be argued, of the lives of those who were to be his family and who would be forced to bear the burdens of his spiritual convictions. At some point in adolescence the Word in the dress of flaming, hellfired rhetoric was brought to the lonely farmhand, and he found in the love of Jesus something of what his earthly circumstances had denied him.
The specifics of the conversion experience are unknown, whether it came as the culmination of broodings while carrying buckets in muddy boots; or while in moments in his metic’s cot before exhausted sleep; or whether some bellows-lunged marathon evangelizer reached the boy on a single, indelible Sunday. Nor is it known which brand of evangelical preaching among the many was decisive. The Scots have always been a divided people with a historical predilection for disputation and “hiving off” into a welter of small and smaller camps of opinion. This is particularly obvious in religious matters, where there exists a long, reddened record of religious warfare. The years of armed strife in Jesus’ name were over by Daniel Muir’s time, but the schisms and splinterings continued, and in the period 1806–20 there existed seven different Presbyterian churches plus other smaller evangelical sects like the Glassites or Sandemanians.
What probably attracted Daniel Muir most in the message he heard was the addition of emotionalism to the ascetic piety of Calvinism and the displacement therein of the elitist doctrines of election and predestination. The most obvious source for this development was the influence of John Wesley, who in the course of his career made twenty-two proselytizing trips to Scotland; he gained few actual converts to Methodism through these, but his influence on the tenor of Scots religious practice was enormous. In a larger sense, this evangelical element was another of the myriad consequences of the Industrial Revolution, which had created new conditions for which the old modes and doctrines of worship now seemed inadequate. The poor, the dispossessed, the laboring masses, those like young Daniel Muir, needed some sort of fire in their lives, and evangelical religion with its odor of brimstone and its passionate promises of true equality in the hereafter gave it to them. As John Nelson, the English stonemason, told Wesley of Christ’s poor, “No other preaching will do … but the fine old sort that comes like a thunderclap upon the conscience.” Daniel Muir’s conscience was struck in that way, and it remained so throughout his life. In his subsequent position as tyrant-head of his household and in his later career as a backwoods Wisconsin preacher and wandering evangelist, he would strive with a grim earnestness to direct God’s thunderclap upon the consciences of his listeners.
In the meantime, he discovered that as one of Christ’s poor this was a hard world to live in, and that some places might be harder than others. So in his early twenties he became part of that shifting, often confused mass of his countrymen seeking more hopeful prospects. But leaving the farm was one thing, a gamble Daniel Muir and thousands of rural people willingly took; accommodating oneself to city life was another. What Daniel Muir encountered in the Glasgow of the 1820s was enough to disabuse him forever of the idea that the city offered anything more than another version of the miseries of the backcountry. At the same time, having experienced the limitations of Scots life in, both places, he may have recognized in the Glasgow episode the potential virtues of that even bigger gamble, emigration.
For Glasgow as Muir encountered it was fearfully overcrowded, having grown without plan more than 100 percent since the turn of the century. Sanitary conditions were hopelessly inadequate, and the old dread diseases like smallpox, typhus, and cholera had reappeared. Gangs of unemployed laborers, displaced rural folk—like Muir fleeing the farms or else thrown off them—aimlessly roamed the streets. Beggars clogged every corner. Hundreds of public houses ministered in their way to the despairing, and to get drunk was said to be “the short way out of Glasgow.”
Another way out and one more congenial to Daniel Muir was to accept military service, as had his father before him. He took it, though it can have done little to ameliorate his view of life’s harsh, regimented necessities. In the course of this tour he found himself on a mission as a recruiting officer to the fishing village of Dunbar.
How long Sergeant Muir stayed on this particular mission is now unknown, but it was long enough to meet, court, and marry a Dunbar woman and to persuade her to buy his release from service with some of her inheritance money. Muir took over the grain and feed store that was another portion of her legacy, and he was apparently in the process of turning it into a going concern when his wife died, leaving him in sole possession.
Given the conditions of the time and Daniel Muir’s own situation, it would seem that this would have been the right, natural time for him to emigrate: he was alone and childless, a comparative stranger in Dunbar, and for the first time he possessed enough capital to make a good start in the New World. He must have seriously considered it, but Daniel Muir stayed on, and it may be that he did so because he had become involved with another woman. Early in 1833 he married Anne Gilrye.
Anne was a tall, serious-faced young woman who lived with her parents diagonally across the high street from where Muir had reestablished his business in a narrow three-story building faced with the Upper Old Red Sandstone so pervasive in the East Lothian region. The parents, David and Margaret Gilrye, both came from old and proud Highlander families and had done well in Dunbar, where David had sold meat until his retirement. They considered their daughter somewhat above the obscure young widower across the way who each Sunday could be seen turning to the right out of his store and marching with military resolution down the sloping street to the kirk on the hill. In that same kirkyard lay six of the Gilrye children, victims of various respiratory diseases, and it would have been natural for the parents to have been protective of Anne, eager to guard her against a bad marriage.
In order to marry her, Daniel Muir had to overcome the strong objections of the father, but the root of these was not social; it was religious. David Gilrye was a Church of Scotland man, satisfied with the state and practice of Presbyterianism within the established body and probably defensive toward enthusiasts like Daniel Muir who thought establishment worshipers not so much satisfied as complacent with dry formalisms. If David Gilrye intuited that such a man, all but consumed in his zeal and arrogantly sure that others of differing shades of opinion were no Christians, would make a hard husband and father, he was right. Anne Gilrye’s life with Muir was hard indeed, and her comforts mainly those achieved through her connections with her children and in her private life, which she took care to shield from her husband. The marriage was to end many years later in separation.
Muir family tradition has it that Anne Gilrye was of a “poetical” nature in her maiden years, a euphemism generally indicating that thin indulgence sometimes granted young women to moon over ineffables and to write harmless verse in the period before life and its realities—husband, home, children—should begin. If she did once write poetry, none of it survives, but in her later letters to her son John there are suggestions of these conjectured youthful inclinations, and in the lines the work-worn farm woman wrote there is some evidence of that romanticism her son was able fully to express and that she could vicariously express through him.
But the woman was no silent cipher in the Muir household. When in 1834 the children began to come, Anne Muir did her best to protect them from the uncompromising rigidity of the father’s beliefs and behavior. Had she been any less successful, Daniel Muir’s tyranny and bigotry, unchecked and unleavened, must have produced corresponding deformities in the children. As it was, all were apparently sufficiently well adjusted—though all bore the marks of such a father—and for this the mother must be given considerable credit. In the pictureless, spartan house that Daniel Muir insisted upon, Anne Muir taught her children how to endure, and how to express and enjoy themselves when the father was elsewhere. They all had to wear the harness of Daniel Muir’s beliefs and character; she showed them how to wear it in some comfort.
PART
I
Apprenticed to the Land
The Lessons of a Long-Distance Runner