Recalling a wild stagecoach ride with a couple of California legends

Our best source of historical footnotes is old people who remember, but many of them die without ever having told their stories.

Some time ago a woman named Josephine Keeler wrote me about her memories of the San Francisco earthquake, in 1906.

How many people do you know who were there?

Now Mrs. Keeler has written again--this time about a memory that is probably unique. Do you know anyone else who rode in a stagecoach with both John Burroughs and John Muir?

Although several California public schools have borne those names, I doubt that John Burroughs and John Muir are very well known to the present generation of children, or even to their parents.

But both were celebrities of their day, popularly admired for their arduous explorations of California’s wilderness, for their writings on the beauty and wonder of nature, and for their work in behalf of conservation.

It was Muir who prodded the federal government into establishing our national parks, including Sequoia and Yosemite, in 1890. In 1897, President Grover Cleveland designated 13 national forests to be preserved from commercial exploitation, and when business interests induced Congress to delay this presidential action, Muir wrote two forceful magazine articles that swung Congress and the public over to the side of the reservations.

By 1903 Muir was so charismatic a camper and hiker that Teddy Roosevelt, then in his first term, went with him on an outing in Yosemite.

I happen to be one of those tens of thousands of California pupils who were exposed to John Muir especially because they happened to go to a John Muir junior high school. (Mine was in Whittier, and it has been replaced by a shopping center.) I don’t remember much about John Muir except that he was an intrepid mountain climber and had a long beard, although it wasn’t as long as John Burroughs’.

In his biography of Charles Lummis, whose stone house still stands on the Arroyo Seco below our house, Dudley Gordon tells of a former Los Angeles library employee who 50 years after the event recalled a highlight of his career:

“Once, upon entering (librarian) Lummis’ office, he found him talking with a couple of visitors. Lummis said, ‘Jimmy, I’d like to have you shake hands with John Muir and John Burroughs.’ �

It may have been while the two naturalists were in California on that visit that Josephine Keeler encountered them.

“On April 28, 1909,� she recalls, “Marshall and I were married and left on our honeymoon in Yosemite Valley. We took the train to El Portal and from there into the valley one traveled by stage.

“I don’t remember if it had four horses or two, but it was like a big truck with wooden seats. Each seat accommodated four people. Our seats were the first back of the driver.

“First I want to tell you how I was dressed. I had been married in my ‘going away suit’--a beautiful beige silk. I had a big leghorn sailor hat. As I had lots of hair, which I wore in a large coil on top of my head, the hat didn’t always stay in place. In the morning I had changed to a skirt, shirtwaist and jacket.

“On the seat with us was John Muir and on the seat beside the driver was John Burroughs, two of our greatest naturalists.

“John Muir was a friendly, outgoing person. He gave me my first lesson in geology. He explained the different pressures that made the narrow canyon walls and how the valley was formed. Also he told me the names of flowers and plants. A delightful man.

“John Burroughs was very different, very quiet, had a lot of very white hair. He would ask the driver to stop so he could walk ahead of our conveyance. Then he would sit on a large rock or tree stump and wait for us to catch up.

“The canyon was narrow and steep at this point. John Muir would always say to him, ‘Don’t walk too far, Johnny,’ or ‘Don’t get too tired.’

“John Muir also told us that he had written three books, one of them was the story of his little dog Stikeen that was with him when he crossed the Muir Glacier. We bought his books when we got settled and our children used the book about the little dog for book reports in school.

“When we reached the floor of the valley our friends left us as they were going to explore some back country.�

Mrs. Keeler thinks she would have been a better companion for the man who sat beside her on the stagecoach if she’d had some geology in school.

“I went to a private school for girls and as some of the sciences were extra, I did not take geology but took Latin in that period instead. How foolish!�

Mrs. Keeler is 95 years old, but she hasn’t rejected the technology of our time.

When her 14-year-old great-grandson wanted to interview her for his social studies class, he asked her to use a tape recorder. “It was a little disturbing at first,� she admits.

But her great-grandson got a B-plus and a letter of commendation from his teacher.

Mrs. Keeler notes that she has changed her address since she wrote me last: “I am now in a very fine retirement home called Regents Point (in Irvine). I much prefer my home, but this keeps the family from worry.�

I want her to know that it’s not too late to take geology.