My Wilderness: The Pacific West

by William O. Douglas, Francis Lee Jaques (Illustrator)

Justice Douglas writes of the Sierras, the Olympics, the Rain Forest of the Cascades, and other wild and beautiful western mountains and forests.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Memoir

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS was born in Maine, Minnesota, on October 16, 1898, and raised in Yakima, Washington. He entered Whitman College in 1916, but his studies were interrupted by military service in World War I. Douglas was graduated from Whitman in 1920 and taught school for two years before attending law school at Columbia University. Upon graduation in 1925, he joined a New York law firm, but left two years later to spend one year in Yakima. He subsequently returned to teach law at Columbia University, and transferred to the faculty of Yale University in 1929. In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Douglas to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in 1937 he became Chairman. President Roosevelt nominated Douglas to the Supreme Court of the United States on April 15, 1939. The Senate confirmed the appointment on April 17, 1939. Douglas had the longest tenure of any Justice, serving on the Supreme Court for thirty-six years, spanning the careers of five Chief Justices. He retired on November 12, 1975, and died on January 19, 1980, at the age of eighty-one.

More information is available from the Federal Judicial Center at http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/nGetInfo?j... or from The Supreme Court Historical Society at http://www.supremecourthistory.org/hi...

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book for the bedside table: snapshots of a dozen places special to Justice Douglas, from the Sierra Nevada to the Brooks Range. Collected and published in 1960, sometimes it feels like Douglas is writing from a different country. Some of the common names he uses (Water Ouzel, Short-billed Gull) have fallen out of use, and one wishes (as I always do) for an appendix listing scientific binomials for everything he names—although he does cite genus and species on occasion. But the unfamiliar names serve to remind us that Douglas's point of view is not ours.

In the tradition of David Brower (with whom he hiked) and John Muir, Douglas warned against aggressive road-building through Forest Service-managed wilderness. Writing in the years before the great environmental protection legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, his message was simple: these parts of the west are beautiful just the way they are, and sometimes the best fishing hole is one you reach by four hours on horseback instead of 15 minutes in a car.

What's particularly otherworldly is that this polemic comes from the pen of a sitting Supreme Court judge. One wonders whether Douglas ever saw the need to recuse himself. It is certain that today such a book would be grounds for a judicial appointment to be blocked by more development-minded Senators.

Douglas's grasp of the interactions among organisms in nature is commendable; specifically, his discussion in the "Mount Adams" chapter of insect predation on pine cone seeds.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read My Wilderness: East to Katahdin and My Wilderness: The Pacific West, both by William O. Douglas in the spring of 1969. I was looking forward to going to summer camp in New Hampshire, and hiking the White Mountains.

These books started my real love of hiking and wilderness. These books transported me to remote places I can never likely get to such as the Brooks Range of Alaska.The book triggered an avid interest in nature and wilderness. While my views have matured, I still have those books on my shelf and remember them fondly.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Douglas is of course best known as a fierce advocate of civil rights during his thirty-six years on the Supreme Court. But as this, and his other writings, make clear, he was also a consummate outdoorsman, reveling in his time in wilderness from his childhood on, and in his travels around the globe. Here, Douglas' focus is on hiking, horseback riding, camping, flyfishing, and sitting for hours taking in the flora (of which he is incredibly knowledgeable) and fauna of the mountains, rivers and lakes of the wild western coastal states, some of which spaces I have been fortunate enough to have visited. He is, as he always was, outspoken in his desire to see the wilderness preserved, and logging and mining of the areas prohibited; he foresaw the doubling of California's population from 15 to 30 million in the last forty years of the 20th century, and understood that, once desecrated by roads and enterprise, the wild places would not return. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book a chapter at a time, then reflecting on the beauty of the places that Douglas so passionately describes. Highly recommended to those who thrive in the wild places.