Age 18, Stanford University Class: “The American Wilderness”
Hector St. Jean Crevecoeur, in a passage from “Letters from an American Farmer,” says that wilderness turns men into beasts, and is an evil influence on man until converted into decent, cultivated farmland. Henry David Thoreau and John Muir would both disagree with this statement, for both believed that the existence of wild, uncontrolled wilderness was necessary to all people. However, they would disagree with Crevecoeur for different reasons, for they saw different values in the wilderness. Thoreau considered the wilderness to be an intellectual haven place to seek philosophical answers; while Muir valued the wilderness as a source of spiritual rejuvenation, a place to find simple joy and faith in God.
Understanding these three men’s contrasting concepts of wilderness first requires an understanding of the historical eras in which they lived. The late eighteenth century was a period of resolution and urban uproar in Europe. During this time the pastoral ideal of a serene, cultivated landscape as the ideal home for civilized man evolved, as people sought alternatives to the complications of an increasingly industrial world. According to pastoralists such as Crevecoeur, wilderness was the lack of civilization, a savage vacuum that drained those who lived there of their culture and manners. “The roughness of their way of life, the primitiveness of struggling for survival, strip these men of their civilization.” The concept of wilderness preservation was unheard of, for the American wilderness was considered to be so vast as to be limitless. “Many ages will not see…the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled…Who can tell the millions of men it will feed and contain?” The pastoralists of the 18th century, therefore, approved of the settlement of all the wilderness. “[The settlers] will change that hitherto barbarous country into a fine, fertile, well-regulated district. Such is our progress…”
By the early 19th century, however, the pastoral ideal had begun to fade from New England, as cities and factories spread and the old rural simplicity was lost. Many of the intellectuals of the time, including Henry David Thoreau, began to turn to the wilderness for idealism and inspiration. These American philosophers, known as Transcendentalists, felt that there was a spiritual essence to Nature that could be interpreted and used to explain the human spirit. Unlike the pastoralists, who desired an entirely rural country, the Transcendentalists maintained that both civilized metropolises and untouched wildernesses were necessary. While Thoreau believed that cities encouraged cultural and intellectual growth, he also wrote, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” By this time a few people had realized that the wilderness was not limitless and that some effort to save it needed to be made. The Transcendentalist’s ideas were largely responsible for the roots of the wilderness preservation movement.
However, attitudes changed by the mid-19th century. The post-Civil War times that John Muir lived in were marked by a degeneration of idealism and widespread governmental and corporative corruption. Muir was understandably disillusioned with civilization as he saw it, and considered society completely dispensable. He led the battle to save many pristine areas out of a genuine love for the wilderness, for it was here that he sought and found the spiritual purity that was lacking in the civilized world around him.
Thoreau and Muir’s different attitudes towards the wilderness can also be explained by their very different personal backgrounds and experiences. Thoreau grew up in populated New England and was highly educated. As a Harvard graduate, he had developed a scholarly mind and was well-versed in classical languages and literature. But though a fervent wilderness advocate, Thoreau himself had little exposure to the actual wilderness and spent most of his time strolling about the placid farms and villages near Concord, Massachusetts.
Muir, on the other hand, grew up away from people—first in Scotland, then on an isolated farm in Wisconsin. A college drop-out, he spent much of his life on long, adventurous wanderings through the South and West. It’s no wonder then that he felt more at home in the wilderness than in populated places, and that “going to the mountains is like going home.” In the magnificent grandeur of the West, he searched for the spontaneous religious faith lacking in his strict Calvinistic upbringing. Even farm country was too tainted by man to be wilderness to Muir, and so he ridiculed Thoreau’s attempt to find wilderness “in a huckleberry patch.”
Considering his scholarly disposition, it’s not surprising that Thoreau looks at the wilderness from an intellectual point of view. Everything he observes is keenly analyzed for profound meanings. He can conduct brilliant analogies from the most ordinary of scenes. For example, he can watch a thawing sandbank and assert, “It seemed to me that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us that we may turn over a new leaf at last?” Thoreau’s intense desire to explain the world is apparent from this last statement—he firmly believes that if the world can be fully understood, it can be improved. He concludes the essay Spring with this claim of a malleable world: “The institutions upon [the earth] are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.” From this one aspect of nature, a sandbank, he has created and substantiated an entire philosophical theory.
Thoreau does have an emotional response to nature, but only after he has detachedly observed it and elevated it to a higher mental plane. He doesn’t impetuously respond to the sandbank as a thing of beauty—first, he has to think about it in abstract times. Then he declares. “Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing clay and sand assume….” This desire to constantly analyze his surroundings is a clue to his uneasiness in true wilderness. Raw nature is too powerful, too immediate, too intense for sensitive Thoreau’s mind to handle. He felt like a “daring and insolent” intruder on the “unfinished part of the globe” as he ascended Mt Katahdin. Though he felt compelled to climb the mountain out of a driving curiosity, he couldn’t relax and take any pleasure in his surroundings. To him, it was “certainly the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled.” It was too vast and complex for him to comprehend, and the realization of this disturbed him greatly. “Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to have escaped through the loose grating of his ribs…He is more lone than you can imagine…There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit…Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him some of his divine faculty.” By the end of the passage, Thoreau is so disoriented by his wild surroundings that he trails off to frantic questions, his analytical mind in a turmoil. “The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” Without the buffer of an abstract stage, the wilderness paralyzes him, strips him of his clear-headed reasoning. Such an emotional reaction was foreign to Thoreau, and frightened him. He much preferred the tame, familiar landscape around Concord for his meditations. It was neat, organized and intimate – something his mind could easily grasp and dissect.
Muir views the wilderness from a completely different angle. He doesn’t have to ponder about what is around him to enjoy it. He doesn’t try to arrive at deep unifying truths from every rock and tree. Instead, he personifies the wild things around him and delights in their company. The abstract stage is unnecessary to him; he finds what he’s looking for—faith, strength, and joy—simply through his direct experiences. While swinging on his tree, he relates, “Never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion…I was free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest around me from my superb outlook.” The words “I was free” are important here—by totally immersing himself in the feel and motion of the storm, Muir was free of all cluttering thoughts, free to absorb the essence of the storm. Contrary to Thoreau, who in a similar situation would spend every moment tussling with deep thoughts, Muir lets his mind rest and his senses take over. He is capable of philosophical venturings, such as his comparison of trees and men at the end of “A Wind-storm in the Forest.” But the analogy is vague, almost hesitant, as though it was only a nice afterthought that occurred to him much later. Arriving at this analogy was certainly not Muir’s prime motive for experiencing the storm, as it would have been for Thoreau. Muir is simply content to have basked for a few hours in the “ineffable beauty and harmony” of the mountain winds.
Muir also differed from Thoreau in that he reveled in long, difficult trips to isolated areas. He gloried in risks, for his ability to somehow survive every tight spot reaffirmed his faith that Nature could never harm him. “Difficulties of this kind only serve to exhilarate the mountaineer,” he claimed cheerfully. His climb-for-fun of Mt. Ritter is a complete contrast to Thoreau’s grim ascension through “the savage and dreary scene.” Whereas Thoreau felt that a part of him was stripped away by the raw power of the wilderness, Muir is rejuvenated by this same power. “In so wild and beautiful a region was spent my first day, every sight and sound inspiring, leading one far out of himself, yet feeding and building up his individuality.” To Muir, the majestic wilderness was full of undiluted “terrestrial manifestations of God,” and was thus the purest source of religious faith. His exuberance while alone in the mountains spills over unabashedly into his writing. “All my first day was pure pleasure…What a fine traveling companion [the Tuolumne] proved to be, what songs it sang, and how passionately it told of the mountain’s own joy! Gladly I climbed along its dashing border…” Above all, the wilderness gives Muir a sense of belonging to all of Nature. “I strode on exhilarated as if never more to feel fatigue, limbs moving of themselves, every sense unfolding like the thawing flowers, to take part in the new day harmony.” This knowledge, that he is a part of the beauty and harmony around him, gives Muir the comfort and joy he is seeking.
In conclusion, Thoreau and Muir would emphatically disagree with Crevecoeur’s theory that the wilderness makes men beasts. Both considered the wilderness to be a positive and stabilizing influence on man, but each for his own reasons. Thoreau would say that the wilderness allows man to arrive at truth and understanding; Muir would say that it gives men joy and renewed faith in God.