Milton in Yosemite: Paradise lost and the national parks idea

Environmental History

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 237-274

  Stoll, Mark ^a  

^a TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL TRADITION; ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; LANDSCAPE; NATIONAL PARK;

CALIFORNIA; ENGLAND; EURASIA; EUROPE; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED KINGDOM; UNITED STATES; WESTERN EUROPE; YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK;

EID: 44949142221     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/13.2.237     Document Type: Article

References (219)

1. John Muir, The Yosemite (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 261-62.
2. Among them Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 167-68;
3. Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 143-51;
4. Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 47;
5. William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 72;
6. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003), 133-36, 141;
7. Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 51-53;
8. Robert W. Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 212;
9. and Bron Taylor, "Resacralizing Earth: Pagan Environmentalism and the Restoration of Turtle Island," in American Sacred Space, ed. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 101.
10. Robert L. Dorman fleetingly notes the Miltonic reference in A Word for Nature: Four Pioneering Environmental Advocates, 1845-1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 168.
11. Edmund A. Schofield, "John Muir's Yankee Friends and Mentors: The New England Connection," Pacific Historian 29 (1985): 65-89.
12. Although not unfamiliar with Milton, nineteenth-century Methodists and Southern Protestants found Richard Baxter's Saint's Everlasting Rest their Puritan classic of choice. Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 63;
13. John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 179.
14. Hilton Kramer, "Ansel Adams: Trophies From Eden," New York Times, May 12, 1974, sec. 2, 23.
15. Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light, rev. ed. (New York: Aperture, 1980), 36.
16. Ansel Adams and Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams:An Autobiography (Boston:Little, Brown, 1985), 59;
17. Ansel Adams, "The Meaning of the National Parks," in My Camera in the National Parks: 30 Photographs with Interpretative Text and Informative Material on the Parks and Monuments, and Photographic Data (Yosemite National Park, Boston: V. Adams; Houghton Mifflin, 1950);
18. reprinted in Andrea G. Stillman and William A. Turnage, eds., Ansel Adams: Our National Parks (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 16.
19. Ansel Adams, letter to Harold Bradley, Richard Leonard, and David Brower, July 27, 1957, in Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, 1916-1984. ed. Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman (New York: Little, Brown, 1988), 248.
20. John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
21. David Robertson's West of Eden: A History of Art and Literature of Yosemite (Yosemite: Yosemite Natural History Association and Wilderness Press, 1984). Other examples: David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
22. and Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, and Richard J. Orsi, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996).
23. See Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes, new ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990);
24. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964);
25. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind;
26. Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997);
27. Alfred Runte, Trains of Discovery: Western Railroads and the National Parks (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1984);
28. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Park: A History(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). For a standard history of Yosemite, see Alfred Runte, Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
29. Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo, "Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness," Environmental History 6 (October 1984): 541-60;
30. Stephen Germic, American Green: Class, Crisis, and the Deployment of Nature in Central Park, Yosemite, and Yellowstone (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001);
31. Carolyn Merchant, "Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History," Environmental History 8 (July 2003): 380-94.
32. Compare Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (London: Hutchison, 1966), 281-82.
33. I have phrased the argument carefully. I do not assert the converse, that only Reformed Protestants can appreciate Yosemite, either in religious terms or in secular. People of all backgrounds and nationalities have visited Yosemite National Park from the beginning. In 1868, New Englander Charles Loring Brace and his party traveled the last stages of the journey into Yosemite with a Southern family and a Philadelphia couple-an example of the diversity of early visitors. Charles Loring Brace, The New West: or, California in 1867-1868 (New York: G. P. Putnam and Son, 1869), 96-98. This essay seeks only to investigate one factor in the surprisingly enduring and prominent association of Reformed Protestants with the valley. The argument also asserts that religion and not a general white elite culture is the key factor in the Edenic response to Yosemite. Several Reformed Protestants associated with the Valley had humble origins among poor farmers or immigrants, including Galen Clark, Albert Bierstadt, William Keith, and Muir himself, which suggests that cultural attitudes outweighed economic, social, or educational status. Moreover, elite Americans from other groups, including other Episcopalians, Methodists, and Southerners, visited the Valley but appear rarely among Yosemite poets, authors, artists, and parks advocates and administrators. I found no Southerner who evoked religion in response to Yosemite. Examples include Virginian David Wood, Letter to H. H. Winchell, July 12, 1856, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (for Wood's origins, see Carla Ehat and Anne Kent, Interview With Bertram K. Dunshee, November 15, 1979, Anne T. Kent California Room, Marin County Free Library, San Rafael, California, http://www.co.marin.ca.us/depts/lb/main/crm/ oralhistories/bkdunsheeft.html [accessed August 9, 2007]);
34. and the diary of North Carolinian Albert Jefferson Young, September 5-9, 1878, in Young Family Papers, 1862-1878, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California. Although Virginian James C. Lamon was the first year-round resident of the valley, he seems also have been another Presbyterian. Thomas Moran also painted Yosemite scenes, but is excluded here due to ambiguity in background and beliefs. Born a year before Muir in 1837, and like Cole a native of Bolton, Moran emigrated to Philadelphia as a boy. His Irish father was a Catholic and his English mother a Catholic convert. Moran married a Scottish Presbyterian immigrant and later possibly became an Episcopalian. Probably Moran abandoned orthodoxy for a general religion of nature, which he expressed in his landscapes. He painted some illustrations of the Bible but not Paradise Lost. Thurman Wilkins and Caroline Lawson Hinkley, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 2-3, 47, 383 n47.
35. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003), is suggestive, but fails to differentiate between the diverse visions of Eden within various Christian traditions.
36. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). European explorers in general used the language of paradise to describe many of the lands they found, so Grove was pointing out a distinct version of a larger genre. Also, Catholic explorers generally sought the location of the true, original Eden, while Protestants generally believed it no longer existed and sought the Edenic. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Visão do Paraíso: os motivos edênicos no descobrimento e colonização do Brasil, 2nd rev. ed. (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1969);
37. Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, tran. Matthew O'Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995), ch. 5, 7, 8.
38. Earlier botanical gardens were medicinal-plant collections for the medical faculty, such as the famous garden at Padua. Ulrich von Rath, Botanik und Pharmakologie in der Renaissance: Die Gründungsgeschichte des Botanischen Gartens Montpellier 1593 und seine Rezeption im nördlichen Mitteleuropa unter besonderer Berücksichtigung eines botanischen Frühdrucks der Lübecker Stadtbibliothek (Lübeck: Bibliothek der Hansestadt Lübeck, 1998). As their meaning changed to something like imperial trophy cases, botanical gardens spread across Europe. See, also, John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
39. Catharine Randall, Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 52;
40. Michel Carmona, Haussmann (Paris: Fayard, 2000).
41. Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.v.1-10;
42. see, also, Benjamin B. Warfield, "Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God," in Calvin and the Reformation: Four Studies by Emile Doumergue, August Lang, Herman Bavinck, and Benjamin B. Warfield, ed. William Park Armstrong (1909; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 131-214. Calvin's doctrines were not original, because Reformed leaders saw their work as restoration, not innovation. Christian theologians long had made similar arguments about creation, but the dual emphasis on praise and glory of God as the purpose of both man and nature, and on worship as the central function of religion, was peculiarly Calvinist.
43. See Susan E. Schreiner, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1991).
44. For Calvin's life and thought in historical context, see William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
45. Compare Massachusetts Puritan Anne Bradstreet's famous poem, "Contemplations," in The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Allan P. Robb (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 167-74.
46. Diane Kelsey McColley, A Gust for Paradise: Milton's Eden and the Visual Arts (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Delumeau, ch. 10.
47. For example, Paradise Lost 4.206; 5.330, 431; 7.328-331, 617.
48. Bernhard Scheifers, On the "Sentiment for Nature" in Milton's Poetical Works (Eisleben, Germany: Ernst Schneider, 1901), 42. Thanks to Donald Worster for bringing this essay to my attention.
49. Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 72-82.
50. See Scheifers, On the "Sentiment for Nature," 43-44.
51. On the sources for his metaphor of light, see William G. Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton's Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), ch. 4;
52. and Clay Daniel, "Milton's Neo-Platonic Angel?," SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 44 (2004): 173-88.
53. McColley, A Gust for Paradise, ch. 6. John Dennis's comment in 1704 may explain the morning hymn's popularity: "I know several gentlemen of very good Sense, who are extremely mov'd by Milton's Hymn, in the fifth Book of Paradise Lost, and hardly at all stir'd with the Translation of the 148th Psalm, from whence that Hymn is taken."
54. Dennis, Paradise Lost: In the Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), 9, quoted in John T. Shawcross, John Milton and Influence: Presence in Literature, History and Culture (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1991), 56.
55. Scheifers, 3-4, 16-19. McColley, ch. 6. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin, ed. (1893; reprint, New York: Prometheus, 2000), 33.
56. McColley, "Beneficent Hierarchies: Reading Milton Greenly," in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1994);
57. McColley, "Milton's Environmental Epic: Creature Kinship and the Language of Paradise Lost,"in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001);
58. Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
59. Hiltner, "A Defense of Milton's Environmentalism," English Language Notes (June 2003): 11-24. For a counterview, see Vernon Purinton Squires, "Milton's Treatment of Nature," Modern Language Notes 9 (December 1894): 227-327.
60. Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
61. Madsen, The Idea of Nature in Milton's Poetry, in Three Studies in the Renaissance: Sidney, Jonson, Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), ch. 2.
62. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 88-89,160-62, 164-65.
63. For Milton's scientific context, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959);
64. Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
65. Edward Dowden, Milton In the Eighteenth Century (1701-1750) (London: Published for the British Academy by H. Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1909), 2;
66. Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 1;
67. Griffin, Regaining Paradise, ch. 7;
68. Shawcross, John Milton and Influence,, chs. 2-5;
69. James G. Nelson, The Sublime Puritan: Milton and the Victorians (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 8;
70. Nelson, The Sublime Puritan, 8, 11-12, 106, 5-6;
71. Dustin Griffin, "Milton's Literary Influence," in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 243-60;
72. Nelson, The Sublime Puritan, ch. 7. E. S. Nadal, "The Cosmogony of 'Paradise Lost," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 56 (December 1877): 137; Almond, epilogue.
73. R. W. Griswold, The Prose Works of John Milton, with a Biographical Introduction (Philadelphia: Hooker, 1845), I, 1, in Shawcross, John Milton and Influence, 139.
74. George F. Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 35-48, 66, 72ff, 222-29;
75. Benjamin Franklin, "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion," The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 101-09. Lydia Dittler Schulman, Paradise Lost and the Rise of the American Republic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).
76. Keith W. F. Stavely, Puritan Legacies: "Paradise Lost" and the New England Tradition, 1630-1890 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
77. See also Robin Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997).
78. Shawcross, John Milton and Influence, chs. 2 and 9;
79. Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America, 66;
80. K. P. Van Anglen, The New England Milton: Literary Reception and Cultural Authority in the Early Republic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
81. Horace Walpole, "John Milton," in "On Modern Gardening," Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol. 4 (London: Shakspeare Press, 1828), 248-49. Newlyn, Paradise Lost, 20.
82. Joseph Heely, Letters on the Beauties of Hagley, Envil, and The Leasowes (1777), in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 329. C
83. p. Heely, A Description of Hagley, Envil and the Leasowes ... (Birmingham: M. Swinney, 1777), 102; see also 12-13, 86.
84. Hunt and Willis, 79. Max F. Schulz, Paradise Preserved: Recreations of Eden in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 1;
85. see also Prest, The Garden of Eden, esp. ch. 7;
86. and John Dixon Hunt, "Milton and the Making of the English Landscape Garden," Milton Studies XV, James D. Simmonds, ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 81-105. Walpole, "John Milton," 248-49. Newlyn, Paradise Lost, 20.
87. Landscape gardeners also drew inspiration from far more than Paradise Lost, of course, including classical antiquity, Italian gardens, and the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa. Tom Turner, English Garden Design: History and Styles since 1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Great Britain: Antique Collectors' Club, 1986), chs. 1-4.
88. Thomas Butts, quoted in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden 1740-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 252.
89. Richard Gorer, The Flower Garden in England (London: Batsford, 1975), 68-70, ch. 5.
90. John Muir, Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 11-12.
91. Shawcross, John Milton and Influence, ch. 3;
92. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 273-76.
93. David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), 10;
94. Downing quoted Paradise Lost 4.223-68;
95. Judith K. Major, To Live in the New World: A.J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 195 n.13, 113-19;
96. Linda Flint McClelland, Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 17-36;
97. Downing's proposal for Central Park, Schuyler, 202-03. Downing also represents the close relationship between landscape painting and landscape architecture. One of his early friends and mentors was landscape painter Raphael Hoyle; his sister-in-law married Transcendentalist landscape-painter Christopher Pearse Cranch; and his wife, Caroline, had a deep interest in the arts and avidly read Emerson and Bryant. Schuyler, 15-17, 21.
98. Of Calvert Vaux's background little is known. He was devout, attended Transcendentalist Octavius B. Frothingham's Unitarian Church, and was greatly influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Ruskin, two authors of Reformed or evangelical background, which all implies possible Reformed leanings. Roy Rosenzweig, and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), ch. 5;
99. Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly, Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 81; his partnership with Downing, Schuyler, ch. 7.
100. Rev. Horace Eaton, "Sermon XXIX: Moral Analogies of Central Park," The National Preacher 38 (December 1864): 318.
101. Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford: J.B. Burr, 1969), 361.
102. Rev. John Francis Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 1609-1871 (New York: E. B. Treat, 1872), 19.
103. Many compared New York to Milton's Pandemonium: New York Times, October 21, 1853, quoted in Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 314;
104. Smith, 708;
105. George Ellington, The Women of New York; Or, The Under-world of the Great City (New York: New York Book Company, 1869), 271;
106. Jocelyn Johnstone, "St. Ambrose Church," Fifty-Eighth Annual Report of the New York Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society, 1888-89 (New York: American Church Press, 1889), 38;
107. Mrs. Helen Campbell, Darkness and Daylight; Or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, A Woman's Story of Gospel, Temperance, Mission, and Rescue Work (Hartford, CT: A. D. Worthington, 1892), 209.
108. Frederick Law Olmsted, Letter to the Board of Commissioners of the Central Park, May 31, 1858, in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 3, Creating Central Park 1857-1861, ed. Charles E. Beveridge and David Schuyler (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 196.
109. Olmsted, "Mount Royal: Montreal," 1881, in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Supplementary Series, v.1, Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems, ed. Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn R. Hoffman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 388.
110. See, also, George L. Scheper, "The Reformist Vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and the Poetics of Park Design," New England Quarterly 62 (September 1989): 369-402.
111. Charles W. Eliot, Charles Eliot: Landscape Architect (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 1; quotation, 39-40.
112. Frederick Law Olmsted, "Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove," [August 1865], in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol.5, The California Frontier 1863-1865, ed. Victoria Post Ranney (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 500, 505.
113. Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), chs. 23-24.
114. On Olmsted as instigator of Yosemite, see Roper, Frederick Law Olmsted, 282-83.
115. See, also, Albert Fein, Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Environmental Tradition (New York: George Braziller, 1972);
116. Albert Fein, "The American City: The Ideal and the Real," in The Rise of an American Architecture, ed. Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. (New York: Praeger, 1970), 51-114.
117. Sellars, Preserving Nature, 48-53.
118. Frederick Law Olmsted, "The Distinction Between National Parks and National Forests," Landscape Architect 6 (1916): 114.
119. Charles P. Punchard, Jr., "Hands Off the National Parks," Landscape Architecture 11 (1921): 53.
120. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., "Hetch-Hetchy: The San Francisco Water-Supply Controversy," Landscape Architecture 4 (1914): 37-46, reprinted from the Boston Evening Transcript, November 19, 1913;
121. Edward Clark Whiting, and William Lyman Phillips, "Frederick Law Olmsted-1879-1957:
122. An Appreciation of the Man and His Achievements," Landscape Architecture 48 (1958): 145-50;
123. Norman T. Newton, Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 535.
124. Linda Flint McClelland, Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 11-12.
125. James Sturgis Pray, "Minute on the Life and Service of Charles Pierpont Punchard, Jr.," Landscape Architecture 11 (1921): 105-10;
126. McClelland, 36-53;
127. Ethan Carr, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), part 1.
128. See, also, Robert C. Pavlik, "In Harmony with the Landscape: Yosemite's Built Environment, 1913-1940," in Yosemite and Sequoia: A Century of California National Parks, ed.
129. Richard J. Orsi, Alfred Runte, and Marlene Smith-Baranzini (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 96-109.
130. William Feaver, The Art of John Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 5.
131. Nelson, The Sublime Puritan, 45;
132. Marcia R. Pointon, Milton & English Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), on Martin, 174-83;
133. and Feaver, 1-5.
134. Louis Legrand Noble, Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3;
135. Paul T. Phillips, The Sectarian Spirit: Sectarianism, Society, and Politics in Victorian Cotton Towns (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), ch. 2;
136. Malcolm Hardman, Classic Soil: Community, Aspiration, and Debate in the Bolton Region of Lancashire, 1819-1845 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).
137. Franklin Kelly, "'A Higher Style of Landscape': Thomas Cole's Paintings of Eden," in Franklin Kelly, Thomas Cole's Paintings of Eden (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1994);
138. Cole to Robert Gilmor, Jr., May 21, 1828, quoted on 17; catalog listing quoted on 51, n. 51;
139. West Indies trip, 27-28. On palm trees in Milton and Cole, Katherine Manthorne, "The Quest for a Tropical Paradise: Palm Tree as Fact and Symbol in Latin American Landscape Imagery, 1850-1875," Art Journal 44 (1984): 376-77. More conservative later in life, Cole was baptized into the Episcopalian (i.e., Anglican) Church in 1844.
140. Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery," in John W. McCoubrey, ed., American Art, 1700-1960: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 102, 109-10.
141. Frederick Kelly, "Frederic Church in the Tropics," Arts in Virginia 27 (1987): 29;
142. Kelly, "'Higher Style,'" 47; Manthorne, "The Quest for a Tropical Paradise," 374-82. Turner had been the first major artist to quote Paradise Lost to fit his landscapes. Pointon, Milton & English Art, xxxi. For examples of the religious meaning American and English critics read into Church's paintings,
143. see Gerald L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1980), 61-62.
144. See also John K. Howat, Frederic Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 109;
145. Katherine Emma Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 72-73;
146. and Katherine Emma Manthorne, Creation & Renewal: Views of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).
147. Howat, Frederic Church, 5, 34, 160-161, 172-173, ch. 7;
148. Roper, Frederick Law Olmsted, 378-82;
149. Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent: A Summer's Journey to the Rocky Mountain, the Mormons, and the Pacific States with Speaker Colfax (New York: Hurd & Holton, 1865), 231.
150. Peter E. Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographer of the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 4. The backgrounds are unknown of the first artist, Thomas A. Ayres, and first photographer, Charles L. Weed, both of whom James Hutchings brought to Yosemite, in 1855 and 1859, respectively. Artists of many backgrounds painted Yosemite, but those most popularly associated with Yosemite have been Reformed Protestants. For other artists, see Kate Nearpass Ogden, "Sublime Vistas and Scenic Backdrops: Nineteenth-Century Painters and Photographers at Yosemite," in Yosemite and Sequoia, ed. Orsi, Runte, and Smith-Baranzini, 49-68;
151. Amy Scott, ed., Yosemite: Art of an American Icon (Los Angeles: Autry National Center, 2006).
152. Bierstadt, like Church, almost never wrote about his work or his beliefs, so direct evidence for spiritual purpose is lacking. Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973);
153. for Bierstadt's motivation, see Matthew Baigell, Albart Bierstadt (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1981), 8-14. Quotation from Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, "Seven Weeks in the Great Yo-Semite," The Atlantic Monthly 13 (June 1864), 749.
154. Marjorie Dakin Arkelian, Thomas Hill: The Grand View(Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum Art Department, 1980);
155. Janice T. Driesbach, Direct from Nature: The Oil Sketches of Thomas Hill (Yosemite National Park: Yosemite Association, 1997), 44-45.
156. Eugen Neuhaus, William Keith: The Man and the Artist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1938);
157. visit to Hetch Hetchy, 89-90;
158. Emily P. B. Hay, William Keith as Prophet Painter (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1916);
159. Taylor is quoted in the epigram. Hay was one of Keith's students. See, also, Ronald H. Limbaugh, "California's Kindred Spirits: John Muir and William Keith," in John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures, Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 65-80.
160. Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, Discovery of the Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851, which Led to that Event, 3rd ed. (New York: F. H. Revell, 1892), 56, in Library of Congress American Memory, http:// memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/ calbk:@field(DOCID+@lit(calbkvg20div8)) (accessed June 27, 2006). "Surpliced priests" suggests veiled anti-Catholicism. Cp. George Seckel, letter to E. C. Hunt, July 15, 1859, in Levi S. Colton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Madison, Wisconsin.
161. John C. Holbrook, Recollections of a Nonegenarian (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1897), ch. 17;
162. Thomas Starr King, A Vacation Among the Sierras, Yosemite in 1860, John A. Hussey, ed. (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1962).
163. Richard C. Pettigrew, "Emerson and Milton," American Literature 3 (1931): 45-59;
164. J. Russell Roberts, "Emerson's Debt to the Seventeenth Century," American Literature 21 (1949): 298-310;
165. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 103;
166. Van Anglen, 109-161. For Emerson's appreciation of Milton, see Emerson, "Milton," The North American Review47 (July 1838): 56-73. George P. Landow, John Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), ch. 4;
167. John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 140-42, and ch. 6 generally. See Robertson, West of Eden;
168. also Demars 23-24, 33, 63.
169. William Minturn, Travels West (London: Tinsley, 1877), 280.
170. Joseph Lamson, Round Cape Horn: Voyage of the Passenger-ship James W. Paige, from Maine to California in the Year 1852 (Bangor, ME: Press of O. F. & W. H. Knowles, 1878), 151-52.
171. William Simpson, Meeting the Sun: A Journey All Round the World Through Egypt, China, Japan and California (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1874), 385-86.
172. Charles Warren Stoddard, In the Footprints of the Padres (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, (1902), 256;
173. Presbyterian, see 105.
174. Ludlow, "Seven Weeks in the Great Yo-Semite," 749, 740, 746.
175. Grace Greenwood [Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott], New Life in New Lands: Notes of Travel (New York: Ford, 1873), 364, 305-06, 333-34. On Lippinicott, see Robert W. McHenry, Famous American Women: A Biographical Dictionary from Colonial Times to the Present (1980; reprint, New York: Dover, 1983), 248.
176. Josiah Letchworth, Letters from Josiah Letchworth, 1880, compiled by P. E. Letchworth, 1966, Genesee Valley Historical Collection, SUNY Geneseo, Letter #13, May 22,1880, 4, 5.
177. Shirley Sargent, in James Mason Hutchings, Seeking the Elephant, 1849:James Mason Hutchings' Journal of his Overland Trek to California (Glendale, CA: Clark, 1980), 13. Towcester: The Story of an English Country Town (Towcester, UK: Towcester and District Local History Society, 1995), 107.
178. Mariposa Gazette, August 9, 1855, 2, http://www.yosemite.ca.us/ library/mariposa_gazette_18550809.html (accessed May 31, 2006).
179. Sargent, "Introduction," in Hutchings, Seeking the Elephant. Hutchings, 1855 Diary, June 3, quoted in Robertson, West of Eden, 38.
180. Hank Johnston, "James Mason Hutchings and His Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity," Yosemite's Yesterdays, vol. 2 (Yosemite, CA: Flying Spur Press, 1991), 15-30.
181. Adams and Alinder, Ansel Adams, 49-50.
182. Jean Bruce Washburn, Yo Semite: A Poem (San Francisco: A. Roman, 1872), line 5; penultimate stanza.
183. Shirley Sargent, Pioneers in Petticoats: Yosemite's Early Women 1856-1900 (Los Angeles: Trans-Anglo Books, 1966), 59-61.
184. John Ward, "California," The Overland Route to California:And Other Poems(New York: Kilbourne Tompkins, 1875), 19, 27. Of Puritan and Reformed ancestry, Ward was raised Episcopalian in New York.
185. Julia Ward Howe was a relative. "Richard Ward," Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, v.6 (New York: Appleton, 1880), 335.
186. Joaquin Miller, "Yosemite," Poems, v. 4 (1909), 119. Cincinnatus Hiner (Joaquin") Miller's paternal grandfather was Scottish and his maternal ancestors were Dutch, while his devout father was Quaker, perhaps a convert since Scottish Quakers were rare. Juanita J. Miller, My Father C. H. Joaquin Miller, Poet (Oakland, Calif.: Tooley-Towne, 1964), 8-9;
187. Martin Severin Peterson, Joaquin Miller: Literary Frontiersman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1937), 8, 10.
188. Muir's exact contemporary, Miller urged the would-be poet to read God's book of nature and appreciate its beauty. "To me the grandest poem on earth is night in a deep half-tropical forest. There is nothing so mighty, so Miltonic as this the myriad voice of night." "Were I a great preacher ... I would make it my mission to teach this one lesson to America the love of the beautiful. Then ... my country would be a world of poets. We would then be a happy, religious, contented and cultured people, instead of a race of vulgar and suspicious money-getting merchants." Joaquin Miller, "What is Poetry?" Memorie and Rime (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1884), 44, 43.
189. George Sterling, Yosemite: An Ode (San Francisco: Robertson, 1916), 4. Sterling's mother was a staunch Presbyterian. Thomas E. Benediktsson, George Sterling(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 14.
190. Wallace Bruce, "The Yosemite," Old Homestead Poems (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888), 81. Born in Hillsdale, New York, in 1844, of Scottish ancestry, Bruce graduated from Yale University to become a well-known author and lecturer.
191. Arthur G. Adams, ed., The Hudson River in Literature: An Anthology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), 329-331.
192. David Robertson has collected samples of Yosemite poetry from 1867 to 1928, most of it addressed to waterfalls and often peppered with Miltonisms. Robertson, West of Eden, 108-11.
193. Edna Dean Proctor, "Yosemite," Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 47. Laura C. Holloway, The Woman's Story as Told by Twenty American Women with Portraits, and Sketches of the Authors (New York: John B. Alden, 1889), 95-97.
194. Caroline Hazard, "The Yosemite," The Yosemite and Other Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 5.
195. One stanza honored the late Muir: "Here on a flowery day came John o' the Mountains, /And shaped he many a far and deep-hid trail. / He saw with loving eye each stream and fountain / And sought each secret of the rain-bowed vale; / Until the white-winged angel, Israefale, / Touched him and beckoned, and gently upward led / Him over the Range or Light." Henry Meade Blande, "In Yosemite," In Yosemite and Other Poems, in Short Story Quarterly (Summer 1920): 3, 5. I am unable to identify "Israefale."
196. Robertson, West of Eden, 158-61;
197. "The Berkeley Barb Interview," in Gary Snyder, The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979, ed. William Scott McLean (New York: New Directions, 1980), 8;
198. Snyder, "Reading Milton by Firelight," Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 9;
199. untitled poem, in Robertson, West of Eden, 161. For Snyder's moralistic environmental attitudes: "The East West Interview," in The Real Work, 92, 93;
200. for early religious notions: Jerry Crandall, "Mountaineers Are Always Free," in Jon Halper, Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 3-5. Raised by atheists, Snyder may have come to religion during his summers as a teenager at a YMCA camp in the Oregon Cascades.
201. William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 30.
202. Muir, Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 244-45.
203. Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, v. 1, 116.
204. Muir, The Yosemite, 3.
205. Letter from Muir to Jeanne Carr, April 3, 1867, in Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr, ed. Bonnie Johanna Gisel (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 44;
206. Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, v. 1, 154-55.
207. Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, v. 1, 66-68. Henry Fairfield Osborn, "John Muir," Sierra Club Bulletin, John Muir Memorial Number, v. 10, n. 1 (January, 1916), on the "John Muir Exhibit" Website, http://www.sierraclub.org /john_muir_exhibit/frameindex.html.Muir, Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 280-283. Letters from Carr to Muir, April 15, 1867;
208. Muir to Carr, April, 1867;
209. Carr to Muir, April 1867;
210. and Muir to Carr, May 2, 1867, in Gisel, 49, 50, 50-51, 51;
211. cp. Steven J. Holmes, The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 153.
212. Thérèse Yelverton, Zanita: A Tale of the Yo-semite (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1872), ch. 1, Yosemite Online Library, http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/zanita/kenmuir.html (accessed June 27, 2006).
213. Muir, My Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 18. Of Muir's biographers, Steven J. Holmes has been most attuned to Muir's familiarity with Paradise Lost;
214. see Young John Muir, 168-69, 174, 177, 179, 186.
215. Certainly not every allusion to these terms, especially "garden," referred to Paradise Lost specifically. To take a typical example, in The Mountains of California, when Muir called alpine meadows "gardens" and even "lawns," context made clear that he meant the home variety-although of course, the works of God were ever superior: "divinely beautiful," "these wild lawns, with all their exquisite fineness, have no trace of that painful, licked, snipped, repressed appearance that pleasure-ground lawns are apt to have even when viewed at a distance? Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Century, 1894), 129, 126.
216. Muir, The Yosemite, 6, 14; also My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 264.
217. The Yosemite, 255, 256-57, 259-60, 261-62.
218. Congressional Record 51, December 6, 1913, 362. Reed's Presbyterian upbringing: Obituary, Kansas City Star, September 8, 1944, James Alexander Reed Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Of Scotch-Irish ancestry, Reed exemplifies how the mix of Reformed heritage and familiarity with Milton did not necessarily lead to advocacy for parks.
219. Perry Miller, "The End of the World," Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 220.