- Two volumes of autobiography are Muir John The Story of My Boyhood and Youth Boston and New York 1913 and John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (Boston and New York, 1916), with additions taking him to California. Also necessary are The Life and Letters of John Muir edited by William Frederic Bade, 2 vols (Boston and New York, 1923–1924); and Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945; reprinted Madison, 1978), a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. William F. and Maymie B. Kimes, John Muir: A reading Bibliography (Palo Alto, Califronia, 1977; second edition Fresno, 1986), is very helpful.
- From subsequent geological literature and Farquhar Francis P. History of the Sierra Nevada Berkeley and Los Angeles 1966 ‘The best illustrated scenic spot’ is from John H. Williams Yosemite and Its High Sierra (Tacoma and San Francisco, 1914), with fine period photographs and paintings, p. 9.
- For the Mariposa Indian War, see Farquhar, chapter IX. The name ‘Yosemite’ (four syllables, accented on the second) apparently derived from a local Indian word for the grizzly bear (unknown in the Valley since 1924) and mistakenly applied to the Indians themselves, so by extension to their valley stronghold. Details regarding Yosemite's growing reputation are from Huth Hans Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes 1957 143 145 reprinted Lincoln, Nebraska, 1972) Yosemite became a national park (the fourth such) in 1890; see Huth for details. California achieved statehood in 1850.
- Brief notices of all three works can be found in Merrill George P. The First One Hundred Years of American Geology 1924 reprinted New York and London, 1969).
- Brewster , Edwin Tenny . 1909 . Life and Letters of Josiah Dwight Whitney Boston and New York with details on Jackson from Merrill. In C. T. Jackson, First Annual Report on the Geloogy of New Hampshire (Concord, 1841), pp. 45–51 and 83–93 were co-authored by Whitney. (With J. W. Foster) J. D. Whitney, Report on the Geology … of … the Lake Superior Land District. Part I: Copper Lands (Washington, D.C., 1850); Part II The Iron Region (1851). Louis Agassiz, Lake Superior: Its Physical Character, Vegetation and Animals (Boston, 1850).
- Life and Letters of JDW , 101 – 101 . 104. J. D. Whitney, The Metallic Wealth of the United States (Philadelphia, 1854).
- Life and Letters of Josiah Dwight Whitney , 184 – 184 . 187, 198, 231, 234–6. Whitney summarized the first five years in Geological Survey of California, by J. D. Whitney, State Geologist, Geology, Volume I: Report of Progress and Synopsis of the Field-Work, from 1860 to 1864 ([New York], 1865. Published by authority of the Legislature of California.), pp. ix-xv and passim. For Yosemite, see section IV, pp. 403–37; one week, p. 404; hasty survey’, p. 405 The most important quotations are cited in my text. Whitney also published brief annual reports. Much the fullest account of his survey, however is Up and Down California in 1860–1864, the Journal of William H. Brewer, edited by Francis P. Farquhar (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1949). Brewer also summarized Geology, I, in the American Journal of Science, 41 (1866), 231–46 (Coast Ranges); 351–68 (Sierra Nevada). Finally, Clarence King includes a few Survey anecdotes in his sometimes unreliable Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), discussed below.
- Whitney , J.D. 1868 . The Yosemite Book: A Description of the Yosemite Valley and Adjacent Regions of the Sierra Nevada, and of the Big Trees of California New York second to fifth editions, as The Yosemite Guide-Book (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1874). His remarks on the origin of the Valley remained unchanged in all editions; my pagination is from the 1874 version (John Muir's copy, the John Muir Center, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California). Completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 brought thousands of visitors to California, including Europeans. Do see, for example, Mrs Henry Lyell, editor, The Life of Sir Charles J. F. Bunbury, Bart., 2 vols (London, 1906), II, 274–5, 286.
- ‘The statements made by the writer in the Geology of California, Vol. I, to the effect that a glacier had once filled the Yosemite Valley, is an error, which has long since been corrected in the various editions of the Yosemite Guide-Book. The mistake was caused by too much dependence being placed on the reports of assistants entirely inexperienced in the study of glacial phenomena. Since the Geology of California, Vol. I, was published, the Yosemite and the adjacent region have more than once been carefully examined by the writer himself’ Whitney J.D. Climatic Changes 1882 47n 47n footnote 36 There is no record in Whitney's Life and Letters of any visit to Yosemite by him later than 1863.
- Whitney denied the existence of present-day Sierran glaciers in all editions of The Yosemite Guide-Book 1874 65 65 but readily affirmed former ones (pp. 67–8). On 4 July 1863, when both he and Whitney were in the Yosemite region, Brewer wrote that ‘There is now no glacier in this state—the climatic conditions do not exist under which any could be formed’ (Brewer, footnote 7, p. 412). John Muir discovered living Sierran glaciers in 1870, and many more soon came to light; Clarence King reported others on Mount Shasta.
- Muir John Letters to a Friend, Written to Mrs. Ezra C. Carr, 1866–1879 1915 50 50 reprinted Dunwoody, Georgia, 1973) Some of the ninety or more letters he is known to have written to her also appear in Life and Letters of John Muir (footnote 1; seventeen were destroyed in part or whole. Mrs Carr, who died in 1903, had tentatively arranged for the publication of the entire series, preferably after Muir's death. Life and Letters of JDW, pp. 234–6; Geology, I, p. xiv. The palaeontological volume was The Geological Survey of California. Paleontology, Volume I: Carboniferous and Jurassic Fossils by F. B. Meed; Triassic and Creataceous Fossils by W. H. Gabb (Philadephia, 1864. Published by authority of the Legislature of California); Whitney contributed a brief preface.
- Muir , John . 1911 . My First Summer in the Sierra Boston and New York excerpts prepublished in The Atlantic Monthly, 1911.)
- For Hutchings, see Farquar History of the Sierra Nevada Berkeley and Los Angeles 1966 chapter XIII; Life and Letters of John Muir, I, 215. In general, Muir's whole attitude toward geological controversy owed much to his father, but he substituted nature for Scripture. Whitney, in contrast, was not particularly religious (Life and Letters of Josiah Dwight Whitney, pp. 38–39, 336).
- Yelverton , Ther`ese . 1872 . Zanita: A Tale of the Yo-Semite New York and Cambridge chapter four, as quoted in Life and Letters of John Muir, I, 283.
- Le Conte , Joseph . 1875 . A Journal of Ramblings Though the High Sierra of California by the University Excursion Party reprinted San Francisco, 1930). Letters to a Friend (footnote 11), pp. 134, 90–3. After practising briefly as a physician in Georgia, Le Conte went to Harvard in 1850 to study for fifteen months under Agassiz. He then taught a wide range of subjects at the University of Georgia and, from 1857, at South Carolina College, where he remained during the Civil War. (South Carolina had been the first state to secede.) From 1869 onwards, Le Conte taught at the new University of California, remaining thirty-two years. He visited Yosemite on many occasions and died there in 1901 (Le Conte Memorial erected, 1903). See also The Autobiography of Joseph Le Conte, edited by William Dallam Armes (New York, 1903) and Lester D. Stephens, Joseph Le Conte: Gentle Prophet of Evolution (Baton Rouge, 1982).
- Rusk , Ralph L. , ed. 1939 . The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson Vol. 6 , New York and London 1966), VI, 154–7; quoting quoting p. 156. Life and Letters of John Muir, I, 295, 293–4, 294; for the complete 8 September letter, see pp. 293–8 and Letters to a Friend, pp. 104–11.
- Life and Letters of John Muir , I 302 – 308 . quoting pp. 302–3, 303. Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey (New York, 1860), pp. 307, 313.
- Life and Letters of John Muir I 287 287 310–13 John Muir, ‘Hetch-Hetchy Valley: The Lower Tuolumne Yosemite’, The Overland Monthly, 11 (July 1873), 42–50; quoting pp. 47, 42. Hetch-Hetchy (discovered 1850) is a corrupted Indian name for a type of grass.
- Life and Letters of John Muir , I 314 – 316 . During the winter, mail to and from the Valley was delivered monthly, brought in and out on snowshoes over the Yosemite trail by a postman named Indian Tom.
- Anonymous (but Muir) Yosemite Glaciers. The Ice Streams of the Great Valley. Their Progress and Present Condition—Scenes among the Glacier Beds New York Tribune December 1971 8 8 5 Reprinted in John Muir, To Yosemite and Beyond: Writings from the Years 1863 to 1875, edited by Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling (Madison, 1980), pp. 76–87; p. 80 (twice).
- King , Clarence . 1872 . Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada Boston reprinted Philadelphia, 1963). After graduating in 1862 from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, King went overland by wagon train from Missouri to Nevada, then hiked across the Sierra to central California, where he joined Whitney's Survey as an unpaid volunteer. His dashing exploits are ably narrated in Thurman Wilkins, Clarence King: A Biography (1958; revised and enlarged, with Caroline Hinkley, Albuquerque, 1988). In his Systematic Geology of 1878 (Washington), King hoped snidely ‘that Mr. Muir's vagaries will not deceive geologists who are personally unacquainted with California, and that the ambitious amateur himself may divert his evident enthusiastic love of nature into a channel, if there is one, in which his attainments would save him from hopeless floundering’ (p. 478n). As Wilkins suggests, Muir's superior exploits as a mountain climber may well have been the chief provocation.
- Whitney, of course, had already rejected in print King's fissure theory for the origin of Yosemite. As he pointed out Valleys which have originated in cross fractures are usually very narrow The Yosemite Guide-Book 1874 118 118 all editions.
- Kneeland visited Yosemite in 1870 and again in 1872. He presented no fewer than three papers based on communications from Muir On the Glaciers of the Yosemite Valley Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 1873 15 36 47 ‘Winter Phenomena of the Yosemite Valley’, ibid., 15 (1873), 148–51; and ‘On the Effects of the Earthquakes of March 26, 1872, in the Yosemite Valley’, ibid., 15 (1873), 185–6. All three of Muir's contributions had been excerpted in Samuel Kneeland, The Wonders of the Yosemite Valley, and of California, third edition (Boston and New York, 1872), pp. 84–91; with the earthquake paper appearing as well in his second edition (also 1872), p. 78. For Muir's reactions to Kneeland's use of his materials, see Life and Letters, I, 345, and Letters to a Friend, pp. 134–5.
- Life and Letters of John Muir I 267 267 345–8, 348n Letters to a Friend, pp. 152–3. For additional details, see chapter two, ‘The Glaciers’, in John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York, 1894; often reprinted).
- Muir's heavily annotated copy of Tyndall is at the John Muir Center, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California. See also Life and Letters of John Muir I 297 297 335, 367 Letters to a Friend, pp. 139–40; and The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (footnote 16, VI, 203. Andrew C. Ramsay, ‘On the Glacial Origin of Certain Lakes in Switzerland, the Black Forest, Great Britain, Sweden, North America, and Elsewhere’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 18 (1862), 185–204; reprinted, American Journal of Science, (series 2) 35 (1863), 324–45. For the resulting British controversy, see G. L. [Herries] Davies, The Earth in Decay: A History of British Geomorphology, 1578–1878 (London, 1969), pp. 301–9.
- Wolfe . 1945 . Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir 159 – 160 . Life and Letters of John Muir, I, 342, II, 291–3. Muir owned and annotated late (1890s) editions of both Agassiz volumes, as well as his Journey to Brazil.
- Life and Letters of John Muir , I 334 – 334 . 336; Letters to a Friend, p. 126. Muir's copy of Lyell, if it still survives, has not been located.
- Life and Letters of John Muir , I 354 – 354 . 355–6. The last is a direct reply to The Yosemite Guide-Book (1874), p. 117, quoted above.
- Le Conte , Joseph . 1873 . On some of the ancient Glaciers of the Sierra . The American Journal of Science , 5 : 325 – 342 . third series
- Life and Letters of John Muir , I 348 – 349 . Letters to a Friend, pp. 140–4. John Muir, ‘Living Glaciers of California’, The Overland Monthly, 9 (December 1872), 547–9; American Journal of Science, 5 (January 1873), 69–71.
- Le Conte On some of the ancient Glaciers of the Sierra The American Journal of Science 1873 5 325 342 third series Mounts Lyell, Maclure, and Whitney, of course, were named by the state Geological Survey.
- Life and Letters of John Muir , I 383 – 384 . Letters to a Friend, pp. 147–8.
- Publication in book form was not achieved until 1950 with Johm Muir's Studies in the Sierra , revised edition Colby William E. San Francisco 1960 1968). Pagination will be cited from the 1968 edition. For more complete discussion, based on the original printings, see D. R. Dean, ‘Muir and Geology’ (forthcoming). As might be imagined, John's father David opposed ‘Studies in the Sierra’ as soon as he learned of the project. ‘You cannot warm the heart of the saint of God with your cold icy-topped mountains,’ he advised John, and suggested that the best disposition of his book would be to burn it (Life and Letters of John Muir, I, 21).
- Muir John Studies in the Formation of Mountains in the Sierra Nevada, California Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 1875 49 64 23 part 2 for December 1874
- Muir John Glacial Phenomena in Nevada San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin December 1878 5 reprinted in Steep Trails (Boston and New York, 1918), pp. 184–94 and quoted form the latter.
- Whitney , J.D. 1882 . The Climatic Changes of Later Geological Times: A Discussion Based on Observations Made in the Cordilleras of North America Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Russell Israel C. Existing Glaciers of the United States Fifth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey Washington 1885 303 355 in reprinted as chapter three, ‘Glaciers of the Sierra Nevada’ in Israel C. Russell, Glaciers of North America (Boston and London, 1897) and quoted from the latter. Clarence King, Systematic Geology (Report on the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, I; Washington, 1878).
- Russell Israel C. Quaternary History of the Mono Valley, California Eighth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey Washington 1889 267 394 in reprinted, Lee Vining, California, 1984 (pagination unchanged).
- Becker George F. The Structure of a Portion of the Sierra Nevada of California Bulletin of the Geological Society of America January 1891 2 49 74 10 Read 20 December 1890.
- Le Conte , Joseph . 1898 . The origin of Transverse Mountain-Valleys and Some Glacial Phenomena in Those of the Sierra Nevada . University Chronicle , 1 December : 479 – 497 . Read before the Science Association of the University of California, Geological Section, 22 September 1898; and before the California Academy of Sciences, 26 September 1898.
- Blake W.P. Sur l'action des anciens glaciers dans la Sierra Nevada de Californie et sur l'origine de la vallée de Yo-Semite Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences July 1867 65 179 181 22 ‘On peut en conclure que cette vallée parait due `a une érosion sous-glaciare, due a l'écoulement des eaux provenant de la fonte des glaces supérieures’ (p. 181, italics his). William P. Blake, ‘Glacial Erosion and the Origin of the Yosemite Valley’, Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, 29 (1990), 823–35.
- Turner , Henry Ward . 1900 . The Pleistocene Geology of the South Central Sierra Nevada, with Especial Reference to the Origin of Yosemite Valley . Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences , 81 : 261 – 321 . (series 3)
- Gannett , Henry . 1901 . The Origin of Yosemite Valley . The National Geographic Magazine , 12 : 86 – 87 .
- Fairchild H.L. Ice Erosion Theory a Fallacy Bulletin of the Geological Society of America February 1905 16 13 74 13 Read 1 January and 30 December 1904 (i.e., in two parts at successive annual meetings).
- Johnson , Douglas Wilson . 1910 . The Origin of the Yosemite Valley . Appalachia , 12 : 138 – 146 . ‘Before the advent of the ice, the Merced River was flowing from two thousand to twenty-five hundred feet above the present floor of the Yosemite Valley, and the tributary creeks joined the river at the same high level. But the main glacier so vigorously eroded its channel that Tenaya Canyon and Yosemite Valley were scoured out to a depth of more than two thousand feet’ (p. 142). For the origin of gräben, see Eduard Suess, The Face of the Earth, I (Oxford, 1904), p. 126, and pp. 124–38, 201–9 more generally.
- For example Clark Galen The Yosemite Valley: Its History, Characteristic Features, and Theories Regarding Its Origin Yosemite Valley, California 1910 especially ‘The Author's Theory’, pp. 23–8. Clark was the first white resident of the Valley, having come in August 1855, with the next group after Hutchings’. He discovered the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, preserved valuable details about the Valley's Indians, and long served as Guardian of the state park. According to his theory, powerful bubbles of subterranean gases or superheated steam once underlay granitic crust still in a semi-plastic condition. Pressure from the bubbles elevated the granite into great domes. Two or more of these domes then ruptured completely to create the Valley, which was afterwards further shaped by glaciers. John Muir reiterated his own position in ‘The Ancient Yosemite Glaciers: How the Valley Was Formed’, chapter eleven of The Yosemite (New York, 1912). Harold French, ‘Genesis and Revelations of the Yosemite Valley’, Popular Science Monthly, 85 (1914), 69–82, likewise imagined that domes had arisen during the upheaval of the molten granitic magma, but thought Yosemite originated as one of the troughs between them. Subsequent tilting then led to a V-shaped valley, later glaciated.
- Matthes , Francois E. 1914 . Studying the Yosemite Problem . The Sierra Club Bulletin , 9 : 136 – 147 . with a series of shorter papers preceding.
- Matthes , Francois E. 1930 . Geologic History of the Yosemite Valley , USGS Professional Paper 160 Washington partially reprinted in Francois E. Matthes, The Incomparable Valley: A Geologic Interpretation of the Yosemite, ed. Fritiof Fryxell (erkeley and Los Angeles, 1964) and summarized from the latter.
- Matthes , Francois E. 1938 . John Muir and the Glacial Theory of Yosemite . Sierra Club Bulletin , : 9 – 10 . reprinted in Fritiof Fryxell, Francois Matthes and the Marks of Time: Yosemite and the High Sierra (San Francisco, 1962), pp. 187–8; p. 188 (see also pp. 55, 62n, 89–91).
- Huber , N. King . The Geologic Story of Yosemite National Park , USGS Bulletin 1595 Washington reprinted Yosemite National Park, California, 1989, and summarized from the latter.
Annals of Science
Volume 48, 1991 - Issue 5