Chapter 18:  The Progressive Era and the Rise of the Conservation Movement

Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite, 1903

Me at Glacier Point, Yosemite, 2009

I had my picture taken here at Yosemite when I was out in California in 2009, not knowing that Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir also had their photo taken from this same spot.  When I first saw the photo of Roosevelt and Muir I was so excited because I knew I had an identical one.  This isn't the only spot, Yosemite is breathtaking from almost every vantage point and is a trip that everyone should make sometime in their life.

Below is an excerpt from Roosevelt's autobiography that is on the Sierra Club website. Imagine going on a camping trip with the President of the United States--and it was President Roosevelt who asked John Muir to go camping.  On this camping trip John Muir was able to convince both President Roosevelt and the Governor of California to expand Yosemite National Park to include the Valley below this point, as well as the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias--two of the most incredible sections of Yosemite.  Follow this link to the NPS website to learn more about John Muir and Yosemite http://www.nps.gov/yose/historyculture/muir-influences.htm   

---

(Excerpt) When I first visited California, it was my good fortune to see the "big trees," the Sequoias, and then to travel down into the Yosemite, with John Muir. Of course of all people in the world he was the one with whom it was best worth while thus to see the Yosemite. He told me that when Emerson came to California he tried to get him to come out and camp with him, for that was the only way in which to see at their best the majesty and charm of the Sierras. But at the time Emerson was getting old and could not go.
John Muir met me with a couple of packers and two mules to carry our tent, bedding, and food for a three days' trip. The first night was clear, and we lay down in the darkening aisles of the great Sequoia grove. The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn.
I was interested and a little surprised to find that, unlike John Burroughs, John Muir cared little for birds or bird songs, and knew little about them. The hermit-thrushes meant nothing to him, the trees and the flowers and the cliffs everything. The only birds he noticed or cared for were some that were very conspicuous, such as the water-ouzels always particular favorites of mine too. The second night we camped in a snow-storm, on the edge of the cañon walls, under the spreading limbs of a grove of mighty silver fir; and next day we went down into the wonderland of the valley itself. I shall always be glad that I was in the Yosemite with John Muir and in the Yellowstone with John Burroughs.

---

Source: Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913). Excerpted from Chapter IX. Outdoors and Indoors