John Muir

Scottish-born American naturalist

• Born: April 21, 1838
• Birthplace: Dunbar, Scotland
• Died: December 24, 1914
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Combining his skills as a scientist, explorer, and writer, Muir played a significant role in the conservation movement and in the development of the United States National Park system and left a legacy that has kept his name honored in the twenty-first century.

Early Life

John Muir (mewr) was the eldest of three sons and the third of eight children of Ann Gilrye Muir and Daniel Muir. His father grew up under the harshest poverty imaginable but eventually gained stature as a middle-class grain merchant and became a Presbyterian of severe Fundamentalist religious beliefs. He worshiped a God of wrath who found evil in almost every childish activity. Typically, John and his playmates would leave the yard, and his tyrannical father would fly into a rage and punish the innocent lad. When his father did not have the total devotion of his entire family, he would punish them with the greatest severity.

In 1849, at the age of eleven, John and his family immigrated to the United States in search of greater economic opportunity. The Muirs moved to Portage, Wisconsin, an area that had a fine reputation for wheat growing, where they purchased farmland. John marveled at the beauty of the countryside. He kept busy with farm chores and read at night when he was thought to be asleep. He also developed an early love of machinery and began the practice of waking at one in the morning to go to his cellar workshop to build things out of scraps of wood and iron. His father considered his inventions a waste of time, but John built a sawmill, weather instruments, waterwheels, and clocks. In 1860, at the age of twenty-two, he displayed his inventions at the state fair in Madison. His gadgets were well received, but his dour father only lectured him on the sin of vanity.

At this juncture in his life, John decided to leave home to make his own way. First, he moved to nearby Madison and attended the University of Wisconsin. He followed no particular course of study; he took classes that interested him. He seemed more concerned with learning than with earning a degree. Muir excelled in the sciences and also enjoyed the outdoor laboratory of nature. A tall, disheveled, bearded man with penetrating, glacial-blue eyes, Muir eventually grew tired of the regimentation of college. He liked books, but he loved experience more. Some men from the university were leaving to fight in the Civil War. Muir was twenty-five years old and in his junior year of school, but he decided to leave also.

From Madison, he journeyed into Canada to take odd jobs and to study the botany of the area. Later, he turned up in Indianapolis, Indiana, working in a carriage shop. With his inventive mind, he proved a success in the factory environment until one day he suffered an eye injury while working on a machine. The puncture wound affected both eyes, and soon he lost his eyesight. After a month of convalescence in a darkened room, his vision slowly returned. With a new lease on life and his eyesight fully restored, Muir decided to abandon the factory world and enjoy nature.

Life’s Work

In September of 1867, Muir began a walking tour that would take him from Louisville, Kentucky, to the Gulf Coast of Florida. He found the wildlife and plants of the South fascinating. His travels took him through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, until he reached the Gulf at Cedar Key. He had no particular route planned, other than to head south. He was not disappointed in what he found on his four-month trek and decided to continue his journey. He had often read the exciting travel accounts of Alexander von Humboldt, who had explored widely in South America. Such exploration was Muir’s dream also, but it was interrupted by a three-month bout with malaria. When he was almost recovered, he set off for Cuba, but, upon reaching that tropical island and after waiting for a southbound ship for a month, he settled on a new destination.

Muir believed that California offered the best climate for his malarial disorder and also afforded an environment of substantial botanical interest. He made the long journey to the West and settled in beautiful Yosemite Valley, which was snuggled in the Sierra Nevada. At times, he worked as a sheepherder and at a lumber mill, but he spent most of the time exploring the beautiful countryside, taking notes of his findings, and looking for one more glorious site of the wondrous Sierra. In 1869, Muir and a friend built a one-room cabin of pine logs near Yosemite Falls, and this became his home. He had famous visitors such as Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist, the novelist Therese Yelverton, and the renowned Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. With all, he shared the exhilarating scenes of the high country.

After four years in Yosemite Valley, Muir moved to San Francisco and dreamed of other trips. He traveled up the coast to Oregon and Washington and climbed Mount Shasta and Mount Rainier. He also made six excursions to Alaska, where he climbed mountains and studied glaciers. His favorite area was Glacier Bay in southern Alaska, but he loved any place where he could find a mountain to climb. During his stay in Alaska, he also studied the customs of the Tlingit Indians.

Muir also found time for romance. A friend introduced him to Louisa Strentzel, daughter of horticulturalist Dr. John Strentzel and owner of a large fruit ranch east of San Francisco, near the town of Martinez. Louisa and John were married on April 14, 1880. At the same time, he became the overseer of the Strentzel ranch and introduced changes that brought production to peak efficiency. Muir grafted one hundred varieties of pears and grapes onto the best strains. His effective management of the ranch provided him with economic security. For the next ten years, he neglected his writing and mountain climbing, but he and his wife grew reasonably prosperous and reared their two daughters, Wanda and Helen.

Nine years after his marriage, Muir took an important trip back to Yosemite. With him was Robert Underwood Johnson, an old friend and editor of the influential The Century. The two were dumbfounded by the changes that had taken place in the Sierra during such a short time. Sheep and lumberjacks had created great devastation in the valley and high country. Forest land was bare, and grass root structures were severely damaged by the sharp hoofs of the sheep. Johnson was moved to action. He promised to lobby influential congressmen, and he encouraged Muir to convince the American public of their conservationist cause and the need to take action before it was too late. Muir accepted the challenge and, in two well-argued articles published in The Century, he convinced many readers of the desperate need to preserve some of the natural wonders of the California highlands.

In 1890, the federal government rewarded the efforts of Muir, Johnson, and other conservationists by creating Yosemite National Park . Other victories followed when Congress established Mount Rainier, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and parts of the Sierra as national preserves. The following year, Muir worked for the passage of legislation that eventually allowed President Benjamin Harrison to set aside thirteen million acres of forest land and President Grover Cleveland, twenty-one million acres more. Muir continued the conservationist cause by helping to create the Sierra Club in 1892. He became the club’s first president, and the members vowed to preserve the natural features of the California mountains.

With the total support of his wife, Muir decided to abandon the ranch work and concentrate on furthering his writing career. In 1894, he published The Mountains of California and followed it with Our National Parks (1901), Stickeen (1909), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Yosemite (1912), and The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913). In these works, he richly illustrated the growth of a conservationist mind and presented forceful arguments for preservation and ecological protection.

In his last years, Muir traveled to Europe, South America, and Africa, always learning and experiencing what he could. Seventy-six years of life and accomplishment came to an end in December of 1914, when Muir died in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve.

Significance

For John Muir, it had been a full life. Forced to make a decision at an early age between machines and inventions on one hand and nature and conservation on the other, he chose the path of mountains, flowers, and preservation. In nature, he found his cathedral, and there he preached the gospel of conservation, preservation, and ecology. He walked the wilderness paths with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Roosevelt; in the end, he convinced many of his contemporaries of the rightness of his ideas.

Muir lived at a time when the United States was becoming a great industrial leader in the world. Nevertheless, he was able to point to the wisdom of preserving many natural wonders of the American West. Although an earlier generation had plundered the East, his efforts and those of others helped to save significant portions of the West, to create large national parks and forest preserves, and to protect the ecological systems so necessary for the survival of nature.

Bibliography

Badè, William Frederic. The Life and Letters of John Muir. 2 vols. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. The best collection of Muir’s letters.

Ehrlich, Gretel. John Muir: Nature’s Visionary. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2000. Insightful biography, containing many quotations from Muir’s unpublished journals and his other writings. Well illustrated with landscape photographs.

Fox, Stephen R. John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981. This is a biography of Muir, a chronological history of the conservation movement from 1890 to 1975, and an analysis of what conservation means in historical terms.

Melham, Tom. John Muir’s Wild America. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1976. A good place to begin the study of Muir. Beautiful illustrations and sound background history.

Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967. This work traces the idea of wilderness from an early view as a moral and physical wasteland to its present acceptance as a place to preserve. John Muir emerges as one of many significant figures in this intellectual transformation.

Smith, Herbert F. John Muir. New York: Twayne, 1964. Approaches Muir through his writings as literary works and places him in the context of Transcendentalist literature.

Turner, Frederick. Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours. New York: Viking Press, 1985. A good, sound coverage of Muir’s life in the context of his times and the development of the United States.

Williams, Dennis C. God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. Examines Muir’s views of nature, morality, and conservation, locating their source in his nineteenth century Calvinist upbringing.

Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. Reprint. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. A well-written biography based on solid research that shows the many-faceted dimensions of Muir’s personality.