The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir

First published: 1913

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1840-1880

Locale: Scotland and Wisconsin

Principal Personages:

• John Muir, naturalist
• Daniel Muir, his father
• Ann Gilrye Muir, his mother
• David Muir, his brother
• Sarah Muir, his sister

Analysis

Written as it was in the winter of life, this autobiography deserves a place among the confessions and apologies which recall eternal spring. The work contains what most pleased the writer’s public and what most endures with posterity, a delightful yet serious account of formative years. Universally applauded for its sweet simplicity, blithe charm, and fresh truth, the book went into nine printings in its first ten years; it remains an inspiration to the young and a pleasant reminder to the old of what life was and yet can be.

Brought up in Calvinist Scotland under the constant surveillance of a most severe but loving father and among beloved brothers and sisters, John Muir received his severest punishments for escaping into nature unaware of time or place. He recalls the many fights and frolics among his schoolmates, his early fears and interests replete with exact Scots dialect, and the school discipline which was all he was to get until his majority; but always he speaks most feelingly of the landscape and its wild inhabitants: “How our young wondering eyes reveled in the sunny, breezy glory of the hills and the sky, every particle of us thrilling and tingling with the bees and glad birds and glad streams! Kings may be blessed; we were glorious, we were free,—school cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature’s glad wildness. These were my first excursions,—the beginnings of lifelong wanderings.”

But all of the wanderings did not come from his love of nature. In school he read Scottish-American ornithologist Alexander Wilson’s accounts of American birds as well as Audubon’s exciting description of the passenger pigeon flights, later to be witnessed by impressionable young Muir. For in 1849 Daniel Muir took part of his family to America. Only the oldest son John, a daughter Sarah, and David, a younger brother, accompanied their father; but the excitement of the journey helped to ease the sadness of leaving behind the mother, three sisters, and a brother, who were to follow after the emigrant Muirs had found a new home in the American wilderness.

The early days in America were ones of exhausting work for the youthful plowboy whose growth was stunted but whose spirits soared. At first, farm and domestic animals, as well as birds unusual to him, drew his attention. In moments snatched from work he and his brother built a boat and discovered water life, though punishment always followed for indulgence in idle ways. In this forest and water setting his theistic views took shape.

After his mother and the other children joined the pioneers, life could have been easier if his father had not been so grasping; another section of land was added, to which the family moved. Again the plowboy and railsplitter, the only real handyman in the household, lost leisure to a seventeen-hour day during harvest season. In the winter he persuaded his father to let him read and invent early in the morning, for he was compelled to go to bed at eight in order to conserve heat and save candles. From this freedom came his inventions later to win him local fame: clocks, barometers, “early risers” in the form of bed dumpers—the latter to enable him to work and study his way through the University of Wisconsin. Always he collected and classified, observed and noted, and began the rudimentary pencil sketches with which he illustrated his nature books in later life.

His loving sister Sarah and his devoted mother tried to intercede on occasion to save John from the harsh authority of Daniel Muir. When the young man wished to go out into the world, he received no help or encouragement from his severe though sincere father. Meanwhile, loyal neighbors lent him books and encouragement when the young genius was at his most diffident period, overwhelmed with work and anxious for his future. Once he was almost overcome by gas fumes eighty feet below the earth’s surface in the sandstone well he was chiseling by hand. At the same time he read and experimented, cutting his rest from ten hours to half as much.

Leaving Portage, Muir Lake (a lovely Walden-like glacial pond), and the family homestead was a giant step for young John Muir. With a sovereign his grandfather had given him ten years before and a little money saved from farming a sandpatch of his own, he eventually left home to seek his fortune as a mechanic. But his love of learning soon led to the University of Wisconsin, where he matriculated but never graduated, so intent he was on taking only courses he needed to fulfill his dreams: mathematics, chemistry, geology, and botany. When he left the University, he felt that he was entering another, the University of the Wilderness, and beginning a botanical and geological excursion that was to continue for the rest of his life.