Lesson One
Our National Parks, by John Muir
NOTE: This is an excerpt. For the full document, see Our
National Parks in The Evolution of the Conservation
Movement, 1850-1920
.
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OUR NATIONAL PARKS
CHAPTER I
THE WILD PARKS AND FOREST RESERVATIONS
OF THE WEST
"Keep not standing fix'd and rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam;
Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,
And stout heart are still at home.
In each land the sun does visit
We are gay, whate'er betide:
To give room for wandering is it
That the world was made so wide."
The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to
see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning
to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is
a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only
as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and
the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and
enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of
rust and disease. Briskly venturing and
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roaming, some are washing off sins and cobweb cares of the devil's
spinning in all-day storms on mountains; sauntering in rosiny pinewoods
or in gentian meadows, brushing through chaparral, bending down and parting
sweet, flowery sprays; tracing rivers to their sources, getting in touch
with the nerves of Mother Earth; jumping from rock to rock, feeling the
life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise,
and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness. This is fine
and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the
care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the
half wild parks and gardens of towns. Even the scenery habit in its most
artificial forms, mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees
arrayed more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game
with red umbrellas, -even this is encouraging, and may well be regarded
as a hopeful sign of the times.
All the Western mountains are still rich in wildness, and by means of
good roads are being brought nearer civilization every year. To the sane
and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search
of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever
they chance to be. Like Thoreau they see forests in orchards and patches
of huckleberry brush, and oceans in ponds and
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Illustration
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Map showing
LOCATION AND EXTENT
OF THE
FOREST RESERVES NATIONAL PARKS
IN
WESTERN UNITED STATES
To 3rd, August, 1901.
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drops of dew. Few in these hot, dim, strenuous times are quite sane
or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so
much good and making so much money,-or so little,-they are no longer good
for themselves.
When, like a merchant taking a list of his goods, we take stock of our
wildness, we are glad to see how much of even the most destructible kind
is still unspoiled. Looking at our continent as scenery when it was all
wild, lying between beautiful seas, the starry sky above it, the starry
rocks beneath it, to compare its sides, the East and the West, would be
like comparing the sides of a rainbow. But it is no longer equally beautiful.
The rainbows of to-day are, I suppose, as bright as those that first spanned
the sky; and some of our landscapes are growing more beautiful from year
to year, notwithstanding the clearing, trampling work of civilization.
New plants and animals are enriching woods and gardens, and many landscapes
wholly new, with divine sculpture and architecture, are just now coming
to the light of day as the mantling folds of creative glaciers are being
withdrawn, and life in a thousand cheerful, beautiful forms is pushing
into them, and new-born rivers are beginning to sing and shine in them.
The old rivers, too, are growing longer, like healthy trees, gaining new
branches and lakes as the residual glaciers at their highest sources on
the
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mountains recede, while the rootlike branches in the flat deltas are
at same time spreading farther and wider into the seas and making new lands.
Under the control of the vast mysterious forces of the interior of the
earth all the continents and islands are slowly rising or sinking. Most
of the mountains are diminishing in size under the wearing action of the
weather, though a few are increasing in height and girth, especially the
volcanic ones, as fresh floods of molten rocks are piled on their summits
and spread in successive layers, like the wood-rings of trees, on their
sides. New mountains, also, are being created from time to time as islands
in lakes and seas, or as subordinate cones on the slopes of old ones, thus
in some measure balancing the waste of old beauty with new. Man, too, is
making many far-reaching changes. This most influential half animal, half
angel is rapidly multiplying and spreading, covering the seas and lakes
with ships, the land with huts, hotels, cathedrals, and clustered city
shops and homes, so that soon, it would seem, we may have to go farther
than Nansen to find a good sound solitude. None of Nature's landscape are
ugly so long as they are wild; and much, we can say comfortingly, must
always be in great part wild, particularly the sea and the sky, the floods
of light from the stars, and the warm, unspoilable heart of the earth,
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infinitely beautiful, though only dimly visible to the eye of imagination.
The geysers, too, spouting from the hot underworld; the steady, long-lasting
glaciers on the mountains, obedient only to the sun; Yosemite domes and
the tremendous grandeur of rocky caons and mountains in general,-these
must always be wild, for man can change them and mar them hardly more than
can the butterflies that hover above them. But the continent's outer beauty
is fast passing away, especially the plant part of it, the most destructible
and most universally charming of all.
Only thirty years ago, the great Central Valley of California, five
hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, was one bed of golden and purple
flowers. Now it is ploughed and pastured out of existence, gone forever,-scarce
a memory of it left in fence corners and along the bluffs of the streams.
The gardens of the Sierra, also, and the noble forests in both the reserved
and unreserved portions are sadly hacked and trampled, notwithstanding,
the ruggedness of the topography,-all excepting those of the parks guarded
by a few soldiers. In the noblest forests of the world, the ground, once
divinely beautiful, is desolate and repulsive, like a face ravaged by disease.
This is true also of many other Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain valleys
and forests. The same fate, sooner or later, is
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awaiting them all, unless awakening public opinion comes forward to
stop it. Even the great deserts in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico,
which offer so little to attract settlers, and which a few years ago pioneers
were afraid of, as places of desolation and death, are now taken as pastures
at the rate of one or two square miles per cow, and of course their plant
treasures are passing away,-the delicate abronias, phloxes, gilias, etc.
Only a few of the bitter, thorny, unbitable shrubs are left, and the sturdy
cactuses that defend themselves with bayonets and spears.
Most of the wild plant wealth of the East also has vanished,-gone into
dusty history. Only vestiges of its glorious prairie and woodland wealth
remain to bless humanity in boggy, rocky, unploughable places. Fortunately,
some of these are purely wild, and go far to keep Nature's love visible.
White water-lilies, with rootstocks deep and safe in mud, still send up
every summer a Milky Way of starry, fragrant flowers around a thousand
lakes, and many a tuft of wild grass waves its panicles on mossy rocks,
beyond reach of trampling feet, in company with saxifrages, bluebells,
and ferns. Even in the midst of farmers fields, precious sphagnum bogs,
too soft for the feet of cattle, are preserved with their charming plants
unchanged,-chiogenes, Andromeda, Kalmia, Linna, Arethusa, etc. Calypso
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borealis still hides in the arbor vit swamps of Canada, and away to
the southward there are a few unspoiled swamps, big ones, where miasma,
snakes, and alligators, like guardian angels, defend their treasures and
keep them as pure as paradise. And beside a that and a that, the East is
blessed with good winters and blossoming clouds that shed white flowers
over all the land, covering every scar and making the saddest landscape
divine at least once a year.
The most extensive, least spoiled, and most unspoilable of the gardens
of the continent are the vast tundras of Alaska. In summer they extend
smooth, even, undulating, continuous beds of flowers and leaves from about
lat. 62 to the shores of the Arctic Ocean; and in winter sheets of snowflowers
make all the country shine, one mass of white radiance like a star. Nor
are these Arctic plant people the pitiful frost-pinched unfortunates they
are guessed to be by those who have never seen them. Though lowly in stature,
keeping near the frozen ground as if loving it, they are bright and cheery,
and speak Nature's love as plainly as their big relatives of the South.
Tenderly happed and tucked in beneath downy snow to sleep through the long,
white winter, they make haste to bloom in the spring without trying to
grow tall, though some rise high enough to ripple and wave in the wind,
and display masses of color,-yellow, purple, and blue, -so
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rich that they look like beds of rainbows, and are visible miles and
miles away.
As early as June one may find the showy Geum glaciale in flower, and
the dwarf willows putting forth myriads of fuzzy catkins, to be followed
quickly, especially on the dryer ground, by mertensia, eritrichium, polemonium,
oxytropis, astragalus, lathyrus, lupinus, myosotis, dodecatheon, arnica,
chrysanthemum, nardosmia, saussurea, senecio, erigeron, matrecaria, caltha,
valeriana, stellaria, Tofieldia, polygonum, papaver, phlox, lychnis, cheiranthus,
Linna, and a host of drabas, saxifrages, and heathworts, with bright stars
and bells in glorious profusion, particularly Cassiope, Andromeda, ledum,
pyrola, and vaccinium, -Cassiope the most abundant and beautiful of them
all. Many grasses also grow here, and wave fine purple spikes and panicles
over the other flowers,-poa, aira, calamagrostis, alopecurus, trisetum,
elymus, festuca, glyceria, etc. Even ferns are found thus far north, carefully
and comfortably unrolling their precious fronds, -aspidium, cystopteris,
and woodsia, all growing on a sumptuous bed of mosses and lichens; not
the scaly lichens seen on rails and trees and fallen logs to the southward,
but massive, roundheaded, finely colored plants like corals, wonderfully
beautiful, worth going round the world to see. I should like to mention
all the plant friends I found in a summer's wanderings in
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this cool reserve, but I fear few would care to read their names, although
everybody, I am sure, would love them could they see them blooming and
rejoicing at home.
On my last visit to the region about Kotzebue sound, near the middle
of September, 1881, the weather was so fine and mellow that it suggested
the Indian summer of the Eastern States. The winds were hushed, the tundra
glowed in creamy golden sunshine, and the colors of the ripe foliage of
the heathworts, willows, and birch-red, purple, and yellow, in pure bright
tones-were enriched with those of berries which were scattered everywhere,
as if they had been showered from the clouds like hail. When I was back
a mile or two from the shore, reveling in this color-glory, and thinking
how fine it would be could I cut a square of the tundra sod of conventional
picture size, frame it, and hang it among the paintings on my study walls
at home, saying to myself, "Such a Nature painting taken at random from
any part of the thousand-mile bog would make the other pictures look dim
and coarse," I heard merry shouting, and, looking round, saw a band of
Eskimos-men, women, and children, loose and hairy like wild animals -running
towards me. I could not guess at first what they were seeking, for they
seldom leave the shore; but soon they told me, as they threw themselves
down, sprawling and laughing,
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on the mellow bog, and began to feast on the berries. A lively picture
they made, and a pleasant one, as they frightened the whirring ptarmigans,
and surprised their oily stomachs with the beautiful acid berries of many
kinds, and filled sealskin bags with them to carry away for festive days
in winter.
Nowhere else on my travels have I seen so much warm-blooded, rejoicing
life as in this grand Arctic reservation, by so many regarded as desolate.
Not only are there whales in abundance along the shores, and innumerable
seals, walruses, and white bears, but on the tundras great herds of fat
reindeer and wild sheep, foxes, hares, mice, piping marmots, and birds.
Perhaps more birds are born here than in any other region of equal extent
on the continent. Not only do strong-winged hawks, eagles, and water-fowl,
to whom the length of the continent is merely a pleasant excursion, come
up here every summer in great numbers, but also many short-winged warblers,
thrushes, and finches, repairing hither to rear their young in safety,
reinforce the plant bloom with their plumage, and sweeten the wilderness
with song; flying all the way, some of them, from Florida, Mexico, and
Central America. In coming north they are coming home, for they were born
here, and they go south only to spend the winter months, as New Englanders
go to Florida. Sweet-voiced troubadours, they
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sing in orange groves and vine-clad magnolia woods in winter, in thickets
of dwarf birch and alder in summer, and sing and chatter more or less all
the way back and forth, keeping the whole country glad. Oftentimes, in
New England, just as the last snow-patches are melting and the sap in the
maples begins to flow, the blessed wanderers may be heard about orchards
and the edges of fields where they have stopped to glean a scanty meal,
not tarrying long, knowing they have far to go. Tracing the footsteps of
spring, they arrive in their tundra homes in June or July, and set out
on their return journey in September, or as soon as their families are
able to fly well.
This is Nature's own reservation, and every lover of wildness will rejoice
with me that by kindly frost it is so well defended. The discovery lately
made that it is sprinkled with gold may cause some alarm; for the strangely
exciting stuff makes the timid bold enough for anything, and the lazy destructively
industrious. Thousands at least half insane are now pushing their way into
it, some by the southern passes over the mountains, perchance the first
mountains they have ever seen,-sprawling, struggling, gasping for breath,
as, laden with awkward, merciless burdens of provisions and tools, they
climb over rough-angled boulders and cross thin miry bogs. Some are going
by the mountains
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and rivers to the eastward through Canada, tracing the old romantic
ways of the Hudson Bay traders; others by Bering Sea and the Yukon, sailing
all the way, getting glimpses perhaps of the famous fur-seals, the ice-floes,
and the innumerable islands and bars of the great Alaska river. In spite
of frowning hardships and the frozen ground, the Klondike gold will increase
the crusading crowds for years to come, but comparatively little harm will
be done. Holes will be burned and dug into the hard ground here and there,
and into the quartz-ribbed mountains and hills; ragged towns like beaver
and muskrat villages will be built, and mills and locomotives will make
rumbling, screeching, disenchanting noises; but the miner's pick will not
be followed far by the plough, at least not until Nature is ready to unlock
the frozen soil-beds with her slow-turning climate key. On the other hand,
the roads of the pioneer miners will lead many a lover of wildness into
the heart of the reserve, who without them would never see it.
In the meantime, the wildest health and pleasure grounds accessible
and available to tourists seeking escape from care and dust and early death
are the parks and reservations of the West. There are four national parks,
1 -the Yellowstone, Yosemite, General Grant, and
Sequoia,-all within easy reach, and thirty forest reservations, 1
There are now five parks and thirty-eight reservations.
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a magnificent realm of woods, most of which, by railroads and trails
and open ridges, is also fairly accessible, not only to the determined
traveler rejoicing in difficulties, but to those (may their tribe increase)
who, not tired, not sick, just naturally take wing every summer in search
of wildness. The forty million acres of these reserves are in the main
unspoiled as yet, though sadly wasted and threatened on their more open
margins by the axe and fire of the lumberman and prospector, and by hoofed
locusts, which, like the winged ones, devour every leaf within reach, while
the shepherds and owners set fires with the intention of making a blade
of grass grow in the place of every tree, but with the result of killing
both the grass and the trees.
In the million acre Black Hills Reserve of South Dakota, the easternmost
of the great forest reserves, made for the sake of the farmers and miners,
there are delightful, reviving sauntering-grounds in open parks of yellow
pine, planted well apart, allowing plenty of sunshine to warm the ground.
This tree is one of the most variable and most widely distributed of American
pines. It grows sturdily on all kinds of soil and rocks, and, protected
by a mail of thick bark, defies frost and fire and disease alike, daring
every danger in firm, calm beauty and strength. It occurs here mostly on
the outer hills and slopes where no other tree can grow. The ground beneath
it
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is yellow most of the summer with showy Wythia, arnica, applopappus,
solidago, and other sun-loving plants, which, though they form no heavy
entangling growth, yet give abundance of color and make all the woods a
garden. Beyond the yellow pine woods there lies a world of rocks of wildest
architecture, broken, splintery, and spiky, not very high, but the strangest
in form and style of grouping imaginable. Countless towers and spires,
pinnacles and slender domed columns, are crowded together, and feathered
with sharp-pointed Engelmann spruces, making curiously mixed forests,-half
trees, half rocks. Level gardens here and there in the midst of them offer
charming surprises, and so do the many small lakes with lilies on their
meadowy borders, and bluebells, anemones, daises, castilleias, comandras,
etc., together forming landscapes delightfully novel, and made still wilder
by many interesting animals,-elk, deer, beavers, wolves squirrels, and
birds. Not very long ago this was the richest of all the red man's hunting-grounds
hereabout. After the season's buffalo hunts were over,-as described by
Parkman, who, with a picturesque cavalcade of Sioux savages, passed through
these famous hills in 1846, -every winter deficiency was here made good,
and hunger was unknown until, in spite of most determined, fighting, killing
opposition, the white gold-hunters entered the fat game reserve
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and spoiled it. The Indians are dead now, and so are most of the hardly
less striking free trappers of the early romantic Rocky Mountain times.
Arrows, bullets, scalping-knives, need no longer be feared; and all the
wilderness is peacefully open.
The Rocky Mountain reserves are the Teton, Yellowstone, Lewis and Clark,
Bitter Root, Priest River and Flathead, comprehending more than twelve
million acres of mostly unclaimed, rough, forest-covered mountains in which
the great rivers of the country take their rise. The commonest tree in
most of them is the brave, indomitable, and altogether admirable Pinus
contorta, widely distributed in all kinds of climate and soil, growing
cheerily in frosty Alaska, breathing the damp salt air of the sea as well
as the dry biting blasts of the Arctic interior, and making itself at home
on the most dangerous flame-swept slopes and bridges of the Rocky Mountains
in immeasurable abundance and variety of forms. Thousands of acres of this
species are destroyed by running fires nearly every summer, but a new growth
springs quickly from the ashes. It is generally small, and yields few sawlogs
of commercial value, but is of incalculable importance to the farmer and
miner; supplying fencing, mine timbers, and firewood, holding the porous
soil on steep slopes, preventing landslips and avalanches, and giving kindly,
nourishing shelter to
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animals and the widely outspread sources of the life-giving rivers.
The other trees are mostly spruce, mountain pine, cedar, juniper, larch,
and balsam fir; some of them, especially on the western slopes of the mountains,
attaining grand size and furnishing abundance of fine timber.
Perhaps the least known of all this grand group of reserves is the Bitter
Root, of more than four million acres. It is the wildest, shaggiest block
of forest wildness in the Rocky Mountains, full of happy, healthy, storm-loving
trees, full of streams that dance and sing in glorious array, and full
of Nature's animals,- elk, deer, wild sheep, bears, cats, and innumerable
smaller people.
In calm Indian summer, when the heavy winds are hushed, the vast forests
covering hill and dale, rising and falling over the rough topography and
vanishing in the distance, seem lifeless. No moving thing is seen as we
climb the peaks, and only the low, mellow murmur of falling water is heard,
which seems to thicken the silence. Nevertheless, how many hearts with
warm red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many
teeth and eyes are shining! A multitude of animal people, intimately related
to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their
own affairs as we are about ours: beavers are building and mending dams
and huts for winter, and
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storing them with food; bears are studying winter quarters as they
stand thoughtful in open spaces, while the gentle breeze ruffles the long
hair on their backs; elk and deer, assembling on the heights, are considering
cold pastures where they will be farthest away from the wolves; squirrels
and marmots are busily laying up provisions and lining their nests against
coming frost and snow foreseen; and countless thousands of birds are forming
parties and gathering their young about them for flight to the southlands;
while butterflies and bees, apparently with no thought of hard times to
come, are hovering above the late-blooming goldenrods, and, with countless
other insect folk, are dancing and humming right merrily in the sunbeams
and shaking all the air into music.
Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God's wild blessings
will search you and soak you as if you were sponge, and the big days will
go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled, and so burdened with duty
that only weeks can be get out of the heavy-laden year, then go to the
Flathead Reserve; for it is easily and quickly reached by the Great Northern
Railroad. Get off the track at Belton Station, and in a few minutes you
will find yourself in the midst of what you are sure to say is the best
care-killing scenery on the continent,-beautiful lakes derived straight
from glaciers,
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lofty mountains steeped in lovely nemophila-blue skies and clad with
forests and glaciers, mossy, ferny waterfalls in their hollows, nameless
and numberless, and meadowy gardens abounding in the best of everything.
When you are calm enough for discriminating observation, you will find
the king of the larches, one of the best of the Western giants, beautiful,
picturesque, and regal in port, easily the grandest of all the larches
in the world. It grows to a height of one hundred and fifty to two hundred
feet, with a diameter at the ground of five to eight feet, throwing out
its branches into the light as no other tree does. To those who before
have seen only the European larch or the Lyall species of the eastern Rocky
Mountains, or the little tamarack or hackmatack of the Eastern States and
Canada, this Western king must be a revelation.
Associated with this grand tree in the making of the Flathead forests
is the large and beautiful mountain pine, or Western white pine (Pinus
monticola), the invincible contorta or lodge-pole pine, and spruce and
cedar. The forest floor is covered with the richest beds of Linna borealis
I ever saw, thick fragrant carpets, enriched with shining mosses here and
there, and with Clintonia, pyrola, moneses, and vaccinium, weaving hundred-mile
beds of bloom that would have made blessed old Linna weep for joy.
Lake McDonald, full of brisk trout, is in the
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heart of this forest, and Avalanche Lake is ten miles above McDonald,
at the feet of a group of glacier-laden mountains. Give a month at least
to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your
life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make
you truly immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will
never again fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven.
The vast Pacific Coast reserves in Washington and Oregon-the Cascade,
Washington, Mount Rainier, Olympic, Bull Run, and Ashland, named in order
of size-include more than 12,500,000 acres of magnificent forests of beautiful
and gigantic trees. They extend over the wild, unexplored Olympic Mountains
and both flanks of the Cascade Range, the wet and the dry. On the east
side of the Cascades the woods are sunny and open, and contain principally
yellow pine, of moderate size, but of great value as a cover for the irrigating
streams that flow into the dry interior, where agriculture on a grand scale
is being carried on. Along the moist, balmy, foggy, west flank of the mountains,
facing the sea, the woods reach their highest development, and, excepting
the California redwoods, are the heaviest on the continent. They are made
up mostly of the Douglas spruce (Pseudotsuga taxifolia), with the giant
arbor vit, or cedar, and several species
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of fir and hemlock in varying abundance, forming a forest kingdom unlike
any other, in which limb meets limb, touching and overlapping in bright,
lively, triumphant exuberance, two hundred and fifty, three hundred, and
even four hundred feet above the shady, mossy ground. Over all the other
species the Douglas spruce reigns supreme. It is not only a large tree,
the tallest in America next to the redwood, but a very beautiful one, with
bright green drooping foliage, handsome pendent cones, and a shaft exquisitely
straight and round and regular. Forming extensive forests by itself in
many places, it lifts its spiry tops into the sky close together with as
even a growth as a well-tilled field of grain. No ground has been better
tilled for wheat than these Cascade Mountains for trees: They were ploughed
by mighty glaciers, and harrowed and mellowed and outspread by the broad
streams that flowed from the ice-ploughs as they were withdrawn at the
close of the glacial period.
In proportion to its weight when dry, Douglas spruce timber is perhaps
stronger than that of any other large conifer in the country, and being
tough, durable, and elastic, it is admirably suited for ship-building,
piles, and heavy timbers in general; but its hardness and liability to
warp when it is cut into boards render it unfit for fine work. In the lumber
markets of California it is
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called "Oregon pine." When lumbering is going on in the best Douglas
woods, especially about Puget Sound, many of the long, slender boles are
saved for spars; and so superior is their quality that they are called
for in almost every shipyard in the world, and it is interesting to follow
their fortunes. Felled and peeled and dragged to tide-water, they are raised
again as yards and masts for ships, given iron roots and canvas foliage,
decorated with flags, and sent to sea, where in glad motion they go cheerily
over the ocean prairie in every latitude and longitude, singing and bowing
responsive to the same winds that waved them when they were in the woods.
After standing in one place for centuries they thus go round the world
like tourists, meeting many a friend from the old home forest; some traveling
like themselves, some standing head downward in muddy harbors, holding
up the platforms of wharves, and others doing all kinds of hard timber
work, showy or hidden.
This wonderful tree also grows far northward in British Columbia, and
southward along the coast and middle regions of Oregon and California;
flourishing with the redwood wherever it can find an opening, and with
the sugar pine, yellow pine, and libocedrus in the Sierra. It extends into
the San Gabriel, San Bernardino, and San Jacinto Mountains of southern
California. It also grows well on the Wasatch Mountains,
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where it is called "red pine," and on many parts of the Rocky Mountains
and short interior ranges of the Great Basin. But though thus widely distributed,
only in Oregon, Washington, and some parts of British Columbia does it
reach perfect development.
To one who looks from some high standpoint over its vast breadth, the
forest on the west side of the Cascades seems all one dim, dark, monotonous
field, broken only by the white volcanic cones along the summit of the
range. Back in the untrodden wilderness a deep furred carpet of brown and
yellow mosses covers the ground like a garment, pressing about the feet
of the trees, and rising in rich bosses softly and kindly over every rock
and mouldering trunk, leaving no spot uncared for; and dotting small prairies,
and fringing the meadows and the banks of streams not seem in general views,
we find, besides the great conifers, a considerable number of hard-wood
trees,-oak, ash, maple, alder, wild apple, cherry, arbutus, Nuttall's flowering
dogwood, and in some places chestnuts. In a few favored spots the broad-leaved
maple grows to a height of a hundred feet in forests by itself, sending
out large limbs in magnificent interlacing arches covered with mosses and
ferns, thus forming lofty sky-gardens, and rendering the underwoods delightfully
cool. No finer forest ceiling is to be found than these maple arches, while
the floor,
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ornamented with tall ferns and rubus vines, and cast into hillocks
by the bulging, moss-covered roots of the trees, matches it well.
Passing from beneath the heavy shadows of the woods, almost anywhere
one steps into lovely gardens of lilies, orchids, heathworts, and wild
roses. Along the lower slopes, especially in Oregon, where the woods are
less dense, there are miles of rhododendron, making glorious masses of
purple in the spring, while all about the streams and the lakes and the
beaver meadows there is a rich tangle of hazel, plum, cherry, crab-apple,
cornel, gaultheria, and rubus, with myriads of flowers and abundance of
other more delicate bloomers, such as erythronium,brodia, fritillaria,
calochortus, Clintonia, and the lovely hider of the north, Calypso. Beside
all these bloomers there are wonderful ferneries about the many misty waterfalls,
some of the fronds ten feet high, others the most delicate of their tribe,
the maidenhair fringing the rocks within reach of the lightest dust of
the spray, while the shading trees on the cliffs above them, leaning over,
look like eager listeners anxious to catch every tone of the restless waters.
In the autumn berries of every color and flavor abound, enough for birds,
bears, and everybody, particularly about the stream-sides and meadows where
sunshine reaches the ground: huckleberries, red, blue, and black, some
growing close to the ground others on
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bushes ten feet high; gaultheria berries, called "sal-al" by the Indians;
salmon berries, an inch in diameter, growing in dense prickly tangles,
the flowers, like wild roses, still more beautiful than the fruit; raspberries,
gooseberries, currants, blackberries, and strawberries. The underbrush
and meadow fringes are in great part made up of these berry bushes and
vines; but in the depths of the woods there is not much underbrush of any
kind,-only a thin growth of rubus, huckleberry, and vine-maple.
Notwithstanding the outcry against the reservations last winter in Washington,
that uncounted farms, towns, and villages were included in them, and that
all business was threatened or blocked, nearly all the mountains in which
the reserves lie are still covered with virgin forests. Though lumbering
has long been carried on with tremendous energy along their boundaries,
and home-seekers have explored the woods for openings available for farms,
however small, one may wander in the heart of the reserves for weeks without
meeting a human being, Indian or white man, or any conspicuous trace of
one. Indians used to ascend the main streams on their way to the mountains
for wild goats, whose wool furnished them clothing. But with food in abundance
on the coast there was little to draw them into the woods, and the monuments
they have left there are scarcely more conspicuous than
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those of birds and squirrels; far less so than those of the beavers,
which have dammed streams and made clearings that will endure for centuries.
Nor is there much in these woods to attract cattle-keepers. Some of the
first settlers made farms on the small bits of prairie and in the comparatively
open Cowlitz and Chehalis valleys of Washington; but before the gold period
most of the immigrants from the Eastern States settled in the fertile and
open Willamette Valley of Oregon. Even now, when the search for tillable
land is so keen, excepting the bottom-lands of the rivers around Puget
Sound, there are few cleared spots in all western Washington. On every
meadow or opening of any sort some one will be found keeping cattle, raising
hops, or cultivating patches of grain, but these spots are few and far
between. All the larger spaces were taken long ago; therefore most of the
newcomers build their cabins where the beavers built theirs. They keep
a few cows, laboriously widen their little meadow openings by hacking,
girdling, and burning the rim of the close-pressing forest, and scratch
and plant among the huge blackened logs and stamps, girdling and killing
themselves in killing the trees.
Most of the farm lands of Washington and Oregon, excepting the valleys
of the Willamette and Rogue rivers, lie on the east side of the mountains.
The forests on the eastern slopes
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of the Cascades fail altogether ere the foot of the range is reached,
stayed by drought as suddenly as on the west side they are stopped by the
sea; showing strikingly how dependent are these forest giants on the generous
rains and fogs so often complained of in the coast climate. The lower portions
of the reserves are solemnly soaked and poulticed in rain and fog during
the winter months, and there is a sad dearth of sunshine, but with a little
knowledge of woodcraft any one may enjoy an excursion into these woods
even in the rainy season. The big, gray days are exhilarating, and the
colors of leaf and branch and mossy bole are then at their best. The mighty
trees getting their food are seen to be wide-awake, every needle thrilling
in the welcome nourishing storms, chanting and bowing low in glorious harmony,
while every raindrop and snowflake is seen as a beneficent messenger from
the sky. The snow that falls on the lower woods is mostly soft, coming
through the trees in downy tufts, loading their branches, and bending them
down against the trunks until they look like arrows, while a strange muffled
silence prevails, making everything impressively solemn. But these lowland
snowstorms and their effects quickly vanish. The snow melts in a day or
two, sometimes in a few hours, the bent branches spring up again, and all
the forest work is left to the fog and the rain. At the same time, dry
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snow is falling on the upper forests and mountain tops. Day after day,
often for weeks, the big clouds give their flowers without ceasing, as
if knowing how important is the work they have to do. The glinting, swirling
swarms thicken the blast, and the trees and rocks are covered to a depth
of ten to twenty feet. Then the mountaineer, snug in a grove with bread
and fire, has nothing to do but gaze and listen and enjoy. Ever and anon
the deep, low roar of the storm is broken by the booming of avalanches,
as the snow slips from the overladen heights and crushes down the long
white slopes to fill the fountain hollows. All the smaller streams are
crushed and buried, and the young groves of spruce and fir near the edge
of the timber-line are gently bowed to the ground and put to sleep, not
again to see the light of day or stir branch or leaf until the spring.
These grand reservations should draw thousands of admiring visitors
at least in summer, yet they are neglected as if of no account, and spoilers
are allowed to ruin them as fast as they like. 1 A
few peeled spars cut here were set up in London, Philadelphia, and Chicago,
where they 1 The outlook over forest affairs
is now encouraging. Popular interest, more practical than sentimental in
whatever touches the welfare of the country's forests, is growing rapidly,
and a hopeful beginning has been made by the Government in real protection
for the reservations as well as for the parks. From July 1, 1900, there
have been 9 superintendents, 39 supervisors, and from 330 to 445 rangers
of reservations.
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excited wondering attention; but the countless hosts of living trees
rejoicing at home on the mountains are scarce considered at all. Most travelers
here are content with what they can see from car windows or the verandas
of hotels, and in going from place to place cling to their precious trains
and stages like wrecked sailors to rafts. When an excursion into the woods
is proposed, all sorts of dangers are imagined,-snakes, bears, Indians.
Yet it is far safer to wander in God's woods than to travel on black highways
or to stay at home. The snake danger is so slight it is hardly worth mentioning.
Bears are a peaceable people, and mind their own business, instead of going
about like the devil seeking whom they may devour. Poor fellows, they have
been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in
brother man, and it is not now easy to make their acquaintance. As to Indians,
most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence. No American
wilderness that I know of is so dangerous as a city home "with all the
modern improvements." One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing
else. Lewis and Clark, in their famous trip across the continent in 1804-1805,
did not lose a single man by Indians or animals, though all the West was
then wild. Captain Clark was bitten on the hand as he lay asleep. That
was one bite among more than a hundred men while traveling nine thousand
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sand miles. Loggers are far more likely to be met than Indians or bears
in the reserves or about their boundaries, brown weather-tanned men with
faces furrowed like bark, tired-looking, moving slowly, swaying like the
trees they chop. A little of everything in the woods is fastened to their
clothing, rosiny and smeared with balsam, and rubbed into it, so that their
scanty outer garments grow thicker with use and never wear out. Many a
forest giant have these old woodmen felled, but, round-shouldered and stooping,
they too are leaning over and tottering to their fall. Others, however,
stand ready to take their places, stout young fellows, erect as saplings;
and always the foes of trees outnumber their friends. Far up the white
peaks one can hardly fail to meet the wild goat, or American chamois,-an
admirable mountaineer, familiar with woods and glaciers as well as rocks,-and
in leafy thickets deer will be found; while gliding about unseen there
are many sleek furred animals enjoying their beautiful lives, and birds
also, notwithstanding few are noticed in hasty walks. The ousel sweetens
the glens and gorges where the streams flow fastest, and every grove has
its singers, however silent it seems,-thrushes, linnets, warblers; humming-birds
glint about the fringing bloom of the meadows and peaks, and the lakes
are stirred into lively pictures by water-fowl.
The Mount Rainier Forest Reserve should be
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made a national park and guarded while yet its bloom is on; 1
for if in the making of the West Nature had what we call parks in mind,-places
for rest, inspiration, and prayers,-this Rainier region must surely be
one of them. In the centre of it there is a lonely mountain capped with
ice; from the ice-cap glaciers radiate in every direction, and young rivers
from the glaciers; while its flanks, sweeping down in beautiful curves,
are clad with forests and gardens, and filled with birds and animals. Specimens
of the best of Nature's treasures have been lovingly gathered here and
arranged in simple symmetrical beauty within regular bounds.
1 This was done shortly after the above was written.
"One of the most important measures taken during the past year in connection
with forest reservations was the action of Congress in withdrawing from
the Mount Rainier Forest Reserve a portion of the region immediately surrounding
Mount Rainier and setting it apart as a national park." ( Report of
Commissioner of General Land Office, for the year ended June, 1899.)
But the park as it now stands is far too small.
Of all the fire-mountains which, like beacons, once blazed along the
Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest in form, has the most interesting
forest cover, and, with perhaps the exception of Shasta, is the highest
and most flowery. Its massive white dome rises out of its forests, like
a world by itself, to a height of fourteen thousand to fifteen thousand
feet. The forests reach to a height of a little over six thousand feet,
and above the forests there is a zone of the loveliest flowers, fifty miles
in circuit and nearly
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two miles wide, so closely planted and luxuriant that it seems as if
Nature, glad to make an open space between woods so dense and ice so deep,
were economizing the precious ground, and trying to see how many of her
darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath,-daisies, anemones,
geraniums, columbines, erythroniums, larkspurs, etc., among which we wade
knee-deep and waist-deep, the bright corollas in myriads touching petal
to petal. Picturesque detached groups of the spiry Abies lasiocarpa stand
like islands along the lower margin of the garden zone, while on the upper
margin there are extensive beds of bryanthus, Cassiope, Kalmia, and other
heathworts, and higher still saxifrages and drabas, more and more lowly,
reach up to the edge of the ice. Altogether this is the richest subalpine
garden I ever found, a perfect floral elysium. The icy dome needs none
of man's care, but unless the reserve is guarded the flower bloom will
soon be killed, and nothing of the forests will be left but black stump
monuments.
The Sierra of California is the most openly beautiful and useful of
all the forest reserves, and the largest excepting the Cascade Reserve
of Oregon and the Bitter Root of Montana and Idaho. It embraces over four
million acres of the grandest scenery and grandest trees on the continent,
and its forests are planted just where they do the most good, not only
for beauty, but
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for farming in the great San Joaquin Valley beneath them. It extends
southward from the Yosemite National Park to the end of the range, a distance
of nearly two hundred miles. No other coniferous forest in the world contains
so many species or so many large and beautiful trees,-Sequoia gigantea,
king of conifers, "the noblest of a noble race," as Sir Joseph Hooker well
says; the sugar pine, king of all the world's pines, living or extinct;
the yellow pine, next in rank, which here reaches most perfect development,
forming noble towers of verdure two hundred feet high; the mountain pine,
which braves the coldest blasts far up the mountains on grim, rocky slopes;
and five others, flourishing each in its place, making eight species of
pine in one forest, which is still further enriched by the great Douglas
spruce, libocedrus, two species of silver fir, large trees and exquisitely
beautiful, the Paton hemlock, the most graceful of evergreens, the curious
tumion, oaks of many species, maples, alders, poplars, and flowering dogwood,
all fringed with flowery underbrush, manzanita, ceanothus, wild rose, cherry,
chestnut, and rhododendron. Wandering at random through these friendly,
approachable woods, one comes here and there to the loveliest lily gardens,
some of the lilies ten feet high, and the smoothest gentian meadows, and
Yosemite valleys known only to mountaineers. Once I spent a night by
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a camp-fire on Mount Shasta with Asa Gray and Sir Joseph Hooker, and,
knowing that they were acquainted with all the great forests of the world,
I asked whether they knew any coniferous forest that rivaled that of the
Sierra. They unhesitatingly said: "No. In the beauty and grandeur of individual
trees, and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass
all others."
This Sierra Reserve, proclaimed by the President of the United States
in September, 1893, is worth the most thoughtful care of the government
for its own sake, without considering its value as the fountain of the
rivers on which the fertility of the great San Joaquin Valley depends.
Yet it gets no care at all. In the fog of tariff, silver, and annexation
politics it is left wholly unguarded, though the management of the adjacent
national parks by a few soldiers shows how well and how easily it can be
preserved. In the meantime, lumbermen are allowed to spoil it at their
will, and sheep in uncountable ravenous hordes to trample it and devour
every green leaf within reach; while the shepherds, like destroying angels,
set innumerable fires, which burn not only the undergrowth of seedlings
on which the permanence of the forest depends, but countless thousands
of the venerable giants. If every citizen could take one walk through this
reserve, there would be
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no more trouble about its care; for only in darkness does vandalism
flourish. 1
1 See note, p. 27.
The reserves of southern California,-the San Gabriel, San Bernardino,
San Jacinto, and Trabuco,-though not large, only about two million acres
together, are perhaps the best appreciated. Their slopes are covered with
a close, almost impenetrable growth of flowery bushes, beginning on the
sides of the fertile coast valleys and the dry interior plains. Their higher
ridges, however, and mountains are open, and fairly well forested with
sugar pine, yellow pine, Douglas spruce, libocedrus, and white fir. As
timber fountains they amount to little, but as bird and bee pastures, cover
for the precious streams that irrigate the lowlands, and quickly available
retreats from dust and heat and care, their value is incalculable. Good
roads have been graded into them, by which in a few hours lowlanders can
get well up into the sky and find refuge in hospitable camps and club-houses,
where, while breathing reviving ozone, they may absorb the beauty about
them, and look comfortably down on the busy towns and the most beautiful
orange groves ever planted since gardening began.
The Grand Caon Reserve of Arizona, of nearly two million acres, or the
most interesting part of it, as well as the Rainier region, should
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be made into a national park, on account of their supreme grandeur
and beauty. Setting out from Flagstaff, a station on the Atchison, Topeka,
and Santa F Railroad, on the way to the caon you pass through beautiful
forests of yellow pine,-like those of the Black Hills, but more extensive,-and
curious dwarf forests of nut pine and juniper, the spaces between the miniature
trees planted with many interesting species of eriogonum, yucca, and cactus.
After riding or walking seventy-five miles through these pleasure-grounds,
the San Francisco and other mountains, abounding in flowery parklike openings
and smooth shallow valleys with long vistas which in fineness of finish
and arrangement suggest the work of a consummate landscape artist, watching
you all the way, you come to the most tremendous caon in the world. It
is abruptly countersunk in the forest plateau, so that you see nothing
of it until you are suddenly stopped on its brink, with its immeasurable
wealth of divinely colored and sculptured buildings before you and beneath
you. No matter how far you have wandered hitherto, or how many famous gorges
and valleys you have seen, this one, the Grand Caon of the Colorado, will
seem as novel to you, as unearthly in the color and grandeur and quantity
of its architecture, as if you had found it after death, on some other
star; so incomparably lovely and grand and
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supreme is it above all the other caons in our fire-moulded, earthquake-shaken,
rain-washed, wave-washed, river and glacier sculptured world. It is about
six thousand feet deep where you first see it, and from rim to rim ten
to fifteen miles wide. Instead of being dependent for interest upon waterfalls,
depth, wall sculpture, and beauty of parklike floor, like most other great
caons, it has not waterfalls in sight, and no appreciable floor spaces.
The big river has just room enough to flow and roar obscurely, here and
there groping its way as best it can, like a weary, murmuring, overladen
traveler trying to escape from the tremendous, bewildering labyrinthic
abyss, while its roar serves only to deepen the silence. Instead of being
filled with air, the vast space between the walls is crowded with Nature's
grandest buildings,-a sublime city of them, painted in every color, and
adorned with richly fretted cornice and battlement spire and tower in endless
variety of style and architecture. Every architectural invention of man
has been anticipated, and far more, in this grandest of God's terrestrial
cities.
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