Son Of The Wilderness The Life

Son Of The Wilderness: The Life Of John Muir Essay, Research Paper

Son of the Wilderness:

The Life of John Muir

by Linnie Marsh Wolfe

Published in 1978 in Wisconsin, US

364 Pages

Daniel G. Hughes

John Muir is the subject of Linnie Marsh Wolfe s Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir. A great deal of personal specifics, professional accomplishments, and philosophical viewpoints are presented, all the while providing a plethora of interesting details concerning the life and times in both Scotland and Wisconsin during the late 1800s. John was Born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21st 1838, where he spent his first 11 years attending the local schools of that small coastal town. He was the third child born to his parents Ann and Daniel Muir, following sisters Margaret and Sarah. Three additional siblings followed young John including Daniel Jr., and twins Mary and Annie. In 1849, the Muir family emigrated to the United States, settling first at Fountain Lake and then later building Hickory Hill Farm near Portage, Wisconsin. Here, John spent 11 years in the backwoods, working through the daylight hours, clearing the forest, holding a plow to a straight furrow behind a team of oxen, digging wells through hard bedrock, and taking an adult’s part in taming the wild nature.

Muir’s father was a harsh disciplinarian and worked his family from dawn to dusk. Whenever they were freed briefly from their duties with the plow and hoe, Muir and his younger brother would explore the fields and woods of the lush Wisconsin countryside. John became more and more the loving observer of the natural word. He also became an inventor, a carver of curious but practical mechanisms in wood. He made clocks that kept accurate time and created a wondrous device that at the appointed time, tipped up his bed and dumped him on the floor long before the dawn. He called it an “early-rising machine.” He created a thermometer so sensitive that it would react to the heat radiated by the body of a person standing up to five feet away.

In 1860, these machines, and his desire to escape from his overbearing father, led Muir to show his inventions at the state fair in Madison, Wisconsin, where he won both admiration and prizes. This brought him to the attention of several people from the University of Wisconsin, and though he had spent only a few months in school after the age of 11, he was admitted. In the following two and a half years, he followed an electic course of study, heavy on Natural Science, and left in 1863 to travel the northern United States and Canada.

In 1867, while working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis, Muir suffered a blinding eye injury that would change his life. He was adjusting some machinery with a file when his hand slipped. A point of the file pierced one eye. He lost the use of that eye. It was the darkest moment of his life for his spirit, as well as his sight. As his sight gradually returned, over a period of months, Muir resolved to turn his eyes to the fields and woods. There began his years of wanderlust. He walked a thousand miles from Louisville, Kentucky to the Savannah, Georgia. From there, he hoped to travel to the headwaters of the Amazon and work his way to the sea. But a case of malaria laid him low in Florida and, after sailing to Cuba, and later to Panama, where he crossed the Isthmus and sailed up the West Coast, he ended up in San Francisco in March, 1868. From that moment on, though he would travel around the world, California became his home.

It was California’s Sierra Nevada and Yosemite that truly claimed John Muir. In 1868, he walked across the San Joaquin Valley and into the high country for the first time and changed the world. Muir had just turned 30 that year. His first summer in Yosemite, he worked as a shepherd. Then he ran a sawmill near the base of Yosemite Falls. He became a guide for some of the most famous of Yosemite’s visitors, including one of his idols, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson tried to entice Muir away from Yosemite, telling him the world was waiting to hear him teach the lessons he had learned. But Muir chose to follow the ideal Emerson had set forth in “The American Scholar.” He stayed in his mountains, working, studying and learning. Eventually, he did leave the Valley. First for only a few months at a time. He would live with friends in San Francisco or Oakland and write about his glorious mountains, the scenery that drew tourists and the science behind the scenery. Gradually, he spent more time in the Bay Area and less time in Yosemite, applying his love of plants and fruitful imagination to the task of raising Bartlett pears and Tokay grapes. He became fairly wealthy, but seemingly discontented. Each trip to the mountains presented him with more proof that, unless something was done, the glorious wilderness he had found in 1868 would soon be only a memory.

By 1871 he had found living glaciers in he Sierra and had conceived his controversial theory of the glaciation of Yosemite Valley. He began to be known throughout the country. Influential men of the time such as Joseph LeConte, Asa Gray and Ralph Waldo Emerson made their way to his pine cabin. Beginning in 1874, a series of articles by Muir entitled “Studies in the Sierra” launched his successful career as a writer.

In 1880, he married Louie Wanda Strentzel and moved to M