San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How John Muir and editor saved Yosemite
You can think of John Muir as one of 19th century America’s most successful influencers. But instead of dominating TikTok, he shared his wilderness exploits in essays and books that begged Americans to preserve the natural wonders — Sierra peaks, redwood forests — he worshiped with religious ferocity.
Muir didn’t get there on his own. Dean King’s “Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite” traces Muir’s relationship with Robert Underwood Johnson, the New York editor who helped transform the rangy outdoorsman into the secular saint of American conservation.
“Guardians” arrives at a moment when the question of Muir’s sainthood is less settled than it used to be. In the 2020s, environmental groups are reckoning with their legacies of racism — including racism displayed by their own revered founders. In Muir’s case, that includes writing that occasionally disparaged Blacks and Native Americans, and a blindness to the fact that the untrammeled wilderness he venerated had been the home of Native Americans for centuries.
King mostly elides these controversies, noting in his introduction that both Muir and Johnson “operated in a world tinged with racism, and they themselves occasionally failed to transcend negative stereotypes.” The story he tells — vividly, often excitingly — is of two decent men devoted to public service.
Both Muir and Johnson were Midwesterners — the Scotsborn Muir raised in Wisconsin, Johnson in small-town Indiana — who made good elsewhere. At 29, Muir began the epic journey that would take him to San Francisco and into the High Sierra that became his spiritual home. At 20, Johnson began what would be a distinguished career as editor at Scribner’s Monthly and its successor, the Century Magazine.
Muir’s writing brought them together. Muir began cobbling together a shaky living as a journalist in the late 1860s, selling articles to San Francisco-based Overland Monthly and then to New York publications. Editor Johnson took notice, asking Muir to write for him: “[W]e should be glad to learn what are your enthusiasms and whether you have time to put them on paper.” Muir obliged with four nature essays, including his famous, charming ode to the water ouzel, the charismatic aquatic songbird that was a favorite of Muir’s. A partnership was born.
“Guardians” centers on Muir and Johnson’s struggle to establish Yosemite National Park. The battle began in 1889, in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, when writer and editor met in person at last. From there, Muir took Johnson to see his beloved Yosemite. The scenery was godlike; the white settlers’ impact on it hellish. Ostensibly protected by the state of California, Yosemite Valley was littered with pigpens, corrals and saloons. Obviously, Johnson decided, Yosemite should become a national park. He would lobby Congress and devote the pages of the Century Magazine to the fight. Muir’s prose would convince Americans of the necessity of preserving this incomparable place.
They succeeded. Plagued by writer’s block, Muir turned in his copy late, but his essays fired public opinion and pushed Congress into establishing Yosemite National Park on Oct. 1, 1890. Johnson was not finished with his friend, though. “My dear Muir,” he wrote, “Why don’t you start an association for preserving California’s monuments & natural wonders — or at least Yosemite? It would be a good influence.” Muir at first demurred. But when, in 1892, the Sierra Club was founded, he became its first president.
The friends’ final battle ended in defeat. After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco proposed damming the Tuolumne River within Yosemite National Park to provide a dependable municipal water supply. The project would drown Muir’s cherished Hetch Hetchy Valley. Muir wrote, Johnson lobbied, but San Francisco won. By then Johnson had been pushed out as editor of the Century, and Muir was frail; he died in 1914.
“Guardians of the Valley” brings to life two compelling figures whose flaws are more apparent in our time than they were in theirs, a reminder that history is the final editor. It’s also a poignant portrait of an era when mere words could change the world.