the john muir exhibit - life - john swett
John Muir
By John Swett
The Century Magazine,
volume 46 (new series 24), issue 1, pp. 120 - 123
(New York: The Century Company, May 1893)
The name of John Muir is inseparably connected
with the Yosemite Valley and the
alpine regions of the Sierra Nevada, and with
the glaciers of Alaska, the greatest of which
bears his name. When Ralph Waldo Emerson
visited the Yosemite, Muir was his guide for a
week, and on his return Emerson said of him,
"He is more wonderful than Thoreau." Of
Emerson, Muir wrote, "He is the Sequoia of
the human race." When Agassiz and Joseph
LeConte met in San Francisco, and were talking
about the glaciers of the Pacific coast, Professor
Leconte remarked that John Muir knew
"more about the subject than any other man."
"Yes," said Agassiz, bringing his hand down
on the table by way of emphasis; "he knows
all about it."
John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland,
in 1836. His mother, Anne Gilrye, is a descendant
of the old Scotch family of Gilderoy. His
father, Daniel Muir, was a grain-merchant. John
was the third child in a family of eight children,
three boys and five girls. At three years of age
he was sent to the public school, where for
eight years he was put through the ordinary
English branches, Latin, French, the Catechism,
and the Bible, in the old Scotch style.
In spite of hard lessons and many fioggings, he
grew up savagely strong, healthy, and active,
fond of all kinds of games and of long tramps
into the country and along the sea-shore.
In 1850 his father emigrated to the United
States, and settled as a pioneer in the wilderness
near Fox River, Wisconsin, twelve miles
from Fort Winnebago, on an uncleared section
of land bordered by a beautiful stream and a
small lake, white with water-lilies. Birds and
flowers, game and fish, made the farm a boy's
paradise, in spite of the hardest kind of toil in
chopping, grubbing, and general farm-work.
At the age of fifteen John's mechanical genius
stirred within his brain, and while doing a man's
work on the farm he rose, for months in succession,
at one o'clock in the morning and worked
until daylight, inventing and making millwheels,
wooden clocks, and various other mechanical appliances.
At the same time he read
every book within reach, and studied grammar,
algebra, and geometry, improving every available
moment, keeping an open book beside him at
his meals, and working out mathematical problems
on chips or on the ground while he was at
work in the field. At twenty-two he entered the
University of Wisconsin, where he continued for
four years. He taught school one winter, and
worked at harvesting during the summer vacations,
to earn money to pay his college expenses.
He pursued a special scientific course, and,
when that was completed, went off into the wilderness
on a long botanical excursion around
the great lakes. While on the Canada shore he
worked for a year in a mill for making hand-rakes,
lathes, boring-machines, and agricultural
implements. Here he set about improving the
old machinery, inventing new appliances, and in
many ways increasing the product of the mill.
All his leisure time was given to botanizing.
The mill, however, took fire and burned down,
and Muir went to Indianapolis, where he
worked for a year in a large manufactory of
carriage and wagon material. Here he was so
highly appreciated that he was offered the place
of foreman, with a prospective partnership; but
one of his eyes was accidentally penetrated by
the sharp point of a file, and after several weeks
of confinement in a dark room, to quote his own
words, he "determined to get away into the
flowery wilderness to enjoy and lay in as large
a stock as possible of God's wild beauty before
the coming on of the times of darkness." Accordingly,
he had scarcely recovered from the
shock of his injury when he set out on his travels,
afoot and alone, going southward on a botanizing
tour across Kentucky, Tennessee, North
Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, reaching tidewater
at Cedar Keys on the Gulf of Mexico.
In consequence of exposure in swamps, and
from lying out at night on the bare ground,
he was taken down with malarial fever. After
partial recovery, he took passage in a schooner
for Havana, intending to proceed thence to
South America to explore the head waters of the
Amazon and to float down the river to its mouth.
But after spending a few months amid the tropical
vegetation of Cuba, and finding that fever
still lingered in his system, he reluctantly
changed his plans, and turned his face toward
California, where, going by the Panama route,
he arrived in April, 1868. He at once set out on
foot for the Yosemite Valley, botanizing on his
way across the broad plains of the San Joaquin
Valley, then covered with flowers. He made
his way into the valley without a guide, while
the trails were yet deeply buried in snow, and
after a stay often days, his money having given
out, returned to the lowlands and worked as a
harvest hand in the wheat-fields. The following
winter, glad to find any employment that
allowed contact with nature, he herded sheep
to earn a living while studying the flora of
that region. With a migratory sheep-camp
as his headquarters, he passed the summer in
botanizing, and in sketching the head waters of
the Merced and Tuolumne rivers. Returning
to the plains in the autumn, he worked on a
ranch for a few months, breaking mustangs
and running a gang-plow, and then again
pushed over the mountains into the Yosemite.
There he was fortunate enough to find employment,
and was thus enabled to make the
great valley his home.
At that time Mr. J. M. Hutchings, the Yosemite
pioneer, desiring to build some cottages
to accommodate the increasing travel to the
valley, and finding that cutting lumber by hand
with whip-saws was a slow and very expensive
method, determined to build a small sawmill.
The frame of the mill was already up when
Mr. Muir arrived on his second visit to the
valley, and Mr. Hutchings was anxiously looking
for some one to put in the machinery and
run it. Finding, on inquiry, that John Muir the
botanist was also a millwright, he gave him
the job, and thus enabled him to carry on
his famous explorations in the high Sierra
until he began to write and could depend on
his pen for bread. But it must not be supposed
that any of the trees were cut down to supply
the mill. All the logs were obtained from fallen
timber, mostly yellow pine blown down in a
gale. John Muir, of all men, would be the last
one to lift an ax against the Yosemite groves.
When the mill was completed, he hung his
bed in the peak of it, beneath the rafters, for
the sake of fresh air and the music of the waters.
On the end of the gable overhanging the
stream he built a small room for a study and
as a storehouse for his collections of plants,
cones, sketches, and papers. In this little
study, which could be entered only by climbing
a narrow, rough-hewn plank, he had the
honor of several visits from Emerson. Here,
too, was written his first article on the Yosemite
glaciers, which was published in the "New
York Tribune" in 1871.
By working in the mill, Muir soon earned a
few hundred dollars, enough to buy his bread
for several years, and set out in glorious independence
to make a systematic survey of the
mountains, tracing every river to its source,
going from cañon to cañon in regular order,
noting particularly the distribution of the forests
and of the flora in general, the structure of
the rocks, the traces of the ancient glaciers, and
the influence they exerted in sculpturing the
mountains, in creating valleys and lake-basins,
and in fashioning the landscape. Wherever
night overtook him, he made his camp. The
scope of his studies was ever increasing, but
he was never in a hurry. He took no note
of time, for he had all the time there was.
Throughout an entire day he could sit motionless,
studying the habits of squirrel, or bird,
or grasshopper; and every plant and animal
was his friend. How lonely and adventurous
his life was is strikingly manifested by the fact
that during ten years of exploration in the
high Sierra, with the single exception of a band
of Mono Indians, he never met a human being.
His outfit on one of his ten-day excursions
was the lightest possible. It consisted of a
pocket aneroid, chronometer, and thermometer,
a note-book and pencil, a few pounds of bread
and oatmeal, a little tea and sugar, and a small
tin can. After climbing a summit during the day,
he descended at night to the timber-line, built
a fire, made a can of tea, ate his bread, and lay
down by the side of his camp-fire, with no other
covering than that which he had worn during
the day. At an elevation of from nine to twelve
thousand feet (the height of the timber-line in
the Sierra) the nights are severe, and the fire
required to be replenished at intervals of about
an hour, thus making his sleep a broken one.
But this hardship was not without fine compensation
in enabling him to hear the many
strange sounds of the night, and to see the glories
of the starry mountain sky. Blankets would
have been a convenience, but in the rugged
regions where he climbed it was impossible to
carry them. A gun was too heavy to carry,
and a pistol would have been only a useless
encumbrance. Bears never molested him, and
other animals - were his companions. In this
manner for years he studied the channels of
ancient glaciers, pushed through the wildest
cañon, and noted the forest-covered moraines.
Muir's numerous note-books of the period
are filled with sketches of forest trees, mountain
meadows and lakes, glaciers and moraines,
domes and pinnacles, the cleavage planes of
rocks, the direction of glacial strife, and sections
of mountains and valleys. So careful were his
observations, so accurate his notes and sketches,
that when he writes on geological subjects his
statements and conclusions have the force of
mathematical demonstration. He discovered
and located sixty-five glaciers among mountain
heights where none had been supposed to exist.
From these fragmentary heads he traced the
course of ancient glaciers far down the slopes
of the Sierra toward the plains, in the valleys
where now flow the rivers. Probably no living
geologist has recognized so fully as he
the vast amount of denudation effected by ice
during the glacial period, and it is doubtful if
any other man has made so exhaustive a study
of the subject.
In his ten years of field-work he had some
narrow escapes from death. Once he was caught
in a snow-storm on the summit of Mount Shasta,
where he lay all night long over the jets of sulphur
steam in the crater, with the thermometer
at twenty degrees below zero. He was in his
shirt-sleeves, without food or fire, and a less
hardy or less resolute man would have perished.
He escaped with frozen feet, and a back blistered
by the hot steam of the fumaroles. Once, when
out with a surveying party in the Great Basin,
he nearly perished with thirst, and but for his
endurance and will-power the whole party might
have been lost. On the Muir Glacier in Alaska
he had a hair-breadth escape from a tomb in a
deep crevasse.
For many successive summers and for five
winters Muir made his home and headquarters
in the Yosemite region. He spent the summers
and autumns in exploring the mountains, and
the winters in writing out his notes, studying
storms and avalanches, and the habits of birds
and animals. During his longer trips, when the
last crumbs of bread were gone, he descended
the range to the nearest point on the bread-line,
filled his sack, and again vanished into
the wilderness, often saying, at such times, that
he wished he could eat one meal in the spring
that would last all summer, so that he could
go on with his studies uninterrupted. During
this period he met many noted scientists who
became his friends--Guyot, Harrington, the
Lecontes, Sir Joseph Hooker, Asa Gray, Dr.
Torrey, Dr. Parry, Professor Runkle of the
Boston Institute of Technology, and others.
Emerson, Gray, Professor Runkle, and others
offered him flattering inducements with a view
to drawing him from the obscurity of his mountain
haunts; but he declined them all, heartily
choosing to pursue his studies in perfect independence,
saying "that there were already
plenty of professors in the colleges and few observers
in the wilderness; that he wanted to be
more than a professor, whether noticed in the
world or not."
In 1876, after his ten years' residence in the
Yosemite region, Mr. Muir joined an exploring
party connected with the geodetic survey in the
Great Basin, chiefly on account of the opportunity
it afforded to study the botany and geology
of the plateau between the Sierra Nevada
and the Rocky Mountains. With this party he
passed three summers, during which he became
familiar with the country. In 1879 he went to
Alaska, and, in a canoe manned by Indians,
began a careful exploration of the rugged icy
region to the north of Fort Wrangel. It was
then that he discovered the now famous
Glacier Bay and the great glacier that bears
his name. Here he saw glaciers on a yet
grander scale than those which he claims
once covered the summits and plowed out
the cañon of California. He also pushed inland
to the head waters of the Yukon and
the Mackenzie rivers. He has since made
three exploring trips to that region. In 1881
he accompanied one of the search expeditions
for the lost Jeannette, and returned with a notebook
full of sketches, and with an enlarged idea
of the vast scale of ice denudation in the north.
The scope of his studies during this cruise of
the Corwin may be traced in the series of
twenty-one letters to the San Francisco "Bulletin,"
and by his paper "On the Glaciation of
the Pacific Coast and the Polar Region about
Behring Sea and the Arctic Ocean."
John Muir has not been a voluminous writer.
He has chosen, in his enthusiastic. love
of nature, to be an original observer. His first
notable articles appeared in the "Overland
Monthly," in the form of a series of illustrated
papers on mountain sculpture. Later, he contributed
papers to "Harper's Magazine,"
which were followed in "The Century" (old
series) by a number of illustrated articles on
the forests, glaciers, and scenery of the Sierra.
Two recent papers in The Century on the
Yosemite Valley (August and September,
1890), and one on the great King's River
Cañon (November, 1891), complete the list of
his magazine articles.1
He has also contributed
from time to time many interesting articles to
the San Francisco "Bulletin." For two years
his leisure time was chiefly occupied in editing
"Picturesque California," for which he
himself wrote most of the descriptive text relating
to the mountain scenery of the Pacific
coast. He has recently been elected first
president of the Sierra Club.
As an original observer and interpreter of
nature, as a hardy and enthusiastic explorer,
John Muir is without a rival in California.
Indeed, it is safe to say that no other geologist
has ever made so exhaustive a study, in
so grand a field, of the agency of glaciers.
He combines scientific accuracy of statement
with a poetic expression which lends a singular
charm to his writings. His descriptions of
"Shasta Bees," "Mount Shasta," and the
"Water Ousel" are prose poems; but the facts
are as accurate as they could be made by the
baldest statement of the most technical scientist.
It will be pleasant for those who read this
brief sketch of his early struggles to know
that John Muir is now in the enjoyment of
a happy home and a comfortable income.
In 1879 he married the only daughter of the
late Dr. John Strentzel, a wealthy fruit-grower
of Contra Costa County, and since that time,
when not out on exploring trips, has been
kept busy in the management of a large vineyard
and orchard. Though money-making
has been with him altogether secondary to
science, his inherited Scotch thrift and his hard
training on a Western farm combine to make
him a shrewd and successful man of business.
In person Muir is tall and slender, possessed
of great power of enduring hunger,
thirst, and fatigue. As a mountain-climber
few can keep pace with him. He is unassuming
in manner, and simple in his tastes and
habits. He is a ready talker, and, when drawn
out by an interested listener, discourses in the
most charming manner about birds and flowers,
glaciers and mountains. He possesses an
exhaustless fund of humor, and is inclined
to look on the sunny side of life as well as of
nature.
John Swett.
1 It was to one of these papers, describing the wonderful
country in the neighborhood of Yosemite, and
setting forth the desirability of reserving these environs
for public use, that was primarily due the establishment,
in October, 1890, of the great Yosemite
National Park, embracing a territory almost as large
as the State of Rhode Island. Mr. Muir's article on
the King's River Cañon, entitled "A Rival of the Yosemite,"
contained a similar suggestion, which led to
the important series of forest reservations made by
President Harrison and Secretary Noble in 1892-93,
one of which includes the territory specifically proposed.
It is not surprising that such a lover of Yosemite
was also among the first to make energetic
protest against the uninstructed meddling with the
beauty of wildness of the valley, and to show the
need of greater skill and care in the management of
its affairs.--Editor.
[Converted to HTML from a
copy of
The Century Magazine
online at
Cornell University's "Making of America" collection,
by Daniel E. Anderson, 2000.]
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