If a man delights in spending days watching little furry wild animals harvest flowers, does he have any chance at persuading a United States President, who is also a proud hunter of his 11,000 kills?
What is John Muir asking? For the President to protect National Parks—where hunting and killing and exploitation, though not allowed, are causing massive damage.
What’s at stake? 536 million acres of American land.
President Theodore Roosevelt, privileged, Harvard educated versus John Muir, emigrant, who left University of Wisconsin in his last year without a degree—to seek an orchid. Not exactly blood brothers.
But Roosevelt knew that no white man knew the Yosemite like Muir, so the President asked John to guide him on the first visit of a President to Yosemite.
Of course, John said no. He wanted to go meet some new trees.
This story, of the 2nd assault on Yosemite National Park, in 1903, like the first, in 1851, is the story of powerful greedy men circumventing the law to make $100 million dollars.
What scrawny figure stands in their way? A mannerly (mostly), passionate, survivor of childhood abuse, who should have been easily bullied, but instead overflowed with courage toward the protection of innocents.
This is that story—an entitled President and an honorable man whose deep integrity makes him fearless, and which makes him the enemy of powerful men who are not bound by law.
536 million acres
200 rivers
Nearly a quarter of US lands ultimately at stake. Pending one 3 night camping trip between a manly president hunter and a gentle passionate naturalist.
Anne Katherine, best-selling author, is a former National Park Service Ranger and has also been a volunteer in state and national parks for more than 13 years. She writes to show that our best resources can be stolen or destroyed if we don't guard them, and to reveal the struggles and deep nobility of the guardians--NPS rangers and workers--both paid and volunteer.
