John Muir in Arizona
As a writer and an advocate, John Muir promoted the protection of what became two national parks in the state of Arizona: the Grand Canyon, and Petrified Forest.
It was in Arizona in 1896 that John Muir first met Gifford Pinchot, with whom he spent a day together on the rim of the Grand Canyon. When Pinchot wanted to kill a tarantula they came across, Muir wouldn’t let him kill it. As Pinchot recalled, “He said it had as much right there as we did.”
While staying in northern Arizona off and on between the spring of 1905 and the summer of 1906 with with his 19-year old daughter Helen to benefit her health, John Muir explored the petrified forest region and discovered the “Blue Forest” of petrified wood. He later wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt asking him to protect it.
Today, Petrified Forest National Park preserves forests which were alive in the Triassic Period, about 225 million years ago. It allows visitors to see the beautiful petrified wood, while prohibiting its destruction or collection.
“Sight-seers often ask me which is best, the Grand Cañon of Arizona or Yosemite. I always reply that I know a show better than either of them–both of them. “
– John Muir, letter to Mr. Asa K. McIlhaney, January 10, 1913. From Badé, William Frederic. The Life and Letters of John Muir, Volume 2: (Illustrated and Annotated) (p. 354). Crazy Wisdom Publishing.
Known best for his writings about California and Alaska, Muir also wrote about parks and forests in other states, including Oregon, Washington, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. As his editor William Frederic Bade relates, “The concluding chapter of Steep Trails on “The Grand Canyon of the Colorado” was published in the Century Magazine in 1902, and exhibits Muir’s powers of description at their maturity. Notably, he celebrated the fact that the Colorado Plateau was ” the home of the multitude of our fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants.” Muir would write admiringly of the ancient and contemporary people who lived in Arizona’s Grand Canyon region, commenting about how “Centuries ago it was inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw America, built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones, some of them several stories high, with hundreds of rooms, on the mesas of the adjacent regions…” and noting “In recesses along the river and on the first plateau flats above its gorge were fields and gardens of considerable size, where irrigating ditches may still be traced. Some of these ancient gardens are still cultivated by Indians, descendants of cliff-dwellers, who raise corn, squashes, melons, potatoes, etc., to reinforce the produce of the many wild food-furnishing plants — nuts, beans, berries, yucca and cactus fruits, grass and sunflower seeds, etc. — and the flesh of animals — deer, rabbits, lizards, etc. The canyon Indians I have met here seem to be living much as did their ancestors, though not now driven into rock-dens. They are able, erect men, with commanding eyes, which nothing that they wish to see can escape.”
An in-depth study of Muir’s time with his daughter Helen in northern Arizona. Starting out for a time at the Sierra Bonita Ranch north of Wilcox, (now a National Historic Landmark, but still operating as a private cattle ranch), he soon moved to Adamana, staying at the Forest Hotel, a fueling and watering station along the Santa Fe Railroad, located within a short distance of the Petrified Forest. Muir fought to preserve both the petrified wood forest and the ancient ruins and petroglyphs of Native Americans that he found there. Muir, more often known as a naturalist than an archaeologist, showed a fascination with ancient Native American artifacts, and was the first to excavate the Puerco Pueblo ruins, and admiringly showed visitors the ancient pottery and petroglyphs found in the region. Incorporating a first-hand account by Alice Cotton Fletcher, professor Wild reveals Muir’s fascination with both ancient fossils and ancient Native American artifacts and petroglyphs.
Full citation: Peter Wild, “Months of Sorrow and Renewal: John Muir in Arizona 1905-1906,” reprinted from Journal of the Southwest 29 (Spring, 1987): 65-80, reprinted here by permission of Jeffrey M. Banister, Editor in Chief of the Journal of the Southwest (June 14, 2021).
This is the original first-hand, typewritten account written by Alice Cotton Fletcher, who met John Muir and his family in Adamana, Arizona, in 1906. This composition is undated, but presumably written late in her life, as the bottom of the document bears the address of a nursing home. An obituary for Alice Cotton Fletcher indicates she died in a New Hampshire nursing home in November, 1961 at the age of 79. Thus, she would have been about age 24 during the 1906 visit she describes here. Peter Wild incorporates this text in his in-depth study above. This link is to the typewritten document held John Muir Papers, held by the University of the Pacific.
A beautifully illustrated and written report of a modern re-tracing of John Muir’s footsteps in the Petrified Forest.
Originally published the New York Times on July 22, 1906, by Lilian Whiting, a Times correspondent. At Adamana [Arizona] she found John Muir and his two daughters, Wanda and Helen. They had arrived the year before, hoping the high desert air would clear up Helen’s respiratory problems. Helen lived there more than a year before returning to California, but recurring bouts of pneumonia brought her back to the desert late in 1907, this time at Daggett, in California’s Mojave Desert. Although the following excerpt only incidentally mentions John and Wanda, and says nothing about Helen, it provides a glimpse of the desert life and the scenery that so attracted Muir and his daughters. Muir spent much time in the Petrified Forest, discovering new sets of fossils, and urged President Theodore Roosevelt to protect the area as a national monument, which he did later in 1906.
Originally published in 1910 in Century Magazine, this article tells how John Muir and famous naturalist John Burroughs visited the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, along with other travels together.
Doug Hulmes, a Professor of Environmental Studies at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona, presents a presents a chautauga of John Muir, presenting an environmental perspective of the West. Performing as Muir helps bring to life the ideas that began during the past century in response to the wide scale destruction of public lands by some of the early pioneers.