The Invention of Nature

23

Preservation and Nature

John Muir and Humboldt

HUMBOLDT HAD ALWAYS walked, from his boyhood rambles in Tegel’s forests to his trek through the Andes. Even as a sixty-year-old, he had impressed his travel companions in Russia with his stamina, walking and climbing for hours. Voyages on foot, Humboldt said, taught him the poetry of nature. He was feeling nature by moving through it.

In the late summer of 1867, eight years after Humboldt’s death, twenty-nine-year-old John Muir packed his bag and left Indianapolis, where he had worked for the previous fifteen months, to make his way to South America. Muir travelled lightly – a couple of books, some soap and a towel, a plant press, a few pencils and a notebook. He only had the clothes he wore and some spare underwear. He was dressed plainly but neatly. Tall and slender, Muir was a handsome man with wavy auburn hair, and clear blue eyes which constantly searched his surroundings. ‘How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt,’ Muir said, desperate to see the ‘snow-capped Andes & the flowers of the Equator’.

Once he had left the city of Indianapolis behind, Muir rested under a tree and spread out his pocket map to plan his route to Florida from where he wanted to find passage to South America. He took out his empty notebook and wrote on the first page, ‘John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe’ – asserting his place in Humboldt’s cosmos.

Born and brought up in Dunbar on the east coast of Scotland, John Muir had spent his early boyhood in the fields and along the rocky seashore. His father was a deeply religious man who had forbidden any pictures, ornaments or musical instruments inside the house. Instead Muir’s mother had found beauty in their garden, while the children roamed the countryside. ‘I was fond of everything that was wild,’ Muir recalled, remembering how he would escape from a father who forced him to recite the entire Old and New Testaments ‘by heart and by sore flesh’. When not outside, Muir had read about Alexander von Humboldt’s voyages and had dreamed himself to exotic places.

When Muir was eleven, the family emigrated to the United States. Muir’s zealous father Daniel had grown increasingly dismissive of the established Church in Scotland and hoped to find religious freedom in America. Daniel Muir wanted to live according to pure biblical truth, untainted by organized religion, and be his own priest. And so the Muir family purchased some land and settled in Wisconsin. Muir marched through the meadows and forests whenever he could to get away from the farm work, nurturing the wanderlust that would persist throughout his life. In January 1861, aged twenty-two, he enrolled in the ‘scientific curriculum’ at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Here he met Jeanne Carr, a talented botanist and the wife of one of his professors. Carr encouraged Muir in his botanical studies and opened her library to the young man. They became close friends and later lively correspondents.

As Muir was falling in love with botany in Madison, the Civil War ripped the country apart, and in March 1863, almost exactly two years after the first shots had been fired at Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln signed the nation’s first conscription law. Wisconsin alone had to raise 40,000 men, and most students in Madison were talking guns, war and cannons. Shocked by his fellow students’ willingness to ‘murder’, Muir had no intention of participating.

A year later, in March 1864, Muir left Madison and avoided conscription by crossing the border into Canada – his new ‘University of the Wilderness’. For the next two years, he rambled through the countryside, taking odd jobs whenever he ran out of money. He had a knack for inventions and built machines and tools for sawmills, but his abiding dream was to follow Humboldt’s footsteps. Whenever he could, Muir went on long excursions – to Lake Ontario and towards the Niagara Falls among others. Fording rivers, wading through bogs and thick forests, he searched for plants, which he collected, pressed and dried for his growing herbarium. He was so obsessed with his specimens that he was nicknamed ‘Botany’ by one family where he lodged and worked for a month on a farm north of Toronto. As Muir scrambled through tangled roots and drooping branches, he thought of Humboldt’s descriptions of the ‘flooded forests of the Orinoco’. And he felt a ‘simple relationship to the Cosmos’ that would accompany him for the rest of his life.

Then, in spring 1866, when a fire destroyed the mill where Muir was working in Meaford on the shore of Lake Huron in Canada, his thoughts turned home. The Civil War had ended the previous summer after five long years of fighting, and Muir was ready to return. He packed his few belongings and studied a map. Where to go? He decided to try his luck in Indianapolis because it was a railway hub and he figured that there would be many manufactories where he would be able to find employment. Most importantly, he said, the city was ‘in the heart of one of the very richest forests of deciduous hard wood trees on the continent’. Here he would be able to combine the necessity of having to make a living with his passion for botany.

Muir found work at a factory in Indianapolis that produced wagon wheels and other carriage parts. The job was only temporary because Muir’s plan was just to save enough money to follow Humboldt on ‘a botanical journey’ through South America. Then, in early March 1867, as Muir tried to shorten the leather belt on a circular saw at the factory, his plans came to an abrupt end. As he undid the stitches that held the belt together with the nail-like end of a metal file, the file slipped and flung against his head, piercing his right eye. When he held his hand under the injured eye, fluid dropped on to the palm and his vision vanished.

At first it was only the right eye but within a few hours Muir’s other eye also became blind. Darkness enveloped him. This moment changed everything. For years Muir had been ‘in a glow with visions of the glories of tropical flora’ but now the colours of South America seemed lost to him for ever. Over the next weeks as he lay in a darkened room to rest, boys from the neighbourhood visited and read books to Muir. To his doctor’s surprise, his eyes slowly recovered. At first Muir was able to make out the silhouettes of the furniture in his room, and then he began to recognize faces. After four weeks of convalescence, he was able to decipher letters and went for his first walk. When his eyesight was fully restored, nothing was going to prevent him from going to South America to see the ‘tropical vegetation in all its palmy glory’. On 1 September, six months after his accident and after a visit to Wisconsin to say goodbye to his parents and siblings, Muir bound his journal to his belt with a piece of string, shouldered his small bag and plant press, and set out to walk the 1,000 miles from Indianapolis to Florida.

Walking south, Muir moved through a devastated country. The Civil War had left the nation’s infrastructure – roads, manufacturers and railways – ruined, while many of the neglected and abandoned farms had fallen into disrepair. The war had destroyed the wealth of the South and the country remained deeply divided. In April 1865, less than a month before the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, struggled to unite the nation. Though slavery had been abolished at the end of the war and the first African-American men had voted in the Tennessee gubernatorial election a month before Muir left Indianapolis, freed slaves were not treated like equals.

Muir avoided cities, towns and villages. He wanted to be in nature. Some nights he slept in the forest and awoke to the dawn chorus of birds; other nights he found shelter in a barn on someone’s farm. In Tennessee he climbed his first mountain. As the valleys and forested slopes stretched out below him, he admired the billowing landscape. While he continued his journey, Muir began to read the mountains and their vegetation zones through Humboldt’s eyes, noticing how the plants that he knew from the north grew here on the higher colder slopes while those in the valleys were becoming distinctively southern and unfamiliar. Mountains, Muir realized, were like ‘highways upon which northern plants may extend their colonies to the South’.

During his forty-five-day walk across Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and then Florida, Muir’s thoughts began to change. It was as if with every mile that he moved away from his old life, he came closer to Humboldt. As he collected plants, observed insects and made his bed on moss-cushioned forest floors, Muir experienced the natural world in a new way. Where previously he had been a collector of individual specimens for his herbarium, he now began to see connections. Everything was important in this grand big tangle of life. There existed no unconnected ‘fragment’, Muir thought. Tiny organisms were as much part of this web as humankind. ‘Why ought man to value himself as more than an infinitely small unit of the one great unit of creation?’ Muir asked. ‘The cosmos,’ he said, using Humboldt’s term, would be incomplete without man but also without ‘the smallest transmicroscopic creature’.

In Florida Muir was struck down by malaria but after recuperating for a few weeks, he boarded a ship to Cuba. The thoughts of the ‘glorious mountains & flower fields’ of the tropics had sustained him during his fever attacks, but he was still weak. In Cuba he felt too ill to explore the island that Humboldt had called his home for many months. Exhausted by the recurring fevers, Muir finally and reluctantly abandoned his South American plans and decided to travel to California where he hoped the milder climate would restore his health.

In February 1868, only a month after his arrival, Muir left Cuba for New York from where he found a cheap passage to California. The quickest and safest way from the North American East Coast to the West was not overland across the continent but by boat. For forty dollars Muir bought a steerage ticket that took him from New York back south, to Colón on the Caribbean coast of Panama. From here he made the short fifty-mile rail journey across the Panama isthmus to Panama City on the Pacific coast, and saw the tropical rainforest for the first time, but only from his train carriage.¹ Trees, garlanded with purple, red and yellow blossoms, rushed by at ‘cruel speed’, Muir moaned, and he could ‘only gaze from the car platform & weep’. There was no time for a botanical exploration because he had to catch his schooner in Panama City.

On 27 March 1868, a month after he had departed from New York, Muir arrived in San Francisco, on the West Coast of the United States. He hated the city. Over the past two decades the gold rush had turned the small town of 1,000 inhabitants into a bustling city of some 150,000 people. Bankers, merchants and entrepreneurs had come with those who had tried to find their luck. There were noisy taverns and well-stocked shops, as well as full warehouses and plenty of hotels. On his first day, Muir asked a passer-by the way out of town. When questioned where he wanted to go, he replied, ‘To any place that is wild.’

And wild it was. After one night in San Francisco Muir left and walked towards the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that runs 400 miles from north to south through California (and some of its eastern parts through Nevada), roughly parallel to and 100 miles inland from the Pacific coast. Its highest peak is almost 15,000 feet and in its midst lies Yosemite Valley, about 180 miles east of San Francisco. Yosemite Valley was surrounded by huge granite rocks with sheer cliffs and famed for its waterfalls and trees.

To reach the Sierra Nevada, Muir first had to cross the vast Central Valley that stretches as a great plain towards the mountain range. As he walked through high grass and flowers, he thought it was like an ‘Eden from end to end’. The Central Valley resembled one enormous flowerbed, a carpet of colour that was rolled out under his feet. All this would change within the next few decades as agriculture and irrigation transformed it into the world’s largest orchard and vegetable patch. Muir would later lament that this great wild meadow had been ‘ploughed and pastured out of existence’.

As he walked towards the mountains, keeping away from roads and settlements, Muir bathed in colour and air so delicious, he said, that it was ‘sweet enough for the breath of angels’. In the distance the white peaks of the Sierra glistened as if they were made of pure light, ‘like the wall of a celestial city’. When he finally entered Yosemite Valley – some seven miles long – Muir was overwhelmed by the raw wilderness and beauty.

The many tall grey granite rocks that hugged the valley looked spectacular. At almost 5,000 feet Half Dome was the tallest and seemed to watch over the valley like a sentinel. The side that was turned to the valley was a sheer cliff, the other was rounded – a dome cut in half. Equally stunning was El Capitan – with a vertical face that rose a straight 3,000 feet from the valley floor (which itself is 4,000 feet above sea level). It is so steep that scaling El Capitan remains one of the greatest challenges for climbers today. With the perpendicular granite cliffs lining the valley, it gave the impression that someone had cut a swathe through the rocks.

It was the perfect time of the year to arrive in Yosemite Valley, as the melting snows had fed the many waterfalls that tumbled over the rock faces. They seemed to ‘gush direct from the sky’, Muir thought. Here and there rainbows appeared to dance in the spray. Yosemite Falls plunged through a narrow gap almost 2,500 feet deep, making it the tallest waterfall in North America. There were pines in the valley and small lakes that reflected the scenery on their mirrored surfaces.

Competing with this imposing scene were the ancient sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in Mariposa Grove, some twenty miles south of the valley. Tall, straight and stately, these giants seemed to belong to another world. They were so particular to the place that they could only be found on the western side of the Sierra. Some of the sequoias in Mariposa Grove soared almost 300 feet high and were more than 2,000 years old. The largest single-stemmed trees on earth, they are one of the oldest living things on the planet. Majestic columns with reddish vertically grooved bark and with no lower branches, the older trees extended into the sky and appeared even taller than they were. They were unlike any tree that Muir had ever seen. He was howling at vistas and darting from one sequoia to another.

One moment Muir was lying on his belly with his head just hovering above the ground, parting the grasses of the meadow to see what he called the ‘underworld of mosses’ populated by busy ants and beetles, and the next moment he was trying to understand how Yosemite Valley might have been created. Muir zoomed from the minute to the magnificent. He was seeing nature with Humboldt’s eyes, echoing the way that Humboldt had been drawn to the majestic views across the Andes but had also counted 44,000 flowers in one single cluster of blooms on a tree in the rainforest. Now Muir counted ‘165,913’ flowers blooming in one square yard, as well as delighting in the ‘glowing arch of sky’. The big and the small were woven together.

‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,’ he later wrote in his book My First Summer in the Sierra. Again and again, Muir returned to this idea. As he wrote of ‘a thousand invisible cords’ and ‘innumerable unbreakable cords’, and of those ‘that cannot be broken’, he mulled over a concept of nature where everything was connected. Every tree, flower, insect, bird, stream or lake seemed to invite him ‘to learn something of its history and relationship’, and the greatest achievements of his first summer in Yosemite, he said, were ‘lessons of unity and inter-relation’.²

Muir was so enchanted by Yosemite that he returned many times and as often as he could over the next few years. Sometimes he stayed for months, other times just weeks. When he was not climbing, walking and observing in the Sierra, he took odd jobs – in the Central Valley, in the foothills of the Sierra or in Yosemite. He worked as a shepherd in the mountains, as a farm hand on a ranch and at a sawmill in Yosemite Valley. One season while he stayed in Yosemite, Muir built himself a small cabin through which a little stream flowed, gurgling a gentle lullaby at night. Ferns grew inside the cabin and frogs hopped along the floor – inside and outside were the same. Whenever he could, Muir disappeared to the mountains, ‘screaming among the peaks’.

In the Sierra the world became more and more visible, Muir said, ‘the farther and higher we go’. He noted and recorded his observations, he drew and collected but he also went to the mountaintops, higher and higher. He climbed from summit to canyon, from canyon to summit, comparing and measuring – assembling data to understand the creation of Yosemite Valley.

Unlike the scientists who at that time conducted the Geological Survey of California and who believed that cataclysmic eruptions had given birth to the valley, Muir was the first to realize that glaciers – slowly moving giants of ice – had carved it out over thousands of years. Muir began to read the glacial footprints and scars on the rocks. When he found a living glacier, he proved his theory of glacial motion in Yosemite Valley by placing stakes into the ice which moved several inches over a period of forty-six days. He had become completely ‘iced’, he explained. ‘I have nothing to send but what is frozen or freezable,’ he wrote to Jeanne Carr. And though Muir still wanted to see the Andes, he decided not to leave California as long as the Sierra ‘trust me and talk to me’.

In Yosemite Valley, Muir also thought about Humboldt’s concept of plant distribution. In spring 1872, exactly three years after his first visit, Muir sketched the migration of Arctic plants over thousands of years from the plains in the Central Valley up to the glaciers in the Sierra. His little drawing showed the position of the plants, he explained, ‘at the opening of the glacial springtime’ but also the location where they grew now, near the summit. It was a sketch that reveals its parentage in Humboldt’s Naturgemälde and Muir’s new understanding that botany, geography, climate and geology were tightly intermeshed.

Muir’s sketch showed the movement of Arctic plants over thousands of years. He gave three positions: in the plains ‘setting out on their journey up the mountains’; further up some were still ‘lingering’ and then near the summit, the ‘recent position of arctic plants – still journeying upward’ (Illustration Credit 23.1)

Muir enjoyed nature intellectually, emotionally and viscerally. His surrender to nature was, as he said, ‘unconditional’, and he happily ignored dangers. One evening, for example, he climbed on to a perilously high ledge behind the Upper Yosemite Fall to investigate what he thought might be a mark made by a glacier. He slipped and fell but somehow managed to hold tight to a small bit of protruding rock. As he crouched on the ledge behind the waterfall some 500 feet high, the relentless spray drove him against the wall behind him. He was soaking wet and almost in a trance. It was pitch dark by the time he scrambled down, but he was ecstatic – baptized, as he said, by the waterfall.

Muir was at ease in the mountains. He leapt across steep icy slopes ‘as surely as a mountain goat’, one friend said, and climbed up the highest trees. Winter storms were greeted with enthusiasm. When strong tremors shook Yosemite Valley and his little cabin in spring 1872, Muir ran outside, shouting, ‘A noble Earthquake!!!’ As huge granite boulders tumbled, Muir saw his mountain theories brought alive. ‘Destruction,’ he said, ‘is always creation.’ This was proper discovery. How could one find the truth of nature in a laboratory?

During these first few years in California, Muir wrote enthusiastic letters to his friends and family but also guided visitors through the valley. When Jeanne Carr, his old friend and mentor from his university days, moved to California from Madison with her husband, she introduced Muir to many scientists, artists and writers. He was easy to recognize, Muir wrote, visitors just had to look out for the ‘most suntanned and round shouldered and bashful man’. He welcomed scientists from across the States.

Respected American botanists Asa Gray and John Torrey came, as did geologist Joseph LeConte. Yosemite Valley was also becoming a tourist attraction and the numbers of visitors soon grew into the hundreds. In June 1864, three years before Muir first arrived, the US government had granted Yosemite Valley to the state of California as a park ‘for public use, resort and recreation’. As industrialization had picked up pace, more and more people were moving into cities and some began to feel the loss of nature in their lives. They now arrived in Yosemite on horses loaded with the comforts of civilization. With their gaudy clothes, Muir wrote, they were like colourful ‘bugs’ among the rocks and trees.

One visitor was Henry David Thoreau’s old mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been encouraged by Jeanne Carr to seek out Muir. The two men spent a few days together during which Muir, who had just turned thirty-three, showed the almost seventy-year-old Emerson his sketches and herbarium, as well as the valley and his beloved sequoias in the Mariposa Grove. But Muir was deeply disappointed that instead of camping under the open sky, Emerson preferred to spend his nights in one of the log cabins in the valley where tourists could rent a room. Emerson’s insistence on sleeping indoors was a ‘sad commentary’, Muir said, on ‘the glorious transcendentalism’.

Emerson, though, was so impressed by Muir’s knowledge and love for nature that he wanted him to join the faculty at Harvard University where he himself had studied and still sometimes gave a lecture. Muir refused. He was too wild for the establishment on the East Coast, ‘too befogged to burn well in their patent, high-heated, educational furnaces’. Muir longed for the wilderness. ‘Solitude,’ Emerson warned him, ‘is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife,’ but Muir was unmoved. He loved seclusion. How could he feel lonely when he was in a constant dialogue with nature?

It was a dialogue that worked on many levels. Like Humboldt and Thoreau, Muir had become convinced that in order to understand nature one’s feelings were as important as scientific data. Having initially set out to make sense of the natural world by ‘botanizing’, Muir had quickly realized how restricting such an approach might be. Descriptions of texture, colour, sound and smell became the trademarks of his articles and books which he would later write for a non-scientific audience. But in his letters and journals from his first years in Yosemite, Muir’s deeply sensual relationship with nature already leapt from almost every page. ‘I’m in the woods, woods, woods, & they are in me–ee–e,’ he wrote, or ‘I wish I was so drunk & Sequoical,’ transforming the sequoias’ strength into an evocative adjective.

The leaves’ shadows on a boulder were ‘dancing, waltzing in swift, merry swirls’ and the gurgling streams were ‘chanting’. Nature talked to Muir. The mountains were calling him to ‘Come higher’, while the plants and animals were shouting in the morning, ‘Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!’ He spoke with waterfalls and flowers. In a letter to Emerson he described how he had asked two violets what they thought of the earthquake, and how they had replied, ‘It’s all Love.’ The world that Muir discovered in Yosemite was animated and pulsating with life. This was Humboldt’s nature as a living organism.³

Muir wrote of the ‘breath of Nature’ and the ‘pulses of Nature’s big heart’. He was ‘part of wild Nature,’ he insisted. Sometimes he became so much one with nature that the reader is left guessing what he was referring to: ‘Four cloudless April days filled in every pore & chink with unsoftened undiluted sunshine’ – Muir’s pores and chinks, or those of the landscape?

What had been an emotional response for Humboldt also became a spiritual dialogue for Muir. Where Humboldt had seen an internal force of creation, Muir found a divine hand. Muir discovered God in nature – but not a God who reverberated from the church pulpits. The Sierra Nevada was his ‘mountain temple’, in which the rocks, plants and the sky were the words of God and could be read like a divine manuscript. The natural world opened ‘a thousand windows to show us God’, Muir had written during his first summer at Yosemite Valley, and every flower was like a mirror reflecting the Creator’s hand. Muir would preach nature like an ‘apostle’, he said.

Muir was not only in conversation with nature and God but also with Humboldt. He owned copies of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, Views of Nature and Cosmos – all heavily annotated with hundreds of Muir’s pencil marks. He read with great interest about the indigenous tribes that Humboldt had encountered in South America and who regarded nature as sacred. Muir was fascinated by Humboldt’s descriptions of those tribes who punished the ‘violation of these monuments of nature’ severely and those who had ‘no other worship than that of the powers of nature.’ Their god was in the forest just like Muir’s. When Humboldt wrote about the ‘sacred sanctuaries’ of nature, Muir turned it into the ‘sanctum sanctorum of the Sierras’.

Muir’s own index on the back page of his copy of Humboldt’s Views of Nature. He listed subjects such as ‘influences of forests’ and ‘forests & civilization’, noting the pages that dealt with the impact of trees on climate, soil and evaporation as well as the destructive force of agriculture and deforestation (Illustration Credit 23.2)

So obsessed was Muir that he even highlighted the pages that referred to Humboldt in his Darwin and Thoreau books. One topic that particularly fascinated Muir – as it had George Perkins Marsh – was Humboldt’s comments on deforestation and the ecological function of forests.

As he observed the world around him, Muir realized that something had to be done. The country was changing. Every year Americans claimed an additional 15 million acres for fields. With the advent of steam-powered reapers, grain binder machines and combine harvesters that cut, threshed and cleaned grains mechanically, agriculture had become industrialized. The world seemed to spin faster and faster. In 1861 communication had become almost instantaneous when the first transcontinental telegraph cable connected the whole of the United States from the Atlantic coast in the east to the Pacific coast in the west. In 1869, the year of Muir’s first summer in Yosemite and also the year that the world celebrated the centenary of Humboldt’s birth, the first transcontinental railway in North America reached the West Coast. Over the past four decades the railway boom had transformed America and during Muir’s first five years in California another 33,000 miles of tracks were added – by 1890 more than 160,000 miles of tracks snaked across the United States. Distances seemed to shrink in tandem with the wilderness. There was soon no more land to be conquered and explored in the American West. The 1890s were the first decade without a frontier. ‘The rough conquest of the wilderness is accomplished,’ the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner would declare in 1903.

The railway not only provided fast access to remote places but also drove the standardization of ‘railway time’ which would bring four time zones to America. Standard time and watches replaced the sun and the moon as a way to measure out lives. Humankind, it seemed, controlled nature and Americans were in the vanguard. They had land to till, water to harness and timber to burn. The whole country was building, ploughing, churning and working. With the rapid spread of the railway, goods and grain could be transported easily across the huge continent. By the end of the nineteenth century the United States was the world’s leading manufacturing country, and as farmers moved into the cities and towns, nature became increasingly removed from daily life.

In the decade after his first summer in Yosemite, Muir turned to writing to ‘entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness’. As he composed his first articles, he studied Humboldt’s books as well as Marsh’s Man and Nature and Thoreau’s The Maine Woods and Walden. In his copy of The Maine Woods he underlined Thoreau’s call for ‘national preserves’ and began to think about the protection of the wilderness. Humboldt’s ideas had come full circle. Not only had Humboldt influenced some of the most important thinkers, scientists and artists but they in turn inspired each other. Together, Humboldt, Marsh and Thoreau provided the intellectual framework through which Muir saw the changing world around him.

For the rest of his life Muir fought for the protection of nature. Man and Nature had been a wake-up call for some Americans, but where Marsh wrote one book that encouraged the protection of the environment mainly for the economic profit of the country, Muir would publish a dozen books and more than 300 articles that made ordinary Americans fall in love with nature. Muir wanted them to stare in awe at mountain vistas and towering trees. He could be funny, charming and seductive in his pursuit of this goal. Muir took the baton of nature writing from Humboldt who had created this new genre – one that combined scientific thinking with emotional responses to nature. Humboldt had dazzled his readers, including Muir, who then in turn became a master of this kind of writing. ‘Nature’ itself, Muir said, was ‘a poet’ – he just needed to let it speak through his pen.

Muir was a great communicator. He had the reputation of being an incessant talker – bursting with ideas, facts, observations and his joy for nature. ‘Our foreheads felt the wind and the rain,’ one friend commented after listening to Muir’s stories. His letters, journals and books were equally passionate, packed with descriptions that transported the reader into the woods and mountains. On one occasion, when he climbed a mountain with Charles Sargent, the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, Muir was amazed how a man so learned about trees could be so untouched by the magnificent autumnal scenery. While he was jumping around and singing to ‘glory in it all’, Sargent stood ‘cool as a rock’. When Muir asked him why, Sargent replied, ‘I don’t wear my heart upon my sleeve.’ But Muir was not allowing Sargent to get away with this. ‘Who cares where you wear your little heart, man,’ Muir countered, ‘there you stand in the face of all Heaven come down to earth, like a critic of the universe, as if to say “Come, Nature, bring on the best you have: I’m from BOSTON.” ’

Muir lived and breathed nature. One early letter – a love letter to sequoias – was written in ink that Muir had made from their sap, and his scrawl still shines in the red of the sequoia’s sap today. The letterhead stated ‘Squirrelville, Sequoia Co, Nut time’ – and on he goes: ‘The King tree & me have sworn eternal love.’ When it came to nature, Muir was never afraid of letting go. He wanted to preach to the ‘juiceless world’ about the forest, life and nature. Those defrauded by civilization, he wrote, those ‘sick or successful, come suck Sequoia & be saved’.

Muir’s books and articles exuded such a playful joy that he inspired millions of Americans, shaping their relationship with nature. Muir wrote of ‘a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices’ and of trees in a storm that were ‘throbbing with music and life’ – his language was visceral and emotional. He grabbed his readers and took them into the wilderness, up snowy mountains, above and behind stupendous waterfalls and across flowering meadows.⁴

Muir liked to cast himself as the wild man in the mountains. But after his first five years in rural California and the Sierra, he began to spend the winter months in San Francisco and the Bay Area to write his articles. He rented rooms from friends and acquaintances and continued to dislike the city’s ‘barren & beeless’ streets, but here he met the editors who commissioned his first pieces. Throughout these years he remained restless, but as his brothers and sisters wrote letters from Wisconsin, reporting on their marriages and children, Muir began to think about his future.

It was Jeanne Carr who introduced him to Louie Strentzel, in September 1874, when Muir was thirty-six. Louie was twenty-seven and the only surviving child of a wealthy Polish emigrant who owned a large orchard and vineyard in Martinez, thirty miles north-east of San Francisco. For five years Muir wrote her letters, and regularly visited Louie and her family, before he finally made up his mind. They became engaged in 1879, and married in April 1880, a few days before his forty-second birthday. They settled at the Strentzels’ ranch in Martinez – but Muir continued to escape into the wilderness. Louie understood that she had to let her husband go when he felt ‘lost & choked in agricultural needs’. Muir always returned, refreshed and inspired, ready to spend time with his wife and later his two young daughters whom he adored. Only once did Louie accompany him to Yosemite Valley where Muir pushed her up the mountains with a stick pressed to her back – to his mind a helpful gesture, but it was an experiment that was never repeated.

Muir’s sketch of pushing Louie up a mountain in Yosemite (Illustration Credit 23.3)

Muir accepted his role as farm manager but never enjoyed it. Then, when Louie’s father died in 1890, he left her a fortune of almost US $250,000. They decided to sell parts of the land and hired Muir’s sister and her husband to run the remaining estate. Muir, who was now in his early fifties, was glad to be relieved of the daily work on the ranch so that he could concentrate on more important issues.

During the years that he had run the Strentzels’ ranch in Martinez, Muir never lost his passion for Yosemite. Encouraged by Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of the nation’s leading literary monthly magazine, the Century, Muir began to fight for the wilderness. Every time he visited Yosemite Valley he saw more changes. Though the valley was a state park, the enforcement of regulations and control was lax. California was managing Yosemite Valley badly. Sheep had grazed the valley floor barren and tourist accommodation cluttered the landscape. Muir also noted how many wildflowers had disappeared since he had first visited the Sierra two decades earlier. In the mountains, outside the boundaries of the park, many of Muir’s beloved sequoias had been felled for timber. Muir was shocked about the destruction and waste – and would later write that ‘no doubt these trees would make good lumber after passing through a sawmill, as George Washington after passing through the hands of a French cook would have made good food’.⁵

Relentlessly pushed by Johnson, Muir turned his love of nature into activism and began to write and campaign for the creation of a national park in Yosemite – like Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the first and so far only one in the country, which had been established in 1872. In the late summer and autumn of 1890, Johnson lobbied for a Yosemite National Park in Washington before the House of Representatives, while Muir’s articles for the popular Century ensured a widespread recognition of the fight thanks to the magazine’s nationwide distribution. Lavishly illustrated with stunning engravings of the canyons, mountains and trees of Yosemite Valley, the articles carried the readers into the wilderness of the Sierra. Valleys became ‘mountain streets full of life and light’, granite domes had their feet in emerald meadows and ‘their brows’ in the blue sky. The wings of birds, butterflies and bees stirred the ‘air into music’ and cascades were ‘whirling and dancing’. The majestic falls foamed, folded, twisted and plunged while clouds were ‘blooming’.

Muir’s prose transported the magical beauty of Yosemite straight into America’s parlours, but at the same time he warned that it was all about to be destroyed by sawmills and sheep. A huge swathe of land needed protection, Muir wrote, because the branching valleys and streams that fed into Yosemite Valley were as closely related as the ‘fingers to the palm of a hand’. The valley was not a separate ‘fragment’ but belonged to the great ‘harmonious unit’ of nature. If one part was destroyed the others would go down too.

In October 1890, only a few weeks after Muir’s articles had been published in the Century, nearly 2 million acres were set aside as Yosemite National Park – under US federal control rather than Californian state control. In the middle of the map of the new park, though, like a huge blank, was Yosemite Valley which remained under the negligent stewardship of California.

It was a first step but there was still so much to do. Muir was convinced that only ‘Uncle Sam’ – the federal government – had the power to protect nature from the ‘fools’ who destroyed trees. It was not enough to designate areas as parks or forest reserves, their protection needed to be watched and enforced. And it was for those reasons that Muir co-founded the Sierra Club two years later, in 1892. Conceived as a ‘defence association’ for the wilderness, the Sierra Club is today America’s largest grassroots environmental organization. Muir hoped that this would ‘do something for wildness and make the mountains glad’.

Muir continued to write and campaign tirelessly. His articles were published in big national magazines such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and of course Underwood’s Century – and his audience continued to grow. By the turn of the century, Muir had become so famous that President Theodore Roosevelt requested his company on a camping trip to Yosemite. ‘I do not want anyone with me but you,’ Roosevelt wrote in March 1903. Two months later, in May, the barrel-chested President, who was an avid naturalist but also enjoyed big-game hunting, arrived in the Sierra Nevada.

President Theodore Roosevelt with John Muir on Glacier Point in Yosemite Valley in 1903 (Illustration Credit 23.4)

They made an odd pair: the thin and wiry sixty-five-year-old Muir and, twenty years his junior, the stout and rugged Roosevelt. They camped for four days at three different places – among the ‘solemn temple of the giant sequoias’, in the snow high up on one of the huge rocks, and on the valley floor below the grey perpendicular wall of El Capitan. It was here, surrounded by majestic granite rocks and the soaring trees, that Muir convinced the President that the federal government should at last take control of Yosemite Valley away from the state of California and make it part of the larger Yosemite National Park.⁶

Humboldt had understood the threat to nature, Marsh had assembled the evidence into one convincing argument, but it was Muir who planted environmental concerns into the wider political arena and the public mind. There were differences between Marsh and Muir – between conservation and preservation. When Marsh had made his case against the destruction of forests, he had been a proponent for conservation because he was essentially arguing for the protection of natural resources. Marsh wanted the use of trees or water to be regulated so that a sustainable balance could be achieved.

Muir, by contrast, interpreted Humboldt’s ideas differently. He advocated preservation, by which he meant the protection of nature from human impact. Muir wanted to keep forests, rivers and mountains in pristine conditions, pursuing that goal with a steely persistence. ‘I have no plan, system or trick to save them [the forests],’ he said, ‘I mean simply to go on hammering & thumping as best I can.’ He also galvanized public opinion and support. As tens of thousands of Americans read Muir’s articles and as his books became bestsellers, his voice reverberated boldly across the North American continent. Muir had become the fiercest champion for the American wilderness.

One of his most important fights concerned the plan to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a lesser known but equally spectacular valley within Yosemite National Park. In 1906, after a major earthquake and fire, the city of San Francisco, which had long struggled with water shortages, applied to the US government to dam the river that ran through Hetch Hetchy in order to create a water reservoir for the growing metropolis. As Muir took up the battle against the dam, he wrote to Roosevelt, reminding the President of their camping trip in Yosemite and the urgency to save Hetch Hetchy. At the same time, though, Roosevelt received reports from the engineers whom he had commissioned, claiming that the dam was the only solution to San Francisco’s chronic water problem. With the battle lines drawn, this became the first dispute between the claims of wilderness and the demands of civilization – between preservation and progress – that would be fought on a national level. The stakes were high. If parts of a national park could be claimed for commercial reasons, then nothing was truly protected.

As Muir wrote more rousing articles, and the Sierra Club urged people to write to the President and politicians, the fight for Hetch Hetchy became a nationwide protest. Congressmen and senators received thousands of letters from concerned constituents, Sierra Club spokespeople testified before government committees and the New York Times declared the fight a ‘universal struggle’. But after years of campaigning, San Francisco won and the construction of the dam began. Although Muir was devastated, he also realized that the whole country had been ‘aroused from sleep’. Though Hetch Hetchy was gone, Muir and his fellow preservationists had understood how to lobby, how to run a national campaign, and how to act in the political arena – thereby setting a model for future activism. The idea of a national protest movement on behalf of nature was born. They had learned hard lessons. ‘Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded,’ as Muir said.

Throughout those decades and battles, Muir had never stopped dreaming of South America. In the early years after his arrival in California, he had been certain that he would go, but something else had always intervened. ‘Have I forgotten the Amazon, Earth’s greatest river? Never, never, never. It has been burning in me for half a century, and will burn forever,’ he wrote to an old friend. In between climbing, farming, writing and campaigning Muir had found the time for several trips to Alaska and then for a world tour to study trees. He had visited Europe, Russia, India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand but had not made it to South America. In his mind, though, Humboldt had remained with him throughout these years. During his world tour Muir stopped in Berlin, and had walked through the Humboldt Park which had been built after the centennial celebrations and paid his respects when he went to see the Humboldt statue that stood outside the university. His friends knew how much Muir identified with the Prussian scientist and therefore called his expeditions ‘your Humboldt trip[s]’. One even shelved Muir’s publications in the explorer section of his library ‘under Humboldt’.

Muir tenaciously clung to the idea of following the footsteps of his hero. If anything, as he became older his lifelong wish to see South America grew stronger. There was also less holding him at home. In 1905, his wife Louie died and then both his daughters married and had their own families. When Muir reached his seventies, an age when other men would have thought about their retirement, he still did not give up his dreams. He now turned his thoughts in earnest to his Humboldt exploration. Maybe it was the writing of his book My First Summer in the Sierra, in spring 1910, that renewed his wish to fulfil the dream of his youth – after all it had been his urge to be ‘a Humboldt’ that had made him leave Indianapolis and had brought him to California more than forty years previously. Muir bought a new edition of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and reread it from cover to cover, marking and annotating the pages. Nothing would stop him. No matter how much his daughters and friends protested, he had to go ‘before it is too late’. They knew that he could be stubborn. He had so often talked about the expedition, one old friend said, that she was certain Muir would not be happy until he had seen South America.

In April 1911, Muir left California and crossed the country on the Southern Pacific Railroad to the East Coast where he spent a few weeks working manically on the manuscripts of several books. Then, on 12 August, Muir boarded a steamer in New York. He was finally travelling towards ‘the great hot river I’ve been wanting to see’. An hour before the ship left the harbour he dashed off one last note to his increasingly distraught daughter Helen. ‘Don’t fret about me,’ he assured her, ‘I’m perfectly well.’ Two weeks later Muir reached Belém in Brazil, the gateway to the Amazon. Forty-four years after he had left Indianapolis for his walk south, and more than a century after Humboldt had set sail, Muir finally set foot on South American soil. He was seventy-three years old.

It had all begun with Humboldt and with a walk. ‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,’ Muir wrote after his return, ‘for going out, I found, was really going in.’

In April 1911, Muir left California and crossed the country on the Southern Pacific Railroad to the East Coast where he spent a few weeks working manically on the manuscripts of several books, and campaigning.

¹ Humboldt’s dream of a canal across the Panama isthmus had still not come to fruition. Instead, a railway now crossed the narrow stretch of land from Colón to Panama City. Completed only thirteen years previously, in 1855, it had been used by the tens of thousands of people who had gone to California during the gold rush.

² Muir marked in his copy of Views of Nature and Cosmos the sections where Humboldt had written about the ‘harmonious co-operation of forces’ and the ‘unity of all the vital forces of nature’, as well as Humboldt’s famous remark that ‘nature is indeed a reflex of the whole’.

³ Humboldt had often explained how everything was infused with life – rocks, flowers, insects and so on. In his copy of Views of Nature, Muir underlined Humboldt’s remarks on this ‘universal profusion of life’ and the organic forces that were ‘incessantly at work’.

⁴ Only Muir’s stern father was displeased with his son’s nature writing. Daniel Muir, who had left his wife in 1873 to join a religious sect, wrote to John: ‘You cannot warm the heart of the Saint of God with your cold icey topped mountains.’

⁵ Muir had underlined a similar idea in his copy of Thoreau’s book The Maine Woods which read: ‘But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure … a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.’

⁶ Roosevelt kept his promise when Yosemite Valley as well as Mariposa Grove were added to Yosemite National Park in 1906.