Dean King and his latest book
Dean King writes about high adventure and epic events (“Skeletons on the Zahara,” “The Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys”).
His latest, “Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite,” (Scribner, $30, 448 pages, illustrated), continues his theme of big stories and larger-than-life people facing enormous challenges.
Begin your adventure in reading at Candela Gallery from 5 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, March 23. King will be there with Ron Smith, 2014-16 Virginia Poet Laureate, for a new collection, “That Beauty in the Trees,” and 2019 Edgar Award-winning novelist James McLaughlin for his forthcoming “Panther Gap.” They’re calling the occasion “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” and it’s free, but registration is requested. King will also be on hand at Three Notch’d Craft Kitchen and Brewery for a book-purchase and -signing event on Thursday, March 30, and Friday, March 31, from 5 to 7 p.m.
I spoke with King about the origin story of this book and the resonance of the late 19th-century beginning of naturalist and environmentalist concerns in this country with our present circumstances. John Muir observed firsthand California’s wildfires, floods and earthquakes, and the industrialized destruction of natural resources, especially the engineered subversion of water routes.
The story begins in 1998, when King traveled west for his father-in-law’s birthday. He visited Yosemite and stood upon Inspiration Point — and for King, the designation proved apt.
Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point, with El Capitan at left, Bridalveil Fall at right and Half Dome in the distance (Photo by George Fiske circa 1883)
“Right then I felt changed,” he recalls. He’s hiked and walked through the East Coast and in Europe — but this panorama struck him in a different manner. “My eyes were opened to how grand and fantastic this is,” he says. “That moment differentiated things for me. I was immediately curious and intrigued and naturally wanted to write something about it.”
In the beginning, King thought the vast subject might be better treated in a novel. But fiction could little improve the figures who stride through the story, from transcendental philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson to the rough and ready conservationist president Theodore Roosevelt, mountaineer and “Guardian of the Valley” Galen Clark, and a fellow Muir encountered while on an expedition along remote portions along the Kaweah River. “The Good Samaritan” made his camp in the burnt-out stump of a massive sequoia. Muir in a waggish way described the place as one might today attempt to upsell a limited-stay accommodation as “a spacious log house of one log, carbon-lined, centuries old, yet sweet and fresh, weather proof, earthquake proof, likely to outlast the most durable stone castle, commanding views of garden and grove grander far than the richest king ever enjoyed.”
Robert Underwood Johnson and John Muir
King also came upon the 40 years of correspondence between Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, the Century magazine editor, which for a historian is about as close as you can get to peering over a subject’s shoulder. “The University of the Pacific has digitized his papers,” King says, still with a trace of amazement. “During the pandemic, when I was doing research and the museums were closed, I was beyond fortunate to have access to these materials.”
Materials including this wonderful example of Nov. 21, 1889, which contains a certain editorial urgency likely familiar to writers of deadline-sensitive publications. Johnson writes, “You must see that now is the time for your article on the Yosemite Valley, I mean your general descriptive article, and I want you to sit down at once and fix a date at which we may expect the article; and then I want you to go right ahead with the article as rapidly as you can, while we will at once proceed with the illustrations. We very much need to make use of the brilliant pictures, and will print them in a spring-number; but we have to prepare for everything three or four months ahead, and we must be sure of having your MS [manuscript]. I know if you promise with your hand on your left breast pocket, I can depend upon it. Do this and the past will all be forgiven.”
At the time, letters took six days to get across the country, and the two wrote with such frequency that they crossed in the mail, “So there’s this Jane Austen aspect to it of one of them responding to something that gets addressed in the next letter,” King says.
Muir and Johnson formed a formidable team to save the Yosemite Valley from the logging of its tremendous and ancient trees and the destruction of its verdant meadows by farming and sheep herding.
Muir, the third of eight children of an immigrant Scottish family, and the father, Daniel, a strict evangelical Protestant, brought the family to Wisconsin. Muir developed a passion for nature as a young man, but as he matured, he also proved his capabilities as an inventor, an early kind of manufacturing efficiency consultant, a husband and father, a mediocre shepherd, an adventuring outdoorsman and conservationist, a climate scientist, a prosperous fruit grower, and one of the best nature writers ever. And he did all these things through the compulsion of his own character and the desire to make a difference.
King explains that Muir realized he couldn’t rescue everything, but he wanted to preserve our most beautiful places. In them he saw true spiritual salvation for people living in cities and experiencing dreary industrial lives. “As he saw it, you get out and into nature, and you get in touch with your faith and this great positivity.” Muir felt that if people could access some of the nation’s most astounding landscapes, they’d become more aware and willing and protect other places closer to home.
You may not be able, like Muir, to climb into the Sierras without much more than a handmade bowl, a couple of blankets, some coffee and a book of Robert Burns poetry, but you can help clean up litter or get into nature however you are able and appreciate what’s out there, whether a grand vista or a back garden plot. And reflect on this quite contemporary-sounding observation by Muir in his 1911 book, “My First Summer in the Sierra,” “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
