THE FUNCTION of the nature essayist, as Henry Beston pointed out some forty years ago, is like that of the poet. 1 Both attempt to reforge a fundamental continuity between inner and outer, so that for the reader the world is alive again, seen precisely for what it is, and the mind is alive to it. To have known the beauty of the world, seen with unclouded eyes the sheer wonder of a clear river or a mesa or a cottonwood tree, is to be in some sense and for that time, psychologically whole. The deepest attraction of the nature essay, probably, is this basic rightness of gestalt. Good nature writing is a recapturing of the child's world, the world before fragmentation, the world as poets and artists can see it. The best nature writing has this, and has also the reliability of science, for a true completeness must, logically, include the objective aspect of mind as well.
In the West, the nature essay also reflects the European and eastern newcomers' drive to be at home in a new land: first to explore it, to list its ingredients and learn its history, then to settle in it, finally to cherish and defend it. For several decades beginning with Lewis and Clark, western nature writing was done by travelers, and by necessity took the form of brief sketches within journal-like narratives. Perhaps its chief quality or charm, at this stage, is the wonder of newness as the writer, far from what he regarded as civilization, burst upon the vast freedom of the prairies or was awed by the abundance of animal life or the wild strangeness of distant, snow-draped mountains floating above the heat waves of summer. By definition, an explorer is not at home, and it is not surprising that the writing of most early observers lacks some of the closeness and thoroughness which distinguishes the best of the genre, and which seems to come from a true immersion in an environment. Nevertheless, even in the early years, there are occasional passages which show that the writer was deeply moved by the wilderness–Meriwether Lewis looking down from a hilltop on the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri, or Prince Maximilian silently descending the Missouri at night, almost thirty years later, listening to the elk and the wolves on shore, and the buffalo thrashing their way across the river. These are some of the great moments of newness.
By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the first freshness was gone. At this point, with the work of a few important writers, chief among them John Muir and Mary Austin, the western nature essay took a turn onto a more profound level. Muir and Austin, and others, spent the requisite time to become dwellers, as opposed to travelers, and the deep perception of place they developed was significant not only for the nature essay, but perhaps also for the general maturation of western regional literature. With them, the post-frontier era begins. They came to believe that the frontier challenge was not of physical movement to a new place, but of the enlargement of understanding. "The secret of learning the mesa life," Austin wrote, "is to sit still, and to sit still, and to keep on sitting still." 2
In our own time, a central concern of nature essayists is the shrinking of the wild biosphere as the technosphere expands. It is now possible that Thoreau's question,"What would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?" could become more than a rhetorical one. Wilderness becomes increasingly rare. For western nature writers in the twentieth century–Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Edward Abbey, to cite just three examples–the old American dialectic of the wild and the civilized has seemingly worked its way into the endgame, with the wild now disappearing so rapidly, so irrevocably, that the fear arises we might be undoing not just wilderness but ourselves as well. The pockets of wild land and the few remaining undammed rivers become powerful in the literature, as settings for introspection about our species and as examples of natural, planetary health.
The classics of nature writing,
beginning with the first great work of the modern era, Gilbert
White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789), and including
such later books as Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854),
John Muir's The Mountains of California (1894), Mary Austin's
The Land of Little Rain (1903), Henry Beston's The
Outermost House (1928), Joseph Wood Krutch's The Voice
of the Desert (1954), and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire
(1968), are works of a settled, home-knowing and home-loving
consciousness. Place, after all, is a logical center and starting
point: from a home ground one may venture thoughts on the human
condition–as all of the major nature writers do–in
terms of a solidly naturalistic perspective (the cycle of the
four seasons being the most common reference and pattern for
the writing), and from a practical involvement with the earth.
The best nature writers are connected in this way; they have,
as it were, a bit of the home place under their fingernails.
In the early decades of nature writing about the West, we do
not often find the familiarized expression of the placed. On
the other hand, we would be remiss to ignore the genuine excitement
of space and wildness the West offered, "once upon a time."
Among the details of travel and food-getting leaps up the occasional
great moment:
[Lewis] Thursday April 25th, 1805
3
. . . our rout lay along the foot of the river hills. when we
had proceeded about four miles, I ascended the
hills from whence I had a most pleasing view of the country,
particularly of the wide and fertile vallies formed by the missouri
and the yellowstone rivers, which occasionally unmasked by the
wood on their borders disclose their meanderings for many miles
in their passage through these delightfull tracts of country.
I could not discover the junction of the rivers immediately,
they being concealed by the wood; however, sensible that it could
not be distant I determined to encamp on the bank of the Yellow stone river which made it's appearance about 2 miles South of
me. the whol face of the country was covered with herds of Buffaloe,
Elk & Antelopes; deer are also abundant, but keep themselves
more concealed in the woodland. the buffaloe Elk and Antelope
are so gentle that we pass near them while feeding, without appearing
to excite any alarm among them; and when we attract their attention,
they frequently approach us more nearly to discover what we are.
. . .
This is a journal entry by a man
traveling with a purpose, with several purposes in fact, and
it was not meant as literature; but there is no mistaking the
Adamic undercurrent, the consciousness of Meriwether Lewis that
he was indeed in a singular, privileged vanguard.
The records of the travels of Thomas Nuttall, who made three
explorations into the West in 1811, 1819, and 1834, suggest a
more deliberate approach to the essay form and to literature.
In Nuttall's writings about the West, which appear in scattered
paragraphs in his later ornithological and botanical works and
most conspicuously in A Journal of Travels into the Arkansa
Territory, During the Year 1819, there is a more informed
documentation of natural history than was possible for Lewis,
and in addition more reflection in the classic manner of the
personal essay. Nuttall reveals his love of nature, and a scheme
of values in which geology and wild flora and fauna seem of considerably
greater interest than detail of travel and camp, and he also
essays general comments on the relationship of civilization and
wilderness, somewhat after the manner of Crèvecoeur, so
that what emerges from his journals and his more formal writings
is something close to a literary persona.
Nuttall, who was born in England in 1786 and died there in 1859,
was one of the most thorough of the early generalists in American
natural history. His Genera of North American Plants (1818)
and A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada
(1832) were authoritative for their time, and were in heavy
use throughout the nineteenth century–the bird
book ("Nuttall," as it was
familiarly known) into the twentieth. Despite Washington Irving's
characterization of him as absentminded ("he went groping
and stumbling along among the wilderness of sweets, forgetful
of everything but his immediate pursuit,"Irving said of Nuttall's
accompaniment of the Astorians in 1811),
The surface of these woodless expanses was gently undulated, and
thickly covered with grass knee high, even to the summits of
the hills. . . . The flowers, which beautify them at this season
of nature's vigour, communicated all the appearance of a magnificent
garden, fantastically decked with innumerable flowers of the
most splendid hues.
5
It is to be regretted that the widely scattered
state of the population in this territory, is but too favorable
to the spread of ignorance and barbarism. . . . the rising generation
are growing up in mental darkness, like the French hunters who
have preceded them, and who have almost forgot that they appertain
to the civilized world.
6
The European model was Nuttall's apparent standard, for he referred to wilderness as "a dead solemnity, where the human voice is never heard to echo, where not even ruins of the humblest kind recal [sic] its history to mind, or prove the past dominion of man." 7
But the wilderness was where the new plants and birds were, and it was to wilderness that Nuttall returned again and again. In 1834 he resigned his position at Harvard to travel once more to the West, this time with Nathaniel Wyeth, the Cambridge merchant who designed to enter the fur trade, and with a young Philadelphia ornithologist, John Kirk Townsend. The party went all the way to the Pacific, and Nuttall continued by ship to Hawaii, always and indefatigably in search of new plants. The West was Nuttall's Eden, where he could roam free and give names to almost everything before him; he left it and America with a deep sense of loss, recorded in his "Preface" to Michaux's North American Sylva in 1841: ". . . and I must now bid a long adieu to the `New World,' its sylvan scenes, its mountains, wilds, and plains; and henceforth, in the evening of my career, I return, almost an exile, to the land of my nativity." 8
In his supplements to the Sylva,
a work first published in 1810–1813 and considerably
enlarged by Nuttall for a new edition in 1841, the naturalist
occasionally departs from botanical description to engage in
short narratives about his own experiences with western trees.
His aesthetic joy is evident and unabashed, leading his science
writing into the realm of the literary essay:
As we sailed along
the smooth bosom of these extensive streams [the "deep Wahlamet"
and the "wide Oregon"], for many miles we never lost sight
of the long-leaved Willow, which seemed to dispute the domain
of the sweeping flood, fringing the banks of the streams and
concealing the marshes entirely from view; at every instant,
when touched by the breeze, displaying the contrasted surface
of their leaves, above of a deep and lucid green, beneath the
bluish-white of silver: the whole scene, reflected by the water
and in constant motion, presented a silent picture of exquisite
beauty.
9
John Kirk Townsend, Nuttall's companion
on the 1834 journey, left a record which has been called "the
most readable and exciting account ever written of the continental
crossing.""First published in 1839, the Narrative of
a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains, to the Columbia River,
and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, &c. is certainly
readable–in part because Townsend, a member of a prominent
Philadelphia family, wrote an urbane, faintly amused, often more
than faintly scornful, prose which interests the reader as much
in the writer's character as in the scenes portrayed. Townsend
is an early specimen of the tourist. His account contains short
descriptions of camas bulbs and chokecherries, among the somewhat
scanty natural history references, but this traveler's attention
seems to have been mainly on topography-in-general and on the
details and stories of camp life. He is an example of the writer
on the move. However, there was an occasion when Townsend took
a leisurely look around himself–he was ill, and was offended
by the brawling of the trappers at a rendezvous, and so stayed
apart–and the result is a pleasant Rocky Mountain pastoral
scene:
One early naturalist whose writing
seems to reflect a more spirited engagement with the wilderness
was Alexander Philip Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied, a small
principality on the Rhine. Maximilian not only "wintered-over"
in the wilderness, a distinctive accomplishment according to
the measurement of frontier veterans, but he also paid attention
to the sounds and smells of the wild and to the complex life
of Indian encampments, so that his account, Travels in the
Interior of North America, 1832– 1834, is one of the
richest and most precise of early travel documents. During his
young manhood in the Prussian army (he fought in the Napoleonic
Wars, rose to the rank of major, and was decorated with the Iron
Cross), Maximilian had become intensely interested in natural
history, and had pursued his studies in the Amazon jungles for
three years (1815–1817) after leaving the military. He collected
and named flora and fauna, and made the first detailed studies
of native tribes in the Amazon Basin. Later, after identifying
and arranging his South American collections and after corresponding
with Thomas Say, the American entomologist who had accompanied
the Long expedition to the front range of the Rockies in 1819–1820,
"Prince Max" determined to extend his nature studies to
North America. In April, 1833, he set out by steamboat from St.
Louis, bound for the upper Missouri, eager to see the primitive
part of America. His narrative, in common with others of this
early period, is largely concerned with travel, but Maximilian
seemed to have a more relaxed approach than most-perhaps because
he traveled with a manservant–and there are numerous occasions
when he simply sat still and watched.
When, in the fall of 1833, he made
the turn at Fort Union and started back down the Missouri, Maximilian
was deeply impressed by the abundance of wildlife: Buffaloes
and elks had crossed the river before us, and we heard the noise
they made in the water at a considerable distance. The island
was covered with lofty trees, and in many places, with tall plants,
especially artemisia, but had many grassy and open spots, and
we found on it five buffaloes, and several troops of elks and
Virginian deer. A white wolf looked at us from the opposite bank,
and the great cranes flew slowly and heavily before us.
13
Appended to his travel narrative, the German prince included some two hundred fifty pages of detailed observations on the Indian life he had seen and to some degree taken part in, covering food, clothing, games, rituals, language
(including sign language), stories, and social relations; the
contrast with Townsend, who at one point simply said of an Indian
village, "I scarcely know how to commence a description
of the tout en semble of the camp, or to frame a sentence
which will give an adequate idea of the extreme filth, and most
horrific nastiness of the whole vicinity,"
Among the writings of mountain men, Osborne Russell's Journal
of a Trapper, which he readied for publication in 1848, is
a remarkable document. Its descriptions of place are innocently
heartfelt, and the appended essays on animals and Indian tribes
of the Rocky Mountains are enlivened by a quaint, untutored,
workmanlike approach. Though Russell was modest about his own
writing, and felt that he was trespassing on poets' territory
when he attempted to describe the mountain wilderness, it is
clear that he himself had the poetic spirit. In his second summer
in the West (1835), he wandered into the Lamar River valley in
what is now Yellowstone National Park, and formed an immediate
attachment to that beautiful area, calling it "Secluded
Valley." "I almost wished I could spend the remainder of
my days in a place like this," he wrote.
This trapper went out of his way
to engage the wilderness at its most potent. In the depth of
winter, 1841, having stayed on in the mountains after the last
rendezvous had been held and the beaver business had declined,
Russell rode out from the Indian camp he had been staying in,
just east of the Great Salt Lake. The 3d day of Feby. I took
a trip up the mountain to hunt Sheep I ascended a spur with my
horse sometimes riding and then walking until near the top where
I found a level bench where the wind had blown the snow off.
. . .
. . . .
the air was calm serene and cold
and the stars shone with an uncommon brightness after sleeping
till about Midnight I arose and renewed my fire My horse was
continually walking backwards and forwards to keep from freezing
I was upwards of 6,000 ft above the level of the lake, below
me was a dark abyss silent as the night of Death I set and smoked
my pipe for about an hour and then laid down and slept until
near daylight–My Chief object in Sleeping at this place
was to take a view of the lake when the Sun arose in the morning.
17
Shortly after the mountain man's
day had faded began the era of the government surveyor. Well
provisioned and equipped for the most part, working as officials
on a mission, the surveyors of the middle and later decades of
the nineteenth century corrected and completed the mapping of
the West, made it known to all through their reports, and served
thus to edge the "country in the mind" out of the unknown
and mythic, toward the account books. However, the writing of
some of these men-John Charles Frémont, Howard Stansbury,
William Henry Brewer, Clarence King, and especially Clarence
E. Dutton–is nowhere near as dry as their assigned work
might suggest. Their reports are informed with excellent geological
understanding and often ecological insight. The immensity of
the West, and the great views from high points necessary for
mapping, and the sheer exhilaration of contact with wilderness,
all worked to bring their documents alive. Some of the writing
is very good indeed.
Frémont (1813–1890),
who in 1842 mapped the Oregon Trail through South Pass in minute
detail and whose later expeditions likewise took on historical
and political importance, had an enjoyment of mountain wilderness, at least in its summer season, which
considerably brightens his journal report. The Wind River range,
which he first visited in August of 1842, seemed to speak to
him in terms quite other than the march-tempo tunes of manifest
destiny, future railroads, and future mines which he heard nearly
everywhere else in the ten or fifteen thousand miles of western
travel covered by his expeditions. Here in the mountains he came
closest to writing simply of nature as nature. It is as if the
Wind Rivers stunned him into a purely aesthetic response. It
is not by the splendor of faroff views, which have lent such
a glory to the Alps, that these impress the mind; but by a gigantic
disorder of enormous masses, and a savage sublimity of naked
rock, in wonderful contrast with innumerable green spots of rich
floral beauty, shut up in their stern recesses."
Howard Stansbury (1806–1863), who as a Captain in the Topographical
Engineers made a hardship-plagued survey of the Great Salt Lake
and its surrounding desert in 1849, wrote a straightforward account
of the area which presents its ruggedness clearly. But Stansbury
too, perhaps to a greater degree than Frémont, was awake
to wild beauty. In Exploration and Survey of the Valley of
the Great Salt Lake of Utah (1852), describing a desert where
he and his men had to carry water for their mules (rationing
them to two pints per day), and where their own survival was
very much in question, he calls the area "a landscape full
of wild and peculiar beauty."
The whole neck and the shores of both of the little bays were
occupied by immense flocks of pelicans and gulls, disturbed now
for the first time, probably, by the intrusion of man. They literally
darkened the air as they rose upon
the wing, and, hovering over our heads, caused the surrounding
rocks to reecho with their discordant screams. The ground was
thickly strewn with their nests, of which there must have been
some thousands. Numerous young, unfledged pelicans, were found
in the nests on the ground, and hundreds half-grown, huddled
together in groups near the water, while the old ones retired
to a long line of sand-beach on the southern side of the bay,
where they stood drawn up, like Prussian soldiers, in ranks three or four deep, for
hours together, apparently without motion.
In 1860, the State Legislature of California sponsored what it
hoped would be "an accurate and complete Geological Survey
of the State."
Brewer's charm as a writer is that of the ordinary man given
heavy responsibilities and difficulties, who meets these and
has time and mind left over for appreciating beauty. He climbed
mountains for the view as much as for survey work, and seemed
to delight in recording what lay below. From a hill at the southern
end of San Francisco Bay, he wrote, "The valley looked like
a map, and the head of the bay, with its swamps intersected and
cut up with winding streams and bayous crossing and winding in
every direction, made by far the prettiest arabesque picture
of the kind I have ever seen."
Clarence King was a writer–at the very least we can say
he was a would-be writer–a fact immediately apparent as
one turns from other surveyors' reports to the opening of Mountaineering
in the Sierra Nevada "The western margin of this continent
is built of a succession of mountain chains folded in broad corrugations,
like waves of stone upon whose seaward base beat the mild small
breakers of the Pacific."
The rocks are granite, very light-colored, the soil light-gray
granite sand. Here and there are granite knobs or domes, their
sides covered with loose angular bowlders, among which grow bushes,
or here and there a tree. Sometimes there are great slopes of
granite, almost destitute of soil, with only an occasional bush
or tree that gets a rooting in some crevice. Behind all this
rise the sharp peaks of the crest, bare and desolate, streaked
with snow; and, since the storms, often great banks of clouds
curl around their summits.
I believe no one can study from an elevated lookout the length and depth of one of these great Sierra cañons without
asking himself some profound geological
questions. Your eyes range along one or the other wall. The average
descent is immensely steep. Here and there side ravines break down the rim in deep lateral gorges. Again, the wall advances in sharp,
salient precipices, rising two or three thousand feet, sheer
and naked, with all the air of a recent fracture. At times the
two walls approach each other, standing in perpendicular gateways.
Toward the summits the cañon grows, perhaps, a little
broader, and more and more prominent lateral ravines open into
it, until at last it receives the snow drainage of the summit,
which descends through broad, rounded amphitheatres, separated
from each other by sharp, castellated snow-clad ridges.
If King, writing with both geological insight and artistic care
for leading the eye, helped to bring the West into sharper focus,
he did not venture into a philosophy of nature or wilderness
in any overt way, not even as far as the sober Brewer had. There
are hints in King–speaking of the forest belt of the Sierra,
he said, "Lifted above the bustling industry of the plains
and the melodramatic mining theatre of the foothills, it has
a grand, silent life of its own, refreshing to contemplate even
from a hundred miles away"
Perhaps the finest of the surveyors, as a writer, was Clarence
Dutton (1841–1912), whose work has even been said to belong
"properly with that of Thoreau, Burroughs, Muir. . . ."
In Tertiary History, Dutton
raises an epistemological and aesthetic point which, in the works
of subsequent writers about western wilderness, has become an
important theme: that which is totally wild cannot be easily
assimilated into the prepared categories of civilized perception.
In fact, it will be distorted by them. A new apprehension is
called for, and this seems not to be a simple acquisition but
something which must be slowly lived
into. Speaking of the Grand Canyon's inner gorge, Dutton wrote,
In accordance with this thought,
Dutton's mode of presentation was an attempt at complete realism–escaping,
or trying to escape, those received conventions of thirty generations.
Dutton did not always abide by
these strictures, but the stated respect for terrain-as-it-is
reveals a certain emotional dedication; only a perfect purity
on the part of the observer, a non-embellishing expression, could
do justice to the unique landscape. It is clear that Dutton felt
such a mission, though he found it impossible to fulfill. He
avoided any explicit comments in the area of the dialectic which
has, from the beginnings of American literature, been suggested
by the opposition of civilization and wilderness–there was,
after all, perhaps little place for this in a government report.
But his statements in favor of directness and accuracy show that
he was aroused by the incomparable wilderness of the canyon country,
and inspired to a kind of purgation of motive and expression.
The main thing was to see clearly.
Dutton's degree of success can be suggested only by samples of
a certain length. We need to be with this observer for several
hours at least, to appreciate his patience and attentiveness.
Perhaps an afternoon and evening watching the Vermilion Cliffs
will serve as an example. In the bright light, depth and proportion
are flattened. But as the sun declines there comes a revival.
The halftones at length appear, bringing into relief the component
masses; the amphitheaters recede into suggestive
distances; the salients silently advance toward us; the distorted
lines range themselves into true perspective; the deformed curves
come back to their proper sweep; the angles grow clean and sharp;
and the whole cliff arouses from lethargy and erects itself in
grandeur and power as if conscious of its own majesty. Back also
come the colors, and as the sun is about to sink they glow with
an intense orange vermilion that seems to be an intrinsic luster
emanating from the rocks themselves.
33
30th.–Our camp here
is the most lovely one in every respect, and as several days
have elapsed since we came, and I am convalescent, I can roam about the country a little and enjoy it. The pasture is rich and very abundant, and it does
our hearts good to witness the satisfaction and comfort of our
poor jaded horses. Our tents are pitched in a pretty little valley
or indentation in the plain, surrounded on all sides by low bluffs
of yellow clay. Near us flows the clear deep water of the Sidkadee
[Green River], and beyond, on every side, is a wide and level
prairie, interrupted only by some gigantic peaks of mountains
and conical butes [sic] in the distance.
11
I often passed my time
in the lofty and shady forest which extended beyond the willow
thickets on the banks, at the border of the open prairie. Sitting
on an old trunk, in the cool shade, I could observe at leisure
the surrounding scene. I saw the turkey buzzards, that hovered
above the hills, contending against the high wind, while a couple
of falcons frequently made a stoop at them, doubtless to defend their nest. A couple of ravens likewise flew about them. The red-eyed finch, the beautiful Sylvia aestiva, the Sylvia striata,
and the wren, flew around me, the latter singing very prettily.
12
Forms so new to the culture of civilized races
and so strongly contrasted with those which have been the ideals
of thirty generations of white men cannot indeed be appreciated
after the study of a single hour or day.
31
There is no need, as we look upon them [the Vermilion Cliffs],
of fancy to heighten the picture, nor of metaphor to present
it. The simple truth is quite enough. I never before had a realizing
sense of a cliff 1,800 to 2,000 feet high. I think I have a definite
and abiding one at present.
32
With Clarence Dutton, the western nature essay may be said to have reached the upper limit of the
pictorial. The West was being described to visual near-perfection.
While it is true that a certain tactile sensitivity must be among
the powers of a landscape-describer, it seems clear that Dutton,
King, Brewer, Stansbury, and Frémont, along with the other
writers discussed to this point (with the partial exceptions
of Osborne Russell and Prince Maximilian), limited their descriptions
to the visual realm. This limitation suggests a certain distance,
a lack of grit, sound, and smell; and this in turn may explain
why the early writers make almost no profound psychological or
philosophical comments about wilderness–that is, about their
experience in it and what this experience might mean for a civilized
inheritor of the European and Judaeo-Christian tradition. There
are only intimations. It is as if the wild had not been deeply
enough entered, or assimilated; the observer remained apart,
bringing back ever more detailed and precise reports, until finally
almost everything knowable had been accounted for in the picture,
but still the complete engagement had not been made.
In the writings of John Muir (1838–1914), the body comes
alive to the wilderness, and with this important, almost baptismal
step (to use one of Muir's metaphors), the western nature essay
reaches toward maturity and significance. The intellectual response
to nature is not neglected-in fact, Muir's first published nature
essays were scientific in nature and grew out of a geological
controversy–but it is placed within a context of physical
and emotional immersion into the wild. Muir's great contribution
to western writing was to bring the holistic or participant experience
alive, but at the same time not to relegate the intellect and
science to vagueness. Muir's writing, at its best, vivifies science.
John Muir's emergence as a mature
thinker–better said, his emergence into a radical, perhaps
historically important consciousness–began in the summer
of 1869, his "first summer in the Sierra." Thirty-one years
old, a man without a career except, as he said, to walk God's
wilderness, Muir had been offered a more or less supernumerary job as a sheepherder-supervisor. The band of two thousand sheep
trailed from the hot foothills up into the forests and finally
to the edge of the little-known alpine zone, and as the summer
developed, Muir rapidly opened out into an ecstatic, wakeful
relationship with the wild mountains, a feeling of deep continuity
which would be the basis of his understanding of geological processes,
his compassion for all life forms, and his subsequent explanation
and defense of all that was wild. His eventual command of a first-rate
prose style, which in its flexibility and emphasis upon the activity
of nature could evoke some of the excitement of a wilderness
experience, was also rooted in the awakening of 1869. That summer
was the key, and Muir was aware that something dramatic was happening
to him. On July 7, he wrote in his journal,
The traditionally limited and separate point of consciousness of Western civilization is here being
transcended. A larger, apparently limitless identity is emerging–two
years later, Muir wrote, "the solid contents of a human
soul is the whole world"
36
–which became the root of
his life and thought. From this new viewpoint, Muir was able
to see or intuit natural facts and relationships that other,
perhaps better trained, observers had not noticed. For example,
he proved that glaciers had played an important role in the formation
of Yosemite Valley, a fact that both Clarence King and Josiah
Whitney of the California Survey had missed. The important point
for Muir's own development, however,
was that his intellect was enabled and enlivened by his inner
feeling for relationship and process, his sharing with the mountains,
as it were, one body. He literally felt the mountains, lying
on boulders in order to sense their grain and possible cleavage
lines, sleeping out tentless where night happened to overtake
him, climbing numerous peaks, wading streams, and going almost
foodless, so that what he called his "loving study" could
proceed with maximum, filterless perception. Muir's studies and experiences in the Sierra suggest a revolutionary transformation or eversion of
consciousness, into a state of mind which accords with the physical
interweavings and mutualisms of ecology.
The writing which proceeded from this vision is characteristically
vivid, imagistically. But it suggests a life within the pictures
by paying attention, above all, to movement and to interconnection.
There are few static scenes in Muir's books: always the wind
is making the flower stalks nod or bending the trees in great
arcs, and the streams are catching at the downhanging grass stems
along the bank; when the sun rose over the Grand Canyon, Muir
saw it "stinging" the uppermost cliffs. Even in his later,
comparatively not so active works, such as The Yosemite (1912),
the sense of movement is basic, as in his description of the
giant sequoia:
With prose that modelled activity and the interpenetration of
subject and object, Muir was able to arouse a caring response
on the part of his readers. In The Mountains of California
(1894), Our National Parks (1901), My First Summer
in the Sierra (1911), and in the posthumously published Travels
in Alaska (1917) and Steep Trails (1918), the attempt
was to express a physical-spiritual joyfulness, an engaged awareness
which could inspire ecological sensitivity. Importantly, Muir's
initial effect was contemporaneous with the closing of the frontier,
and perhaps indicated the acceptability of a new style of thought.
His fundamental recognition was that the world is a living system,
not an endless flat plane consisting of resources which may be
used up, serially, by an always-advancing people. Nor was the
world, for Muir, an object of any sort, not
even the "pretty" sort. His is thus the first post-frontier
mind in western literature. He had the science of the great surveyors, but he went the necessary step further
to make himself completely at home in the mountains, and to become
capable of ecological vision.
The primary experience had first come to Mary Austin at the age
of six, near her family home in Illinois. Fifteen years later,
while riding in the hills near her brother's homestead in California,
she was reconfirmed in the fundamental, mystical center which
was to inspire all of her writings. As her third-person autobiography,
Earth Horizon ( 1932), has it,
Her resolute holding to this center,
and to a degree her promotion of it in her role as a literary
figure later in life, served to isolate Austin somewhat and perhaps
helped make her life more difficult. But her chosen path also
allowed her to concentrate and to see. Her neighbors in Independence,
California, after the publication of The Land of Little Rain,
could not understand how she drew so much out of the apparent
barrenness of an ordinary, vacant field next to her house. But
Austin, who unlike most of her townsmen was not looking for gold
or planning to move water, had time to look meditatively and
to see the riches in "My Neighbor's Field." She sat out
on the mesas in the same way, at the edge of the wilderness desert,
until the dry and seemingly hostile landscape became for her
a land of abundance. The ecological givens of place were not
irritations to her but matter for the opening of vision. She
spent hours of outdoor stillness to get the one right word for
the dry foothills, and got it, to her satisfaction: "puckery."
Her great contribution to the western essay is just such a distillation
and purity of image.
To Austin, however, especially in later years, this vision was
not solely imagistic but also had historical, analytic, and prophetic
aspects. When invited to a conference of prominent southwesterners
in 1927, on the subject of the proposed Boulder Dam, she alone
was outspoken against it. Man should be learning and adapting
to natural conditions, not rushing to change them. Austin's case
against dams would move no "realists," probably, but she
believed that time and the gradual influence of the land and
its native people upon the incoming races, the water movers,
would prove her right. The Southwest, she thought, the environment
itself, operating "subtly below all other types of adjustive
experience," will work to produce a new, land-harmonious culture.
It will be, she said, "the next great and fructifying
world culture."
40
This future, for Mary Austin, begins
in any moment of true seeing. To an alert mind, any natural object
will do; one could be walking casually through a stand of junipers,
surely an ordinary environment, and quite suddenly touch the
core of things. Not one of all the ways by which a tree strikes
freshly on your observation,–with a greener flush, with
stiffened needles, or slight alterations of the axis of the growing
shoots, accounts for this flash of mutual awareness. You walk a stranger in a vegetating world; then with an inward click the shutter
of some profounder level of consciousness uncloses and admits
you to sentience of the mounting sap.
41
Aesthetic communion is also the
heart of the work of John Charles Van Dyke (1856–1932),
a New Jersey librarian and professor of art history at Rutgers
College, whose experience in the West began in Minnesota in 1868
and encompassed long stays in Montana, Arizona, and California.
Again, as with Muir and Austin, the opening of perception to
a specific environment led eventually to an ecological vision
and a critique of civiliza-tion. In Nature for Its Own Sake
(1898), The Desert (1904), The Mountain
(1916), The Grand Canyon of the Colorado (1920), and The
Open Spaces
(1922), which represent Van Dyke's western writings, he covers
nearly all of the subjects of the western nature essay, and in
his firm, Muirian, antianthropocentric position, strikes the
western essay's major tone perfectly. Though he did not overtly
promote or even assert a mystical consciousness, as did Mary
Austin, there is evidence of Van Dyke's having transcended the
limited, egoistic view. Speaking of the Grand Canyon, he said,
"And we, if we would understand the Canyon, must largely
eliminate the human element of it. It is insignificant."
42
The ideal point of view, apparently,
is Mind, not ego.
The utilitarians look at it [the Colorado River]
and perhaps wonder how they can harness it, make it turn wheels,
generate electricity, or irrigate the earth. It now serves no
"purpose" and is quite "useless"–useless to man,
who still cherishes the idea that the world was made exclusively
for him.
The origin of the larger vision
is unmediated aesthetic experience– simply being aware of
light, rain clouds, color in fog banks, the lightness and drift
of clouds, the roll of the divides and swales–to list a
few of the topic headings in Nature for Its Own Sake. Van
Dyke teaches awareness by narrative example, for instance in
the opening chapter of The Mountain, an autobiographical
account of riding across the high plains of Montana toward the
Rockies, by noticing the air becoming thinner and the light brighter.
More often, he gives minutely detailed lectures in which the
usually-passed-over beauties of nature are set up for notice.
The attention to detail is extraordinary, almost dissective,
and yet the sense of the whole is kept alive, as a kind of diapason,
by the fact that all of the scenes and details are, after all,
being known by one careful, meditative consciousness. The feeling
of interested participation is great, and is one of the positive
beauties of Van Dyke's writing.
Van Dyke also directly attacked
what he considered to be false approaches to nature, for example
"fancy" and the "pathetic fallacy." Like Clarence Dutton,
he thought a stripped, illusionless and traditionless perception, unfiltered by any predisposition to
dualistic judgments, was the only means by which the wild could
be apprehended.
The fault is not in the subject [desert wildlife]. It is not
vulgar or ugly. The trouble is that we perhaps have not the proper
angle of
vision. If we understood all, we should admire all.
If we could but rid ourselves of
the false ideas, which, taken en masse, are called education,
we should know that there is nothing ugly under the sun, save
that which comes from human distortion.
46
The ideal of a direct and perfected
awareness is a major theme in the western nature essay, still
very much alive. It was clearly John Van Dyke's guiding thought,
and it led him more and more to wilderness, as an environment
conducive to such perception. "The great spaces of the wilderness
have a quality of beauty about them that no panorama of civilized
lands can equal or even suggest,"
47
he wrote in The Mountain. This
beauty was for Van Dyke not an object but a personal, mind-awakening
renewal. "He [the climber of a wilderness mountain] is back
to a primitive faith from which he never should have wandered."
48
In his autobiography, The Open
Spaces,
he describes sleeping out in the arid, spacious West, and summarizes
his thought: "What a strange feeling, sleeping under the
wide sky, that you belong only to the universe. You are back
to your habitat, to your original environment, to your native
heritage."
49
Anything less than this was, for
Van Dyke, civilized and partial, and vision-obstructing.
Muir, Austin, and Van Dyke represent the flowering of the post-frontier
vision. But it should not be supposed that the closing of the
frontier automatically or widely conferred such an outlook. Many
writers simply exploited the West as a tourist's curiosity–some
continue to do so. Some appeared to approach the level of sensitivity
of the three authors cited, but then seemed to fall short. George
Wharton James (1858–1923), for example, who praised the
curative powers of the southwestern deserts in his best book,
The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (1906), and gave tours
of the West in such works as California, Romantic and Beautiful
(1914) and Utah, Land of Blossoming Valleys (1922),
was apparently greatly attracted to the wildness of mountain
and desert which Muir and Austin had found so
meaningful. Indeed, James found
a personal regeneration in the desert after losing, in a scandal, his former career as a minister. But he wrote quickly and excitedly, as a promoter
or converter rather than one who had rested deeply in the self-nature
continuum. He described himself as having been "`on the
jump' for many years," indicating perhaps the nature of his relationship
with any one particular place.
50
Even so, there are passages in
his works, for example the last several pages of The Wonders
of the Colorado Desert, which intimate a great deal.
The lure of the desert, according
to James, is that it can deepen one who will cross the line into
wildness and revoke all former claims. "There is no knowing
of self in the whirl of the cities,"
52
he asserts. But the boosterism
in James suggests a certain incompleteness. For him, the underground
aquifers in the desert were, simply, "inexhaustible," and
should be tapped. Where John Van Dyke had argued that "the
deserts should never be reclaimed. They are the breathing-space
of the West and should be preserved forever,"
53
James rather trippingly stated,
in summarizing vast water projects in Utah, "Thus the good
work of irrigation goes on."
54
Having it both ways– the desert
is good, and reclaiming the desert is good–James shows a
positive attitude. But it is legitimate to ask if he was thinking
through the matter of aridity completely.
Authors from California and the southwestern deserts dominate
the western nature essay from the close of the frontier onward
into our time. Among the few good writers dealing with the interior,
mountain West was Enos Mills (1870–1922), a philosophical
follower of John Muir and a Colorado mountaineer of very extensive
experience in the wild. Mills's debt to Muir is clearly great–he
dedicated his first major book to Muir, quoted him at length
when the scene under discussion apparently seemed to require
an extra dimension in the writing (see Mills's Your National
Parks [1917], for example), and even used several Muirisms
in something very like their original form–but he also had
a great fund of personal experience, particularly with animals,
which enabled him to make a unique contribution to western literature.
In Wild Life on the Rockies ( 1909), The Spell of the
Rockies (1911), and Wild Animal Homesteads ( 1923),
the sense of being involved with myriad life forms–beaver,
mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, skunks, grizzlies, and a host
of birds–is particularly strong. From 1886 on, Mills spent
a great deal of time in lone mountain rambles, having as a base
camp a small cabin near Longs Peak, and he came to know the Rockies
with a lover's intimacy.
He was a true dweller. Where Henry
Thoreau had referred to himself humorously as an inspector of
snowstorms, Mills actually had a government job in precisely
that line, walking the continental divide to measure snow depth. "I lived intensely through ten
strong days and nights, and gave to my life new and rare experiences,"
he said of one inspection trip. "I went beyond the trails
and visited the silent places alone."
55
The demands of winter travel in the wilderness helped to develop
in Mills a remarkable hardiness and insouciance, which in his
accounts often reaches toward the philosophical dimension. His
writing also shows a profound understanding of territory, in
the animal-behavior sense: the absolute interdependence of animal
and habitat. Walking quietly, alone, and sitting still in concealment
for long periods, he observed intensely, and upon occasion attempted
to take part in, the often dramatic scenes unfolding around him.
He also entered the animals' home life, and in a sense did make
it his own by writing with emotion for his home ground and his
wild neighbors. This connection, like his hardiness, suggests
much, philosophically. But Mills, a self-educated man, was reticent
about deep interpretations, seeming to pass them off in almost
formulaic sentences. ("Silence sounds rhythmic to all, and
attunes all minds to the strange message, the rhapsody of the
universe,"he said once, for example, speaking of the quiet of
the high country.)
56
Chiefly, he seemed content to let
his adventures speak for themselves. His narratives showed the
wilderness as a friendly place, by and large, where night and
winter held no genuine terrors. In comparison to his contemporaries
Muir, Austin, and Van Dyke, Mills may seem less intellectual,
perhaps, less in command of the cultural references of Western
civilization; but his fearless absorption into the wild gives
his writing original life and a vivid sense of place. He was
at home in the mountains.
Mills was also, like all twentieth-century nature writers, disturbed
by the swift passing of large-scale wilderness. Like John Muir
(indeed, perhaps partly because of a youthful meeting with Muir),
he entered the political arena on the side of the shrinking wild,
using his writing to awaken readers to the awesomeness of their
moment in history. In an explosive change occupying only a few
decades, man had become capable of transforming the planet, and
of losing sight of the most fundamental connections. In Your
National Parks, Mills wrote,
Never while anything is left of me shall this first camp be forgotten. It has fairly grown into me, not merely as memory pictures, but as part and parcel of mind and body alike. The deep hopper-like hollow, with its majestic trees through which all the wonderful nights the stars poured their beauty. The flowery wildness of the high steep slope toward Brown's Flat, and its bloom-fragrance descending at the close of the still days. . . . The great sun-gold noons, the alabaster cloud-mountains, the landscape beaming with consciousness like the face of a god.
34
Two weeks later, the emergence continued.
No pain here, no dull empty hours,
no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains
are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal
hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water
is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement
of the limbs is pleasure, while the whole body seems to feel
beauty when exposed to it as it feels a campfire or sunshine,
entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's
flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure-glow
not explainable.
35
The immensely strong, stately shafts are free
of limbs for one hundred and fifty feet or so. The large limbs
reach out with equal boldness in every direction, showing no
weather side, and no other tree has foliage so densely massed,
so finely molded in outline and so perfectly subordinated to
an ideal type. A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking
branch, from five to seven feet in diameter and perhaps a thousand
years old, may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk
as if determined to break across the bounds of the regular curve,
but like all the others it dissolves in bosses of branchlets
and sprays as soon as the general outline is approached.
37
We are governed more than we know,
and most when we are wildest. Plants, animals, and stars are
all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another,
and through the midst of one another. . . .
38
Mary Austin (1868–1934) had
a similar attitude toward nature, though perhaps more forthrightly
mystical and less scientific than Muir's. She realized the importance
of the territory he had opened up, and paid him tribute in her
first book, The Land of Little Rain (1903); by the end
of her career, she had made a significant extension of the Muir
line, as it might be called, by prophesying that the consciousness
of the unity of mind and nature would become not just a literary
theme but the ground of an entirely new culture. This would happen,
according to Austin, in the American West. She also paid a good
deal of attention to Native Americans and their philosophies,
an area in which Muir had small interest, and she absolutely
relished the details of folk life on the land, finding in native
and folk adaptations instances of ecological wisdom. Her essays
on natural history, found in The Land of Little Rain, The
Flock (1906), California, the Land of the Sun (1914),
and The Land of Journeys' Ending (1924), are distinguished
by a leisurely, spacious, and at the same time almost microscopic
attention. There is no hurry in Mary Austin's books. Time and
the seasons will come around again; the flocks will be moved
a few miles a day, toward the lowlands in fall, toward the mountains
in spring; the dust devils way out on the alkali flats will whirl
again when the winds are right. The chief thing is to be alert,
unhurried, ready, because vision and the "Deep-self," her
term for the ultimate consciousness that one's self and the environment
are not two, may awaken at any time.
It was a dry April, but not entirely barren; mirages multiplied on every hand, white borage came out and blue nemophilia; where the runoff of the
infrequent rains collected in hollows, blue lupine sprang up
as though pieces of the sky had fallen. On a morning
Mary was walking down one of these,
leading her horse, and suddenly she was aware of poppies coming
up singly through the tawny, crystal-sanded soil, thin, piercing
orange-colored flames. And then the warm pervasive sweetness
of ultimate reality, the reality first encountered so long ago
under the walnut tree. Never to go away again; never to be completely
out of call. . . .
39
43
. . . . Nature neither rejoices in the life nor
sorrows in the death. She is neither good nor evil; she is only
a great law of change that passeth understanding.
44
The desert is nothing if it is not sincere.
It is sincere to brutality. Open, bare, exposed it lies, and
yet it is not dead. It is alive with a fiery aliveness that takes
you into its heart and compels you to be as it is, open, frank,
sincere.
51
Once, like a web of joy, trails overspread all the wild gardens
of the earth. The long trail is gone, and most others are cut
to pieces and ruined. The few broken remnants are but little
used.
57
If we realize that the change Mills
lamented had occurred in something less than a century–counting
from the expedition to the eastern edge of
the Rockies by Major Stephen Long
in 1820, to the publication of Mills's major Rocky Mountain books
between 1909 and 1923–we are then acquainted with the chief
thematic element in the modern western nature essay. As in Mills's own career, the wonder and the deep enjoyment of nature are encountered, and given a
bittersweet flavor, by the rising feeling that something, in
the broad historical sense, is going rapidly and vastly wrong.
Loss, particularly the loss of wilderness, casts a sundown light
over much of the nature literature of the modern time. Yet the
wild continues to be upheld, at times apparently almost in desperation,
as the archetype of harmony.
The importance of wilderness may be seen clearly in the work
of Aldo Leopold (1886–1948), Robert Marshall (1901–1939)
and Olaus Murie (1889–1963). All three had government careers
in the field of natural resources, in the courses of which they
worked successfully for wilderness protection or for "wild"
solutions to ecological problems, all had deep personal experience
of wilderness in several locations, mostly in Alaska and the
West, and each wrote influential essays on the wild. Leopold
was perhaps the most explicitly philosophical of the three, in
terms of speaking to the general human condition–his formulation
of the "Land Ethic" is one of the truly new and important
philosophical statements of the twentieth century–but Marshall
too addressed the central conflict of our time, and was especially
penetrating on the psychological necessity of wilderness. Olaus
Murie seemed, by comparison, to avoid the general or portentous,
but the practicality and simplicity of his writing seem to bespeak
the wild itself, and a life in touch with it.
Leopold, who had a Master of Forestry degree from Yale, came
to the West in 1909 and spent the next fifteen years as a forest
ranger in Arizona and New Mexico, with time off for trips into
the wilder parts of northern Mexico. In the West, he came to
know wildland as something more important than good hunting territory.
A 1922 trip to the delta of the Colorado River, in particular,
provided him with images of freshness, abundance, and order,
images of seemingly universal import; this trip may be seen as
part of the necessary foreground for the philosophy of "ecological
conscience" he later developed. By 1924 he was campaigning within
the Forest Service for a policy of wilderness protection; by
1933, with his textbook, Game Management, he was promoting
the idea of the biota as a community or system, an enormously
complex system which included man. He later termed the ecological
concept of system "the outstanding scientific discovery
of the twentieth century."
As Leopold saw it, wilderness is system, the original, the ground of being. It is also the "base line" of data which gives, or could give, reference to all human activity. But it is possible, Leopold thought, for man to so encapsulate himself within the industrial pattern that he can forget wilderness–which is to say, forget where his industry came from, and in the end essentially forget himself, becoming a caricature of alienation. Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallowminded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. 60
Robert Marshall, who along with Leopold and Murie and others founded the Wilderness Society in 1935, once wrote that he grew up regretting he had not been born
in the time of the great explorations–of Lewis and Clark,
for example. However, he went on to make four long expeditions
into the Alaskan wilderness, where he lived to a degree the "Lewis
and Clark" life, and out of this experience, coupled with his
twentiethcentury consciousness, he gave modern expression to
the psychological and spiritual value of wilderness for civilized
man. Marshall made effective what might be termed the "wilderness
corollary" to the Turner or frontier thesis of history: if the
frontier had indeed been important in shaping American institutions
and ideals, and most especially the self-reliant American psychology,
then it behooves us in the contemporary age to preserve some
land (large tracts, in fact) in a wild condition. Otherwise,
in Marshall's view, we might degenerate into the nervous little
man of the industrial dystopia, looking to vast social identities
and national confrontations for a release from the tepidity of
his existence.
In Arctic Wilderness (1956), Marshall described a world of pioneer testing and adventure. He forded rivers, climbed mountains, endured extremes of weather,
and thrilled to the opening of consciousness as he beheld range
upon range of wilderness mountains. He also kept careful records
of tree distribution (he held a Ph.D. in plant physiology), made
accurate maps, and studied the Eskimo culture with remarkable
thoroughness, his entire Alaskan experience in essence suggesting
a nineteenth-century journey by a man of science into the western
wilderness. The important addition was that Marshall also had
the twentieth-century perspective and was far from reveling in
primitivism or nostalgia.
In 1930, in an influential essay
which appeared in The Scientific Monthly, Marshall summarized
what he had learned and thought about in the wilderness. The
essay is comprehensive and historical: America stands at an important
moment, and must decide whether to keep its frontier–its
West–alive in anything greater than token size. To
make the decision by "deliberate rationality," as Marshall
recommends, the country must know what wilderness was and is,
must know its effects, and must see how its own character has
been molded by the existence of the wild. All of these topics
are covered in the essay, in such a way that finally a choice
between two fundamentally different kinds of life presents itself:
on the one hand is the "terrible neural tension of modern
existence"; on the other, a breakthrough to psychological fulfillment:
Olaus Murie, like Leopold and Marshall a trained scientist, also saw the upshot of the wilderness issue, and fought for wildland preservation for many years, first as a nonconformist within the Biological Survey and later as Director of The Wilderness Society, but his writings do not stress the grand vision so much as the particular, telling experience. In
Wapiti Wilderness (1966), a book co-authored by his wife,
Margaret E. Murie, and in Journeys to the Far North (1973),
Murie writes narratively of the wilderness base. He depicts wildlife
adventures and camp life in Wyoming, Alaska, Labrador, and the
Hudson Bay country with obvious feeling for the wild but also,
usually, with a kind of respectful reticence, as if the wilderness
would always be–should always be–beyond words.
He occasionally lets go:
Few people in our time have had
anything like the field experience of Murie, and the writing
in The Elk of North America (1951) and A Field Guide
to Animal Trucks (1954) is solid, experiential, and radiant
with the implications of wilderness experience.
Over a rise I
came upon a depression, a green meadow, in the middle of which
was a pond. A band of elk was just then coming in to water. As
they came near, some of the eager ones rushed on ahead, jumped
into the water, and romped along in the shallows, splashing the
water, shaking their heads, and hopping with the same joy that
a group of children go splashing into the water at a beach.
63
Adolph Murie (1899–1973), the younger brother of Olaus and also a government biologist for many years, likewise enjoyed a great breadth of field experience, some of the best episodes of which are described in A Naturalist in Alaska (1961). Like his brother, Adolph Murie was keenly aware of the larger issues of civilization and wilderness–A Naturalist, for example, opens with a description of Alaska as "a land where the individual is not yet swamped by numbers"–but also in the Murie manner he concentrated upon the animal life
around him, so that the implications, for example in the adjustments
of arctic animals to the boom and bust cycles of population typical
of the north, are understated and are discovered by the reader,
rather than preached at him. The same can be said of two wellknown
government reports that Adolph Murie wrote, The Ecology of
the Coyote in the Yellowstone (1940) and The Wolves of
Mount McKinley (1944), the latter a landmark study in terms
of science and perhaps one of the few examples of a twentieth-century
government document's approaching literary quality. That The
Wolves transcends mere technical writing may be shown by
Murie's description of an evening's observations:
Again, as in many episodes in the
writings of his brother Olaus, the implication is of a profound
connection having been made, and the necessity for calm awareness
and patience, so that one may be ready for such moments when
by grace they occur.
According to J. Frank Dobie (1888–1964),
who along with Roy Bedichek (1878–1959) and John Graves
(1920–) might be said to constitute the Texas school of
natural history writing, such awareness, schooled in the outdoors,
is very often a mark of great literature. What endures as quality,
in writing, comes from the land and keeps its reference to the
land. But this is not a narrowness, for in knowing a place truly,
with respect, a good writer escapes provincialism and begins
to model nothing less than excellence of mind. The commercialized
or mass-industrial type of mind, lost to the outdoors and the
land, Dobie anathematized with the adjective "jukebox."
In Guide to the Life and Literature of the Southwest, first
published in 1942, updated in 1952, and many times reprinted,
Dobie set forth his naturalistic standards and revealed at the
same time an uncommon range. He was not only a "natural
historian" of letters, but a skilled folklorist and a student
of animal life, and a commentator on humanity-in-general who
believed above all in the conclusive importance of environment.
One of the few western nature writers who was also a professor,
Dobie affected to scorn what he termed "our institutions of so-called higher learning," 65 but in fact (and almost singlehandedly for a long time) he worked to make the study of western regional literature respectable in the university.
His major ventures into natural history are The Longhorns
(1941), The Voice of the Coyote (1949), The Mustangs
(1952), and Rattlesnakes (1965). These books are marked
by a direct and informal style and a native skepticism of things
urban, new, highly publicized, or mechanical. The personality
and belief of Dobie–belief in the land, and in life lived
close to it– make of the books' typical structure, a montage
of folklore, scientific observation, personal experience, and
side-cutting commentary on modernisms of all kinds, an informed
whole. His stated philosophy is that "the coyote's howl
is more tonic than all theories about nature,"
66
but his art and thoroughness in
presenting that howl assure that his reader will nevertheless
absorb a complete theory of nature–better said, a vision
of nature. The books on the coyote and the rattlesnake are
illustrative. These two are hardhunted animals, thus not the
usual subjects of leisurely observation, and furthermore they
are surrounded by myths of several kinds from outright
legend to profound religious symbolism.
Perhaps Dobie chose them as subjects because to come to terms
with these species, to know them truly, one must discern and
then see through a great deal of human conception and projection. Under Dobie's guidance, to study
the coyote and the rattler is to study humanity and its life
with and against nature, and then suddenly, if Dobie's persuasion
has worked, to realize respect and compassion for the animals
themselves, as they are, living their lives. In the end, one
may share in the ecologist's broad-gauge consciousness. Dobie
saw things as Aldo Leopold did, or John Muir, but he expressed
that vision in terms of a
countryman's feisty allegiances.
Dobie's friend Roy Bedichek, to whom he paid his highest compliment–"He was an earth man"
68
–was also, like Dobie, an
autodidact of amazing range and depth. His great theme through
three "nature" books– Adventures with a Texas Naturalist
(1947), Karánkaway Country (1950), and The
Sense of Smell (1960)–was the same as Dobie's, and indeed
is one of the foundations of all modern nature writing: man and
nature, contrary to the economics, politics, and technology of
our recently flourishing scene, are one system; to know this
unity as a personal realization and not merely as a set of facts
is the basis of right living. Both Dobie and Bedichek argue that
to earn such a knowledge is not to engage in primitivism but
rather to extend an ancient and honorable human insight. Their
scholarship is aimed at connection.
There are some interesting differences. Bedichek is not so merry
and mischievous as Dobie, his style not so "down-home."
His vision of our time seems more melancholy. He had been vouchsafed
a profound experience of nature, an innocent ten-year-old boy's
epiphany, when riding his pony across a meadowlark-filled Texas
grassland early one morning in 1888:
My pony became quiet at last and I know not how long I sat and
looked and listened, consciousness merged in the general ecstasy
of that April morning.
69
This touchstone experience of transcendence
marked Bedichek's life. He refers to it, obliquely, as a "dedication."
It was apparently thus the root of his fierce support of wildlife, and of his
hope, later, that others of the modern time could somehow, as
he did, feel the great connection. His writings seem to indicate
that such a man must only wonder, perhaps, and become as the
years go by more than a little saddened, at the general and seemingly
accepted alienation which is everywhere created as the upshot
of progress. Of the fragile and precious coast where the last
whooping cranes winter, Bedichek wrote in 1950:
Karánkaway Country, from
which this passage comes, is marked by a subtly increasing anger,
as the book enlarges from its original concern with the Gulf
Coast between Corpus Christi and Galveston to include almost
all of the watersheds of Texas. All is connected, ecologically:
Bedichek cannot discuss the silt that is choking the mouths of
the rivers, and ruining the shellfish grounds, without addressing
the upstream problems; and here one must confront the builders
of dams–to find that the bigger the project, the more likely
are its promoters to know nothing about the decisive subtleties
of ecology, or its interlocking of all things.
However, sacred rage is only one of Bedichek's voices. Just as
often, he is meditative, curious, studiously reporting his own
experience with wildlife or that of others he has learned about,
venturing interpretations, appearing to seek always a more intimate
view, a new or closer understanding of nature that may prefigure
communion. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist is slow-paced,
Thoreauvian. It is a series of carefully-thought-out meditations
on diversity and stability, the keys to the wild. The main theme,
and the standard for analysis, is the health that naturally obtains
before the simplifications wrought by civilization–by some
types of civilization. This health is indicated persuasively
by Bedichek's own joy of perception: seeing a male vermilion
flycatcher displaying for the female his fiery hue, or a small
snake patiently swallowing a frog of twice its own diameter,
or a fallen sweet gum tree, disintegrating amid a riot of new-grown
flowers and nectar-seeking insects. His tone is vital and interested,
carrying the feeling that whatever one may know or learn, there
is always more.
First with Goodbye to a River (1960), which has earned
a place as a minor classic in western letters, then with an essay
entitled "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" in the Sierra Club's
book, The Water Hustlers (1971), and more recently with
Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land (1974),
and Texas Heartland (1975), John Graves has moved toward
the front rank of contemporary western nature writers. In
the tradition of Dobie and Bedichek, his works are founded on
research into the folklore and history of his chosen place–north-central
Texas–on a sound ecological sense, and in recent years on
a landsman's working connection with his home ground. Graves
is an amateur naturalist, a farmer after the style of Aldo Leopold
(having purchased a rundown homestead and attempted to restore
it to health, as Leopold did with his "Sand County," Wisconsin,
farm), a writer and professor, and a contemplative. His is a
voice of the edgelands, rural country rather than the deep wilderness,
and in this too he resembles his two great Texas forebears. Typically
in his writings, Graves drifts in a canoe down a river, sits
before a campfire, or lays stonework at his place, thinks of
others who have done these things before him, thinks of his reasons
for doing what he is doing, notes with sharp perception the life
that is going on around him, and gradually is moved to deeper
reflection, understated almost always, but provocative and widely
applicable. It is the general manner of Gilbert White, or Thoreau,
or Henry Beston. The subject matter is practical consciousness
awakening to its revelatory but heretofore ordinary surroundings
and daily life.
Goodbye to a River, as the title implies, is an elegy–for
a section of the Brazos River about to be dammed, for a Texas
that once was and the youth that was lived there, for many good
things that seem to be going under. However, the book does not
read in that summary fashion, for Graves's sentences and thoughts
are not predictable. His sympathies are plain, but the expression
is not righteous or programmatic. He makes mistakes and admits
them, surprises himself, and seems to be discovering what he
is writing about as he goes along. As his canoe drops down the
Brazos he resolves not to shoot any more ducks except in real
need. Hard upon this promise, "Three green-winged teal from
a big flock of them turned and bulleted back past me very high.
I led the lowest one by perhaps twelve feet and fired. . . ."
This projection of a fallible persona, pretty much the mode throughout
his writings, seems to indicate that Graves is realistically
in touch with his own membership in the modern scene. He says
in Hard Scrabble that he "does not seek to grind
large axes or to give large answers."
72
Thus there is a more complex, or
perhaps more mixed, consciousness than that projected in the
books of Dobie or Bedichek. But Graves's reticence is severely
tested on occasion. In The Water Hustlers, for example,
after giving a restrained but telling analysis of one of the
more egregiously anti-ecological proposals in history (the "Texas
Water Plan" of 1968), he struggles with the urge to fight fire
with fire. "One would just as soon not wax shrill and indignant
and earnest, there being so much shrillness all around us as it is, and so much Christlike earnestness."
73
Sweet reason is best. But two pages
later, as if finally giving in to the joy and freedom of polemic,
he appears to relish the delivery of an acidly phrased series
of rhetorical questions, the upshot of which is that modern,
technology-dependent life may become, quite logically and unknowingly,
monstrous.
A persistent theme in the western
nature essay has been the apparent need for civilized man, when
confronting the wild, to develop clearer ways of seeing and a
clearer consciousness in general. Several western writers have
stated explicitly that wilderness on the scale of the West called
for a new approach or a new mentality; a number of others, upon
entering the West, doubted in print that their language–that
is, we may say by extension, the whole set of paradigms they
brought with them–could adequately convey what they were
seeing. There were new ranges of experience here. It is as if
the strangeness of immense space, the frequent feeling of removal
from traditional props, and the immersion into the moving, natural
world of wildlife illuminated the European-derived mind somewhat,
with the effect that its conventional, verbal, dualistic nature
became apparent to itself. But what then? The great challenge,
which perhaps is fudged by writers who fall back onto the "picturesque"
or "sublime" modes, but is bravely attempted by some few
of a more daring cast of personality–Muir, say, or Austin–is
to break through the received frames of reference into something
less rigidly dualistic and alienated, something wilder. Muir
and Austin found a participative, that is, transcendental or
"mystical" approach congenial. Not many have followed these
two all the way, but they indicate forthrightly a general path
upon which most have at least stepped.
Precisely this theme of mind seemed to preoccupy John Steinbeck
on his one venture into natural history, a biological expedition
to the Gulf of California in 1940 with his mentor Edward Ricketts.
As is shown in the literary record of that trip, The Log from
the Sea of Cortez (1941; 1951), when Ricketts and Steinbeck
came to the extensive wilderness of Baja California, and plunged
into the swarming life of its tide pools, their shipboard and
campfire reflections increasingly turned on what was proper,
accurate thinking, and what was not. It is as if the wilderness
inspired them with a certain urgency to sort through accumulated
patterns of consciousness, rejecting all that was wishful or
false, looking for bedrock truths. The upshot of their reflections,
given in a chapter entitled "March 24, Easter Sunday," which
was apparently written originally by Ricketts,
74
is that "teleological thinking,"
the goal-oriented, emotionally attached and reductionist mentality
which dominates Western civilization, is something to be outgrown.
"Non-teleological thinking," by contrast, which does not
break down the totality of things into simplified, linear cause-and-effect
but instead concentrates upon what is and attempts
to "live into" it, is desirable, because it is open to the
ecological, relational nature of nature. Teleological thinking
is frontier-minded thinking, in which the self is an entity confronting
a separate world of objects. Non-teleological thinking, ultimately,
foregoes projections and undue attachment to self and becomes,
the authors argue, "deeper and participating, possibly encompassing
the Oriental concept of being."
75
We see Steinbeck and Ricketts here edging into the "perennial philosophy," to use the phrase of Leibniz and of Aldous Huxley, and in American western terms, into what might be called the wilderness mind. As they traveled
deeper into the wild, and measured their own minds by its implicit
standard, they came closer to a holistic, Muirian point of view.
The movement is so widely shared among western writers that it
almost seems inevitable: go into the wild; start to think "wildly."
Finally, in the "Introduction" to the Log, and as
a fitting epigraph to a book written at the dawn of the world-war,
world-technology era, Steinbeck recorded a powerful, wilderness-inspired
insight: We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in
a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the
tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging
with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly
destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with
the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region.
That isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles
away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved
thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.
76
Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970),
perhaps the best-known western nature writer and regarded by
many as one of the most profound, philosophically, also was deeply
interested in the epistemological questions which wilderness
seems to arouse. In The Voice of the Desert (1954), he
reflected upon the traditional, Lockean dualism of Western civilization,
and questioned how well it fit the systematic, holistic world
he was then learning, in his first years of desert study.
Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate
upon which anything may be written. Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously
toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps
it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares nature's
intentions.
Krutch also questioned the ancient
Western denial of mind and emotion to
the so-called lower forms of life.
In The Desert Year (1952), his first western book, he faced the "pathetic fallacy" squarely:
In The Great Chain of Life (1956),
Krutch repeatedly affirmed a view of animals that was more than
merely sympathetic. Man and the other animals are a continuum
of life and consciousness, and as such an aspect of a great,
overall, interpenetrating system. There is no good reason, according
to Krutch, to suppose that when a bird sings it is not motivated
by happiness and confidence as much as by some mechanical announcement
of territory. Furthermore, and this point is crucial to understanding
Krutch's own philosophical development, man can share the joy
of animals, and in so doing overcome some of the sophisticated
alienation which darkens our time.
These ideas are particularly interesting in light of their author's
point of view some twenty-five years earlier, when in The
Modern Temper (1929) he had stated conclusively that "Humanism"
and "Nature" were "fundamentally antithetical." He
had ended that book with a classic formulation of Western dualism:
"Ours is a lost cause and there is no place for us in the
natural universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human.
We should rather die as men than live as animals."
79
A few years later, in a series
of articles for The Nation entitled "Was Europe a
Success?" Krutch concluded that indeed it had been, and he mentioned
in particular European philosophy as being one of "mankind's
most precious achievements." By the middle 1930s, then, Krutch
seemed to have arrived at a paradox: his culture was the best
that mankind could attain to, but it appeared nevertheless to
be a kind of dead end. At the end of its great course lay only
a knowing, urban pessimism.
Krutch's intellectual life for the next forty years may be described
as a recovery from that psychological impasse, a slowly accelerating
turn toward a positively conceived holism in which, finally,
wilderness played a great part. The writing of a biography of
Henry David Thoreau, published in 1948, was important to his
change, but a sabbatical year in the Arizona desert in 1950,
during which he decided to move to the West, was decisive. The
rest of Krutch's life was spent in a study of the desert in the
Southwest and in Baja California. He made many trips to Baja,
beginning in 1958, and there came into his closest contact
with the wild. The great contrast between the quiet, pristine
quality of a then-little-visited land and the furious development
of his own Arizona made the modern situation more clear to him
than ever, but in a very different way from that portrayed in
The Modern Temper. He came to recognize alienation, certainly,
but not as a given–rather, as a cultural artifact. His sense
of wilderness, as the pattern which connects and instructs, became
confirmed. In one of his final essays, Krutch turned one hundred
and eighty degrees away from The Modern Temper to state
that wilderness, besides being the expression of ultimate systematic
health, also represents a saving spiritual allegiance.
The themes of solitude and self-sufficiency
in wilderness, long present at the experiential core of the nature
essay, have been brought to perhaps quintessential expression
in the work of Welsh-born Colin Fletcher (1922–). Author
of the immensely popular The Complete Walker, Fletcher
often deals specifically, even minutely, with technical aspects
of backcountry travel. In his case, though, equipment seems to
be merely the means to freeing up time in which a leisurely,
reflective frame of mind may develop. Fletcher's specifically
western works, The Thousand-Mile Summer and The Man
Who Walked Through Time, are marked by introspection and
by the quickened, whole-body sense of one's environment that
solitary backpacking may bring on. There is a strong sense of
place in these books, and a parallel sense of perceptual clarification.
At the close of The Thousand-Mile Summer, after six months
of walking northward across the diversity of California, Fletcher
found himself loath to quit the march. He had come all the way
from Mexico and now stood at the Oregon border; six months of
route-figuring, shelter-finding, food-preparing, and simply moving
ahead under a heavy pack had not only straightened out the lines
of his life and created a certain competence, but had also, perhaps
inevitably, built an identity. Fear of the "letdown and
emptiness that can come at the end of something" came to him.
Simplicity, though, might in fact be transferable: "I walked
down through the trees toward the road that would take me back
to San Francisco and everything the city now offered." Renewal
through wilderness experience, specifically the enlivening of
the mind to small, simple things, is an old theme in the nature
essay; Fletcher's witness is that it continues to exert a deep
pull, even (or especially) in our urban, technical time.
Edward Abbey (1927–) is also
concerned with mind and wilderness, and in Desert Solitaire
(1968), his major nonfiction work, he shows a strong desire
for a clarified, illusionless consciousness with which to know
the desert. The sense is that in the very seeing,
in the meeting with raw nature in what might be its most portentous
aspect–dry wilderness–something profoundly meaningful
could be enacted. One must be extraordinarily careful not to
let conventions distort the precious moment. A purely subjective
or idealistic mode of consciousness would result in "not
a picture of the external reality but simply a mirror of the
thinker." At the opposite, objective end, one would be "separating
too deeply the observer and the thing observed . . . and again
falsifying our view of the world."
81
The ideal is a perception that
transcends the dualism: Abbey says he "dream[s] of a hard
and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the
nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual,
separate."
82
With that, presumably, one would
know and be, simultaneously. One would have entered
the paradox of nature, of the wild universe, in which systematic
unity and selfhood coexist. The genuine realization or accomplishment
of this state would seem to place one in the company of the enlightened;
Abbey says he only "dreams" of it.
With this philosophicaland psychological quest Abbey demonstrates
an inherent significance in nature writing. He is also making
a contemporary statement of one of the western essay's ancient
and recurrent concerns. But the quest is not his only theme.
He is probably best known, in fact, for his cinematic, rhythmic
presentations of landscape, and for his spirited, noholds-barred
defense of the wilderness. Describing the view from a side-door
Pullman in 1944, when he first traveled into the West, Abbey
says,
In the struggle to defend wilderness, Abbey uses a first-person narrative point of view, and cuts and rips the commercial spirit of the times, technological power out of control, institutionalized laziness symbolized by automobiles and power lines running everywhere across the land, the arrogance of some politicians and bureaucrats, the ecological ignorance of these same and of economic boosters who see no limits in nature, and the timidity and insularity of all who somehow fail to hear the cry of the wilderness as it goes under. Clearly, in Abbey's view, we are in something like the last days, and strong measures are required. In Desert Solitaire, Slickrock (1971), Cactus Country (1973), and in The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West (1977), he has established a presence more militant than that of any other major western writer.
In a time like this, Abbey seems to be saying, what must be guarded
above all is the moment and the place wherein free, unmediated
perception, and perhaps the dreamed-of ultimate connection, may
occur. The ideal is leisure for the free play of the mind, together
with its natural partner, the unspoiled clarity and rightness
of wilderness. Upon this protected base, which Abbey refers to
as "something entirely different" (different from capitalism
or socialism, or indeed any "ism"), a sane society might
conceivably evolve. Meanwhile, Abbey's persona as a writer revels
in what free time and free place are yet available. In Desert
Solitaire he speaks with great affection of his first two
seasons as a ranger in Arches National Monument, "when the
tourist business was poor and the time passed extremely slowly,
as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious
and free as the summers of childhood."
84
Independence of convention, love
of wilderness, nostalgia for freedom, serious searching for psychological
wholeness-with-nature, and righteous defense of the wild–all
of the major themes in the western nature essay–come to
fresh expression in Abbey's popular and influential writing.
Adventure, whether physical or mental, implies breaking into
unpenetrated ground, venturing beyond the boundary of normal
aptitude, extending oneself to the limit of capacity, courageously
facing peril. Life without the chance for such exertions would
be for many persons a dreary game, scarcely bearable in its horrible
banality.
61
Now, by the alchemy of moonlight, all
was transformed into a soft duotone of black and silver. The
tiny meadow lay silver bright, overlaid with a dark tracery of
moon shadows from the pines. On the forest floor about our tent
lay the same network of shadowy limbs and twigs, while in the
deeper woods a few gleams penetrated in scattered flecks that
silvered the underbrush. We scarcely broke the silence with speech.
62
On May 31 I
left the lookout at 8:30 p. m. since the wolves seemed, after
some indications of departure, to have settled down again. But
as I looked back from the river bar on my way to camp I saw the
two blacks and the two gray males assembled on the skyline, wagging
their tails and frisking together. There they all howled, and
while they howled the gray female galloped up from the den 100
yards and joined them. She was greeted with energetic tail wagging and general
good feeling. Then the vigorous actions came to an end, and five
muzzles pointed skyward. Their howling floated softly across
the tundra.
64
When I remember their [coyotes'] derision of
campfires, their salutes to the rising moon, their kinship cries
to stars and silences, I am ten thousand times more grateful
to them than I am to the makers of the blaring radios and ringing
telephones that index the high standard of American living.
67
My whole world was green and blue, except for the flowers and
the bicolored breasts of those proud and joyous birds. And the
chorus was also green and blue out of which shot skyward bursts
of individual song, like the brilliant flowers springing up here
and there in sudden rapture out of the communal happiness of
the level, grassy meadow, bordered by trees of deeper green.
But worst of
all, and as a final debauchment of these virgin marshes, are
the oil "developers" pushing in for the final squeeze, making
their seismographic surveys, which involve earth jarring, subterranean
peals of artificial thunder as well as terrific underwater explosions,
occasionally blowing out a deadly "oil slick" to mess up
the waters of a bay-deadly, I mean to all avian life.
70
Let us not say that this animal or even this
plant has "become adapted" to desert conditions. Let us
say rather that they have all shown courage and ingenuity in
making the best of the world as they found it. And let us remember
that if to use such terms in connection with them is a fallacy
then it can only be somewhat less a fallacy to use the same terms
in connection with ourselves.
78
Faith in wildness, or in nature as a creative
force, has the deeper, possibly the deepest, significance for
our future. It is a philosophy, a faith; it is even, if you like,
a religion. It puts our ultimate trust, not in human intelligence,
but in whatever it is that created human intelligence and is,
in the long run, more likely than we to solve our problems.
80
Proud of my freedom and hobohood I stood in the doorway of the
boxcar, rocking with the motion of the train, ears full of the
rushing wind and the clattering wheels, and stared and stared
and stared, like a starving man, at the burnt, barren, bold,
bright landscape passing before my eyes. Telegraph poles flashed
by close to the tracks, the shining wires dipped and rose, dipped
and rose; but beyond the line and the road and the nearby ridges,
the queer foreign shapes of mesa and butte seemed barely to move
at all; they revolved slowly at an immense distance, strange
right-angled promontories of rose-colored rock that remained
in view, from my slowly altering perspective, for an hour, for
two hours, at a time.
83
Notes 1. Henry Beston, "Foreword," in Herbert Faulkner West, The Nature Writers (Brattleboro, Vermont: Stephen Daye Press, 1939), pp. 5–6.
2. Mary Austin, The Lands of the Sun (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), p. 19.
3. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806 (New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959), pp. 334–335.
4. Washington Irving, Astoria, edited by Edgeley W. Todd (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), p. 170.
5. Thomas Nuttall, A Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, During the Year 1819 (Philadelphia: Thos. H. Palmer, 1821). Rpt. in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1905), vol. XIII, pp. 218–219.
6. Thwaites, ed., vol. XIII, pp. 161–162.
7. Thwaites, ed., vol. XIII, p. 101.
8. F. Andrew Michaux, The North American Sylva. (Volumes 4 and 5 by Thomas Nuttall.) Philadelphia: Rice, Rutter & Co., 1865, vol. 4, p. 10.
9. Michaux, vol. 4, pp. 74–75.
10. John I. Merritt III, "Naturalists Across the Rockies," The American West 14 (March-April 1977): 8.
11. John K.Townsend, Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River, and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, &c. (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1839). Rpt. in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1905), vol. XXI, p. 194.
12. Alexander Philip Maximilian, Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832– 1834, in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), vol. XXII, p. 299.
13. Thwaites, ed., vol. XXIII, pp. 176–177.
14. Townsend, Narrative, p. 258.
15. Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, n.d.), p. 27.
16. Russell, p. 46.
17. Russell, p. 118.
18. J.C. Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843–'44 (Washington: U.S. Senate, 1845), p. 66.
19. Frémont, p. 69.
20. Howard Stansbury, Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1852), p. 172.
21. Stansbury, p. 179.
22. Francis P. Farquhar, ed., Up and Down California in 1860–1864 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. x.
23. Farquhar, ed., pp. 174–175. 24. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford university Press, 1973), p. 179.
25. Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1963), p. 1.
26. Farquhar, ed., pp. 520–521.
27. King, p. 32.
28. King, pp. 23–24.
29. Wallace Stegner, "The Scientist as Artist: Clarence E. Dutton and the Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District," The American West 15 (May-June 1978): 19.
30. Clarence E. Dutton, Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880), p. 3.
31. Clarence E. Dutton, Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882), p. 90. 32. Dutton, Tertiary History, p. 56.
33. Dutton, Tertiary History, pp. 55–56.
34. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), pp. 83–85. (First published in 1911.)
35. Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, p. 131.
36. John Muir, Letters to a Friend (Dunwoody, Georgia: Norman S. Berg, 1973), p. 161. (First published in 1915.)
37. John Muir, The Yosemite (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1962), p. 99. (First published in 1912.)
38. John Muir, "Wild Wool," The Overland Monthly 5 (April 1875): 364.
39. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), p. 198.
40. Mary Austin, The Land of Journeys' Ending (New York: Century, 1924), pp. 441–442.
41. Austin, The Land of Journeys' Ending, p. 40.
42. John C. Van Dyke, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), p. 17.
43. Van Dyke, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado, p. 130.
44. John C. Van Dyke, The Desert (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904), p. 129.
45. Van Dyke, The Desert, p. 173.
46. Van Dyke, The Desert, p, 192.
47. John C. Van Dyke, The Mountain (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), pp. 68–69.
48. Van Dyke, The Mountain, p. 198.
49. John C. Van Dyke, The Open Spaces (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), p. 20.
50. George Wharton James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906), p. 76.
51. James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, p. 531.
52. James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, p. 532.
53. Van Dyke, The Desert, p. 59.
54. George Wharton James, Utah, Land of Blossoming Valleys (Boston: The Page Company, 1922), p. 205.
55. Enos A. Mills, Wild Life on the Rockies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), pp. 3, 5.
56. Mills, Wild Life on the Rockies, p. 254.
57. Enos A. Mills, Your National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), p. 393.
58. Aldo Leopold, Round River (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 146.
59. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 224–225.
60. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, pp. 200–201.
61. Robert Marshall, "The Problem of the Wilderness," The Scientific Monthly 7 (February 1930): 143.
62. Margaret E. and Olaus Murie, Wapiti Wilderness (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1966), p.47.
63. Olaus Murie, A Field Guide to Animal Trucks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954, pp. 272–275.
64. Adolph Murie, The Wolves of Mount McKinley (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1944), pp. 31–32.
65. J. Frank Dobie, "Pertinences and Patrons," in Dobie, Mody C. Boatright and Harry H. Ransom, eds., Coyote Wisdom (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1938), p. 6.
66. J. Frank Dobie, Guide to the Life and Literature of the Southwest (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952), p. 149.
67. J. Frank Dobie, The Voice of the Coyote (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949), p. 29.
68. J. Frank Dobie, "Foreword," in Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 7.
69. Roy Bedichek, Karánkaway Country (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), p. xxii. (Originally published in 1950.)
70. Bedichek, p. 25.
71. John Graves, Goodbye to a River (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1960), p. 290.
72. John Graves, Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land (New York: A. A. Knopf, 19741, p. 5.
73. Robert H. Boyle, John Graves, and T. H. Watkins, The Water Hustlers (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1971), p. 111.
74. Richard Astro, "Steinbeck and Ricketts: Escape or Commitment in The Sea of Cortez?" Western American Literature 6 (Summer 1971): 117.
75. John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), p. 151.
76. Steinbeck, pp. 3–4.
77. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1954), p. 218.
78. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1952), pp. 28–29.
79. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 249.
80. Joseph Wood Krutch, "If You Don't Mind My Saying So," The American Scholar 39 (Spring 1970): 204.
81. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 240.
82. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p. 6.
83. Edward Abbey, The Journey Home (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), pp. 10–11.
84. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p. xii.
Selected Bibliography There is not very much critical literature on western nature writing–almost nothing, in fact, in comparison to that on western fiction or poetry. The following list is meant to include the most important primary sources. I have also included three critical studies which emphasize the psychological and cultural importance of the experience of nature.
Abbey, Edward. Abbey's Road. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979. The Introduction is a forthright statement on the writer in the West; the essays are crusty, various, sometimes surprising.
. Cactus Country. New York: Time-Life Books, 1973. The Lower Sonoran desert, with iconoclastic commentary on man's impact and related subjects.
Austin, Mary. Earth Horizon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. A fearless and searching autobiography, especially in the early chapters.
Bedichek, Roy. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1947. The essay on fences is a small masterpiece of ecological understanding.
Boyle, Robert H., John Graves, and T. H. Watkins. The Water Hustlers. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1971. Three big water projects in Texas, California, and New York dissected; their promoters deservedly pilloried.
Burdick, Arthur J. The Mystic Mid-Region. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904. Travelogue to the Mohave, with emphasis on the ways of burros and prospectors.
Colby, William E., ed. John Muir's Studies in the Sierra. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1960. Muir at his most scientific, proving his glacier theory of the Sierra's history.
Craighead, Frank. Track of the Grizzly. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979. An account of a long-term study in the Yellowstone area, with suggestions for management. Deeply informed by ecological sensitivity.
Dobie, J. Frank. Guide to the Life and Literature of the Southwest. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952 Well-ventilated with fresh, outdoor air.