How a Notion Became a Story
Genre sets what’s in, what’s out, and why. That helped.
Once the work of promoting The Modoc War wound down, I turned to trying to figure out what my next project would look like. The link between conquest, colonialism, and America’s public wildlands drew me as a topic to investigate further. John Muir figured into it in one way or another, but I wasn’t yet sure how or where.
My Modoc War research had uncovered Muir’s trip to the Lava Beds battleground soon after the war and made me aware of his newspaper depictions of Modoc fighters as dark-skinned demons rising up against America’s enlightened civilization. Muir returned to this landscape some years later when he proposed that Mount Shasta and its surrounding wildlands, including the Lava Beds, be set aside:
The Shasta region is still a fresh unspoiled wilderness, accessible and available for travelers of every kind and degree. Would it not then be a fine thing to set it apart like the Yellowstone and Yosemite as a National Park for the welfare and benefit of all mankind, preserving its fountains and forests and all its glad life in primeval beauty?
Despite its once-bloody reputation, the Mount Shasta region was now safe for wilderness tourists. The insurgent Modocs had been crushed and exiled to Oklahoma, and the other tribes in the area were too beaten down to pose any threat.
Besides, the tribes steered clear of the mountain, Muir reassured his readers, because of its steam vents, fumaroles, and other volcanic features:
Mount Shasta, so far as I have seen, has never been the home of Indians, not even their hunting-ground to any great extent, above the lower slopes of the base. They are said to be afraid of fire-mountains and geyser-basins as being the dwelling-places of dangerously powerful and unmanageable gods.
The same claim had long been made for Yellowstone, and it was as wrong there as it was for Mount Shasta. In fact, the mountain held sacred, life-giving significance for the Wintus, Shastas, Ajumawis, Atsugewis, Modocs, and Karuks. With ancestral roots reaching back 7,000 years, the tribes revered the peak.
The false claim that Muir failed to fact-check served his purpose, though. It portrayed the mountain as empty, pristine, and pure, as well as useless to the Indigenous locals. Nothing stood in the way of making it a public wildland where visiting Euro-Americans might experience the miracle of creation as if returning to the unspoiled days of Eden. And the key to raising a landscape up to this high spiritual purpose was removing the peoples native to it.
Some decades and a few dozen national parks later, the idea that Muir helped popularize was spelled out in the 1964 Wilderness Act:
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
No matter that a wild landscape was an Indigenous homeland. To make that landscape a wilderness, the tribes needed to be gone.
In the years since the Wilderness Act, several scholars and writers have zeroed in on conquest, dispossession, and preserved wilderness. Mark David Spence’s Dispossessing the Wilderness, Mark Dowie’s Conservation Refugees, and Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature detail the consequences of declaring a landscape a wilderness, fencing the place off, driving out its Native peoples, and posting wardens and rangers to keep them from returning.
Often called fortress conservation and epitomized by Yellowstone and Yosemite, this American model has become the default international paradigm for protecting wild lands.
Linking colonialism to fortress conservation made some sense as a book topic, so I pulled my research together, wrote a high-level outline, and gave the project a working title: Decolonizing the Wilderness.
Righteous as this idea was, though, I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for it. My outline, I slowly realized, offered up an argument fit for a legal brief or an academic monograph, but it lacked the breathing, flesh-and-blood reality of a story.
Readers want narratives; so do writers. That’s where the juice flows.
While my writer’s mind was chewing on this dilemma, I signed up for a “Writing Nonfiction Like a Novel” workshop led by T. J. Stiles. He’s written exceptional biographies of landmark Americans Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jesse James, and George Armstrong Custer, work that has won him the National Book Award as well as two Pulitzers. Stiles knows what he’s doing.
In the workshop Stiles talked about fitting form to material to give a book shape, and he offered up the genre called selective biography: the writer focuses the narrative of the subject’s life within the frame of a particular, limiting perspective. Everything inside the frame is in; everything outside is out.
Stiles said he had used this approach with Custer’s Trials, which recounts the cavalry officer’s successes and failures through the lens of his courts martial, saving the one following the disaster at the Greasy Grass (a. k. a. Little Bighorn) for the book’s epilogue. Selective biography, Stiles explained, helped him escape the trap of defining Custer by his death and tangling the book in the eternally contentious debate over what actually happened during the battle. Stiles focused instead on Custer’s life.
In the weeks after the workshop, I began to see that selective biography offered a way to shape my vague idea about decolonizing wilderness into a narrative centering John Muir. I didn’t need to go into depth on Muir as nature mystic and prophet; Donald Worster had done that well in A Passion for Nature. Instead, I could tell the tale of Muir’s life within the frame of his writings and public advocacy toward tribal peoples and their homelands.
With that, my vague idea took flesh and blood and became a story. It was time to start writing Cast out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness.
Further reading
Mark Dowie, Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples
Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation
Marl David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon, Jesse James, and Custer’s Trials
Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
Save on pre-orders
Cast out of Eden publishes on May 1. Order a copy now for delivery on the publication date, and you’ll save 40% off the cover price. Be sure to use discount code 6AS24 at the University of Nebraska Press website.
Robert- I like your commitment in defining "wilderness" in its own right. With such history of claims, ownership, tribes, and colonization---I do believe the keen sense of real meaning of the word is a worthy pursuit.