after a month of walking. They spent the summer working at odd jobs—breaking horses, shearing sheep, and serving as farm hands.
In l869 he became chief shepherd of Patrick Delaney’s flock of 2,000 sheep, and this is what Muir considers his first summer in the Sierra. Along with Carlo, a Saint Bernard dog, he and another shepherd followed the flock to green pastures high in the mountains and eventually into Yosemite and up to Tuolumne Meadows. Every day Muir explored the mountains and streams, the waterfalls and the huge variety of plants and birds. He learned to make sourdough bread that became the staple of his diet when he was tramping. He needed the job and its money; he was fond of Pat Delaney, but he was aghast at the damage done by the sheep. “Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry…almost every leaf that these hoofed locusts can reach within the radius of a mile or two has been devoured. Even the bushes are stripped bare.”2 Still, his job as a shepherd enabled Muir to get into the Sierra where he wanted to be. Here he had what was, by his own reckoning, an authentic conversion to the wilderness: “Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can hardly conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or the sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is. In this newness of life we seem to have been always.”3
These Sierra years—1868–1874—were probably the happiest years of John Muir’s life and easily the most productive. Working for James Hutchins, one of the first white settlers in the Yosemite Valley, Muir operated a sawmill, using only fallen trees, and he utilized his carpentry skills to improve Hutchins’s rustic hotel. Having become knowledgeable about every aspect of Yosemite, its flora and fauna and its geological features, Muir was sought out as a guide. In this role he introduced a stream of visitors to the Valley, including Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1871.
From his first weeks in Yosemite, Muir wondered how the mountains and valleys had been formed. From observations throughout the terrain he became convinced that Yosemite had been shaped and molded by glacial action, slowly moving ice that carved away whole mountainsides and created the valleys and streams. This theory challenged that of the California state geologist, Josiah D. Whitney, who contended that Yosemite had been created as a result of earthquakes. Geologists later affirmed Muir’s slowly moving ice theory, but the dispute with Whitney pushed Muir to learn more by exploring the “living glaciers” of Alaska, where glacial action was more evident than in the Sierra.
During these halcyon years Muir found himself and his livelihood; he found his grounding and his sense of place; he found his sense of well-being and his home. He kept diaries and journals, which he handsomely illustrated; he wrote letters to his friends and notes to himself on scraps of paper. He recorded impressions of all he was learning, sensing, feeling, seeing, hearing, and tasting. These became the sources for most of his articles and books. His first published article, “Yosemite Glaciers,” appeared in the New York Tribune in December, 1871. By 1874 he had completed fifteen articles for the California literary magazine, Overland Monthly. Muir’s richly embroidered writings of these Yosemite years formed the basis for My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Mountains of California (1894), The Yosemite (1912), and, to some extent, Our National Parks (1901).
The passion and energy of these formative six years were the point of reference of Muir’s life. As he recorded in his journal one August evening during his first summer in the Sierra, “The Forests…and lakes and meadows and glad-singing streams.… I should like to dwell with them forever…a new heaven and earth every day.… Creation just beginning.… ”4
Arriving in the Enchanting World of the Sierra Nevada
JOHN MUIR WAS TO DRAW many times on this image of his first sight of the Sierra Nevada. It was a view that shaped his thinking and sustained him all his days to come. Of his three-month walk from San Francisco to this point, Muir wrote, “I followed the Diablo foothills along the San Jose Valley to Gilroy, thence over the Diablo Mountains to the Valley of the San Joaquin by the Pacheco Pass, thence down the valley opposite the mouth of the Merced River, thence across to San Joaquin, and up into the Sierra Nevada to the mammoth trees of Mariposa and the glorious Yosemite, thence down the Merced to this place.” The curtain was raised!
The air was perfectly delicious, sweet enough for the breath of angels; every draught of it gave a separate and distinct piece of pleasure. I do not believe that Adam and Eve ever tasted better in their balmiest nook.
The last of the Coast Range foothills were in near view all the way to Gilroy. Their union with the Valley is by curves and slopes of inimitable beauty, and they were robed with the greenest grass and richest light I ever beheld, and colored and shaded with millions of flowers of every hue, chiefly of purple and golden yellow; and hundreds of crystal rills joined songs with the larks, filling all the Valley with music like a sea, making it an Eden from end to end.
The scenery, too, and all of Nature in the pass is fairly enchanting, strange and beautiful mountain ferns, low in the dark canyons and high upon the rocky, sunlit peaks, banks of blooming shrubs, and sprinklings and gatherings of flowers, precious and pure as ever enjoyed the sweets of a mountain home. And oh, what streams are there beaming, glancing, each with music of its own, singing as they go in the shadow and light, onward upon their lovely changing pathways to the sea; and hills rise over hills, and mountains over mountains, heaving, waving, swelling, in most glorious, overpowering, unreadable majesty; and when at last, stricken with faint like a crushed insect, you hope to escape from all the terrible grandeur of these mountain powers, other fountains, other oceans break forth before you, for there, in clear view, over heaps and rows of foot hills is laid a grand, smooth outspread plain, watered by a river, and another range of peaky snow-capped mountains a hundred miles in the distance. That plain is the valley of the San Joaquin, and those mountains are the great Sierra Nevadas. The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree fringing of the river and here and there of smaller cross streams from the mountains.…
—LETTER TO JEANNE C. CARR, JULY 26, [1868]
A New Earth Every Day
IT WAS JOHN MUIR’S VIEW that all of nature was a revelation of a dynamic God who is continuously creating the universe. Although Muir grew far beyond his father’s orthodox theology, he remained steeped in the language of the Bible, which he had memorized as a boy. “A New Heaven and a New Earth Every Day,” is an echo of The Revelation to John, Chapter 21, verse 1, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”
Another glorious Sierra day, warm, crisp, fragrant, clear—On the way back to our Tuolumne camp, I enjoyed the scenery if possible more than when it first came to view. Every feature already seems familiar as if I had lived here always. I never weary gazing at the wonderful Cathedral [Peak]. It has more individual character than any other rock or mountain I ever saw, excepting perhaps the Yosemite South Dome. The forests, too, seem kindly familiar, and the lakes and meadows and glad singing streams. I should like to dwell with them forever. Here with bread and water I should be content.… Bathed in such beauty, watching the expressions ever varying on the faces of the mountains, watching the stars, which here have a glory that the lowlander never dreams of, watching the circling seasons, listening to the songs of the waters and winds and birds, would be endless pleasure.
And what glorious cloud-lands I should see, storms and calms—a new heaven and a new earth every day, aye and new inhabitants.… And why should this appear extravagant? It is only common sense, a sign of health, genuine, natural, all-awake health. One would be at an endless Godful play, and what speeches and music and acting and scenery and lights!—sun, moon, stars, auroras. Creation just beginning, the morning stars “still singing together and all the [creatures] of God shouting for joy.”
—JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 27, 1868
A Window Opening into Heaven
ALL OF JOHN MUIR’S FIRST SUMMER in the Sierra was an epiphany, and during his hike to Lake Tenaya he was close to ecstasy. As he recounted,