The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Brian C. Wilson

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California—an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. On their journey across the American West, he and his companions would take in breathtaking vistas in the Rockies and along the Pacific Coast, speak with a young John Muir in the Yosemite Valley, stop off in Salt Lake City for a meeting with Brigham Young, and encounter a diversity of communities and cultures that would challenge their Yankee prejudices. Based on original research employing newly discovered documents, The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson maps the public story of this group’s travels onto the private story of Emerson’s final years, as aphasia set in and increasingly robbed him of his words. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

Published May 27, 2022

About the author

Brian C. Wilson is professor of American Religious History in the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living and Yankees in Michigan.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued by the idea of the Yankee poet and philosopher traveling out west. I was especially interested in comparing Emerson's experiences of 1872 with those of Robert Louis Stevenson in 1879. (I highly recommend The Amateur Emigrant.) Emerson the eminence grise travelled from Massachusetts to California in a Pullman Palace car as the guest of railroad executive John Murray Forbes. RLS travelled from New York to the Sonoma Valley among the poorest passengers in a crowded, smelly railroad car, since he was a penniless renegade Scottish young man chasing after his married paramour.

For Emerson's experience we must rely on the diary and letters of James Bradley Thayer. Emerson by that time was in at least the early stages of dementia, and wrote little on the trip. But the Forbes party was numerous and social. they had eminent connections all along the way, so Thayer is able to report on meetings with well known westerners. Emerson found an eager audience for his Chatauqua type presentations when he reached San Francisco, but his failing abilities made them less than successful. Instead, he enjoyed the sights. Vigorous in body if not mind, he travelled to Yosemite and was delighted by invigorating discussions and excursions with the young John Muir. This was before Muir had written anything or was at all known as a great naturalist.

Wilson also provides a lively account of California's early cultural milieu. He is most concerned with Yankees come west, and Unitarians (Emerson's original spiritual home), but extends out to sites such as the Cliff House, the seedy parts of the entertainment district, writers, etc.. Again, it is startling how developed San Francisco was just 20 years after the discovery of gold and only three years after the transcontinental railroad's completion.

[Lisa-Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great convergence of literary figures, California history, travel adventures, and Emersonian transcendence in the wild west. I was caught up in the whole idea of Emerson exploring the Golden State in his dotage. “In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the dean of American Transcendentalism and one of America’s most celebrated lecturers and essayists, boarded a train in Concord, Massachusetts, bound for a month-and-a-half-long tour of California.” Sold! It was a compelling episode from so many angles. “By all accounts, the journey became one of the highlights of Emerson’s life.”

At first, I was worried because Emerson didn’t keep a detailed record of the trip and the narrative depended on his companion’s journal and other sources but, as the story proceeded, I realized that the record of an observer is even more informative. “I never saw Emerson so fresh and radiant as he is now,” his friend Thayer wrote. “He is greatly interested in everything that is peculiar out here and reads up the local history.” James Bradley Thayer, a Harvard law professor, was a long-time Emerson friend and a wonderful correspondent who traveled with him to California, documenting contemporaneous recollections of Emerson’s activities and reactions. The author also drew from 1871 newspaper accounts and first-hand accounts by other persons Emerson encountered, such as John Muir. That Muir exchange was fascinating! The book was a well-rounded portrayal, meticulously researched. I wanted to know every detail of Emerson’s meeting with Brigham Young during a Salt Lake City stopover and all about his reaction to the majesty of Yosemite. It was intriguing to consider the transcendentalist meeting with the Mariposa Big Trees. This book was a complete reading pleasure and I loved it from start to finish.

“…As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed’.”
-Excerpt from Terminus, Emerson, 1867.

[Linda Callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

SLOW

I found this a slow read at first, however, the more I read, the more I loved it. It’s worth the effort! A great glimpse into early California.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well-written account of Emerson’s sightseeing trip to California. It was late in his life, when he was beginning to show signs of mental decline.

This account confirms my prior view of Emerson - he was pretty much a stuffed shirt with a stuck point of view about the place of humans in the cosmos and about those who were not, as he regarded himself, elite. Regarding the former, humans were god in the making, and nature was God’s expression in the world. Regarding the latter, Indians seen on this trip were “ignorant creatures” and “uncultivated humanity.” In one of his few editorial comments, Wilson, a fellow Western Michigan University Bronco, writes that, “As ‘uncultured’ as they may have appeared to the tourists [Emerson’s party], the religious imagination of the Paiutes was no less active than that of anyone aboard the Huron [the name of the Pullman rail car that Emerson and his party traveled on]. Emerson and his party also contrasted their fine manners with those they observed on the American frontier, those who were so lacking “in behavior forbidden by the well-bred” that the West begged for colonization by the “Saxon race.” California needed “English populations,” Anglo-Saxons, and their New England counterparts, Yankees who, collectively, constituted civilization.

Even accounting for his age and mental handicaps, Emerson was an armchair naturalist and an enjoyer of God’s presence in the world, once removed. In ignoring his pledge to spend a night with him in a sequoia grove, John Muir told Emerson, in more or less plea form, “You yourself are a sequoia. Stop and get acquainted with your brethren.” For Emerson, there was, Wilson says, a “certain effeteness.” It was better to describe God’s nature in literary form than to experience it viscerally, as Muir did. That is not inherently a bad thing, but there is this hint that Emerson was more about literary affect, rather than feeling God’s presence in his soul.

It could be said that Emerson was the product of his age and therefore immune from such critical comment, as in this review. But this excuses way too much, for such attitudes, common among American colonists, contributed to the wholesale inhumanity toward native Americans and expressed an extreme form of ethnocentrism that one’s own culture is inherently superior to other cultures. It is an attitude that we see today among self-regarding elites whose disdain is obvious for perspectives and mores different from their own.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

With wonderful context and detail, Wilson recounts Ralph Waldo Emerson on his trip to California. In Spring 1871, Emerson traveled on the recently completed transcontinental railroad with his daughter Edith, and her husband and her in-laws, the Forbes family, along with several other friends and relations. Emerson had traveled west before, as a lyceum lecturer, but never as far as the Pacific Coast. This was predominately a leisure trip, but Emerson also gave impromptu lectures when invited (thanks to his daughter Ellen having the foresight to pack some manuscripts in case the opportunity arose). Emerson, in his late sixties, had to opportunity to explore San Francisco and to sightsee and hike in Yosemite with John Muir, himself. The chapters on Yosemite and Muir are some of the best in the book, though the journey itself is interesting, too.

Wilson's main primary source is James Bradley Thayer, the husband of Emerson's cousin. He also uses guidebooks and newspaper clippings, as well as some rare surviving letters from the Emerson family and their pocket journals, as well as Muir's correspondence. Despite these wonderful sources, Wilson makes several small factual mistakes through out; some of these are as slight and trivial to the account as misdescribing the location of the parlor in Emerson's home, but more consequently, he misidentifies Sophia Ripley's parents as Brook Farm's founders George and Cynthia Ripley. George Ripley was a second cousin to Emerson's step-grandfather Ezra Ripley not his son. Rather Sophie Thayer's parents were Emerson's uncle and aunt, Samuel and Sarah Ripley. Samuel (and not George) was the son of Phebe Bliss Emerson Ripley and Ezra Ripley, and his daughter Sophie was thereby Emerson's cousin. While this detail may not have any direct bearing on the account of the trip itself, it is, nonetheless, important to the historical record. Even the best scholars (myself included) make unfortunate mistakes that sometimes find their way into print, and this is not mentioned to take away from all that Wilson does get right. However, being less familiar with the details of Emerson's trip, I sometimes found myself second guessing implications and identities, such as when Wilson recounts an acquaintance troubling Emerson for a letter of recommendation in San Francisco, I questioned whether this was indeed slight acquaintance from Boston or rather a good and close friend by the same name (and since I was listening to the audio version I could not see the spelling or check the footnotes/citations). Despite, this hesitancy, I trust that the broad strokes and the majority of the details are right, and, even so, Wilson's exploration into Emerson's California trip remains vital to any study of Emerson's life and career.

This book is a terrific resource for readers who would like to travel west with Emerson, and get a taste for both early tourism in the western United States and to appreciate Emerson not as the sage in his prime, but as a private man in his sunset years. This account gives us both the celebrated man inadvertently on tour, as well as quieter, more personal and humble moments largely through Emerson's companions' eyes. As before mentioned, I was most touched by Emerson's experiences in Yosemite, opening up new dimensions to his experience of nature and the American landscape. I felt so gratified and moved to know that he had these experiences. Thank you to Wilson for researching and retracing this little explored, but wonderful and final culmination to Emerson's late career, and highlight of his later life.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1871, an aging Emerson took a transcontinental trip to California with a group that included his daughter, his in-laws, and some friends. He never wrote much about the trip (only a couple of letters survive), two of the lectures he gave there were never published, and, other than a passing mention that Emerson once visited Yosemite & met John Muir, I've never read anything detailed about the trip in any Emerson scholarship.

Besides loving the idea of Emerson walking around San Francisco's Chinatown or being frustrated along with Muir that his handlers declined young Muir's invitation for the old man to sleep outside in the cold air under the redwoods, the research is also fascinating. As mentioned above, Emerson himself didn't record much of the trip, but his fellow travelers did & so the author pieces together a story of the journey through their diaries, letters, published accounts, as well as newspaper reports of his lectures & accounts by people who met Emerson in California, including many transplanted New Englanders (a surprising number of them, actually!) who were central to developing San Francisco, the East Bay, and Santa Clara Valley and were thrilled to show off "their" West to Mr. Emerson.
The author also draws on Emerson's earlier writings & lectures to draw context for his views on travel, nature, customs, and the West, weaving it all together seamlessly.

Here's a favorite quote from a rare letter Emerson did write home to his wife Lidian in April 1871 about the allure of the good life in California:

"We live today & every day in the loveliest climate...Our company is, as you know, New England's best, & we fare sumptuously every day...If we were all young, - as some of us are not, - we might each claim his quarter-section & plant grapes & oranges & never come back to your east winds & cold summers, - only remembering to send home a few tickets of the Pacific Railroad to one or two or three pale natives of Massachusetts Bay."

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kinda like a collection of B-sides for a musician or band. Diehard fans of the wordsmith Emerson as well as his words will probably take more from the book than I did. This book and a 2024 biography of Emerson's full life, Glad to the Brink of Fear, confirm for me that I only need be interested in his writings.

But it shouldn't be a crime to be a dull person or to be subject to star ratings like this; personally I hope not. Plus many many people liked Emerson personally in his life time, so his seeming stoicism or stiffness 150 years perhaps says more about our current culture's need for scandal or adventure or controversy.

Focusing on the book itself. Wilson has done a very fine job of telling chronicling Emerson's final years beginning with a poorly received speech given in Harvard to the trip out west to rekindle his spirits, to his meeting of Brigham Young and, more substantially, meeting John Muir, and Waldo's life after. I added a star for Wilson's efforts and success at making the book interesting enough to finish.

[Jansy Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed 'meeting' Ralph Waldo Emerson thru this book.
What a charismatic, kind, interested and interesting man he must have been. Admittedly, I've never read anything by RWE other than the snippets in this book, and did happily look up some of his poetry afterwards. I loved reading about the man and this enchanting trip in such an Intriguing era when conversation was truely an art form.

[Michael E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding tale, which describes the trials of "luxury " travel in the late 1800's and also presents a unique look at one of America's great minds!

[Connie Kronlokken]

Fun, especially for the California history, the meetings with John Muir.