| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.3

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Sunken Treasure

RIGHTER, ROBERT W. The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xxii + 303 pp. Introduction, illustrations, maps, notes. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-514947-5.
Only certain people belonged in wilderness. So John Muir determined in The Mountains of California (1894), his first book and perhaps most impressive record of the Sierra, his Range of Light. Among those he cast out from the rugged country that he anointed a "terrestrial manifestation of God" were shepherds and their ravenous flocks, artists, and even the native peoples. The solo self in commune with Nature, a Transcendentalist trope Muir adopted from Emerson and Thoreau, denoted an archetype in which "pure wildness," by definition, was devoid of people—or at least of those who did not embrace the Romantic ethos. Moreover, anyone who threatened this sacred ground, and Muir's bracingly protective vision of it, would be expelled. Ever since, we have been fighting over who is most deserving of "pure wildness."	1
This has been especially true of one special patch of high country, Muir's beloved Hetch Hetchy valley, located in the Yosemite National Park. When it was selected as the site for a reservoir for San Francisco, a decision that presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson supported, Muir and a series of (mostly) eastern allies opposed its construction. Their opposition generated intense debate, often framed in retrospect as an Armageddon, pitting the values of wilderness against those of civilization, sparking Muir's prophetic denunciation of those promoting the valley's inundation: "Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's churches and cathedrals, for no holier temple has ever been built been consecrated by the heart of man."	. . .

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