FROM THE DOLLAR TO THE MOON
Chapter 3 – A spirit of adventure (page 2 of 2)
by Sarah Powell
| "Over the sea to Skye" Flora Macdonald, the renowned Jacobite heroine who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie to escape from Scotland following his defeat at Culloden in 1746, also sought a new life in America. Following in the footsteps of thousands of other Highlanders fleeing the aftermath of Culloden, Flora, her husband Allen (also a Macdonald) and their seven children emigrated, settling in North Carolina in 1774. But Flora's sojourn was to be short-lived. Some time following the imprisonment of her husband for his support of the British during the American Revolution, Flora returned to her native Skye. At her death in 1790 she was buried in Kilmuir churchyard on Trotternish, some three miles north of Monkstadt House near Uig – the house to which she had brought Prince Charles Edward Stuart, disguised as her maid, after they sailed "over the sea to Skye". |
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Exploitation, exploration and conservation
Concepts of exploration, exploitation and conservation have become closely entwined. The first expedition to cross, explore and survey America was led in 1804 by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark who documented its geography, climate, wildlife, mineral resources and Indian population, and opened up the American West. Clark was a Virginian of Scottish descent, and variously frontier soldier, explorer, governor and Indian agent. Launched by President Jefferson, the Lewis and Clark expedition took eighteen months to reach the Pacific coast, following the Missouri and Columbia rivers. Eighteen months sounds astonishing but it was more than fifty years later, in 1858, that the first stagecoach crossing of the West was achieved, and this took twenty-four days. The first transcontinental railroad followed just over a decade later.
The names of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, meanwhile, have been commemorated in the Boone and Crockett Club, an organisation set up in 1888 to conserve and protect the buffalo that, by 1880, had been shot almost to extinction by settlers, professional hunters and sportsmen. The lumbering beast was just too easy a target. Meanwhile Muir Woods, the John Muir Wilderness and John Muir Trail, all twentieth-century initiatives, are a tribute to the Scots-born naturalist, explorer and Sierra mountaineer John Muir.
John Muir was the founder of the Yellowstone National Park and is considered the father of the US conservation movement. Born in Dunbar, Scotland in 1838, eleven years later Muir moved with his family to Wisconsin. A passion for exploration prompted him, as a young man, to trek the thousand miles from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico. He had planned to continue on southwards to the Amazon, but malaria forced him to make a diversion to California where Muir was awe-struck by the Yosemite and High Sierra Mountains. This was to lead to a lifetime of exploration and promotion of conservation in the region.
A profile of John Muir in National Geographic describes how this led, after his death, to designation of a 212-mile long trail bearing his name, rising from the Yosemite Valley, following the crest of the Sierra mountains to end atop 14,494 ft. Mount Whitney. We can but imagine the challenges of the trek in Muir's day, when mules would be loaded up with "wood-burning stoves and iceboxes".**
John Muir's inspiration and recommendations were to lead to the establishment in 1890 of the Yosemite National Park, and two years later Muir was one of the founders of the conservationist Sierra Club. Under John Muir's influence, notes Galen Rowell in National Geographic, Theodore Roosevelt's administration "was to make the most sweeping conservation effort in the nation's history".
The traditional quest for knowledge
A pioneer in a perhaps more contemporary mould was Melville Bell Grosvenor, grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and, from 1957 to1967, Editor and President of the National Geographic Society. In this role Melville was following in the footsteps of his father. But he was notable in his own right for his love of maps (and consequent introduction of the National Geographic Atlas of the World), life-long interest in photography (he was a pioneer of aerial colour photography), writing (twenty-six articles for National Geographic) and great sense of adventure.
An article celebrating Grosvenor's life and contribution to the National Geographic Society describes how, during his 58-year association with the Society, he promoted greatly increased sponsorship of scientific research and expeditions, expanded the Society's publication list, and launched its first television series. It was during his editorship that the magazine first appeared in full colour and that photographs appeared on the distinctive yellow-bordered cover. Membership doubled.
A passionate sailor and world traveller, Grosvenor, fondly known as "The Skipper", "steered a course that made the National Geographic Society the largest non-profit educational organization on earth – his bequest to the enrichment of the mind of man".*** What a fitting memorial to a man who so passionately espoused a quest for knowledge, serving as living proof that the Scots pioneering spirit lives on down the generations...
**"The John Muir Trail – Along the High, Wild Sierra" by Galen Rowell in National Geographic, April 1989, pp. 467-475
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***"A Decade of Innovation, a Lifetime of Service" by Bart McDowell in National Geographic, August 1982, pp. 270-278.
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