Good Tidings, Strenuous Life I Maurice Isserman

WIRED 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.

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