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Show 85. Nor is it a charming coincidence that Muir entered the canyons of the Sierra at about the same time that John Wesley Powell set off in his boat to follow the flow through canyons carved by the Colorado. Muir's Hetch Hetchy, and Powell's Glen Canyon, are gone now, impounded behind dams. Yet both men had attempted to check the tide of unthinking settlement in the West, and both had failed. Now we might look back and see that Muir always knew that the issues were not economic, or scientific, but were philosophical at bottom. What, his friends and family might have asked him, was he doing out in the howling wilderness? People like Powell or Clarence King never had to reach so deeply for their answers. They were part of a larger organization of men and had their duties to perform. Muir would have to appeal to deeper reasons for his quest, and that is what he did. Why did men go West? Muir recognized his kinship with a new wave of immigrants. Like Galen Clark who was to become the Yosemite Guardian, Muir went to the mountains seeking personal health, and became a student of natural history. He found more than he expected. "Go east, young man, go east!" he wrote in his journal, speaking in his mind to the residents of the cities of California. "Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal. . . . " Muir, Clark, or John Nelder who made his home near Giant Forest among the god-like Sequoias - these men were explorers who sought a home in Nature. Their example suggests a new consciousness in the American westward movement, a countercurrent to the advancing tide of civilization. |