Original subtitles

MAN: One learns that the world, though made, is

yet being made, that this is still the morning of creation,

that mountains long conceived and now being born brought to

light by the glaciers, channels traced for rivers,

basins hollowed for lakes.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it

hitched to everything else in the universe.

The whole wilderness in unity and interrelation

is alive and familiar.

The very stones seem talkative,

sympathetic, brotherly.

Everybody needs beauty, as well as bread, places to

play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give

strength to body and soul alike.

This natural beauty hunger is made manifest in our

magnificent national parks...

nature's sublime wonderlands,

the admiration and joy of the world.

John Muir.

PETER COYOTE: They are a treasure house of nature's

superlatives, 84 million acres of the most stunning

landscapes anyone has ever seen...

including: a mountain so massive it creates its own

weather, whose peak rises more than 20,000 feet above

sea level, the highest point on the continent...

a valley where a river disappears into burning sands

282 feet below sea level, the lowest and hottest

location in the hemisphere...

a labyrinth of caves longer than any other ever measured...

and the deepest lake in the nation

with the clearest water in the world.

They contain trees dead for 225 million years

that are now solid rock...

and trees still growing that were already saplings before

the time of Christ, before Rome conquered the known

world, before the Greeks worshipped in the Parthenon,

before the Egyptians built the pyramids, trees that are

the oldest living things on Earth

and the tallest and the largest.

They encompass a mile-deep gash in the ground, where the

Hopis say the first people emerged from the underworld

and where scientists say a river has patiently carved its

way to expose rocks that are 1.7 billion years old,

nearly half the age of the planet itself...

and an island where a goddess named Pele destroys everything

in her path while she simultaneously gives birth

to new land.

They preserve cathedrals of stone gaily ornamented

by cascading ribbons of water...

Arctic dreamscapes where the rivers are made of ice...

and a geological wonderland with rivers that steam,

mud that boils amidst the greatest collection

of geysers in the world.

They became the last refuge for magnificent species

of animals that otherwise would have vanished forever...

and they remain a refuge for human beings seeking to

replenish their spirit, geographies of memory and hope

where countless American families have forged

an intimate connection to their land and then passed it

along to their children.

MAN: I think that deep in our DNA is this embedded memory

of when we were not separated from the rest of the natural

world, that we were part of it.

The Bible talks about the Garden of Eden as that

experience that we had at the beginnings of our dimmest

memories as a species, and so when we enter a park, we're

entering a place that has been... at least the attempt has

been made to keep it like it once was, and we cross that

boundary, and suddenly, we're no longer masters

of the natural world.

We're part of it, and in that sense,

it's like we're going home.

It doesn't matter where we're from.

We've come back to a place that is where we came from.

MAN: It is the preservation of the scenery, of the forests,

and the wilderness game for the people as a whole instead

of leaving the enjoyment thereof to be confined to

the very rich.

It is noteworthy in its essential democracy, one

of the best bits of national achievement which our people

have to their credit, and our people should see to it that

they are preserved for their children and their children's

children forever with their majestic beauty all unmarred.

Theodore Roosevelt.

COYOTE: But they are more than a collection of rocks

and trees and inspirational scenes from nature.

They embody something less tangible yet equally enduring,

an idea born in the United States nearly a century

after its creation, as uniquely American as

the Declaration of Independence and just as radical.

MAN: What could be more democratic than owning

together the most magnificent places on your continent?

Think about Europe.

In Europe, the most magnificent places,

the palaces, the parks, are owned by aristocrats,

by monarchs, by the wealthy.

In America, magnificence is a common treasure.

That's the essence of our democracy.

COYOTE: "National parks," the writer and historian

Wallace Stegner once said, "are the best idea

we've ever had."

MAN: It's not the best idea.

The best idea came from Thomas Jefferson, that all human

beings, irrespective of the accident of their birth,

are entitled to enjoy the aspirations of being fully

complete and free human beings.

That's America's gift to the world,

but right up there are the national parks.

Jefferson, I think, would say if you go out into the heart

of America and see this continent in its glory,

it will embolden you to dream

about the possibilities of life, that American nature is

the guarantor of American Constitutional freedom,

that if you don't have a genuine link to nature

in a serious, even profound way,

you can't be an American.

COYOTE: Like the idea of America itself, full

of competing demands and impulses, the national park

idea has been constantly debated, constantly tested,

and is constantly evolving, ultimately embracing places

that also preserve the nation's first principles,

its highest aspirations, its greatest sacrifices,

even reminders of its most shameful mistakes.

Most of all, the story of the national parks is the story

of people, people from every conceivable background,

rich and poor, famous and unknown, soldiers

and scientists, natives and newcomers, idealists, artists,

and entrepreneurs, people who were willing to devote

themselves to saving some precious portion of the land

they loved and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens

of the full meaning of democracy.

From the very beginning as they struggled over who should

control their national parks, what should be allowed within

their boundaries, even why they should exist at all,

Americans have looked upon these wonders of nature

and seen in them the reflection of their own dreams.

MAN: One of the things I think we witness when we go to the

parks is the immensity and the intimacy of time.

On the one hand, we experience the immensity of time,

which is the creation itself, it is the universe unfolding

before us, and yet it is also time shared with the people

that we visit these places with, and so it's the

experience that we remember when our parents took us

for the first time to these and then we as parents passing

them on to our children, a kind intimate transmission

from generation to generation to generation of the love

of place, the love of nation that the national parks are

meant to stand for.

[Birds chirping]

[Birds chirping]

[Water running]

COYOTE: Early in 1851 during the frenzy of the California

gold rush, an armed group of white men was scouring the

western slopes of the Sierra Nevada,

searching for Indians,

intent on driving them from their homeland.

They called themselves the Mariposa Battalion, and late

on the afternoon of March 27, they came to a narrow valley

lined by towering granite cliffs where a series

of waterfalls dropped thousands of feet to reach

the Merced River on the valley's floor.

One of the men, a young doctor named Lafayette Bunnell stood

there transfixed.

MAN AS LAFAYETTE AS BUNNELL: As I looked, a peculiar,

exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being,

and I found my eyes in tears with emotion.

I said with some enthusiasm, "I have here seen the power

"and glory of the Supreme Being.

"The majesty of His handiwork is in that testimony

"of the rocks."

COYOTE: Bunnell's enchantment with the scenery was not

shared by the rest of the Mariposa Battalion, who busied

themselves setting fire to any Indian homes they found.

Before the Battalion moved on, Bunnell convinced the others

that as the first white men ever to enter the valley they

should give it a name.

He suggested Yosemite because he thought that was the name

of the tribe they had come to dispossess.

Later, scholars would learn that the people living in

the valley called it Ahwahnee, meaning the place of a gaping

mouth, and they called themselves the Ahwahneechee.

Yosemite, it was learned, meant something

entirely different.

In the native language, Yosemite refers to people

who should be feared.

It means they are killers.

4 years later in 1855, a second group of white people

entered Yosemite Valley, this time as tourists,

not Indian fighters.

They were led by James Mason Hutchings,

an energetic Englishman who had failed miserably

as a prospector during the gold rush.

Now he hoped to make a fortune by promoting California's

scenic wonders through an illustrated magazine.

When a report about the Indian campaign in the Sierras

mentioned a waterfall more than 1,000 feet high,

Hutchings rushed to see it for himself.

Word and images of Yosemite quickly spread.

Other tourists began showing up to witness

its beauty firsthand.

The trip required a two-day journey from San Francisco to

the nearest town and then, with no wagon road into

the valley, a grueling 3-day trek by foot or horseback up

and down steep mountainsides on narrow, rocky paths.

But for most, the scenic reward was worth the hardship.

"Looking at the majestic cathedral rocks

"and cathedral spires," wrote a Massachusetts

newspaperman, "made it easy to

"imagine that you are under the ruins of an old gothic

"cathedral to which those of Cologne and Milan are

"but baby houses."

Upon seeing Yosemite Falls, the highest free-leaping

waterfall on the continent, another visitor began

quoting The Bible.

"Now let me die," he told his companions, "for I am happy."

15 miles south of Yosemite Valley,

the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias contains

the largest living things

on earth, trees nearly 3,000 years old.

When Horace Greeley, editor of the "New York Tribune,"

saw them, he boasted to his readers that they were

"of substantial size when David danced before the Ark."

Soon, the celebrated painter Albert Bierstadt arrived

and produced a series of masterpieces.

One of them would command a price of $25,000, equal to

the highest amount ever paid for an American work of art.

While Bierstadt painted, his friend Fitz Hugh Ludlow

wrote dispatches that appeared in "The Atlantic Monthly,"

the nation's most prestigious magazine.

MAN AS FITZ HUGH LUDLOW: We did not so much seem to be

seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old

familiar globe as a new heaven and a new earth into which

the creative spirit had just been breathed.

I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my

vision utterance.

Never were words as beggared for an abridged translation

of any scripture of nature.

JENKINSON: Jefferson looked across America from the

portico at Monticello, and he saw wilderness all the way

out, so he couldn't conceive of a national park because,

for Jefferson, America was a national park.

This country is Eden, and we Americans had this glorious

opportunity to see the world in its infancy so that America

in a sense had been kept as a symbol of what

the world once was.

COYOTE: As Thomas Jefferson's nation had grown,

the country's sense of itself and its possibilities had

grown, as well, not only in the political sphere

but in the arts, literature, and in its citizens'

relationship to God.

MAN: At the gates of the forest, the surprised man

of the world is forced to leave his city estimates

of great and small, wise and foolish.

The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first

step he takes.

Here is sanctity which shames our religions and reality

which discredits our heroes.

Here, we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs

every other circumstance and judges like a god all men

that come to her.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

COYOTE: The transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson had

been telling Americans for years that God was more easily

found in nature than in the works of man.

His disciple, Henry David Thoreau,

had called for "little oases of wildness in the desert

"of our civilization."

CRONON: What emerges in the middle of the 19th Century is

this idea that going back to wild nature is restorative,

it's a way of escaping the corruptions of urban civilized

life, finding a more innocent self, returning to who you

really are, returning to a kind of authenticity, and if

you want to know God at firsthand, the way to do that

is not to enter a cathedral, not to open a book, but to go

to the mountaintop, and on the mountaintop, there you will

see God as God truly is in the world.

COYOTE: But it was all in danger as the nation,

in the name of manifest destiny, marched inexorably

across the continent, systematically dispossessing

Indian peoples from their homelands and transforming

the land to new uses.

The artist George Catlin worried that the vast herds

of buffalo and the Indians who depended on them would someday

be gone forever, and he called for the creation of a nation's

park to save them both.

No one listened.

By the 1860s, the country's most famous natural landmark,

Niagara Falls, had already been nearly ruined.

Every overlook was owned by a private landowner

charging a fee.

Tourists could expect to be badgered and oftentimes

swindled by the hucksters and self-appointed guides who

swarmed the rail road depot and carriage stands.

European visitors publicly belittled Americans

for allowing such a majestic work of nature to become

blighted by commercial development and offered it as

further evidence that the United States was still

a backward, uncivilized nation.

CRONON: Americans feel that the United States is somehow

inferior to Europe, where the United States doesn't have the

ruins of Rome or of Greece, it doesn't have the Acropolis,

it doesn't have the Parthenon, and so it seems like we're

an inferior nation, and yet the one thing we do have is

a nature that looks closer to the new morning of God's own

creation, closer to paradise than anything that Europe has

to offer, and so the thought is that if we're to preserve

anything that stands for the glory of America, then these

overwhelmingly beautiful, sacred spots are the ones we

ought to preserve.

COYOTE: On May 17, 1864, in the midst of the Civil War,

with Union casualties averaging 2,000 a day,

the junior senator from California, John Conness,

rose to explain a bill he had just introduced.

It had nothing to do with the war that threatened

to destroy his nation.

MAN AS JOHN CONNESS: I will state to the Senate that this

bill proposes to make a grant of certain premises located

in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the state of California

that are for all public purposes worthless but which

constitute perhaps some of the greatest wonders of the world.

It is a matter involving no appropriation whatever.

The property is of no value to the government.

COYOTE: Conness' bill proposed something totally

unprecedented in human history, setting aside not

a landscaped garden or a city park but a large tract

of natural scenery for the future enjoyment of everyone.

More than 60 square miles of federal land, encompassing

the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of big trees,

were to be transferred to the care of the state

of California on the condition that the land never be opened

for private ownership and instead be preserved

for public use, resort, and recreation.

After only a few questions and no objections, the Senate

passed Conness' bill and moved on to other business.

A month later, the House did the same, and on June 30, 1864,

a day in which he also signed bills increasing import

duties and broadening the income tax in order to

continue a war to preserve the Union,

President Abraham Lincoln signed a law to preserve forever

a beautiful valley and a grove of trees that he had never seen

thousands of miles away in California.

JENKINSON: And so Lincoln, who realizes that it's the

West that is the dynamo of American life, it's the fuel

of American idealism... Lincoln wants to save some significant

portions of it from what he sees as the North's runaway

industrial idea of the future of the continent.

In a sense, the whole history of America is a lament that

this Garden of Eden which we have discovered is going to

slip away from us somehow.

MAN: When I think of a grove of giant sequoia, I think

of a cathedral or a church, a place where you're not

necessarily worshipping the name of something

but the presence of something else.

There's no need for someone to remind you that there is

something in this world that is larger than you are

because you can see it, and you look up in a storm,

and you can't even see the rim of the valley.

All you can see our clouds gathered there at the rim

of the valley, and Yosemite Falls seems to flow out

of the clouds itself as if out of nowhere.

It's a gathering place of water, all the waters

of the sky flowing into that one spot, which makes it

a gathering of life and a gathering of spirit, as well,

and all of those things, are flowing through Yosemite,

and so I think what better place is there that has such

a confluence of so many things flowing together

and the result is music?

MAN: Men who are rich enough provide places of needed

recreation for themselves.

They have done so from the earliest periods known

in the history of the world.

The enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country

is thus a monopoly of a very few, very rich people.

The great mass of society, including those to whom it

would be of the greatest benefit, is excluded from it.

Thus, unless steps are taken by government to withhold them

from the grasp of individuals, all places favorable

in scenery to the recreation of the mind and body will be

closed against the great body of the people.

Frederick Law Olmsted.

COYOTE: 4 months after the Civil War ended, a small group

gathered in Yosemite Valley to hear Frederick Law Olmsted,

the celebrated designer of New York City's Central Park,

read a report he had written about the future of the land

that had just been entrusted to the state of California.

He called for strict regulations to protect the

landscape from anything that would, in his words, "obscure,

"distort, or detract from the dignity of the scenery."

"In a place as special as Yosemite," Olmsted said,

"the rights of posterity were more important than

"the desires of the present."

MAN AS FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED: Before many years if proper

facilities are offered, these hundreds will become

thousands, and in a century, the whole number of visitors

will be counted by millions.

An injury to the scenery so slight that it may be unheeded

by any visitor now will be one multiplied by those millions.

COYOTE: But once Olmsted returned to New York, a small

group of Yosemite commissioners secretly

convened, decided his recommendations were too

controversial to bring to the state legislature, and quietly

shelved his report.

Among those who studiously ignored Olmsted's suggestions

on the future of Yosemite was James Mason Hutchings.

No one had done more than Hutchings to bring the valley

to the nation's attention, but now that the nation had

moved to protect it in perpetuity by declaring it

public, no one fought that decision

with greater vehemence.

MAN: James Mason Hutchings loved Yosemite, no doubt

about that, and every national park will have somebody who

loves it deeply and then wants to exploit the hell out of it.

The thing about James Mason Hutchings is that once he gets

control of Yosemite Valley he does exactly what most

concessionaires do with a beautiful place like that.

He begins to make it into another Niagara Falls.

You have to pay him for the privilege of seeing

Yosemite Valley.

COYOTE: He had already given up his publishing business

and bought one of the valley's two hotels, which he quickly

renamed The Hutchings House.

He enjoyed lecturing his guests and leading them

on sightseeing tours, yet sometimes failed to

provide them with knives and forks at dinner or forgetfully

filled their coffee cups with cold water.

"Guests would be better served," one of his early

customers wrote, "if the proprietor paid less attention

"to describing the beauties and more to providing comfortable

"beds and properly prepared meals."

WOMAN: Upstairs, the rooms were only divided by pieces

of cotton cloth, and it required some little strategy

to place the candle so that one's figure should not appear

on the cloth partition hugely magnified for the amusement

of one's neighbors.

COYOTE: Hutchings was technically a squatter

in Yosemite, but in brazen defiance of the law, he went

about expanding his operations.

To provide the lumber he needed would require a sawmill

Hutchings decided and someone to run it.

Just at that moment in the fall of 1869, a 31-year-old

Scottish-born wanderer would show up to apply for the job.

He called himself "an unknown nobody," but he would do far

more than Hutchings to extol the beauty of Yosemite,

more than Frederick Law Olmsted to protect it,

and with his lyrical voice infuse the national park idea

with the passion of religious fervor.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: I know that I could under ordinary

circumstances accumulate wealth and obtain a fair

position in society, but I am sure that the mind of no

truant schoolboy is more free and disengaged from all the

grave plans and purposes and pursuits of ordinary orthodox

life than mine.

John Muir.

I don't know how you ever account for an extraordinary

individual like John Muir.

It's one of the enduring human mysteries.

Out species is capable of such pathetic, appalling narrowness

and occasionally of such magnificent generosity.

I don't know how to account for that.

COYOTE: John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, and raised

in Wisconsin, where he had suffered a harsh childhood

at the hands of a tyrannical father, an itinerant

Presbyterian minister who insisted that Muir memorize

The Bible and repeatedly beat him until by age 11 he was

able to recite 3/4 of The Old Testament

and the entire New Testament by heart.

He was a natural-born scientist, studied geology

and botany at the University of Wisconsin, and coming

of age at a time when new industries were transforming

post-war America, Muir also showed great promise as

an inventor, increasing the productivity of every one

of the businesses that hired him.

DUNCAN: He went to work in a carriage factory

in Indianapolis and did a sort of time-motion study that said

the factory is like a machine itself and the human beings

are parts of that.

He could have been Andrew Carnegie, he could have

been... with his inventive genius, he could have been

Thomas Edison, but something inside of him drew him to

a different destiny.

COYOTE: A factory accident temporarily blinded him

for several months.

When he regained his sight, Muir fled his workday world

and set out on a thousand-mile walk to Florida, pursuing his

passion for the natural sciences, studying plants

and flowers, and beginning a journal he would keep

for the rest of his life.

MAN: When Muir began that walk, he was intending to walk

to South America and to eventually find the headwaters

of the Amazon, build himself a raft, and float down the

entire length of the Amazon.

Happily, he was discouraged from doing so by a fever,

probably malaria that so weakened him he decided that

going to the west coast and what he had heard vaguely

of Yosemite might be a better idea.

COYOTE: After getting off a boat in San Francisco, he was

asked, "Where do you wish to go?"

Muir answered, "Anywhere that's wild."

POPE: And he walks.

The essence of John Muir is the John Muir who walks.

He immediately sets off across Pacheco Pass, across the

Central Valley to Yosemite, and it is this act of walking

which actually creates a faith for him, a new version

of Christianity, a Christianity rooted in place

and wildness and nature.

It's a Christianity that is not about the built worship

of God but about the worship of God's creation.

COYOTE: Soon, he was rambling across the Sierra Nevada,

the vast mountains he called "the range of light, surely

"the brightest and best of all the Lord has built."

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: We are now in the mountains,

and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making

every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to

the beauty about us, neither old nor young, sick nor well,

but immortal.

COYOTE: Then he descended into Yosemite Valley.

"It was," Muir wrote, "by far the

"grandest of all the special temples of nature I was ever

"permitted to enter,

the sanctum sanctorum of the Sierra."

When Hutchings offered him the job, he realized he could make

Yosemite his home.

Muir built Hutchings' sawmill and began producing lumber

for the many projects his new employer directed him to

undertake: replacing the muslin sheets with wooden

partitions in the hotel's sleeping quarters; improving

a space called The Big Tree Room built around the trunk

of a giant cedar; and erecting two additional cottages to

accommodate the increasing number of tourists,

now exceeding 1,000 a summer.

For himself and a fellow worker, Muir built a one-room

cabin near the base of Yosemite falls complete

with a single window facing the falls, a floor paved

with stones spaced far enough apart to allow ferns to

continue growing, and a small ditch that brought part

of the creek into a corner of the cabin "with just enough

"current," Muir wrote, "to allow it to sing

"and warble in low, sweet tones, delightful at night

"while I lay in my bed suspended from the rafters."

Every free moment Muir devoted to exploring the valley

and the mountain ramparts surrounding it, traveling

for days with only a few pounds of crackers, oatmeal,

and tea for nourishment, the soles of his shoes studded

with nails for clamoring up rocky slopes, pondering

the geology of the Sierras, closely inspecting everything

he encountered, thinking nothing of covering 50 miles

in a two-day excursion.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: I drifted from rock to rock,

from stream to stream, from grove to grove.

When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it

for a minute or a day to make its acquaintance and hear

what it had to tell.

I asked the boulders I met whence they came and whither

they were going.

CRONON: One way to think about John Muir is as a kind

of ecstatic holy man, a man who is sort of in a berserk

rapture out there in nature doing bizarre things that I

think most of us can't imagine ever doing.

DUNCAN: He decided he wanted to go see the brink

of Yosemite falls a few thousand feet or so above

the canyon floor, and something, he said,

impelled him not just to go look but to crawl out over the

edge and bring himself along the side of the canyon face

so he could be... experience what the water felt when it

goes, leaps over the edge.

He went behind Yosemite Falls, I mean,

crawling up just these very, very dangerous,

slippery rocks.

I mean, he didn't have pitons and ice axes.

He didn't have gear.

He climbed up so he could stand right behind the falls.

He said, "I wanted to hear the song of the waterfall."

STETSON: Some of the more astonishing things he did

there was to ride a snow avalanche to the bottom

of the valley, having spent all day climbing to the top

of the Yosemite Valley walls and then being swished to

the foot of that canyon in just less than a minute.

DUNCAN: He was interested in the animals, and he saw a bear

in a meadow and decided "if I run at it, I can view it as

"what it looks like when it's running."

Well, so he scampered and made a bunch of noise.

The bear raised up an didn't run at all.

He later called it "my interview with the bear."

STETSON: An earthquake hit Yosemite Valley, and Muir was

bounced from his bed and ran outside, shouting,

"Noble earthquake!"

And as soon as a great section of the wall had collapsed,

he was racing to see it.

[Thunder]

He celebrated trees by going up, crawling up into the very

tops of them and letting storms batter him so that he

understood what a storm felt like to a tree.

WOMAN: John Muir saw the spirituality

inherent in granite.

His view as a scientist and his view as a deeply religious

man were the same view.

He had this wonderful sense of ecstasy, having been born

every single day new when he was in a wild, raw landscape.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: I am a captive, I am bound.

Love of pure, unblemished nature seems to overmaster

and blur out of sight all other objects

and considerations.

COYOTE: "it was all part," Muir said, of his

"unconditional surrender to nature.

"The winds and cascading creeks seemed to sing an exalting

"chorus audible to anyone willing to listen."

He contemplated the life of a raindrop, marveled

at the tenacity of plants somehow clinging to life

on bare granite, soaked sequoia cones in water

and drank the purple liquid.

"To improve my color," he explained, "and render

"myself more tree-wise and sequoical."

Other times, he liked to put his head down between his

knees and look at the world upside down to see what he

called "its upness."

Everywhere Muir turned, he believed he was witnessing

the work and presence of God, not the stern and wrathful God

of his father, who placed man above nature, but a God who

revealed himself through nature and for whom mankind

was merely one part of a great, joyously interconnected

web of being.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: I will follow my instincts, be myself

for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot.

As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds

and winds sing.

I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood,

storm, and the avalanche.

I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens

and get as near to the heart of the world as I can.

EHRLICH: John Muir once said, "By going out into the natural

world, I'm really going in."

He defined in that sentence what it is to be a human being

because I think we're born lost, and we remain lost until

we remove the shell of who we think we are, all the

preconceptions of who we think we are and to expose ourselves

to the great power of the natural world and to let that

power reshape us the way it's reshaped the rocks

of Yosemite Valley.

COYOTE: Muir now felt he had discovered something else,

his own destiny.

The gaunt mountaineer with blazing blue eyes and long

whiskers would devote himself to understanding

the wilderness and then teach others the lessons

he had learned.

If Yosemite was a temple, he would be come its

high priest.

"Heaven knows," he wrote, "that John the Baptist was not

"more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan

"than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty

"of God's mountains."

The man who seemed to talk to flowers and rocks was

considered by many people as an eccentric, one more

of Yosemite's curiosities.

On one excursion into the mountains, he met a total

stranger and told him he was rambling across

the Sierra Nevada looking at trees.

"Oh, then," the stranger replied,

"you must be John Muir."

Josiah Whitney, California's state geologist,

grew indignant when he heard that Muir was

disputing his theory that Yosemite had been created by

a cataclysmic collapse of the valley floor.

Muir instead believed that over thousands of years

glaciers had gouged out the valley and polished smooth

the granite domes.

Whitney derided Muir as "a mere sheep herder"

and "an ignoramus" and scornfully dismissed

his conclusions,

but Muir persevered and in 1871 discovered a living

glacier in the recesses of the Sierra, the first of 65 he

would eventually encounter and study, and when he led other

geologists to his evidence, they came to see that he was

right and Whitney was wrong.

Meanwhile, James Mason Hutchings has persuaded his

friends in the California Legislature to pass a special

bill exempting him from the law that had set the valley

aside as public property, and twice, the U.S. House of

Representatives was willing to go along.

Both times, however, the Senate held firm against him.

Hutchings sued, arguing all the way to the U.S. Supreme

Court that the federal government had no right to

dispose of public lands for any purpose other than

private settlement.

Ruling against him, the High Court established a precedent

that the act creating Yosemite was in fact Constitutional.

In 1875, Hutchings was evicted from his

hotel and banished from the valley he had

so tirelessly promoted.

DUNCAN: James Mason Hutchings did 3 very important things

for the national park idea.

First of all, he brought Yosemite and its wonders to

the attention of the world.

Secondly, inadvertently, by challenging the law that

set it aside and tried to kick him out... by challenging that

all the way to the Supreme Court, luckily, the Supreme

Court ruled that, in fact, it was Constitutional to do.

So that was a very important precedent that if it had gone

the other way who knows what would have happened

with national parks.

The third and probably most important thing is he hired

John Muir and helped introduce him to the Yosemite Valley.

COYOTE: With the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad,

even more tourists were arriving in the par:

writers, artists, scientists, and wealthy Easterners who

enjoyed listening to Muir as he led them from one

spectacular viewpoint to another.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: How little note is taken

at the deeds of nature.

What paper publishes her reports?

Who publishes the sheet music of the winds or the music

of water written in river lines?

Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous

creations coming into being every day like freshly

upheaved mountains?

COYOTE: But soon, John Muir would leave Yosemite, too.

He packed his meager belongings and moved to

Oakland, where he hoped to spread his gospel of nature by

writing a series of reports for the "Overland Monthly"

and other popular magazines.

"Writing," he said, "was like the life of a glacier,

"one eternal grind," but over the next several years,

that writing would help articulate for millions

of Americans a deep and abiding love for their land.

[Birds cawing]

[Birds cawing]

MAN: Sacred means different things to different people,

and to the American Indians, sacredness means you can go in

there walk as your ancestors did,

you can go in there and you can see what the creator has

made for us, and you can feel it, you can feel the spirits,

but we can take it one step farther.

Because the environment is still there as in the time

of creation, we believe that it is still alive.

[Rumbling]

DUNCAN: In the early 1800s, reports started filtering out

about this magical place.

John Colter, who had been a member of the Lewis and Clark

expedition had left them instead of returning to

civilization, became the first legendary mountain man, and he

came back with a tale of a place where mud was boiling,

where steam was coming out of the ground, water spouted,

and people sort of made fun of it.

They called it Colter's Hell.

Joe Meek, the mountain man, stumbled upon it and said it

reminded him of the place that the preachers had warned him

about back when he went to church.

COYOTE: Jim Bridger, another mountain man, had also told

tales of the place, the long-time home of the

Sheepeater Band of Shoshone Indians and a meeting place

for half a dozen other tribes.

It included a lake, he claimed, where a man could

catch a fish in one spot and then swing his line over a few

feet to instantly cook his catch in a hot spring.

"There was a canyon so deep," he added, "that a man could

"shout down into it at night and be awakened by his echo

"the next morning."

As late at 1869, a group of prospectors had ventured into

the area they called the Valley of Death, but when they

finally wrote a detailed account of their journey,

magazines in the East refused to publish it.

"Thank you," one editor responded, "but we do not

"print fiction."

[Horse neighs]

Then in the late summer of 1870, a much more prestigious

group intended to put an end to the mystery and either

confirm or deny the rumors once and for all.

Accompanied by a small military escort, they included

a prominent banker, a son of a United States Senator,

a part-time newspaper correspondent,

and Truman C. Everts, at age

54 the oldest member of the expedition,

a Vermonter who had come along on a lark.

The moving force behind the expedition was

Nathaniel P. Langford, a well-connected

Montana politician who

believed the future prosperity of the territory rested

with completion of a proposed second transcontinental

railway, The Northern Pacific.

Earlier in the year, Langford had met privately with

Jay Cooke, the financier underwriting $100 million

worth of Northern Pacific bonds.

The two had agreed that any publicity about the region's

attractions would be good for the territory, good

for The Northern Pacific's bond sales, and good

for Nathaniel Langford.

MAN: And we know that Langford was actually in the employ

of Northern Pacific.

He seemed to always... no matter where else he was, he seemed

to always be near the till.

COYOTE: Two weeks into his expedition's journey, Langford

came across the kind of scenery the mountain men

had described.

MAN AS NATHANIEL LANGFORD: We came suddenly upon a basin

of boiling sulfur springs, boiling like a cauldron,

throwing water and fearful volumes of vapor higher

than our heads.

The spring lying to the east of this, more diabolical

in appearance and filled with a hot,

brownish substance of the consistency of mucilage,

is in constant, noisy ebullition, emitting fumes

of a villainous odor.

COYOTE: They kept moving past more mud pots that made

noises, they said, "like the safety valve of a laboring

"steamboat engine," over ground that sounded hollow under

their horses' hooves, near vents that were too hot

too touch even with gloved hands, places to which they

would attach names like Hell Broth Springs,

Hell Roaring River, Devil's Den, Brimstone Basin.

Farther on, they came to two waterfalls slicing through

a steep and narrow canyon they estimated at half a mile

in depth, the one Jim Bridger had once bragged about,

the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

Langford was now convinced that the Yellowstone could be

an even greater attraction than he and the backers

of The Northern Pacific had dreamed.

During their exploration, the nearsighted Truman Everts

somehow got separated from the main group and went missing.

Over the next several days, search parties were

dispatched to find him.

They encountered grizzly bears, heard the howls

of wolves, but found no trace of Everts or his horse.

On September 13, a surprise storm dropped two feet

of snow on them.

Running low on supplies, the expedition had no choice

but to turn for home, leaving notes behind for Everts

at each campsite along with what little food they could

spare from their own dwindling rations.

Heading for the Madison River and the mining town

of Virginia City, they struggled for days through

snow and dense timber until they came upon

a large clearing.

MAN AS NATHANIEL LANGFORD: We had already seen what we

believed to be the greatest wonders on the continent.

Judge then of our astonishment on entering this basin to see

at no great distance before us an immense body of sparkling

water projected suddenly and with terrific force into

the air to the height of over 100 feet.

General Washburn has named it Old Faithful because

of the regularity of its eruptions, the intervals

between which being from 60 to 65 minutes.

COYOTE: They gave names to the other geysers, too...

The Castle, The Bee Hive, and The Giant... but because of their

shortage of food could not stay long amidst the wonders

surrounding them.

Yet as they followed the steaming Firehole River,

they came across still more basins and still more

curiosities, the greatest concentration of geothermal

features on Earth, a vast array of geysers, fumaroles,

mud pots, and hot springs

of unimaginable strangeness and beauty.

When the expedition finally reached Virginia City and then

Helena, the big news was Langford's confirmation

of what had been considered wild rumors about a place once

called Colter's Hell, but the even bigger news was that

Truman Everts was still lost there.

MAN AS TRUMAN EVERTS: On the day that I found myself

separated from my company, our course had been impeded by

the dense growth of the pine forest.

As separations like this had frequently occurred, it gave

me no alarm, and I rode on in the direction which I supposed

had been taken until darkness overtook me.

I selected a spot for comfortable repose,

picketed my horse, built a fire, and went to sleep.

COYOTE: At first, Everts thought his separation from

the expedition would be a momentary inconvenience,

but on the second day, his horse ran away, taking

with it his guns, blankets, fishing tackle, and matches,

everything but the clothes on his back, a small opera glass,

and two knives, which the hapless Everts promptly managed

to lose in the underbrush.

MAN AS TRUMAN EVERTS: I realized I was lost.

Then came a crushing sense of destitution... no food, no fire,

no means to procure either, alone in an unexplored

wilderness 150 miles from the nearest human abode,

surrounded by wild beasts, and famishing with hunger.

WHITTLESEY: He didn't have any matches.

All he had was an opera glass, and it took him quite a while

to figure out he could make a fire with the opera glass.

DUNCAN: Then he finally figured out that

"if it's no sunny, I can't start a fire."

So he learned that he had to keep a stick burning, so you

can imagine him stumbling around midday with a burning

stick, emaciated.

I mean, this was not John Muir

in ecstasy becoming one with nature.

This was a horrific ordeal for a poor guy who just got lost

at the wrong time.

COYOTE: He wandered for days, vainly searching for his

friends or any sign of their trail.

He spent a night in a tree cowering from a mountain lion

prowling underneath, suffered frostbite on his feet from

the snowstorm that blanketed the region and saturated his

clothes, found refuge for a week huddling day and night

against the warm ground of one of the thermal features.

MAN AS TRUMAN EVERTS: I was enveloped

in a perpetual steam bath.

At first, this was barely preferable to the storm,

but I soon became accustomed to it,

and before I left, though thoroughly parboiled,

actually enjoyed it.

COYOTE: At another hot spring, Everts broke through the thin

crust of earth, and his hip was severely scalded by steam.

One evening in his sleep, he lurched forward into his

fire and burned his hands.

Wasting away from exhaustion and hunger, Everts began

seeing apparitions and hearing voices.

"I will not perish in this wilderness," he told himself

and forced himself onward, retracing the route that had

originally brought the expedition into

the Yellowstone Plateau.

On October 16, 37 days after being separated from the

expedition, Everts was found crawling along a hillside.

His starvation diet of thistle roots had reduced him to

a mere 50 pounds.

The scalded flesh on his thighs was blackened.

His bare and frostbitten feet had been worn to the bone.

His burnt fingers were said to resemble birds' claws.

He was incoherent for days, though he slowly recovered

and in time produced a widely read account of his ordeal

that "Scribner's Monthly"

published for popular consumption.

MAN AS TRUMAN EVERTS: My narrative is finished.

The time is not far distant when the wonders

of the Yellowstone will be made accessible to all lovers

of sublimity and novelty in natural scenery, and when

that day arrives, I hope in happier mood and under more

auspicious circumstances to revisit scenes fraught for me

with such mingled glories and terrors.

Truman Everts.

[Wolf howls]

BAKER: Every time I hear about the white people coming into

our national parks and discovering something,

I can almost see them standing there on top of this mountain,

3 or 4 of them saying, "From now on, we'll call those

"mountains so and so because we're the first ones here."

In the meantime, I can see my relatives hiding behind

the rocks, looking at them, saying, "Wow. What are these

"GUYS doing up here?"

For us, it was almost kind of humorous

because we've been there for thousands upon thousands

of years, and it didn't need to be discovered.

It was never lost.

All they had to do was ask us.

All they had to do was get together with the tribes,

"OK. What's there?"

And we could have told them.

COYOTE: In the summer of 1871, the United States government

decided it was time for professionals to take a look

at the place where Truman Everts had gotten

so helplessly lost.

Ferdinand Hayden, who had been exploring other parts

of the West, now led an expedition of topographers,

botanists, zoologists, and mineralogists to

Yellowstone to determine once and for all its real value,

but perhaps even more important than the scientists

was the presence of two other men, a young artist named

Thomas Moran, who had never ridden a horse before

and required a pillow on his saddle, and William Henry

Jackson, a photographer from Omaha who most recently had

chronicled the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.

For the first time, Americans could see what mere words had

previously described.

As Ferdinand Hayden prepared the report that Congress was

expecting, he received an intriguing letter from a man

named A.B. Nettleton, a shrewd lobbyist working

for The Northern Pacific, suggesting that Hayden do more

than merely catalog his discoveries.

MAN AS A.B. NETTLETON: Dear, Dr. Hayden, let Congress pass

a bill reserving the great geyser basin as a public park

forever just as it has reserved the Yosemite Valley

and Big Trees.

If you approve this, would such a recommendation be

appropriate in your official report?

COYOTE: Hayden was happy to oblige.

His report took pains to assure Congress that

at an elevation of 6,000 feet above sea level or higher the

Yellowstone region was totally unsuitable for farming

and ranching and that because of its volcanic origins no

valuable mines were likely to be found there, but,

he warned, if congress did not protect Yellowstone from

private development, it would become another Niagara Falls,

another national embarrassment.

RUNTE: Well, if there had been gold next to the geysers

in Yellowstone, there would not be geysers in Yellowstone,

and if there had been a big gold strike in the Yosemite

Valley, Yosemite Valley would have been a mining pit,

and the reason for that is that it was still very,

very difficult for the American people to relent from

their commercial pursuits.

COYOTE: With The Northern Pacific quietly maneuvering

behind the scenes and with Moran's sketches and Jackson's

photographs prominently displayed in the halls

of the Capitol, a bill began moving through congress,

and by late January of 1872, it was ready for action

in the Senate.

MAN: Be it enacted that the tract of land lying near

the headwaters of the Yellowstone River...

COYOTE: The senate overwhelmingly

approved the bill.

The house passed it 115-65, and on March 1, 1872,

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill creating

Yellowstone Park.

Unlike Yosemite, which was being administered by

the state of California, this would be a national park,

the first national park in the history of the world.

You wish that they had, you know, gone out and rang

bells to say, "This is something new on Earth,"

because it was.

A federal government was saying, "We're setting this

aside as a national park."

No government had ever done that before, and you'd like

them to make note of it in that way just the way with the

Declaration of Independence

they read it and bells were rung.

That didn't happen with this.

It looks like they took it maybe a little more seriously

than the decision of whether or not to repaint

the cloak room.

It wasn't that big a deal to most of them.

It was just business as usual that day.

It's only hindsight that allows us to see

what they started.

You know, they were kicking the rock off the cliff,

and most of them turned and walked away.

There's no evidence that any of them thought this was

the first of a type or that "we're going to turn this into

"a hugely important world institution."

COYOTE: The "New York Herald" saw the new creation as one

more reason for national bragging rights.

"Why should we go to Switzerland to see mountains

"or to Iceland for geysers?" it asked, adding that

"with Yosemite and Yellowstone, now we have attractions which

"diminish Niagara into an ordinary exhibition."

But the "Helena Rocky Mountain Gazette" complained that

a great blow had been struck against the prosperity

of the region.

"The new park," it said, "will keep the country

"a wilderness and prevent economic development."

Its cross-town rival the "Helena Herald" disagreed.

"It will be a park," the paper said,

"worthy of the great republic."

DUNCAN: I think that if Wyoming had been

a state in 1872, they probably would have

followed the Yosemite model.

They would have just given it to the state of Wyoming

for safekeeping, but because it was a territory, there was

no state to give it to, and so therefore, almost by accident,

it became a national park, and that doesn't seem like

a big thing at first, but when you think about it, it really

was an incredible turning point.

What would we think of Yellowstone if it was

Yellowstone State Park in Wyoming?

It would still be... the geysers would be going off,

the waterfall would still be there, the mud would still be

boiling, we'd be attracted to go see it, but we wouldn't

feel the sense of responsibility to it as

a citizen of our nation, only if we were a citizen

of the state of Wyoming.

By making it a national park, implicitly it becomes

ours, everybody's.

We're all somehow responsible for it,

and we all can take pride in it, and so by this accident

more or less, this precedent was set that it's gonna be

a national park that we as a nation have to take care of.

COYOTE: By any standard, the new national park

at Yellowstone was huge, more than 2 million acres

of remote mountainous terrain covering the northwestern

corner of Wyoming Territory

and spilling into Montana and Idaho, bigger than

the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined,

more than 50 times larger than the Yosemite Grant

in California, but having created the world's

first national park, Congress had seen no reason to

appropriate any money to manage it or protect it from

the people who were sure to come.

WOMAN: Our first site of geysers made us simply wild

with the eagerness of seeing all things at once.

We ran and shouted and called to each other

to see this or that.

We had at last reached Wonderland.

Emma Cowan.

COYOTE: In August of 1877, a group of 9 tourists from

Montana had entered the park bent on taking in the sights.

Among them were Emma Cowan, 24 years old, and her husband

George, planning to celebrate their second wedding

anniversary in Yellowstone.

WOMAN AS EMMA COWAN: We seemed to be in a world of our own.

Not a soul had we seen save our own party.

One can scarcely realize the intense solitude which then

pervaded this land fresh from the Maker's hand.

COYOTE: On the morning of their anniversary, the Cowans

stepped outside their tent and found themselves not only

in the middle of the world's first national park

but in the middle of an Indian war.

WOMAN AS EMMA COWAN: A pistol shot rang out.

My husband's head fell back.

A red stream trickled down his face from beneath his hat.

COYOTE: Chief Joseph and hundreds of his Nez Perce Tribe

were streaming through the park, pursued by

the U.S. Army because they had refused to move onto

a reservation in Idaho.

Only two weeks earlier, nearly 90 of them had been killed,

more than half women and children, when their sleeping

village had been attacked in The Battle of the Big Hole.

Some of the young warriors were still incensed

about the casualties they had suffered and ignored Joseph's

instructions not to harm any white civilians.

[Hoof beats]

As the Nez Perce continued their flight through

Yellowstone, there were other incidents

with unlucky tourists.

Several were wounded, and two were killed.

Moving through a few days behind the Indians, the army

picked up the survivors.

Among them was George Cowan, somehow still alive.

Army surgeons probed his head by candlelight and removed

the bullet, flattened by his skull.

By the time he was reunited with his wife, the Nez Perce War

was ending hundreds of miles away with Chief Joseph's

surrender in northern Montana.

Yellowstone's superintendent soon arranged for the native

Sheepeaters, who had not taken part in the troubles, to be

evicted from their homeland so he could assure the public

that Yellowstone National Park was now free of all Indians.

Years later when the Cowans returned to visit the park,

Emma would say she was surprised any of her group had

been spared given the horrible treatment

the Indians had suffered.

George meanwhile happily recounted their tale of their

second anniversary and then capped his story by showing

off his proudest Yellowstone souvenir, the bullet that had

been removed from his skull, which he had made into

a watch fob.

[Train chugging]

[Train chugging]

[Whistle blowing]

[Bell clangs]

MAN: I had a vision of the future of this great country.

The iron horse had jumped the Missouri and was rushing up

the bountiful valley of the Yellowstone, carrying with it

all its civilization and change.

Instead of the teepees of the wild red men, there were

thousands of beautiful homes.

In the bottomlands waved the rich grain,

giving bread to millions.

The hillsides were covered with stock, supplying

the world its meat, and still thundered on the iron horse up

over the Rocky Mountains, and I thanked God that right

in the heart of all this noise and restless life of millions

a wise government had forever set apart that marvelous

region as a national park.

Colgate Hoyt.

SCHULLERY: As early as 1871, they began to call Yellowstone

Wonderland because "Alice in Wonderland," the book,

had just appeared a few years earlier,

and The Northern Pacific Railroad took that

right up and began to produce

pamphlets, brochures, and guidebooks all

with the title "Wonderland."

COYOTE: In 1883, The Northern Pacific Railroad was finally

completed across the continent.

Now tourists from the East, well-to-do refugees from the

increasingly industrialized and crowded cities

of the Gilded Age, could reach the entrance to Yellowstone

National Park in relative comfort and speed.

That first year, attendance increased 5-fold.

Everything, the hotel, the food, the tents,

the stages, the guides, was now under the exclusive

control of the Yellowstone Park Improvement Company,

a politically well-connected firm with close ties to

The Northern Pacific.

They had quietly arranged for the secretary of the interior

to grant the company a remarkable monopoly

within the park.

For a fee of only $2.00 an acre, the lease allowed the

company to cut as much timber as it needed, kill elk, deer,

and bison in the park to feed their work crews and guests,

plant crops and graze horses and cattle wherever they

wished, even mine coal for their furnaces and rechannel

some of the hot springs to heat the buildings.

As if that weren't enough, the contract granted the

company the right to choose parcels of 640 acres,

one square mile, at 7 different locations

within the park.

The prime attractions of Yellowstone were about to be

completely surrounded and exploited.

MAN: The project of the worthy speculators, who are after

the people's pleasure ground, appears to be flourishing.

Here and there are feeble voices raised in protest against

the steal, but with a powerful lobby to back them and no

opposition from the interior department, the grabbers have

little to fear.

The park is at present all our own.

How would the readers like to see it become a second

Niagara, a place where one goes only to be fleeced,

where patent medicine advertisements stare one

in the face, and the beauties of nature have all been

defiled by the greed of man?

George Bird Grinnell.

COYOTE: George Bird Grinnell of New York City had been

educated at Yale in ornithology and paleontology

and had made several trips to the West to collect specimens

as a young man, including an 1875 excursion to Yellowstone,

which had instilled in him a deep love of the new park

and a fierce desire to protect it and its wildlife.

Having sold his father's investment business, Grinnell

had taken control of "Forest and Stream,"

a sportsman's magazine he now used to champion his causes.

Yellowstone was one of them, and he began a crusade to stop

what he called "the park grab."

Grinnell's fight against the rail road interests was soon

joined by an unlikely ally, General Philip Sheridan,

a cavalry hero of the Civil War and celebrated Indian

fighter, who was now commander of the U.S. Army

for much of the West.

MAN AS PHILIP SHERIDAN: I regretted exceedingly to learn

that the national park had been rented out to

private parties.

The improvements in the park should be national,

and the control of it in the hands of an officer

of the government.

I can keep sufficient troops in the park to accomplish this

object and give a place of refuge and safety

for our noble game.

[Galloping]

COYOTE: Sheridan even suggested that Yellowstone

should be expanded by more than 3,000 square miles,

doubled in size to provide greater

protection for the elk and buffalo by conforming the

park's boundaries to their seasonal migrations.

It was a radical idea immediately opposed by Western

politicians, who believed that Yellowstone was

already too big.

In Washington, Grinnell took on the rail road lobby

directly, calling for an investigation into the park

contracts, proposing an expansion of Yellowstone,

and trying to write park regulations concerning

hunting into law.

The debate that followed would be echoed in every debate

on national parks for the next century.

[Gavel bangs]

MAN: I do not understand myself what the necessity is

for the government entering into the show business

in the Yellowstone National Park.

I should be very glad myself to see it surveyed and sold,

leaving it to private enterprise.

Senator John Ingalls, Kansas.

MAN: The great curse of this age and of the American people

is its materialistic tendencies.

"Money, money" is the cry everywhere

until our people are held up already

to the world as noted for nothing except

the acquisition of money.

I am not ashamed to say that I shall vote to perpetuate

this park for the American people.

There should be to a nation that will have 100 million or

150 million people a park like this as a great breathing

place for the national lungs.

Senator George Vest, Missouri.

COYOTE: The bill to expand Yellowstone failed, though

Congress did appropriate $40,000 for its maintenance.

In the next few years, proposals were made to shrink

the park, to place it under Montana's legal jurisdiction,

or to follow the Yosemite example and simply turn

the park over to Wyoming once the territory became a state.

George Bird Grinnell would have none of it.

"Leave the people's park alone," he declared.

He tried valiantly to stop each attack on Yellowstone

until August 4, 1886, when Congress stripped away

any money to protect the park.

For the moment it seemed, Yellowstone would have to

fend for itself.

Coming to the rescue,

Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan gladly

dispatched Troop "M" of the 1st United States Cavalry

to take control of the world's first national park.

They arrived believing, as everyone else did,

that military supervision of Yellowstone would be

a temporary stopgap.

30 years later, the cavalry would still be there.

[Clock ticking]

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: I am losing precious days.

I am degenerating into a machine for making money.

I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men.

I must break away and get out into the mountains to

learn the news.

COYOTE: For 5 years, John Muir had tried his best to confine

himself to his writing desk in Oakland, California, turning

out article after article for the "Overland Monthly,"

"Scribner's," and "Harper's" magazine about the majesty

of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada,

about the necessity to preserve forests from

destruction, and about the joy

to be found in quietly observing the world, all part

of his desire, he said, to "preach nature

"like an apostle."

In the process, he had become famous, but he had soon grown

restless to travel again, and when the opportunity came

to visit Alaska, a vast wilderness that had been part

of the United States for barely a decade,

he had jumped at the chance.

At Fort Wrangell, hearing talk of a remote and unexplored

area lined with glaciers, he had hired 4 Tlingit Indians

and their big canoe to make the long 800-mile

journey there.

It was Glacier Bay.

Here, the glaciers marched right down to the sea and were

of an entirely different scale from the remnants Muir had

tracked down high in the Sierra Nevada.

"Alaska," he wrote, "is nature's own reservation,

"and every lover of wildness will rejoice with me that by

"kindly frost it is so well-preserved."

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: Glaciers, back in their white solitudes,

work apart from men, exerting their tremendous energies

in silence and darkness.

Outspread spirit-like, brooding above predestined

landscapes, they work on unwearied through immeasurable

ages until in the fullness of time the mountains and valleys

are brought forth, channels furrowed for rivers, basins

for lakes and meadows, and soil spread for forests

and fields.

Then they shrink and vanish like summer clouds.

He camps out on the glacier, and he's been diagnosed as

having a deep cough.

He goes out and sleeps on the glacier and loses his cough,

says that "no lowland microbe can survive on a glacier."

He said, "Any man that does not believe in God

"and glaciers is the worst kind of unbeliever."

COYOTE: The conversations he shared around the campfire

with his Tlingit companions exposed him for the first time

to Indian beliefs.

"Don't you believe wolves have souls?"

one of them asked, and the discussion that followed

impressed upon Muir that they held views of the natural

world not that much different from his own.

BAKER: John Muir would have made a great medicine man

in his day because he would feel the same things

an American Indian would because he was listening,

he was truly listening.

He wasn't exploring.

He was living, he was learning, he was living

with the elements out there, and John Muir would have been

part of it just like the elders that I knew were part

of the environment.

COYOTE: After his return from Alaska, he married

Louie Wanda Strentzel, the reclusive daughter

of a prosperous fruit grower and settled down on her

parents' estate near the town

of Martinez in California's Alhambra Valley.

Two children quickly followed, and Muir single-mindedly threw

himself into providing for his family, taking over management

of his in-laws' 3,000 acres, bringing to bear the same

intensity and mechanical inventiveness he had

demonstrated as a young man.

He improved the farm's productivity, converting extra

land from pasture into cash crops of cherries,

Tokay grapes, and Bartlett pears and steadily amassed

considerable wealth.

Muir was tender and devoted to his wife and daughters,

but his health deteriorated from the ceaseless dawn to

dusk farm work and his isolation from the mountains

and forests and glaciers that had always seemed to

replenish him.

He lost weight.

He'd become "nerve-shaken and lean as a crow," he wrote his

brother, "loaded with care, work, and worry."

The result was that he was slowly weaning himself away

from all that had compelled him in his life up to that

point, and his... his wife essentially said,

"You've got to go out and engage the wilderness."

COYOTE: In 1888, Louie Muir persuaded her husband to take

another outing to Mount Rainier in the state

of Washington, where he camped at what he called "the most

"extravagantly beautiful of all the Alpine gardens I ever

"beheld with a volcanic cone looming overhead reflected

"in a crystalline blue lake."

Captivated by the view, he felt some of his old energy

returning, and when the young men camping with him set off

on a grueling 7 1/2-hour climb up the 14,000-foot peak,

the 50-year-old Muir impulsively joined them.

"Did not mean to climb it," Muir wrote his wife later,

"but got excited and soon was on top."

The climb, he said, had left him "with heart and limb

"exultant and free."

STETSON: By the time he came down from that mountain,

he understood that his real passion and his energy should

be devoted to preserving such places, and that's where he

went from there.

COYOTE: Louie Muir, meanwhile, had written her husband

a letter that released him just as surely as

the thrilling vista from Rainier's mountaintop.

WOMAN AS LOUIE MUIR: My dear John, a ranch that needs

and takes the sacrifice of a noble life ought to be flung

away beyond all reach and power for harm.

The Alaska book and the Yosemite book, dear John,

must be written, and you need to be your own self, well

and strong, to make them worthy of you.

COYOTE: In 1889, Robert Underwood Johnson,

an editor of "The Century Magazine,"

arrived from the East and asked Muir for a tour of Yosemite.

In the last 8 years, Muir had managed only one brief visit

to the place that had changed his life,

and he eagerly accepted.

But as they approached Yosemite Valley, he began

seeing disturbing signs.

Tunnels had been carved through the heart of some of the big

trees as gaudy tourist attractions to entice visitors

to use one road over another.

In the valley itself, he found piles of tin cans and other

garbage in plain view, and the meadows had been converted into

hay fields and pastures, even a hog pen "whose stink,"

Muir wrote, "has got into the pores of the rocks."

He was dismayed to learn of plans to throw colored lights

upon the majestic waterfalls as if that would make them

more beautiful.

"Perhaps," he said, "we may yet hear of an appropriation

"to whitewash the face of El Capitan or correct

"the curves of the domes."

Glacier Point, 3,254 feet above the valley, had been one

of Muir's favorite spots from which to contemplate the place

he considered nature's cathedral.

Now it was a place where tourists mugged

for the camera.

An entrepreneur named James McCauley had built

the Mountain House Hotel there.

On summer nights, his sons would collect donations from

tourists for a firefall in which McCauley would build

a huge bonfire and then light sticks of dynamite to send

the fire cascading over the sheer cliff.

The crowds loved it.

[Cheering]

DUNCAN: Muir came back into the Yosemite Valley,

his cathedral, and his cathedral had been turned

into a carnival.

It wasn't what he envisioned it should be.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: Like anything else worthwhile,

however well guarded, they have always been subject

to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers

of every degree from Satan to senators, eagerly trying to

make everything immediately and selfishly commercial.

Thus long ago, a few enterprising merchants

utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead

of a place of prayer, and earlier still, the first

forest reservation, including only one tree,

was likewise despoiled.

COYOTE: Distressed at everything he saw within

Yosemite Valley, Muir fled with his guest

Robert Underwood Johnson into the high country,

but here, too, much had changed.

Beyond the boundaries of the Yosemite Grant and therefore

unprotected by even the lackluster vigilance

of the state, the headwaters of the streams feeding into

the valley had been left to the mercy of the lumbermen

and sheep herders.

That evening at their camp in Tuolumne Meadows, Muir spoke

passionately about what they had seen.

"The harm they do goes to the heart," he said of the sheep,

and he predicted that if the destruction continued

unchecked without the trees and grasses of the high Sierra

to trap and hold the winter snows, the springtime melts

would become swifter and more destructive, the clear streams

would become muddy with silt, and by summertime, the valley

and the waterfalls that nourished it would be dry.

Johnson suggested that the high country be set aside as

a national park and urged Muir to become the public voice

for the campaign by writing articles again describing not

only the region's beauty but its vulnerability.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: The mountains are

fountains of men, as well as of rivers,

of glaciers, of fertile soil.

The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose

thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from

the mountains, mountain dwellers who have grown strong

there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.

CRONON: Muir in a way comes from a literary rhetorical

tradition that for most modern Americans has been lost,

that comes from... as with Abraham Lincoln with whom,

I think, he has a lot in common... that knowing

The Bible chapter and verse, the entire text, knowing

Shakespeare, these sort of classic literary roots that

are as fundamental to the way so many literate Americans are

educated in the 19th Century, and Muir has that language,

this rapturous, religious, rhetorical set of images that

he has at his fingertips, and he maps them onto his

concrete experiences out in these natural settings

in a way that makes them transcendent.

COYOTE: Muir threw himself into what became a pitched

battle to preserve the high country.

Vested interests and opposing politicians lied about his

past, questioned his motives, and publicly impugned

his integrity.

Muir was hurt but endured it all, going directly to

the people, who soon flooded Congress

with letters and petitions.

Finally on October 1, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison

signed into law a bill creating Yosemite National Park,

setting aside more than 900,000 acres,

nearly 1,500 square miles.

Muir was disappointed that the original Yosemite Grant

encompassing the valley floor and the Mariposa Grove was

still left under state control, but this new park was

30 times bigger and, to Muir's delight, included one of his

favorite places on Earth, the nearby Hetch Hetchy Valley,

which he considered "a grand landscape garden,

"one of nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples."

At the same time as the Yosemite Bill, two more groves

of big trees on the western flank of the Sierras had also

been preserved as Sequoia and General Grant National Parks.

"The majestic sequoia is the king of the conifers,"

Muir had written, "the noblest of all the noble race."

There were now 4 national parks.

Flushed with the success of his first venture into

the world of politics, Muir immediately began

making new plans.

He wanted more parks, bigger parks, and more park

supporters to defend them against the enemies he knew

would oppose them.

He was right.

In the years to come, the battle over parks would

intensify, threatening even his own precious

mountain temple.

John Muir was 52 years old now.

It had been nearly a quarter century since,

as a self-described "unknown nobody,"

he had first entered Yosemite and then been transformed

by his "unconditional surrender to nature."

He would need to convince many other Americans to

surrender, as well, to see the necessity, as he

said, "in all that is wild."

CRONON: What he means is that wildness is an essential part

of ourselves that our ordinary lives tempt us to forget,

and by losing touch with that essential part of ourselves,

we risk losing our souls, and so for him,

going out into nature to these parks is how we recover

ourselves, remember who we truly are, and reconnect

with the core roots of our own identity, of our own

spirituality, that which is sacred in our experience.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: The tendency nowadays to wander

in wilderness is delightful to see.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken,

overcivilized people are beginning to find out

that going to the mountains is

going home, that wildness is a necessity, and that mountain

parks and reservations are useful, not only as fountains

of timber and irrigating rivers but as fountains of life.

John Muir.