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Show 410. Muir would speak to the tourist as he had to Johnson. He would take the tourist as far as Johnson had been able to go, down canyons and up mountains. In this spirit he would acknowledge the difficulties of wild terrain in places like Tuolumne Canyon. Any one accustomed to walk on earthquake boulders, carpeted with canon chaparral, can easily go down the canon as far as the big cascades and return to camp in one day. Many, however, are not able to do this, and it is far better to go leisurely, prepared to camp anywhere, and enjoy the marvelous grandeur of the place. Muir's rhetoric echoes the lesson he learned with Johnson. If a tourist wanted to climb a mountain, Muir would take his reader up Mount Dana, not Mount Ritter. Dana is a gradually sloped peak, one of the highest but at the same time easiest climbs in the proposed Yosemite Park. Thus he learned to accommodate himself to the weak but interested tourist. Muir became conscious of his new necessity, selling the Parks, and seemed actually comfortable for a while. His truce with such a role would only last for a few years. For the present, Muir's role as narrator was designed on the ideal of John the Baptist, and he realized aspirations recorded in his journal twenty years before. "Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize mine in the beauty |