The internet is responsible for many bad things, spyware, pornography, spam, fake news, Donald Trump, etc. But there are wonderful things about it too. Because it made it possible over the weekend to track down this quote by John Muir from his paper on the Forests of Oregon. I can’t describe how pleased I was to finally find some words by Muir on my favorite subject! I had to make a graphic for emphasis.
I can’t tell you what a feeling it is to read that. Living in Martinez, John Muir’s home for 25 years and the town where he is buried it just felt SO WRONG not to hear him weigh in on the importance of beavers. You can tell in this quote that he knew beavers had the last laugh. I found it in a collection of essays and correspondence called “Steep Trails” carefully published four years after his death. Looking at this made me wonder where the phrase ‘beaver meadows’ first came from and how Muir knew it?
Viva Las Vegas –– When explorer Antonio Armijo came upon the place in 1829, he found bubbling springs, abundant beavers, and grassy beaver meadows. Armijo named the site Las Vegas – Spanish for “the meadows.” Beavers do much to shape the natural landscape. They fell trees along creeks and stack the logs and branches into dams. Before long, they’ve created wetlands that are magnets for nesting birds, from ducks and rails to warblers and blackbirds, like this one. In time, the beavers move on. The ponds fill gradually with soil and organic debris. They give way to marshes, the marshes to wet meadows, which dry a bit and, at last, to fertile expanses of green meadows. Las vegas.
It hurts my heart to read about Las Vegas as a green meadow filled with and by beavers, I doubt that Muir read Armijo, so I still wonder how he knew it. Apparently it was generally used to because Ben just wrote that it was used by in the trapping account of Black Beaver published in 1911. It was used widely enough that there are several towns called ‘beaver meadows’ so I’m still interested in how Muir came by it.
I also found this:
Indians, no doubt, have ascended most of the rivers on their way to the mountains to hunt the wild sheep and goat to obtain wool for their clothing, but with food in abundance on the coast they had little to tempt them into the wilderness, and the monuments they have left in it are scarcely more conspicuous than those of squirrels and bears; far less so than those of the beavers, which in damming the streams have made clearings and meadows which will continue to mark the landscape for centuries.
Steep Trails, John Muir
A collection of writings published in 1918, after his death
Chapter XVIII The Forests of Washington
Do you think maybe he wrote this at the ‘scribble desk’ in his home in Martinez? I hope so. I hope so. I hope so.
