John Muir The ice that started a fire by Kim Heacox 2016 212pg

 John Muir; The great American Naturalist 22/10/18

.This book is about the glaciologist, explorer, conservationist and writer John Muir and gives the background to the subject and interesting aspects of American history. Also our first cruise was to Alaska and I now understand what I saw better.

William Seward had been Lincoln Secretary of State and now he held the post under Andrew Johnson, He bough Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million under Alexander 2nd as Russia knew she could not defend the territory and needed the money after the Crimean War and the 1861 emancipation of serfs.  The US was in a state of Reconstruction after the Civil War and were hard pressed for money and the sea otter for furs had mostly been hunted out leaving the territory little values and it was called Seward's Folly.
(1838 -1914)John Muir was born in southern Scotland  in where there was a very literate population. The family moved to Wisconsin where from the age of  12 he worked the family farm and his father forced the bible on the family. This is about the first Alaska explorer with the missionary Young
 Wordsworth's romantic poetry influenced them and showed God in nature. He influenced the preservation of the Lake District in England.
1871 Ralph Waldo Emerson met Muir at Yosemite and influenced him, in the same way as Emerson had met John Adams the 2nd President who had mentored him at Braintree in 1825.
1582 Edinburgh University had been established and  in the Scottish Enlightenment of 18C had more students than Oxford Cambridge combined.
1619 Descartes Principia Philosophae was that man was above nature that must be subdued.
Francis Bacon  " the world is made for man, not man for the world,
1620 The Mayflower arrived in New England and 200 years later most hardwood forests had been felled.
1770 James Cook circumnavigated the Antarctic.

1823 James Fenimore Cooper first  novel The Pioneers followed by other novels on the early settlers of the East Coast.
1804 to 1806 Lewis and Clark expedition to that crossed to the Pacific Ocean.
  1826  George Catlin an artist in the west commented on the destruction of the Indians and bison.
1843 John James Audubon wrote about the destruction of the bison.
1863 the Civil war had killed 625 000  Americans, and the whole Southern way of life had been destroyed. Lincoln had explained that the whole country had profited from slavery now the trend was to conquer the west.
1872 Yellowstone made a national park under Ulysses Grant.
1883 Glacier Bay Alaska attracted tourists on ships.
1890 Yosemite made a national Park by President Benjamin Harrison to stop sheep grazing there and felling the trees.
1891 Boone and Crocket club set up in NY with Teddy Roosevelt to preserve the wild.
1892 Sierra Club set up in Berkley
          Svante Arrhenius a Swedish scientist speculated on the "hydrocarbon Problem" and the CO2 effect on the air. He won the Noble Prize for science in 1903 for work on conductivity.
1893 Chicago World Fair  the hamburger and Ragtime music of Scot Joplin, a smallpox epidemic, internal combustion engine   alternate current, originate here.
           Fredrich Turner wrote a thesis titled "With the American Frontier gone'.
1896 Klondike Gold Rush portrayed by Jack London. John Nordstrom a Swede made money here and set up department stores all over the USA.
 1899 Edward Harriman (father of Averell Harriman) wealthy road and rail magnet chartered a ship George W Elder and took American greatest scientists including John Muir on a 2 month expedition to Alaska - it took these scientist years to document what they had studied there. After an earthquake later that year Glacial Bay was inaccessible due to ice that had broken off. The lengthening and receding of glaciers is understood today to be relevant to sea temperature.

1901 Teddy Roosevelt becomes president and received Booker T Washington as the first black guest to the White House.
1903 in Florida the first Bird Preserve made. Wright Brothers aeroplane, trans Atlantic radio transmissions.
         John Muir toured India and Egypt but avoided the Holy Land as there was a cholera epidemic.
1906 American Antiquities Act protected the Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon Park, Olympus National Park
        Earthquake destroys San Francisco.
1919 Grand Canyon becomes a national park
A kilo of oil can produce twice the energy of a kilo of coal.
Mark Twain lived from Haley's Comet in1835 to Haley's Comet 1910  75 years
1980 Jimmy Carter made large parts of Alaska a national park.
---------------------------------------------------------------------