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Show 445, just as today most Americans consider themselves environmentalists, and a Presidential candidate who once said, "If you've seen one Redwood you've seen 'em all," can now call himself an environmentalist, so too the citizens of the eighteen nineties read Muir's adventures because they wanted to believe that their Frontier had not passed away, and they read Muir's picturesque essays because they wanted to believe that America was still pretty as a picture. Muir would feed these appetites for a beautiful, wild, and exciting America if they would be consummated in a movement for preservation of wilderness. "We are all mountaineers," he said in Picturesque California. Did urban America really believe him? Apparently it wanted to. So in his public life, the real Muir in the nineties and beyond was a shrewd businessman and nobody's fool. He was a man who could talk to Presidents as equals. He was undaunted by the position, wealth, and prestige of worldly men. The Harrimans and Roosevelts of the world came to him, came to his mountains and glaciers for recreation; these men were not objects of wonder, but possible allies who might help Muir's cause. THE SIERRA CLUB AND SECULAR PANTHEISM When Johnson proposed that Muir help form an organization on the West coast, primarily as a "defense association" which would watch over and help protect Yosemite National Park, |