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John Muir
LEFT: Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir going out of the Yosemite Valley on May 15, 1903
anxious suggestion, we bought an old army musket, with a few pounds of quail shot and large buckshot, good, as the merchant assured us, for either birds or bears.” After spending a week and a half in Yosemite, awed by nature’s spectacle, the two made their way back down into the valley foothills, via Mariposa. Both Muir and friend Chilwell found work on a Hopeton ranch owned by Thomas Egleston, harvesting wheat, breaking wild horses and shearing sheep. This ranch is on what is now Turlock Road west of Cox Ferry Road. There they were seated for a meal where Chilwell recited complaints about having to live on meals of flour and water without meat. Muir wrote that Chilwell “ate so many hot biscuits at that table, and so much beans and boiled pork, that he was sick for three or four days afterwards, a trick the despised Yosemite diet never played him.” Chilwell went his own way, while Muir stayed in Merced Falls, working on a ferry. He was then hired to shear sheep, a Pat Delaney hired him. On June 3, 1869, Muir, Delaney, Billy, “a Chinaman” and “a Digger Indian” then left the La Grange ranch and headed into the brushy foothills, probably in a southeast direction. Five days later they were in a valley of
your foot would press upon 100 flowers at each step.” He wrote: “Crossing this greatest of flower gardens and the San Joaquin River at Hill’s Ferry, we followed the Merced River, which I knew drained Yosemite Valley, and ascended the foothills from Snelling by way of Coulterville. We had several accidents and adventures. At the little mining town of Coulterville we bought flour and tea and made inquiries about roads and trails, and the forests we would have to pass through. The storekeeper, an Italian, took kindly pains to tell the pair of wandering wayfarers, newly arrived in California, that the winter had been very severe, that in some places the Yosemite trail was still buried in snow eight or ten feet deep, and therefore we would have to wait at least a month before we could possibly get into the great valley, for we would surely get lost should we attempt to go on. As to the forests, the trees, he said, were very large; some of the pines eight or ten feet in diameter. “In reply I told him that it would be delightful to see snow ten feet deep and trees ten feet thick, even if lost, but I never got lost in wild woods. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘go, if you must, but I have warned you; and anyhow you must have a gun, for there are bears in the mountains, but you must not shoot at them unless they come for you and are very, very close up.’ So, at last, at Mr. Chilwell's 209MAGAZINE.COM
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