Part 18

Love to all and “Fare ye well, my ain Jean.”

The kerchiefs have come from Bentons and a package of books from Doggetts.

Yosemite Valley, April 19th, 1873.

The bearer of this is my friend Mr. Black, proprietor of Black’s Hotel, Yosemite. He will give you tidings of all our valley affairs.

I sent off a letter and article for you a week ago. I find this literary business very irksome, yet I will try to learn it.

The falls respond gloriously to the ripe sunshine of these days; so do the flowers.

I hope that you will be able to send me word when you will come, so that I may arrange accordingly. Mr. Black will give all particulars of trails, times, etc. If Moores have not gone ranching, send Mr. Black over to their house. It will do her good. I fondly hope she is growing better.

Love to all.

JOHN MUIR.

Yosemite Valley, May 15th, 1873.

The robins have eaten too much breakfast this morning, and there is a grossness in their throats that will require a good deal of sunshine for its cure. The leaves of many of the plants are badly disarranged, showing that they have had a poor night’s sleep. The reason of all this trouble is a snowstorm that overloaded the flowers and benumbed the butterflies, upon which the birds have breakfasted too heartily.

The grand Upper Yosemite Fall is at this moment (7 A.M.) coming with all its glorious array of fleecy comets out of a cloud that is laid along the top of the cliff, and going into a cloud that is drawn along the face of the wall about half way up. These clouds are shot through and through with sunshine, forming, with the snowy waters and fresh-washed walls, one of the most openly glorious scenes I ever beheld. A lady on Black’s piazza is quietly looking at it, sitting with arms folded in her chair. A gentleman is pointing at it with his cane, while another gentleman is speaking loudly and businessly about his “baggage.” “Eyes have they but they see not.”

Looking up the valley, the cloud effects are yet more lavishly glorious. Tissiack is mantled with silvery burning mists, her gray rocks appearing dimly where thinly veiled. Over the top of Washington Column the clouds are descending in a continuous stream and rising again suddenly from the bottom like spray from a waterfall. O dear! I wish you were here. I may write this cloud glory forevermore but never be able to picture it for you.

Doctor and Priest in Yosemite. Emerson prophesies in similar dialect that I will one day go to him and “better men” in New England, or something to that effect. I feel like objecting in popular slang that I can’t see it. I shall indeed go gladly to the “Atlantic Coast,” as he prophesies, but only to see him and the Glacier Ghosts of the north. Runkle wants to make a teacher of me, but I have been too long wild, too befogged and befogged to burn well in their patent high-heated educational furnaces.

I had a good letter from Le Conte. He evidently doesn’t know what to think of the huge lumps of ice that I sent him. I don’t wonder at his cautious withholding of judgment. When my mountain mother first told me the tale, I could hardly dare to believe either, and kept saying “What?” like a child half awake. Farewell. My love to the Doctor and the boys. I hope the Doctor will run away from his enormous bundles of duty and rest a summer with the mountains. I have a great deal to ask him. I have begun to build my cabin. You will have a home in Yosemite.

Ever thine, J. MUIR.

My horse and bread, etc., are ready for upward. I returned three days ago from Mts. Lyell, McClure, and Hoffman. I spent three days on a glacier up there, planting stakes, etc. This time I go to the Merced group, one of whose mountains shelters a glacier. I will go over all the lakes and moraines, etc., there. Will be gone a week or two or so.

Hutchings wants to go with me to “help me,” but I will, etc., etc.

Ink cannot tell the glow that lights me at this moment in turning to the mountains. I feel strong to leap Yosemite walls at a bound. Hotels and human impurity will be far below. I will fuse in spirit skies.

Farewell, or come meet in ghost between Red Mountain and Black on the star-sparkled ice.

Love to all thine and to Moores and Stoddard.

Yosemite Valley, June 7th, 1873.

I came down last night from the Lyell Glacier, weary with walking in the snow, but I forgot my weariness and the pain of my sun-blistered face in the news of your coming.

I would like you to bring me a pair or two of green spectacles to save my eyes, as I have some weeks of hard work and exposure among the glaciers this fall. They are sore with my last journey. All of the upper mountains are yet deeply snow-clad, and the view from the top of Lyell was infinitely glorious.

Thanking God for thee, I say a short farewell.

Kellogg has not yet appeared, nor any of the other friends you speak of.

Yosemite, September 17, [1873.]

I am again at the bottom meadow of Yosemite after a most intensely interesting bath among the outer mountains. I have been exploring the upper tributaries of the Cascade and Tamarac streams. And in particular all of the basin of the Yosemite Creek. The present basin of every stream which enters the valley on the north side was formerly filled with ice, which also flowed into the valley, although the ancient ice basins did not always correspond with the present water basins because glaciers can flow up hill. The whole of the north wall of the valley was covered with an unbroken flow of ice, with perhaps the single exception of the crest of Eagle Cliff, and though the book of glaciers gradually dims as we go lower on the range, yet I fully believe that future investigation will show that, in the earlier ages of Sierra Nevada ice, vast glaciers flowed to the foot of the range east of Yosemite and also north and south at an elevation of 9000 feet. The glacier basins are almost unchanged, and I believe that ice was the agent by which all of the present rocks receive their special forms. More of this some other day. Would that I could have you here or in any wild place where I can think and speak! Would you not be thoroughly iced? You would not find in me one unglacial thought. Come, and I will tell you how El Capitan and Tissiack were fashioned. I will most likely live at Black’s Hotel this winter in charge of the premises, and before next spring I will have an independent cabin built, with a special Carr corner where you and the Doctor can come and stay all summer; also I will have a tent so that we can camp and receive night blessings when we choose, and then I will have horses enough so that we can go to the upper temples also. I wish you could see Lake Tenaya. It is one of the most perfectly and richly spiritual places in the mountains, and I would like to preëmpt there. Somehow I should feel like leaving home in going to Hetch Hetchy. Besides, there is room there for many other claims, and it soon will fill with coarse homesteads, but as the winter is so severe at Lake Tenaya, very few will care to live there. Hetch Hetchy is about four thousand feet above sea, while Lake Tenaya is eight. I have been living in these mountains in so haunting, soaring, floating a way that it seems strange to cast any kind of an anchor. All is so equal in glory, so ocean-like, that to choose one place above another is like drawing dividing lines in the sky. I think I answered your last with respect to remaining here in the winter. I can do much of this ice work in the quiet, and the whole subject is purely physical, so that I can get but little from books. All depends upon the goodness of one’s eyes. No scientific book in the world can tell me how this Yosemite granite is put together or how it has been taken down. Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them.