came to pay homage: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sir Joseph Hooker, Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray of Harvard, all shared steep trails with Muir to benefit from his first-hand observations. Muir won the respect of many of the century’s greatest men by his remarkable synthesis of geology, geography, botany, and biology, which was unique at that time. In retrospect it is evident that Muir was a pioneer “ecologist”, almost before the word was coined in 1866.
Prior to the 1870s most Americans pictured their vast country as a boundless cornucopia, overflowing with inexhaustible reserves of land, timber, water, minerals, grazing and wildlife. But as the frontier closed, Muir witnessed the rapacious exploitation of this natural wealth by the timber, mining and cattle interests. He knew that such asset-stripping was unsustainable and should be opposed, but desperately tried to avoid any public or political role himself. Predictably, it was the wanton destruction of the giant sequoias which finally impelled him to act; in mapping the distribution of the Big Trees across the Sierra Nevada, he had been appalled to discover five sawmills reducing the sacred groves to mere lumber. The giant trees were often so large that they could not be felled by the axe or the saw and so were blasted with dynamite—a crude practice that blew valuable timber to smithereens.
Hoping to alert California’s law makers, Muir went public in a newspaper article on February 5th 1876, entitled: “God’s First Temples; How Shall We Preserve the Nation’s Forests?”. In this he explained the forests’ vital and complex role in relation to water and soil conservation as well as climate. Some historians point to this single essay as the moment when the American conservation movement was born; but for Muir it marked the reluctant acceptance of a career as an environmental campaigner, a role which he was never able to relinquish until his death thirty-six years later. But whether or not Muir wanted the national role as the champion of conservation, he had little choice; he was the right man, in the right place at the right time. Apart from his expert knowledge and experience, he had been gifted the passion, the oratory, and the literary talent which enabled him to cast the conservation issue in memorable words and to raise the debate in the national arena at a crucial moment in American history. His renowned charisma and storytelling ability enabled him to convince legislators, politicians and presidents that conservation of America’s wild places was as vital to the nation’s economic and ecological prosperity as it was to the people’s recreational and spiritual well-being. He was sustained in his noted campaigns by a singularly Scottish character founded upon endurance, self-reliance and the life-long practice of self-education. Apart from Thoreau, Emerson and Humboldt, his intellectual heroes included various Scots: the naturalist Alexander Wilson, the geologists James Hutton, Hugh Miller and Archibald Geekie and the writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg and Walter Scott.
Burns in particular gave Muir a profound respect for the democratic intellect and an utter disregard for matters of class, political power or social position: “the rank is but the guinea stamp, the man’s the gowd for a’ that” was for Muir a living testament.
Spiritually, Muir’s Christian faith proved a wellspring of inner strength, tempered by his scientific awe at the complexity of the universe. This was not the dark and sin-ridden Calvinism of his childhood in Scotland, but the illumined nature-gospel of Wordsworth, Thoreau and Emerson, buttressed with the scientific revelations of Lyell, Huxley and Darwin. Muir’s decades of field studies, his “readings in the great book of Nature”, left him with no doubt that a divine and beneficent presence permeated all creation.
His scientific studies revealed, again and again, that everything in Nature was subtly interconnected beyond our wildest imaginings; for Muir, “the hand that whirls the water in the pool” animated everything in the universe, from swirling nebulae to shimmering electrons. All things sang with beauty, purpose and meaning, from the epochal grind of mountain-sculpting glaciers to the evanescent “flower in the crannied wall”.
Muir’s cosmic vision was undoubtedly too radical to find a comfortable home in any church or school of materialist science. The very personification of Blake’s aphorism: “the cistern contains, the fountain overflows”, he needed neither the catechism of any conventional church nor lectures from the halls of academe.
The divine message was written clearly, for all to read: in flower, leaf and fossil; in snowflake and star. The divinity which shone through the entire Creation could not be contained in any metaphor, described in books or letters, limited by any religious creed or confined in any doctrinal bottle. And Muir never made the error of mistaking words and abstractions for the reality of the creation. He knew from bitter experience that “the word is not the thing, the map is not the territory”; books were “nothing but piles of stones, set up by the roadside to show where another mind has wandered” while words were mere “dry pebbles rattling in skeleton’s teeth” which could never convey the living, breathing beauty of the real world.
But whenever he turned from dry and dusty words to explore the mountains and read directly from the divine manuscript of Nature, he found the omnipresent evidence of pattern, order, connectedness, symmetry and universal law. And above all, pervading everything, he found the Grace of beauty, which he characterised as “the smile of God”.
President Teddy Roosevelt’s eulogy affirmed that Muir really did alter the consciousness of an entire nation, and even that of the President himself:
he was … what few nature-lovers are—a man able to influence contemporary thought and action on the subjects to which he had devoted his life. He was a great factor in influencing the thought of California and the thought of the entire country so as to secure the preservation of those great natural phenomena—wonderful canyons, giant trees, slopes of flower-spangled hillsides … our generation owes much to John Muir.
Robert Underwood Johnson, his editor and political ally in all his campaigns, wrote of him:
Muir’s public services were not merely scientific and literary. His countrymen owe him gratitude as the pioneer of our system of national parks. Before 1889 we had but one of any importance, The Yellowstone. Out of the fight which he led for the better care of Yosemite by the state government grew the demand for extension of the system. To this many persons and organisations contributed, but Muir’s writings and enthusiasm were the chief forces that inspired the movement. All the other torches were lighted from his … John Muir was not a “dreamer”, but a practical man, a faithful citizen, a scientific observer, a writer of enduring power, with vision, poetry, courage in a contest, a heart of gold and a spirit pure and fine …
Turner’s biography is deservedly regarded as the standard modern work, but since Muir biographies are something of a rarity in the United Kingdom, it is perhaps useful to place it in the context of other biographies.
Turner was the beneficiary of the monumental scholarship of the earliest Muir biographers, William Frederic Badè and Linnie Marsh Wolfe. The first attempt to deal with Muir’s epic life was that of Badè, his literary executor, who published The Life and Letters of John Muir in 1924. A theologian and university professor, Badè joined the Sierra Club in 1903 and became Muir’s protégé, supporting him in his campaigns and particularly in the battle against Hetch Hetchy valley being flooded as a municipal reservoir for San Francisco. After Muir’s death, Badè went on to become President of the Sierra Club, from 1918 to 1922. In setting out to compile The Life and Letters, he had hoped to collect perhaps a thousand letters from Muir’s correspondence; in the event he collected and transcribed over 2,000 of Muir’s own letters, as well as more than a thousand from other correspondents. This biography is now available as a new edition in the UK, since Terry Gifford included it in his second Muir omnibus, John Muir: His Life, Letters and Other Writings (Baton Wicks 1996).
Linnie Marsh Wolfe, the second Muir biographer, spent twenty-two years studying Muir’s letters, papers and journals, sixty of which she selected for John of the Mountains (1938). She went on to produce a full biography, Son of the Wilderness, The Life of John Muir (1945), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1946. Frederick Turner generously acknowledges his debt to Badè and Wolfe who had, as he says, “sifted through the lateral, medial and terminal moraines” of Muir’s papers. In the lengthy work of sorting and cataloguing these, they created order out of chaos and pieced together the chronology which has served as a rosetta