You’ve written that you found certain elements of Muir’s character that you didn't like. Did those have anything to do with racism or xenophobia?
Xenophobia, I don't find in John Muir. Some of his statements were probably a little insensitive or unkind, but they were written usually in a journal, and they were mostly about people he runs into. When he ran into Indians on the trail in Yosemite who were demanding cigarettes, tobacco, alcohol — John Muir was a fastidious kind of guy. He was not much of a drinker at that point in his life, so all those things repelled him. He had a lot of caustic things to say about a lot of people. He was not an easy person to get along with. I'm not sure I would have liked to go on a hike with him! [laughs] He was the kind of person who could easily offend people by his comments. But the other side of it is, this is maybe a huge paradox — he was a much-beloved man. So many people made friends with him over his lifetime and he continued those friendships.
There’s always a question of what is a racist. And this word is very loosely applied anymore. Believing in the inborn biological superiority of your group of people over others is, I think, the more classic definition of the term. I don’t find that in Muir. I find quite the opposite. There's a scrap of paper I found when I was going through his papers, doing my research. It was jotted down when he was off the coast of China. The Chinese never get into these discussions; it’s always about Blacks or Indians. Muir lived in a state with a growing Chinese population of immigrants, and that was extremely controversial. He hired Chinese workers on his fruit farm. And when he was traveling on the coast of China, he wrote on a little scrap of paper: “Some of the best people in the world are Chinese and we must not hate them. Hatred of any race of human beings is both foolish and wicked. We should not try to flock together too closely with the Chinese, for they are birds with feathers so unlike our own they seem to have been hatched on some other planet.”
John Muir was a complicated guy. When he says, “We shouldn't hate anybody,” he’s writing this to himself. He's not publishing it. But I think we should take that just as seriously as we take some of the more negative things he said. It's not always clear when he said negative things that he was opposed to people as such, or he thought that they were inferior, but maybe that culturally it was going to be hard to assimilate or amalgamate or create social bonds.