Transcription:
The following is the first rough draft of a letter to Mr. Kent Dear Mr. Kent, It was a surprise of the pleasantest kind
seeing my name in the tender and deed of the Tamalpais Sequoias, copy of which you sent with your letter of January 17. This
is the very best monument to a tree-lover's memory that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world. You have
done me a great enduring honor and needless to say I am proud of it. Long ago Asa Gray named several plants for me, the best
of which, the most interesting, is a sturdy frost-enduring daisy that I discovered on the shore of the Arctic Ocean near Icy
Cape. Schools here and there have planted Muir trees in their playgrounds; a Sierra peak and also one of the Alaska glaciers
bear my name, but these aboriginal woods saved from man will outlast them all, even the mountain and glacier. Compared with
Sequoia glaciers are young and fleeting. Mountains great and small, thousands of them, have been ground down, weathered, washed
away, and cast into the sea since the first Sequoia forests lifted their domes and spires to the sky, and two of the many
species have come safely through all the geological storms that have fallen upon them since the cretaceous period, surviving
even the crushing, destroying ice sheets of the glacial period. Saving these woods from the axe and saw, from money-changers
and water-changers, and giving them to our country and the world is in many ways the most notable service to God and man I
have ever known of since my forest wanderings began -- a much needed lesson and blessing to saint and sinner alike, and credit
and encouragement to God himself. That so fine and divine a thing should have come out of money-mad Chicago, wha wad a thocht
it. Immortal Sequoia life to you, Ever Yours, J. M. Of course I'm with you in your all-embracing Mt. Tamalpais park
plan. I have been away in the Mohave desert with my daughter Helen, who is convalescing from pneumonia. Hence the delay in
replying to your letter of Jan. 17. 10059