Nature on an Empty Stomach

Almost a mile up the valley, on the other side of the cabin from which I had come, a herd of deer moved across a field.  I could just make out their bodies in the fading light of evening.  Dark brown bodies on a golden-brown field, now bare of the snow that still clung to the hillsides and lurked in shady patches under the cottonwoods of Otter Creek.  Otter Creek was the winding centerline of this valley, its course traced by cottonwoods that now stood dark and leafless.  I trained my binoculars on the deer.  Whitetails.  I’d be hunting them in a few days.  I counted twelve of them – a big herd, even for this area.  They were moving from Otter Creek, a thickly-populated corridor for cervine travel, west toward the Crazy Mountains.  I dropped my binoculars.  The snow-capped Crazies bounded the valley to the west, their peaks pushing into the clouds.  To the east, the flatlands surrounding Otter Creek ascended into sage-covered hills breached by coolies and interspersed with rock cliffs.  Beyond those hills, flatlands.  The western edge of the Great Plains.  It was a remarkable place to sit and survey the country.

I have wondered if this appreciation for natural grandeur is a modern development.  Did man have to know cities, buildings and roads before he could appreciate landscapes, mountains and rivers?  Did man first have to be certain that he could wrest sufficient food from the earth before he could appreciate its beauty?  Aldo Leopold – a nature writer who stands shoulder-to-shoulder in prominence with John Muir and Henry Thoreau – thought so.  In his Forward to Sand County Almanac, he wrote, “[t]hese wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured of a good breakfast.”

But I’m not so sure.  The fur trappers, for whom the availability of breakfast was frequently in doubt, appreciated the natural splendor of their surroundings.  Osborne Russell, a trapper in the 1830s who penned his memoirs in Journal of a Trapper, waxed eloquent about various natural scenes.  He was particularly enamored with, and was most moved to gush about, the Lamar Valley in what is now Yellowstone National Park.  “For my part,” Russell wrote upon one of his visits to the valley, “I almost wished I could spend the remainder of my days in a place like this.”  Zenas Leonard, clerk of the Walker Expedition and author of Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard, wrote about the natural beauty of various scenes, particularly the San Joaquin Valley.  Warren Ferris, a fur trapper who wrote his memoirs in Life in the Rocky Mountains, described the beauty of the Rockies.  Despite living outdoors almost all the time, and despite frequently foregoing a good breakfast, these trappers found aesthetic value in the wild things around them.  Leonard did note that, on occasion, the trappers were too concerned about survival to ponder pretty landscapes: when on the brink of starvation in Yosemite country, he wrote that “we spent no time in idleness – scarcely stopping in our journey to view an occasional specimen of the wonders of nature’s handy-work.”  But even then, when recounting the Sierra crossing that the Walker Expedition almost did not survive, Leonard recognized the beauty of his surroundings – even if his thoughts quickly returned to his empty belly.

Of course, Russell, Ferris, and Leonard were all Americans in the political, rather than native, sense – they came from the east where they had known cities, buildings and roads.  So if the question is whether an appreciation of natural beauty is inherent, or must be learned by exposure to landscapes altered by man, these three trappers – although they lived day-to-day in wilderness, and although the sources of their next meals were frequently in doubt – do not provide perfect answers.  A better test would be to asses the degree to which Native Americans appreciated natural beauty.  That’s a question I can’t answer, because the Indians didn’t leave much behind in the way of written records.  But we can make this observation: the historical record is replete with explorers, trappers, pioneers and settlers leaving the eastern settlements and heading west for wilder country.  But I can think of no example of a Native American leaving the wild country and seeking to live in a town.

The sun had long since slid behind the Crazy Mountains, and soon it would be dark.  I had no headlamp and a good distance to walk before I got back to the cabin.  Reluctantly, under a darkening sky tinged with orange, I rose to go.

A bison in Yellowstone National Park.

Picture taken in late September.