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Show 405. and authentic. Certainly Muir was not really lost. He had been a farmer for six years, not a mountaineer, and had lived in San Francisco off and on while writing in the last two years. He was a member of San Francisco's cosmopolitan Bohemian Club, and spent many evenings with fellow journalists, smoking and talking in parlors. On the other hand, there is a spiritual truth here; Muir had been lost in his attempt to foster civic righteousness. The Muir who understood a wilderness of Nature better than the one made by men needed Johnson to help him through a decade of legislative activity. If Johnson had plans, so did Muir. He knew that Century magazine offered a chance for a national campaign. To impress Century with the need for such a campaign, Muir would need to take Johnson out of the artificial canyons, and into the Sierran wilderness. A few weeks later, they were in Yosemite, and Muir wrote to his wife that he was "getting into a sort of second youth." They were off to Tuolumne Meadows and Tuolumne Canyon. "But how much we will be able to accomplish will depend upon the snow, the legs, and the resolution of the Century." Muir knew what he was after, and was using the strategy he made a part of his later program, when he lured Taft, Roosevelt, and other influential easterners into the woods where Nature could speak. When he referred to Johnson as the Century he indicated his real target on this excursion. Johnson's legs didn't hold out, but his resolution did. At the same time, Muir learned more than he thought he would. On their excursion down the Tuolumne River, he learned to |