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Show 557. of the gold rush is significantly different in an early draft and in the final version of First Summer. Originally Muir wrote that it was a brutal period of history: "On no virgin landscape were such savage blows rained & such marked damage done by so small a band of men in so short a time." So when the small band of the sheep camp climbed out of the deadly heat of the plains, and passed the abandoned gold country, they escaped from dead worlds and sought eternal summer as they invaded the mountains. The parallel was obvious, though Muir would not attack Delaney so directly. The young man only commented that the Don had been "overflowed and denuded and remodeled by the excitements of the gold fields;" which made him a typical Californian of his generation. Though Muir noted that "the California sheep-owner is in haste to get rich," and the sheep business "blinds and degrades," he seemed to like Delaney. The Don was no Ahab. But the sheep business was a natural extension of the get-rich ethics of the gold rush, and Delaney was an example of the men who continued the rape of the mountains. He appeared with no staff, but rather carried "a heavy rifle over his shoulder intended for bears and wolves." It was about as useful as Don Quixote's lance, and when it did not work, Delaney also had a ready supply of strychnine. Thus he conducted his war against bears, coyotes, mountain lions, in fact against all Nature, not as a monomaniac, but in a banal and businesslike sort of way. It was not comforting for young Muir to think that he was Delaney's trusted lieutenant. |