set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”8
chapter one
Earth-Planet, Universe
Commentary
DANIEL MUIR MADE A GOOD LIVING operating a feed and grain store in Dunbar, Scotland, a fishing and farming town on the North Sea. He and his second wife, Ann Gilrye Muir, and their growing family first lived over the store, but when income permitted, they moved to a house next door. Perhaps most people would have rested content with a stable, a profitable business, and a solid family, but not John Muir’s father, Daniel.
Daniel was a complex man, driven by deep religious convictions and always seeking a better path of being faithful. From his Scottish Presbyterian roots, he sought a simpler expression of the faith more in keeping with early Christian communities. When he learned that the fledgling Disciples of Christ had established centers in Wisconsin, he decided in late l848 to emigrate. Canada, reported to have vast open prairies suitable for farming, was a possibility, but he chose Wisconsin because of the church and because there were other Scottish families in the area.
In February of l849 Daniel Muir set off on the six-week journey with John, age 11, Sarah, age 13, and 9-year-old David. They left behind Ann and the four other Muir children until Daniel could find suitable farmland and build a homestead.
The family sailed from Glasgow to New York City and then traveled to Buffalo where they continued their journey through the Great Lakes and then by wagon to Fountain Lake, near Portage, Wisconsin. For the next eight years, Daniel and his sons chopped away the oak and hickory forest, pulled out roots and rocks, built a simple house, planted winter wheat and corn for the draught animals and vegetables for themselves. In the winter the work was bone-chilling, and in the summer they baked under the blistering sun. As John Muir wrote in the memoir of his childhood, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, “I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater part of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy.… And as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all the other hard work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for long lines of zigzag fences.… Making rails was hard work and required no little skill. I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short, knotty oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night.”1
Whether the children were sick or well, Daniel drove them to work from dawn to dusk. Twice John almost died—once from pneumonia and once when he was overtaken by toxic fumes from a well he was digging.
Believing that the Fountain Lake farm wasn’t fertile enough, Daniel bought Hickory Hill, a new half-section of land (320 acres) five miles from Fountain Lake. As John recalled, “…we began all over again to clear and fence and break up the fields for a new barn, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking, chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-raising.… ”2
An insatiable reader, the young John Muir was constantly borrowing books from friends and neighbors, but farm work kept him from attending school in America until entering the University of Wisconsin in l861. Always fond of “wildness,” as he called natural areas, John dreamed of the planet’s most distant and wild places. Not surprisingly, the books that particularly influenced him were: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1795) by his fellow Scot, Mungo Park, and Personal Narrative of Travels in the Equinoctial Regions of America (1814) by the German naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt.
The Muir children’s only free time was Sunday afternoon after church, Sunday School, and farm chores. Their only vacation days were Independence Day and New Year’s Day, but John and his brothers made the most of it. His father had built the boys a simple plank boat for fishing and swimming in Fountain Lake. John reveled in running through the oak groves and the grass-filled meadows. He delighted in springtime’s gift of wild flowers. He was particularly fond of lilies. He knew the identity of every bird, and he awaited the arrival of migratory birds that flocked to the Muir fields. His blood quickened to the haunting call announcing the loons’ return to the lake. The sights, the sounds, the music, and the scents of winter unfolding into spring were intoxicating to the naturalist-in-the-making.
For more than a decade John Muir worked his father’s farms. As a diversion he taught himself algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and, using scraps from the wood pile, he concocted all manner of inventions—clocks, door latches, water wheels, an automatic horse-feeder, a barometer, a thermometer, a hygrometer, a self-setting saw mill, and, most important to John, an “early rising machine.” This unique device would, at its appointed time, usually 1 a.m., tip Muir’s bed on end, rousing him to read, to study, to imagine, to invent, to dream. Muir’s inventions attracted the attention of his neighbors, especially William Duncan, who urged him to exhibit them at the Wisconsin State Fair in Madison in l860. Muir won the “Ingenious Whittler’s Award” and met Mrs. Jeanne C. Carr, wife of University of Wisconsin’s Professor Ezra Carr. It was a fortuitous encounter. Taken by Muir’s intelligence and creativity, she urged him to enroll at the university. Jeanne Carr, in a role similar to that of an older sister, was to encourage and guide John Muir for many years, both at the University of Wisconsin and in the wider, outdoor “university of the wilderness” where landscapes, waters, skies, and animals of the waters, lands, and air would teach him all he would need to know about the universe. But before he could enter full-time into the “university of the wilderness,” he had many hurdles to overcome and much to understand before finding his way to become, in his words, “joyful and free.”
The years between 1860 and l867 were turbulent both for the nation and for John Muir personally. The North and the South had taken up arms against each other, and for Muir these were years of moral choices, decisions about which line of work to follow, and how to nourish his independent spirit while supporting himself.
The battle cry was rising. Muir’s companions from neighboring farms were enlisting in the military as were his fellow students at the University of Wisconsin. Muir was not drafted, but had he been, it is hard to say how he would have responded. Aside from some hunting he did as a farm boy, Muir had never carried a gun and he could not conceive of killing another human being. Whether wearing the blue or the gray, the end result would be the same. Killing is killing; death is death. War was an unconscionable loss of life. When Congress passed the Enrollment Act of l863, requiring all male citizens to enlist, Muir felt he couldn’t join. But where would he go and what would he do? He was 25 years old; most of his brothers and sisters had married, and his parents had moved into Portage. He was uncertain about which studies to pursue in Madison. Should he fulfill his parents’ dream and become a preacher? Or his own idea of becoming a doctor? Perhaps he could support himself as a country schoolteacher as he’d done for a few months in l862. He was certain he did not want to spend his life on a farm.
All his life, beginning in early childhood, John Muir was drawn to the wild, natural world. From the seashore of the Firth of Forth and its surrounding hills to Wisconsin’s lakes and forests, the natural world had been a source of wonder and refreshment. Now he needed the clarification of thought that only the wilderness could afford him. By this time he had acquired the skills of a botanist, so nothing pleased him more than the gathering and classification of plants. In l863 he took a long tour through the Wisconsin Dells and along the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi River gathering and identifying all kinds of plant species. Still, the gathering of specimens could not constitute his life’s work, and by this time the clock was ticking. He was balancing on a thin line between desire and duty without any clearly discernable direction to his life.
Though factory work was far from his first choice of employment, in light of his gifts for invention and innovation, Muir saw it as his only way forward. Consequently, he did three stints working in factories—each of them ending in disaster. His first was for an inventor he’d met at the Wisconsin State Fair. The invention was a steam-powered ice-breaking boat, and Muir was hired as the boat’s mechanic at the plant in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. When the boat broke up on its maiden voyage on the ice-filled Mississippi, the job abruptly ended.
In l864, Muir