What Happened in the
Rainier Grand's Lobby?
A Question of Sources

Char Miller

One of the enduring narrative tensions that animates much of American environmental historiography is the conflict between those who argue for the preservation of natural spaces and those who call for their conservation—and use. Made to stand as champions of these two apparently irreconcilable ideological positions are John Muir, one of the founders and first president of the Sierra Club, and Gifford Pinchot, who helped establish the Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and served as its first chief. The older Muir initially befriended the younger Pinchot; they met in June 1893 in the New York City home of James and Mary Eno Pinchot, when Muir was fifty-five and Pinchot was thirty-one. Thereafter they maintained a lively correspondence, and when possible they hiked and camped amid some of the West's most spectacular landscapes. Their amiable relationship allegedly soured in the late 1890s due to sharpening differences in their perspectives on the human place in nature. These differences came to outweigh the benefits they had derived from their excursions into the wild.1	1
No moment seems to have captured this rupture more vividly than an apparently heated exchange between the two men in the lobby of Seattle's Rainier Grand Hotel, sometime early in September 1897. Please note the qualifiers in the preceding sentence. Although many historians have recounted the incident in some detail and believe it signaled an irreparable breach in the men's personal relationship, and consequently in the two wings of the political movement with which they are so strongly identified, there is no incontrovertible evidence that it ever happened. I did not know that when I began work on a biography of Pinchot, in the pages of which—I must confess—I had expected to renarrate this tale because of its inherent drama and symbolic importance. It was only after I had read through the various secondary accounts that I noticed some small discrepancies that then forced me to sift through the relevant primary sources, research that could not confirm the substance of the story as it has been told.	2
That does not mean Muir and Pinchot did not have a confrontation at that time, just that the surviving records do not support such a claim, an additional qualification that should complicate subsequent narrations. That hesitation also (and often) drives my students to distraction: they want to know what happened exactly, and I can only shrug, a physical gesture of some heuristic value. Of greater import, I hope, is the experience my students have in reading through the documents below and wrestling with their many meanings and lacunae. I use this episode, for instance, to open an undergraduate seminar on environmental history, and on its first day we read aloud three versions of the story, the first narrated in Linnie Marsh Wolfe's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Muir, Son of the Wilderness (1945), the second in Lawrence Rakestraw's 1958 article "Sheepgrazing in the Cascades," and the third in Michael Smith's Pacific Visions (1987).2 The students are encouraged to circle those names, arguments, and ideas with which they are unfamiliar and to note alterations in the story as subsequent historians recast Wolfe's original construction. We then discuss what they do not know or understand, work our way through the many discrepancies embedded within these texts, and analyze the literary strategies each author employs to make her or his case:	3
The Story: First Narration Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness (1945), 275-76 . . .