12 minute read
WHO IS JOHN MUIR?
Naturalist, author, inspiration, activist, explorer and, amongst other things, known as the Father of the National Parks of United States of America.
A little over a third of Marloe Watch Company watches are sent to the USA. Considering we are a small British business, tucked away in a quiet, rural location, we think that’s quite special. Our watches ship all over the world, and that brings us huge joy; knowing that there’s a small piece of Great Britain and Marloe in a plethora of countries is a humbling and often surreal feeling. But the company’s affinity with American customers is something quite special indeed.
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Contemplating this got us to thinking about Scottish- American connections and, being of the outdoorloving persuasion, our thoughts naturally turned to one man in particular. John Muir is the sort of chap who one is either acutely aware of or has never heard of - it’s perhaps more likely that he’s known in the USA, rather than here in Britain, but he’s someone who had and continues to have a profound impact on the wilderness that we love here at home as well as ‘across the pond’. It was only in 2013 that the first ever John Muir Day was celebrated in Scotland, marking the 175th anniversary of his birth. I know of him quite by chance; a young lad who I taught in my pre-Marloe life asked if the school at which I taught could work towards achieving the John Muir Award. A short afternoon of research later, we were signed up and raring to go. Within the year, inspired by the adventures of one man, we’d built safe environments for wild waterfowl and houses for bees, planted a wild garden, taken part in forest and beach clean-ups, and had begun to nurture a wildlife garden within the marshes and woodland surrounding this little school at the foot of a mountain in the Scottish Highlands.
So who is this John Muir, otherwise known as ‘John of the Mountains’ and ‘Father of the National Parks’? And why are we only now beginning to celebrate him properly here in Scotland?
Born in 1838 in Dunbar, in the East Lothian region of Scotland, John was the third of eight children. He and his siblings were raised by strict religious parents who believed that spending time on anything which wasn’t Bible study was ‘frivolous and punishable’. John, unfortunately for his buttocks but fortunately for the natural world, was extremely energetic, fascinated by the countryside, and thus “prone to lashings”. Despite suffering regular punishments, he sought out nature and adventure at every opportunity; collecting and studying birds nests and insects, roaming in the countryside, taking off on solo adventures and worrying his parents sick with regularity.
He developed a passion for reading, but to his parents’ dismay, he had little interest in the Bible; instead choosing the works of the beloved Scottish poet Robert Burns, and the Scottish naturalist Alexander Wilson. When John was just 9 years old his family immigrated to America; his father had found the Church of Scotland to be insufficiently strict, so had joined a congregation of the Campbellite Restoration Movement, called the Disciples of Christ. The Muir family moved onto a farm and John was subjected to further ‘encouragement’ to adhere to his father’s strict religious ways; by the age of 11, John had learned - in his own words, ‘by heart and sore flesh’ - to recite all of the New Testament and much of the Old Testament. John was a very spiritual soul, but his connection was to the natural world, rather than God. He did his best to be an obedient son, but struggled to find any contentment in the world unless he was in the wilderness, learning and discovering and adventuring.
John attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, paying his own way and finally free to explore the world on his own terms. There, he developed his love for botany and chemistry. He took so many classes that he actually never graduated; never spending more than a year or two on one particular specialism, but building up a remarkable bank of knowledge alongside a solid group of friends and acquaintances, who watched him and his unique approach to schooling with fond bemusement.
In 1864, John left school and travelled to Southern Ontario in Canada. He spent much of that year roaming the wilderness; collecting samples of plants and flowers, marvelling at the changing of the seasons, drawing parallels to his home in Scotland and finding scores of thrills in the endless menu of new sights, landscapes and specimens which he had never encountered before. John covered an enormous amount of ground, hiking through spring, summer and autumn before making a sensible choice to seek shelter for the winter. He took a job in a sawmill in Ontario, continuing to ‘botanise’ alongside working, before returning to America in 1866.
Mountain lakes in the upper South Fork of Bishop Creek basin, from Chocolate Peak
He settled briefly in Indianapolis, working in a wagon wheel factory. His ability to learn quickly, to improvise and think outside the box - no doubt honed by his time alone in the wilderness - meant that he was able to impress his employers and he was quickly promoted. While he was fairly content, it took a horrific accident to prompt him to return to pursuing his true passion. A tool which he was using slipped, cutting open his right eye. His left eye ‘sympathetically failed’, rendering him completely blind, and he was confined to a dark room to try to recover for 6 weeks. He was tormented during this time, not knowing whether he would regain his sight, preemptively mourning for all the things he hadn’t yet seen in the world. When his sight began to return, he immediately began to plan the next phase of his life; he wanted to see as much as possible of the natural world.
As soon as he was able to, John set off on a thousandmile walk; from Kentucky to Florida - and wrote a book about his journey; ‘The Thousand Mile Walk’. He had no set route; choosing only the “wildest, leafiest, and least-trodden way” he could find, studying plants as he went. When he reached Florida, he took a job in a sawmill again, thinking that gainful employment was the right and proper thing to do. Within three days of starting his job, he nearly died of a malarial sickness. John wrote that “God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.” Given that both of his recent jobs had ended in near-catastrophe, he took this as a further sign to return to his wandering ways and to pursue his one true passion; his study of the natural world. As he recovered from his sickness, he climbed onto the roof of the sawmill to watch the sun set and spotted a ship; the Island Belle. Asking around, he learned that it was bound for Cuba, and without further ado he bought himself a one-way ticket to Havana, where he spent a spell of happy time continuing to recuperate while studying the flowers and shells which this new part of the world presented to him.
Some time later, Muir reappeared in San Francisco, under the pretence of ‘settling down’ - almost immediately planning a trip to Yosemite. He had never been to Yosemite before, but he had heard about it and he felt compelled to go and see it for himself. When he laid eyes on it for the first time, he noted that he was “overwhelmed by the landscape, scrambling down steep cliff faces to get a closer look at the waterfalls, whooping and howling at the vistas, jumping tirelessly from flower to flower”.
He worked for a season as a shepherd in Yosemite, feeling unable to tear himself away from the majesty of the place. He hiked the mountains, walked the trails, and eventually decided to stay; he built a small log cabin next to Yosemite Creek, which he carefully designed so that a small section of the stream ran through the corner of one of the rooms - meaning that he could enjoy the sound of running water even while inside. He lived here alone for two years, writing another book about his experience.
While John found it easy to make friends, he had been alone and unmarried - for a long time, by the standards of his generation - due to his nomadic lifestyle. In 1880 he married a lady named Louisa Strentzel, and began to work for her father on his orchards in California. Sustained by the Californian mountains and by being outside in the orchards, he lived a happy life, having two daughters with Louisa; but the call of the wild was relentless and John spent much of his time on excursions back to Yosemite. He would take only a tin cup, some bread, some tea, and a book - generally by the naturalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson - and set off for extended periods into the landscapes that he had come to love so deeply. As the years passed, he became a fixture in the valley; often spotted by visitors and locals alike, sitting reading alone or forging a path through the wildest parts of Yosemite which he could find. Emerson himself visited Yosemite, and happened upon John; both men were equally delighted to meet each other, and Muir described it as something akin to a religious experience. After spending one day together, Emerson offered John a teaching post at Harvard, which John politely declined.
John’s interest in geology, and the extensive time he had spent in Yosemite, had together begun to form into something of a theorem in his head; he was convinced that glaciers had shaped many of the features of Yosemite, which stood in stark contrast to the generally accepted theory of the time, which was that it had been created by a huge earthquake. One morning, John was woken by a large earthquake in the valley. Panic was widespread, with many believing that this quake was a prelude to another cataclysmic
deepening of the valley. Confident that his theory was correct, John refused to flee the site, instead carrying out a moonlit study of the rockslides caused by this earthquake. As the residents of the valley calmed down, and other geologists arrived to study the scene, it began to seem apparent that John was right.
John quietly wrote several scientific papers, which were swiftly published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and his reputation as a leading naturalist grew. He undertook four expeditions to Alaska, becoming the first Euro- American to explore Glacier Bay. The Muir Glacier was later named after him, and he went on to record a further 300 glaciers.
John’s health had begun to suffer by this point; it’s unclear whether this was linked to the extremes that he put his body through, but he took to the mountains to recover, and recover he did. John was only ever totally at peace when in the wild, and he began to contemplate how very necessary the wilderness is to human life and health, and that of the planet. His focus shifted to preservation, beginning with the most beloved of his spiritual homes; Yosemite.
John had noted with disgust the effect that domestic livestock had on Yosemite; he had a particularly vigorous dislike for sheep, which he referred to as ‘hooved locusts’. In 1889, the highly influential and esteemed associate editor of Century magazine, Robert Underwood Johnson, camped with Muir and saw first-hand the effect that sheep grazing had on one area of Yosemite. He made a vow to write about it, and to use his influence to introduce a bill to Congress which would make Yosemite into a protected national park.
Just over a year later, the bill was passed; and by 1903, Muir was camping with the President Theodore Roosevelt in Yosemite. They spoke, man to man, under the stars and Roosevelt ensured that Yosemite would be protected forever more under federal law. John’s quiet, calm influence over politicians and lawmakers was remarkable; and, as much as he didn’t particularly enjoy writing, he began to realise that he had something of a duty to future generations to ensure that his learnings didn’t go to the grave with him, and that his influence continued beyond his lifetime.
Forcing himself to arise at 4.30am each day, John would agonise over writing; endlessly criticising his own ability, but driven by the need to make sure future generations would have access to all he had learned. John Muir wrote over 300 articles, and 12 books; each of which has become a hugely valuable and inspirational resource. However, in his own words, and as he was always keen to emphasise; “No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to ‘know’ these mountains. One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.”
So perhaps it’s apt that we begin to conclude this short, highly condensed tribute to John Muir, lest we detract from the time you have to get outside today. He died at the age of 76 in 1914, of pneumonia. As you can imagine, he did a huge amount of living between establishing Yosemite as a National Park and his death; it would take us a lifetime to cover it all.
There’s a huge amount that John accomplished in his life that we haven’t even touched on here; but if there’s one take-away, we hope it’s a sense of appreciation for all that he has done for both the preservation of the American wilderness, and for the natural world in general. Despite having spent the vast majority of his life in America, John never lost his Scottish accent - which probably took some conscious determination on his part. He spoke often of his love for his homeland, and his legacy lives on here in the hearts and minds of the many children who are busily building wildlife hides and litter-picking in his name. John Muir is, perhaps, the most precious of shared connections between the USA and the UK; something which makes us feel even more proud of the community of customers that we have in America.
We’ll sign off with some words from John himself, which feel very timely and relevant for us as a small company who feel strongly about slower living and reconnection with the outdoors in today’s overworked, over-stimulated world.
