His writings have shaped generations of thought about nature and public lands for both good and ill, and as such his literary art remains a powerful source of insight that deserves continued reflection from our current vantage point.

  MUIR’S LITERARY LEGACY

  Not much is known about Muir’s sense of his own literary artistry. We do know that he resisted what he referred to disdainfully as “bookmaking.” The disdain comes largely from his favoring firsthand experience in the world over vicarious experience derived from books. As he wrote in his journal around 1872, “No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. . . . One day’s exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.”10

  The only writing he truly enjoyed was journal writing—field notes and drawings. Writing for publication, however, required confining himself indoors (he dubbed the study in his Martinez home his “scribble den”); it required transmuting his fragmentary, spontaneously generated journal entries into fully developed, coherent discourse. For Muir this was devilishly hard work. Explains Marion Randall Parsons, who boarded Muir when he was working on Travels in Alaska, “Composition was always slow and laborious for him. . . . Each sentence, each phrase, each word, underwent his critical scrutiny, not once but twenty times before he was satisfied to let it stand.”11

  But his resistance to writing books is not as paradoxical as it seems. Muir wrote as naturally as he walked and rejoiced in nature—but it was spontaneous writing. His journal was part of his amazingly sparse backpack, accompanied by three books (the New Testament, Paradise Lost, and Robert Burns’s poems), a change of clothes, and some food. He used pencils to write his journal entries and make sketches; sometimes when he wrote letters, he made his own ink out of tree sap. Muir’s writing, we might say, was a kind of spontaneously generated singing from the soul. Writing was as essential a life function to him as walking, seeing, breathing.

  For someone who did not regard himself as “a writer,” Muir possessed a profoundly poetic sensibility. He recognized this sensibility himself early on, and wondered if he could manifest it by literally writing poetry—but no; the few poems of Muir’s that survive make it clear that his poetic soul would not manifest itself in traditional verse.

  Page randomly through Muir’s writings, and the first thing you will probably notice is the way he shifts almost seamlessly from the rhapsodic to the scientific and back again. In virtually one breath, Muir can rejoice in the celestial power of a Yosemite waterfall and describe plant species with botanical precision. He can be expressive as a giddy child in one paragraph and professorial in the next. Was this symptomatic of a capricious sensibility? My guess is that Muir strove in his writing, as he did in his life, to fuse the two sensibilities together. His works are neither “scientific” nor “literary” in the traditional sense of those terms but a fusion of both.

  The most dramatic achievement resulting from this fusion of sensibilities occurred when Muir demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt the glacial origin of the Yosemite Valley. Not only did he collect geological evidence of, for example, glacial striae (scrapings on rock faces that could only have been caused by glacial movement), but he quite transcended conventional scientific procedure altogether by living like a glacier. As he explained in an 1871 letter to his lifelong friend and mentor, the educator and botanist Jeanne Carr:

  I can do much of this ice work in the quiet, and the whole subject is purely physical, so that I can get but little from books. All depends upon the goodness of one’s eyes. No scientific book in the world can tell me how this Yosemite granite is put together, or how it has been taken down. Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them.12

  MUIR’S RACIST VIEWS

  For the past two decades, scholars have been shedding light on John Muir’s views toward persons of color and Native peoples.13 Muir’s attitude toward minorities gained renewed attention in the spring of 2020, triggered in part by a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement that followed the brutal murders of African Americans at the hands of police. The reputation of John Muir as America’s premier nature celebrant and preservationist must continue to be reassessed in terms of racism, especially toward Indigenous peoples and African Americans. To attempt to absolve him by noting that “this was how people thought back then” is not acceptable; the legions of white abolitionists and defenders of the rights of Native Americans to their own lands also lived “back then.” To some extent, Muir’s racial biases evolved in his later years, but he never repudiated his earlier racist attitudes.

  According to New York Times reporter Lucy Tompkins in 2020, “a disproportionately low number of people of color visit national parks.”14 Additionally, according to Dorceta E. Taylor in The Rise of the American Conservation Movement (Duke University Press, 2016), many people of color avoid joining the Sierra Club and other organizations whose histories involved pursuing environmental projects that benefitted only white Americans or were based in racial exclusion in other ways. Perhaps Muir’s unwillingness to be more inclusive in his writings is partially to blame. Sadly, his vision of preserving the wild involved the expulsion of Native peoples from their homes in Yosemite Valley and elsewhere.

  That John Muir’s lifelong devotion to wilderness preservation has made a valuable contribution to humanity cannot be denied. However, his racist views must not be overlooked; indeed, they must be factored into his vision of nature. Wilderness preservation, in fact, is inextricable from race: we cannot really regard wild nature as a transcendent realm apart from the Native peoples who have always inhabited those realms. Yet John Muir believed those inhabitants somehow sullied “pristine” nature, and he felt no compunction about their removal.

  HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED

  Muir defies labeling; and so, in surveying his considerable body of work, one does not find mutually exclusive categories; instead, we can identify phases in which we see one of five sensibilities manifested. Accordingly, I have organized the book’s selections in the context of these sensibilities, which I call, in reference to the sequential stages of his life, The Visionary Inventor, The Wandering Minstrel, The Nature Scribe and Rhapsode, The Global Adventurer, and The Planet Steward.

  THE VISIONARY INVENTOR

  Because his father forbade him to read novels (“The Deevil’s ain buik o’ lies!” was Daniel Muir’s assessment of a novel15), John would get up in the middle of the night to read on the sly, but during the winter months, when a fire was needed, his father would awaken. And so John shifted his attention to an equally joyous pursuit: inventing fanciful yet practical machines such as a plant-growth measurer, an all-in-one barometer-hygrometer-pyrometer, a study desk that automatically rotated his books, and various early-rising machines, including a bed that propped the sleeper upright on the floor at the pre-appointed time. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Muir captures the delight of such inventiveness, which proved to be an antidote to the drudgery of farm life and his father’s relentlessly harsh rule.

  THE WANDERING MINSTREL

  Muir’s first major excursion into wilderness took place during the Civil War. A committed pacifist, he ventured into the woodlands and marshes of northern Michigan, then crossed the border into Canada, where he remained until 1866, working as a machinist and teacher. Back in the United States, he went to work for a wagon parts manufacturer in Indianapolis. One evening in March 1867, while adjusting a machine belt, he lost his grip on a file, which flew into his right eye, causing temporary blindness in both eyes. The terror, however short-lived, of losing his sight forever motivated him to reassess his priorities, and later that year he boarded a train for Louisville, Kentucky, to fulfill his dream of exploring the wilderness areas of the South. From Louisville he set out on a two-month, thousand-mile walk through Kentucky, Tennessee (via the Cumberland Mountains—“the first real mountains that my foot ever touched or eyes beheld”), across the western tip of North Carolina, then diagonally across northern Georgia, down the Savannah River to the Atlantic (where he boarded a steamship to Florida), and across Florida to Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast. He’d originally planned to sail to South America but fell ill with malaria. After recuperating in Havana, he set sail for San Francisco.

  Although the resulting book, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, published posthumously in 1916, is composed of reworked journal entries (characteristic of most of Muir’s books), it still retains much of the spontaneity of those original entries. These writings capture well their author’s wanderlust heart. But they also capture, as one of his biographers, Herbert F. Smith, so aptly states, “the narrative of a man who had not yet made up his mind” about the direction his life was to take.16

  Muir’s excursions brought him into contact not only with different geographical regions of the country but also with a diverse group of people, including Native Americans and African Americans. Reading his accounts of these observations and encounters, we learn that his principal interests lay with the land—the mountains, the caves, the trees, the animal life. The human encounters were of secondary interest at best. Although he walked through Georgia just a few years after the end of the Civil War, he focused almost exclusively on the nonhuman world, turning conversations away from politics and social issues to plant and animal life.

  THE NATURE SCRIBE AND RHAPSODE

  With the wilderness now in his blood, and having read about the sublime, vast mountain wildernesses of the Sierra—especially of the Yosemite Valley—Muir was eager to embark on the path that would enable him to bring his gifts as a naturalist to fruition. Like the great geologist Louis Agassiz, who had first theorized the existence of an ice age and of glaciation, Muir too believed that “a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle.”17

  On virtually every page of his Sierra books—The Mountains of California (1894), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), and The Yosemite (1912)—we feel the author’s awe at the majesty of mountain wilderness, enhanced rather than diminished by the author’s well-trained scientific scrutiny, as in this description of Sierra summit trees from The Mountains of California:

  There are two trees in the Sierra forests that are never blown down, so long as they continue in sound health. These are the juniper and the dwarf pine of the summit peaks. Their stiff, crooked roots grip the storm-beaten ledges like eagles’ claws, while their lithe, cord-like branches bend round compliantly, offering but slight holds for winds, however violent. The other alpine conifers—the needle pine, mountain pine, two-leaved pine, and hemlock spruce—are never thinned out by this agent to any destructive extent, on account of their growth.18

  Even Muir’s letters often possess the same fusion of reportage and poetic description, as in the two letters to Jeanne Carr that appear in this section. Jeanne Carr, wife of the botanist and Berkeley professor Ezra Carr (with whom Muir had studied when they were both at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1860s), nurtured Muir’s botanical and geological studies in the wild and encouraged—prodded—him to publish. “She formed the bridge between the crabbed isolation of his boyhood and the world of men he would have to live in,” writes Linnie Marsh Wolfe in her biography of Muir. “By her unfailing tact and faith in his genius she directed his aims and helped fit him for leadership.”19 I venture to add that she was also his muse, inspiring him, as in his “Nut Time” letter, to such eloquent flights of fancy as to make him seem like a jubilant Tom o’ Bedlam.

  THE GLOBAL ADVENTURER

  John Muir the adventurer was not too different from John Muir the wanderer or the poet-naturalist or even the inventor-machinist. The distinctions are matters of degree, or of principal sensibility. For example, while in Yosemite, he put his machinist’s skills to use in helping to operate a sawmill. He was certainly the adventurer when he rode a snow avalanche down the north slope of Cloud’s Rest in Yosemite, or when he perched himself on a lip of rock in order to better experience the sensation of a waterfall—adventures he relates in The Yosemite, chapters 1 and 3, respectively. His sensibilities were different in each “incarnation,” however. In Wisconsin his focus was to learn and to create labor-saving devices that would free him to study, or enable him to earn more money; on his thousand-mile trek through the South, it was to experience freedom, to discover himself. In California it was to exult in the sublime beauty of the Sierra and to solve the mystery of how Yosemite Valley had formed.

  But something else stirred in Muir’s blood: a sheer craving for adventure—adventure for its own sake, for the intrinsic life-thrills it provided. It is what his near contemporary, Jack London, would refer to as “the call of the wild.”

  And so, in 1879, Muir heeded the call of the northern wildernesses of Puget Sound, British Columbia, and especially Alaska, which, although it had already begun to be exploited by whites for its resources, was as close to unexploited wilderness as Muir would ever see in North America. During these Alaska trips Muir also began to pay close attention to the Native peoples and their customs (as in the piece “Eskimos and Walrus”).

  Soon after marrying Louisa (“Louie”) Strentzel in 1880 and beginning a happy, successful family life, Muir embarked on his second Alaska adventure—a glacier-exploration trip that resulted in his most popular book. Accompanied by a little black border collie mutt he named Stickeen (after the Stickeen Indians, or Tahltan people, who had originally adopted him), Muir ventured into Taylor Bay to explore on foot a newly discovered glacier but got trapped. In Stickeen (1909), first published in the Overland Monthly magazine as “An Adventure with a Dog and a Glacier,” Muir demonstrates his exceptional storytelling ability. Also, in a mysterious way, his intrepid companion seems to embody all that Muir himself represented. As publisher Malcolm Margolin explains in his afterword to the illustrated Heyday edition of the story, “It was as if the dog—driven to its utmost limits that day on the glacier—became momentarily transparent; and when Muir looked through to the essence of its being, what he saw in Stickeen was not very different from what he saw in himself.”

  THE PLANET STEWARD

  One might argue that anyone who reveres the natural world in all of its manifestations, as did John Muir from his earliest romps in the fields of his native Scotland, is well on the way toward becoming an environmentalist. After all, one never has to look very far to find evidence of nature being ravaged. Muir had also long been keenly aware of humanity’s role in environmental destruction from having read George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864), a revolutionary and unprecedented investigation of human environmental destruction since ancient times. Marsh asserts:

  Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. The proportions and accommodations which insured the stability of existing arrangements are overthrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extirpated, and supplanted by others of foreign origin, spontaneous production is forbidden or restricted, and the face of the earth is either laid bare or covered with a new and reluctant growth of vegetable forms, and with alien tribes of animal life. . . . The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as essentially a destructive power . . . tends to prove that, though living in physical nature, he is not of her.20

  One cannot help but suspect that Muir, after reading the above passage, felt compelled to prove Marsh right. Indeed, Muir’s environmentalism was grounded in the notion that the natural world not only transcended humanity but needed to be preserved from exploitation by land developers and industrialists.

  In 1876, after sojourning among the giant sequoias and observing their rapid decimation, he published the newspaper article “God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?” This powerful piece, which appeared in the Sacramento Daily Record-Union (Feb. 5, 1876), gave the public a vivid overview of forest destruction and advanced the case for federal protection. But it wasn’t until 1889 that Muir turned his attention full time to the rapidly developing environmental crises in California. After surveying the destruction in Yosemite with Robert Underwood Johnson (an editor at Century Magazine), the two men decided to make the case for federal protection of the area, to advocate making it a national park. Johnson would lobby in Washington, D.C.; Muir would write articles for Century. Their plan worked and, in the fall of 1889 Congress passed a bill to make Yosemite a national park (the nation’s third), effective the following year. Over the next decade, more forest reserves were created across the nation.

  JOHN MUIR AND THE SIERRA CLUB

  Even before precious public lands became national parks, it was clear that an organization was needed to protect them from privatization and exploitation by land developers. Since the 1860s organizations had sprouted up around the country, such as the Alpine Club in Massachusetts, the Rocky Mountain Club in Colorado Springs, and various Audubon Society clubs, all of which aimed to maintain wilderness areas for specific recreational purposes like mountain climbing and birding. According to environmentalist and historian Tom Turner, two professors from the University of California, Berkeley, J. H. Senger and William Dallman Armes, set up a founding meeting for a new association that would work to protect Yosemite and Yellowstone and encourage recreational activities in these parks. “Muir responded enthusiastically” to the plan, Turner writes, quoting Muir, who said he was “hoping that we will be able to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad.”21 In September 1892 the Sierra Club was founded and Muir was unanimously elected its first president—a position he retained until his death.