A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada

by Robert Leonard Reid

The first and only anthology of writings about the Sierra. Contains selections from the first century-and-a-half of recorded history of the Sierra Nevada written by explorers, immigrants, poets, travelers, scientists, conservationists and mountain climbers. Here, of course, are Clarence King, John Muir, and David Brower, but also Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Genres: History

363 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1983

Reviews

[Carl R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an old book (1983) but nowhere near as old as its subject. Robert Leonard Reid''s sterling collection of articles and essays and stories and poems about the history and nature of California's Sierra Nevada comes as close as mere words can to fill the reader with an awe akin to visiting the majestic peaks themselves. Yosemite is the centerpiece of the book, but Reid wanders up and down the mountain range from north to south, east to west and deep into the heart of what makes it all so very special.

He delves into the before-the-white-man history of the place with a merciless eye on the depredations native Americans visited on one another. The Ahwanee vs. the Yosemite, being the main actors in that drama. However, those skirmishes were as nothing compared to the all-too-familiar horrors the incoming Europeans and their ilk visited upon the natives. The whole kit and kaboodle, as far as these rapacious invaders were concerned, belonged to them, and death to him who first cried "hold, enough."

Actually it didn't matter what they cried. They were done for. Herded off to reservations to clear the way for. . .

To begin with, it was for cattle and sheep to trample and graze the glorious landscape to death. Thanks to the intervention of Teddy Roosevelt and other minions of the federal government (remember them?) the place was preserved as a park. Of course, it continued to be assaulted by timber kings, miners, and eventually, most of all, it turned out, by tourists.

Through his wisely-chosen compendium of writings, Reid manages to spotlight all these conflicts yet preserve the eloquent and poetic musings of writers ranging from John Muir to poets as diverse as Walt Whitman and Gary Snyder. amid all that fine poetry and prose we encounter the explorers and mountaineers. The ones who dared to clamber to impossible heights and over the highest elevations on the continent and who invented techniques and devices to help them up and over so that future generations could follow in their footsteps.

John Muir writes poetic lines about a night he spent weathering a tumultuous storm amid the boughs of a swaying pine. Virginia Reed recalls the horror of her family when--she but a young girl at the time-- they suffered through the wretched and fatal trials as part of what we now call the Donner Party. Brett Harte adds a gruesome short story about "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." Yet, David Brower, one of the founders of The Sierra Club, calls these mountains "a gentle wilderness."

"Neither California nor the rest of America," he writes, "is rich enough to lose any more of the Gentle Wilderness or poor enough to need to."

I conclude with these lines of wonder, begging you to ignore for the moment, the historical inaccuracies of Walt Whitman's call to the now-widely-despised Christopher Columbus:

(Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave.
The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream)

I'm sure John Muir would agree.

[Michael McCue · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada is a collection of writings edited by Robert Leonard Reid in 1982. Reid is a math professor, writer and Sierra Club Member. The book is made up of seven sections including; The Explorers, The Vacationers, The Mountaineers, The Conservationists and several others. Among the authors excerpted in A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada are John Muir, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Charles Fremont, Robert Louis Stevenson and John McPhee. The selections were well chosen. Even though I had read many of the whole books some of these chapters were taken from I would say that reading A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada was well worth the time and effort.

Reid's introduction to the chapter that was an editorial in the 1890 Atlantic, The Carcase of a Horse, could be addressing the recent takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Writing in 1982 Reid said "private interests attempted to wrest public-interest lands away from the Federal Government during the Land Grab of the 1940s and the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1980s. Supporters of the takeovers put forth the specious argument that local people should control local lands, ignoring the fact that this is not an argument at all but a mandate for exploitation. However plodding and impersonal federal management of national interest lands may be, Washington has the interests of the nation at heart, while local managers have only their own. "