May Kellogg Sullivan’s exultation over the coming of spring to northern Alaska is matched by my own notebook comment regarding the same page — “Nature, at last!”. It is page 354 of a book with 392 pages, and it is one of the first (and precious few) passages where Sullivan contributes a few words of description of the natural world. Throughout much of the book, it is the Arctic winter, and Sullivan passes her days knitting clothes for Eskimo children at a mission. Nearly all of the animals she mentions in the book take the form of pelts. For instance, a red fox pelt figures prominently; she had bought it to add to her winter gear, only to have it stolen by one of the several bad elements she encountered during her time in the far north. Her first encounter with a ptarmigan is one that was caught in a trap and was trussed up to be served at dinner.
To be completely fair, the book was a mostly enjoyable read (though the winter knitting scenes did get tedious); it only fails completely when evaluated as a nature book. One thing I learned from reading his volume, and the previous one by Frederick Schwatka, is that a journey to a wild place does not automatically constitute nature writing. May Kellogg Sullivan was not, as far as I can tell, a naturalist of any kind. Her trip to Alaska appears to have been motivated by a quest for gold coupled with some level of interest in adventure. Only once does a proclivity for nature study appear in the work — on page 354. Here it is, in its entirety. Molly was the native wife of the Mission director (called the Captain); Jennie was her semi-invalid daughter.
The last week of May has finally come, and with it real spring weather. The children play out in the sand heap on the south side of the house for hours together, enjoying the warm sunshine and pleasant air, the little girl clothed from head to foot in furs. Never has a springtime been so welcome to me, perhaps because in striking contrast to the long, cold winter through which we have just passed. From the hillside behind the Mission, the snow is slowly disappearing, first from the most exposed spots and rocks, the gullies keeping their drifts and ice longer. Mosses are everywhere peeping cheerfully up at me in all their tints of gorgeous green, some that I found recently being tipped with the daintiest of little red cups. This, with other treasures, I brought in my basket to Jennie when I returned from my daily walk upon the hill, and together we studied them closely under the magnifying glass.
To examine the treasures brought in by Mollie, however, we needed no glass. They are sand-pipers, ptarmigan, squirrels, and occasionally a wild goose, shot, perhaps, in the act of flying over thehunter’s head, as these birds are now often seen and heard going north. In the evening I see from my window the neighboring Eskimo children playing with their sleds, and sometimes they light a bonfire, shouting and chattering in their own unique way. All “mushers” now travel at night when the trail is frozen, as it is too soft in the daytime, and the glare of the sun often causes snow-blindness. Then, too, there is water on the ice in places, which we are glad to see, and pools of the same are standing around the Mission and schoolhouse. I can no longer go out in my muckluks, but must wear my long rubber boots and short skirts.
Today I went out for an hour, walking to Chinik Creek over the tundra, from which the snow has almost disappeared, and returned by the hill-top path. The tundra was beautiful with mosses, birds were singing, and the rushing and roaring of the creek waters fairly made my head swim, they were such unusual sounds. The water was cutting a channel in the sands where it empties into the bay. Here it was flowing over the ice, helping to loosen the edge and allow it to drift out to sea.
It is, on the whole, a charming springtime tundra scene, though the particular species of birds and mosses are, of course, not provided. How I longed for Sullivan to set out across the tundra and have adventures amongst the various animals of the north — though I suppose the hazard of polar bears would rather discourage that kind of behavior. I struggled throughout the book with wanting it to be what it clearly wasn’t. Where it shines, actually, is in documenting the gritty realities of life in gold rush communities of tents and shacks. Her time in Alaska was chiefly spent in such places, where the thirst for gold was causing considerable environmental harm (which was, of course, overlooked by all). Sullivan’s Kodak camera documents the damage, though.
And yes, this is the Nome gold rush. I had never heard of it before.
Sullivan herself is a bit of a mystery. I know that she visited Alaska twice over 18 months in 1899-1900, covering over 12,000 miles in her solo travels. She was evidently married at the time but says absolutely nothing about her husband. Were they estranged? Was he deceased? And I have no birth or death dates for Sullivan. She does mention that she is a native of the Badger State, a.k.a., Wisconsin.
I will close out my post with another all-too-brief nature scene, this one from the Arctic summer, soon after Kellogg arrived in Nome (where she got a job in a tent restaurant since women were not permitted to participate in the actual mining work). It is tacked onto a picture of the burgeoning mining camp:
To eyes so unaccustomed as ours to the sight, how strange it all looked at midnight. From the big tent door which faced south and towards Nome City we could see the blue waters of Behring Sea away in the distance. Great ships lying there at anchor, lately arrived from the outside world or just about to leave, laden with treasure, at this long range looked like mere dots on the horizon. Between them and us there straggled over the beach in a westerly direction, a confused group of objects we well knew to be the famous and fast growing camp on the yellow sands. To our right, as well as our left, rolled the softly undulating hills, glowing in tender tints of purples and greys, or, if the moon hung low above our heads, there were warmer and lighter shades which were doubly entrancing.
Accompanying the low moon twinkled the silver stars with their olden time coyness of expression. Little birds, not knowing when to sleep in the endless daylight, hopped among the dewy wild flowers of the tundra, calling to their mates or nestlings, twittering a song appropriate to the time and place because entirely unfamiliar.
My copy of this book is a later edition, from 1915. According to the title page, it is part of the “Thirteenth Thousand” of Kellogg’s work. Given the book’s clear sales success, I am surprised that so little information is available online about its author.
These Eskimos had been hired on the Lower Yukon, and but for their being a little more stolid and homely than those of north Hudson’s Bay, I should have thought myself back among the tribes of that region. They make better and more tractable workmen than any of the Indians along the river, and in many other ways are superior to the latter for the white men’s purposes, being more honest, ingenious and clever in the use of tools, while treachery is an unknown element in their character.
The transition from a “standard-issue nature book” to an explorer’s narrative came as quite a shock to me. Alaska was the rugged West in 1885, a wild country with boundless resources to be identified and exploited. Schwtka eyes everything around him in terms of potential use, from forests to native peoples. The only moment the modern reader glimpses a different future for Alaska in this account is in a passing mention of the Muir Glacier, discovered by John Muir during his own 1879 expedition (to be covered in a future blog post). Although he had evidenced an aptitude for natural history during his time at the US Military Academy, Schwatka was a military officer first and foremost and saw the landscape and objects in it in largely utilitarian terms.
In this particular expedition, Schwatka commanded a truly low-budget, under-the-radar journey from the headwaters of the Yukon River almost 2000 miles to its mouth, mostly by raft. But whereas John Wesley Powell’s thousand-mile journey down the Green and Colorado Rivers through the Grand Canyon is widely celebrated today, who has even heard of Schwatka? For all its length, his expedition was virtually free of rapids; instead, it was the gnats and mosquitoes that posed the greatest danger. There are no grand dramatic moments in this account. In terms of advancing the cause of natural science, Schwatka did gather some herbarium specimens at the beginning of the trip, and he includes a few descriptions of wild animal encounters in this book. But for the most part, wildlife was there to be shot at (fortunately, as his comments frequently show, expedition members tended to aim poorly). Birds might be pleasant to observe, but there was always the possibility that they could be good for eating, too (or not):
Everywhere we came in contact with the grouse of these regions, all of them with broods of varying numbers, and while the little chicks went scurrying through the grass and brush in search of a hiding place, the old ones walked along in front of the intruder, often but a few feet away, seemingly less devoid of fear than the common barn fowls, although probably they had never heard a shot fired.
The Doctor and I sat down to rest on a large rock with a perturbed mother grouse on another not over three yards away, and we could inspect her plumage and study her actions as well as if she had been in a cage. The temptation to kill them was very great after having been so long without fresh meat, a subsistence the appetite loudly demands in the rough out-of-door life of an explorer. A mess of them ruthlessly destroyed by our Indian hunters, who had no fears of the game law, no sportsman’s qualms of conscience, nor in fact compassion of any sort, lowered our desire to zero, for they were tougher than leather, and as tasteless as shavings; and after that first mess we were perfectly willing to allow them all the rights guaranteed by the game laws of lower latitudes.
Fortunately (in my opinion), most of the animals observed on the journey survived. Grizzlies fared quite well, as even the natives of the region tended to avoid hunting them, as Schwatka explains:
Everywhere in his dismal dominions [the grizzly bear] is religiously avoided by the native Nimrod, who declares that his meat is not fit to be eaten, that his robe is almost worthless, and that he constantly keeps the wrong end presented to his pursuers. Although he is never hunted encounters with him are not altogether unknown, as he is savage enough to become the hunter himself at times, and over some routes the Indians will never travel unless armed so as to be fairly protected from this big Bruin.
(As a side note, for all of Schwatka’s condescension toward the natives, I am fairly confident that by Nimrod, he means to label the Indian as a skillful hunter, not as a dimwitted or stupid person. The more insulting use of the word did not appear in text until 1932.)
The attribute of this narrative that stands out the most is its length. It is over 400 pages, and most of the time, the expedition members are struggling downstream on the very wide and often quite braided Yukon River, trying to keep the raft off the sand bars and moving downstream. This is occasionally interrupted by visits to native villages along the shoreline, typically described as squalid affairs consisting of a few shacks (often untenanted, since the Indians were semi-nomadic and did not occupy most locations for extended periods of time). Mosquitoes are mentioned on nearly every page, and gnats put in appearances too, along with one particularly vicious horsefly. Expeditions by foot into the adjacent forest and mountains are rare, since they inevitably resulted in encounters with brutal clouds of biting insects. Those readers seeking an armchair vacation in paradise had best look elsewhere; backcountry Alaska definitely does not conform to Mabie’s transcendental visions of Eden. Here is what a coastal forest walk (prior to the Yukon raft journey) was like for Schwatka; for once, the hazards aren’t insects, but topography and climate:
To turn inland from the shore was at once to commence the ascent of a slope that might vary frcm forty to eighty degrees, the climbing of which almost beggars description. The compact mass of evergreen timber had looked dense enough from the ship, but at its feet grew a denser mass of tangled undergrowth of bushes and vines, and at their roots again was a solid carpeting of moss, lichens, and ferns that often ran up the trees and underbrush for heights greater than a man’s reach, and all of it moist as a sponge, the whole being absolutely tropical in luxuriance. This thick carpet of moss extends from the shore line to the edges of the glaciers on the mountain summits, and the constant melting of the ice through the warm summer supplies it with water which it absorbs like a sponge… It is almost impossible to conceive how heavily laden with tropical moisture the atmos- phere is in this supposed sub-Arctic colony of ours. It oozes up around your feet as you walk, and drips from overhead like an April mist, and nothing is exempt from it. Even the Indians’ tall, dead ” totem-poles” of hemlock or spruce, which would make fine kindling wood any where else, bear huge clumps of dripping moss and foliage on their tops, at heights varying from ten to thirty feet above the ground. An occasional stray seed of a Sitka spruce may get caught in this elevated tangle, and make its home there just as well as if it were on the ground. It sprouts, and as its branches run up in the air, the roots crawl down the “totem-pole ” until the ground is reached, when they bury themselves in it, and send up fresh sustenance to the trunk and limbs, which until then have been living a parasitic sort of life off the decayed moss… Imagine a city boy tossing a walnut from a fourth story window, and its lodging on top of a telegraph pole, there sprouting next spring, and in the course of a couple of years extending its roots down the pole, insinuating themselves in the crevices and splitting it open, then piercing the pavement; the tree continuing to grow for years until the boy, as a man, can reach out from his window and pick walnuts every fall, and the idea seems incredible ; and yet the equivalent occurs quite often in the south-eastern portions of our distant colony. Nor is all this marshy softness confined to the levels or to almost level slopes, as one would imagine from one’s experience at home, but it extends up the steepest places, where the climbing would be hard enough without this added obstacle. In precipitous slopes where the foot tears out a great swath of moist moss, it may reveal underneath a slippery shingle or shale where nothing but a bird could find a footing in its present condition. There is wonderful preservative power in all these conditions, for nothing seems to rot in the ground, and the accumulated timber of ages, standing and fallen, stumps, limbs, and trunks, “criss-cross and tumble-tangled,” as the children say, forms a bewildering mass which, covered and intertwined as it is with a compact entanglement of underbrush and moss, makes the ascent of the steep hillsides a formidable undertaking. A fallen trunk of a tree is only indicated by a ridge of moss, and should the traveler on this narrow path deviate a little too far to the right or left, he may sink up to his arm-pits in a soft mossy trap from which he can scramble as best he may, according to his activity in the craft of “backwoodsmanship.” Having once reached the tops of the lower hills — the higher ones are covered with snow and glacier ice the year round — a few small openings may be seen, which, if anything, are more boggy and treacherous to the feet than the hillsides themselves, lagoon-like morasses, covered with pond lilies and aquatic plant life, being connected by a network of sluggish canals with three or four inches of amber colored water and as many feet of soft black oozy mud, with here and there a clump of willow brake or “pussy-tails” springing above the waste of sedge and flags.
While Schwatka doesn’t exult in nature like Muir or even celebrate the rich biodiversity of the temperate rainforest ecosystem, he does a robust job of describing the scene, and for those moments, I am grateful to have read this book. And here, in whimsically describing a moose, he even goes so far as to wish the species well, though he naturally refers to it as “noble game”:
While descending the stream on the 24th, late in the forenoon, we saw a large buck moose swim from one of the many islands to the mainland just back of us, having probably, as the hunter would say, “gotten our scent.” I never comprehended what immense noses these animals have until I got a good profile view of this big fellow, and although over half a mile away, his nose looked as if he had been rooting the island and was trying to carry away the greater part of it on the end of his snout. The great palmated horns above, the broad “throat-latch” before, combined with the huge nose and powerful shoulders, make one think that this animal might tilt forward on his head from sheer gravity, so little is there apparently at the other end to counterbalance these masses… A few winters ago the cold was so intense, and the snow covered the ground for so great a depth throughout the season, that sad havoc was played with the unfortunate animals, and a moose is now a rare sight below the upper ramparts of the river, as I was informed by the traders of that district. It is certainly to be hoped that the destruction has only been partial, so that this noble game may again flourish in its home, where it will be secure from the inroads of firearms for many decades to come.
As evident in this description of a moose, there is a charmingly comedic edge to this book. Schwatka has a delightfully wry sense of humor, though it is often directed toward the natives he encounters. Here, he conveys a sense of what the interiors of the Indian dwellings were like: “The vast majority of the houses are squalid beyond measure, and the dense resinous smoke of the spruce and pine blackens the walls with a funereal tinge, and fills the house with an odor which, when mingled with that of decayed salmon, makes one feel like leaving his card at the door and passing on.” And here are his thoughts about dried salmon as a food source:
This [Indian] house was deserted, but evidently only for a while, as a great deal of its owner’s material of the chase and the fishery was still to be seen hanging inside on the rafters. Among these were a great number of dried salmon, one of the staple articles of food that now begin to appear on this part of the great river, nearly two thousand miles from its mouth. This salmon, when dried before putrefaction sets in, is tolerable, ranking somewhere between Limburger cheese and walrus hide. Collecting some of it occasionally from Indian fishermen as we floated by, we would use it as a lunch in homeopathic quantities until some of us got so far as to imagine that we really liked it.
Ultimately, though, this book casts a long shadow as a work of Western imperialism. Throughout their odyssey, Schwatka and his men pass rivers, cross lakes, and view distant mountains that all most likely have native names. But rather than seeking them out to add to the map, Schwatka draws from an endless well of European scientists and statesmen to furnish new ones. And it is difficult to overlook his disdain for the native peoples of Alaska. Consider this passage about those in the southeastern part of the territory:
The progress of the natives of Southeastern Alaska toward civilization is steady and certain, though it must not be supposed that these people yet take high rank in learning, intelligence or morality. The educating and elevating influences of the schools and missions, though doing much, perhaps more than we should expect under the circumstances, must be continued a long time in order to effect anything like satisfactory conditions.
Reading this book has been particularly helpful to me as I continue to explore American nature writing. I feel comfortable saying that, while nature is present in it, this is not in that category. Perhaps the line might be drawn at books of exploration written by naturalists, such as William Beebe, books that focus on nature first and foremost. All I know is that if I expand this blog to encompass more works like this one, I will have thousands of titles yet to read, instead of merely hundreds.
This will be my first in a pair of posts about Alaska; the next blog post will feature a title recommended to me by the renowned environmental historian, Ralph Lutts (who has so kindly been guiding more toward further titles and resources, much to my wife’s dismay and my bank account’s suffering). I anticipate there will be more in the future — at some point, I will be reading Muir’s travels in Alaska, as well.
As a postscript, while my copy of this book is from 1894, it was first published in 1892, the year of Schwatka’s untimely death at the age of 43. One newspaper reported that he died of an accidental overdose of morphine, while another paper claimed it was suicide by laudanum. The true cause of his death has never been resolved.
As obscure nature authors go, William Everett Cram (1871-1947) is one of the most enigmatic. I know that he was an author and illustrator, identified in a long list of credible nature writers identified by Theodore Roosevelt during the Nature Faker Controversy (stay tuned to this blog for more about that). I know that he illustrated Witmer Stone’s American Animals, published in 1902. He also illustrated Charles Conrad Abbott’s Bird-Land Echoes(1896), which likely explains why Cram dedicated his own first book, Little Beasts of Field and Wood (1899) to Abbott. Cram would go on to publish a sequel with still more “little beasts” more than a decade later, and then Time and Change (described by one bookseller as “farming essays”) more than a decade after that. I know that he spent most of his life in New Hampshire, and that, as of August 15th, 1899 (when he penned the preface to his first work), he was living in Hampton Falls, along the coast just north of Seabrook.
I was intrigued by this title, though the book’s small size, cover design, and title made me fear at first that the work was aimed at children. Even given a potentially greater vocabulary of youngsters about 125 years ago compared to now, this book still strikes me as primarily geared for older youths and adults, however. Though it is a collection of animal profiles like those of Ernest Thompson Seaton, it is a far cry from his children’s tales (expect reviews of his work in the future, also). He opens the work with this keen observation:
To my thinking, the small beasts that still inhabit our woods have been altogether too much neglected by the student of nature, though really much nearer to us and much more easily comprehended than birds, when you have once succeeded in finding them. For that they are more difficult to observe than birds is undeniable.
Indeed, having read now in excess of 60 nature books, I can attest to the fact that most of the attention is usually given to birds and/or plants. Many of the animals in this book, such as otters and muskrats, rarely receive any attention whatsoever from other writers. Most of them received plenty of attention from trappers, though; in the case of minks, for instance, Cram noted that their wild numbers fluctuated inversely with how much their pelts were in style at the time. Indeed, Cram himself clearly hunted and trapped quite a few of his subjects. The book is entirely illustrated by him, and many of the animal poses suggest that they were drawn from dead specimens rather than live ones. Interestingly, Cram never mentions using an opera-glass (as the birders at the time largely did). He does speak frequently of reading animal tracks, and he also reports animal sightings relayed to him by other trappers. His own dedication to careful, patient observation is attested to by his noting that Thoreau himself saw few foxes, while Cram encountered them frequently. (He discounted the possibility that they were less abundant in Concord half a century earlier, though I would think that question merits further research.)
As I noted earlier, I found Cram enigmatic from the start. I sought to get to know him through this book, and for most of it, he remains quite aloof. His prose is consistently clear, but without sparkle; its workmanlike quality evokes most field guides I have viewed. So we will skip over most of the volume to its very last chapters, where he finally comes to life in reporting on the ways and habits of squirrels. Perhaps this is, in part, because squirrels were more commonplace about the home than, say, weasels would have been. And perhaps they are more endearing by nature. Whatever the cause, his fondness for squirrels (relative to foxes, in this case) is evident from the two images below. The one on the left is of a fox bringing food to its young; note in particular the manner and expressions of the pups. Compare that with the right-hand image, of a mother red squirrel stripping seeds from a pine cone while her two adorable offspring look on expectantly.
In one of my favorite passages, Cram notes about the red squirrel’s diet that it “seems to include pretty nearly everything that is ever eaten by any of our native animals. I have known them to find their way into the pantry of a farmhouse, and sample everything available, appearing to be par- ticularly well pleased with the custards.” I don’t know about Cram, but that is certainly a fondness I can identify with, myself.
But Cram saves his confessions of delight for the flying squirrels. While he notes that they seem to act “wholly upon instinct and without displaying the slightest symptom of intelligence”, he still confesses that “for all that, there are no more attractive or winning creatures in the woods. They never exhibit any marked symptoms of fear, but just cuddle up on a knot or projecting piece of bark only a few feet away, looking as if they would like nothing better than to be taken in the hand and petted.” He follows this declaration with a charming story from his grandparents (the first and only time they appear in this book):
I remember hearing my grandmother tell how one winter evening she was sitting before the fire, when my grandfather came home from the woods and taking off his coat threw it across a chair near the fireplace. Presently a flying squirrel crawled out of one of the pockets, sailed across the room to where she sat, and nestled contentedly in her hair, which she wore in a great fluffy mass piled high above her head. I cannot recall the sequel of the story, which was undoubtedly interesting, at all events to those chiefly concerned in it. No one ever knew exactly how the squirrel came to be in the coat, but it was supposed that a family of them must have been disturbed by the choppers in the woodlot and that this one had taken refuge in my grandfather’s pocket, probably bereft of what little wit it ever had by the noise of chopping and the crash of falling trees, and glad to find any retreat away from so rude a world. Perhaps it was only half awakened from its winter’s sleep, and dozed off again as soon as it found itself finally ensconced in the depths of the pocket, to be aroused later by the heat of the fire. I cannot help wondering what finally became of it, and just how much of an impression the adventure made upon its sleepy little brain, or whether it took it all as a matter of course, to be forgotten as soon as it was fairly back in the trees again. Perhaps I have run across some of its descendants in the woods or caught them in box-traps without mistrusting that their ancestor and mine had once been on such very intimate terms.
By the final paragraph of the book, Crum’s neutral tone has vanished completely:
It is now several years since I have seen a live flying squirrel, though there is no reason to suppose that they are any less abundant than formerly. I have rapped on hollow trees and pried into decaying logs and stumps on every occasion without discovering the sleepy little chaps I was in search of. But this sort of thing goes largely by chance after all, and to-morrow I may happen on them where I least expect it. I remember once climbing to a crow’s nest in a tall pine while the old birds wheeled and scolded overhead. When rather more than half-way to the top, I reached the place that I had seen from the ground, but was disappointed to find only a last year’s nest heaped up with dry leaves and pine-needles in such a way as to show that it had already been appropriated by squirrels. On investigation, I founds instead of red squirrels as I had expected, four or five little flying squirrels about half-grown. I only saw them for a few seconds at most, as they scrambled away in all directions and disappeared completely. But in those few seconds I became aware that young flying squirrels are simply the most delightful things in existence. And I still look forward to the time when I shall discover another family of them, without the slightest fear of being disenchanted.
In closing, a word about this volume. It bears only one small mark from its past: impressed into the back of the frontispiece is the single word, Gorman. Alas, it is not sufficient for tracking down the previous owner.
Four years elapsed between Burroughs’ first book of nature essays, Wake Robin, and his second collection, Winter Sunshine. During that time, Burroughs moved back home to New York State (January 1873) and a year later, purchased 9 acres in West Park, where he built his estate, Riverby. The Hudson Valley would be his home base for the remainder of his days, and out of its soil would emerge his finest writing. But not yet.
Winter Sunshine documents Burroughs’ rambling journey toward finding his voice, his roots, his place. It is a work of transition, and as such, not one of his strongest achievements, but vital to understanding how Burroughs would one day become “the Seer of Slabsides”. One of the first essays in the book, “The Exhilarations of the Road”, is a celebration of the nomadic life; a young and brash Burroughs longs to travel the world. “I think how much richer and firmer-grained life would be to me if I could journey afoot through Florida and Texas, or follow the windings of the Platte or the Yellow- stone, or stroll through Oregon, or browse for a season about Canada,” Burroughs announces. Indeed, most of the second half of the book is taken up with his impressions from a multi-week trip to England, France, and Ireland. His remaining essays are split between the Washington, D.C. area and upstate New York. Repeatedly, too, Burroughs makes comparisons between England and the United States in terms of culture and landscape. For instance, he contrasts the British love for walking and footpaths with the relative dearth of both back home. Birds, central to Wake Robin, rarely appear. Instead, Burroughs devotes an essay to all the animals leaving tracks in the snow during a Hudson River Valley winter — mostly mammals.
Another essay in the collection is a paean to the pleasures of apples. It is telling, I think, that Thoreau wrote an essay on “Wild Apples” while Burroughs emphasizes the more domesticated variety. Thoreau sought to keep a foot planted firmly in the wild and a foot in civilization; Burroughs places both feet firmly in the rural landscape that blends elements of both. Burroughs ends his essay by speaking of Thoreau’s work:
…the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and pastures! The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her planting….
I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its tree are under obligation. His chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious piece of writing. It has a ‘tang and smack” like the fruit it celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner. It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness of the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts, and was obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten indoors.
At some moments in the book, Burroughs seems to copy Thoreau in topic and outlook. For instance, Burroughs remarks early on about how he, like Thoreau, feels naturally drawn to the west on his walks. Thoreau also frequently explored how human beings are in sympathy with the forms and patterns of nature, including the journey of the seasons. When I first read the passage below from Burroughs’ essay, “Autumn Tides”, I could imagine it appearing somewhere in Thoreau’s Journal:
Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons? Are there not more births in the spring and more deaths in the fall? In the spring one vegetates; his thoughts turn to sap; another kind of activity seizes him; he makes new wood which does not harden till past midsummer. For my part, I find all literary work irksome from April to August; my sympathies run in other channels; the grass grows where meditation walked. As fall approaches, the currents mount to the head again. But my thoughts do not ripen well till after there has been a frost. The burrs will not open much before that. A man’s thinking, I take it, is a kind of combustion, as is the ripening of fruits and leaves, and he wants plenty of oxygen in the air.
Literary work isn’t the only irksome thing to Burroughs during the summer months. Here, in quite a different tone, is his disdainful description of Washington D.C. at that time of year:
Think of the agonies of the heated term, the ragings of the dog-star, the purgatory of heat and dust, of baking, blistering pavements, of cracked and powdered fields, of dead, stifling night air, from which every tonic and antiseptic quality seems eliminated, leaving a residuum of sultry malaria and all-diffusing privy and sewer gases, that lasts from the first of July to near the middle of September!
Much of the book is filled with hasty generalizations about other races and cultures, not all of which are to Burroughs’ credit. These are not his finest pages — ones where he seeks to figure out the British, the Irish, the French, and colored people. Here are his observations on the latter, from the eponymous essay that opens the collection:
In my walks about Washington, both winter and summer, colored men are about the only pedestrians I meet; and I meet them everywhere, in the fields and in the woods and in the public road, swinging along with that peculiar, rambling, elastic gait, taking advantage of the short cuts and threading the country with paths and byways. I doubt if the colored man can compete with his white brother as walker; his foot is too flat and the calves of his legs too small, but he is certainly the most picturesque traveler to be seen on the road. He bends his knees more than the white man, and oscillates more to and fro, or from side to side. The imaginary line which his head describes is full of deep and long undulations. Even the boys and young men sway as if bearing a burden.
Along the fences and by the woods I come upon their snares, dead-falls, and rude box-traps. The freedman is a successful trapper and hunter, and has by nature an insight into these things. I frequently see him in market or on his way thither with a tame ’possum clinging timidly to his shoulders, or a young coon or fox led by a chain. Indeed, the colored man behaves precisely like the rude unsophisticated peasant that he is, and there is fully as much virtue in him, using the word in its true sense, as in the white peasant; indeed, much more than in the poor whites who grew up by his side; while there is often a benignity and a depth of human experience and sympathy about some of these dark faces that comes home to one like the best one sees in art or reads in books.
One touch of nature makes all the world akin, and there is certainly a touch of nature about the colored man; indeed, I had almost said, of Anglo-Saxon nature. They have the quaintness and homeliness of the simple English stock.
But Burroughs saves his most cringe-worthy descriptive passage for his brief stay in Ireland:
I hardly know why I went to Ireland, except it was to indulge the few drops of Irish blood in my veins, and maybe also with a view to shorten my sea voyage by a day. I also felt a desire to see one or two literary men there, and in this sense my journey was eminently gratifying; but so far from shortening my voyage by a day, it lengthened it by three days, that being the time it took me to recover from the effects of it; and as to the tie of blood, I think it must nearly all have run out, for I felt but few congenital throbs while in Ireland.
The Englishman at home is a much more lovable animal than the Englishman abroad, but Pat in Ireland is even more of a pig than in this country. Indeed, the squalor and poverty, and cold, skinny wretchedness one sees in Ireland, and (what freezes our sympathies) the groveling, swiny shiftlessness that pervades these hovels, no traveler can be prepared for. It is the bare prose of misery, the unheroic of tragedy. There is not one redeeming or mitigating feature.
Burroughs would gain his fame by inhabiting one corner of the world and studying it passionately and thoughtfully. But in these early days of his literary career, he shows what harm might be done by quick judgment and rash generalizations about the world. It is an object lesson for all of us, I think.
Just as Burroughs struggled to find his voice, so, too, did nature writers in America during the 1870s. As of now, having read over 60 titles, I can report that only three of them date to this decade: Among the Isles of Shoals by Celia Thaxter (1873), this work, and Into the Wilderness by Charles Dudley Warner (1878). Including 1880 and 1881 adds Friends Worth Knowing by Ernest Ingersoll (1880) and The Diary of a Bird by H. D. Minot (1880). For reasons I can only speculate about at this point, the two decades following Thoreau’s death in 1861 marked a relative dry spell for the nature genre in America, before a flood of writers would emerge during the “Nature Movement” (as Sharp called it) in the three decades that followed.
John Coleman Adams (1849-1922) graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1872 and went on to serve as pastor at five Universalist churches during his lifetime. He wrote several books on religion, philosophy, and other topics. Nature Studies in Berkshire was his only book in the nature genre unless one counts a biography of William Hamilton Gibson, another nature author of the time.
At first glance, I was fearful that the book was going to be, well, vacuous. The opening chapter on “Our Berkshire” is a work overwrought with boosterism that includes this cliché-riddled passage:
To know Berkshire is to love it. To love it is to feel a sort of proprietorship in it, a pride in its glories, a joy in its beauties, such as owners have in their estates, and patriots in their native land. He who was born here, clings to the soil if he stays, or reverts to it if he moves from it, with a New England stead- fastness, as intense and deep as a moral principle. He who visits Berkshire is almost certain to visit again and yet once more. He would fain revel in the old delight of air and scene and influence. He believes he has not exhausted the possible experiencesto be found in this spot. And so the charm grows, and the sense of belonging to the soil, and the belief that there is nowhere the like of this blend of tonic and restful scenery, of wild nature and cultivated land, of hill-country and broad plains.
I am grateful to report that the book gets much better. As a dominie (the term for a pastor that Adams preferred to apply to himself), he includes some religious sentiment; but it is muted for the most part, and not overly didactic. I found it strangely endearing to read, early on, Adams’ declaration that “I am a stranger in bird-land”; so many other writers of the time, such as Olive Thorne Miller and Brandford Torrey, reveled in descriptions of the feathered folk. Birds still appear here — robins, thrushes, and a few others — but only briefly, and mostly concerning their songs or behaviors, not their plumage or nesting habits. His botanical knowledge is much stronger; unlike early Burroughs, Adams identifies the wake-robin trillium as being deep purple. In his 1901 biography of William Hamilton Gibson, Adams identifies Thoreau, Burroughs, and Gibson as the greatest nature writers of the time. In this slightly earlier book, Adams mentions John Burroughs, Grant Allen (stay tuned for a future blog post or two on this Canadian writer who wrote popular pieces about plant evolution), and Bradford Torrey, along with the poetry of Wordsworth and Emerson.
I found the simple, straightforward nature of Adams’ prose to be quite refreshing after Field-Farings. I lifted the title of this blog post from the book because I think it describes Adams’ audience well — novices at nature study, those seeking inspiration in charming accounts of the out-of-doors. Nearly all of the chapters are set in the summer because that is when Adams would stay in the Berkshires; the rest of the year, he was a parson at All Souls’ Universalist Church in Brooklyn. The chapters are accounts of excursions he took in the area, or reflections upon various landscape features — trees, brooks, lakes, and clouds. While his prose rarely waxes eloquent, I admit to enjoying this passage about a delightful afternoon visit to a stream near his home:
…sweetest of all our memories will be that bright morning when we wandered to the brookside, with a little child for company, and lay stretched on a greensward shaded by the meeting boughs of a maple and a butternut, while she played like a baby naiad in the stream, and the brook sang, and the trees whispered, and the birds hopped on branches close beside us, and the kingfisher from downstream dropped in to call, and the tenant frog stared at us from his pool, and the oxen in the next lot sent looks of fellowship across the stone wall, and we seemed to blend our lives with that of the brook, and for each of us, child, man, and woman, the poet’s word was true: ” Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.”
Like many nature authors of his time (particularly of the religious persuasion), Adams believed that connecting with nature was ultimately a religious experience. He explained the connection between religion and nature thus:
I have grown to feel that the love of nature and its beauty and inner life have much to do with the enrichment of the religious life. Religion has been the gainer both from science and art, for these interpreters of nature have broadened our vision, lifted our ideals, and expanded all our conceptions of the universe and of its Creator.
I am confident that Hamilton Wright Mabie, among others, would have agreed with him.
Before I consign this book to my rapidly expanding “finished books” shelf, I will share excerpts from three chapters in the volume that particularly caught my attention. The first is a passage singing the praises of the music of the thrush in the forest:
The breeze lulls for a moment ; the far sounds from the farms come to our ears softened and sweet. But best and dearest of all sounds, across the glen, from out those woody coverts, there floats the tender, liquid trill of the thrush. It is the harbinger of the evening, the first notice the birds serve that the day is waning, and that the shadows are gathering in the forests on the eastern slopes. There is no other woodland note like this. It is perpetual music. It touches the emotions like profoundest poetry. It calls on the religious nature and stirs the deepest soul to joyous praise. There is no bird, among the many which have found their way into song, in other lands or other times, whose note deserves so much of poet and lover of nature as the wood-thrush. The very spirit of the forest thrills in this vesper-song. It is the trembling note of solitude, rich with the emotions born of silence and of shadow, rising like the sighing of the evergreens, to fill the soul at once with joy over its sweetness, and with sadness because that sweetness must be so evanescent. When one has heard the song of the thrush there is no richer draught of joy in store for him in any sound of the woods. There is nothing to surpass it, save the ineffable ecstasy of the silence which reigns in their deepest shades.
The second excerpt presages Edwin Way Teale’s North With the Spring, published half a century later:
Now if I had the means and the time, I should every year in this same fashion run ahead of the vernal advance, the procession of leaves and blossoms and birds and butterflies, as it moves northward from the Carolinas to the Canadas. There is such an exquisite pleasure in watching the burst of life, the outbreak of colour and fragrance, the clothing of field and forest with verdure, that one would be glad to prolong the sensation. In these days it would be an easy matter to keep just ahead of summer for a good two months. And then one might halt on the banks of the St. Lawrence and let the pageant pass by; for when it has gone as far north as that, the line of march is nearly done.
Finally, I was surprised to find in Adams a kindred spirit with Enos Mills. Indeed, one might imagine the two meeting for conversation — the New England parson extolling the rural delights of the Berkshires with their “gracious air of culture and refinement”, and a John Muir wannabe backwoodsman with endless tales to tell of adventures in the rugged Rockies. Both men, however, clearly recognized the importance of trees to civilization and the environment. Indeed, many points Mills offers about the value of forests to humans and ecosystems in “The Wealth of the Woods” from The Spell of the Rockies (1911) also appear in Adams’ 1899 essay, “Fruitful Trees”. I suspect that both writers were in turn influenced, at least in part, by George Perkins Marsh’s much earlier work, Man and Nature (1864). “Nature has made the tree one of the great conservators of the soil,” Adams declares. He goes on to explore how trees moderate the local hydrology (diminishing the severity of floods and droughts) and play a key role in preventing soil erosion.
…cut down the trees, clear the hillsides, and see what happens. The thin soil, no longer protected by the trees, no longer held in place by their netted roots, no longer shaded by their leafy branches, grows dry, and crumbles, and loosens. The heavy rains wash it bodily into the valleys. The bare ledges appear. The vegetation dwindles. The hill or mountain becomes a barren crag. Its brooks and springs dry up as soon as they are filled. The drench of the hillsides is hurried in bulk down into the valleys; and every rain-storm becomes a swift freshet, destroying the crops and threatening house, barn, and factory, at the same time that it washes down the sand and gravel from the heights to deaden and impoverish the lowland meadows. But as soon as the rain stops, the streams stop too. They dry up and shrink in their beds. They disappear under the scorch of the sun. The same fields which were inundated in the springtime are parched and dusty in the heats of midsummer. That is the way we are enriching ourselves. We are paying dividends at the sawmill, and putting mortgages on the farms. We are burying our fields at the same time that we are destroying our forests.
On the whole, I found Adams a worthy nature writer. And any lightness in his prose was more than counteracted by the weight of his book: 2.4 pounds, with pages made of some of the heaviest paper I have seen — approaching cardstock. The photographs are lovely, each one shielded by vellum with a brief text excerpt printed in red ink. It was a charming read. Alas, no previous owner left their mark, so I cannot tell anything about the history of this volume itself, beyond the fact that it was a slightly later edition of the work, published in 1901.
I do not know quite what to make of this book, its rather pretentious title, or its somewhat enigmatic author. I am not even clear that it qualifies as a “nature book”, though it is rich in bucolic scenes of flowering plants and singing birds. I suppose I will share what I know, and let readers figure out the rest on their own.
What is known about the author is that Martha McCulloch-Williams was born near Clarksville, northwest Tennessee, in approximately 1857. Daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, she grew up in luxury, being taught by an older sister instead of attending school. After the Civil War, her family lost much of their wealth. When her already elder parents both died in the mid-1880s, a distant cousin (Thomas McCulloch-Williams) arrived on the scene to help run the farm. Martha’s three sisters soon thereafter decided to sell out instead. Martha, an aspiring writer, moved with Thomas (whom she never actually married) to New York City. In 1882, she published Field-Farings, her first book. It was followed soon thereafter by many works of fiction, including over two hundred short stories. Later, she would gain renown for her domestic works, including a cookbook and household handbook. Eventually, Thomas and all three of her sisters died, then fire swept through her Manhattan apartment, leaving her destitute. She died in a New Jersey nursing home in 1934.
This book, then, is an orphan — her only foray into something akin to nature writing. Its closest relatives, from what I have read thus far, would be Prose Pastorals by Herbert Sylvester (published five years earlier) and Minstrel Weather by Marion Storm (published 28 years later). The work consists of a seasonal round of poetic vignettes of farm landscapes and life in Tennessee. For the first half of the book, the reader is led by the author through each scene, most of which are devoid of other human presences. The language is poetic and sentence structures are sometimes fluid, sometimes awkward, and almost always somewhat difficult to digest. At times, her word choices feel almost like the reimagined Anglo-Saxon of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As the book progresses, scenes of country life (such as haying) replace woodland explorations, and the reader is introduced to a few of the “darkies” who live in the area and presumably are the descendants of former plantation slaves. Always there is a hint of magic, of fairie. At various points, she speaks of elves, gnomes, wood-sprites, and Dyads. It is not that McCulloch-Williams disavows science — rather, she puts science in its place and lets magical thinking have a bit of room, too. Here, she writes about mysterious lights in the swamp, jack o’lanterns as they were known:
Of still, warm nights you may see his fairy lights adance over all the wooded swamp. Now they circle some huge, bent trunk, now leap bounding to the branches for the most part, though, plod slow and fitful, as though they were indeed true lantern rays, guiding the night-traveller by safe ways to his goal. Master Jack is full of treacherous humor. Follow him at your peril. He flies and flies, ever away, to vanish at last over the swamp’s worst pitfall, leaving you fast in the mire.
Wise folk say he has no volition he but flees before the current set up by your motion. We of the wood know better. There is method in Jack’s madness. He knows whereof he does. Science shall not for us resolve him into his original elements turn him to rubbish of gases and spontaneous combustion. Spite his tricksy treachery, he shall stay to light fairies on their revels, scare the hooting owls to silence.
This is not Burroughs, that is certain. Indeed, McCulloch-Williams names no antecedent writers; her only clear inspiration is her childhood on the plantation. Nature, in her eyes, is not some remote wilderness; it is part of the domestic world of her youth. Nature and humans coexist in this landscape — or at least, they do after the original forest was cleared:
Trees give room only through steel and fire. The felling is not a tenth part of the battle. Have you ever thought what it means to wrest an empire from the wilderness ? Do but look at those four sturdy fellows, racing, as for life, to the great yellow poplar’s heart. Four feet through, if one — sap and heart ateem with new blood, just begun to stir in this February sun — it is a field as fair, as strenuous, as any whereon athletes ever won a triumph of mighty muscle.
Once the plow arrives on the scene, so, too, does a host of birdlife. In this vignette, plowing the land not only yields future crops for the landowner but also an immediate gift to the birds:
In flocks, in clouds almost, they settle in each new furrow, a scant length behind the plough, hopping, fluttering, chirping, pecking eagerly at all the luckless creeping things whose deep lairs have suffered earthquake. A motley crowd indeed! Here be crow and blackbird, thrush and robin, song-sparrow, bluebird, bee-martin, and wren. How they peep and chirp, looking in supercilious scorn one at the other, making short flights over each other’s backs to settle with hovering motion nearer, ever nearer, the plough. Who shall say theirs is not the thrift, the wisdom, of experience. How else should they know thus to snatch dainty morsels breakfast, truly, on the fat of the land, for only the trouble of picking it up ? All day they follow, follow. It is the idle time now, when they are not under pressure of nest-making. Though mating is past, yet many a pretty courtship goes on in the furrow. Birds are no more constant, nor beyond temptation, than are we, the unfeathered of bipeds.
And so the vignettes rush by (or drag, depending upon my own reading mood at the time), from winter into spring, to summer, autumn, and back again, ending the round at Christmastime. The result is a sort of literary Currier and Ives calendar, with scenes a bit like the image below, but without the grand plantation home (no buildings other than cabins are mentioned in this book) and with the Mississippi River replaced with the Cumberland.
By Currier and Ives – Digital scan of a reprint of an original chromolithograph., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7530803
The problem with vignettes is that nothing actually happens. The height of drama in the book is a chapter toward the end in which a nighttime hunting party trees some opossums and raccoons. There are no fond memories here, not even tales of sauntering through the woods and some of the discoveries made along the way. As a volume on the edge of the nature genre, it acquaints the reader with Tennessee phenology but tells very little about the actual landscape and names no geographical locations. As sense-of-place literature, it largely fails. If I did not know where the writer grew up, I would not know where the book is set. Only the presence of “darkies” reminds the reader that it is a long way from New England.
Finally, about my copy of this book: it appears to be the first edition (though I doubt it had a second) and is in remarkably good condition, apart from the very tanned pages. After a series of books with uncut pages, I was surprised to see that this one had probably been read before. I do not know who owned it, but I do know who gave it as a gift: Dr. Dowdell Wilson, Christmas 1896. And I think I found her — yes, her: Dr. Maria Louise Dowdell Wilson, a physician in Troy, New York: alumnus of Boston University School of Medicine (1877) and second wife of Hiram Austin Wilson (1887). She passed away in October 1902.
So well is man served in the distribution of the waters and management of their movements by the forests, that forests seem almost to think. The forest is an eternal mediator between winds and gravity in their never-ending struggle for the possession of the waters. The forest seems to try to take the intermittent and ever-varying rainfall and send the collected waters in slow and steady streams back to the sea.
I return to Enos Mills, at last, gladly encountering an old friend. The self-styled “John Muir of the Rockies”, MIlls shares amazing (almost unbelievable) survival stories in the mountains, many of which begin with a crazy act on his end (hiking up to the high country without his snowshoes, for instance) followed by a crazy dash across the landscape, outriding an avalanche or hurrying to the nearest medical assistance — in the dark off-trail — after drinking from a spring containing some sort of toxic substance (probably heavy metals). I do not know how he survived so long to write so many books. But I am grateful that he did. And I will be back to read more of his work in the future.
While Conrad Abbott stifles me with his dense, actionless prose, Mills is always on the go. When not quoting Muir, he is emulating him, consciously or otherwise. Perhaps you recall John Muir, in The Mountains of California, clinging onto the top of an ancient Douglas spruce in a thunderstorm, exulting in the elemental forces at play? Here is Mills’ own version, in the Rockies:
The summit of the forested slope was comparatively smooth where I gained it, and contained a few small, ragged-edged, grassy spaces among its spruces and firs. The wind was blowing and the low clouds pressed, hurried along the ground, whirled through the grassy places, and were driven and dragged swiftly among the trees. I was in the lower margin of cloud, and it was like a wet, gray night. Nothing could be seen clearly, even at a few feet, and every breath I took was like swallowing a saturated sponge.
These conditions did not last long, for a wind- surge completely rent the clouds and gave me a glimpse of the blue, sun-filled sky. I hurried along the ascending trend of the ridge, hoping to get above the clouds, but they kept rising, and after I had traveled half a mile or more I gave it up. Presently I was impressed with the height of an exceptionally tall spruce that stood in the centre of a group of its companions. At once I decided to climb it and have a look over the country and cloud from its swaying top.
When half way up, the swift manner in which the tree was tracing seismographic lines through the air awakened my interest in the trunk that was holding me. Was it sound or not? At the foot appearances gave it good standing. The exercising action of ordinary winds probably toughens the wood fibres of young trees, but this one was no longer young, and the wind was high. I held an ear against the trunk and heard a humming whisper which told only of soundness. A blow with broad side of my belt axe told me that it rang true and would stand the storm and myself.
The sound brought a spectator from a spruce with broken top that stood almost within touching distance of me. In this tree was a squirrel home, and my axe had brought the owner from his hole. What an angry, comic midget he was, this Fremont squirrel ! With fierce whiskers and a rattling, choppy, jerky chatter, he came out on a dead limb that pointed toward me, and made a rush as though to annihilate me or to cause me to take hurried flight; but as I held on he found himself more “up in the air” than I was. He stopped short, shut off his chatter, and held himself at close range facing me, a picture of furious study. This scene occurred in a brief period that was undisturbed by either wind or rain. We had a good look at each other. He was every inch alive, but for a second or two both his place and expression were fixed. He sat with eyes full of telling wonder and with face that showed intense curiosity. A dash of wind and rain ended our interview, for after his explosive introduction neither of us had uttered a sound. He fled into his hole, and from this a moment later thrust forth his head; but presently he subsided and withdrew. As I began to climb again, I heard mufHed expletives from within his tree that sounded plainly like “Fool, fool, fool!”
The wind had tried hard to dislodge me, but, seated on the small limbs and astride the slender top, I held on. The tree shook and danced; splendidly we charged, circled, looped, and angled; such wild, exhilarating joy I have not elsewhere experienced. At all times I could feel in the trunk a subdued quiver or vibration, and I half believe that a tree’s greatest joys are the dances it takes with the winds.
Conditions changed while I rocked there ; the clouds rose, the wind calmed, and the rain ceased to fall. Thunder occasionally rumbled, but I was completely unprepared for the blinding flash and explosive crash of the bolt that came. The violent concussion, the wave of air which spread from it like an enormous, invisible breaker, almost knocked me over. A tall fir that stood within fifty feet of me was struck, the top whirled off, and the trunk split in rails to the ground. I quickly went back to earth, for I was eager to see the full effect of the lightning’s stroke on that tall, slender evergreen cone. With one wild, mighty stroke, in a second or less, the century-old tree tower was wrecked.
Note that Mills returns quickly to earth, not to avoid a fatal lightning strike, but out of curiosity about the tree’s fate. So like John Muir!
Beyond the adventure stories, there is another, almost scholarly, side to Enos Mills. He is an early advocate for forests — not merely as agglomerations of trees, but as entities in their own right. This holistic viewpoint enables him to recognize the many benefits — scientists today would call them ecosystem services — that forests provide. He explores these gifts in his essay, “The Wealth of the Woods”. According to Mills, these include wood supply, climate regulation, moisture retention, soil erosion prevention, air filtering/purifying, and a source of foods and medicines. In a later chapter in the book, “A Rainy Day at the Stream’s Source”, Mills ventures out in the soaking rain to observe the confluence of two streams — one densely forested, the other a recent victim of a forest fire. These early observations of the effects of forest disturbance on sediment transport in mountain streams bring to mind my own graduate research on bedload transport in a subalpine channel of the Western Slope of the Rockies in the summer of 1993, and a host of other (more noteworthy) geomorphological research over many decades. As expected, one stream flows clear, while the other is choked with sediment. I will leave the reader to guess which was which.
Mills also writes extensively about forest fires and their impacts. Though it would be most of a century before the apocalyptic infernos wrought by climate change in the West, the fires he describes were still quite intense; most were started by people (campfires, sparks from trains). Not surprisingly, Mills viewed fire almost entirely as a destructive force, one to be prevented if at all possible. However, he does acknowledge one positive effect of such fires — the formation of all the open grassy parks high in the Rocky Mountains, including his beloved Estes Park.
Before closing out my review of this book, I feel compelled to mention Mills’ fascination with beavers. He spent countless days closely observing them carrying out their industrial operations — logging the woods, hauling the timber, building dams, and building lodges. At one location, he observed more than forty beavers all hard at work at one time! He recognized their substantial role in modifying streams and forests. But the fascination with them went well beyond that. Here is MIlls, in one of his most charming passages, singing the praises of beavers and their world:
The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primitive place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle; around it are the ever-changing, never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. He grows up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the enameled flowers, the great boulders, the Ice King’s marbles, and the fallen logs in the edge of the mysterious forest; learning to swim and slide; listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water; living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich the hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days. If Mother Nature should ever call me to live upon another planet I could wish that I might be born a beaver, to inhabit a house in the water.
Finally, a few words about the provenance of my copy of this book. I suspect I will never fully grasp the complex intricacies of out-of-print book pricing. For some reason, Wild Life on the Rockies is generally much cheaper than The Spell of the Rockies. Fortunately, I was able to locate a fairly intact copy; the hinges are cracked, but the binding still has a bit of life left in it. For an ex-library volume, the cover is remarkably pristine. It was long in the possession of the Toledo – Lucks County Public Library, and it bears the scars — stamps, a card pocket in the front, a sticker with a computer code. All I know about its acquisition by the library is that it was “A Gift of a Citizen of Toledo”.
Charles Wendell Townsend, MD was born in Boston in 1859, “of good old New England stock” (as an “In Memorium” piece by Glover Allen in The Auk puts it). He developed an early interest in birds, which at the time mostly involved collecting eggs and shooting “specimens”. In 1885, Townsend graduated from Harvard Medical School as a Doctor of Medicine. He married Gertrude Flint of Brookline, Massachusetts, and set up a private practice in Boston. In 1892, he built a summer house on a ridge overlooking a coastal marsh in Ipswich, Massachusetts, just north of Cape Ann. He would spend both summer vacations and weekends there over many years, increasingly opting to observe nature with binoculars and telescope instead of a gun. His particular interest was the land and shore birds frequenting the area, but he also closely observed changes in the dunes over time; the dunes took on a very different appearance in the summer than in the winter. He traveled extensively through the marshlands by boat, and became closely acquainted with the region’s natural history, including its geology (with its “pleasures and possibilities”). Remarking that “I have sometimes been asked what I found of interest in the dunes and marshes,” Towsend explained that “This little book [Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes] is the answer.” He published it in 1913, followed by Beach Grass in 1923. (That book will be explored in a future post.) Travel was another facet of Townsend’s life; he made several trips to Labrador, first by steamer and later by canoe, publishing several books about the region, particularly its human and bird life (at least one volume of which will also be covered in this blog at some point). He continued to travel extensively (including around the world) up to the time of his passing in 1934.
Taken as a whole, the book is a tribute to the rich natural history of the dunes and marshes of northern Massachusetts over one hundred years ago. While the text at times feels a bit dry (rather like the dunes themselves), Townsend’s photographs throughout are a delight. They depict landscapes at the time, animal tracks through the dunes, marsh haying operations, and a few images of the wildlife itself. Because he returned so frequently over many years, Townsend was able to document changes, such as the image below of a shipwreck soon after it happened and again a year later. For much of the book, I struggled a bit with his prose. I did enjoy his chapter on tracks in the dunes, where he identifies dune visitors by their tracks, and their meals by investigations of scats and bird pellets. He closes the chapter by declaring that “The study of ichnology and scatology in these sandy wastes is as absorbing as a detective story.” His bird chapters that followed were informative but so laden with bird descriptions (and, alas, no bird close-up photographs) that they were tough going. I think the main challenge to the reader is that Townsend himself is largely absent from most of the volume, stepping aside to report scientifically what he has seen. Oddly, though, the book is also interspersed with chunks of poetry — some identified by the author, others not (Townsend’s own writing?). Here, again, is that concept of the time, that effective nature writing combines both the scientific and the poetic sensibilities. Unfortunately, in this case, the two are mostly kept separate.
Townsend cooks a meal amid the dunes in winter.
The tone changes when Townsend reaches the salt marsh. Here, his voice strikes an enthusiastic, joyful tone that is uncommon in the rest of the book. Consider this passage describing the salt marsh in late summer:
All the marsh vegetation is at its height of luxuriance in mid-August. Then the marsh lies brilliant in the sunlight, a broad expanse, flat as a floor and glowing in yellow-greens, touched here and there with washes of buff and of chestnut.
Fringing its upper edge is the broad band of the mourning black-grass, while the rich dark green of the thatch threads invisible serpentine creeks, and borders the ribbons of water that wander hither and thither like tortuous veins through the marshes, reflecting the brilliant blue of the skies. There are wonderful plays of light and shade as cloud shadows chase each other over the surface of the marshes, or as the lengthening shadows of the hills extend their range with the declining sun. On windy days the tall thatch bends before the blasts, and shimmering waves like those on the surface of the water pass over it.
On such days, with the wind in the north- west quarter, the air is exceedingly clear, and every wooded island and distant hill stands out with great distinctness, while the creeks take on an intense blue which contrasts strongly with the light green of the marshes.
The tides creeping over the sand flats, swell- ing the creeks, obliterating the brown banks and drowning the tall thatch, bursting out in unexpected veins and pools throughout the marshes,-all this, notwithstanding its twice daily repetition, is never other than a miracle.
or this passage about exploring the salt marsh creeks by boat at low tide:
To float down in a canoe with the ebb tide, to explore the narrow channels now sunk deep below the marsh level, to surprise the marsh birds on the broad sand and mud flats, to push over the waving forests of eel grass and their varied inhabitants, affrds much enjoyment, and opens up an entirely different world from that of the same water courses when they are brimming over onto the marsh. Partly from prejudice, partly from ignorance, dead low tide is not appreciated as it deserves. The clean sand of the estuaries and the fine mud of the smaller creeks and inlets, and the clear water of the sea, are all very different from the foulness to be found at low tide in the neighborhood of sewer-discharging cities.
For the reader of today, a clear theme throughout this book is the impact of humans upon nature, already underway in the 1910s and 1920s. Townsend notes the ongoing increase of invasive species, including beach wormwood (a plant), and the European periwinkle (a snail). He notes that deer numbers are up in the region, compared to their total absence in Thoreau’s day (1853), partly due to highly protective hunting laws in eastern Massachusetts, but also resulting from the extirpation of wolves, lynxes, panthers, and Indians from the region. Harbor seals, Townsend observes, are starting to return to the coast; until 1908, Massachusetts placed a bounty on them, intended as a boon to fishermen afraid of seals jeopardizing their livelihoods. Finally, there is mention of the impacts of the millinery trade on birds, specifically common terns:
Not so many years ago various fragments and the whole skins of these beautiful birds were fastened on women’s hats, just as scalps and feathers are fastened on the head-dresses of savages. Thousands of the birds were shot down where they could be most easily obtained. namely, on their breeding grounds, for they are plucky little birds and valiantly attack any marauder who intrudes on their homes, and they do not seek to escape. These, as well as other species of birds, were greatly reduced in numbes by this cold-hearted combination of fashion and slaughterers, when, through the strenuous efforts rof the Audubon Society ad of ther bird lovers, the killing was stayed, and, too the great joy of all naturalists, the graceful birds are again increasing.
Meanwhile, the situation for piping plovers and other shore birds remained grim. Consider the tragic fate of the immature sanderlings, who endure a barrage of guns every fall:
In the middle of August the young, sadly inexperienced, arrive, and in their tameness fall an easy prey to the gunner. They are beautiful birds, with faint smoky bands across their white breasts. It is a great pleasure to watch a flock as they crowd together along the shore, probing every spot of sand for the small molluscs and crustaceans which consti- tute their food. As the season advances our pleasure is somewhat dimmed by the fact that cripples, with a foot shot away or blood-stained sides, are common in their ranks.
The piping plovers, another shorebird species, are on the path to extinction:
Up to half a dozen years ago the piping plover bred regularly in the dunes and laid its eggs in the sand. It belongs to a dying race, and although it is protected by law at all seasons, I fear this is not sufficient to stop its path to extinction. So long as the law permits the shooting of other plovers of the same size and the small sandpipers, one cannot expect the ordinary gunner to discriminate, as in fact he is unable to do, and the piping plover is shot with the rest. Only by stopping all shooting, or by the creation of bird refuges, can the tendency to extinction of this and other shore birds be prevented.
The 1925 “New Edition” of this book (which I read) adds a hopeful footnote: “The passage of the Federal Migratory Bird Act has since stopped the shooting of most of our shore birds.” Indeed, despite its grim moments (for instance, disparaging “these degenerate times” for all the wanton shooting of wildlife), even the first edition of 1913 manages to strike a somewhat hopeful note, at least in regards to seabird protection:
What a joy it would be to have a return of the old conditions, when terns and piping plover bred in the dunes, and when shore birds large and small thronged the beaches, and when the sea teemed with water fowl. Many of the birds I have mentioned in this chapter are on the way to extinction, some have already disappeared forever; a few, happily as a result of protection, are increasing. In Japan it is said that when travelling artisans see an eagle, they take out their sketching tablets and record its beautiful shape and attitudes. The barbarians of this part of the world try to shoot it, a fate they have often meted out to every large or unusual bird they came across, even if it were of no value to them, and they left it to rot where it fell. Fortunately times are changing and the people are gradually awakening to the idea that money value in food or plumage, or even in work done for man, is not the only thing for which birds should be protected. We are also beginning to realize that the interest which finds pleasure in the sport of bird destruction is a very limited and a very selfish one, and that the claims of the sportsman are not paramount to those of the nature student or even of the lover of natural beauty.
Though you may have been familiar with the locality by day for all of your life, it is another world now. Go out into the night with no disturbing thoughts. Gaze awhile at the stars and lose in a measure your earthiness, and a song of a dreaming bird will arouse you to a quicker sympathy with the creatures to which it is now day.
I return again to the indomitable and highly prolific author Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D. (1843-1919). Again I wend my way through the thickets of his prose, hoping to glean a few literary morsels like the lovely bit above to record in my notebook and share with my readers. It is slow going. Abbott is not easy on the reader. He rambles interminably, and his sentences, while not quite labyrinthine, rarely capture my attention. As a resident of the Trenton area, the flora and fauna he describes are quite similar to that of my own native home in Horsham, Pennsylvania. The Delaware River at his doorstep runs through my own childhood by way of canoe trips (well upstream) and many visits to its banks. His interest in the past — both prehistory and colonial days — mirrors my own. And yet I struggle to keep moving forward. The challenge, I think, lies in his tendency toward prolix description. Nothing happens. Rarely does he lead you from his doorstep, out into the meadows and woods around his home, then back again. In the moments when he offers a narrative thread to bind his observations and thoughts together, the result almost works. Abbott is capable of applying an endearing humorous tone to his prose, though he does that all too rarely.
My favorite part of the book is set in the brutal heat and humidity of midsummer in the Delaware Valley. I will quote it in full if only for my own future enjoyment looking back through these past posts:
Liquify brass by heat and then reduce the liquid to a yellow gas, and you will have what did duty for atmosphere at high noon recently. It was 95o in the shade, on the north porch, and away above 100o out in the fields. For this reason, I took to the fields, and finding only crickets equal to the occasion, kept on, and soon plunged into a ferny thicket with three big oaks and a bubbling spring. Here the thermometer showed but 88o, so I had found a cool spot and concluded to tarry. It was all very well to let enthusiasm suggest examining the animal life of a field at noon, but to carry out such suggestions does not pay for the danger involved. It was hot enough to melt your brain, and I shall never forget the languid look of one poor toad that by some cause had been ousted from his day-time retreat and found it too hot to go hunt up another. That toad would not hop, but let me roll him over with the toe of my shoe. The rattling creak of the crickets sounded precisely like the crisp crackling of dry twigs in a fire. What is to be known of open fields at mid-day in summer, let others tell me.
The scene continues with Abbott remaining in the shade by the spring, watching the birds. Eventually, he disturbs a cloud of mosquitoes which drives him back out into the sun-baked field. After a few moments of contemplating the absurdity of being forced out of a relatively pleasant retreat and back into the hot sun, he screws up his courage and returns to the spring and the calling birds. This time, the mosquitoes stay away. It may not be the makings of a movie or even a short story, but it is the closest to high drama that Abbott allows himself to get.
As I read through the book, I did extract some odds and ends of interest. With regard to the literary influences on Abbott, Thoreau is undoubtedly first. Abbott references Thoreau several times and ends his book with a brief and rather lackluster essay on him. The only other writer mentioned, interestingly enough, is John Muir; in his first essay, Abbott remarks that “I had been reading that day Muir’s volume, and the mountains of California seem to have settled over the Jersey meadows.” Another aspect of the book that I appreciated was that Abbott approached nature without fear, urging others to do the same. While recognizing that people tend to have an innate fear of being outdoors at night, Abbott encouraged his readers to overcome that fear and explore the “night country” (as Loren Eisley would later call it). In a later essay in which Abbott dedicated several pages to local reptiles, he remarked on how “utterly unreasonable it is to be afraid of snakes.” Indeed, he urged readers to get out into nature and observe animals with an open mind, letting go of preconceptions and seeking to know the purpose that animal serves in nature. Of course, this outlook did not preclude him from determining the whereabouts of a snapping turtle’s nest and gathering all the eggs to eat.
Finally, throughout the book are passages that speak to the human impacts on nature at the time. For the most part, Abbott seems to recognize that humans have been rather destructive to their environment, yet he generally stops short of advocating a solution. At one point, he observes that “the stream that has a factory on its banks too often has nothing in its waters.” Elsewhere, he notes that “we are doing so little to preserve what remains of our forests.” In yet another essay, Abbott complains about the dwindling number of bluebirds in New Jersey due to egg collectors and invasive sparrows. Here, he goes so far as to call for more protective laws to safeguard songbird numbers. In another passage, he acknowledges human impacts on natural systems, observing that “We should remember that the so-called balance of nature is necessarily disturbed by men’s interference.” Yet he is not willing to discard the possibility that humans have been a positive influence on some species. In particular, thanks to humans, many small birds have more nesting sites and an abundant food supply. This argument has been noted in the writings of others at this time and appears to have been a general belief. Of course, this was also a time in which many Americans were convinced that “rain follows the plow.”
To take the earth as one finds it, to plant oneself in it, to plant one’s roof-tree in it, to till it, to understand it and the laws which govern it, and the Perfection which created it, and to love it all — that is the heart of John Burroughs’ religion, the pith of his philosophy, the conclusion of his books.
In the end of March, 1921, John Burroughs passed away while on a train taking him back from California to his beloved home in New York State. A few months later, Dallas Lore Sharp, an admirer and friend of Burroughs, published this brief volume (71 pages in large print) as a eulogy to the fallen nature writer. The various copyright dates in the front (1910, 1913, 1921) hint at how it is a hastily cobbled-together affair. It says relatively little by way of biography; a good portion of the book is actually a comparison of Burroughs and Thoreau. Along the way, however, it sheds considerable light on why Burroughs was such a central figure in the literary Nature Movement of the previous half-century.
One immediate shock the reader receives, upon opening the book with its mahogany veneer cover, is the dedication: “To Henry Ford / Lover of Birds / Friend of John Burroughs”. Here, one can immediately see a difference between Thoreau and Burroughs. Thoreau, I am confident, would never have befriended a robber baron, choosing instead to advocate for the “common man”. I am certain that Ford’s political views would have sat very uneasy with Thoreau. But for Burroughs, largely free of political views, it was a marvelous thing to ride about the countryside in a Model T given t him by Henry Ford.
As Sharp describes Burroughs early in the book, “He loved much, observed and interpreted much, speculated a little, and dreamed none at all.” He was a “…teacher and interpreter of the simple and the near at hand.” He brought a sense of wonder and curiosity to all that he encountered. According to Sharp, during his last visit with Burroughs a few months before the writer’s death, the two noticed a woodchuck, and Burroughs remarked, “How eternally interesting life is! I’ve studied the woodchuck my whole life, and there’s no getting to the bottom of him.” In various essays, he shed particular light on facets of the natural world, from woodchucks to bluebirds. Over 50 years, Burroughs produced what Sharp describes as “…beyond dispute, the most complete, the most revealing of all our outdoor literature.” Ultimately, Burroughs was after the whole of nature, more than just its individual living components: “His theme has not been this or that, but nature in its totality, as it is held within the circle of his horizon, as it surrounds, supports, and quickens him.”
A few pages later, Sharp presents the argument that the “modern” (i.e., 1921) nature writer model has its roots in Burroughs: “The essay whos matter is nature, whose moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary, belongs to John Burroughs.” As practiced by Burroughs, Sharp explains, good outdoor writing demonstrated both fidelity to fact and sincerity of expression. Sharp proposes two questions for testing all nature writing: 1) Is the record true?; and 2) Is the writing honest?
At this point, Thoreau enters the scene. In the next dozen pages or so, Sharp argues (without slighting Thoreau) that the founding figure of the Nature Movement is not Thoreau, but Burroughs. Thoreau’s thoughts were lofty, his demeanor iconoclastic. Burroughs was companionable and firmly grounded in everyday realities, with a prose style immediately accessible to the general public. In writing about their own garden or woodlot and observing the birds and trees, aspiring nature writers could hope to emulate Burroughs’ tone and voice; Thoreau’s was out of reach. “Burroughs takes us along with him,” Sharp explains, “Thoreau comes upon us in the woods, jumps out at us from behind some bush, with a ‘Scat!’ Burroughs brings us home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves us tangled up in the briars.” Thoreau hoed beans as a reenactment of the roots of civilization; Burroughs maintained an 18-acre vineyard and made a living from it. As Burroughs himself once asserted, “Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am.” Sharp follows with this vivid comparison of “…Thoreau, searching by night and day in all wild places for his lost horse and hound, while Burroughs quietly worshipped, as his rural divinity, the ruminating cow.” Burroughs made no new discoveries, but he saw old things anew and invited others to do the same.
As a closing observation, Sharp noted that there were many themes in Burroughs’ works, but only one central message: “…that this is a good world to live in; that these are good men and women to live with; that life is good; here and now, and altogether worth living.”
My somewhat weatherbeaten copy of this book bears no dedications or signatures but does have a tiny bookseller’s label from Dennen’s Book Shop, 37 East Grand River Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. Whoever owned the book at very least had it off the shelf for a time; there is some water staining along the edges of the first few pages, and the first half of the book has a gentle fold. But toward the end of the brief volume, I still found an uncut page.
