| OCR Text |
Show 297 that even possible? He had occasional intimations that Indians expressed a spiritual communion with the mountain spirit. Listening to their death chants in the Sierra one night, "the wild wailing came with indescribable impressiveness through the still dark woods." He imagined "falling boulders and rushing streams and wind tones caught from rock and tree were in it." He was entranced, and "wondered that so much of mountain nature should well out from such a source." Yet several months later he wrote of the defeated Modocs in the stereotyped language of the time. He spoke of them as "panthers," "unsavory," and "not very amiable looking people." If he was repulsed by wild Indians, he was also disappointed when he met an Indian who had become a shepherd and lost his wildness. Muir chose not to see poetry in the Indian soul, and that was at least consistent with his view of most men. He wrote to one friend in Oakland: I don't agree with you in saying that in all human minds there is poetry. Man, as he came from the hand of his maker was poetic in both mind and body, but the gross heathenism of Civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, in all that is spiritual. I am tempted at times to adopt the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity- . . . This was the sort of reasoning which failed to reach any clarification. An anthropologist might point out that the Native American had more leisure, more time for contemplation and meditation, |
