Essential Muir (Revised), page 3
In 2020, the Sierra Club had a reckoning with a concept that underscored its founding: the idea of nature’s “purity,” a notion that was entwined with those of white supremacy, which included the assumption held by Muir and others that the Native peoples inhabiting these wilderness areas detracted from their beauty and purity. The Sierra Club has acknowledged that Muir’s racist, white supremacist views were interwoven with the organization’s founding principles.
John Muir scrutinized and celebrated wild nature on behalf of the human soul as he understood it more than one hundred years ago. Can he still speak to us today? Yes, but we must reconsider his legacy even though “the world is too much with us,” as Wordsworth lamented two hundred years ago in a famous sonnet that starts with those words and later includes the line “Little we see in Nature that is ours.” Muir can teach us once again to see what is ours—and not ours—in the natural world. By reading his best and worst together, we can also learn how the wider conservation movement and American nature writing have excluded non-white perspectives, even from those who have and continue to live deeply in relationship to the natural world, California Indians among them. We must know all of Muir: the mystic, the scientist, the ardent activist and adventurer, and the man unable to shake his prejudices. Even more, knowing him better, we can work to repair the damage done to those whose voices and lives meant little to Muir. More than a century later, greater numbers of us can come to understand that the American wilderness was never empty, was never even really wild. Yet even still, we take heart and inspiration from him at his best: “Go now and then for fresh life,” he wrote in his journal on the way to the Yosemite Valley in September 1874. “[Even] if most of humanity must go through this down stage of development—just as divers hold their breath and come ever and anon to the surface to breathe . . . go to the snow-flowers in winter, to the sun-flowers in summer. . . . Go up and away for life.”22 He is not merely telling us to jump into our RVs and spend a weekend in the mountains; he is reminding us that, like Antaeus, we cannot remain uprooted from the earth for too long without losing our sense of what it means to be fully alive. How we restore that relationship for everyone is the challenge that faces us all today as the inheritors of Muir’s legacy.
SELECTIONS NEW TO THIS EDITION
The following selections have been added to those from the original edition to provide a more comprehensive picture of John Muir’s ideas and experiences, including his views of people of color—particularly African Americans and the Native peoples he encountered in the Sierra and in Alaska:
“Kentucky Forests and Caves” and “Through Florida’s Swamps and Forests,” from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
“In Camp on the North Fork of the Merced” and “The Mono Indians of Bloody Canon,” from A Near View of the High Sierras
“A Yosemite Earthquake,” from The Yosemite
“Indian Tribes of the Yosemite Valley,” from The Yosemite
“Thoughts upon National Parks,” from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
Notes
1 The Yosemite (New York: Anchor Books, 1912), 66.
2 An evangelical, utopian sect founded in America by the Scotsman Alexander Campbell. Unlike Calvinism, and more in keeping with the spirit of American democracy and liberty, it held that salvation was available to anyone, not just to a pre-ordained “Elect.”
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address to the Harvard Divinity School Seniors,” July 15, 1838, in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1957), 113.
4 Robert Underwood Johnson, “John Muir As I Knew Him,” Sierra Club Bulletin, January 1916, Web.
5 Journal entry from January 18, 1869, in John of the Mountains: Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979).
6 The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 178–179.
7 The Life and Letters of John Muir, ed. William Frederick Badè (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), I:20–22.
8 The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 93.
9 Ibid, 89.
10 John of the Mountains, 95.
11 Marion Randall Parsons, “John Muir and the Alaska Book,” in John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings, ed. Terry Gifford (London: Baton Wicks, 1996), 884.
12 The Life and Letters of John Muir, I:300.
13 See, for example, Mark David Spencer, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14 Lucy Tompkins, “Sierra Club Says It Must Confront Its Founder’s Racism,” New York Times, July 24, 2020, A14.
15 Quoted by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1945), 46.
16 Herbert F. Smith, John Muir (New York: Twayne, 1965), 35.
17 Agassiz in conversation with his pupils, with whom he traveled to Lake Superior in 1848; quoted by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 76.
18 The Mountains of California (New York: The Century Co., 1894), 246.
19 Son of the Wilderness, 79.
20 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (London: S. Low, Son and Marston, 1864), 36–37.
21 Tom Turner, Sierra Club: 100 Years of Protecting Nature (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991), 48.
22 John of the Mountains, 191.
PART ONE:
The Visionary Inventor
Knowledge and Inventions
Several of our neighbors had brought a dozen or two of all sorts of books, which I borrowed and read, keeping all of them except the religious ones carefully hidden from Father’s eye. Among these were Scott’s novels, which, like all other novels, were strictly forbidden but devoured with glorious pleasure in secret. Father was easily persuaded to buy Josephus’ Wars of the Jews, and d’Aubigné’s History of the Reformation, and I tried hard to get him to buy Plutarch’s Lives, which, as I told him, everybody, even religious people, praised as a grand good book; but he would have nothing to do with the old pagan until the graham bread and anti-flesh doctrines came suddenly into our backwoods neighborhood, making a stir something like phrenology and spirit-rappings, which were as mysterious in their attacks as influenza. He then thought it possible that Plutarch might be turned to account on the food question by revealing what those old Greeks and Romans ate to make them strong; and so at last we gained our glorious Plutarch. Dick’s Christian Philosopher, which I borrowed from a neighbor, I thought I might venture to read in the open, trusting that the word “Christian” would be proof against its cautious condemnation. But Father balked at the word “philosopher,” and quoted from the Bible a verse that spoke of “philosophy falsely so-called.” I then ventured to speak in defense of the book, arguing that we could not do without at least a little of the most useful kinds of philosophy.
“Yes, we can,” he said with enthusiasm. “The Bible is the only book human beings can possibly require throughout all the journey from earth to heaven.”
“But how,” I contended, “can we find the way to heaven without the Bible, and how after we grow old can we read the Bible without a little helpful science? Just think, Father, you cannot read your Bible without spectacles, and millions of others are in the same fix; and spectacles cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of optics.”
“Oh!” he replied, perceiving the drift of the argument. “There will always be plenty of worldly people to make spectacles.”
To this I stubbornly replied with a quotation from the Bible with reference to the time coming when “all shall know the Lord from the least even to the greatest,” and then who will make the spectacles? But he still objected to my reading that book, called me a contumacious quibbler too fond of disputation, and ordered me to return it to the accommodating owner. I managed, however, to read it later.
On the food question, Father insisted that those who argued for a vegetable diet were in the right, because our teeth showed plainly that they were made with reference to fruit and grain and not for flesh like those of dogs and wolves and tigers. He therefore promptly adopted a vegetable diet and requested mother to make the bread from graham flour instead of bolted flour. Mother put both kinds on the table, and meat also, to let all the family take their choice, and while Father was insisting on the foolishness of eating flesh, I came to her help by calling Father’s attention to the passage in the Bible which told the story of Elijah the prophet who, when he was pursued by enemies who wanted to take his life, was hidden by the Lord by the brook Cherith, and fed by ravens; and surely the Lord knew what was good to eat, whether bread or meat. And on what, I asked, did the Lord feed Elijah? On vegetables or graham bread? No, he directed the ravens to feed his prophet on flesh. The Bible being the sole rule, Father at once acknowledged that he was mistaken. The Lord never would have sent flesh to Elijah by the ravens if graham bread were better.
I remember as a great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a source of inspiring, exhilarating, uplifting pleasure; and I became anxious to know all the poets and saved up small sums to buy as many of their books as possible. Within three or four years I was the proud possessor of parts of Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Cowper’s, Henry Kirke White’s, Campbell’s, and Akenside’s works, and quite a number of others seldom read nowadays. I think it was in my fifteenth year that I began to relish good literature with enthusiasm, and smack my lips over favorite lines, but there was desperately little time for reading, even in the winter evenings—only a few stolen minutes now and then. Father’s strict rule was, straight to bed immediately after family worship, which in winter was usually over by eight o’clock. I was in the habit of lingering in the kitchen with a book and candle after the rest of the family had retired, and considered myself fortunate if I got five minutes’ reading before Father noticed the light and ordered me to bed; an order that, of course, I immediately obeyed. But night after night I tried to steal minutes in the same lingering way, and how keenly precious those minutes were, few nowadays can know. Father failed perhaps two or three times in a whole winter to notice my light for nearly ten minutes, magnificent golden blocks of time, long to be remembered like holidays or geological periods. One evening when I was reading Church history, Father was particularly irritable and called out with hope-killing emphasis, “John, go to bed! Must I give you a separate order every night to get you to go to bed? Now, I will have no irregularity in the family; you must go when the rest go, and without my having to tell you.” Then, as an afterthought, as if judging that his words and tone of voice were too severe for so pardonable an offense as reading a religious book, he unwarily added: “If you will read, get up in the morning and read. You may get up in the morning as early as you like.”
That night I went to bed wishing with all my heart and soul that somebody or something might call me out of sleep to avail myself of this wonderful indulgence, and next morning to my joyful surprise I awoke before Father called me. A boy sleeps soundly after working all day in the snowy woods, but that frosty morning I sprang out of bed as if called by a trumpet blast, rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won; and when I held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the kitchen I found that it was only one o’clock. I had gained five hours, almost half a day! “Five hours to myself!” I said, “five huge, solid hours!” I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of these five frosty hours.
In the glad, tumultuous excitement of so much suddenly acquired time-wealth, I hardly knew what to do with it. I first thought of going on with my reading, but the zero weather would make a fire necessary, and it occurred to me that Father might object to the cost of firewood that took time to chop. Therefore, I prudently decided to go down cellar and begin work on a model of a self-setting sawmill I had invented. Next morning I managed to get up at the same gloriously early hour, and though the temperature of the cellar was a little below the freezing point, and my light was only a tallow candle, the mill work went joyfully on. There were a few tools in a corner of the cellar—a vise, files, a hammer, chisels, etc., that Father had brought from Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse, crooked one that was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine-tooth saw suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned corset, which cut the hardest wood smoothly. I also made my own bradawls, punches, and a pair of compasses, out of wire and old files.
My workshop was immediately under Father’s bed, and the filing and tapping in making cogwheels, journals, cams, etc., must, no doubt, have annoyed him, but with the permission he had granted in his mind, and doubtless hoping that I would soon tire of getting up at one o’clock, he impatiently waited about two weeks before saying a word. I did not vary more than five minutes from one o’clock all winter, nor did I feel any bad effects whatever, nor did I think at all about the subject as to whether so little sleep might be in any way injurious; it was a grand triumph of willpower over cold and common comfort and work-weariness in abruptly cutting down my ten hours’ allowance of sleep to five. I simply felt that I was rich beyond anything I could have dreamed of or hoped for. I was far more than happy. Like Tam O’Shanter I was glorious, “O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious.”
Father, as was customary in Scotland, gave thanks and asked a blessing before meals, not merely as a matter of form and decent Christian manners, for he regarded food as a gift derived directly from the hands of the Father in heaven. Therefore, every meal to him was a sacrament requiring conduct and attitude of mind not unlike that befitting the Lord’s Supper. No idle word was allowed to be spoken at our table, much less any laughing or fun or storytelling. When we were at the breakfast table, about two weeks after the great golden time discovery, Father cleared his throat preliminary, as we all knew, to saying something considered important. I feared that it was to be on the subject of my early rising and dreaded the withdrawal of the permission he had granted on account of the noise I made, but still hoped that, as he had given his word that I might get up as early as I wished, he would as a Scotchman stand to it, even though it was given in an unguarded moment and taken in a sense unreasonably far-reaching. The solemn sacramental silence was broken by the dreaded question:
“John, what time is it when you get up in the morning?”
“About one o’clock,” I replied in a low, meek, guilty tone of voice.
“And what kind of a time is that, getting up in the middle of the night and disturbing the whole family?”
I simply reminded him of the permission he had freely granted me to get up as early as I wished.
“I know it,” he said in an almost agonized tone of voice. “I know I gave you that miserable permission, but I never imagined that you would get up in the middle of the night.”
To this I cautiously made no reply, but continued to listen for the heavenly one o’clock call, and it never failed.
After completing my self-setting sawmill I dammed one of the streams in the meadow and put the mill in operation. This invention was speedily followed by a lot of others—waterwheels, curious door locks and latches, thermometers, hygrometers, pyrometers, clocks, a barometer, an automatic contrivance for feeding the horses at any required hour, a lamplighter and fire-lighter, an early-or-late-rising machine, and so forth.
After the sawmill was proved and discharged from my mind, I happened to think it would be a fine thing to make a timekeeper which would tell the day of the week and the day of the month, as well as strike like a common clock and point out the hours; also to have an attachment whereby it could be connected with a bedstead to set me on my feet at any hour in the morning; also to start fires, light lamps, etc. I had learned the time laws of the pendulum from a book, but with this exception I knew nothing of timekeepers, for I had never seen the inside of any sort of clock or watch. After long brooding, the novel clock was at length completed in my mind, and was tried and found to be durable and to work well and look well before I had begun to build it in wood. I carried small parts of it in my pocket to whittle at when I was out at work on the farm, using every spare or stolen moment within reach without Father’s knowing anything about it. In the middle of summer, when harvesting was in progress, the novel time machine was nearly completed. It was hidden upstairs in a spare bedroom where some tools were kept. I did the making and mending on the farm, but one day at noon, when I happened to be away, Father went upstairs for a hammer or something and discovered the mysterious machine back of the bedstead. My sister Margaret saw him on his knees examining it, and at the first opportunity whispered in my ear, “John, Father saw that thing you’re making upstairs.” None of the family knew what I was doing, but they knew very well that all such work was frowned on by Father and kindly warned me of any danger that threatened my plans. The fine invention seemed doomed to destruction before its time-ticking commenced, though I thought it handsome, had so long carried it in my mind, and like the nest of Burns’s wee mousie, it had cost me many a weary whittling nibble. When we were at dinner several days after the sad discovery, Father began to clear his throat to speak, and I feared the doom of martyrdom was about to be pronounced on my grand clock.
“John,” he inquired, “what is that thing you are making upstairs?”
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