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Places Important to John Muir

For a short list, see John Muir's World Travels.

Contents

 

The World


Australia


Canada

  • For updated informatioon about John Muir in Canada, see the extensive list of resources on John Muir in Canada on the John Muir Global Network.


Cuba


New Zealand


Russia


Scotland

 


South America


United States of America

  • General

 

    • Alabama
        • General
          • On November 23, 1897, John Muir visited Mobile, Alabama. He enjoyed the fine forest of Magnolia trees, tupelo, and fine live oak. Upon learning that his botanical friends were unable to prevent destruction of these as road making in straight line ruthlessly cut through glorious magnolias and Tupelos, he wrote in his journal, " This hurts my heart."

    • Illinois
        • In 1864, Muir took a train from Madison, Wisconsin via Chicago on March 1, 1864 he crossed the international border at Windsor, Canada West, which later became the Province of Ontario, Canada.
        • In summer 1867, after recovering his eyesight, Muir walked across Indiana and Illinois on a botanizing excursion, with his final destination Madison and the old homestead at Fountain Lake. His companion was eleven-year-old Merrill Moores, of the extended family of Catherine Merrill, who had nursed him during his convalescence from his eye injury. Avoiding the railroads, they walked across prairies not yet ploughed, covered with flowers, fossils and minerals. They hiked along the banks of the Vermillion River, passed through Bloomington, Illinois, and on north to Rockford, Illinois, where they caught a train to Wisconsin.
        • Chicago: In August of 1867, Muir reported to his friend Jeanne Carr regarding a brief stop he had in Chicago that month: "I could not but notice how well appearances in the vicinity of Chicago agreed with Lesquereux's theory of the formation of prairies. We spent about five hours in Chicago. I did not find many flowers in her tumultuous streets; only a few grassy plants of wheat and two or three species of weeds,--amaranth, purslane, carpet-weed, etc.,--the weeds, I suppose, for man to walk upon, the wheat to feed him. I saw some new alga, but no mosses. I expected to see some of the latter on wet walls and in seams in the pavement, but I suppose that the manufacturers' smoke and the terrible noise is too great for the hardiest of them."
        • In May of 1893, Muir visited the Chicago World's Fair; finding it "a cosmopolitan rat's nest." (In Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness). In a letter to his wife Louie, he expanded on his assessment: "I ...have seen the best of it though months would be required to see it all. You know I called it a cosmopolitan rats nest containing much rubbish & common place stuff as well as things novel & precious. Well, now that I have seen it, it seems just such a rats nest still, & what do you think was one of the first things I saw when I entered the nearest of the huge buildings. A huge rats nest in a glass case about 8 feet square, with stuffed wood rats looking out from the mass of sticks & leaves etc. natural as life. So you see as usual I am [always?] right! I most enjoyed the art galleries. There are about eighteen acres of paintings by every nation under the sun & I wandered & gazed until I was ready to fall down with utter exhaustion. The art gallery of the California building is quite small & of little significance, not more than a dozen or two of paintings all told – 4 by Keith, not his best, & 4 by Hill not his best, & a few others of no special character by others except a good small one by Yelland. But the national galleries are perfectly overwhelming in grandeur & bulk & variety... The outside view of the buildings is grand & also beautiful. For the best architects have done their best in building them while Frederick Law Olmsted laid out the grounds. Last night the buildings & terraces & fountains along the canals were illuminated by tens of thousands of electric lights arranged along miles of lines of gables, domes & cornices with glorious effect. it was all fairyland on a scale & would have made the Queen of Sheba & poor Solomon in all their glory feel sick with helpless envy." Letter from John Muir to Louie [Strentzel Muir, 1893 May 29.
        • Early in July 1896, Muir joined the Forestry Commission in Chicago, and with Sargent, Brewer, Hague, and Abbot proceeded to South Dakota to inspect the Black Hills forests of yellow pine . Muir, looking upon the hills denuded by mining operations, fires, and illegal cutting, wrote home : "Wherever the white man goes, the groves vanish ." He continued on with the Forestry Commission to Yellowstone, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. After an interlude in August, Muir returned to the Forestry Commission at Crater Lake. He tours with them the southern Cascades, Santa Lucia coast range, Grand Canyon, and South Sierra.

      • Muir lived in Indiana from the spring of 1866 through June, 1867, working in a carriage-parts factory. He spent what little free time he had exploring the nearby forests for their botanical treasures. When an industrial accident temporarily blinded him, he wrote, "I bade adieu to all my mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God."
      • Indiana State Historical Marker - John Muir in Indiana - View text and photos of maker dedicated July 2, 2004
      • Indiana State Historical Marker Text Annotation - References and citations for Historical Marker from John Muir Global Network (off-site link)
      • John Muir Remembered in Indiana with New Historical Marker by Lori Hazlett, The Indiana Sierran, (Fall, 2004) (off-site link) - Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter members celebrate the dedication.
      • John Muir Marker to Be Erected in Indianapolis - The Indiana Sierran, Spring, 2004. (off-site link) - Background about the marker
      • John Muir in Indiana (PDF) by Harold W. Wood, Jr. - required research paper submitted to Indiana Historical Bureau in support of the Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter request for a commemorative historical plaque in Indianapolis.
      • "A Genius in the Best Sense: John Muir, Earth, and Indianapolis" by Catherine E. Forrest Weber, in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Vol. 5, no. 1, Winter 1993.
        A review of Muir's life, with a focus on his early inventions and his time spent in Indiana, including his friendships with Catharine Merrill and her nephew Merrill Moores. Nicely illustrated with Muir portraits and his drawings of inventions. The issue of Traces that includes this article is available as a back issue from the Indiana Historical Society, 315 W. Ohio St., Indianapolis, IN 46202-3299; or by calling 1-800-IHS-1830.
      • While in Indiana, John Muir met and was cared for in his illness by Catharine Merrill, one of the first woman professors in America.



      • Hunnewell Arboretum - Wellesley, Massachusetts. Muir visited this Arboretum, near Boston, in October, 1898, where he met and had dinner with its founder, philanthropist and amateur botanist H.H. Hunnewell.
      • Arnold Arboretum & Library - Harvard University, Jamaica Plain, Boston. Muir was a close friend and traveling companion of its director, Charles Sprague Sargent.



      • Moosehead Lake - Muir visited this area near Greenville, Maine, in October, 1898. He described it inn a letter to his daughter Wanda as "a charming sheet of pure water 40 ms. long full of picturesque islands."


      • Daniel Muir Gravesite - Elmwood Cemetery, Kansas City - In 1885, John Muir visited Kansas City to see his father, Daniel, on his deathbed. In late August of that year, John had "the most powerful inner compulsion" he had ever known, sensing that he must go east if he would see his father alive. Muir gathered up his siblings in Portage, Wisconsin and nearby Nebraska, insisting that they visit their father in Kansas City where he was visiting Muir's sister Joanna and her family. The family had several days visiting with the 80 year-old Daniel, who died on October 6, 1885, surrounded by 7 of his 8 children, including John, who later wrote an obituary about his father for the Portage Recorder newspaper. Daniel is buried in the historic Elmwood Cemetery of Kansas City, Block N, Lot 57, along with 2 deceased infants of Muir's sister Joanna and her husband Walter Brown. In May, 2004, the Muir-Hanna Trust donated a headstone to commemorate him.
      • "John Muir In Kansas City" by David Anderson, Sierra Club Thomas Hart Benton Group Chair.

    • Writing in July 1896 to his daughter Wanda, Muir wrote "Nebraska is monotonously level like a green grassy sea - no hills or mountains in sight for hundreds of miles. Here, too, are cornfields without end and full of promise this year, after three years of famine from drouth. (From Life and Letters of John Muir. vol. 2, 1924.)


    • On his first visit to New York in 1868, Muir stayed on the ship until he sailed to California. He wrote, "My walks extended but little beyond sight of my little schooner home. I saw the name Central Park on some of the street-cars and thought I would like to visit it. but fearing that I might not be able to find my way back, I dared not make the adventure. I felt completely lost in the vast throngs of people, the noise of the streets, and the immense size of the b buildings. Often I thought I would like to explore the city if, like a lot of wild hills and valleys, it was clear of inhabitants."
    • Late, Muir wrote, "I can make my exhilarated way over an unknown ice-field or sure-footedly up a titanic gorge, but in these terrible canyons of New York, I am a pitiful, unrelated atom that loses itself at once."
    • Years later, with his friend and editor Robert Underwood Johnson, he visited Central Park, where he was interested in the glacial scratchings on outcroppings of granite.
    • In later years, Muir spent time in the Hudson River Valley, visiting friends John Burroughs and Osborn.


    • John Muir Visited Grandfather Mountain 100 Years Ago (defunct offsite link to Grandfather Mountain)


  • South Dakota
    • Black Hills: Writing on July 6, 1896 to his daughters, Muir wrote: "South Dakota, by the way we came, is dry and desert-like until you get into the Black Hills. The latter get their name from the dark color they have in the distance from the pine forests that cover them. The pine of these woods is the ponderosa or yellow pine, the same as the one that grows in the Sierra, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and all the West in general. No other pine in the world has so wide a range or is so hardy at all heights and under all circumstances and conditions of climate and soil. This is near its eastern limit, and here it is interesting to find that many plants of the Atlantic and Pacific slopes meet and grow well together....
      " How wonderful you would think this hollow in the rocky Black Hills is! It is wonderful even to me after seeing so many wild mountains -- curious rocks rising alone or in clusters, gray and jagged and rounded in the midst of a forest of pines and spruces and poplars and birches, with a little lake in the middle and carpet of meadow gay with flowers. It is in the heart of the famous Black Hills where the Indians and Whites quarreled and fought so much. The whites wanted the gold in the rocks, and the Indians wanted the game -- the deer and elk that used to abound here. As a grand deer pasture this was said to have been the best in America, and no wonder the Indians wanted to keep it, for wherever the white man goes the game vanishes.
      "We came here this forenoon from Hot Springs, fifty miles by rail and twelve by wagon. And most of the way was through woods fairly carpeted with beautiful flowers. A lovely red lily, Lilium Pennsylvanicum was common, two kinds of spiraea and a beautiful wild rose in full bloom, anemones, calochortus, larkspur, etc., etc., far beyond time to tell. But I must not fail to mention linnsea. How sweet the air is!" From Life and Letters of John Muir. vol. 2, 1924.)

  • Tennessee

       

      • Texas
        • On November 27, 1897, Muir took the train across Texas on his way back home from an eastern botanizing expedition. Noting that nearly all of western Texas was a splendid garden of Yucca lilies, grass, compositae, and sage, he thought it must be a fine sight in the springtime flowering period.
        • A blogger for the Texas Master Naturalist program notes, "the ultimate icon of the true naturalist was John Muir. The idea that he never spent much of his considerable talent in the Lone Star state is our loss; he was drawn to places of—forgive me—extraordinary majestic beauty... I cannot think of any one single man who did more in his lifetime to force us to examine our relationship with nature."

       

        • Muir visited the Salt Lake City area in 1877 with the U.S. Geodetic Survey, and wrote of the Mormon pioneer descendents, mountain storm scenery, Utah lilies, and bathing in the Great Salt Lake in several chapters of Steep Trails.
        • Years later, in 1913, Muir visited the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City where he heard "memorable organ music," especially "Nearer, my God to Thee," which he described as "so devout, so sweet, so whispering low." (John Muir's August 1913 "Island Park" Idaho journal.)

        • Mt. Mansfield in the Green Mountains - highest peak in Vermont - John Muir wrote that he had gone up "to the snowy summit" of this peak in October, 1898.


      • Washington, D.C.

          • General
          • "The Capitol he summed up as "fine grounds, acres of marble . " The Congressional Library he described as "gaudy in fresco, but tomby, sepulchral in blue vivid marble outside and in, overdecorated. "The Washington Monument he found "the finest of all the stone things hereabouts." But not until he reached the Zoo did he wax enthusiastic : "We saw lots of deer, buffaloes, bears, birds . . . . But the queerest and funniest were the kangaroos and a lot of coons . . . sunning themselves in the forks of . . . a big dead tree." (Wolfe, pg. 279).



          • Muir is Still Here, by Daryl Christensen and Kathleen McGwin - summary of book featuring Muir's boyhood ties to Marquette County, Wisconsin.

        • Fountain Lake Farm, Boyhood Home, near Montello (Buffalo Township, Marquette County):
          • The video below is from Wisconsin Public Television In Wisconsin - May 21, 2009 - Ice Age Trail - John Muir - 3 minute video clip showcasing Muir's boyhood home at Fountain Lake Farm, near Buffalo Township, Wisconsin, with Muir quotes and outstanding videography.


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