Theodore Seixas Solomons: The Sierra Club’s Trailblazing Humanist

Michael Hoberman

While Theodore Seixas Solomons is far less famous than the man for whom California’s best known high-elevation trail was named, he was instrumental in the creation of the crest-parallel footpath that links the entire length of the High Sierra from Yosemite to Mt. Whitney. In 1940, this San Francisco-born Jew recounted his earliest conception of what would become the John Muir Trail, which occurred less than a year after his bar mitzvah. Looking eastward from his uncle’s Fresno alfalfa field in 1884, Solomons recalled, he had been struck by the sight of “the flashing teeth of the Sierra crest.” Projecting himself forward in time and space, he imagined himself traversing “the immensity of that uplifted world.”¹ Today, we might ask ourselves: by what path did this city-bred Jewish youth become one of the most significant explorers in the history of the High Sierra?

We might also ask, given his background as the scion of one of the oldest and well-established Jewish families in the United States, why has his story been almost entirely ignored by scholars? With the exception of a single biography (by the Yosemite historian, Shirley Sargent) which was published privately in 1990 and has long been out of print, very little has been written about Solomons’ remarkable life and his outsized influence on the development of the Sierra Nevada as a destination for backpackers and other wilderness enthusiasts.² Despite his considerable relevance to both fields of study, Theodore Solomons has escaped the attention of Jewish American historians and environmental studies specialists alike.

Over the course of four summers in the 1890s, Theodore Solomons traveled hundreds of miles (and ascended hundreds of thousands of feet) in his quest to configure the best-known, oldest, and most scenically spectacular long-distance recreational footpath in the United States. In the aftermath of those trips, he published more than two dozen articles about his wayfinding, often accompanying them with maps he had drawn and photographs he had taken. Solomons’ name appears in much of the existing literature on the John Muir Trail, including the many guidebooks that have been published since the trail’s completion in the 1930s. Nonetheless, the fact of his Jewishness is rarely if ever mentioned in these contexts, despite its oddity: the Sierra Club, after all, was a notoriously Anglo-Protestant organization, and Jewish alpinists are few and far between in world history.

In 2021, I completed a thru-hike of the John Muir Trail. Even though I was relatively well-informed about the trail’s history and encountered dozens of fellow long-distance-hikers in the three weeks I spent on-trail, I never once heard Solomons’ name mentioned. By contrast, the legacy of John Muir, who had virtually nothing to do with the trail’s development (it was named in his honor when the state of California commissioned it a year after his death in 1914), is well-known both on- and off-trail. My argument is that Solomons’ Jewish identity played a central role in his marginalization. That being said, straightforward antisemitism was only one of the several factors that influenced his having been written out of American environmental history.

Lineally speaking, Solomons’ Jewish connections, which included Sephardi and Ashkenazi strains, were undeniable. On his paternal side, he was a great-grandson of Gershom Mendes Seixas, a cousin of Emma Lazarus, and genealogically linked to several other notable early American Jews, including Abigail Levy Franks and Uriah Levy. Solomons, who was born in 1870, grew up in an observant Jewish household and attended Hebrew school at San Francsico’s Temple Emanu-El, where he became bar mitzvah. Through his childhood and adolescence, both of Solomons’ parents were actively involved in San Francisco Jewish life. Gershom Solomons, who had been born in Montreal in 1828, served briefly as Temple Emanu-El’s reporting secretary. Hannah Marks, born to a Polish Jewish family in 1835, taught Hebrew school there. Solomons and Marks met in San Francisco in the early 1850s, shortly after both of them traveled there in the immediate aftermath of the Gold Rush.

Despite the facts of his ancestry and upbringing, however, the adult Theodore Solomons who explored the Sierra Nevada in the 1890s neither practiced Judaism nor had anything to say about it in any of his writings. In this respect, he resembled his siblings, only one of whom was actively and publicly involved in Jewish life through adulthood.³ Nonetheless, Ansel Adams, who knew Theodore Solomons well, claimed that antisemitism was a factor in his marginalization by the Sierra Club, the preservationist group whose founding in 1892 coincided with his first ventures into the California mountains.⁴

Solomons’ Jewishness mattered not so much because it evoked the hostility of others but because it helped to shape his distinctive views toward the High Sierra, which were almost always out of sync with those of his Sierra Club contemporaries. Most notably, and in contrast to better-known figures like John Muir, Solomons was not so much a vocal advocate for walling off the wilderness as he was a promoter of wider access to and navigational knowledge about the mountains. To borrow a term from US environmental history, he was a conservationist, as opposed to a preservationist.

When he first traveled to the remote environs of Mt. Ritter in 1892, for instance, Solomons couldn’t help but imagine that the broad lake that lay at its feet would one day become the perfect setting for “the ubiquitous Swiss hotel.”⁵ Many years later, as the Sierra Club was feverishly lobbying to prevent a road from being built across the spine of the southern Sierra (it would have bisected Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks), Solomons expressed his opposition to their efforts. If the places that he had frequented on foot and with the assistance of pack animals in the 1890s were to remain roadless into perpetuity, he argued, they would soon become the sole preserve of the “plutocrat and sub-plutocrat classes.”⁶

As an adjunct to his populism, much of Solomons’ writing hearkened to California’s pioneer era. He habitually trumpeted the expansionist ideologies that had inspired people from the eastern seaboard to settle on the Pacific coast. In the 1940 Sierra Club Bulletin article he wrote on his contributions to the creation of the John Muir Trail, Solomons spoke of having “completed a kind of reconnaissance of the unexplored High Sierra.” Today’s reader can’t help but take note of his tendency to describe wilderness travel as a quest. He freely employed the language of military conquest. “The vast Alpine complex called the southern High Sierra,” he stated in 1940, “remained much as it was—terra incognita” before he had begun his effort to map the trail. On the subject of his 1895 attempt to find an elusive pass over an area called the Goddard Divide, he wrote, “the ground was broken and a skirmish line traced from which in subsequent years” other Sierra Club explorers “continued to battle against the unknown.”⁷

In an ironic, or at least deeply disappointing, turn of events, the “skirmish line” that Solomons managed to establish on the basis of that 1895 trip would prove insufficient to the task of gaining him the recognition he sought. To echo the language of warfare was to invite indifference, or even scorn, when one failed to achieve a certifiable victory.

Solomons’ writing about the Sierra was also far less reverent than that of his Sierra Club contemporaries, and he often punctuated his descriptions of wilderness spaces with humorous and highly opinionated personal anecdotes. Returning to the Yosemite Valley from a five-day adventure in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne in the summer of 1894, for instance, Solomons took pleasure in drawing a contrast between his own nearly famished party and a group of “lollers in silk” who, as he put it, considered “the hotel dining-table [to be] an object of greater interest and concern than El Capitan itself.”⁸ Solomons prided himself on his impatience with genteel manners, polite discourse, and all forms of sanctimony.

Accordingly, Solomons placed as much of a focus on the sheepherders and other people he met in the mountains as he did upon the pristine landscapes that he encountered there. His essays abounded with character sketches of sheepherders and other non-recreationally inclined denizens of the Sierra. Moreover, in the dozens of articles he published on his travels through the wilderness, his own and his companions’ misadventures featured prominently. They supplied insight into a theme that interested him greatly and about which he had much to say: “the duality of man.”⁹ The High Sierra, as he wrote about it, brought out the best and worst qualities of the people who visited its fastnesses. Solomons cared as much about the mountains’ history as an arena for social and cultural interaction as he did about their natural history.

Given his enthusiasm for highlighting human incursions into the mountains, it is no wonder that Solomons’ writing departed drastically from the precedent that stricter naturalists like John Muir had established, which typically dismissed human concerns as superfluous, if not entirely detrimental to the literature of the wilderness. Leaving aside their blatant secularity, in their humor-laden and rollicking spirit of public performance, Solomons’ essays hearkened back to an earlier era in which men attempted to reign supreme over mountains. Indeed, his articles about the Sierras sometimes echoed the works of nineteenth-century frontier explorers in their eagerness to dramatize human achievements (and, to be fair, failures) and their tendency to describe the wilderness as an obstacle to be overcome and even triumphed over.

For his part, John Muir did not revel in human triumphs over the wilderness, but that didn’t mean he sanctioned human frailty. For all of his tender and even affectionate personifications of various wilderness features, from gentle winds to sweet birdsongs to singing rivers, Muir freely condemned indications of vulnerability or weakness in human beings, especially when those traits turned out to be the flipside of arrogance. He also expected wilderness travelers to experience and express unmitigated joy at their every exposure to danger. A man proved his love for the natural world by facing its hazards with equanimity and always seeing the beauty, and even beneficence, that lay beneath the surface of its most threatening appearances. Muir’s entire career as a mountaineer was a testament to his philosophy. His writing abounded with episodes in which a superior force outside himself had come to his rescue.

The prevailing attitude in Muir’s depictions of wilderness travel was one of a quiet reverence toward the natural world and a pronounced indifference toward the feelings, concerns, or social stature of the human beings who entered it. If he admired his friend Galen Clark, for instance, it was because of his stoicism and understated character. “His voice was uniformly pitched at a rather low tone,” the naturalist wrote, emphasizing the Canadian-born mountaineer’s quality of unobtrusiveness. “Upon the whole, he was serious and industrious,” Muir noted, “and however deep and fun-provoking a story might be, he never indulged in boisterous laughter.”¹⁰ It made no sense to Muir, in other words, for human beings to upstage nature’s magnificence or glory with disruptive behaviors. For that matter, crowd-pleasing accounts of their own bumbling and pathetic practices were superfluous to their efforts to describe the transcendent beauty of the wilderness.

Solomons brought an entirely different perspective to bear on the wilderness than the one we gain from reading the works of other turn-of-the-century Sierra enthusiasts. While Solomons was a highly assimilated and non-observant Jew, his relationship to the Sierra was an outgrowth of a distinctly Jewish historical experience. His mentality had been shaped, first by the centuries of exile and landlessness that his progenitors had undergone, and then by the generations-long process through which they had come to think of America as their rightful home.

For scholars such as myself who are interested in exploring the relationship between Jews and the sense of place, especially in the North American context, Solomons’ career presents a range of interpretive possibilities. While his writing about the High Sierra was in some ways fairly typical for its period—at least nominally observant of romantic conventions, occasionally stilted, and highly dramatic in its depictions of a gargantuan landscape—it is also sufficiently distinct to merit attention for its differences from the work of late nineteenth-century naturalists such as John Muir. In fact, it is in Solomons’ writing about and in response to John Muir’s writing, that we gain some of the most valuable insights into his unique, and Jewishly-informed, perspective on the “California Alps,” as he more than once referred to them.

Theodore Solomons was too young to have known Muir well, but he did have more than one interaction with the elder naturalist in the 1890s, and mostly came to know him in the context of the Sierra Club, whose founding occurred in 1892. One year later, Solomons prepared a short but remarkably incisive critique of Muir’s oeuvre that was published in a periodical called California Writers and Literature. Several decades later, after he had long since stopped exploring the Sierra, Solomons published an essay about Muir’s influence upon his own work in the magazine Yosemite Notes. Muir also figured prominently in Solomons’ private writing and correspondence. Even when John Muir was not the central topic of his writing, however, Solomons found ways to refer to his legacy. He was the canonical figure whose example Solomons could never ignore, even when he wanted to reject it.

Two particular episodes in Solomons’ career as an explorer of the Sierra offer especially useful insight into how and why the younger writer’s attitude toward Muir matters and reflects meaningfully upon his Jewish background. The first, which occurred during Solomons’ first summer in the Sierra and about which he wrote three years later, highlights his rejection of Muir’s romantic viewpoint, especially as it bears upon the potentially fatal temptations of reverie within the wider context of mountain travel. The second, which resulted from Solomons’ most consequential exploration in the Sierra, during the summer of 1895, along an area called the Goddard Divide, enunciated his distinct viewpoint on the role that human beings play, or should play, in the natural environment.

Not a “nature-gusher:” Rejecting the Sublime

Early in his career, Theodore Solomons was an independent thinker to a fault. More than once on his trips through the High Sierra, his youthful and unstinting zeal for self-reliance could easily have gotten him killed. Instead of undergoing a period of apprenticeship and learning from his elders, he seized every opportunity to hurl his inexperienced self—and often his even less knowledgeable and unwitting hiking companions—at the mountains. Solomons’ first extended sojourn in the Sierras took place in 1892, when he was twenty-one years old. The young mountaineer fearlessly and foolishly embraced his first chance to travel solo at high elevation only a few weeks following upon his first arrival in the Sierras. If nothing else, the near-misses lent a spirit of adventure and drama to his writing.

The disasters that nearly befell Solomons as he ventured away from the relative safety of his friends’ campsite in the vicinity of Tuolumne Meadows in mid-August of 1892 would spur his lively imagination and launch his career as a wilderness author. Now that he was not just dreaming about making a trail from one end of the High Sierra to another but experiencing its uplifted world first-hand, Theodore Solomons would have stories to tell. His tales would play up the spirit of adventure that brought him to the Sierra in the first place. They would also evoke a singularly un-romantic skepticism from him that, for years to come, would set him apart from his contemporaries on the mountaineering scene.

Solomons had spent the first part of the summer traveling through and immediately south of Yosemite in the lively company of his friends. Only as his hiking companions returned to the city and the end of the short Sierra summer approached did he contrive his first solo adventure. His immediate destination was the large glacier that lay along the northeastern slope of 13,211-foot-high Mt. Lyell, which lay along the southern boundary of Yosemite National Park. Summiting the mountain, which had first been climbed in 1871 by J. B. Tilleston and was the park’s highest peak, would add excitement to the venture.

Solomons set out to climb the Lyell Glacier on August 16. He could tell that parts of it had been hollowed out because he could hear water rushing beneath its surface, see small holes in its surface, and also noticed numerous small pools of water that had formed intermittently along its length. He knew that he needed to be on guard against the surrounding dangers, but his steady hiking cadence and excitement about reaching the summit lulled him into a dangerous complacency. His first published piece in the Sierra Club Bulletin told the story. “I had been plodding up the sloping glacier,” he wrote, “my eyes fixed on the distant cliffs, when, happening providentially to glance downward I saw, with horror, that I was on the brink of a crevasse.” Had he not stepped back from the brink, he joked, his “brief career in the high Sierra would have abruptly terminated.”¹¹

Perhaps because it could so easily have put an end to him, the crevasse fascinated Solomons. He peered over the edge and tried dropping a rock into the chasm, but couldn’t gain any insight into its depth. “Beautiful beyond description are these crevasses,” he wrote in the Bulletin, “but the cold shiver which invariably gambols down the spinal column of the beholder is not always to be regarded as a purely aesthetic sensation.” Solomons’ reference to “purely aesthetic sensations” suggests that his Lyell Glacier experience shaped his thinking about the danger of natural reveries. He wouldn’t forget what had almost befallen him as a result of his reverential state of mind.

In May of 1895, almost three years after his near miss on Mt. Lyell, Solomons returned to the subject of what had happened to him there in a short story that he published in The Traveler, a California magazine which would feature a few of his articles through the mid- to late 1890s. “In a Crevasse of the Lyell Glacier” was the only one of the nearly twenty magazine pieces he would publish about his career as a mountaineer that fictionalized one of his trips in the Sierra.¹²

Unlike Solomons, the story’s protagonist loses his footing and falls into the crevasse. Eventually, through a combination of clear thinking and good fortune, he manages to escape from the abyss. Though the story doesn’t qualify as one of Solomons’ stronger pieces—it is melodramatic to the extreme—it is a powerful conveyance of his ideas about the wilderness and its enticements to fatalistic thinking. In contrast to John Muir, who was always eager to meld the self into the divine power of nature and, in so doing, or to negate it entirely, Solomons’ narrator keeps himself alive by actively resisting any temptation to declare his oneness with nature. Early on in the story, for instance, on the brink of giving in to despair, he catches himself “stupidly drifting away on an ocean of thought.”¹³

Soon afterward the story’s protagonist begins a journey that echoes classic tales like Homer’s Odyssey, which its author must have come across in his San Francisco high school days. He descends into an underworld, literally, in order to make his way out of the abyss. “There was but one avenue of escape,” he says, noting that when he was still above ground looking into the crevasse, he had seen that the distant and smaller end of the crevasse sloped upwards. “To gain that slope,” he thinks to himself, “I should have to traverse the bottom of an unknown abyss.”¹⁴ Solomons’ direct reference to Tantalus, later on in the tale, reinforces the connections between his narrative and the Homeric epic that had undoubtedly sat on his family’s bookshelf in San Francisco.

Downward he goes, past “overhanging pillars of ice” and the “zigzagging, angular faces” of the crevasse’s stunning inner topography. Before long, he finds himself “in a great blue chamber carved in simple, massive grandeur, with a vaulted roof curving far up to the crack.” He has come face-to-face with the remarkable architecture of the natural world, and, in his enthrallment with it, starts to sound like the caricature of a nineteenth-century Transcendentalist. The temptation to “pause spellbound at the sight” is the greatest threat to his survival. Deep in the “blue chamber,” he comes close to giving up entirely. It is “an ecstasy of nature-love,” in fact, that almost lulls him into the “soul-reposeful sleep” that will kill him.¹⁵

Only the extreme cold brings him back to life. His survival, in fact, depends entirely on his ability to avoid thinking abstractly or embrace any affinity between himself and the indifferent forces which are on the verge of doing him in. Solomons’ actual experience on the Lyell Glacier must have reinforced his sense that staying alive necessitated resistance, as opposed to acquiescence to those forces. Accordingly, the key line in “In a Crevasse” is the one that the protagonist delivers when he finally comes to his senses and understands that life necessitates struggle, as opposed to easeful surrender. “I was fighting against the beauty,” he says, “the freezing, stupefying supernatural beauty of the crevasse.”¹⁶ Mustering up his wits, the protagonist mounts the steep, snowy slope that, if he can find a way to trust his own physical strength, will lead him out of the crevasse and back into the daylight. On emerging into the land of the living, a swallow flies past him, “a reminder and a promise” of the gift of life and of his obligation to cling to it with every ragged breath.¹⁷

For all of its melodrama, Solomons’ fictionalization of his near mishap on the Lyell Glacier reified his distinctive approach to documenting and making sense of wilderness experiences. Considering his youth and relative newness to the backcountry, the fact that he upheld any particular philosophy on the subject is remarkable, and even somewhat ironic. Comparatively early on in his career as an adventurer and writer, and despite the errors in judgment to which he freely admitted in his writing, it didn’t take him long to acquire a reputation as an expert on the subject of Sierra mountaineering.

Indeed, on the basis of his single summer’s travels in the Sierra, Solomons was invited in 1893 to contribute a short essay on John Muir to a periodical called Californian Writers and Literature. The editors of that publication referred to him as “a young writer” and “a student of the literature . . . of . . . Californian nature-lovers and scientists” who had himself “invaded the Kings River country and other fastnesses of the High Sierra.”¹⁸ (Although he would eventually spend time in the Kings River area, he wouldn’t actually get there until 1895!) Solomons’ assessment of Muir’s writing talents began with an oddly noncommittal, even tepid statement about the elder author’s essays. “Mr. Muir’s literary work,” he wrote, “is not more unique than that work would seem to suggest in his character in a man.”¹⁹ What made Muir remarkable in Solomons’ view wasn’t so much his talent as an author but his accomplishments as a mountaineer. If John Muir was an artful poet, Solomons explained, it was because he found ways to channel the splendor of the mountains into his writing. It was the wilderness, not the man, that spoke through his prose.

Solomons, whose own oeuvre had yet to come into being, appeared not to care that his comments were out of step with the mainstream view. In withholding praise from a man who was universally admired, both as an author and as a mountaineer, he was taking his chances. At best, Solomons’ assessment of Muir’s writing comprised a backhanded compliment, its salient point being that Muir’s personality was of greater consequence than anything he ever published. While Solomons’ brief review would go on to praise the naturalist’s singular aptitude for landscape description, the strained neutrality of his opening observation set the tone for the entire piece. Even his ostensible defense of Muir’s literary reputation bore uncharitable overtones. After distinguishing the naturalist from the host of “indiscriminate nature-gushers” who specialized in wilderness writing, Solomons went on to note that some readers (ostensibly, not including himself) considered Muir to be “over florid” in his poetic descriptions of mountain features.²⁰

If the literary record of Sierra travel that he would go on to produce in the coming years is any guide, Theodore Solomons found Muir’s writing to be wanting in a single essential quality: humanity. Solomons was just starting out as a writer and seemed to be operating by instinct when he prepared his critique of Muir’s work. Nonetheless, his remarks about the older naturalist can’t help but bring our attention to the stark contrast between Muir’s studied indifference to human experiences and Solomons’ predilection for telling colorful stories about his (and other people’s) high-elevation triumphs and blunders. For all of the newfound pleasure he took in traveling through the Sierras, Theodore Solomons did not wish for them to be vacated of human beings, much less ineligible for elaborate consideration as a proper foil for the expression of human feelings.

In one extended passage of his Californian Writers and Literature review, Solomons employed a method for describing Muir’s writing that he must have intended to sound complimentary. He was outlining the elder author’s ability to negate his own humanity and to downplay the prospect of mortality. According to Solomons, John Muir habitually described the beauty of the wilderness without playing up its potential for destroying the people who came to it. As the younger writer put it, Muir’s

[was] the almost tragical poetry of the wilderness, of the remote solitude, of that sublimity of desolation which hovers in the atmosphere of the naked granite or the slow-moving, eternal ice. Yet he has complained of no desolation. There is in the poetry of his prose an undercurrent of cosmical ethics . . . to which the conception of a real desolation is utterly inimical.²¹

For Solomons, the desolation that Muir managed to keep at bay was, in fact, an active if not always dominant force. From his perspective, being prompted to think about and react to that desolation was actually as good a reason as any for a person to enter the wilderness, especially because it yielded captivating stories. If Muir’s accomplishment was praiseworthy, on the other hand, it was because it eliminated every shred of human emotion (most notably, fear) from nature writing, replacing the articulation of ordinary feelings with an oddly Calvinist reverence for the grandeur of the mountains. Muir’s asceticism precluded any indulgence on his part in anything that smacked of human drama. It was unique for its time because, as Sierra Club historian Michael Cohen points out, it was “rooted in a non-anthropocentric experience of the mountains.”²² By extension, it also assumed that people “who actually lived in the mountains . . . [were] incapable of appreciating their own landscapes.”²³ Solomons’ entire career as a wilderness author would comprise an extended repudiation of this mentality. For better or worse, Theodore Solomons wasn’t ready to relinquish his subjectivity or stop telling stories in which human beings, with all of their weaknesses and foibles, figured prominently.

“No where more generous is the recompense:” Humanizing the Wilderness

Sierra Club founder John Muir went to the mountains in order to document their sanctity and to advocate for their protection. Whether or not his wanderings had been influenced by the example of the “mountain men” of the previous generation, he devoted much of his career to repudiating his predecessors’ obliviousness to and exploitation of the natural world. In his writing about the wilderness, Muir, an emigrant from Scotland who had avoided service in the Civil War, eschewed the triumphalism of Manifest Destiny.

Theodore Solomons’ representations of the time he spent in the High Sierra, by contrast, often echoed the language of the earlier explorers. He had been cast in the mold of his ancestors, who were among the first Jews come to North America and had eagerly embraced the opportunity put their long history of landlessness behind them. Many assimilated early American Jews developed the habit of celebrating the continent’s vast territory as their birthright. In his dedication of Charleston, South Carolina’s new synagogue building in 1840, Gustavus Poznanski had put it simply enough: “This happy land [is] our Palestine.” (The first San Francisco Jew to be elected to the US Congress would make a similar pronouncement in his refusal to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. “The United States is my Zion,” said Julius Kahn in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration in 1919, “and San Francisco is my Jerusalem.”) Having inherited a similar mindset, Theodore Solomons was untroubled by westward expansion. He freely compared his explorations in the mountains to the efforts of earlier pathfinders. He was on a navigational mission and wanted to create an exploratory legacy.

In July of 1895, Solomons spent several weeks in the middle portion of the High Sierra in hopes of closing a final gap in his attempt to map out his vision of a crest-parallel trail from Yosemite to Kings Canyon. He would come achingly close to realizing that objective. From a commanding height of land during the second week of their trip, he and his friend Ernest Bonner had glimpsed a pass over the Goddard Divide that would link existing pathways through the much better-known northern and southern portions of the Sierra. At a crucial moment, however, a freak snowstorm forced them off the crest. For all of the hidden wonders that they had seen in their travels, the viability of a crest-parallel trail that could run the entire length of the High Sierra remained in question. Thirteen years would elapse before Solomons’ friend Joseph N. (“Little Joe”) Le Conte, with the help of the expert map that Solomons drew after his 1895 trip, would finally make it over the Goddard Divide, assuring the trail’s eventual completion.

The two men set out from a sheep camp at Jackass Meadows on July 13, hoping to make relatively quick tracks for the Goddard Divide. They made five miles, camping at Blaney Meadows, where a stockman named John Shipp had built a homestead. To this day, John Muir Trail thru-hikers know the place well because of the opportunity it offers for resupply and bathing in natural hot springs. Now occupied by a dude ranch called Muir Trail Ranch (“MTR,” in hiker lingo), the meadows in question mark the halfway point between Whitney and Yosemite.

They began the most momentous portion of their trip by traveling eastward from Blaney Meadows along the South Fork of the San Joaquin, which Solomons described as “a deep canyon.”²⁴ Though it was not “Yosemite-like in character,” Goddard Canyon (as it is labeled on maps today) was “lofty and rugged.” After traveling fourteen miles along its length, they stopped for the night where the Middle Fork, the body of water that a shepherd had told them about a few nights earlier, dropped precipitously into the canyon they’d been following.

The next morning, after caching three days’ worth of supplies for their eventual return, they began their climb along the sheepman’s recommended route up the Middle Fork. Their decision to do so was also fortified by their own calculated surmise concerning that body of water’s point of origin and overall importance. As Solomons would write in the “Minutes” that he prepared about the trip many years later, the two men “estimated that its stream flow indicated it to be the main South Fork in spite of its seeming to be merely a tributary tumbling over the north side wall.”²⁵ In other words, while the South Fork along which they had been traveling thus far was better-known and assumed to be the quickest path to the San Joaquin’s source along the Goddard Divide, the Middle Fork appeared to be conveying a much larger volume of water and was, in this sense, the “true” South Fork of the San Joaquin.

As Solomons and Bonner first encountered it on the floor of the Goddard Canyon, the Middle Fork presented “cascade falls in a continuous series twisting turning, spreading out in sheets over building rock surfaces, leaping over projecting ledges into little chasms, only to boil furiously out of them + precipitate itself over the next descent.”²⁶ Solomons had only once before seen such an amount of water passing through such a narrow space, in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Canyon. Even in the immediate aftermath of the trip, Solomons knew that he had come upon a landscape that deserved to be memorialized. “The amount of water that flows over this series of falls,” he wrote in his 1896 Sierra Club report, “is sufficiently great to name them to the dignity of important scenic features.”²⁷ In keeping with his enthusiasm for establishing navigational facts and precedents, Solomons eagerly called attention to the first discovery of his 1895 journey.

When Solomons and Bonner reached the top of the thundering gorge, the noise dissipated and gave way to sudden tranquility. Here, the Middle Fork widened its channel and meandered across six miles of nearly level ground. In the Sierra Club report, Solomons described this segment as “open spacious + entrancingly lovely” and “form[ing] a succession of meadows + groves alternating with picturesque irregularities of the side slopes.”²⁸ Today’s John Muir Trail follows the same exact trajectory. Hikers experience the Evolution Valley as a moment of level and wooded calm punctuated at both ends by precipitous—and exposed—ascents and descents. The river, as he wrote in the Sierra Club report, slows its pace, “alternat[ing] between gentle flow among boulders + lazy swims through lake like enlargements of [its] channel . . . through beautiful grassy flats.”²⁹ In the Appalachia article, Solomons provided still more poetic, if not hyperbolic, fare. “This valley,” he wrote, “I account one of the fairest paradises of the nowhere unlovely western slope of the Sierra.”³⁰

Ironically, given the fact that he’d never have gotten to it had it not been for the advice of the shepherd that he and Bonner camped with in Blaney Meadows, Solomons noted the Evolution Valley’s good fortune in having been spared from ruin by sheep. Evidently, the difficulty of approach—the tumultuous gorge that he and Bonner had climbed from the South Fork canyon—had been too steep for most sheepmen, not to mention sheep, to follow.

At the southeastern end of the river’s meandering portion, Solomons and Bonner confronted a new order of verticality. They were looking at “a colossal, sugarloaf-shaped buttress of fractured granite” that Solomons would soon name The Hermit. As that peak and its companion (and also considerably larger) peaks loomed in the distance, the two explorers confronted “an abrupt, semi-circular wall over which two streams poured in thunderous cascade.” They ascended the gorge formed by the Middle Fork and topped out onto “a splendid Alpine area” that Solomons would name in accordance with an emergent theme: Evolution Lake. He correctly judged the lake’s elevation to be roughly 11,000 feet. Whether or not he and Bonner had ever been preceded there, Theodore Solomons was without a doubt the first person to describe the place in writing in such a way as to make it possible for someone else to follow in his footsteps.

Solomons’ navigational priorities become even clearer when we contrast his description of Evolution Lake and its environs with the only other piece of writing that could, in theory, have been inspired by someone else’s visit to the same place. Interestingly, it was not the writer himself who made the claim, but a Sierra Club insider whose detective work may well have been intended to put Solomons, who claimed to have been the first person to see the area, on the defensive. In 1925, in an article he published for the California Historical Quarterly, Francis Farquhar asserted that John Muir had explored the Evolution Valley and the area surrounding Evolution Lake on an 1873 solo trip that he had made over the (as yet unnamed) Goddard Divide in his quest to climb “the highest mountain at the head of the San Joaquin.”³¹

Farquhar based his case on his interpretation of an extended passage from Muir’s book, The Mountains of California. In keeping with his usual indifference to navigational specificity, Muir had paid little attention to any of the landmarks he’d encountered along the way. In fact, the description that Farquhar identified in connection with Evolution Lake was one that Muir had included in his book’s chapter on “The Wild Sheep” of the Sierra. Muir’s purpose, ultimately, had been to tell the story of a remarkable encounter he had had with three of them.

From a quiet campsite in what would have been the Evolution Valley, Muir had written, he made his way “over huge, swelling rock-bosses through a majestic canyon, and past innumerable cascades, the scenery in general became gradually wilder and more alpine.” Passing through another area that he guessed had never been entered by human beings, Muir found his way to the foot of a cascade that plunged downward between two enormous rock walls. After climbing up a crooked seam in the rock to a viewing point, he sat down to view the territory he had just covered and realized that he was being watched by three bighorn sheep. Muir took in “the flowing undulations of their firm, braided muscles, their strong legs, ears, eyes, heads, their graceful rounded necks, the color of their hair, and the bold, upsweeping curves of their noble horns.”³² Where the encounter had taken place, in other words, was an entirely incidental matter to Muir, who had been dead for over ten years before Francis Farquhar had figured out where he’d been.

By contrast, when he and Bonner got there in 1895, Solomons knew that he had come upon a uniquely beautiful, but also historically and culturally consequential site, and he was eager to tell the world about it. Though he couldn’t yet have predicted that the crest-parallel trail would wind along the lake’s eastern shore or that its northern end would eventually play host to a succession of thousands of overnight campers, Solomons did understand that the area around Evolution Lake was the actual source of the San Joaquin. That understanding pertained to more than his immediate purpose as someone who was trying to create a crest-parallel trail and needed to know where one watershed ended and another began. Solomons grasped Evolution Lake’s symbolic importance within the framework of human experiences and legacies. The connection between the mountains and human history was a theme of greater importance to him than it was to his mountaineering peers.

Where his Sierra Club contemporaries might have been satisfied to sing its praises as a pristine alpine lake with unrivalled sweeping views of several surrounding peaks, Solomons pointed to Evolution Lake’s wider importance to the entire history and culture of California. “Such is the birthplace of the San Joaquin,” he wrote in his Appalachia article:

Such [is] the origin of that river which turns a hundred mills, irrigates a million acres of grain, fruit, and vine, and which imparts fertility and beauty to the largest and richest of California’s valleys. The Sierra crest is nowhere grander, and nowhere more generous is the recompense that awaits the wearied traveler, than here among the sources of the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin.³³

In 1884, Solomons had been a fourteen-year-old boy gazing at the faraway mountains while sitting on a bronco on the outskirts of Fresno—an inadvertent beneficiary, on his uncle Bernhard Marks’ farm, of the San Joaquin’s bounty. Now he was reveling in “the immensity of that uplifted world” that he’d once dreamed about visiting, thinking about how the two worlds were connected to each other.

Conclusion

In 1896 Solomons made two trips in the region north of the Goddard Divide. The second of the two, during which he successfully led an official Geological Survey party through the territory around Mounts Lyell, Ritter, and the Minarets that he had first visited and mapped in 1892, would prove to be his final outing in the Sierra for several decades to come, and also the last time he would be either making or following his own path through the mountains.

The events of 1897 led to a drastic change of venue for Solomons. In the flush of excitement surrounding the gold strikes in the Yukon, he traveled to Alaska and put family money to use in establishing himself there as a mine-owner. He did return to California some years after the turn of the century, visited the Sierra on multiple occasions, and even ended up building and raising his children in a house that he called Flying Spur, on the fringes of Yosemite National Park. The most rugged phase of his mountaineering and exploration career lay behind him, however, and his active contributions to the development of the John Muir Trail had come to an end. In the deliberations that took place between its official commissioning in 1915 and the completion of its final portion in 1938, Solomons weighed in freely but commanded little authority.

In large part owing to his background as a Jew, Solomons brought an entirely different perspective to bear on the wilderness than the one that we gain from reading the works of other turn-of-the-century Sierra enthusiasts. While Solomons was a highly assimilated and non-observant Jew, his relationship to the Sierra was an outgrowth of a distinctly Jewish historical experience. His mentality had been shaped, first by the centuries of exile and landlessness that his progenitors had undergone, and then by the generations-long process through which they had come to think of America as their rightful home.

As the scion of a Jewish family whose founding figure (German-born Moses Raphael Levy) had first come to North America in the 1690s, Solomons assumed its landscape to be his national birthright and imbibed an affinity for the wilderness during his childhood and adolescence in San Francisco. His proprietary attitude toward the Sierra amounted to a bold assertion of national identity and belonging. It echoed the brashness of two of his illustrious ancestors, Haym Salomon and Uriah Phillips Levy, both of whom loudly proclaimed their Americanness as a hedge against their rivals’ imputations of rootlessness and impertinence. Just as Salomon and Levy were marginalized by their non-Jewish contemporaries for being presumptuous in their embrace of American identity, so too was Theodore Solomons, at least late in his life, marginalized for claiming the High Sierra as his rightful preserve.

Solomons was a geographer who went out of his way to push past established discursive boundaries. His efforts to assert a literary and navigational claim over the mountains predated the deliberate attempts of early twentieth-century European Jews, through the development of alpine societies and agricultural projects, to inculcate a healthful and culturally assimilative alternative to centuries of urbanism and alienation from the land. Nonetheless, Solomons’ background was a launching pad for his distinct brand of landscape-based writing, in which the wilderness functioned as a foil for social commentary and the delineation of a specific geography was a method by which he could assert his belonging.

Michael Hoberman, PhD is Professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University and an adjunct professor of history at Yeshiva University. His most recent book is Imagining Early American Jews (Oxford University Press, 2025). The John Muir Trail’s Jewish Founder: The Uplifted World of Theodore Solomons is to be published by the University of California Press.

¹ Theodore Solomons, “The Beginnings of the John Muir Trail,” Sierra Club Bulletin 25.1 (February 1940): 28.
² Shirley Sargent, Solomons of the Sierra (Flying Spur Press, 1990).
³ Theodore Solomons’ siblings, by birth order, included Selina (born in 1862), a prominent California suffragist; Lucius (born in 1863), an attorney and Jewish rights advocate; Adele (born 1868), a physician; and Leon (born in 1873), a pioneering psychologist.
⁴ Sargent, 124.
⁵ Theodore Solomons, “Among the Sources of the San Joaquin,” Sierra Club Bulletin 1.3 (January 1894): 71.
⁶ Theodore Solomons, letter to William Colby, August 1940 (F. P. Farquhar Papers, Bancroft Library).
⁷ Theodore Solomons, “The Beginnings of the John Muir Trail,” Sierra Club Bulletin 25.1 (February 1940): 34-35.
⁸ Theodore Solomons, “Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne,” The Traveler Magazine (May 1895), 88.
⁹ Solomons, “Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne.”
¹⁰ John Muir, The Yosemite (Doubleday, 1912), 189.
¹¹ Theodore Solomons, “Among the Sources of the San Joaquin,” 63.
¹² Theodore Solomons, “In a Crevasse of the Lyell Glacier,” The Traveler Magazine, 75-79.
¹³“Crevasse,” 75.
¹⁴ Solomons, “Crevasse,” 79.
¹⁵ “Crevasse,” 79.
¹⁶ “Crevasse,” 79.
¹⁷ “Crevasse,” 79.
¹⁸ Theodore Solomons, sketch of John Muir in The Story of the Files: Californian Writers and Literature, ed. Edna Sterling Cummins (World's Fair Commission of California, 1893), 155.
¹⁹ Solomons, sketch of John Muir, 155.
²⁰ Solomons, sketch of John Muir, 156.
²¹ Solomons, sketch of John Muir, 156.
²² Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (Sierra Club Books, 1988), 15.
²³ Susan Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and Environmentalism (University of Kansas Press, 2005), 25.
²⁴ Theodore Solomons, “Mt. Goddard and its Vicinity, in the High Sierra of California,” Appalachia 8 (January 1896): 45.
²⁵ Theodore Solomons, “Minutes of trips on the High Sierras of Theodore S. Solomons, 1895,” Yosemite Archives, Shirley Sargent Papers, Collection 2006.
²⁶ Theodore Solomons, manuscript of February 1896 report to the Sierra Club, Lilbourne Winchell Papers, Bancroft MSS C-B 517, Carton 8.
²⁷ Solomons, report to the Sierra Club.
²⁸ Solomons, report to the Sierra Club.
²⁹ Solomons, report to the Sierra Club.
³⁰ Solomons, “Mt. Goddard and its Vicinity,” 46.
³¹ Francis Farquhar, “Exploration of the Sierra Nevada,” California Historical Society Quarterly 4.1 (March 1925): 28.
³² John Muir, The Mountains of California (1894) (Ten Speed Press, 1977), 315.
³³ Solomons, “Mt. Goddard and its Vicinity,” 49.