The familiar story of the Donner Party is one of misfortune, madness, and profound isolation. But archaeologists have come to believe that the Midwestern migrants who became trapped in the northern Sierra during the winter of 1846-47 were not alone.

While October snowfall represented a catastrophe for the pioneers' wagon train as they crossed the mountains, it would have been wholly ordinary to members of the local Washoe tribe, whose way of life had been adapted to the Lake Tahoe region for thousands of years.

During the warm months, the natives gathered stores of pine nuts, roots, and dried rabbit meat. In the winters, they wore cloaks of rabbit fur, ice fished, and huddled in willow huts with central fire pits. Three winters before the arrival of the Donner Party, the frontiersman John Fremont recorded an encounter with the Washoe. As his men struggled through deep snow, he wrote, three natives were seen, “circling around us on snow-shoes and skimming along like birds.” The tribesmen returned later with an offering of pine nuts.

According to Indigenous histories, Washoe scouts kept close track of strangers in their territory. The migrants, among the few whites they had ever seen, would have aroused intense interest. But Donner testimonies mentioned only a few encounters. In one, William Eddy, a carriage maker from Illinois, fatally shot a Washoe man who had fired arrows into their oxen. In another, a tribesman emerged from the wilderness and offered the foreigners a handful of edible roots.

But those almost certainly weren’t the only encounters. The 2011 book “An Archaeology of Desperation” introduced historical accounts overlooked in the popular telling of the Donner story: those passed down to the great-great-grandchildren of Washoe members present during the Donner encounters.

Numerous times, according to the oral histories, Washoe scouts brought the stranded migrants food — including a deer carcass, fish, and wild potatoes — but were met with hostility. On one occasion, an offering of fish was refused. On at least three others, the Washoe approached the Donner camps with food only to be met by gunshots, leaving one man dead.

When a scout saw the white people cannibalizing their dead, the tribe was said to retreat, afraid they too might be killed and eaten. From then on, the Washoe referred to the migrants as “not people.”

Of roughly 80 pioneers who set out for California from Missouri, only half survived. Their apparent distrust of the Sierra natives, even as starvation loomed, likely came from their experiences on the trail, historians say. During the three weeks before their arrival in Washoe country, members of the migrant train reported being shot at and robbed of horses and cattle. But native histories, supported by archaeological evidence, suggest the Washoe tried to help them, wrote Julie Schablitsky, an archaeologist who performed excavations at the Donner site in the early 2000s.

Once the migrant camps were deserted, tribal members returned to burn and bury objects left behind in a bid to drive away unwelcome spirits. But the Donner Party was only a harbinger of what was to come. Gold was discovered down the mountain range a year later. Before long the region was swarmed by prospectors, and the Washoes' way of life was put on a path toward oblivion.

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Mike McPhate

As the snowbound migrants succumbed to starvation in the Sierra in 1847, they were not alone. The Washoe people were watching, and they had tried to help.

Native Americans tried to help the starving Donner Party, research shows. They faced gunshots.

Lockdowns, mask mandates, defiance from churches, anti-mask protests, hotels requisitioned for the poor, a devastating winter surge.

California's coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has been, in many ways, eerily similar to the influenza pandemic of 1918.

As the state's Covid-19 cases and deaths plummet, many journalists and academics have been predicting that the similarities will persist in the post-pandemic period, with a return of the exuberance that characterized the Roaring Twenties. 

The waning of the 1918 pandemic coincided with the end of World War I, and Californians were determined to make up for lost time. Los Angeles’s population grew by more than 200% in the 1920s to more than 1.2 million people. The city’s Mexican population tripled. The film industry exploded. 

San Francisco, one of the American cities hardest hit by the flu, experienced a cultural resurgence with several new theaters and a proliferation of speakeasies in defiance of Prohibition. It was a period, according to a KRON documentary on San Francisco in the 1920s, “when hemlines got higher, morals got lower, and the party never stopped.”

A year after the coronavirus roared into California, signs are now mounting of a return of ordinary pleasures, like dinner parties and hugs for grandma. A recent outlook by economists at UCLA predicted that 2021 would be one of the strongest years of growth in 60 years. “With a vaccine and the release of pent-up demand, the next few years will be roaring,” wrote Leo Feler, a senior economist with the forecast.

The California Sun spoke to two experts, Dr. Shira Shafir, an associate professor of epidemiology at UCLA Fielding School, and Pieter M. O’Leary, author of “The 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in Los Angeles” in Southern California Quarterly, for their insights. Our conversation, below, has been edited for clarity and brevity.

California Sun: Is there a pattern for what happens after a pandemic?

Shafir: We can go all the way back to the Black Death of the 14th century and we can see there is a pattern of those who survive. There is a tremendous sense of, “I’ve made it through.” In the Middle Ages, it was very much about debauchery. In the United States, post-influenza pandemic, it was about the Roaring Twenties. I think we're even now starting to see little snippets of what things may be. You see people starting to travel, posting on social media, that they're having these indoor parties, that they're ready to get back to life as normal. So I think we already have small hints that once people are vaccinated, they feel that they themselves are protected, that they are ready for their own Roaring Twenties.

Sun: How long do you think this post-pandemic celebration will last? 

O’Leary: I think that maybe it will be two years of this kind of buoyancy and happiness, maybe not even that long. But I think some of those things that pre-existed the pandemic are going to come back and may be exacerbated by that. There's also this growing sense of the disparities, the racial disparities and the impacts on health. I think there's a lot that's going to be done to try and address that. I also think there's going to be a lot to celebrate science. And I hope that occurs, just to realize that science is really what saved us. 

Sun: What were the key drivers in getting back to normal in San Francisco and Los Angeles after the 1918 flu pandemic? 

Shafir: It's really important to note that in 1918, when there was no vaccine, they were able to control the pandemic with the other measures that we have been putting forward. So mask, wearing, social distancing, hand hygiene, etiquette, all of those things together, or as we sometimes call the Swiss cheese model of respiratory virus defense. All of those things together, helped them control the pandemic. So will it be more efficient now? Absolutely. But is a vaccine the only tool or the only path forward? No, it's not.

Sun: What do you think people should understand at this moment in the pandemic? 

O’Leary: Covid and the Spanish flu were natural things. Disease outbreaks occur and we as human beings are not separate and apart from nature. We can control them a little better now than we could in 1918 with vaccinations, more effective masking, and improvements in medicine, but we're still part of nature and anybody who thinks that we're not or that we've conquered nature is wrong. And all they have to do is go back and look at what's happened in the last year. 

Shafir: The biggest thing I hope people will understand is that the reason we are now in a good place is because of the work that we have all been doing. Transmission decreases because of a combination of things: No. 1, because of vaccination; No. 2 because of mask wearing; No. 3, social distancing, and No. 4, sort of all the rest. So we absolutely should be optimistic. Now is the time for us to begin looking to the future and thinking about what it will be like when we are all vaccinated.

But it's also the time to remember, we're not all vaccinated. And we do still have massive equity issues, particularly in the county of Los Angeles, where we see individuals who are white are way more likely to have been vaccinated than individuals who are Black or Latinx. So we need to be and we should be and we deserve to be able to be optimistic, but that needs to be balanced with continuing to act communally. 

Noah Smith

The California Sun asked experts what history tells us about life after a pandemic. 

Signs point to a roaring 2020s in post-pandemic California

Half of Californians live below this red line. 👇

That may be hard to believe, but it's more or less accurate, demographers say: Roughly 20 million people reside north of a line running through Los Angeles, and the other 20 million are squished underneath it.

In the second half of the 19th century, the majority of the state’s residents lived in Northern California, where the Gold Rush city of San Francisco hosted the largest urban population on the West Coast. So what happened?

The shift began with the oil and citrus booms of the 1890s. “Los Angeles and Southern California have one of the largest oil reserves of any region in the country. And agriculture made it an attractive place for land speculators, especially as major aqueduct projects brought water to the region,” said Justin Levitt, an adjunct political science professor at California State University, Long Beach.

Then came Hollywood’s entertainment boom in the 1920s, the WWII defense boom that sprouted industrial factories as well as a sizable military presence in San Diego, and the Southern California aerospace boom of the 1940s and '50s. The population exploded, with Los Angeles County growing from about 170,000 in 1900 to 10 million today, a full quarter of California’s people.

The San Francisco Bay was once considered the state's most important harbor, but Southern California stole that distinction away too. The ports at Long Beach and Los Angeles are now the busiest in the United States. 

“L.A. spent a lot of resources in the first two decades of the 20th century building the groundwork of what would become a major harbor,” said Levitt. “Over time, ships became deeper and needed deeper water and different kinds of berthing. The shallower San Francisco Bay waters weren't set up as well for new ships, especially after WWII.”

There are signs that California's slackening growth in recent years — a consequence of curtailed immigration, housing shortages, and high cost of living — might be nudging the dividing line back north, said Dowell Myers, a demographer at USC.

At last check, about five years ago, the halfway mark was near Hollywood Burbank Airport, he said. “But since then population growth has really stalled in the state. If anything, growth is shrinking in the southern counties. This weak growth must be moving the halfway line slightly upward geographically.”

John Metcalfe

How it happened that half of California's population was squeezed into the lower portion of the state.

The curiously lopsided population of California

The Oakland painter and poet Obi Kaufmann calls to mind a tatted-up, modern day John Muir, only with half of the beard and serious watercolor skills. Like the 19-century Scotsman, Kaufmann has become recognized for his explorations of California’s natural world in so-called "field atlases" that blend graceful prose with paintings of maps and wildlife. 

His first book, “The California Field Atlas,” published in 2017, surprised even Kaufmann with its commercial success, winning book awards and selling so many printings that publisher Heyday Books commissioned four more field atlases. One about water came out last year. 

After the publication of his latest volume, “The Forests of California,” in September, the California Sun posed an unreasonable challenge to Kaufmann. In a state covered by 33 million acres of forestland, give us your top five destinations. Below, in his own words, are his choices. 

5. The coastal redwood forest — from just south of Big Sur, north to just across the border of Oregon, the kingdom of Sequoia sempervirens, the tallest tree species in the world extends in a mosaic of old-growth and second-growth forest, providing habitat for a precious array of endemic biodiversity that can only exist among these big trees. Only 5% of the old-growth forest still exists, and it is in these ancient spaces that the most endangered species live. These trees still survive. It is very hard to kill a redwood, but once you chop it down, its regrown form finds itself in a broken system that has largely forgotten its old-growth functionality. The only way to really kill a redwood is to heat up the atmosphere and remove the now endangered phenomenon of coastal fog that supplies the nutrient moisture this majestic forest needs.

4. The Los Padres National Forest — extending from Monterey to Santa Barbara, the two sections of the national forest (divided near San Luis Obispo) harbor a portfolio of arboreal diversity that rivals anywhere on the globe for sheer beauty and variety. In the wilder backcountry, California’s largest predators stalk prey across verdant wildflower fields, through lilac chaparral, in watersheds that once supported large runs of trout and salmon; which if we are wise enough to make way for, could once again.

3. The sky-island forests of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts — pockets of relict habitat from a time when California was a colder and wetter place, the mountain top forests of the desert seem to be out of place and time. Hike from sand to snow, Palm Springs to the top of San Jacinto and marvel at how old pine trees make their home in this place of extraordinary, physiographic diversity. These delicate places are shrinking, running upslope — it has been measured that the San Bernardino Forests has retreated by two hundred feet in the last fifty years — an incredibly fast pace for an ancient ecosystem.    

2. The montane forests of the Sierra Nevada — from the Plumas National Forest south 400 miles to the Sequoia National Forest, across the west slope of the longest, continuous mountain range in the lower 48, the forests of the Sierra Nevada are at least as intrinsically valuable as they are wealthy in the natural resources they provide. On the long list of their invaluable holdings, these forests shelter the largest trees on the planet and work as a water tower, making human civilization possible in this otherwise arid state.

1. The California floristic province — the whole enchilada! The botanical region west of the Sierra Nevada, reaches from the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon, down to the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Isolated from the rest of the continent by the Sierra, the tallest mountain range in the lower 48, the process of natural selection has invented here, a stunning, world-class assemblage of biodiversity. The measure of a forest's health is rooted in the quality of its connectivity and its diversity. Understanding the measure of this necessity is the key to not only defending the integrity of forest health but is intimately tied to the quality of our continued residency in this beautiful place we call home.

Ashley Harrell

Obi Kaufmann has released a new book, “The Forests of California,” that blends graceful prose with paintings of maps and wildlife.

California's 5 most wondrous forests, according to "field atlas" author Obi Kaufmann

Along the slopes of the Sierra west of Lake Tahoe, several oddly symmetrical groups of trees rise from the middle of the forest. Shaped like wagon wheels, they are known as nelder plots and were planted in the 1990s as part of a study at the Blodgett Forest Research Station.

The aim was to glean insights into resource competition among trees, said John A. Helms, a silviculturist involved in the project. "It's a little bit like putting rats in a cage or people in a tight suburban environment," he told the Sun. "People behave differently when they're jammed together."

To visitors viewing the plots at ground level, the trees appear little different than the surrounding forest. Send up a drone, however, and their full magnificence comes into view.

A few more pictures. 👉 I Love the Sierra 

Also, a great drone's-eye view rising up from a plot. 👉 @mirandaleconte 

Along the slopes of the Sierra west of Lake Tahoe, groups of trees shaped like wagon wheels rise from the middle of the forest. 

The strangely symmetrical tree plots of California's northern Sierra 

Frederick Roberts is a major figure in California history whom few people have heard of. Born to a prominent businessman on this day in 1879, Roberts became the first Black graduate of Los Angeles High School. He attended USC and later worked as a school principal, mortician, and news editor.

Then in 1918, at a time of entrenched racism in California, he made a stunning announcement: He was launching a bid for office in the state Legislature. “People through he was crazy,” his wife later recalled. But Roberts won, defeating a rival who handed out campaign literature that read simply, “My opponent is a nigger.”

The improbable victory made Roberts the first Black person elected to state office on the West coast. He served 16 years in the California Assembly, where he sponsored bills bolstering the causes of civil rights and public education. Colleagues across party lines took to calling him "the dean of the Assembly."

In his calls for racial equality, Roberts sometimes made reference to the ideals of America's founding fathers, with whom he had a complicated relationship. Although the topic was neither discussed in public nor much at home, Roberts was the great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson.

The primary author of the Declaration of Independence is believed to have had a sexual relationship with an enslaved woman at his Monticello plantation, a reality that historians long dismissed as rumor. Today, most accept it as true, with some arguing that the relationship could only be characterized as coercive.

Little is known about the woman, Sally Hemings, but evidence suggests she raised four children conceived with Jefferson, negotiating for their emancipation upon reaching adulthood. Over the generations, the Jefferson-Hemings family tree grew to include hundreds of descendants.

One of its branches reached into California in the life of Roberts, who played no small part in advancing the ideals of liberty that Jefferson, in words if not deeds, so eloquently championed.

Frederick Roberts is a major figure in California history whom few people have heard of.

California's first Black state legislator was the great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson

Jenny Sampson, a Berkeley photographer, had been taking pictures of skateboarders for years. 

Then one day in early 2017, during a visit to a skate park in the Bay Area city of Emeryville, a new phenomenon caught her attention: about half a dozen young female skaters holding their own in a subculture traditionally dominated by men. 

"Up until then it was really unusual to see a group of girls skating," Sampson said. "There would be, if any at all, one or two." 

Women and girls have been a part of skateboarding since its early days in the 1960s and 70s, when skaters like Ellen O'Neal were among the best of any gender. But according to Sampson, their presence at skateparks has jumped in recent years. 

The shift has been attributed in part to social media, networking groups such as "Skate Like a Girl," and the Olympics, which will include both male and female skateboarding events for the first time in 2021. Sampson also cited another factor: Fathers who grew up skateboarding are now introducing their daughters to the sport.

"It's a whole new ballgame right now," Sampson said. "Skateboarding has just become a much more open sport in a way."

Sampson focused on the women and girls of skateboarding for her new photography book "Skater Girls," shot at parks up and down the West coast. To create the images, she used the 19th-century tintype technique, which requires subjects to sit perfectly still for a multi-second exposure.

The result is a collection of portraits that possesses a timelessness and intimacy seldom seen in glossy magazines or Instagram feeds. Sampson shared a selection with the California Sun, below.


This article is from the California Sun, a newsletter that delivers must-read stories to your inbox each morning — for free. Sign up here.

Jenny Sampson's portraits of female skaters possess a timelessness and intimacy seldom seen in glossy magazines or Instagram feeds.

Vintage-style photos showcase the women of skateboarding

John Muir is an almost prophetlike figure in California. The 19th-century Scottish-American found rapture in the Sierra Nevada, publishing works that helped inspire the preservation of wild areas, including the designation of Yosemite as a national park in 1890.

No fewer than 70 schools, lodges, roads, and other places in California bear Muir’s name.  

So it came as a jolt to many last week when the Sierra Club, of which Muir was the first president, issued a statement denouncing the environmentalist for drawing on racist stereotypes in his writings. The post, titled “Pulling down our monuments,” linked to an Atlas Obscura article that recounted how Muir had described Native Americans as “lazy” and “savages.” While walking through the South, Muir recalled encountering a “black lump of something” that turned out to be a small boy. “Birds make nests and nearly all beasts make some kind of bed for their young, but these negroes allow their younglings to lie nestless and naked in the dirt,” he wrote. 

In an essay responding to the Sierra Club’s post, the Muir biographer Donald E. Worster acknowledged there was much to regret about Muir’s views, but argued that the environmentalist should be judged in a broader context. 

“Muir has been dead for more than a century,” Worster wrote, “but if he could speak from the grave, I can easily imagine him agreeing that systemic racism is bad and should be repudiated, for he never published a word in support of black slavery, racial segregation, the Confederacy, forced sterilization of minorities, or genocidal policies toward Native Americans.”

California Sun contributor Finn Cohen reached out to ask a few questions of Worster, who is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Kansas and the author of “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.” 

Excerpts of their conversation, below, have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q. What are your feelings about the Sierra Club’s statement regarding John Muir?

A. If they just turn the page, sometimes they find some rather surprising context. Particularly that one episode from John Muir’s journal from 1868 when he was for the first time in the Yosemite area and encountered Indians coming over the mountains from Mono Lake. That gets quoted again and again. But the rest of that day's journal entry, just something he wrote by the campfire, is quite different in tone from what most people gather from a couple of words and characterizations. 

When you ignore the context, then you are cherry-picking. You're looking for items that fit your definition. I think the Sierra Club definitely ought to be aware of who joined it over the years. A lot of people joined the club who didn't even live in California, never came to a meeting. I think during the first several decades, the Sierra Club was probably a hiking club of very elite people who were probably full of racists and white supremacists. Of course, everybody believes the Sierra Club ought to be on today's good side of moral values and changing social attitudes. But I fear that the way this current executive director has done this is not conducive to really rational analysis of where it's been, or really even of its traditions or its heritage of ideas, because it is undoubtedly a lot more complex. Historians always say history is more complicated. [laughs] 

You’ve written that you found certain elements of Muir’s character that you didn't like. Did those have anything to do with racism or xenophobia? 

Xenophobia, I don't find in John Muir. Some of his statements were probably a little insensitive or unkind, but they were written usually in a journal, and they were mostly about people he runs into. When he ran into Indians on the trail in Yosemite who were demanding cigarettes, tobacco, alcohol — John Muir was a fastidious kind of guy. He was not much of a drinker at that point in his life, so all those things repelled him. He had a lot of caustic things to say about a lot of people. He was not an easy person to get along with. I'm not sure I would have liked to go on a hike with him! [laughs] He was the kind of person who could easily offend people by his comments. But the other side of it is, this is maybe a huge paradox — he was a much-beloved man. So many people made friends with him over his lifetime and he continued those friendships. 

There’s always a question of what is a racist. And this word is very loosely applied anymore. Believing in the inborn biological superiority of your group of people over others is, I think, the more classic definition of the term. I don’t find that in Muir. I find quite the opposite. There's a scrap of paper I found when I was going through his papers, doing my research. It was jotted down when he was off the coast of China. The Chinese never get into these discussions; it’s always about Blacks or Indians. Muir lived in a state with a growing Chinese population of immigrants, and that was extremely controversial. He hired Chinese workers on his fruit farm. And when he was traveling on the coast of China, he wrote on a little scrap of paper: “Some of the best people in the world are Chinese and we must not hate them. Hatred of any race of human beings is both foolish and wicked. We should not try to flock together too closely with the Chinese, for they are birds with feathers so unlike our own they seem to have been hatched on some other planet.” 

John Muir was a complicated guy. When he says, “We shouldn't hate anybody,” he’s writing this to himself. He's not publishing it. But I think we should take that just as seriously as we take some of the more negative things he said. It's not always clear when he said negative things that he was opposed to people as such, or he thought that they were inferior, but maybe that culturally it was going to be hard to assimilate or amalgamate or create social bonds. 

If you put that with the other comments, to call him a racist or white supremacist and just leave it at that, I think that's really unfair. I'm saying that about the executive director of the Sierra Club, if he buys that sort of thinking. Has he really read this journal entry? Has he really tried to put all this together in his mind? Do the people who come to him and say, “I read that Muir said these Indians were dirty, and it really hurts me” — has he asked them to sit down and read the rest of the passage? We all make snap decisions, sometimes on the basis of reading a few words, but I think the job of the Sierra Club ought to be to help people think about the past and its complexities, the gray tones, and use this to educate their own members, educate the public about what an environmental movement should look like. 

Besides the interaction in Yosemite that you mentioned Muir had with Native Americans, what were some of his other interactions with them, and how did those change his views? 

Most of John Muir’s knowledge about Native Americans came later in his life. He knew a few Indians in a remnant population in Yosemite Valley. But when Muir began taking longer trips up to Alaska, he met a lot of Natives, from the panhandle all the way up to the Bering Strait. There he saw the effects of white immigration and the diseases that came along, wiping out whole populations; the presence of alcohol and its effects; trade relations that were not good for the Indians. He wrote a diatribe against the white invasion. He said this is something the government should be up here doing: taking care of and protecting these people from being exploited, from being hurt and dying from all this. 

There's one episode from those days that really touched me, when Muir stopped at an Indian village somewhere and stayed overnight for several days with the people. Muir often hired them to take him on canoe expeditions up in these fjords. And in this village, there’s a little baby crying piteously. Nobody knows what to do. Its mother has died and the baby's hungry. No one's nursing it. So Muir goes to his canoe and he brings out a box of canned milk. He opens it and he spends the entire night with this baby, basically feeding it and holding it in his arms. He's walking up and down, trying to soothe it. And the people of this village are so struck by it that they named the baby after John Muir. He gets word of this later on.

I think his attitudes toward Native Americans got more positive as he got to know more of them and particularly that came in Alaska. The population of Indians in California dramatically dropped even before he got there, due to gold mining and the Gold Rush. So he didn't see many Native Americans there; he certainly didn't see many whose lives had been what they were. The people he would see were alcoholic, whose lives were degraded from what they had been. Demanding whiskey, cigarettes, having little to do; their hunting was gone. In Alaska, he met a very different group of Native Americans who were undergoing invasion to some extent, but still were intact: their ways, their culture, their hunting, their economy, and their pride.

When he got to California, it wasn't just the Indians who got him saying unflattering things. The white population, the people who were invading, the frontier types, the miners — he thought they were uncouth, savages, brutal, dirty, given over to alcohol. His writings are full of those descriptions. Nobody gets upset about that. You could, I suppose, claim that he was anti-working people generally, but that wouldn't be true because he spent a couple of years in Indianapolis working in a factory. You can chase these sorts of things around and try to find something. But he certainly didn't understand or know much about what we would call today systemic racism built into our institutions and cultures. 

You wrote that he had some radical ideas about justice — what were those? 

I trace them back to poets like Robert Burns or people like William Wordsworth, English romantics, Scots. It was a kind of egalitarianism extended to the whole living world. This theme is very strong in his growing up, and particularly after he leaves home, when he goes to the South after the Civil War — where he has lots of encounters with African Americans, by the way. When he gets to California, he is writing constantly about the “other people of the planet.” He talks about the plant people, the bird people, the grasshopper people. He really takes it seriously, that all of these are organisms forming societies, and families, and relationships and they have a right to exist. There's a point where on the trail up in Yosemite, he comes upon the carcass of a dead brown bear, just lying down the grass. And he sits down next to this carcass and writes on another little scrap of paper: “We live in an age of liberal principles.” He means that he also is a liberal, he is wide open to these ideas about human rights, equality. And goes on to say that we have allowed into our idea of heaven all kinds of other peoples in the world; we all can come into the Christian heaven, but “our liberal principles don't extend to the bears, or other species.” So he's going to sit down by the trail and mourn the passing of this brown bear. 

I take this as meaning, “I'm a liberal, I'm an egalitarian; I believe in democracy, but my sympathies are not limited to just conventional ideas of humanity. We draw a line around ourselves, a fence around who we are as a species, and everybody is supposed to be equal, but everything outside of it’s nothing, absolutely nothing to us.” No, he says, “I don't believe in that sense. And I'm going to talk about these liberal principles in a broader way.” And this, I think, is the moral value Muir thought he stood for, which didn’t exclude people but didn't stop with people, that the Sierra Club ought to be talking about right now, ought to be remembering, and ought to be asking, “What can we do with it? And how do our programs encourage this or at least to examine it carefully and talk about it critically?”

Read Worster's essay responding to the Sierra Club’s criticism of John Muir.

Finn Cohen

A conversation with Donald E. Worster, the author of “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.”

John Muir and race: Biographer argues for nuanced view of the environmentalist

Donald E. Worster is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Kansas and the author of “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.”

Below is an essay he wrote in response to a Sierra Club initiative to reckon with comments by Muir that the group said "drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes."

The Sierra Club’s president now wants to distance himself from John Muir, the Club’s first president from 1892 to 1914, ostensibly because Muir was a racist and associated with “white supremacists.”

Several years ago I wrote a biography of Muir, not to make him a hero or to celebrate uncritically his life and achievements, but rather to understand better the complexities of thought and character within this individual and within American environmentalism. In the end there was much in the man that I did not admire or even like, although I concluded that he lived an extraordinary life, and was most extraordinary when he advocated a broad new ethical perspective on human relations with the rest of the planet. I would call that idea “justice,” but it went beyond what today many call “environmental justice,” which is focused only on racial, class, and gender lines within society. But I never went so far as to denounce him as a racist or white supremacist.

There is also talk of taking down statues of Muir, erasing his name from college buildings, the California landscape, and so forth. Why did anyone put up a statue of Muir in the first place? Did they mean that here is a human being without moral blemish? There are no such people in the world. Move those statues to the basement or tear them down — it’s okay with me. But why must we scrub this man from our list of good people, and in the process risk overlooking the good that was in him and in his valuing of wilderness, natural beauty, and the rights of all “God’s peoples” to enjoy their lives in the outdoors, in the midst of or away from cities, crowds, and bulldozers?

Muir has been dead for more than a century, but if he could speak from the grave, I can easily imagine him agreeing that systemic racism is bad and should be repudiated, for he never published a word in support of black slavery, racial segregation, the Confederacy, forced sterilization of minorities, or genocidal policies toward Native Americans.

Late in his life Muir acquired a few friends who were rich developers, like E. H. Harriman, the New York railroad magnate, but his preferred circle of friends did not include Frederick Henry Osborn, another New Yorker who was a blue-blooded paleontologist and could fairly be called a white supremacist. By far Muir’s greatest moral failings came, in my view, when, influenced by those close friendships, he soft-pedaled his more radical ideas about justice. He failed to address how those ideas should be applied outside the national parks wherever people sought a living and economic development. At home he was an agriculturalist, but he never got around to explaining what it meant to be an environmentally just farmer, nor to define environmental ethics for miners, lumbermen, engineers, irrigators, or railroad men. Thus, he left a lot for later generations to figure out.

Muir was not, by the way, the founder of the Sierra Club — a group of professors at Berkeley were the main organizers. Reluctantly, he agreed to serve as president but was often negligent in his duties. The Club was not that important to him. He even made powerful enemies among its members, especially over his opposition to dam building within Yosemite National Park. If today’s Club wants to distance itself from some things Muir said, then let it do so, but without obscuring or repudiating the core of what he stood for. Above all they should not tar him with “white supremacist” labels that represent mere “guilt by association.”

After several years of digging into his life, I could find no evidence that Muir was an out-and-out “racist” (if we mean that he believed in the innate superiority of his own race over others). True, he occasionally made unflattering remarks about this person or that, including a lot of white people. I could find only a few expressions of distaste for non-whites: a poor family of African Americans he met while tramping across Florida, a band of Indians he met on a trail near Yosemite Valley who begged him for whisky, all of whom he found disgusting mainly because they were dirty. But he was even more disgusted by a filthy white lad who was his fellow sheepherder in the Sierra. The rush-to-judgment reader should not seize on a single word or two he uttered in those encounters, ignoring their full context. In the second case, for instance, Muir went on to self-examine the repulsion he felt toward the Indians he met on the trail and then concluded with a call for interracial brotherhood! Clearly, he was ashamed by his initial reactions. But too often his critics don’t turn the page and see that fuller picture.

Muir showed far more sympathy for Native Americans as he got older and came to know the indigenous people of Alaska. But throughout his life he never called for excluding any group from the national parks. The notion that he was a lone, antisocial hiker out to claim exclusive possession of the parks is a common but false stereotype. Always he wanted to get people of all sorts in touch with the natural world. And by no means did he want the parks to become exclusive preserves for the privileged and wealthy. At the same time he insisted that humans were not the only form of life that mattered. The world had not been made only for Homo sapiens; it existed for all living creatures, including the bears and grasshoppers. Muir was a radical egalitarian in his environmental philosophy, and he should be remembered and honored for that.

See the California Sun's Q. and A. with Worster.

Donald E. Worster

The historian Donald E. Worster responds to the Sierra Club’s criticism of John Muir.

John Muir biographer: He was no white supremacist 

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