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Good Tidings, Strenuous Life I Maurice Isserman

In October 1872, near the summit of a spiny ceased to quiver as a “new sense,” an “other its sharp peaks towering above a multitude of granite peak in the Eastern Sierra, a climber self…. Instinct, or Guardian Angel—call it crystal-blue alpine lakes. But the most memo- awaited death. It was John Muir, who had what you will—came forward and assumed rable moment had been his experience below spent the past four years as a casual laborer control.” In place of fear, he felt an intense the summit. Other mountaineers of the era, and amateur naturalist in California’s Yosem- bond with the mountain. Even the subtlest such as Clarence King, boasted of their sense ite Valley. He’d set out alone to make the first ripples in the stone appeared magnified, and of mastery over mountains; Muir exulted in a ascent of 13,142-foot Mt. Ritter. Now, about his body began to move with a self-assurance sense of oneness with the rock. The physical halfway up the final steep couloir, he found detached from conscious thought. act of climbing had become for Muir a form himself incapable of moving. His arms spread- “Had I been born aloft upon wings,” he of spiritual devotion. eagled, his face pressed near the stone, he concluded in his 1894 book, The Mountains “What we call a mountain,” Robert could see no way up or down. of California, “my deliverance could not Macfarlane wrote in the now-classic 2003 Limbs trembling, mind clouding, he have been more complete.” Soon afterward, Mountains of the Mind, is “a collaboration thought, I must fall. Then a feeling of calm he stood atop California’s sixteenth-highest of the physical forms of the world with the acceptance descended upon him. His muscles peak, admiring the vista of the Ritter Range, imagination of humans.” Mountains have

93 Americans to their “best and highest sources.” Three years later, Bowles returned to Colo- rado and found the perfect mountain to illus- trate his point. From the apex of 14,278-foot Grays Peak, he glimpsed another summit, about forty miles away at the northern end of the remote Sawatch Range. A vertical couloir ran up the mountainside, bisected by a hori- zontal, sloping bench. Snow lingered in both features long after the summer heat dried the surrounding rock, forming the impression of a white cross superimposed on the dark granite- gneiss. Could this image have been fashioned by mere happenstance? Bowles thought other- wise: “It’s as if God has set His sign, His seal, His promise there,” he wrote in a widely read account, “a beacon upon the very center and height of the Continent to all the people and all its generations.” The Civil War might well have left Bowles’ fellow countrymen wondering about their nation’s share of Divine Favor. In his Second an enduring presence in the form of ridges, travelogue, Across the Continent. Like many Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, faces, scree slopes and summits, but they have literary-minded Northeasterners, Bowles was 1865, President Lincoln asked his listeners another, more transient and variable pres- fascinated by the idea of peaks much higher to consider the possibility that the “mighty ence as “the products of human perception… than the familiar 4,000-footers of New scourge of war” had been a judgment by God imagined into existence down the centuries.” England. Nothing he encountered en route for the sin of slavery. After Lincoln’s assassina- Or as Henry David Thoreau, best known for to the Pacific impressed him as much as the tion on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, grieving his Walden Pond sojourn, wrote in 1857, “I approach to the Front Range of Colorado. citizens found it comforting to think that an keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little The palisade of summit monoliths and great emblem of God’s eternal covenant still existed way, which I ascend in my dreams both awake walls eclipsed even his recent memories of the on this mountainside. To them, it was as if the and asleep.” Conflicting notions of wild Swiss Alps. “No town that I know of in all the Continental Divide (re)united the Union that places had long existed in North America, world,” Bowles wrote, “has such a panorama mortals had attempted to set asunder. ever since the first Europeans arrived, bring- of perpetual beauty spread before it as Denver Other peoples had their own ideas about ing their own myths about the vast spaces has in this best and broadest belt of the Rocky the sacred nature of the Colorado Rockies. beyond their settlements, visions that often Mountains…. [T]hese are visions that clear Native Americans long had climbed into clashed with those of the original inhabitants. the heart of earthly sorrow and lead the soul alpine regions in search of game, but also Yet in the years following the Civil War—that up to its best and highest sources.” on spiritual journeys or vision quests. Cir- great divide in United States history—moun- “Earthly sorrow,” to modern ears, may cular stonewalls, cleared talus slopes, cairns tains began to occupy an ever-greater portion sound like one of those high-minded plati- and other traces already marked many of the of the national dreamscape. It was then that tudes that dot (and clot) the rhetoric of peaks, evidence that Ute and Arapaho climb- Thoreau’s successors, including John Muir, nineteenth-century prose. But most Ameri- ers reached summits long before white settlers began to piece together the fragments of a rei- cans reading those words in the summer of arrived. Between 1998 and 2002, archeolo- magined natural world. 1865, just weeks after the surrender of General gists interviewed tribal elders and documented Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, would immedi- more than a thousand sites in what is now A Cross in the Rockies ately recall the deaths of as many as three quar- Rocky Mountain National Park. Dozens of In May 1865 the Massachusetts publisher ters of a million of their countrymen in the these rock configurations appear to have held Samuel Bowles set off to see the West for preceding four years of war. In Bowles’ imag- religious significance. There is no way to know the first time. He sent back a series of dis- ined mountainscape, the Continental Divide what Ute and Arapaho climbers would have patches, which appeared first in his newspa- became a symbol of restored national unity made of the imagined cross on that Colorado per, The Republican, and later in a best-selling and spiritual redemption, leading the souls of mountainside, though it’s safe to say they

[Previous Page] Albert Bierstadt’s 1864 painting Valley of the Yosemite. Part of the Hudson the creation of the first national park, in Yellowstone. Albert Bierstadt, Courtesy The Museum River School, Bierstadt accompanied surveying expeditions to the American West, cre- of Fine Arts, Boston l [This Page] William Henry Jackson’s iconic 1873 photo of the Mount ating sketches in the field and completing the paintings back in his New York studio. His of the Holy Cross (14,005'), which became a symbol of an increasingly spiritual and na- work reflected a sublime and utopian vision of American wild places and contributed to tionalist view of mountains after the end of the Civil War. NPS Historic Photograph Collection

94 would not have attached the same meaning to to the study of nature. it that Bowles did in 1868. “Climb the mountains and get Meanwhile, “wild places” and “wild crea- In 1869 William Henry Brewer, a veteran tures” were becoming ever more rare in the of the California State Geological Survey, their good tidings. Nature’s peace Midwest. Railroads spread across the conti- made his own way up Grays Peak. He, too, nent; towns and factories multiplied. For the spotted the cross-bearing mountain, and will flow into you as sunshine powerful, it was the beginning of a “Gilded he christened it Mount of the Holy Cross. Age,” a time characterized by a heedless (Earlier Spanish explorers and priests had pursuit of wealth and luxury (not unfamiliar called it “Santa Cruz.”) Four years after- flows into trees. The winds to Americans in more recent years). Muir felt ward, J.T. Gardner and W.H. Holmes, part displaced in this bustling new world. He set of another surveying expedition, made the will blow their own freshness off on a cross-country trek to Florida, looking first recorded ascent. Intent on establishing a for the “wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way geodesic station, they climbed for scientific, into you....” –John Muir I could find.” His path took him into his first rather than spiritual, purposes. Nonetheless, mountains, the Great Smokies of the southern a picture taken by the expedition photogra- Appalachians. Along the way, he shed the strict pher William Henry Jackson (who fought on peaks, but they tended to be philosophers evangelical doctrines of his family, although the Union side in the Battle of Gettysburg) of like Thoreau, more mountain ramblers than not his yearnings for the sacred. “Oh these the cross-bearing peak from Notch Mountain mountain climbers. Other Americans iden- forest gardens of our Father!” he exclaimed in reinforced its religious aura. As it turned out, tified summits, particularly in the West, as a journal. “What perfection, what divinity in God’s handiwork needed a little tweaking. symbols of national destiny, but, for the their architecture!” Back east in his studio, Jackson discovered most part, these people belonged to a select Muir’s quest eventually brought him to that the cross’s right arm looked crooked, so corps of explorers, such as Meriwether Lewis, California. After arriving in San Francisco in he retouched the negative. The resulting image William Clark and John C. Frémont. In the late March 1868, he headed immediately on won acclaim at the 1876 National Exposition decades afterward, these two ways of viewing foot for the Sierra. He reached Yosemite at the in Philadelphia, a world’s fair in honor of the mountains, the spiritual and the nationalist, start of May. Only four years had passed since nation’s centennial. increasingly overlapped. In the minds of many President Lincoln had signed a bill granting The Philadelphia fair also featured a 7-by- citizens, the climber, naturalist and sage John Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of 5-foot oil painting by Thomas Moran, a dis- Muir came to embody the former vision; the Big Trees to the state of California; the parcel ciple of the Hudson River School of heroic solider, politician and president Theodore was some 40,000 acres in all, to be “held for landscape painting. Moran brought his sketch- Roosevelt the latter. And in 1903, the two public use, resort and recreation...for all time.” book to the Sawatch Range in 1874, and men’s paths—and their visions—would inter- From the flat granite shelf of Inspiration Point, on his return to the studio, embellished the sect in Yosemite. Muir looked out over a cleft in the earth, a Mount of the Holy Cross in his oil painting, mile wide and seven miles long, framed by complete with a halo of wispy clouds around The Religion of Nature steep granite walls that rise for thousands the summit. Collectively, the four Eastern- The most important figure in nineteenth- of feet. The colossus of El Capitan swept bred visitors, Bowles, Brewer, Jackson and century American mountaineering was born skyward. Half Dome curved like a giant silver Moran, fashioned the peak into a shrine to the a Lowland Scot in 1838 and emigrated with moon against the horizon. The Merced River nation’s providential mission to explore and his family to the United States at age eleven. flowed placidly through verdant meadows. settle the West—at the expense, of course, of John Muir loved to recite the poems of Robert As Muir recalled, “Never before had I seen so the earlier residents and of the meanings they Burns, his homeland’s bard, especially those glorious a landscape, so boundless an afflu- attached to the landscape. Before the Civil celebrating the birds and beasts on the margins ence of sublime mountain beauty.” As Donald War, white Americans tended to think (posi- of human society. “When I was a boy in Scot- Worster explained in his 2008 biography, A tively or negatively) of wild spaces as regions land,” Muir wrote in a memoir, “I was fond of Passion of Nature, Muir “experienced, in the that included Native Americans. But the ide- everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve fullest sense yet, a profound conversion to the alized vision of “wilderness” that emerged in been growing fonder and fonder of wild places religion of nature.” the war’s aftermath left no place for them. As and wild creatures.” After spending his ado- The summer of 1869, when he herded Mark Spence points out in Dispossessing the lescence on a farm, he enrolled at the Univer- sheep between the rim of Yosemite Valley and Wilderness (2000), the imagining of “pristine” sity of Wisconsin in the fateful year of 1861. Tuolumne Meadows, was perhaps the happi- sites of national pilgrimage required forgetting There, he discovered a love of botany. But est of Muir’s life. At the end of that season, and often evicting the people who had long the prospect of being drafted into the Union he undertook a solo first ascent of 10,940- lived there. Army and having to kill, even for a cause foot Cathedral Peak. Just below the top, he A confluence of powerful impulses he regarded as just, drove him to cross into surmounted a crack up a thirty-foot block—a began reshaping perceptions of the land. In Canada in 1864. On his return to the United section on which many modern climbers use the prewar years, a group of well-educated States in 1866, Muir worked in an Indianapo- a rope. Four years later, he became the first and unconventional New Englanders had lis factory, until an injury nearly cost him his to solo Mt. Whitney. Muir scrambled up a ascribed spiritually redeeming qualities to eyesight. He decided, then, to devote his life snow- and rock-filled gully and then wove

96 through the cliffs of the north face, via a new above nature to fulfill their spiritual destinies. environmental policy. It was a role difficult to line known subsequently as the Mountain- Nevertheless, the idea elevated the wild to a imagine the more-unworldly Thoreau playing. eers Route. Although he enjoyed reaching realm nearly (and for some Transcendentalists, In 1892 Muir founded and became president summits, he was not simply a peak-bagger; he actually) sacred. of the Sierra Club, one of the most significant also loved to cross the High Sierra from pass to Now, while he refined his own ideas, Muir outdoors organizations in American history. pass. In The Mountains of California, he wrote, borrowed freely from the Transcendentalists’ Over the course of the next two decades, he “The free mountaineer with a sack of bread on work. From Thoreau’s account of an 1846 detailed the natural wonders of California, the his shoulders and an axe to cut steps in ice and climb of Maine’s Mt. Katahdin, he took the Pacific Northwest, Wyoming and Alaska in frozen snow can make his way across the range phrase “unhandselled” (meaning untouched twelve books, as well as in scores of articles in almost everywhere, and at any time of year.” or unspoiled), to describe California’s Hetch popular magazines like Scribner’s, The Century (His axe was probably a tree-cutting one, not Hetchy. He also adapted a variation of Thore- and The Atlantic Monthly. In the process, he a climbing axe, a piece of gear then unknown au’s motto “In Wildness is the preservation of helped create a new constituency among the in America.) the world”—although Muir’s preferred usage educated middle classes for an environmental- As he explored the peaks above Yosemite, was “Wilderness.” When Emerson visited ist movement that hadn’t yet found its name. Muir made copious notes in books by Ralph Yosemite in 1871, Muir took the grand old Muir wanted to preserve “wilderness” for Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. Muir had philosopher around the valley floor and the its own sake, but also for a larger purpose. As encountered the Transcendentalists’ writings Mariposa Gove. Emerson’s caretakers would Donald Worster wrote, he sought to save “the while attending the University of Wisconsin. not allow him, at sixty-eight, to accompany American soul from total surrender to mate- For New Englanders of earlier generations, Muir on a camping trip to the High Sierra. rialism.” To many outdoor enthusiasts, Muir’s the Bible was the only appropriate guide to “You are yourself a sequoia,” Muir told nature essays became a kind of American understanding the divine order, including Emerson. “Stop and get acquainted with your scripture, the “Good Tidings” of the hills. In its embodiment in the natural world. The big brethren.” That was not to be. Still, the his famous 1912 salute to his spiritual moun- Transcendentalists had turned this argument sage of Concord came to regard the sage of tain home, published just two years before his around: they believed that a close study of the Yosemite as a worthy successor. Muir would death, he wrote of the rampart of peaks above earth revealed truths about life’s meaning that also be compared in his lifetime and ever after- the Central Valley, “so gloriously colored and so could only be dimly understood from Scrip- ward to Thoreau, and it is fair to say that Muir radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but ture. “The happiest man,” Emerson observed, was the Thoreau of California, that Yosemite wholly composed of it, like the wall of some “is he who learns from nature the lesson of and the Sierra Nevada were his Walden Pond. celestial city…. Then it seemed to me that worship.” This wasn’t nature worship, exactly, But for all his love of solitude, Muir used the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or since Emerson still expected people to rise his skills as a publicist to influence national Snowy Range, but the Range of Light.”

[This Page, Left] John Muir’s extensive books and articles have helped spread ideas about may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” Carleton Watkins, Courtesy the spiritual value of the wild to many Americans. In The Yosemite (1912), he wrote: The University of the Pacific digital collections l [This Page, Right] Yosemite from Inspiration “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature Point in 1879, as Muir would have seen it. Carleton Watkins, Princeton University Art Museum

97 Who Does Not Shrink from Danger dress and general appearance, we were none Muir’s younger contemporary, Theo- the less so in spirit…. College presidents, dore Roosevelt, was not given to bursts of eminent surgeons, celebrated naturalists, lyricism about the celestial, and probably and men of letters, were, for a time, merci- would have regarded them as unmanly. fully spared that deference which it is their Nevertheless, he shared Muir’s enthusiasm lot to endure in classroom and clinic; they for mountains. Born in New York City answered promptly to their nick-names, in 1858, Roosevelt was a sickly child. He and helped to select appropriate sobriquets remade himself into a strong adult through for the others.” his willpower and his family’s consider- Despite Riley’s celebration of his able financial resources. In August 1879, club’s “joyous riot of democracy,” his list accompanied by a local guide, he stood of members’ occupations served only to atop Mt. Katahdin, at the time a remote underline the club’s actual social exclusiv- and rarely climbed summit. He reveled in ity. Nevertheless, such outdoor fellowship the sense of physical mastery that came represented a ritualized (if romanticized) from overcoming obstacles. “I find I can return to earlier versions of the community endure fatigue and hardship pretty nearly that Americans liked to believe had thrived as well as these [Maine] lumbermen,” he on the frontier. Roosevelt’s language soon boasted afterward. found its way into the writings of leading Two years later, on a European honey- American mountaineers at pains to find a moon, he summited the Matterhorn and socially acceptable rationale for their avo- the Jungfrau at a time when few of his he was concerned about the values of the cation. In a 1902 essay, Charles E. Fay, countrymen had climbed either peak. Part of Gilded Age. In the spring of 1899, as gover- longtime editor of Appalachia, defended the his motivation was to prove to English alpin- nor of New York, Roosevelt had been invited values of “genuine alpinism, worthy as it is of ists that Americans were their equals. He later to give a speech to a well-heeled Republican being fostered and helpful as it might become had himself photographed in a studio, duded social club in Chicago, during an annual to society and the State. Its contempt of hard- up in mountaineering attire, striking a heroic banquet commemorating the anniversary of ships, and its acceptance of a certain element pose while clutching one of the long ice axes the Confederate surrender. A former “Rough of personal danger to be averted by judgment then in use on the Continent. Of the Mat- Rider” and hero of the Spanish-American and coolness, its alluring invitations to con- terhorn, he wrote home to his sister Anna, “It War, Roosevelt announced that he had come quest…render it not only the king of sports was like going up and down enormous stairs to preach “the doctrine of the strenuous life, for strenuous man, but the one theoretically on your hands and knees in nine hours.” the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.” the best adapted to develop fearless leaders.” Roosevelt had inherited his interest in the Success would come only to the man (and by natural world from his father, a founder of the extension to the nation) “who does not shrink Sierran Solitude American Museum of Natural History in New from danger, from hardship, or from bitter Gentle John Muir was not among Roos- York City. When he left for his first year at toil, and who out of these wins the splendid evelt’s converts; he made no use of the language Harvard, he aspired to become a naturalist or human triumph.” His words represented, in of “conquest,” nor did he concern himself with biologist. Instead, he embarked on a political part, a call for the United States to protect the training of “fearless leaders.” In his own career. In 1881 he won his first elected office its new overseas empire in the Caribbean telling, it was not “toil and effort” or “labor as a New York state assemblyman. Ambitious, and the Pacific. But Roosevelt also intended and strife” that got him up mountains, but a energetic and a master of self-publicity, Roos- to challenge the spirit of materialism that, he calm and loving embrace of all aspects of the evelt soon rose to national prominence, and by felt, had animated and corrupted the nation’s natural world, including its dangers. There’s 1901 he was the vice president of the United wealthiest citizens since the Civil War. no record of what he thought of the “Strenu- States. He held that office for barely six months. The “Strenuous Life” speech struck a ous Life” speech, but on the face of it, Muir On September 13, shortly after he reached the nerve with a public fearful that the country and Roosevelt had little in common. Muir was top of Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks, an offi- had once again drifted from the moorings of a pacifist; Roosevelt was a warrior. Muir wor- cial messenger met him on the summit trail: its forebears—a recurrent theme in American shipped wild creatures; Roosevelt was a big- President William McKinley, recovering from self-scrutiny, both past and present. What, if game trophy hunter. an assassination attempt, had taken a turn anything, could take the place of the nation- And although no American president did for the worse. Roosevelt descended the tallest and character-building experience of explor- more for the cause of national parks, Roosevelt mountain in New York to ascend to the highest ing the Western frontier, so recently thought had little sympathy for Muir’s commitment to office in the United States. limitless, and now finally vanquished? Perhaps the preservation of wilderness for its own sake. Although he thrived in the turbulent the answer lay in the American mountains. In Roosevelt’s version of conservationism held world of electoral politics, Roosevelt was a the 1914 Mazama club journal, Frank Branch that the nation’s natural resources should not child of privilege, and he displayed no little Riley waxed nostalgic about 1890s excursions be squandered heedlessly, but neither, outside sense of entitlement. Nevertheless, like Muir, to the Cascades: “Reduced to frank equality in of spectacular settings like Yosemite and the

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In more recent years, presidents have rarely night,” he exulted, pointing toward Glacier sought out photo opportunities with promi- Point. “Up there, amid the pines and the silver nent wilderness advocates. Yet clearly both firs, and the Sierran solitude, in a snowstorm, men saw an advantage in their proximity. At too, and without a tent. I passed one of the the time, Muir and Roosevelt shared a con- most pleasant nights of my life.” stituency: an educated middle class of urban Muir and Roosevelt, Good Tidings and white Americans, the backbone of Progres- Strenuous Life. These were not entirely com- sive-era reformism. Invisible in the newspaper patible men, nor entirely compatible philoso- accounts of this celebrated moment were the phies. But for three nights, the differences former native inhabitants of the Valley—not blurred, and the two co-existed comfortably to mention the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the 24th in their “Sierran solitude.” Their combined Infantry and 9th Cavalry, African American ideals would contribute to the rise of national men then charged with patrolling the park, parks, the vitality of a growing environmental whose segregated regiments had originated movement and the vibrancy of a new moun- with the United States Colored Volunteers of taineering culture. Similar themes of renewal the Civil War. and redemption would continue to shape the Most of Roosevelt’s entourage stayed way many Americans think of mountains, behind on the valley floor, while he and Muir resurfacing in the “Rucksack Revolution” of headed for the hills. The two men spent their the Beat writers and in the ethos that helped evenings around a campfire, and slept in the fuel the climbing boom of the Sixties. open, the first night at the Mariposa Grove, There was also a darker side to the policy Grand Canyon, should they be locked up the second on the valley rim near Sentinel of setting aside mountain regions for urban in their imagined original condition forever. Dome and the third at Bridalveil Meadow, visitors to enact idylls of “wilderness.” Muir, Accordingly, Roosevelt was prepared to make with a view of El Capitan across the Merced despite his profound spirituality, appeared tradeoffs. He would later support the proposal River. Muir tutored the president on the glacial at times incapable of perceiving the sacred to dam the Sierra’s Hetch Hetchy Valley as a origins of the valley, while Roosevelt tried to values of the Sierra for members of local water source for San Francisco—a proposal interest Muir in the local birds (one of Muir’s tribes. In Mountains of California (1894), he that Muir would adamantly and unsuccess- rare blind spots when it came to appreciat- described an encounter with a group of Mono fully oppose. But that unhappy controversy ing nature). Muir, who had his own agenda, people: “They seemed to have no right place was a few years off when Roosevelt wrote lobbied for a federal takeover of the original in the landscape, and I was glad to see them to Muir in the spring of 1903 to secure his park granted to California, arguing that the fading out of sight down the pass.” Likewise, company on a planned trip to Yosemite state was mismanaging it. “I never before had the statue of Theodore Roosevelt before the Valley. That April, Roosevelt had embarked a more interesting, hearty and manly com- Natural History Museum in New York City on a two-month national speaking tour to panion,” Muir wrote his wife. “I stuffed him gives an unintentionally accurate rendition more than half the states. Along the way, he pretty well regarding the timber thieves, the of the Rough Rider’s sense of racial hierar- visited Yellowstone Park and the rim of the destructive work of the lumbermen, and other chy: he sits on a horse, flanked by an African Grand Canyon before heading to his rendez- spoilers….” The payoff for Muir’s efforts came American and a Native American on foot. vous with Muir. “I do not want anyone with in 1906 when Roosevelt signed the Yosemite Muir and Roosevelt were products of their me but you,” Roosevelt wrote, “and I want to Recession Bill, which placed Yosemite Valley era, as we all are. By understanding them as drop politics absolutely for four days and just and the Mariposa Grove under federal juris- such, we can perceive “some tarnish”—as be out in the open with you.” diction. Once again Muir, the prophet, proved Joseph Taylor writes of Muir in Pilgrims of the Roosevelt seldom did anything without he was also a practical man of politics. Vertical (2012)—but we can also see these men political calculation. When he and Muir Many Americans were delighted with the as “more representative, and thus more histori- headed toward Yosemite by buggy and on image of their president roughing it in the cally relevant.” Rather than merely parading horseback from the Raymond train station, Western wild. “The President in The Yosemite them as grand, flat icons, we might perceive reporters and photographers were not far Park,” readers of the New York Times learned more of the complexities of the individuals they behind. One of the latter took the famous in a headline on May 16, 1903: “Gets Dusty were, and of the traditions they helped shape. picture of Roosevelt and Muir atop 7,214-foot Riding in Stage, and Goes Mountain Climb- And in the process, we might find reflections of Glacier Point. In the image, a nattily attired ing and Horseback Riding.” Roosevelt held a the summits that modern climbers still dream Roosevelt strikes a domineering pose, one press conference on the morning of May 17, into being, between the intricate contours of hand on his hip. A characteristically bedrag- and pronounced the Yosemite trip a “bully” vertical landscapes remembered and forgotten, gled Muir looks on, perhaps a little bemused. experience. “Just think of where I was last imaginary and real. z

[Previous Page] Theodore Roosevelt, ca. 1881, two decades before his presidency. When don’t care how short it is.” Ignoring the doctor’s advice, he became an avid mountaineer. he was in college, his doctor warned him away from intense exercise because of a heart Courtesy Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard Image Library l [This Page] The famous picture condition. “If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described,” Roosevelt replied, “I of Roosevelt and Muir atop Glacier Point Apron, Yosemite, 1903. Courtesy Library of Congress

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