Late Night in the Bulletins

I can remember, maybe not every detail, but I recall the feeling, standing in the presence of the California Big Trees for the first time. It was Grant Grove in May of 2005. In that moment, time stood still, there was no place to be but exactly where I found myself. There were no items left unchecked on the to-do list. It was there that my eyes, heart, and mind all swelled with awe at the sleepy giants before me. The largest, oldest, rarest things my eyes had ever seen. It was then, in a transformative moment, I knew that providence had led me some place exceedingly beautiful and I had the sense that I was standing in history.

I walked past and through the Fallen Monarch, Gamlin Cabin and then closer to the General Grant tree. I was a stranger in a dreamland that I didn’t understand. Maybe that’s the moment the curious trail began.

I cannot quite remember the first Sierra Club Bulletin I read, but again I remember the feeling. The details pass away from memory, the feeling abides. It was years later, late at night, on the east coast, when an internet search led me to a digital archive. I began to read eloquent prose from the late 19th century, full of the warmth of life. It brought me back to the grove. That connection to something transcendent, historic, superlative. It felt like reading the news of home. It stirred the affections for my humble cabin, and filled the void of having been gone so long. The words were factual, informative, intriguing. The explorations of terra incognita had me at the edge of my seat. The bravery and boldness of that generation was shocking from my modern perspective.

The Sierra Club Bulletin was first published in 1893. It was the official magazine of the Sierra Club. John Muir was the Club’s first president. The Bulletins were written by climbers, scientists, artists, and explorers that would submit articles and trip reports to be included for publication.

Today, I was spending some time in the Bulletins and stumbled across an article that piqued my interest. It was written by Professor Bolten Coit Brown, an artist, mountaineer and former Professor of Fine Arts at Stanford University. 

Historian Francis P. Farquhar had the following remarks about Brown in Exploration of the Sierra Nevada (1925): 

In 1895, after a trip in Kings River Canyon and a vain attempt to reach the summit of Mount King, he crossed to Simpson Meadow and ascended Mount Woodworth; thence he made his way up Cartridge Creek and returned to the head-waters of the South Fork of Kings River. Here he observed and named Split Mountain, Striped Mountain, and Arrow Peak, and returned to Kings River Canyon by way of Paradise Valley. In the following year, accompanied by his wife, Lucy Fletcher Brown, he again visited Kings River Canyon and joined Joseph N. Le Conte in a successful ascent of Mount Gardner. After a visit to Mount Brewer, he and Mrs. Brown crossed the Kings-Kern Divide and climbed Mount Williamson.

Professor Brown made a series of admirable sketches of the mountain summits, which appear in the Sierra Club Bulletin accompanied by a number of charts showing his routes and the names which he gave to many of the landmarks.

I was moved by Brown’s words in the Sierra Club Bulletin Volume 2 in the Notes and Correspondence section, “On the Naming of Mountains” pages 53-55 Bolton writes,

“Who indeed can rightly be said to have authority over the Sierra Nevada? Politically, they are the property of the seventy million people of the United States; but in a wider and truer sense they belong to the human race, and will rear their untroubled summits when the memory of the United States is kept alive in archaic records and museum specimens. Their use to humanity is not that of a collection of memorial monuments minus the epitaphs. Their highest, most permanent, most important use is not to feed sheep, not to raise timber, not to mine gold, not to furnish money-making shows for hotel-keepers, not to afford trout-fishing and bear-hunting, not even for quarrying granite or storing water supplies. For all of these things they may be used; for some of them, and to some extent, they may be well used; but it remains true that these are not the highest uses of the mountains. These uses serve but material ends, and for the gratification of the inherited, but now useless and detrimental, passion for chasing and killing.

It is not easy, probably it is not possible, exactly, to define what the highest uses are. But in general we may say that they are the uses which men put them to when they go to them for the love of them, for the exaltation of spirit and the exhilaration of body which comes from them. Underneath what is called the ‘sport’ of mountaineering — and a true and noble sport it is, — there is something more than mere sport in the ordinary use of the word. This something is not in the sport of horse-racing, of whistplaying, or of prize-fighting; it is not in any sport except those which touch the nobler sides of human nature. Mountaineering has two sides, the athletic and the aesthetic. The athletic side is not at all affected by names; the muscular exercise is just the same, no matter what the name is. But the other side — the poetic — is affected by names; is affected by whatever is or is not poetic, is or is not harmonious, beautiful, fitting; and this, either to the ear or to the mind.

Much of the charm of the mountains depends upon the absolute harmony of all that is there. There is no intrusive foreign thing in them; there is no inappropriate thing; there is no vulgar thing. They do not insolently thrust in your face silly placards about Hobson’s Rat Poison or Johnson’s Pills; they do not disfigure themselves with lying real-estate signs; the names of no political candidates insult the trees; there are no yelping c-rs, blatant voices, or jangling street-cars; there is no odor of underground horrors or discomfort of dirty crowds. In the mountains all is large, quiet, pure, strong, dignified; there all is beautiful; each thing is a perfectly appropriate part of that unity which we call nature. . . . All is wholesome to the body, interesting to the mind, and agreeable to the senses. And the state of mind they tend to put us in may be called poetic.”

Bolton continues, and the reader gets a sense that he has really spent some time thinking this through: “Why should we not have — what is our excuse for not having — names that are appropriate in sound and sense? A good name will harmonize; it will, in euphonious syllables, either appropriately describe (as does Half Dome or Cloud’s Rest), or to be to us a meaningless, euphonious, appropriate sound (like Tahoma, Shasta, Kearsarge), which may designate that group of impressions which we call the mountain. And it will not force on all comers any particular piece of suggestion or sentiment, especially none of a personal sort, which the namer may have happened to think of. Each person ought to have a fair chance to have these things mean what they will to him, and should not, as a rule, be afflicted with Twin Sisters, Devils Slides, or Bridal Veils. All such pseudo-romantic appellations smack of childishness and of cheap sentimentalism.

Sometimes it will happen that a personal name is phonetically good, and yet not wishy-washy. In Ritter, for example, we seem to hear the clink of rattling stones. Campbell, Stanford, University Peak, Gardiner, Whitney, and Williamson, however, are bad, as also are King’s Cañon, Bubb’s Creek, and Cartridge Creek. King, Brewer, Barnard, are poor; Woodworth, Ericsson, Jordan , and Tyndall, are middling; Blue Cañon, Tioga Road, Tehipite Valley, Yosemite, Roaring River, are good. North Dome, South Canon, East Lake, are inoffensive, but absolutely colorless and flat. Bullfrog Lake is not bad; Lake Eleanor is very beautiful. Of descriptive names, I should call Cathedral Spires middling; Sawtooth Mountains and Arrow Peak, good. Tuolumne Meadows, in the common pot-bellied corruption of it — Tuh-woll’ummy — is absurd; but when given rightly, as I have heard an Indian speak it, — Tu-ah-lum’nee, in distinct syllables, — there is hardly a more beautiful name in the mountains. Sierra Nevada falls most musically upon the ear; and, taken with its meaning, is, perhaps, the best name of all. No, not all — Shasta is the best of all.“

In our age there seems to be a lot of debate about names. Sometimes I wonder what all the fuss is about. But then, when I think of the place, the transcendent beauty, the memories made, the granite and the light, the formative years of a boy turning into a man within its womb, it is then that I begin to understand the gravity. I am slow to support change, possibly in an effort to preserve the place I know and love. The Sierra is not mine to name. For all my affection and fascination, many have spent more time, known it more fully and in many respects, have closer and more direct knowledge of the place than I ever will, as I write from here in Kentucky, staring at a screen. But I still have a perspective. It doesn’t align completely with Bolton Brown, but all the while, I appreciate nearly every word he has written. 

I do not claim to have all the answers. My heart aches to let the indigenous people teach us the names, that we may know them. I’m sure there are some cases where reinstating the indigenous name would be the right thing to do. M. Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild makes plain that Brown wasn’t naming an untouched wilderness. The indigenous tribes of California had been tending that land for millennia before he ever set foot on it. If a name causes harm, it deserves examination. But when I consider Muir Pass, and the lakes on each side, Wanda and Helen, named for his two daughters, I feel that renaming those natural features would be a loss. There is value in history, in tracing the story across time. I live in the tension. I suspect I always will.