Son of the wilderness by Linnie Marsh Wolfe

Author:Linnie Marsh Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Muir, John, 1838-1914, Naturalists -- United States -- Biography
ISBN: 0299077306
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 1978-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

i875~i887

and squirrels and wild sheep are my only children. A Mormon woman tells you at once . . . ; “Fve nine, ten, fifteen,” and then asks: ‘‘How many have your wives yielded? What of your fruit?” My companion gladly sings out, “Vve eight!” “Well, that’s not bad.” And then she turns fidl on me. I look out of the door to the mountain instinctively, and fortunately there are mountains before every Utah door, and say: “Vve not got any!”

One day, becoming a bit surfeited with man and his strange creeds, he went swimming in the Great Salt Lake. “It was the finest water baptism I ever experienced. . . . Salted, braced, I ran bounding along the beach with blood tingling as if I had discovered a new glacier.” ^

Then, looking south, he beheld the white snow-clad Oquirrh Mountains, “dipping in smooth curves . . . toward the Lake.” He lifted up his arms to salute them while the god within him chanted:

“Now I shall have another baptism,

I shall dip my soul in the high sky.

I shall go up through the pines and firs.

Among the wind waves on the mountains.” ®

After ascending the Oquirrhs in quest of golden lilies, he returned to the lowlands and spent two weeks in and about the town of Gunnison, south of Lake Utah, lodging in the home of Joseph Angell Young, son of Brigham. In this family he found “a human lily . . . the prettiest lily-lass in Utah” — a child just blooming into womanhood, and so fair that her beauty is even today a legend. Charmed by her, he wrote a tribute to her in a Bulletin article entitled: “Mormon Lilies.” ® “Among my memories of this strange land — will ever rise in clear relief . . . the Mormon lily of San Pitch.”

Nor did the Lily of San Pitch ever forget John Muir. In her scrapbook she kept the tribute he had written to her. The Lily herself died a few years ago, but in the family cherished memories still persist of the tall, blue-eyed stranger who came their way so long ago.^^^

After pausing at Lake Tahoe and the Yosemite on his return from Utah, John Muir, bestriding the landscape like a Colossus, went on to southern California, to spend “five shaggy days in the San Gabriel Mountains.” Sauntering up the coast he visited the Sequoia sempervirens groves in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and lectured “without too much scare” at the San Jose Normal SchooL’^^ Taking all these events in his swift and competent stride, he planned to explore the Oregon forests before winter.

But arriving in San Francisco, he learned that Asa Gray, his wife, and Sir Joseph Hooker, the English botanist, were in the city, waiting for him to guide them to Mount Shasta.

Early in September the party, including Muir, stopped briefly at the Rancho Chico on the Sacramento River, where the pioneer. General John Bidwell, his wife, and her sister Miss Sallie Kennedy, joined them with horses and a camp outfit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.