Existing comment:
Friends of Muir: John Burroughs:
"I love you, though at times I want to punch you or thrash the ground with you."
-- Burroughs to Muir
Both Burroughs and Muir have been credited with being the fathers of the conservation movement of the late 1800s. And both were good friends. They could never, however, agree on anything. They met in New York City, traveled to Alaska and extensively throughout the continental United States while corresponding regularly over the course of their lives. They became known to their friends as "The twa [two] Johnnies."
Muir was a western man and had made California his home, but travelled far and wide and connected to beauty in all environments. Burroughs was an eastern man and felt deeply linked to his Catskill Mountains of New York. This, and other philosophical differences, constantly kept the two at odds with each other. When Muir missed a sunset during the Harriman Expedition to Alaska in 1889, Burroughs chided him: "You ought to have been here fifteen minutes ago, instead of singing hymns in the cabin." The reply was quick and sharp: "Aye, and you Johnnie ought to have been up here fifteen years ago, instead of slumbering down there on the Hudson [River]." |