Skip to main content

A Vacation Among the Sierras by Thomas Starr King

Better known as "Starr King", he's got a mountain named for him and there's a statue in Golden Gate Park and there used to be one in Washington DC except someone declared they had no idea who he was. Rather than fix that ignorance, they demoted him. Also, my own "nursery school" was named for him: Starr King Parent-Child Workshop.

Well, I didn't know who he was either, so I decided to fix that ignorance, at least a little. He was a Universalist, then a Unitarian minister with a slight stature and a booming voice that was quite desired on the lecture circuit, it seems. He had much to say about morality and spirituality and tolerance and staying off the drink. He also traveled from time to time and would write about that, mostly as series of newspaper articles.

He moved from the east coast to San Francisco shortly before the Civil War and as an abolitionist, had much to say about that too. He is credited with "preserving California for the Union", which seems to be his great claim to fame and what has inspired the statuary, but he was plenty famous in his day overall. And he did it all before turning 40. Pneumonia and diphtheria brought him down before that birthday.

 Among his travel writings for newspapers was a series of 8 articles in the Evening Transcript (Boston) that were collected into a book in 1962 (just over 100 years after they were written) by the California Book Club. They added in an extensively researched introduction that, well, knocked King down a peg or two regarding that whole keeping California in the Union thing which many entities also get credit for and rightly so. It was unlikely that California was going to leave then, really. It turns the man into a man instead of a mighty hero, which is probably where men should be.

This is a book in copyright, however it is shared at Yosemite Online Library. It is in many formats there, but not my favorite ebook format EPUB, and the MOBI doesn't show how far along in a chapter I am! They state that it may be used for non-commercial uses so long as a note at the start is preserved. Therefore, I fixed it up for myself. While converting the format, I also fixed a half dozen or so typographic errors. (This book was a lot cleaner than the Chase book I got from there, but it was also about 1/5 as old at time of scanning.) While I was at it, I removed some of the "marvellous" double el spellings by this "traveller", filled in the extra el for "fulfil", and swapped some "re" endings to "er", modernizing the spelling. There was also a use of "staid" instead of "stayed" that seemed... unlikely to mean the one used.

I am making this EPUB version available here: A Vacation Among the Sierras by Thomas Starr King.

I left in the various links to books that you can also get from the Yosemite Online Library. They've got almost all the references that mention Yosemite in the introduction! There are a few that might intrigue the reader of this work. (Let me know if any seem like something I should have a go at cleaning up for a later share.)

 While reading this, keep in mind that he is writing for an audience in Boston. This audience may know him from the one guide-like book he published, The White Hills, about the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Maine. (I'm working on this book. It's going to take a lot of time.) He makes quite a few comparisons to those mountains that may not mean anything to far westerners.

 Other things I would be interested in: his other newspaper travel writings. A trip to Spain was mentioned. I know a lot of newspapers have been digitized, but if that includes the Evening Transcript all the way back to 1850, I do not know. It could be very incomplete by now even if they have. It was mentioned that he was nearly done with a second travel book, this one on the Sierra, when he died. I wonder what became of that a well. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Strava Heat Map and Open Street Map

Found me a new trick for editing the map, which is really nice for confirming that other people also see the paths I see. The Strava Global Heat Map . They seem to be getting quite a few to participate and, while the heat may not be strong, it often extends into backcountry routes. You can get it as a background for editing Open Street Map via Strava-iD . The background here is not as detailed as can be found on the heat map if you are logged in and may be an older data set. I'm not sure. I am sure that it is useful. For instance, I found that my path and the marked path for climbing Medicine Bow on the popular eastern side did not match up. They were very much of the same shape, which is always a warning bell that some GPS might have transposed itself sideways. Both paths seemed to be following a line that could be a trail, but frankly the pictures aren't that great for that spot. Which is correct? Mine was the only GPS trace uploaded to Open Street Map, so that layer wasn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Discoveries: Flower Crab Spiders

Once upon a time, while having some amazing Zion National Park rocks to look at, I took a moment to observe the flowers. There was one quite pretty penstemon getting pollinated by a bee. Except there was something wrong. The whole of the scene was very very still. The bee hung in front of the flower without so much as a wing flap. Where was physics? The natural laws were not being obeyed. A frozen tableau in Zion. I looked closer and found I wasn't seeing all of the bee. At first I saw something like two fangs and the negative space resolved itself into a large spider. The integrity of physics was restored, but flowers had just become very dangerous places. The things you find when out and about! But it does make a bit of sense. You hear that watering holes are one of the most dangerous places for wandering animals. This would just be the bee equivalent. I then returned home to those nice, safe flowers I'd known. A very familiar blue-dick hosting danger. Sp...
Post a Comment
Read more

Winter Reading: Yosemite Trails by J. Smeaton Chase

Yosemite Trails was ostensibly a guide book, but I expect that if I were getting it for that purpose, I'd be rather disappointed. It's rather like the posts on my own blog in that it describes the route that was taken including remarks about the quality of the trail and excellence of a campsite. Sometimes options are mentioned. When an opportunity arises, a little camp etiquette might get thrown in. However, he even spends a week of one trip not knowing for sure where he is. It is actually a story of traveling the trails of Yosemite. The first part contains a couple small stories plus a circumnavigation of the rim. The second part goes further afield in traveling the high country near the park. Published in 1911, he describes a familiar and unfamiliar place. The Tioga road, which I should follow for some fifteen miles, is a rough track built in historic days by the owners of the once famous Tioga mine, which, long since abandoned, lies near the crest of the Sierra about t...
Post a Comment
Read more