Guardians of the Valley

March 1, 2022

Providing context for today's conservation efforts, King (Skeletons on the Zahara) relates what happened when environmentalist John Muir and his longtime editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, left 1889 San Francisco for Yosemite Valley. Muir was devastated by the depredations wrought there by mining, tourism, and logging, but Johnson persuaded him that they had to fight back. The result: the creation of Yosemite National Park and the launching of the U.S. environmental movement. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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January 30, 2023
Bestseller King (Skeletons on the Zahara) probes the transformative partnership between a writer and an editor in this sparkling history. Naturalist John Muir, “the father of our national parks, founder of the Sierra Club, and spiritual leader of the environmental movement,” began working with Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson in 1877, but they didn’t meet in person until 1889, when they traveled from San Francisco to “the holy temple” of Yosemite Valley, where Muir’s “enthrallment with nature... his belief in its worth, power, and sacredness” had “crystallize” 20 years earlier. But when Muir and Johnson visited, they saw a landscape devastated by damming, logging, grazing, mining, and tourism. Launching a preservation movement, the two “moved a mountain of greed and apathy” to have Yosemite declared a national park but lost the battle to save one of its most beautiful sections, Hetch Hetchy Valley, from being flooded to provide water to San Francisco. King vividly chronicles Muir’s evolution from “self-styled hobo” to forceful activist, goaded and nurtured by the “urbane” Johnson, and weaves in intriguing vignettes of Theodore Roosevelt, Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe, and others, as well as rhapsodic descriptions of the Sierra Nevada landscape. Fans of Ken Burns’s The National Parks documentary will cherish this inspired account of how an American treasure was saved. Photos.

February 15, 2023
A comprehensive account of John Muir's long battle to save Yosemite. Scottish immigrant and Sierra Club founder Muir and conservation-minded President Theodore Roosevelt are remembered as the saviors of Yosemite and the neighboring redwood-rich slopes of California's Sierra Nevada. However, King, the author of Skeletons on the Zahara and nonfiction adventure tales, demonstrates that many other players figure in that story, especially Robert Underwood Johnson, "one of America's most prominent magazine editors," who took it as his duty to "wrangle stories out of Muir" and urged him to take his considerable powers of communication to audiences via lecture tours and visits to Congress. Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and other areas were under full-scale assault in the Gilded Age. Foresters wanted the giant trees, miners wanted ores, and agricultural concerns and cities wanted the mountains' vast stores of water. On the latter, one of the titanic battles Muir and Johnson fought--and lost--was to include the Hetch Hetchy Valley in their proposed Yosemite National Park; instead, Hetch Hetchy fed San Francisco with water for generations. The two protagonists were very different. "Whereas Muir was a philosopher and a man of action in the outdoors, he felt hopeless at swaying policy makers," writes King. "Johnson, on the other hand, was an activist shaping the nation's conversation." Nonetheless, their collaboration was fruitful: Muir wrote for Johnson's magazines and took political leaders to see for themselves, while Johnson worked the halls of Congress. King's narrative is long but mostly lively, turning up small but meaningful moments of history--e.g., a gruesome train accident on a high grade or the felling of a giant redwood to cart off to exhibit in Chicago. The author is particularly adept at recounting the complex politics surrounding frontier resources in a time when official policy was utilitarian: multiple use and the greatest good for the greatest number of people--which, inarguably, preserving Yosemite forever accomplished. A welcome study of environmental politics in action.

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Starred review from March 1, 2023
In the age of Zoom, collaboration across countries and continents is commonplace. In the late nineteenth century, not so much. Yet the partnership between naturalist and conservationist John Muir in California and Robert Underwood Johnson, an East Coast man of letters, would result in nothing less than the creation of Yosemite National Park, the founding of the Sierra Club, and mutual concerted efforts to protect essential natural resources through sustained political and civic activism. Muir was a force of nature unto himself as a fearless explorer of wild places across the continent and captivating writer. Johnson, primarily in his role as editor of the then-influential magazine, Century, disseminated Muir's poetic narratives and prophetic assessments to the highest reaches of government. With the country's national parks and resources continually under threat from corporate exploitation and climate change devastation, it is essential to understand how such natural treasures came to be established so that the dedicated work of Muir, Johnson, and other environmentalists can continue and expand. Journalist and adventure writer King was inspired by a personal connection to Yosemite, and this comprehensively researched and compellingly readable history offers an intimate yet sweeping portrait of an inspirational friendship that literally altered the American landscape and enshrined the modern-day conservation movement.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.