1184
John Muir, Famed Conservationist & Author, ALS, Yosemite Valley, 1872 [196732]
Currency:USD
Category:Collectibles / Paper
Start Price:2,500.00 USD
Estimated At:8,000.00 - 10,000.00 USD
SOLD
2,500.00USDto d*******f+ buyer's premium (625.00)
This item SOLD at 2025 May 02 @ 10:11UTC-07:00 : PDT/MST
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John Muir, Famed Conservationist & Author, ALS, Yosemite Valley, 1872
by Grant Peterson, 2025
INTRO
A fantastic partial letter (ALS) from John Muir, famed conservationist, "Father of the National Parks," and author of several works on Nature. The letter was written at a pivotal time (the early 1870s) in his professional career and composed in Yosemite, the most important setting in Muir's life. The letter includes Muir's trademark poetic language and theological/ecological worldview. Provenance: The consignor acquired the letter in the 1970s directly from Jean Hanna Clark, granddaughter of John Muir.
MUIR BIO
John Muir (1838ñ1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, writer, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, he immigrated with his family to Wisconsin at the age of eleven, where he grew up working on the family farm and developing a deep love for the natural world.
After briefly attending the University of Wisconsin, Muir set out on a life of exploration, famously walking a thousand miles from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico. His travels eventually led him to California's Sierra Nevada, where he fell in love with Yosemite Valley and began writing extensively about its beauty and significance.
Muir's vivid articles, published in magazines like Century and later collected into books such as The Mountains of California and My First Summer in the Sierra, brought national attention to the need for conservation. He was instrumental in the establishment of Yosemite National Park and co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892, serving as its first president. His influence helped shape public opinion and government policy, earning him the nickname "Father of the National Parks." Muir's writings combined scientific observation and keen detail with poetry and religious reverence, helping to shape America's early environmental movement.
In the final years of his life, Muir continued to write and campaign tirelessly for the preservation of wild lands. Despite personal heartbreak, including the death of his wife Louisa in 1905, he remained committed to conservation. He traveled to places like Alaska and South America, gathering material for new books. Sadly, Muir faced deep disappointment when the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which he fought to protect, was approved for flooding in 1913 to provide water for San Francisco. He died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital on December 24, 1914, leaving behind a powerful legacy of wilderness protection and environmental advocacy.
THE LETTER
The partial letter is numbered "7" at the top. Unfortunately, Muir's granddaughter Jean Clark did not have the previous pages and did not know who the letter was written to (though we have some theories, discussed later). Approx. 8 x 6"
Even though it is only a partial letter, this is an important and desirable document since it includes Muir's autograph, a unique dateline, and some classic examples of his environmental theology and ability as a prose writer.
The letter reads:
"...in one mansion, creeping & warming in one fleck of sunshine, homed all together in one beam of light.
Fair play then & fair life to all Heavens children. Let the wild flower lie in wait for the dewdrop, the wild sheep for the flower, & the wild coyote for the sheep.
J Muir
Blacks Hotel, Yosemite Valley, Cal.
Feb' 2d 1872"
When Fred Holabird and I (GP) first read the letter, we were sure the language sounded very familiar and had been used later in one of his published works. Luckily, most of Muir's work is available online, so we combed the digital collections and even used AI to search for this specific language in Muir's books. It did not turn back a direct match, though Muir continually referenced similar imagery (light, wildflowers, sheep, coyotes, ecology) is most of his work. In fact, after reading more of his letters while researching for this description, you can see Muir developing his ability as a prose writer in his letters, an epistolary training ground employed by other great Western writers at the time like Mark Twain.
The first paragraph of text is very reminiscent of Muir's other discussions of light in the Sierra. In his The Mountains of California (1894), he famously remarked: "The Sierra should rightly be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light." While we do not know what the "mansion" he is referring to, we can safely guess it was the spectacular granite monuments in Yosemite Valley or perhaps the valley itself. Muir saw light (and sunshine) as both a divine and natural force, as Nature and God were nearly inseparable in his philosophy. His use of "Heavens children" in the next paragraph, followed by a list of plants and animals, further shows how he saw Nature as shaped by and embodying the divine.
The final line in the letter perfectly encompasses Muir's view of the interconnectedness of Nature. By listing predator and prey pairings (wildflower/dewdrop, wild sheep/flower, wild coyote/sheep), we can see Muir's fascination with the harmony of Nature, born out of its complicated webs of relationship. It also reminds us of a famous line of his from The Yosemite (1912): "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
So what was Muir doing in Yosemite in 1872 as he wrote this letter? And who might the letter have been addressed to?
MUIR IN THE EARLY 1870s: THE FORMATION OF YOSEMITE & A YOSEMITE NATURALIST
Muir came to Yosemite in 1868. At the time of this letter, he was exploring Yosemite to answer an important question: how did Yosemite Valley form?
The conventional wisdom at the time, as espoused by prominent geologist Josiah D. Whitney, was that the valley had been formed by earthquakes. In The Yosemite Guidebook (1869), Whitney states:
"We conceive that, during the process of upheaval of the Sierra, or, possibly, at some time after that had taken place, there was at the Yosemite a subsidence of a limited area, marked by lines of 'fault' or fissures crossing each other somewhat nearly at right angles. In other and more simple language, the bottom of the Valley sank down to an unknown depth, owing to its support being withdrawn from underneath during some of those convulsive movements which must have attended the upheaval of so extensive and elevated a chain. "
Muir did not agree. He spent the final months of 1871, before settling in for the winter at Black's Hotel, exploring the glacial features and ice fields of Yosemite. In a fall 1871 letter to Jeanne Carr, he explains his unique field methodology:
"I think I answered your last with respect to remaining here in winter. I can do much of this ice work in the quiet, and the whole I 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."
In a Sept. 24th, 1871 letter to Clinton Merriam, Muir clearly lays out his hypothesis for the valley's formation:
"You know my views concerning the formation of Yosemite, that the great Valley itself, together with all of its various domes and sculptured walls, were produced and fashioned by the united labors of the grand combination of glaciers which flowed over and through it, their forces having been rigidly governed and directed by the peculiar physical structure of the granite of which this region is made, and, moreover, that all of the rocks and lakes, and meadows of the whole upper Merced basin owe their specific forms and carving to this same glacial agency."
In December 1871, two months before our letter, Muir published his ideas in an article in the New York Tribune titled "Yosemite's Glaciers," which Bade calls "the first published statement of the ice erosion theory to account for the origin of Yosemite."
In a November 16th, 1871 letter to his mother, Muir spelled out his plans for the 1871/72 winter. He writes:
"I have returned from my last hard exploratory ramble in the summit mountains. I will remain during the winter at Black's Hotel, taking care of the premises and working up the data which I have garnered during these last months and years concerning the ancient glacial system of this wonderful region. For the last two or three months I have worked incessantly among the most remote and undiscoverable of the deep canyons of this pierced basin, finding many a mountain page glorious with the writing of God and in characters that any earnest eye could read. The few scientific men who have written upon this region tell us that Yosemite Valley is unlike anything else, an exceptional creation, separate in all respects from all other valleys, but such is not true. Yosemite is one of many, one chapter of a great mountain book written by the same pen of ice which the Lord long ago passed over every page of our great Sierra Nevadas. I know how Yosemite and all the other valleys of these magnificent mountains were made and the next year or two of my life will be occupied chiefly in writing their history in a human book--a glorious subject, which God help me preach aright."
Also of special note to Muir and Yosemite lovers: a few months before he wrote our letter, Muir first visited Hetch Hetchy Valley, a location that would play a large role later in his life as a conservationist. Muir would later note that "Hetch Hetchy Valley, far from being a plain, common, rock-bound meadow, is a grand landscape garden, one of Nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples." At the end of his life, he fought to prevent it from being flooded as a source for San Francisco water. He lost this fight in 1913, just a year before his death.
POSSIBLE RECIPIENTS OF THIS LETTER
Until the rest of this letter surfaces (if ever), we can only speculate as to who Muir was writing. Luckily, there are excellent repositories of his letters online, as well as a collection of his letters from William Frederic Bade (1924), that allows us to pinpoint his pen pals at the time. Amazingly, Muir wrote another letter on the same date as ours, Feb. 2nd, 1872. This letter was to American author Charles Warren Stoddard. The complete letter is available online (Bancroft), and our page here is not from this letter.
Using Bade's The Life & Letters, we can see that Muir was in constant letter contact at this time with Ezra & Jeanne Carr. Thus, we believe Jeanne Carr is the most likely recipient of this letter. Physician/professor Ezra Carr and his wife Jeanne were close friends of Muir and played a major role in his professional development. They met Muir at a Wisconsin State Fair where Muir was displaying clocks and other inventions. Jeanne Carr encourage Muir to apply to university, where he was eventually taught by her husband, Ezra Carr. While in Yosemite, Jeanne Carr helped set-up a job for Muir with James Hutchings (of Hutchings Hotel fame). While Muir was working for Hutchings over the next few years, Carr frequently suggested to friends that they seek out Muir as a personal guide/naturalist. Among those who took up this suggestion were Ralph Waldo Emerson and scientist Asa Gray.
Bade notes that at the time of this letter (winter 1871/72), Jeanne Carr was actively encouraging Muir to send his writing off for publication in newspapers and magazines: "Many of his friends at this time were aware of his literary ability through his letters and were urging him to write, but no one had assessed his genius and his literary powers more accurately than his friend Jeanne C. Carr." Carr took some of Muir's thoughts on glaciers from two of his letters and combined them. She sent this to Emerson with the request to get it published in the Atlantic. She told Muir in late 1871:
"You are not to know anything about it 'Let it take its chances' All this fugitiveness is going to be gathered up, lest you should die like Moses in the mountains and God should bury you where 'no man knoweth.' I copied every word of your old Journal. It looks pretty, and reads well. You have only to continue it and make the Yosemite Year Book, painting in your inimitable way the march of the seasons there. Try your pen on the humans, too. Get sketches at least. I think it would be a beautiful book. Then you will put your scientific convictions into clear-cut crystalline prose for other uses."
Another exciting possibility is that our letter was sent to another very famous American writer: Ralph Waldo Emerson. At this time (1871/1872), Muir was frequently communicating with Emerson, who was encouraging Muir's literary ambitions. Bancroft has a great collection of Muir's correspondence, and looking at other letters written at the beginning of 1872, a particular letter to Emerson on Jan. 10th , 1872, stands out. Muir signs this letter to Emerson as "J Muir", the same way our letter is signed, and not as most of his other letters are signed (with his full name). Muir's letters to Emerson (and Emerson's to Muir) are highly poetic, full of the very same language and reflection on Nature we see in our letter. And our letter was written on the same day Muir sent a letter to another author (Stoddard). Therefore, it is not out of the range of possibility that our partial letter may have been sent to Emerson, two world-class writers sharing their appreciation for the beauty of the natural world.
A UNIQUE DATELINE: BLACK'S HOTEL
Finally, it is worth noting the special location Muir wrote his letter from. Our letter includes the dateline, "Blacks Hotel, Yosemite Valley." A.G. Black, an early settler of the Coulterville region, first hosted visitors at Bull Creek north of Yosemite before Mrs. Black later established Black's Hotel in Yosemite Valley by purchasing the old Lower Hotel in the 1860s. (The Lower Hotel had been built in 1856-57.) Black tore down the structure in 1869 and built a new hotel, a simple shed-like building near the Four-Mile Trail, that served tourists for nearly two decades until it was removed in 1888 following the opening of the Stoneman House. The salvaged lumber from Black's Hotel was then reused to build the "Kenneyville" property, located where the Ahwahnee Hotel now stands.
A PERSONAL NOTE
Getting to research an original John Muir letter was a thrill for our office. I (GP) first came to love Muir as an undergraduate in UC Davis's Nature & Culture program, when I first read My First Summer in the Sierra and other works by Muir. My appreciation for Muir deepened when I then went on to complete a graduate degree in Literature & Environment from UNR's English department. Fred Holabird also has a special personal family connection to Muir: his great grandfather was good friends with Muir.
SUMMARY
This early John Muir ALS would be a treasure for our book & Yosemite collectors, as well as lovers of the Sierra Nevada and its natural history. Written at an early and important juncture in Muir's life, it is a snapshot of the development of a poetic naturalist and defender of the environment, "John of the Mountains," "Father of the National Parks."
PROVENANCE
This partial letter was acquired by our consignor in the 1970s directly from John Muir's only granddaughter, Jean Hanna Clark. Clark was the daughter of Wanda Muir-Hanna (John Muir's daughter) and Thomas Hanna. She died in 1976.
^
Date: 1872
Country (if not USA):
State: California
City: Yosemite
Provenance:
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