Essential Muir (Revised), page 18
Instead of bands of sheep one may meet new bands of bright girls and boys threading the forest aisles, stepping briskly along, the health and exhilaration of the mountains in every eye. In the exciting times of gold-digging scenery was unnoticed. Many old Californians even, living within a day or two’s journey of Yosemite, never saw it; but now in the springtime children go to the park with enthusiasm as if called by the blast of a trumpet.
The park is the poor man’s refuge. Few are altogether blind and deaf to the sweet looks and voices of nature. Everybody at heart loves God’s beauty because God made everybody.
Sources
Part One: The Visionary Inventor
“Knowledge and Inventions” and “The World and the University” from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Chs. 7 and 8) from John Muir: Nature Writings, William Cronon, ed. (New York: Library of America, 1997), 117–42.
Part Two: The Wandering Minstrel
“Kentucky Forests and Caves and Through the Cumberland Mountains” and “The River Country of Georgia, Through Florida’s Swamps and Forests, and across Florida to Cedar Keys,” from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf by John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin—Mariner Books, 1916), 9–14; 30–33; 60–63; 103–7; 121–34.
Part Three: The Nature Scribe and Rhapsode
“In Camp on the North Fork of the Merced” and “The Mono Indians of Bloody Cañon” from My First Summer in the Sierra (Chs. 2 and 9) by John Muir (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 71–79, 214–31.
“A Near View of the High Sierra” and “A Windstorm in the Forest,” from The Mountains of California (Chs. 4 and 10) by John Muir (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, Facsimile Edition, 1894, 1977), 48–73; 244–57.
“Yosemite Falls at Midnight,” letter from John Muir to Jeanne (Mrs. Ezra S.) Carr, April 3, 1871, from The Life and Letters of John Muir, William Frederic Bade, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 1:249–52.
“Nut Time in Squirrelville,” letter from John Muir to Jeanne (Mrs. Ezra S.) Carr, dated “Nut Time,” ca. 1870, from The Life and Letters of John Muir, 1:270–73.
“Yosemite Glaciers,” originally published in the New York Tribune, Dec. 5, 1871, from John Muir: Nature Writings (New York: Library of America), 577–86.
“A Yosemite Earthquake” and “Indian Tribes of the Yosemite Valley,” from The Yosemite by John Muir (New York: Doubleday / Anchor Books, 1912, 1962), 59–65; 173–76.
Part Four: The Global Adventurer
“Eskimos and Walrus,” from The Cruise of the Corwin by John Muir (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1993), 48–55.
“Stickeen vs. the Glacier,” from Stickeen by John Muir (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1990), 39–64.
“Voyage to East Africa,” from John Muir’s Last Journey, Michael P. Branch, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001), 107–14. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, DC.
Part Five: The Planet Steward
“God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?” originally published in the Sacramento Daily Record-Union, Feb. 5, 1876, from John Muir: Nature Writings (New York: Library of America), 629–33.
“The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, August 1897, from Our National Parks by John Muir (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 1–10.
“Thoughts upon National Parks” (ca. 1895), from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, reprint edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938, 1979), 350–54. Reproduced by permission of John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of The Pacific Library. ©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.
Major Works by John Muir
(in order of publication)
The Mountains of California (1894)
Our National Parks (1901)
Stickeen (1909)
My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)
The Yosemite (1912)
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)
Travels in Alaska (1915)
A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)
About the Editor
Fred D. White, a native Californian, was born in Los Angeles in 1943, in the very same hospital—California Hospital—in which John Muir had died twenty-nine years earlier. White received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa and his B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota, where he studied with the distinguished poet-critics Allen Tate and John Berryman. He is a professor of English, emeritus, at Santa Clara University where, since 1980, he taught courses in writing and literature (including a course in writing about nature and the environment—on campus and in Trinidad & Tobago). In 1997 he received the Louis and Dorina Brutocao Award for Teaching Excellence. Professor White’s other books include Approaching Emily Dickinson, The Writer’s Idea Thesaurus, The Daily Writer, The Well-Crafted Argument (coauthored with Simone Billings), Where Do You Get Your Ideas? and Writing Flash. He lives in Folsom, California, with his wife, Therese (an attorney), and their two irrepressible cats, Emily and Otis.
John Muir, Essential Muir (Revised)
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