October 2020 – CommonPlace Nature

The Confidence of the Wild Things: “A Hermit’s Wild Friends” by Mason A. Walton, 1908

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Oct 072020

Well we know that the wild things manage their domestic affairs in a way best suited to their needs and natures. But it is only here and there than a human being can gain the confidence of the wild things so far as to share the secrets of their lives.

KNOWN TO HIS FANS AS THE HERMIT OF GLOUCESTER, MASON WALTON LIVED IN A CABIN IN THE WOODS OF CAPE ANN, MASSACHUSETTS. Born and raised in Maine, Mason came south for his health, hoping his various illnesses would be cured by some time at sea with the fishermen. When they all declined to take him aboard, he headed for a hill a short distance inland, set up his hammock, and began living out of doors. Within a few months, he had constructed his first cabin; a few years later, he built a second one. For eighteen years, he spent his days observing nature, and particularly the birds and small mammals that lived around (and even in) his rustic home. Even with his cabin sanctuary, he still spent eight months of every year sleeping outside in the hammock He made his living as a writer of columns in Field & Stream, a project that earned him many admirers. For a time, he grew flowers and sold them for supplemental money. He kept notebooks of all his interactions with “the wild things”, as he called them, and drew upon his notes to write a series of essays cobbled together in a volume published in 1908. It was his only book; he abandoned his hermit life a few years later, and passed away in his sleep in 1917, at the age of 79.

TO A CONSIDERABLE EXTENT, HOWEVER, HIS PERSONA OF A FOREST HERMIT WAS A MANUFACTURED ONE. He frequently had visitors to his home, sometimes even crowds. Though he remained unmarried (his only wife and child had died tragically when he was still young, before he moved to Cape Ann), he certainly did not want for friends and associates. Most humorously of all, though, was his daily coffee habit, which sounds frightfully like a modern-day Starbucks addiction many of us might confess to:

I found it inconvenient to cook my breakfast and then, after eating it, go to the city [Gloucester]. Why I did so was on account of my coffee habit. I had tried to find a good cup of coffee in the city and had failed, so had depended on my own brewing.
One morning I dropped into the little store at the head of Pavilion Beach, and the proprietor asked me to have a cup of coffee. He piloted me into the back shop, where he told me that he served a light lunch with coffee, to the farmers. The coffee was just to my taste, and for twelve years I patronized the coffee trade in that little back shop. My note-book shows that during the twelve years I had missed only eighty mornings. I had paid six hundred and forty-five dollars, during that time, for my lunch and coffee, and had walked, on account of my breakfast, seventeen thousand two hundred miles. Whew! It makes me feel poor and tired to recall it.

I CONFESS THAT I AM A BIT HARD-PRESSED TO CONSIDER HIM A HERMIT AFTER READING THIS PASSAGE. It is almost like a parody of Thoreau’s chapter on Economy in “Walden”. where Thoreau carefully considered his various expenses in setting up his cabin, which totaled just over twenty-five dollars. To put his expense into modern terms, using an online inflation calculator I was able to determine that his coffee habit cost him the 2020 equivalent of over $18,000. (To be fair, Thoreau’s 2020 expenses would be over $850.) Then I remind myself that Walton slept out-of doors from the first of April through Christmas, and that ought to count for something.

WALTON, AN AMATEUR NATURALIST, WAS KEENLY OBSERVANT OF THE BEHAVIORS OF LOCAL WILDLIFE. Unlike the modern ecologist, though, Walton was more than willing to interact with the wildlife, and learn from those cross-species communications. He regularly fed birds and squirrels and mice, keeping a loaf of bread in a caged box just outside his cabin door and regularly scattering anything from seeds and corn to cupcakes and donuts for his wild friends. While he maintained the noble attitude that they were his teachers, he did not always make the kindest of pupils. His very first story in the book, about a raccoon named Satan, begins with him catching the raccoon in a trap and chaining it to a tree in his front yard. Once, when upset about Satan’s running up a pine tree and being difficult to retrieve, Walton whipped the raccoon to teach it a lesson. And while he was generally quite kind to birds, he regularly killed crows, snakes, and weasels, all of which he saw as threats to the local songbirds. (Once he did keep a garter snake as a pet for a few months, but the weather turned colder and it died.)

ONCE WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE HERMIT OF GLOUCESTER’S VARIOUS IMPERFECTIONS, THOUGH, THERE REMAINS A CONSERVATIONIST SIDE TO HIM THAT IS WORTH RECOGNIZING AND APPRECIATING. To his credit, for instance, Walton gave up his gun in favor of respecting (nearly all) wildlife he encountered. And he was quite dedicated as a student of wild creatures. This is how he described his work, in an essay about a red squirrel he named Tiny:

I am writing natural history just as I find it, from observation of the wild things. To some of these wild things I am caterer, protector, and friend. They do not object to my presence when engaged in domestic affairs, so my ability to pry into their secrets is increased in ratio to the confidence accorded me.

Walton noted, on more than one occasion, that too many naturalists of the time simply echoed what they read about in books, rather than closely studying nature themselves:

With few exceptions, writer on outdoor life make it a point to denounce the red squirrel. They claim that he is a nest-robber of the worst kind. The most of this abuse bears the earmarks of the library. One author copies after another, without knowledge of the real life of one of the most interesting wild things of the woods.

Perhaps Walton’s most fascinating discovery, from all his observations, pertained to the white-footed mice that took possession of his cabin:

My object in writing about these mice is to call attention to their peculiar method of communication. I have summered and wintered them over fifteen years, and never have I heard one of them utter a vocal sound. They communicate with each other by drumming with their fore feet, or, rather, they drum with their toes, for the foot in the act is held rigid while the toes move.
If any writer has called attention to this…, it has escaped my reading. I am well satisfied that the habit has never been published before, so it must prove interesting to those who pry into the secrets of Dame Nature.

Curious, I investigated current scientific knowledge on the subject. According to the University of Georgia Museum of Natural History, the mice communicate by foot-stamping, vocal squeaks, and scent.

ONE FASCINATING THING I LEARNED ABOUT WALTON WAS THAT HE WAS, IN FACT, A FRIEND OF THE NATURE WRITER FRANK BOLLES, WHOSE THREE VOLUMES I READ AND WROTE ABOUT PREVIOUSLY IN THIS BLOG. Indeed, Bolles visited him at his cabin, and reported on the visit in his posthumously-published book, “From Blomidon to Smoky”:

I have a friend who lives alone, summer and winter, in a tiny hut amid the woods. The doctors told him he must die, so he escaped from them to nature, made his peace with her, and regained his health. To the wild creatures of the pasture, the oak woods, and the swamps, he is no longer a man, but a faun; he is one of their own kind, — shy, alert, silent. They, having learned to trust him, have come a little nearer to men…. The secret of my friend’s friendship with these birds was that, by living together, each had, by degrees, learned to know the other.

IN MARCH, 1903, JOHN BURROUGHS PUBLISHED AN ESSAY ENTITLED REAL AND SHAM NATURAL HISTORY, TOUCHING OFF WHAT CAME TO BE KNOWN AS “THE NATURE FAKERS CONTROVERSY”. Burroughs called attention to, and attacked, nature writers of the time who had taken to teaching children about wildlife by telling animal’s life stories from the animals’ own points of view. Although supposedly drawing upon actual observations, the accounts were simultaneously fictionalized, and they sometimes portrayed the animals as having very human thoughts and emotions. They threatened to blur the boundary between natural history and fantasy tales. It is no surprise that, in publishing his book about wild animals he befriended, Walton was very clear that he was a scientific observer, not a fiction author: “…the truth is that I describe wild life just as I find it, not as some books say I ought to find it.” In his finest moments as interpreter of animal thought and behavior, Walton is worthy of some degree, at least, of admiration and respect. I know that I would gladly join him for a cup of coffee and some conversation if I could.

MY VOLUME OF THIS BOOK WAS THE ONLY EDITION EVER PRINTED. A weighty tome, its pages are of heavy stock, interspersed with a variety of images, all black and white. Some are photographs, others drawings by more than one illustrator. The finest of these are full-page images of different birds. The artist of these was none other than Louis Agassiz Fuertes. My copy of the book had one previous owner whose name is written semi-illegibly along the right-hand edge of the inside front cover, along with the date of 4/1913.

No Less than an Inspiration: “In the Open” by Stanton Davis Kirkham, 1908

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Oct 052020

What familiarity with the elements and with natural features of the earth the migrating birds must acquire — with winds and clouds, with mountain chains and rivers and coast lines! They know the landmarks and guide-posts of two continents and can find their own way. The whistle of curlew, or the honk of wild geese high in the air, seems a greeting out of the clouds from these cosmopolites, to us, sitting rooted to the earth beneath. A flock of wild geese on the wing is no less than an inspiration. When the strong-voiced, stout-hearted company of pioneers pass overhead, our thoughts ascend and sail with them over the roofs of the world. As band after band come into the field of vision — minute glittering specks in the distant blue — to cross the golden sea of the sunset and disappear in the northern twilight, their faint melodious honk is an Orphean strain drawing irresistibly.

AND SO, TOO, WITH THIS STUNNING IMAGE AS ITS FRONTISPIECE, KIRKHAM’S “IN THE OPEN” DREW ME IRRESISTIBLY IN. My excitement about the book mounted as I read the opening lines of the first essay, The Point of View, poetically celebrating the opportunities to engage with the exuberant energy and vitality of nature around us:

Nature is in herself a perpetual invitation: the birds call, the trees beckon and the winds whisper to us. After the unfeeling pavements, the yielding springy turf of the fields has a sympathy with the feet and invites us to walk, It is good to hear again the fine long-drawn note of the meadow-lark — voice of the early year, — the first blue-bird’s warble, the field-sparrow’s trill, the untamed melody of the kinglet — a magic flute in the wilderness — and to see the ruby crown of the beloved sprite. It is good to inhale the mint crushed underfoot and to roll between the fingers the new leaves of the sweetbrier; to see again the first anemones — the wind-children, — the mandrake’s canopies, the nestling erythronium and the spring beauty, like a delicate carpet; or to seek the clintonia in its secluded haunts, and to feel the old childlike joy of lady’s-slippers.

ALAS, POOR KIRKHAM. Having read close to forty works of natural history now, I have to recognize that this book opens with two strikes against it. Firstly, it is set in New England — what is worse, Massachusetts — just like practically half of the nature books from its day. And then it relies heavily on the round-of-the-seasons motif, a tired structure for natural history accounts of the time. What is more, there is no reference to places; I suppose Kirkham’s idea was that his book encounters with nature might be anyone’s, and particularities of locale did not matter. Only in two essays near the close of the book — The Mountains and The Forest — does the author stray further afield, to the Rockies and the Sierras, respectively. (Even then, if not for brief name-dropping of the two mountain ranges midway through each chapter, I would not know where they were set.) Oh — and in a bit of bait-and-switch, the frontispiece painting is the only color image in the book, and Luis Agassiz Fuertes’ only contribution to it.

THE THIRD STRIKE, THOUGH, IS ITS RATHER FORMULAIC PROSE AND OVERLY FAMILIAR NATURE ENCOUNTERS. His writing is poetic and aesthetically rich, yet somehow falls mostly flat in the long run. Kirkham makes abundant mention of mythological figures, and fills his pages with names of plants and birds — clearly he knew his Greek and Roman legends and his New England natural history in abundant measure. But somehow, he rarely manages to bring something new to the genre of nature writing. He offers the reader vivid sensorial descriptions — the book does not want for adjectives. He shares many facets of the natural world, but they are ones I have encountered elsewhere — cowbirds laying their eggs in the nests of other species, caterpillars falling prey to ichneumon wasps, squirrels gathering acorns. He even includes several pages of observations of red and black ants fighting each other in a barn — the red ants evidently attempting to enslave the black ones (which he disturbingly refers to again and again as “negroes” — but we will leave that faux pas — or perhaps even bit of intentional racism — alone for the time being). But he brings no new realization to the story — Thoreau beat him to it with an ant battle scene in “Walden” several decades earlier.

OCCASIONALLY, THOUGH, KIRKHAM SUCCEEDS — AT LEAST, FOR THIS PARTICULAR READER. Kirkham devotes an essay to Pasture Stones. Perhaps it is the geologist in me that enjoyed his appreciation of them and his invocation of the last Ice Age. They infuse the New England pasture landscape with a sense of deep time, and Kirkham explores this here:

There is a rustic notion that boulders somehow grow, in some inexplicable manner enlarging like puffballs and drawing sustenance from the earth — and what could be more puzzling to the uninitiated than the presence of these pasture stones? His was an ingenious mind who conjured up that remote ice age from this fragmentary evidence and derived a history from these scattered letters and elliptical sentences. It was like tracing the stars in their origin.
It takes a bold imagination, indeed, to see these familiar fields and woods overlaid with a mile’s thickness of ice; to recognize here in this present landscape a very Greenland, redeemed and made hospitable. There was need of a solid foundation of fact, patiently garnered, before such an arch of fancy could be sprung. What chaos and desolation once reigned here, only these boulders can tell. Here was a frozen waste as barren as the face of the moon. But beneath lay the soil that was to nurture the violet and the hepatica. There was a fine satisfaction in riding a miracle like this to earth, to corner it and see it resolve itself into the working of natural laws.

Here is another passage I enjoyed, in which Kirkham muses on a bit of driftwood he found on an ocean beach. Again, he writes about the power of imagination, imbuing natural objects like pasture stones and pieces of wood with rich stories steeped in the magic of time’s long passage:

I take home a piece of driftwood, for no ordinary fire but to kindle the imagination, for it is saturated with memories and carries with it the enchantment of the sea. To light this is to set in motion a sort of magic-play. True driftwood has been seasoned by the waters and mellowed by the years. Not any piece of a lobster-pot, or pleasure yacht, or, for that matter, of any modern craft at all is driftwood. It must have come from the timber of a vessel built in the olden time when copper bolts were used, so that the wood is impregnated with copper salts. That is merely the chemistry of it. The wood is saturated with sunshine and moonlight as well, with the storms and calms of the sea — its passions, its subtle moods; more than this, it absorbed of the human life whose destiny was involved with the vessel — the tragedy, the woe. It had two lives — a forest life and a sea life. By force of tragedy alone it became driftwood. Winter and summer the sea sang its brave songs over the boat and chanted her requiem at last as she lay on the ledge. This fragment drifted ashore out of the wreck of a vessel, out of the wreck of great hopes, out of the passion of the sea.

AT TIMES OVERWROUGHT, AT TIMES TEDIOUS, AT TIMES NEARLY ELOQUENT, KIRKHAM’S BOOK LEAVES ME WITH A SENSE OF MISSED POTENTIAL. Perhaps, if he had chosen as a theme a collection of brief musings and impressions of natural objects and scenes, along the line of the pasture stones and driftwood, the book would have been more engaging. Like nearly every nature writer I have encountered so far, Kirkham clearly had moments of insight that he successfully transferred to the page. Yet his work, collectively, does not (in this volume, at least) sustain the wonder and intensity that it occasionally manages to convey so well. My favorite page, without question, is the stunning frontispiece painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

MY COPY OF THIS BOOK IS A FIRST (ONLY?) EDITION. Unlike the pasture stones Kirkham wrote about, this volume has no marks showing its journey. It is a lovely book, visually; the cover is so enticing in its simplicity (in an age of sometimes ornate gilded cover art), and the pages so thick and robust, with deckled edges on bottom and side and gold along the top. It would have made a fine gift for a discerning lover of nature — ideally, one who had not previously read half a dozen other books about Massachusetts through the seasons.

Between Bend and Burns: “Where Rolls the Oregon” by Dallas Lore Sharp, 1914

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Oct 032020

The utter nowhereness of that desert trail! Of its very start and finish! I had been used to starting from Hingham [Massachusetts] and arriving — and I am two whole miles from the station at that. Here at Mullein Hill I can see South, East, and North Weymouth, plain Weymouth, and Weymouth Heights, with Queen Anne’s Corner only a mile away; Hanover Four Corners, Assinippi, Egypt, Cohasset, and Nantasket are hardly five miles off; and Boston itself is but sixty minutes distant by automobile, Eastern time.
It is not so between Bend and Burns. Time and space are different concepts there. Here in Hingham you are never without the impression of somewhere. If you stop, you are in Hingham; if you go on you are in Cohasset, perhaps. You are somewhere always. But between Bend and Burns you are always in the sagebrush and right on the distant edge of time and space, which seems by contrast with Hingham the very middle of nowhere. Massachusetts time and space, and doubtless European time and space, as Kant and Schopenhauer maintained, are not world elements independent of myself, at all, but only a priori forms of perceiving. That will not do from Bend to Burns. They are independent things out there. You can whittle them and shovel them. They are sagebrush and sand, respectively. Nor do they function there as here in the East, determining, according to the metaphysicians, the sequence of conditions, and positions of objects toward each other; for the desert will not admit of it. The Vedanta well describes “the-thing-in-itself” between Bend and Burns in what it says of Brahman: that “it is not split by time and space and is free from all change.”
That, however, does not describe the journey; there was plenty of change in that, at the rate we went, and according to the exceeding great number of sagebushes we passed. It was all change; though all sage. We never really tarried by the side of any sagebush. It was impossible to do that and keep the car shying rhythmically — now on its two right wheels, now on its two left wheels — past the sagebush next ahead. Not the journey, I say; it is only the concept, the impression of the journey, that can be likened to Brahman. But that single, unmitigated impression of sage and sand, of nowhereness, was so entirely unlike all former impressions that I am glad I made the journey from Boston in order to go from Bend to Burns.

AT ITS BEST, “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON” REVEALS THE REFLECTIONS OF AN EASTERN NATURALIST COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE ARID AND IMMENSE LANDSCAPES OF THE WEST. He is the archetypal Outsider, struggling to relate his experiences in the woodlands and fields of New England to the canyons, mountains, and empty country of Oregon. Here, Dallas Lore Sharp writes of his glimpse of a raven soaring over Deschutes Canyon, against a vast backdrop of emptiness and silence:

As our train clung to its narrow footing and crept slowly up the wild cañon of the Deschutes, I followed from the rear platform the windings of the milk-white river through its carved course, We had climbed along some sixty miles to where the folding walls were shearest and the towering treeless buttes rolled, fold upon fold, behinds us on the sky, when, of from one of the rim-rock ledges, far above, flapped a mere blot of a bird, black, and strong of wing, flying out into midair between the cliffs to watch us, and sailing back upon the ledge as we crawled round a jutting point in the wall and passed from his bight of the deep wild gorge.
…And I knew, though this was my first far-off sight of the bird, that I was watching a raven. Beside him on the ledge was a gray blur that I made out to be a nest — an ancient nest, I should say, from the stains below it on the face of the rock…..
Or did I imagine it all? This is a treeless country, green with grass, yet, as for animal life, an almost uninhabited country…. Such lack of wild life had seemed incredible; but no longer after entering the cañon of the Deschutes. A deep, unnatural silence filled the vast spaces between the beetling walls and smothered the roar of the rumbling train. The river, one of the best trout streams in the world, broke white and loud over a hundred stony shallows, but what wild creature, besides the osprey, was here to listen? The softly rounded buttes, towering above the river, and running back beyond the cliffs, were greenish gold against the sky, with what seemed clipped grass, like to some golf-links of the gods; but no creature of any kind moved over them. Bend after bend, mile after mile, and still no life, except a few small birds in the narrow willow edging where the river made some sandy cove. That was all — until out from his eyrie in the overhanging rim-rock flapped the raven.

FOR SHARP, THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE WAS FUNDAMENTALLY FOREIGN TO HIS EXPERIENCE. Spaces were so immense and so desolate and so unfamiliar to a New Englander. Not always able to appreciate the monumentality of the West, on at least this one occasion he gave up, turning his focus instead on a more familiar sight, reminiscent of what he might encounter back home:

How often one becomes the victim of one’s special interests! I climbed to the peak of Hood, looked down upon Oregon and into her neighbor states, saw Shasta far off to the south, and Rainier far off to the north, and then descended, thinking and wondering more about a flock of little butterflies that were wavering about the summit than about the overpowering panorama of river and plain and mountain-range that had been spread so far beneath me. Or was I the victim, rather, of my inheritance? Was it because I happened to be born, not on a mountain-peak eleven thousand two hundred and twenty-five feet above the sea, but in a sandy field at sea-level? I was born in a field bordering a meadow whose grasses ran soon into sedges and then into the reeds of a river that flowed into the bay; and I found myself on the summit of Hood dazed and almost incapable of great emotion. So I watched the butterflies.

THIS BOOK HAD BEEN A RARE FIND FOR ME: a natural history study of the Pacific Northwest, written between 1862 and 1942. And several of its essays, particularly the ones quoted above, lived up to the expectation. But after reading Enos Mills’ accounts of his adventures in the Rockies, I also came to recognize that there is a considerable difference between the West as portrayed by a deep inhabitant of its wilds, and the West as encountered by an Eastern nature rambler visiting for a couple of months one summer. That difference continues to fascinate me. Alas, however, the book as a whole is highly uneven and its structure rather baffling. It opens with a visit to the seabird-covered crags of Three-Arch Rocks Reservation, just offshore west of Portland. The next section of the book is the most coherent, covering Sharp’s time in eastern Oregon, including the epic drive from Bend to Burns. He visits desert wetlands filled with birds (except for the white heron, driven nearly extinct at the time by the brutal millinery trade). Then he inserts a lengthy consideration of herd behavior, which begins with cows in the pastures of Hingham and ends with a cattle stampede in eastern Oregon. After the butterflies of Mt. Hood he shares about his encounter with a cony (pica) in the Wallowa Mountains. Then back to Shag Rock in Three Arch Rocks Reservation (on the same visit as began the book), then a long essay on animal mothers that again started in New England and ended back on Three Arch Rocks again. Then a final appreciation of Mt. Hood as seen from Portland (with some ponderings on Portland’s economic and cultural potential. And then the book closed.

THE FINAL RESULT IS A SERIES OF VIGNETTES, SNAPSHOTS FROM A PLEASANT RAMBLE THROUGH THE WESTERN WILDS. To his credit, Sharp advertises it as such in the Preface, where he explains that “…this volume is…a group of impressions, deep, indelible impressions of the vast outdoors of Oregon. Still, the reader is left longing he would develop his impressions of the West into a more coherent, richer, more extensive volume. The editor, too, might have encouraged him to save essays on animal behavior (mothering and herd instincts) for another book, and instead to concentrate on encounters with the Western landscape and its flora and fauna. Finally, most ironically of all, Sharp’s title, “Where Rolls the Oregon” (lifted from Thanatopsis, a poem by William Cullen Bryant) refers to an older name for the Columbia River, whose striking gorge along the Oregon/Washington border cuts through the heart of the Pacific Northwest. Yet Sharp does not mention the river even once in his book.

I WAS FORTUNATE TO LOCATE A VOLUME IN SUPERB CONDITION. It is a first edition from 1914, with cover art well preserved. It was signed by a previous owner, Henrietta A. Pratt, but without a date. My attempts to track down the owner via Google met with no success. At very least, I would like to thank her for caring for this book so thoughtfully.

Go Out Under the Open Sky: “Wild Life on the Rockies” by Enos Mills, 1909

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Oct 022020

This is a beautiful world, and all who go out under the open sky will feel the gentle, kindly influence of Nature and hear her good tidings. The forests of the earth are the flags of Nature. They appeal to all and awaken inspiring universal feelings. Enter the forest and the boundaries of nations are forgotten.

ENOS MILLS REMINDS ME VERY MUCH OF JOHN MUIR. The resemblance is far from accidental; in 1889, Mills chanced upon John Muir at a beach in San Francisco, and the experience left him seeking to emulate the master in his celebration of the western landscape. In fact, he even referred to himself as “John Muir of the Rockies” — popularizing the wild wonders of the Colorado Rockies and the joys of living a rugged life among them. From his cabin in Estes Park (now a museum), he led numerous trips into the Rockies, including hundreds of ascents up Long’s Peak. Like Muir, he had a charming, loyal, highly intelligent dog companion (Scotch); like Muir, he never carried a gun and respected all wildlife; like Muir, he played a vital role in the development of the National Park system and the preservation of wild mountains; like Muir, he had many dramatic adventures in the wild that he shared in his books; and like Muir, he saw encountering nature as a means of connecting with God. But unlike Muir, almost no one has heard of him nowadays. And I think that is a tragic loss.

I CURRENTLY HAVE TWO OF MILLS’ BOOKS; TWO MORE ARE ON THEIR WAY; I ALSO HAVE HIS BIOGRAPHY. In the coming months, I will revisit him many times in this blog. His writing is superb; it flows beautifully, evoking the splendors of the Rockies without being pedantic or flowery. If anything, Mills was remarkably humble about his exploits. And in so many ways, his perception of the environment was far ahead of its time (or at very least, on the leading edge of a new ecological awareness). Consider, for instance, his essay on The Story of a Thousand-Year Pine. I suspect it is one of the earliest essays ever written for a popular audience in the field of dendrochronology. He opens with an homage to Muir:

The peculiar charm and fascination that trees exert over many people I have always felt from childhood, but it was that great nature-lover John Muir, who first showed me how and where to learn their language. Few trees, however, ever held for me such an attraction as did a gigantic and venerable yellow pine which I discovered one autumn day several years ago while exploring the southern Rockies. It grew within sight of the Cliff-Dwellers’ Mesa Verde, which stands at the corner of four States, and as I came upon it one evening just as the sun was setting over that mysterious tableland, its character and heroic proportions made an impression upon me that I shall never forget, and which familiar acquaintance only served to deepen while it yet lived and before the axeman came. Many a time I returned to build my camp-fire by it and have a day or night in its solitary and noble company.

ALAS, THE LOGGERS CAME AT LAST. In an indescribable tragedy, when the tree was felled, it crashed to the ground with such a resounding blow that the trunk was shattered. The loggers abandoned it as being of little value. Withholding comment on the loss of such a noble tree, Mills reports how he set to work piecing together its past: “Receiving permission to do as I pleased with his remains, I at once began to cut and split both the trunk and the limbs and to describe their strange records.” Carefully counting its rings, he discovered the tree had been born in about 856, and was felled in 1903, having lived 147 years. Over the next ten pages, Mills told the story of the pine’s remarkable life, including periods of drought, possible earthquakes, encounters with Indians, and episodes of fire. All in all, it is a remarkable bit of detective work, decades before radiometric dating was developed.

ANOTHER AMAZING ESSAY IN THIS BOOK IS ON THE BEAVER AND HIS WORKS. Based upon extensive observations of beavers in the Rockies and the surrounding region, Mills gave an account of the incredible engineering work beavers have accomplished — including a dam on the South Platte River that was over a thousand feet long! What makes the essay so impressive, however, is how he was able to extrapolate from what he witnessed beavers doing to a sense of the considerable role they had played in shaping the Western landscape:

[The beaver’s] engineering works are of great value to man. They not only help to distribute the water s and beneficially control the flow of the streams, but they also catch and save from loss enormous quantities of the earth’s best plant-food. In helping to do these two things — governing the rivers and fixing the soil — he plays an important part, and if he and the forest had their way with the water-supply, floods would be prevented, streams would never run dry, and a comparatively even flow of water would be maintained in the rivers every day of the year.

Later in the essay, he proposes that

An interesting and valuable book could be written concerning the earth as modified and benefitted by beaver action, and I have long thought that the beaver deserved at least a chapter in Marsh’s masterly book, “The Earth as modified by Human Action.” To “work like a beaver” is an almost universal expression for energetic persistence, but who realizes that the beaver has accomplished anything? Almost unread of and unknown are his monumental works.

In fact,

Beaver-dams have had much to do with the shaping and creating of a great deal of the richest agricultural land in America. To-day there are many peaceful and productive valleys the soil of which has been accumulated and fixed in place by ages of engineering activities on the part of the beaver before the white man came. On both mountain and plain you may still see much of the good work accomplished by them. In the mountains, deep and almost useless gulches have been filled by beaver-dams with sediment, and in course of time changed to meadows. As far as I know, the upper course of every river in the Rockies is through a number of beaver-meadows, some of them acres in extent.

Alas, the beavers were dying out, and that would lead inevitable to changes in the Western landscape:

Only a few beavers remain, and though much of their work will endure to serve mankind, in many places their old work is gone or is going to ruin for the want of attention. We are paying dearly for the thoughtless and almost complete destruction of the animal. A live baver is far more valuable to us than a dead one. Soil is eroding away, river-channels are filling, and most of the streams in the United States fluctuate between flood and low water. A beaver colony at the source of every stream would moderate these extremes and add to the picturesqueness and beauty of many scenes that are now growing ugly with erosion. We need to coöperate with the beaver. He would assist the work of reclamation, and be of great service in maintaining the deep-waterways. I trust he will be assisted in colonizing our National Forests, and allowed to cut timber there without a permit.

I WILL CLOSE WITH ONE MORE LOVELY PASSAGE CELEBRATING THE WESTERN WILDS. In this case, Mills is reminiscing about a trip into the Uncompahgre Mountains, where he spent many nights in solitude beside a campfire, miles from anyone:

The blaze of the camp-fire, moonlight, the music and movement of the winds, light and shade, and the eloquence of silence all impressed me more deeply here than anywhere else I have ever been. Every day there was a delightful play of light and shade, and this was especially effective on the summits; the ever-changing light upon the serrated mountain-crests kept constantly altering their tone and outline. Black and white they stood in madday glare, but a new grandeur was born when these tattered crags appeared above storm-clouds. Fleeting glimpses of the crests through s surging storm arouse strange feelings, and one is at bay, as though having just awakened amid the vast and vague on another planet. But when the long, white evening light streams from the west between the minarets, and the black buttressed crags wear the alpine glow, one’s feelings are too deep for words.

MY COPY OF MILLS’ BOOK IS A LIBRARY REBIND. On the one hand, that means that the binding is really sturdy; on the other hand, the pain forest green cloth is no replacement for the decorated cover with its image of a bear on a snow-blanketed rock. However, the interior is the original first edition of the book from 1909. For some time, it was evidently the property of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, not far from my home.