**B**

**BEARS, NATURAL HABITAT**

\"To him almost everything is food except granite.\"

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.173

"There are bears in the woods, but not in such numbers nor of such
unspeakable ferocity as town-dwellers imagine, nor do bears spend their
lives going about the country like the devil, seeking whom they may
devour.\"

STEEP TRAILS, pg.223

\"Bears are peaceable people and mind their own business, instead of
going about like the devil seeking whom they may devour.\"

###  OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.28

\"After Uncle Sam\'s soldiers, bears are the most effective forest
police but some of the shepherds are very successful in killing them.\"

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.188

\"The Sierra bear, brown or gray, the sequoia of the animals, tramps all
over the park, though few travelers have the pleasure of seeing him.\"

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.172

\"On many of the trees, at a height of six or eight feet, their
autographs were inscribed in strong, free flowing strokes on the soft
bark where they had stood up like cats to stretch their limbs.\"

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.315

**BEARS, MUIR\'S FIRST MEETING**

\"In my first interview with a Sierra bear we were frightened and
embarrassed, both of us, but the bear\'s behavior was better than
mine.\"

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.174

**BEARS FOOD**

\"And as if fearing that anything eatable is all his dominions should
escape being eaten, he breaks into cabins to look after sugar, dried
apples, bacon, etc. Occasionally he eats the mountaineer\'s bed."

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.173

\"What digestion! A sheep or a wounded deer or a pig he eats warm, about
as quickly as a boy eats a buttered muffin: Or should the meat be a
month old, it is still welcomed with tremendous relish.\"

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.173

**BEARS FOOD cont.**

"Bears, too, roam this foodful wilderness, feeding on grass, clover,
berries, nuts, ant-eggs, fish, flesh, or fowl, -with but little
troublesome discrimination. Sugar and honey they seem to like best of
all, and they seek far to find the sweets; but when hard pushed by
hunger they make out to gnaw a living from the bark of trees and rotten
logs, and might almost live on clean lava alone."

STEEP TRAILS, pg.27

**BEAR KINSHIP**

Thoughts on Finding a Dead Yosemite Bear

\"Toiling in the treadmills of life we hide from the lessons of Nature.
We gaze morbidly through civilized fog upon our beautiful world clad
with seamless beauty, and see ferocious beasts and wastes and deserts.
But savage deserts and beasts and storms are expressions of God\'s power
inseparably companioned by love. Civilized man chokes his soul as the
heathen Chinese their feet. We depreciate bears.

But grandly they blend with their native mountains. They roam the sandy
slopes on lily meads, through polished glacier canyons, among the solemn
Firs and brown Sequoia, Manzanita, and chaparral, living upon redberries
and gooseberries, little caring for rain or snow. Magnificent bears of
the Sierra are worthy of their magnificent homes. They are not
companions of men, but children of God, and His charity is broad enough
for bears.

There are no square edged inflexible lines in Nature. We seek to
establish a narrow line between ourselves and the feathery zeros we dare
to call angels, but ask a partition barrier of infinite width to show
the rest of creation its proper place.

Bears are made of the same dust as we, and breathe the same winds and
drink the same waters. A bear\'s days are warmed by the same sun, his
dwellings are overdomed by the same blue sky, and his life turns and
ebbs with heart-pulsings like ours, and was poured from the same First
Fountain. And whether he at last goes to our stingy heaven or no, he has
terrestrial immortality. His life not long, not short, knows no
beginning, no ending. To him life unstinted, unplanned, is above the
accidents of time, and his years, markless and boundless, equal
Eternity. God bless Yosemite bears!\"

WILDERNESS WORLD OF JOHN MUIR, pg.313

**BEAUTY**

\"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray in,
where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul
alike.\"

THE YOSEMITE, pg.198

\"I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact
with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more,
because I have discovered that I also live in \`creation\'s dawn.\' The
morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made,
becomes more beautiful every day.\"

WILDERNESS WORLD OF JOHN MUIR, pg.311

**BEES**

###  MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA, Chapter XVI, The Bee-Pastures

**BIGHORN SHEEP**

\"The largest of the canon animals one is likely to see is the wild
sheep, or Rocky Mountain bighorn, a most admirable beast, with limbs
that never fail, at home on the most nerve-trying precipices, acquainted
with all the springs and passes and broken-down jumpable places in the
sheer ribbon cliffs, bounding from crag to crag in easy grace and
confidence of strength, his great horns held high above his shoulders,
wild red blood beating and hissing through every fiber of him like the
wind through a quivering mountain pine.\"

STEEP TRAILS, pg.268

**BIRDS**

"But fortunately one's first instinctive love of song-birds is never
wholly obliterated, no matter what the influences upon our lives may be.
I have often been delighted to see a pure, spiritual glow come into the
countenances of hard businessmen and old miners, when a song-bird
chanced to alight near them."

MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA, pg.204

Blue jays

"Just as we arrived at the shanty, before we had time to look at it or
the scenery about it, David and I jumped down in a hurry off the load of
household goods, for we had discovered a blue jay's nest, and in a
minute or so we were up the tree beside it, feasting our eyes on the
beautiful green eggs and beautiful birds-our first memorable discovery."

MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, pg.35

Bob-whites

"The loud clear call of the handsome bob-whites was one of the
pleasantest and most characteristic of our spring sounds, and we soon
learned to imitate it so well that a bold cock often accepted our
challenge and came flying to fight."

MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, pg.85

Redwing

"Redwing blackbirds\...enjoy an exhilarating feast and after all are
full they rise simultaneously with a quick birr of wings like an old
fashioned church congregation fluttering to their feet when the minister
after giving out the hymn says, \`Let the congregation arise and sing.\"

MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, pg.80

Water-Ouzel

MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA, The Water-Ouzel, Chapter XIII

**BIRDS cont.**

### Quail

"Oh, what bonnie, bonnie birds!" we exclaimed over the first that fell
into our hands. "Oh, what colors! Look at their breasts, bonnie as
roses, their necks aglow wi' every color juist like the wonderfu' wood
ducks. Oh, the bonnie, bonnie creatures, they beat a'! Where did they a'
come fra, and where are they a' gan? It's awfu' like a sin to kill
them!"

WILDERNESS WORLD OF JOHN MUIR, pg.46

**BISON**

\"I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of
things they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might
have been made without barbarous wickedness.\"

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.335

**BLINDNESS, HIS ACCIDENT**

\"The sunshine and the winds are working in all the gardens of God, but
I am lost.\"

LETTERS TO A FRIEND, April 3, 1867, pg.6

\"I am thankful that this affliction has drawn me to the sweet fields
rather than from them.\"

LETTERS TO A FRIEND, June 9, 1867, pg.9

**"**My days were terrible beyond what I can tell, and my nights were if
possible more terrible. Frightful dreams exhausted and terrified me."

SON OF THE WILDERNESS, pg.104

**BLIZZARD, SIERRA**

\"\...the trees, bending in the darkening blast, roar like feeding
lions\"

OUR NATIONAL PARKS, pg.250

**BOOKS**

\"I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show
coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes
to call attention\....One day\'s exposure to mountains is better than
cartloads of books.\"

JOHN OF THE MOUNTAINS, pg.94 -5

**BOYS**

\"Boys are often at once cruel and merciful, thoughtlessly hard hearted
and tender hearted, sympathetic, pitiful and kind in ever changing
contrasts. Love of neighbors, human or animal grows up amid savage
traits, coarse and fine.\"

###  MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, pg.23

\"Some fifty years later, when I visited Scotland, I got one of my
Dunbar schoolmates from whom I obtained permission to go upstairs to
visit our bedroom window and judge what sort of adventure getting on its
roof must have been, and with all my after experience in mountaineering,
I found that what I had done in daring boyhood was now beyond my
skill.\"

MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, pg.23

**BOYS cont.**

\"So far from complete at times is sympathy between parents and
children, and so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting,
biting, climbing pagans.\"

MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, pg.6

**BURNS, ROBERT**

"Wherever a Scotsman goes, there goes Burns."

JOHN OF THE MOUNTAINS, pg.436

"On my first long walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico I carried a
copy of Burns's poems and sang them all the way. The whole country and
the people, beasts and birds, seemed to like them. In the Sierra I sang
and whistled them to the squirrels and birds, and they were charmed out
of fear and gathered close about me."

JOHN OF THE MOUNTAINS, pg.436

**BUTTERNUT**

Mammoth Cave \"Only a butternut seems, by its angular knotty branches,
to sympathize with and belong to the cave, with a fine growth of
Cystopteris and Hypnum.\"

THOUSAND MILE WALK TO THE GULF, pg.12

**BREAD**

Muir proffering advice on how prospectors should make bread in effect,
how to create sourdough starter.

\"If you must have your bread old fashioned and light bloated into a
fluffy mass full of airholes then instead of a heavy case of powders
take a quarter ounce of baker\'s compressed yeast to start with, and
after each baking put a handful of the fermented dough into the flour
sack, and with this store you may go on raising cerealiane billows as
long as you like.\"

SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, Oct. 1, 1897

\"Good bread, on which your climbing and digging depends, may be made
direct from the flour-sack, with a little salt and water stirred in.
After the dough is worked to the required firmness squeeze it into thin
cakes about the size of ship biscuits, throw them on hot coals raked
from the heart of your camp fire; turn them before they begin to burn,
and when firm enough set them on edge to be toasted until thoroughly
baked through.\"

SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, Oct. 1, 1897