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Show 546. the eradication of Indians and wolves amounted to the same thing. In a historical sense, we are all to blame for the loss of wolves. In the nineteenth century when the Indians on the plains were telling us that the wolf was a brother, we were preaching another gospel. Manifest Destiny. What rankles us now, I think, is that an alternative gospel still remains largely unarticulated. You want to say there never should have been a killing, but you don't know what to put in its place. This alternative gospel was at the heart of Muir's narrative, but never quite crystallized in Story of MyBoyhood and Youth. Muir knew that he had lived out his life forever caught between the values of civilization and those of wildness. Once a man had passed the point in history where he could never become an Indian, he could never return. So his story was at bottom a narrative of loss. Whitman asked the question in 1855: The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it? Muir could only answer that question ambiguously- After all, he remembered how he had as a boy abused his pet pony Jack. And once an Indian had stolen a horse named Nob from his father's ranch and treated it with "terrible cruelty." Worse, he remembered the irony of Nob's death, caused by his father's abusing her to arrive at a church meeting on time. "Civilized" or "primitive," all men had failed in a sacred duty to respect their brother mortals. Maybe, with better education, the |
