the john muir exhibit - bibliographic_resources - book_reviews - the wilderness world of john muir
Book Review:
The Wilderness World of John Muir, Edited by Edwin Way Teale
Reviewed by Anthony Netroy
(October, 1955)
Of the great American naturalists of the nineteenth century, John Muir is actually the least known to our generation. [No longer true; this was written in 1955.] His books are not easily obtained , and most of them are out of print. [No longer true.] The cult of John Muir has been largely confined to the Far West, where devotees have kept his name alive in such organizations as the Sierra Club, and in connection with natural places like Muir Woods or Muir Glacier in Alaska. Few anthologists of American prose seem to be acquainted with the bulk of Muir's works, and the ideas he propagated have naturally more appeal to Westerners than Easterners.
We must therefore hail with enthusiasm
The Wilderness World of John Muir, ably edited by the sensitive naturalist
Edwin Way Teale, a selection of writings arranged (with pertinent editorial notes)
in such a way as to present in sequence the running story of Muir's life. While
an anthology cannot give the reader the full scope and magnificence of Muir's
books, it whets the appetite. Many who will dip into it will not be content to
stop there. They will wish to read The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, A
Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
,
My First Summer in the Sierra
,
Travels in Alaska,
Our National Parks
,
and
the
Journals.
What kind of man was John Muir and what does he have to say to us? Teale's short introduction is an admirable précis of his life and character. Of Scotch ancestry, Muir was transplanted as a boy to a wilderness farm in Wisconsin. He had no formal schooling after leaving Scotland, but managed to spend four years at the University of Wisconsin without, however, taking a degree. Quite early he showed his love for naturalistic observation - the outdoors was his schoolroom, and nature his teacher.
Oddly enough, Muir had a practical bent and made a reputation as an inventor
both at the university and later. His ingenious clocks and other contraptions
made him famous in Madison, and as manager of a wagon-wheel factory in Indianapolis
he was well on the way to a fortune. But an accident to his eye turned him
forever away from machines. When his sight was sufficiently restored he set
out on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico, and never stopped wandering
for the rest of his life. In middle age Muir married and partly settled down,
managed a ranch at Martinez, and was said to have cleared $100,000 in ten years.
Unlike such naturalists as Thoreau, Muir traveled far and wide across North America
and eventually to other continents. He was not merely the observer, recording
in poetic form impressions of winds and storms, mountains, glaciers, and forests,
but an analytical scientist whose greatest contribution was to point out the
role glaciers played in forming the Sierra, particularly the Yosemite Valley.
Teale's anthology ranges the gamut of Muir's writings. It contains reminiscences
of his youth, exultation in his Sierran wanderings, descriptions of Far Western
forests, and the record of explorations among glaciers and Indian villages
in Alaska. Muir's style is revealed in all its subtlety and power - the exact
observations of birds and game animals, mountains and plains, and the hymns
to nature; description of strange people met on his ramblings; conversations
with sheepherders, hermits, prospectors, Indians; and above all, the conservationist's
plea for restraint in slaughtering wildlife and mutilating natural features
of the landscape.
Source: Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. 40, No. 8, October, 1955.
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