A library of books has been written about John Muir, many of which mention Robert Underwood Johnson, but not many adequately describe his long collaboration with Muir. In this book, Dean King remedies that oversight.

Muir’s life story and his contributions to the preservation of what is now Yosemite National Park have often been chronicled and King presents the highlights of that story. What King adds to the Muir story is who Robert Underwood Johnson was and what his role and contributions were in helping Muir in his many battles for protection of Yosemite.

The two men could not have been more different in their younger years. King writes that Muir “was a wilderness savant, mystic, and self-styled hobo, one who had rejected the entreaties of Emerson and others to come East and teach at Harvard. He remained a determined bachelor with no fixed address and barely enough possessions to fill a backpack.”

Robert Underwood Johnson and his wife, Katherine, on the other hand, were urbanites, living in New York, the nexus of American culture. Robert was an editor at Scribner’s Monthly, a prominent magazine with a wide national readership at a time when magazines and newspapers were highly important and significant influencers of public opinion. 

Muir ultimately settled down to married life and fruit farming in California, though he was always a “wilderness savant,” avid outdoorsman, curious naturalist, and crusading conservationist. As I read this book, I pondered who needed the other more in their relationship and concluded that, as King describes it, Muir needed Johnson more than Johnson needed him. A decade after Muir arrived in California he began agitating for protection of the natural world, particularly in the Sierra, and Johnson gave him the national voice that made him the historic figure that he became.

King describes the early careers of the two men and how, in 1878, Johnson learned of Muir, who had submitted an article to Scribner’s Monthly that had been enthusiastically received by the magazine and its readers. He and his fellow editors heard a strong voice in Muir’s article they believed would resonate with a national audience.

In 1881, Scribner’s name was changed to Century and Johnson became an associate editor. He cultivated relationships with important men at the time, including Theodore Roosevelt, and in King’s words, “one of his jobs was to stay on top of John Muir.” He did so, which was significant, because “what Johnson wanted, he usually got.”

Johnson was involved in other assignments for several years, and Muir was preoccupied with his fruit ranch and family, but in the late 1880s his love of adventure, exploration, and wild places was restored, his wife recognizing how critical it was to her husband’s well-being. He and Johnson met in person in San Francisco in 1889, spoke of Yosemite, and Johnson convinced Muir to lead him on a visit to this place about which he had written so much — Johnson had “wrangled” a dozen stories out of Muir over the years and wished to see this place that so inspired the savant and which Johnson had not only appreciated as an editor but as a reader and nature enthusiast, though the nature he knew might be far from the wild places about which Muir wrote.

King reviews the history of the Yosemite, its status as a California park, and the excursion there with Muir. Johnson learned from Muir and observed many threats to the Yosemite Valley, was struck by its beauty and that of its surroundings, and his life took a turn.

By this campfire at Soda Springs, Muir and Johnson began a conversation that would profoundly impact the way America preserved its most precious landscapes. Whereas Muir was a philosopher and a man of action in the outdoors, he felt hopeless in swaying policy makers. Johnson, on the other hand, was an activist, shaping the nation’s conversation, whether at his Brown House dinner table with the likes of Twain, Burroughs, Kipling, and Tesla; in the pages of Century Magazine; or in the halls of Congress.

Having heard Muir and having now experienced for himself the simultaneous beauty and degradation of Yosemite, he felt an urge to do something about it, and he thought the two of them could make a powerful case for stronger protections. Now all he had to do was overcome Muir’s skepticism that politicians would have the foresight and courage to protect the environment. So far, Muir had seen no such inclination. He feared that the decimation of Yosemite was inevitable: “The people of California are blinded by moneymaking and are indifferent to the destruction of their natural resources.”

Johnson convinced the dubious Muir that they should campaign to make the glorious country surrounding Yosemite Valley a national park, “creating a federal reserve so well managed that California would be eager to merge Yosemite Valley into it.”

When they returned to San Francisco a plan was in place — Muir would be “poet, heart, and soul of their two-man preservation movement, and Johnson the ringmaster.” The team got to work, Muir writing, Johnson editing, publishing Muir’s essays, and lobbying, and on October 1, 1890, much to the delight and astonishment of Muir, Johnson wired, “My Yosemite bill passed both houses and approved.” He added, “The Yosemite bill is of course the result of your very outspoken reference to the depredations in that region.”

President Benjamin Harrison signed the bill establishing Muir’s proposed Yosemite National Park, which was much larger than Yosemite Valley state park, and surrounded but did not include it. King writes, “The park borders in the bill matched Muir’s sketch. This remarkable achievement by Muir and Johnson was almost too good to be true: they had moved a mountain of greed and apathy.” He observes that the fight for Yosemite, despite this landmark moment, had only just begun, and the struggles for protection of Yosemite that followed are described in detail in Guardians of the Valley.

Two big challenges followed creation of Yosemite National Park in which Muir and Johnson were central figures. One was convincing California to cede Yosemite Valley back to the federal government, which had granted it to the new state back in 1864 for a state park. California was doing a poor job of protecting the park as required by the agreement to cede it to the state. The second was the battle to block a dam sought by the city of San Francisco out of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the national park which Muir considered a smaller but very valuable version of Yosemite Valley.

The first was achieved, the second not. King very ably recounts details of these political battles. Muir may have been reluctant to engage politically but saw that, with Johnson’s well-connected and very sophisticated and effective lobbying, the politics of preservation could bring the results he sought, so he became very engaged, not only in the Yosemite fights but in others as well.

Johnson wrote Muir often during the effort to establish a Yosemite National Park, encouraging him to write the articles he had promised as part of the national park campaign. King writes that at the bottom of the page of one letter, “Johnson handwrote one of the most important things he would ever say to Muir:

Why don’t you start an association for preserving California’s monuments & natural wonders — or at least Yosemite? It would be a good influence if you guarded carefully the membership. You’d have to face obloquy but you . . . are the one to do it and decent people would help. How timid you Californians are, anyhow!

 Muir responded, politely declining the suggestion. “He would do anything he could ‘to preserve nature’s sayings & doings’; however, he had ‘no genius for managing societies.’” King notes that, “But for Johnson’s relentlessness, that might have been that.” But, of course, eventually such an “association” was formed, and despite his reluctance, Muir was unanimously elected the first president of the Sierra Club.

John Muir was a man of “evangelical tendencies and deep conviction,” and King reveals how this was so, quoting him extensively as he describes Muir’s role in the Sierra Club and the battles for Yosemite. He writes, “In a sense Muir preached through nature and through his deep belief that nature would prevail. Until now he had been waging a lonely war in California against the commercial interests that were exploiting and destroying the forests, rivers, and mountains.”

While Johnson remained a steadfast partner, he was in New York, and with formation of the Sierra Club Muir had a close “band of friends and allies” at home in California. With others joining his Yosemite campaign there, he could go further afield, as he did with the National Forest Commission in the mid-1890s where he met Gifford Pinchot and other important national players in progressive conservation. His national profile and the reach of his preservationist ideas continued to grow, and he, Johnson, and the Sierra Club ultimately achieved the return of Yosemite Valley to the federal government and inclusion of it in Yosemite National Park.

King divides his book into four parts, the final two titled “The Water Stealers” and “A California Water War.” These tell the story of the corrupt water politics in San Francisco early in the 20th century, and quite a complex and convoluted tale it is. The pivotal event in this story is the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the devastation it caused, and the efforts of the city to assure a water supply for the rebuilding city that would serve better than the corrupt monopoly of Spring Valley Water Works that had failed the city more than once and especially in its time of crisis.

King provides detail on how the city, using the trauma of the earthquake to argue for a large volume of water from the Tuolomne River, which would require taking it from Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley, ultimately succeeded in damming the river in the park. This section is a strength of the book, telling the seedy backstory of the ultimate invasion of one of the early national parks more thoroughly than most books about John Muir.

Robert Underwood Johnson continued to be an important player in this chapter of Yosemite history, primarily as a lobbyist back in Washington where the decision to dam the Tuolomne in Hetch Hetchy was ultimately made by Congress. He and Muir stayed in close touch, strategizing about how to defeat the dam, and encouraging each other.

King reveals, in his telling of the Hetch Hetchy battle, how far Muir had come from his reluctance to engage in politics and how important Robert Underwood Johnson had been to that engagement. Muir, in King’s telling, seems conflicted, driven by strong desire on the one hand for a peaceful life in his beloved wilderness and with his family while on the other unable to ignore the threats to the natural world he loved and his compulsion to fight them. He did both, but as he grew older and the threats increased, he became both an “association man” and a very effective political influencer on the issues he cared so much about.

The way King juxtaposes the roles of Muir and Johnson in defense of the Yosemite country fills out this side of Muir’s complex life. After reading this account one wonders how different the history of Yosemite might have been had Robert Underwood Johnson not been the unrelenting goad to action for Muir. Neither man could have fought as effectively as they did without the other.

The battle for Hetch Hetchy was, of course, a loss deeply regretted by both men. Some have suggested Muir died on Christmas Eve 1914 of a broken heart over the fate of Hetch Hetchy Valley, but King thinks “that in all probability, given his unwavering faith and optimism, he died still firm in his belief that one day Hetch Hetchy would be set free again, and everything would turn out for the best.”

Whether Hetch Hetchy is “set free again” remains to be seen, but Muir would be happy to know that even the loss of this battle proved to be a rallying force for defense of national parks in the century following the failure to prevent the dam in Yosemite National Park. Johnson continued his distinguished career, focusing on culture, arts, and war relief during World War I.

King quotes from Johnson's memoir, published in 1923: “There has been only one John Muir. He was not a ‘dreamer,’ but a practical man, a faithful citizen, a scientific observer, a writer of enduring power, with vision, poetry, courage in a contest, a heart of gold, and a spirit pure and fine.” Johnson goes on to say that Muir was “likely to remain the one historian of the Sierra which he depicted with the imagination of a seer and the reverence of a worshiper.”

This was a fitting tribute to Johnson’s great friend and colleague, and Guardians of the Valley is a story of these two men’s historically important relationship very worth reading.