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Show 504. same reason, he did not become a member of the National Forestry Commission. Perhaps one could say he was temperamentally a loner, but h i s reasons were more deliberate. Like Thoreau, to whom he compared himself frequently in the early years of the twentieth century, Muir thought of himself as a "majority of one." If he were to influence the government, he would do so as an upright and independent citizen, not as a civil servant. He had neither the d e s i r e nor the a b i l i t y to become a bureaucrat, or even to become a lobbyist. Indeed, he preferred to leave the running of the Sierra Club to the younger, more organizationally inclined a l l i e s like Colby. If he were to wield any power, he wished to do so with his pen and his ideas. Thus i t was with great t r e p i d a t i o n that he entered the political realm, during the b a t t l e for the recession of Yosemite Valley from the State of California to federal control. His first foray in t h i s b a t t l e was a disappointment. He wrote to T.H. Lukens early in 1897, t h a t he had gone to Sacramento to talk to l e g i s l a t o r s about recession. Warren Olney and Eliot McAlister, the Sierra Club's secretary and legal counsel, refused to go with him. He went alone, despite his feeling that he was "far from the r i g h t man for such work." But when he arrived, he discovered that the Legislature had already voted against recession. He was out of his realm. He was not l i k e the men who would run the National Park Service. Unlike Mather and his successor, Albright, Muir's strength grew from his uncompromising i n t e g r i t y . He was |