled ravine, which was very steep. All went
well until i reached a bluish spot which proved to be ice, on which i
lost control of myself and rolled into a gravel talus at the foot
without a scratch. Just as i got up and was getting myself
orientated, i heard a loud fierce scream, uttered in an exulting,
diabolical tone of voice which startled me, as if an enemy, having
seen me fall, was glorying in my death. Then suddenly two ravens
came swooping from the sky and alighted on the jag of a rock within a
few feet of me, evidently hoping that i had been maimed and that they
were going to have a feast. But as they stared at me, studying my
condition, impatiently waiting for bone-picking time, i saw what they
were up to and shouted, "Not yet, not yet!"
I made out to get a cup of tea by means of a few shavings and
splinters whittled from the bottom board of my sled, and made a fire
in a little can, a small campfire, the smallest i ever made or saw,
yet it answered well enough as far as tea was concerned.
Twice to-day i was visited on the ice by a hummingbird, attracted by
the red lining of the bearskin sleeping-bag.
author: Muir, John, 1838-1914
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/John_Muir
LOC: QH31.M9 A3
(DIR) source: gopher://gopher.pglaf.org/1/7/3/4/7345/
tags: ebook,non-fiction,outdoor
title: Travels In Alaska
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(DIR) non-fiction
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