What John Muir Could Teach Kristi Noem About Bad Dogs
Noem chose to shoot her troubling pointer in a gravel pit, while Muir took a major life lesson from his challenging canine companion.
Noem, in case you missed it, is the Republican governor of South Dakota. Facing a term limit this year and hoping to advance her political career, she has been openly angling for the vice-presidential spot on Donald Trump’s 2024 GOP ticket.
To advance her standing, Noem just this week published a memoir and manifesto entitled No Going Back. There she tells of the challenge she faced from Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer who ruined a pheasant hunt then crunched joyfully through somebody else’s flock of chickens. Noem had had enough. She dragged Cricket to a gravel pit and shot her. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done.”
Like Noem, John Muir once faced an uppity dog. To his credit, he never thought about shooting it. Instead, he made sure the critter lived on, an experience that widened his world.
Like Noem, John Muir once faced an uppity dog. To his credit, he never thought about shooting it. Instead, he made sure the critter lived on, an experience that widened his world.
It happened during Muir’s second long canoe trip in Southeast Alaska with a Tlingit crew and the Presbyterian missionary S. Hall Young. On a whim Young decided to bring along Stickeen, the aloof, multicolored mongrel his wife had received as a wedding present. The small dog came with serious attitude. Even though the local Tlingits took to Stickeen as a talisman of good luck, he avoided their dogs, refused play dates with their children, and acted friendly only toward those few dressed like white folks.
Muir didn’t like the idea of taking Stickeen along. He remembered, “I like dogs, but this one seemed so small and worthless that I objected to his going.”
Still, Young insisted, Muir relented, and Stickeen took his place in the dugout.
Well into the trip while camped west of Glacier Bay, Muir resolved to rise early the next morning and explore the ice field now known as Brady Glacier. A fierce rain storm that blew up overnight did nothing to forestall his plan. Skipping breakfast and coffee, sticking a piece of bread in his pocket, and grabbing an ice axe, he was off before anyone else in the camp was awake. Except, that is, for Stickeen, who insisted on coming along and could not be persuaded to return to camp. Again Muir gave in.
Soaked through but making good progress over the course of the day, man and dog crossed the glacier, and all was going well. Then the rain turned to cold, blinding snow, and Muir lost sight of his position in the vast field of riven ice. Leaping one by one across a series of crevasses, Muir hurried his pace in what he hoped was the direction back to camp. He realized that spending the night on the glacier looked all too possible:
We were hungry and wet, and the wind from the mountains was still thick with snow and bitterly cold, so of course that night would have seemed a very long one.
Then a great crevasse, far too wide to leap, blocked the way. Either Muir and Stickeen could retrace their steps, which would take hours and maroon them overnight, or they could bet their lives on the sliver of an ice bridge that crossed the gaping crevasse. A fall meant certain death.
Muir understood what he and Stickeen were facing:
Of the many perils encountered in my years of wandering on mountains and glaciers none seemed so plain and stern and merciless as this. And it was presented when we were wet to the skin and hungry, the sky dark with quick driving snow, and the night near.
For Muir and Stickeen, it was do or die. Muir chose to do.
The ice bridge crossed the crevasse diagonally 25 or 30 feet below the glacier’s main level. Swinging his ice axe, Muir cut steps down to the bridge, then edged step by slippery step along it to the opposite side, where he cut more steps up to the glacier’s surface. Muir had made it.
Meanwhile, Stickeen remained on the far side, crying and whining piteously at the icy abyss between him and his master for the day. In a sudden, agitated rush Stickeen scampered down the steps Muir had cut, crossed the bridge with precise four-legged footwork, and bounded up the far side to safety. The ecstatic dog raced back and forth, twirled, lay down, and rolled over, yipping, howling, and barking all the while.
Never before or since have I seen anything like so passionate a revulsion from the depths of despair to exultant, triumphant, uncontrollable joy.
The two fairly raced the whole wet way back to camp, arriving only a couple of hours short of midnight, too cold and tired to eat more than a few bites before collapsing into sleep.
Stickeen enlarged Muir’s sense of the oneness of being:
I have known many dogs, and many a story I could tell of their wisdom and devotion but to none do I owe so much as to Stickeen. At first the least promising and least known of my dog-friends, he suddenly became the best known of them all. Our storm-battle for life brought him to light, and through him as through a window I have ever since been looking with deeper sympathy into all my fellow mortals.
Noem might have done as Muir did and opened her heart to her recalcitrant pointer. But no, she reached for the gun and Cricket paid the price.
First reviews of Cast out of Eden
In Foreword Reviews, historian Erika Harlitz Kern wrote, “A revealing biography, Cast Out of Eden details the hypocrisy, cruelty, and astonishing achievements of John Muir.”
In the San Francisco Chronicle, environmental writer Peter Fish calls the book “anguished and angry…. Cast Out of Eden is a convincing, corrective portrait of a revered but flawed man, and of a movement’s original sins. It ends on a note of modest hope, as McNally jumps to the present to detail how Native Americans are claiming their rightful places in the nation’s national parks.”
Cast out of Eden Comes to Berkeley
Under the auspices of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, I’ll be offering a talk with Q&A session on the book on Friday, June 7, 10 a.m.–noon PDT. This session will be online only, both live-streamed and recorded for later viewing, so wherever you are, you can take part. To watch my informational video and to register, head over to the OLLI website. Please join me!
To steal a line from Lloyd Benson, Kristi Noem is no John Muir.