John Muir

To understand the motives and actions of individuals it is important to know them and understand their lives. Looking back into someone’s life and upbringing allows unique insight to their views, writing styles and messages. John Muir was a conservationist, nature writer, and a lover of nature. He would do anything to protect it the things that he held dear. The experiences in John Muir’s life made him so in love with Yosemite Valley that he would climb to the top of a tree during a storm to experience and hear the sounds that the trees made in the wind. He revered Yosemite so much he lobbied to make it into a National Park. When it was threatened by industry and peoples need for convince he did everything in his power to protect it. Muir’s knowledge and experiences, allowed him to share and impart some understanding and love of the natural world upon the American public through his nature writing.

                 John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland on April 21, 1838. As a child, Muir was enthralled with the world around him, the sea-shore and fields around Dunbar Castle (Muir and Teale 3). Finding and enjoying life at a young age. Muir once reflected about a time he searched for a quite sharp cry in a barrel of hay,”…a mother field mouse with a half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. This to me was a wonderful discovery. No hunter could have been more excited on discovering a bear and her cubs in a wilderness den” (Muir and Teale 4). This really shows an example of Muir’s natural curiosity and desire to discover new things. He was just a child but he wanted to know the source of that cry. It also shows the joy and jubilation Muir experienced when he discovered something new. At eleven years old he, his father, brother, and sister sailed to New York.  He grew up with his siblings for the rest of his childhood on a pig farm in Fox River, Wisconsin (Muir and Teale 27-34). By the time he reached his early twenties, John Muir had decided on becoming a processional inventor yet was still swayed by nature in his heart. By the summer of 1860, Muir, only twenty-two, moved away from home with fifteen dollars and his inventions. He took a train to the Madison Fair Grounds where he proudly walked up to the fine arts building and presented his inventions, two clocks and a thermometer.  It was at this fair that a Professor of Literature from the University of Wisconsin offered him a spot at his University.  Muir eventually attended the University of Wisconsin, where he studied Greek, Latin, physics, botany, and geology among other things. He also continued inventing in his dorm room. These small products of labor soon became that of legend (Muir and Teale 51-72).  However, he was never satisfied with what he learned, and was always hungry for more. In Muir’s words he explains why he left, “I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness” (Muir and Teale 72).

After his stint in University which did not end in a degree, he once again had a decision to make about what to do with the rest of his life. He tried working in factories which was unsuccessful in many ways (Muir and Teale 75). He continued to invent, but finally, after avoiding the draft into the army during the Civil War, he chose to explore California.  After he made land in San Francisco he traveled to Yosemite (Muir and Teale 94-95). In Yosemite Valley Muir found employment with James Hutchings. He worked, designed, built, and operated a saw mill along Yosemite Creek. While working at the saw mill he only used and cut up trees that had blown or fallen down (Muir and Teale 174). He has always felt that you have to approach nature respectfully.  In my opinion Yosemite was his first true love after he left home in Dunbar, Scotland. It was in this majestic valley surrounded by massive gray granite that Muir wrote “A Wind-Storm in the Forest.” If you are ever fortunate enough to read even a small passage of Muir’s writing, you will instantly be cognizant of Muir’s love for Yosemite. Muir has an unmistakable passion and joy in being in nature that is prevalent in every sentence he writes. His enthusiasm would be almost child-like, were it not for the sophistication and grace of his writing. It was as if every time he walks through a forest, it is the first time he has ever explored such vast beauty, untouched and unimpeded by man. Muir took it upon himself to explore every peak and canyon of Yosemite. He was the first to discover living glaciers during his explorations. Muir was also the first to proposed that glaciers formed Yosemite Valley (Muir and Teale 235). Here he describes his admiration of the woods, “There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the sound of winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence over every mind but in their varied waterlike flow as manifested by the movements of the trees, especially those of the conifers” (Muir 252). There was never simply one aspect of nature which specifically enamored him, but rather all of them combined in synchronicity. In the following quote, he focuses on the wind, but also its relationship with other parts of nature. “The waving of a forest of the Giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime, but the pines seem to be the best interpreters of winds. They are mighty waving goldenrods, ever in tune, singing and writing wind music all their century long lives,” (Muir 253). His view of this forest filled with strong gales is that of composers and performers creating everlasting, ever original music. He can’t help but see beauty in every inch of Yosemite. Even something as invisible and indefinable as the sound of the wind gushing through trees has Muir mesmerized, a spectacular sound that most overlook or view as only a reminder of the cold a wind brings. On a particularly stormy day it occurred to Muir that it would be “a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook” (Muir 254).  On top of a hundred-foot Douglas Spruce this man, who needed to experience every part of the enormity of this storm, described the exhilaration of watching “the slender tops fairly flapping and swishing in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm brace, like a bobolink on a reed” (Muir 255). Who else would watch a fierce storm at the top of a tree but someone who needed and loved the mere experiences an area can provide?

                What was it in Muir’s life that made him so enthralled and beguiled by nature? As a child in Scotland he learned to love to walk with his grandfather.  He was raised learning and discovering what life was hidden around Dunbar Castle. Muir learned about every stage of life on his parent’s pig farm in Fox River.  Self-discovery was self-taught as he invented things to better his life through trial and error. He was always in love with learning from the times he read poetry in secret after Sunday church to when he would continue to read even as he was scolded by his father to go to bed every time he was caught at the kitchen table with a candle and a book.  He father was not supportive of Muir’s need for knowledge.  When Muir left home for University, questions were encouraged and his observational skills were refined.  Seeking answers to his questions and making observations became his life’s passion.  Botany and geology were all things in learned in school, and he constantly utilized his knowledge into his writing.  John Muir learned very young the mysteries and magnificence this world has to offer (Muir and Teale 3-109).  He chose to write about his love and passion so that others could understand and share in the same affection and sentiment. All of these qualities are prevalent in his writing. His boyish wonder shows through his imagery and thoughtfulness. “I suddenly recognized a sea-breeze, as it came sifting through the palmettos and blooming vine- angles, which at once awakened and set free a thousand dormant associations, and made me a boy again in Scotland, as if all the intervening years had been annihilated” (Muir 256-257).

                John Muir was incredibly effective both in their writing skills, and also in achieving the environmental goals he set forth.  John Muir’s loving and latitudinarian upbringing was instrumental in creating the man he became. Yet his father was deeply religious and did not support him in his academic endeavors. Muir was a self-taught child. He discovered his love for nature for himself. He had to work to find his path. Although working on their families’ farm helped him to see beyond the traditional confines of a conservative education, while also instilling an intense desire for both knowledge, and hands-on, applicable experience. It also influenced his writing, which depended heavily on emotion, and experience to persuade readers to join his cause, and protect that which he loved so dearly (Muir and Teale 3-139). Muir’s love of nature led him to lobby for environmental protection. He such adulation for Yosemite National Park Muir did everything in his power to protect it from human consumption and destruction.