Roosevelt’s passion for the American land and for natural history went back to his childhood. His father, one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History, enthusiastically encouraged his young son’s collecting and stuffing of animal specimens for the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” which the boy set up in the family’s New York City mansion. He wrote in his autobiography that he had “fully intended to make science my life-work,” an ambition reflected by his being first in his class in zoology at Harvard. When Roosevelt returned to New York from the Dakota Badlands, he formed the Boone & Crockett Club to promote preservation of big game animals and to encourage forest and land conservation. It was an effective group, later influential in establishing Yellowstone Park and in saving great stretches of timberlands.
By the time Roosevelt became president, America’s natural resources had been stripped. Native bison herds were decimated; only eight hundred or so of the original sixty million animals survived. Many other species of birds and mammals were on the edge of extinction and nearly half of all forest lands had been logged. “Ever since man in recognizably human shape made his appearance on this planet,” wrote Roosevelt, “he has been an appreciable factor in the destruction of other forms of animal life.”
Roosevelt acted quickly to stop the destruction. “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country,” he declared. “We do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many, nor do we intend to turn over to any man who will wastefully use them by destruction, and leave to those who come after us a heritage damaged by just so much.” He ended his remarks in revival fervor: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
Roosevelt engaged not only the Lord, but the Congress and the American public as well. With characteristic vigor he set out on a campaign of persuasion. Action must be taken, it must be bold, and it must be now. His outrage was visceral, and his persuasiveness nearly absolute. “He is doubtless the most vital man on the continent, if not the planet, to-day,” observed the naturalist John Burroughs. “He is many-sided, and every side throbs with his tremendous life and energy.… His interest in the whole of life, and in the life of the nation, never flags for a moment. His activity is tireless.”
Roosevelt’s exuberant campaign was manifestly successful. He doubled the number of national parks, created 150 national forests, added nearly 150 million acres of timber to the government reserves, set up more than fifty federal wildlife preserves, initiated thirty major irrigation programs, and established sixteen national monuments. One journalist commented that if Roosevelt continued to create reserves “there would be little ground left to bury folks on.” The president’s own summing up of his conservation efforts was different but equally succinct: “During the seven and a half years closing on March 4, 1909, more was accomplished for the protection of wildlife in the United States than during all the previous years, excepting only the creation of the Yellowstone National Park.” He had been audacious in his use of the presidency and deft in his employment of conviction and enthusiasm.
Roosevelt’s passion for saving the wilderness stayed with him. “Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property of the people alive to-day, but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander,” he wrote a few years before he died. “It is barbarism to ravage the woods and fields, rooting out the mayflower and breaking branches of dogwood as ornaments.” These were sustaining passions—“A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias,” he believed, “should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral”—and these passions and great enthusiasms made Roosevelt the activist he was. Without them it is unimaginable that the nation’s wilderness would be as vast and wonderful as it now is.
Shortly before Theodore Roosevelt went to Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize in 1910 he gave a lecture at the Sorbonne, in Paris. It was his most eloquent tribute to the centrality of exuberance in action: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly … who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have … known neither victory nor defeat.”
John Muir was different from Theodore Roosevelt in a thousand particulars. An immigrant Scot who knew neither a loving father nor a privileged upbringing, he preferred the company of mountains to that of men, had no desire to govern, and did not willingly put down in cities. But, like Roosevelt, he had a passion for wild places and a persuasive exuberance that vaulted passion into action.
Muir was born in 1838 on the east coast of Scotland. His lasting childhood influences, he said, were the sea and hills and his father’s restless, often cruel, evangelical Presbyterianism. Nature was Muir’s deliverance: “When I was a boy in Scotland,” he wrote, “the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.… Kings may be blessed; we were glorious, we were free—school cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature’s glad wildness.”
“Glorious” was a term Muir would invoke time and again in his accounts of nature, despite his conscious attempts to eradicate it from his writing. “Glorious” and “joy” and “exhilaration”: no matter how often he scratched out these words once he had written them, they sprang up time and again to dominate his descriptions of the world as he experienced it. His exultant roots were deep, and never, as a writer or as a speaker, was he fully able to bridle the abounding delight of his language.
The Muir family emigrated to America in 1849. Young Muir worked at a brutal pace on their Wisconsin farm until he was able to escape, first to Madison and then, as a student, to the University of Wisconsin. A chance lesson in botany from a fellow classmate who queried him on the unlikely similarities between a straggling pea vine and the hardwood locust tree sent Muir “flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm.” Before long, his college room, like Roosevelt’s at Harvard, was brimming with life but instead of lobsters and tortoises he kept gooseberry bushes, wild plum, posies, and peppermint plants. He collected the specimens and studied them late into the night: “My eyes never closed on the plant glory I had seen,” he later recalled.
Muir left Madison without a degree and wandered off, as he put it, into the “University of the Wilderness.” This “glorious botanical and geological excursion” would last for the next fifty years. On the flyleaf of his journal, with the expansiveness that would characterize his life and writings, he inscribed: “John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe.”
When Muir was thirty years old he saw Yosemite for the first time. He fell in love. Everything, he wrote, was “glowing with Heaven’s unquenchable enthusiasm.… I tremble with excitement in the dawn of these glorious mountain sublimities, but I can only gaze and wonder.” Watching the sun come up between the mountain peaks and over the rock domes of Yosemite, he proclaimed what he experienced: “Our camp grove fills and thrills with the glorious light. Everything awakening alert and joyful … every pulse beats high, every cell life rejoices, the very rocks seem to thrill with life. The whole landscape glows like a human face in a glory of enthusiasm.” With good cause, Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra has been described as the journal of a “soul on fire.”
The mountains, the trees, and the air were, he effused, “joyful, wonderful, enchanting, banishing weariness and a sense of time.” The streams “sing bank-full”; they leap, shout in “wild, exulting energy … joyful, beautiful.” Muir joined in the exuberance of nature: “I shouted and gesticulated in a wild burst of energy,” he wrote. “Exhilarated wi
th the mountain air, I feel like shouting this morning with excess of wild animal joy.” He climbed to the top of a hundred-foot Douglas spruce in the midst of a winter gale and, clinging to the tree, joined in its “rocking and swirling… [its] wild ecstasy.” Never, he said, had he enjoyed “so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender [tree]tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.”
Whether he was climbing in the Sierra or exploring the crevices of an Alaska glacier, Muir’s fiery, joyous relationship with nature burned on. A friend described Muir’s reaction to seeing a thick spread of mountain flowers in Alaska: “Muir at once went wild.… From cluster to cluster of flowers he ran, falling on his knees, babbling in unknown tongues, prattling a curious mixture of scientific lingo and baby talk.” He felt himself to be “doomed to be ‘carried of the spirit into the wilderness,’ ” and at times expressed concern that he was out of control: “I feel as if driven with whips, and ridden upon,” he wrote his sister. “I am swept onward in a general current that bears on irresistibly.”
Muir’s exuberance found a match only in Nature’s: “Every summer my gains from God’s wilds grow greater,” he wrote his fiancée from Alaska. “This last seems the greatest of all. For the first few weeks I was so feverishly excited with the boundless exuberance of the woods and the wilderness, of great ice floods, and the manifest scriptures of the ice-sheet that modelled the lovely archipelagoes along the coast, that I could hardly settle down to the steady labour required in making any sort of Truth one’s own.”
“Manifest scriptures” is a telling phrase. Muir’s capacity to exult in nature, and his feeling of unity with the mountains and trees, led inexorably to a deep mystical appreciation of the world as he experienced it. The great sequoias were not just magnificent, they were sacred. The light that streaked through the sequoia woods was oracular, the tree sap sacramental. In a rhapsodic letter to a friend, written with the sap of a sequoia tree, Muir let his devotions tumble out: “Do behold the King in his glory, King Sequoia! Behold! Behold! seems all I can say. Some time ago I left all for Sequoia and have been and am at his feet; fasting and praying for light, for is he not the greatest light in the woods, in the world? … I’m in the woods, woods, woods, and they are in me-ee-ee. The King tree and I have sworn eternal love.… I’ve taken the sacrament with Douglas squirrel, drunk Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood.… I wish I were so drunk and Sequoical that I could preach the green brown woods to all the juiceless world, descending from this divine wilderness like John the Baptist … crying, Repent, for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand!”
Having taken communion with the woods, Muir offered up their liniment: “There is a balm in these leafy Gileads—pungent burrs and living King-juice for all defrauded civilization; for sick grangers and politicians; no need of Salt rivers. Sick or successful, come suck Sequoia and be saved.” The salvation of the wilderness was not an abstraction to John Muir. He understood nature, felt nature, and then illuminated her to those who did not. The slaying of the wilderness was to him personal and intolerable.
With an almighty energy, Muir threw himself into saving the great groves of the sequoias and the mountain ranges of Yosemite. He brought into words the beauty he had seen and viscerally knew. He became an interpreter of nature, a prophet. “He sung the glory of nature like another Psalmist,” said Muir’s editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, and “as a true artist, was unashamed of his emotions.” Muir took Johnson camping in Yosemite in 1889 and together they drew up plans for a campaign to establish what is now Yosemite National Park. Muir’s writings and compelling enthusiasm were essential forces leading to the preservation of that part of the Sierra. When the Sierra Club was founded in 1892 to preserve the American wilderness, Muir became its first president; he held that office until his death twenty-two years later.
Muir branded others with his own almost painful awareness of the wilderness, attempting to make them feel some measure of what he himself felt so acutely. One friend, in discussing their exploration of Alaska, said, “Muir was always discovering to me things which I would never have seen myself and opening up to me new avenues of knowledge, delight, and adoration.… How often have I longed for the presence of Muir to heighten my enjoyment by his higher ecstasy, or reveal to me what I was too dull to see or understand … for I was blind and he made me see!” Person after person acknowledged a debt of profound comprehension: “To have explored with Muir the great glacier which bears his name,” proclaimed one, “to have wandered with him in Yosemite and the Kings River Canyon, is to have come, through his enthusiasm and vision, a little nearer the hidden mysteries of nature.”
Emerson, who visited Muir in Yosemite, said that Muir’s was the most original mind in America. Muir used this originality to advantage, pouring it into persuasive, exultant language. His speech was described by those who heard him as nonstop and magnetizing—it had a “spell of fire and enthusiasm and glowing vitality,” said one acquaintance—and Muir talked to all who would listen about the need to conserve the wild. He barraged lawmakers with letters and petitions and poured his heart into writing the books that would eventually bring the world’s attention to the spectacular Sierra Nevada and its great stands of sequoias.
One of those who paid attention was the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. “I write to you personally to express the hope that you will be able to take me through the Yosemite,” he requested of Muir. “I do not want anyone with me but you.” Muir agreed, and in May 1903 he met the president and together they set off with packers and mules. For several days they hiked and camped in the Sierra, an experience they both recollected with great pleasure. Muir wrote to his wife, “I had a perfectly glorious time with the President and the mountains”; to a friend he said, “I fairly fell in love with him.” Roosevelt, who declared he had never felt better in his life, was no less enthusiastic in his letter to Muir: “I trust I need not tell you, my dear sir, how happy were the days in the Yosemite I owed to you, and how greatly I appreciated them. I shall never forget our three camps; the first in the solemn temple of the great sequoias; the next in the snow storm among the silver firs near the brink of the cliff; and the third on the floor of the Yosemite, in the open valley fronting the stupendous rocky mass of El Capitan with the falls thundering in the distance on either hand.”
It is not possible to know the extent to which Muir’s contagious enthusiasm for Yosemite and the sequoia groves influenced Roosevelt’s subsequent actions. Roosevelt was already committed to the idea of conservation and had been for many years, but there is no doubt that he felt an additional sense of urgency after hiking with Muir. Immediately following his trip to Yosemite, Roosevelt delivered what was to become one of his most famous speeches. “I have just come from a four days’ rest in Yosemite,” he said to a gathering of people in Sacramento. “I want [the trees] preserved because they are the only things of their kind in the world. Lying out at night under those giant sequoias was lying in a temple built by no hand of man, a temple grander than any human architect could by any possibility build, and I hope for the preservation of the groves of giant trees simply because it would be a shame to our civilization to let them disappear. They are monuments in themselves.” He talked about the need to conserve American forest lands and then closed with a plea for the rights of future generations: “I ask that your marvelous natural resources be handed on unimpaired to your posterity. We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”
Muir expressed the same desire differently. “Any fool can destroy trees,” he wrote. “They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed.… It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods—trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty fores
ts of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, levelling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools—only [the government] can do that.”
Muir knew in his marrow that wilderness was a necessity, that “going to the mountains is going home.” It was scripture: in wilderness “lies the hope of the world.” To save nature was to save oneself. “The galling harness of civilization drops off,” he said, “and the wounds heal ere we are aware.”
John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt were exuberant men. Infectiously enthusiastic, stupendously energetic, they left the country a wilder and more beautiful place because of their vision and action. Both registered the mountains and lands so keenly that they could not but act with urgency when the wilderness was threatened. Their receptive natures allowed them to feel and see that which was essential in the lands, that which could not be gotten elsewhere. Neither was capable of doing nothing when there was much to be done. Their joy in the wild was contagious to those around them. Both were persuasive by temperament and able to convince others of what they felt to be a moral imperative. Conservation was in their blood, not just in their intellect. It was elemental.
For Muir, it was a single, sustained, and consistent life’s passion to preserve the wilderness. For Roosevelt, there would be many other crusades to engage his energies over a long and diverse political life. But because Roosevelt was a politician, because he had so many other passions and commitments, he was in a wider arena, with a more powerful scope, and therefore better able to act on behalf of the lands they cherished in common. “All of us who give service, and stand ready for sacrifice, are the torch-bearers,” wrote Roosevelt. “We run with the torches until we fall, content if we can pass them to the hands of the other runners.… These are the torch-bearers; these are they who have dared the Great Adventure.”