even as one wore the harness of repetitive chores.
But perhaps it was not absolutely given that a workingman remain fixed in that physical place where life had put him. For Muir was learning too in these days that his countrymen, those wandering Scots, had adventured in virtually every land on the globe. He had known in his Dunbar school days of the great Alexander Wilson, who traveled in the New World when it was yet a vast, unmarked wilderness, and doubtless he had heard tales of those hundreds of Scots who had fanned out through the breadth of the continent as trappers, scouts, and fur traders: Alexander Mackenzie, to take but one example, who explored an unimaginably vast area of the Pacific Northwest.
He read too of the exploits of Mungo Park, the Edinburgh surgeon who explored the Niger for eighteen months, during which he endured fabulous privation merely for the chance of “rendering the geography of Africa more familiar to my countrymen.” Park’s heroism made a deep impression on Muir; it seemed wonderful to be willing to suffer and dare so much in so disinterested a cause. And there was buried in the midst of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa an episode that may well have given Muir much to muse on, not only on the Wisconsin farms but in after years. Park had just been stripped and robbed by a band of Foulahs who took his horse and compass, leaving him utterly destitute and alone. “I saw myself,” he wrote,
in the midst of a vast wilderness, in the depth of the rainy season—naked and alone, surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage. I was five hundred miles from the nearest European settlement. All these circumstances crowded at once on my recollection, and I confess that my spirits began to fail me. I considered my fate as certain, and that I had no other alternative but to lie down and perish.
At this moment of almost terminal despair Park experienced an epiphany when his distracted eye happened to fall upon a small moss, the extraordinary beauty of which so compelled his admiration that his spirits suddenly soared. Could the Being, asked the marooned adventurer, who placed this magnificent little thing here in this obscure part of the world, “look with unconcern upon the situation and sufferings of creatures formed after His own image? Surely not!” The natural manifestation of divinity conquered despair and brought resolution, the will to survive, and Park struggled onward to a small village where two shepherd guides took him to safety. It is an odd occurrence in a narrative so crammed with adventures and suffering that almost all the incidents save this one cancel each other. The young man who read it had already been rescued often enough from his own homely despair by various manifestations of nature and the force that lived through it, and he would not have missed the parallel.
Muir read another book of travels that made a deep impression on him during these years and for a long time thereafter. Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels in the Equinoctial Regions described the young adventurer’s fearless probes into the heart of South America, searching along mosquito-blackened watercourses, mute amid a welter of unknown tongues, for the principle he felt must unify all flora, fauna, and geological formations.
One day excitedly—and unguardedly—talking to his mother of Humboldt and Park and describing to her some of their experiences in the jungles of places scarcely on any map, Muir heard her words of quiet encouragement. “Weel, John,” he recalled her saying, “maybe you will travel like Park and Humboldt some day.” In her necessarily careful way she would often so encourage her son in his nascent enthusiasms, usually when Daniel Muir was absent. But on this occasion her guard, like her son’s, must have been down, for Daniel Muir heard the exchange from his study and cried out what his son remembered as a “solemn depreciation, ‘Oh, Anne, dinna put sic notions in the laddie’s heed.’ ” In Daniel Muir’s mind, there was no thought of travel for his eldest son and still less of that son’s spiritual change. And yet, under his unforgiving gaze, this was what was happening.
Of course Daniel Muir sought to bully John about his reading. He himself read only Christian literature, little more than the Bible and rigorously screened commentaries on it, and he felt that other kinds of texts were less than useful. Occasionally John was able to talk his father into accepting the household presence of texts in no way related to Christian doctrine. Plutarch, for example, was allowed since Daniel Muir was persuaded the ancient historian might be able to shed further light on the question of proper diet, just then vexing the senior Muir because of the graham bread fad that had visited the Wisconsin backwoods. But Daniel Muir dug in his heels at Thomas Dick’s The Christian Philosopher. The offense was given in the title’s word, “Philosopher.” Philosophy in the father’s lexicon meant sophistry, but in truth Dick’s work was an earnest attempt to defend Christianity and reconcile it with nineteenth-century scientific advances. The effort was common at midcentury, and indeed Hugh Miller in his The Footprints of the Creator (1847) had recently framed a brilliant geologically buttressed refutation of fellow Scot Robert Chambers, whose Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) contained striking anticipations of Charles Darwin.
Despite Daniel Muir’s objections, his son read Dick in secret, and the argument of this book must have been of more than casual interest, for John himself had entered a struggle with orthodoxy that was to continue well into maturity. His earliest efforts were directed toward defining for himself the tenor and tone of his own practice of the faith. He had been early immersed in Scripture, of course, and in childhood had been coerced into memorizing huge quantities of it. Nor did the gradual emancipation from paternal tyranny that was now in process include anything approaching a thorough rejection of so firm-set a heritage. But there are a few indications that Muir was now beginning to consider in an informal but nonetheless serious way just what sort of Christian he could continue to be. Such spiritual probings would find an uneasy coexistence with his acquired religious enthusiasm and Scriptural literalism, and it might be argued that he never really wrestled with his faith to the point where he felt finally blessed as Jacob had been by the departing angel. Perhaps he did not need such a contest.
In any case, available evidence suggests that in his young manhood Muir argued with himself about the quality and practice of his faith and that the argument was strenuous enough so that he projected it upon others. He could be in these years a jackleg preacher to his peers, zealous to bring the message of Christ’s love to those he sensed were slipping from rigor. He wrote several hortatory epistles on the subject to a friend named Bradley, one of which has survived.
It was written in the form of a parable of a young man, lost and freezing in a blizzard at night, who was taken in and befriended by a benevolent stranger. Now, Bradley, Muir wrote, wouldn’t you love and honor that kind man forever? Wouldn’t you hold his memory in the warmest corner of your heart? Then how much more do we owe Jesus for His eternal, unfailing love of us?
The letter, which dates from 1856, is of interest not only as it indicates how deeply Muir’s orthodoxy was set, but also because it indicates that he had been reading and responding to much more than religious literature. The prose is polished if stilted, and the imaginative evocation of the young man’s predicament is so convincing it seems as if the writer were unconsciously more interested in the composing of it than in the message it was to convey. Here is evidence of a mind beginning to range and to range away from that orthodoxy it yet professes.
The major problem Muir faced in his religion probings was that of reconciling Christianity as he had observed its practice with the way it appeared to him in Scripture. Perhaps it would also be necessary to find a way of reconciling the Old Testament with the New.
His father, of course, was a New Testament man who had taught all his children to love Jesus and to admire and emulate the greatest Apostle, Paul. And yet Daniel Muir’s behavior seemed decidedly un-Christian at times and was surely at variance with the mild and loving example of Christ. The elder Muir appeared to be more nearly the patriarch of the Old Testament: severe, implacable, capable of shocking acts. Angered at the way the boys’ Indian pony, Jack, would chase the cows in at sundown on the Fountain Lake farm, Daniel Muir had once ordered John to shoot Jack. He had relented then, but he had himself killed one of the boys’ favorite horses by relentlessly driving it twenty-four miles over hot, sandy roads to get to a revival meeting. Muir never forgot the way that doomed animal had lingered on in its suffering, how it would pathetically trail after the children, bleeding from the nostrils, gasping for breath, mutely pleading for