[BITList] Park life

[John Feltham]

For those living in Scotland...



To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2010-04-21



Muir,  John  (1838-1914), naturalist and conservationist, was born in Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland, on 21 April 1838 to Daniel Muir (1804-1885) and his second wife, Anne Gilrye Muir (1813-1896). John was the third child (of eight) and first son of this deeply religious, poorly educated shopkeeper and grain dealer of longtime Scottish descent. Daniel Muir, a stern Calvinist and lay preacher, eventually abandoned both the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches to join the yet more zealous Campbellites (later known as the Disciples, or Churches, of Christ), a denomination of scriptural literalists founded primarily in America by Thomas and Alexander Campbell. Returning to Scotland in the famine-plagued 1840s, the Campbells (father and son) persuaded Muir and other followers to emigrate with them back across the Atlantic, cheap land and religious freedom being the main attractions.

Daniel Muir and his three older children-the others would come later-left Dunbar by rail on 19 February 1849 to sail under abject conditions on an overcrowded boat from Glasgow to New York, a difficult voyage requiring more than six weeks. During it Muir was persuaded to settle in Wisconsin, USA, rather than Ontario (a British colony). From New York, therefore, the Muirs continued up the Hudson River to Albany, through the Erie Canal to Buffalo, and across the Great Lakes to Milwaukee-still very much a frontier town, as Wisconsin had achieved statehood only the year before.

John Muir, then only eleven, grew to adulthood as a tall, wiry manual labourer on farms his father bought near Portage, some 35 miles north of the state capital at Madison. Like Daniel Muir's other children, John was required to memorize Bible verses daily but forbidden to read anything not having practical or religious merit. When he was fifteen two neighbouring boys surreptitiously introduced him to poetry. Quietly defying Daniel and his whip, John began to read books of all kinds available in their homes. He developed an aptitude for creating mechanical devices and, under his mother's influence, a keen interest in nature.

In 1860, now of age, John took some of his inventions to the state fair at Madison and, despite his relative lack of formal education (he seems to have attended the grammar school in Dunbar and had further schooling in Wisconsin), was admitted to the recently founded University of Wisconsin, which had a faculty of five. During the two years of his studies, beginning in 1861, Muir was introduced to science by Dr Ezra Slocum Carr, formerly of Massachusetts, and to the value-centred views of nature in the writings of William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Carr's wife, Jeanne, became a nurturing adviser and lifelong friend. Muir found no conflict between the geology of Charles Lyell and Louis Agassiz now being taught to him and the indwelling human divinity of the transcendentalists. But he quickly discarded the scriptural literalism and punitive fundamentalism of his father.

After several years in Canada, where he had gone to avoid the American Civil War of 1861-5, Muir found employment in a machine shop at Indianapolis. He lost the use of his right eye due to an accident and was for a time blind in both, but sight in the left gradually returned. During his period of darkness and recovery, Muir experienced a further conversion, abandoning (as he later wrote) all mechanical inventions in favour of the inventions of God.

Attempting in 1867 to emulate Alexander von Humboldt (whose comprehensive writings about natural history had become a major influence), Muir walked 1000 miles through the woods from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, keeping a journal in the manner of Emerson and Thoreau. He had hoped to go to South America, like Humboldt, but got no closer than Cuba. Instead, Muir crossed Panama and went on by ship to San Francisco, near where the Carrs were now living. He then found employment in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada for a time, working as a shepherd.

From 1869 to 1873 Muir lived in the scenically stunning and recently discovered Yosemite valley, which he explored thoroughly on foot. Finding everywhere traces of the huge but now vanished glaciers that he believed had carved it out of granite, Muir began to communicate his geological views to Mrs Carr by letter and at first hand to the numerous distinguished visitors she sent from the Bay Area to see him. One of these visitors was Therese Yelverton, a former countess escaping from the publicity of her sensational divorce. Her mediocre novel Zanita: a Tale of the Yo-Semite (1872) includes a character who is unquestionably based on Muir. Professor Joseph Le Conte of the University of California (where Carr now also taught) was another visitor; after seeing the evidence for himself, he accepted almost all of Muir's ideas. Like Carr, Le Conte had studied geology under Louis Agassiz (Swiss advocate of the Ice Age) at Harvard. Emerson, making his only journey west from Massachusetts, was a further distinguished visitor; he recognized in Muir a kindred spirit. Yet another was Professor John Daniel Runkle, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who listened to Muir expound on the geological origins of Yosemite valley for five days and was responsible for promulgating his ideas among the east coast establishment. Agassiz himself corresponded with Muir and thought highly of his fieldwork.

Muir's insistence that Yosemite valley was almost entirely the product of slow glacial erosion directly contradicted a previously published theory by the California state geologist and Harvard professor Josiah D. Whitney, who believed that Yosemite had been created suddenly, by a tectonic cataclysm. Muir's unorthodox ideas were presented most fully in the Overland Monthly, a San Francisco periodical in which several of his shorter pieces had previously appeared. The extremely dichotomized Muir-Whitney dispute continued to influence geological analyses of Yosemite well into the twentieth century.

Though geology was uniquely important to him, as a protracted record of divine creation, Muir also delighted in botany and pursued it with nearly equal fervour. He knew plants very well, described them accurately, and supplied numerous specimens to professional classifiers; at least three species were named for him. Besides Le Conte, he was closely associated with the noted American botanists Asa Gray and John Torrey, as well as with Charles Darwin's close friend Sir Joseph Hooker, president of the Royal Society of London. Like Emerson, Gray, Torrey, and Hooker all came to California on the recently completed transcontinental railroad and were guided round the Sierra Nevada by Muir. Though numerous plant species attracted him, none aroused Muir's admiration so thoroughly as the giant redwoods, some of them more than 2000 years old, that he did much to preserve.

From 1868 to 1875 Muir was an accomplished mountaineer, probably the best in the United States. Climbing, usually alone, with a minimum of equipment and food, he scaled one Sierra Nevada peak after another, including the highest, Mount Whitney. In 1875 he was trapped for four days atop Mount Shasta by a blizzard and suffered frostbite, permanently damaging his feet. Even so, he made the seventh recorded ascent of Mount Rainier (in Washington state) in 1888 at age fifty, and still climbed occasionally thereafter.

By 1873, however, encouraged by Mrs Carr on the basis of his letters to her, Muir had begun to turn his attention to writing. For seven years he continued to spend his summers in the mountains but wintered regularly in Oakland or San Francisco, where he began to prepare manuscripts based on his summer excursions. A series of short pieces on his adventures, most extolling the beauty and spirituality of nature, appeared in local publications. In several of them he argued that still-pristine landscapes should be preserved for later generations as national parks, as Yellowstone (the only national park at that time) had been. Through his efforts other parks such as Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Mount Rainier, Grand Canyon, and Petrified Forest eventually came into being, and the idea of national parks spread worldwide.

After marrying Louisa Strentzel (1847-1905) on 14 April 1880, at the age of forty-two, Muir settled down in Martinez, California, east of San Francisco, to manage a large fruit ranch belonging to his wife. The couple had two daughters. He continued his conservationist efforts, travelled widely, and visited Alaska (with its living glaciers) seven times. His major books, all written at Martinez from earlier journals and publications, were autobiographical, adventurous, and full of rhapsodic descriptions. They included The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901), Stikeen (1909; an Alaskan dog story), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Yosemite (1912), and The Story of my Boyhood and Youth (1913). Travels in Alaska (1915), A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), The Cruise of the 'Corwin' (1917; to Alaska), and Steep Trails (1918) were posthumous, with further collections since.

In 1892 Muir founded the conservationist Sierra Club, and was its president until his death from pneumonia in Los Angeles on Christmas eve 1914. He left an estate of almost 250,000 and was buried in Martinez at the Strentzel family cemetery. He lived to see the Hetch-Hetchy valley, part of his beloved Yosemite (where he is memorialized), flooded to become a reservoir for the city of San Francisco, despite his efforts to prevent this, but he was spared the agony of world war. In 1903 he had camped out in Yosemite with Theodore Roosevelt, during the latter's presidency of the United States. A well-known photograph shows them together atop Glacier Point. In 1909, still thin, tangle-bearded, and scruffy, Muir served as Yosemite guide to William Howard Taft, also during the latter's presidency. More national parks came into being as a result. Muir received an honorary master's degree from Harvard in 1896 and honorary doctorates from Wisconsin (1897), Yale (1911), and California (1913). During the 1980s Muir was voted the most important person in the history of California; he is commemorated there and in Alaska by dozens of place names. His birthday, 21 April, is a California holiday (with Earth day following). His home at Martinez, 4202 Alhambra Avenue, is now a national historic site. In 1984 a John Muir trust was founded in his home town of Dunbar, Scotland.

Dennis R. Dean 

Sources  autobiographical writings and correspondence by Muir, University of the Pacific, CA + L. M. Wolfe, Son of the wilderness: the life of John Muir (1945) + W. F. Bade, ed., The life and letters of John Muir, 2 vols. (1923-4) + S. M. Miller, ed., John Muir: life and work (1993) + 'John Muir: life and legacy', Pacific Historian, 29 (1985), 1-166 + D. R. Dean, 'John Muir and the origin of Yosemite valley', Annals of Science, 48 (1991), 453-85 + private information (2004)
Archives University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, Holt-Atherton Library + University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, John Muir Centre for Regional Studies | Muir Historic Site, Martinez, California + Sierra Club, San Francisco, William E. Colby Library + U. Cal., Berkeley, Bancroft Library + Yosemite National Park Research Library, California
Likenesses  photograph, c.1875, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, Holt-Atherton Library; repro. in Miller, ed., John Muir · statue, after 1991, corner of Alhambra Valley Road and Alhambra Avenue, Martinez, California · M. Muir, oils, Muir National Historic Site, Martinez, California · O. Rouland, portrait, NPG, Smithsonian Institute [see illus.] · photographs, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, Holt-Atherton Library · portrait, U. Cal., Berkeley, Bancroft Library · portrait, Yosemite National Park Research Library · portrait, Sierra Club, San Francisco, William E. Colby Library
Wealth at death  under £250,000: Muir Historic Site, Martinez, California, archives