OCR Text |
Show 469 were anything but comfortable. I'm sure he liked Pinchot partly because the young man was willing to sleep outside, even in the rain. That was the sort of behavior which would go a long way toward making Muir forget other indiscretions. Despite the fact that he was not an official member of the Commission, Muir gained tremendous power when he began to interpret the report of the Commission in Harper's Weekly and Atlantic Monthly. It was the Muir-Sargent view that appeared in these magazines, and the essays Muir wrote would have to do in lieu of any public proclamation by the government. Though Cleveland issued an Executive Order creating thirteen new Reservations, he passed out of office, and the Secretary of Interior under McKinley.- Cornelius Bliss, suppressed the Commission's report. There was very little arboreal bliss in Bliss, Muir wrote to Johnson. And shortly thereafter, Congress passed the McCrae-Pettigrew Bill, celebrated by Pinchot, which went against the Commission's report and opened the Reserves to use. Even while Muir and Sargent had won the first battle, they had lost the war. Reserves and National Parks would become very different from wildernesses, and would be administered as commercial enterprises, the first for lumber, forage, and water, and the second for public playgrounds. So Muir's support of the Forestry Commission was published too late to change the course of Congressional action, as he knew when he wrote to Johnson in June of 1897. Though his first two articles in Harperjj. and Atlantic revealed his hope for the future of governmental conservation, in his third |