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Show 358. acres with orange trees, and by the time your last mountain is climbed their fruit will be your fortune." Muir responded with sympathy and appreciation to this and other offers. He appeared generally pleased to see the growth of agriculture in southern California in 1877. Travel-worn pioneers, who have been tossed about like boulders in flood-time, are thronging hither as to a kind of terrestrial heaven, resolved to rest. They build, and plant, and settle, and so come under natural influences. When a man plants a tree he plants himself. Seduced by such a vision of spiritual plenty, the man who did this kind of work produced "grander miracles every day than were ever written." Muir thought that the development of agriculture in California was a comparatively good thing. The prayers of the farmer, expressed in seeds, slips, and rootlets, were far superior to the miners* single-minded prayers for wealth where, "in the search the seekers too often become insane, and strike about blindly in the dark like raving madmen." Muir believed he saw a serious attempt by his fellow westerners to recreate a more lasting, healthy, and harmonious life in their land, after what he called the "fever" or "the disturbance of the gold period." While portraying a sharp contrast between the old mining ethic and the new agricultural ethic, he wrote as an optimist, because he wished to foster the hope that a new and better life was coming to the West. After meeting John Nelder in Giant Forest, he commented with sympathy on the forty-niners. |