MUIR, JOHN 1838-1914

Naturalist, founder of the sierra club

Background

John Muir was the most influential and best known advocate of wilderness protection during the 1900s. He was born in Scotland and immigrated to the Wisconsin frontier in 1849. Self-educated, he later attended the University of Wisconsin from 1860 to 1863. Muir became interested in botany, and he took walking trips around the Midwest and Canada. After an industrial accident in 1867, he decided to devote himself to "the study of the inventions of God." In 1868 he first visited California's Yosemite Valley, where he remained for six years. After spending years away from it, Muir returned to the valley in 1889 to find it spoiled by logging and sheep grazing. In 1890 he helped to win passage of the Yosemite National Park Act.

National Influence

By 1900 he had helped found the Sierra Club (1892) and was busy raising public awareness of the need to protect America's wilderness lands. In 1901 he published Our National Parks, and two years later went on a camping trip in California with President Theodore Roosevelt. It was on this trip that Muir was able to influence public policy the most. Roosevelt was moved to add 148 million acres to the national forest lands, and he also doubled the number of national parks and created sixteen national monuments. One of them, a stand of redwood near San Francisco, was later named the Muir Woods National Monument.

Preservation Versus Conservation

Theodore Roosevelt was a personal friend of Muir's, and declared in 1908 that in the nation's park's "all things wild should be protected and the scenery kept wholly unmarred." But as president he was torn between Muir's belief in preservation—the notion that wilderness should be protected simply for its beauty and wonder—and conservation, advocated by chief forester Gifford Pinchot, who thought more in terms of the wise use of natural resources than about "Nature." Conservationists advocated such measures as the 1902 Newlands Act (named for Francis G. Newlands, representative from Nevada), which required that the money from the sale of public lands be used to build dams and irrigation for the approximately five hundred million open acres in the West that were mostly arid land. While preservationists and conservationists often cooperated in the effort to establish parks and national forests, their differences in principle came to a head in the great battle of John Muir's life, the struggle to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park.

Hetch Hetchy

In 1900 the city of San Francisco announced its desire to create a reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, one hundred fifty miles away in the Sierra Nevada mountains, by constructing a hydroelectric dam on the Tuolomne River. Because the valley was located in a national park, the secretary of the interior blocked the plan. Following the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906, the city tried again and was granted permission by the Interior Department, with the backing of Pinchot. Muir swung into action. Since the plan would require congressional approval, he hoped to block the measure in Congress by gathering public support. He denounced advocates of the project as "Temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism," who "seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar." Muir put his heart and soul into the effort for more than a decade, but advocates of urban growth finally prevailed in 1913, when Congress approved the dam. A year later, worn out and disheartened, Muir died of pneumonia, but not before making wilderness protection a national issue.

Sources:

Stephen R. Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981);

Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1959);

Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967);

Elmo R. Richardson, "The Struggle for the Valley: California's Hetch Hetchy Controversy, 1905-1913," California Historical Society Quarterly, 38 (1959): 249-258.

John Muir

The writings of John Muir (1838-1914), American naturalist and explorer, are important for their scientific observations and their contributions to the cause of conservation.

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21, 1838. If his recollections in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913) can be credited, his father was harsh and tyrannical, enforcing piety and industry by frequent whippings. In 1849 the Muirs moved to America, establishing a homestead near Portage, Wis. When Muir's father forbade him to waste daylight hours on reading, he asked and received permission to rise early in order to study. He invented "an early-rising machine" that dumped him out of bed at one o'clock each morning. In 1860 he displayed this and other inventions at the Wisconsin State Fair.

In 1861 Muir entered the University of Wisconsin to study science. Subsequently he tried studying medicine but soon gave it up for various jobs that challenged his inventive skills. In 1867 he made the career decision he never regretted: to give up his own inventions "to study the inventions of God." He set out on the tour described in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916). Actually he went as far as Cuba. In 1868 he traveled to San Francisco and worked on a sheep ranch. Exploring Yosemite Valley occupied much of the next 6 years. On all explorations he kept a journal of scientific and personal observations and also pencil sketches.

In 1880, returning from exploring in Alaska, Muir married Louie Wanda Strentzel. In 1881, after another trip to Alaska, he settled on a fruit ranch near Martinez, Calif. He worked 10 years to make the ranch pay enough to enable him to give it up. Having thus provided permanently for his wife, two daughters, and himself, he turned his full attention to the study of nature. Glaciation particularly interested him, and his work contributed to its explanation.

In 1889 Muir argued in Century Magazine that Yosemite Valley should become a national park. The passage of legislation for that in 1890 owed much to his influence. The Mountains of California (1893), Our National Parks (1901), and his many articles in popular magazines greatly advanced the conservation movement.

Muir's wife died in 1905. During the 10 years Muir survived her, he published four books, including Stickeen (1909), which was a much-admired dog story, and My First Summer in the Sierra (1911). He died in Los Angeles on Dec. 24, 1914. John of the Mountain, drawn from Muir's journal of his 1899 Alaskan expedition, appeared in 1938.

Further Reading

Linnie M. Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (1945), is an admiring biography. Edwin Way Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir (1954), provides an introduction to Muir and a selection of his writings. The development of Muir's ideas and character is surveyed in Herbert F. Smith, John Muir (1965). Muir is discussed at length in Norman Foerster, Nature in American Literature (1923). □

Muir, John (1838–1914), naturalist and a founder of the environmental movement.John Muir was born near Edinburgh, Scotland. His family emigrated to America in 1849, settling on a farm in southeastern Wisconsin. After a grim childhood and adolescence, Muir in 1861 escaped to the state university at Madison, where he studied botany and geology. Years of travel through Canada and the United States followed. On a long hike in 1867 he intuited the central insight of his life: the need for human forbearance toward nature.

His initial encounter with California's Yosemite Valley, in 1869, moved him profoundly; he was thereafter identified with Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Independent geological work on the valley's glacial origins led to his first published articles in the 1870s. After a hiatus for family and farming, he resumed writing and conservation work in 1889. Muir cofounded the Sierra Club in 1892 and served as its president until his death.

In the intramural battles of the nascent conservation movement, Muir led the amateur, preservationist wing, which fought both with and against the professional, utilitarian faction under Gifford Pinchot. Possessed of sparkling if verbose charm, Muir formed friendships with powerful men (such as Theodore Roosevelt and the financier E.H. Harriman), which proved useful to his causes. His passionate nature writings—in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and implicitly pantheistic—gained him wide attention and support. Muir's protracted final battle, to forestall the Hetch Hetchy reservoir within Yosemite National Park, ended in a loss for the preservationists.
See also Environmentalism; Forests and Forestry; Progressive Era; West, The.

Bibliography

Stephen Fox , John Muir and His Legacy, 1981.
Michael P. Cohen , The Pathless Way, 1984.

Stephen Fox

John Muir 1838–1914, American naturalist, b. Dunbar, Scotland, studied at the Univ. of Wisconsin. He came to the United States in 1849 and settled in California in 1868. In recognition of his efforts as a conservationist and crusader for national parks and reservations, Muir Woods National Monument was named for him. He made extended trips throughout the country, often on foot; he also traveled in Alaska (discovering Muir glacier) and in Russia, India, and Australia. His books include The Mountains of California (1894), The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), Steep Trails (1918). John of the Mountains (1938; ed. by L. M. Wolfe) contains his journals.

Bibliography: See biographies by W. F. Bade (2 vol., 1924, repr. 1972), L. M. Wolfe (1945, repr. 2003), and D. Worster (2008); study by R. Silverberg (1972).