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Show 407, and a hardy mountaineer who penetrated deeper into the wilderness, became the bond between the eastern reader and the narrator of Muir's essays in the early nineties. Muir had learned to be a gracious host, as Johnson was at pains to show. Apparently he changed his style, since Keith had complained that Muir was always a poor provider. But now, the canyon of the Tuolumne could be a good place for both Johnson's and Muir's activities; they could appreciate it according to their tastes and abilities. Not only would this become the basic rhetorical technique Muir would use when writing of National Parks, it would also be essential to his conception of a National Park. A Park would be partly a wilderness accessible to those who could appreciate it, but created for the good of Nature, not Man. In it, the manzanita could flourish. But a Park would also be a place where a man like Johnson could receive his own baptism, tenderfoot though he might be. Parks needed tourists, even if Nature didn't need Man. Tourists were better than sheep. Muir carefully planned Johnson's baptism into the wilderness, at the same time as he planted seeds of discontent. When Johnson asked about those beautiful mountain meadows which Muir had described for Scribner's in the late seventies, the answer was ready: "No," said Muir, "we do not see any more of those now. Their extinction is due to the hoofed locusts." This was the first time I heard him use this graphic expression for sheep. |