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Show 349. scenery of the Kings River Yosemite, Muir mentioned that he and his companions had seen a Sequoia being cut down for exhibition at the Philadelphia Centennial. He commented, Many a poor, defrauded town dweller will pay his dollar and peep, and gain some dead arithmetical notion of the bigness of our Big Trees, but a true and living knowledge of these tree gods is not to be had at so cheap a rate. Maybe it would be possible for the poor to come to the forests in the future; in 1875 Muir was appealing to those who could afford to pay for their rest. If there was rest in the woods, there was forgetfulness in the waters. On the east side of the Sierra, he found Mono Lake to be "as translucent as Tahoe." "And the Mono desert is a desert of flowers the beauty of which the most loving pen will never describe." In these articles, every lake and canyon seemed the finest of them all. Tahoe in winter was "King of them all" and a "fine place this to forget weariness and wrongs and bad business." But several months later he was wondering why everyone went to Tahoe when Pyramid Lake was the "most singular and beautiful sheet of water" he had ever seen, surpassing "anything on the face of the earth for picturesque grandeur." After bathing in the Great Salt Lake he said that the railroad had made it "as accessible as any watering place on either coast," and it would lure thousands "were its merits hut half known." The clear message was that westerners who could afford it had the answer to their problem of overwork near at hand. |