Lowell of the South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 1

Chapter 1: Lowell of the South
There are no lakes in any part of the region under consideration except a few near the
coast, a position which renders them of no value as regards water-power .
—George F. Swain (1885)
After months of planning and recovery from an industrial accident, John Muir began his
southern walking tour in late 1867 at an unusual and critical turning point in the region's
history. Well in advance of his better-known and published experiences of his first summer
in California's Sierra Mountains, Muir passed through Georgia in the wake of the American
Civil War on his “thousand mile walk” from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. After arriv-
ing in Gainesville, Georgia, Muir spent September 24 “sailing on the Chattahoochee” with
an old friend from Indiana. While cruising the “first truly southern stream” he had ever en-
countered, the two men set about “feasting” on ripe wild grapes that dropped into the unen-
cumbered upper Chattahoochee River. Muir and his host followed the apparently free-flow-
ing river's cue and currents and discovered masses of grapes floating effortlessly in slow
churning “eddies along the bank.” Other enterprising men working with the river from boats
and the shore easily collected the grapes from these pools where the river's current slacked.
Muir enjoyed some of the delicious grapes right out of the river, as well as the muscadine
wine they produced. “Intoxicated with the beauty” of the river's banks and intrigued by what
the banks farther down the river might look like, Muir briefly contemplated traveling the
Chattahoochee by boat to the gulf. However, he opted to forgo the water route in favor of
overland travel to really see the southern landscape, and eventually, he reached Augusta by
foot. 1
In deciding to walk and record his observations, Muir contributed to a set of social and
economic assumptions about the American South. John Muir wanted to disengage from an
“entangling society,” according to environmental historian and biographer Donald Worster,
but he did not avoid journaling and judging the region as a rural and uncivilized backwa-
ter. 2 Furthermore, Muir encountered a postbellum South that remained—like the majority of
the nation at the time—primarily an agricultural region with wild margins that lacked the
pristine wilderness usually associated with the Sierra Club's first president. 3 In his travels
across the Chattahoochee, Oconee, and Savannah River valleys, Muir “zigzagged … amid
old plantations” and encountered former slaves working and harvesting low-hanging bolls
in cotton fields for wages. Muir also encountered the “northern limit” of the longleaf pine
( Pinus palustris ) ecosystem. The trees fascinated Muir: “sixty to seventy feet in height, from