John Muir. Frederick Turner

du Chien had not after all proved a channel opening into wider opportunities but instead a backwater. Whatever it was he was meant to do and be, this was not it. Wiard was absent much of the time and had given his apprentice but a single lesson in mechanical drawing, and the routine of the machine shop had not been a great deal more inspiriting than the round of farm labor Muir had left behind. In a letter to his seventeen-year-old brother, Dan, dated November 19, Muir discussed these concerns of time, opportunity, and vocation, advising Dan to stay home and read up on mechanics and philosophy, and especially to read the Bible since his time on earth was to be terribly short. Nor should Dan be so anxious to get away from the farm, Muir wrote, for a machine shop in Prairie du Chien was not heaven, however it might appear from Hickory Hill. Indeed, Muir guessed, the routines of the shop did not teach much to help you get ahead. Original inventions would probably come out of freedom from such routines and maybe even out of a kind of ignorance of the mechanics of industrial production. For one so unacquainted with the ways of the world, to say nothing of the patterns of American industrial life, it was a shrewd guess, and it suggests Muir was being guided by some vision of himself and his destiny, however obscure. Already this vision had driven him from the farm; presently it would take him out of the machine shop and back to Madison and the university on the hill.

      With winter, the river froze over, and so came the appointed time for the trial of the Lady Franklin. The boat broke down, nor was there anything its inventor and his apprentice could do to make it run, some fatal flaw in its design dooming it to immediate extinction. Probably by this point Muir had made up his mind anyway to go back to Madison; he was without prospects there, but really he had none here either, and he was haunted by the memory of the university.

      On December 20, the event so many had seen as inevitable occurred: South Carolina declared itself out of the Union. A few days thereafter Muir received a fine friendly letter from David Galloway advising him that he was being much too stiff and sober with the young folks at the Mondell House and gently suggesting that he relax and enjoy himself a bit. Galloway also remarked that, however homesick and stranded Muir might be feeling, he could hardly be in a worse situation than Galloway himself, who felt doomed to grub an existence out of the soil, dawn to dusk, for the rest of his life. From this perspective, wrote Galloway, Muir looked pretty well set up.

      Muir did not need to be reminded of this truth; whatever might lie ahead for him he would not retreat into farming. By the first weeks of the new year he was in Madison, a handyman now, hanging about the edges of the university and wondering how he might possibly enter that life. He made a few dollars selling his early-rising machines and a few more addressing circulars in an insurance office. He tended stock and ran errands, but still he had to live very close to the bone, and in a letter to his mother he confessed that his health was not good. Probably he was not eating regularly.

      As Muir recalled it many years afterward, his university experience began with a casual conversation with a student who recognized him from the fair. When Muir learned it was possible to board oneself at the university for as little as a dollar a week and that many did so he summoned his courage and went to talk with Professor John Sterling.