Busacca Gallery

John Muir, "Stickeen" Vintage Book "Stickeen" by John Muir, hardcover, published March 1909, Tenty-Ninth Impression, April, 1926 by the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Condition: Light foxing to edges, light corner bumps. Overall very good. John Muir's true story of what happened on an Alaskan glacier with a dog named Stickeen, in 1880, is one of Muir's best-known writings, and is now considered a classic dog story. Although it can be read as a straight adventure story, it is much more than that. Muir's story is most compelling because it revealed to Muir that man and dog were not so unlike each other. Stickeen was at first an unfriendly little dog, but after surviving a perilous journey across a glacier by crossing an ice bridge, Stickeen's aloofness is replaced by rapturous emotion, revealing to Muir the fact that our "horizontal brothers" are not that much unlike us.

Muir wrote, "I have known many dogs, and many a story I could tell of their wisdom and devotion; but to none do I owe so much as to Stickeen. At first the least promising and least known of my dog-friends, he suddenly became the best known of them all. Our storm-battle for life brought him to light, and through him as through a window I have ever since been looking with deeper sympathy into all my fellow mortals."