John Muir

Frederick Turner

Description

Immigrant, inventor, botanist, writer and pioneering conservationist, Muir is one of the great Scots of the nineteenth century. From his humble origins in Dunbar, John Muir has risen to the status of an American icon as the father of American conservation. While others dreamed of becoming the archetypal New World Man, escaping into the wilderness beyond the confines and comfits of civilisation, very few actually lived the dream as Muir did, fully and deeply. Frederick Turner's monumental work is the definitive biography on Muir.

Sujets

• USA
• Escocia
• Natural history
• États-Unis
• Scotland

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 20 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782114314
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

JOHN MUIR

FROM SCOTLAND TO THE SIERRA
Frederick Turner
Introduced by Graham White
CANONGATE
First published in the USA by Viking Penguin Inc. First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EHI ITE .
Copyright © 1985 Frederick Turner Introduction copyright © 1997 Graham White
This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books
Photographs: courtesy of the John Muir Papers, Holt- Atherton Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Libraries, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust and courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
The right of Frederick Turner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this volume is available on request from the British Library.
ISBN 9781782114314
www.canongate.tv
In Memory of Peter Farb
Contents

Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction by Graham White
Prologue: Peru Again
PART I Apprenticed to the Land

The Lessons of a Long-Distance Runner
Discovering the New World
Terms of Challenge
PART II Into His Own

Books of Life, Drums of Death
The Eye Within
The Thousand-Mile Walk
PART III Rediscovering America

First Summer
The Secret Pass
Civilization and Its Discontents
Home
PART IV A Legacy

Against the American Grain
The American Forests
Other Yosemites
 
 
 
Notes on Sources
Index
Acknowledgments

M y first debt , chronologically and otherwise, is to my late friend Peter Farb, who enthusiastically encouraged me to attempt this book. Ronald H. Limbaugh, archivist of the Muir Papers at the Holt-Atherton Pacific Center for Western Studies, University of the Pacific, has been unfailingly generous, both with his time and with his great knowledge of the Muir Papers. Thanks are due also to the members of his staff, especially Berenice Lamson.
I was cordially assisted by the staffs of other institutions holding Muir materials or items of related interest. These include the Yosemite National Park Research Library, with special thanks to Jack Geyer; the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, with special thanks to James Hanson and Harold Miller; the University of Wisconsin and its archivists Bernard Schermetzler and F. Frank Cook; the Huntington Library; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, with special thanks to Mary-Ellen Jones; the Widener and Houghton libraries, Harvard University; the Cape Cod Community College library, with thanks to Gregory Masterson; the Martinez (California) Public Library; the John Muir National Historic Site, Martinez, with special thanks to P. J. Ryan, Armando Quintero, Margaret Plummer, and Linda Moon Stumpff; the California Hospital Medical Center, Los Angeles, with thanks to Vicky A. Ryan and Joan Flynn of its Medical Records division; the Military Service Branch, National Archives, with thanks to Brenda Beasley Kepley; the Tennessee State Department of Conservation, with thanks to Terry Bonham.
Many individuals helped me along my way, and for what they freely gave, the mere mention of their names seems poor recompense. However, my sincere thanks to Millie Stanley, T. H. Watkins, Honora Moore, John Hay, Robert Card, Sr., Stephen B. Oates, Clara Gee Rymer, Grant Barnes, Nelson Lichtenstein, Eric Simmons, William Cadman, Robert E. Fletcher, Dr. John Talley, Eugene Newmann, Holway Jones, Dr. Gulden Mackmull, Harry Kearns, Roy Harvey Pearce, William A. Williams, and Charles A. Reich; to Lucille Adler for special examples; and to Elise R. Turner, who has cheerfully borne all the changes attendant to so long a labor.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation assisted me with a handsome grant while I was in the early stages of this work.
Chronology

1804
Daniel Muir born, Manchester, England.
1813
Anne Gilrye born, Dunbar, Scotland.
1833
Daniel Muir marries Anne Gilrye, Dunbar.
1838
John Muir born, Dunbar, April 21.
1845
Potato crop failures trigger famine in Europe. The Condition of the Working Class by Friedrich Engels.
1849
Emigration of Muir family to America. California gold rush.
1857
Muir family moves to Hickory Hill farm, Wisconsin.
1860
John Muir leaves home for Madison; meets Jeanne Carr; Lincoln nominated by Republican party, elected in November. Extinction of California jaguar.
1862
Muir in second year at University of Wisconsin; hires out as teacher for part of year. Homestead Act. Morrill Act. Death of Thoreau.
1866
Civil War over. Muir returns to America from Canadian exile, goes to Indianapolis.
1867
Muir’s thousand-mile walk to the Gulf. Coal Land Act regulates sale of U.S. coal-bearing lands.
1868
Muir sees Yosemite for first time; he is thirty.
1871
Muir deep in glacial studies; publishes “Yosemite Glaciers.” Visit of Emerson to Yosemite. Great slaughter of passenger pigeons in Wisconsin.
1872
Muir begins to write for Overland Monthly; meets William Keith; visits Oakland. Yellowstone Park established.
1876
Muir lives with Swetts in San Francisco; “God’s First Temples” heralds his emerging voice in conservation debates. Centennial Exposition. Little Big Horn.
1879
Muir engaged to Louie Strentzel; leaves on first Alaskan expedition. Edison’s incandescent bulb glows forty consecutive hours.
1880
Muir marries Louie Strentzel, April 14.
1881
Muir’s daughter Annie Wanda born; Muir’s health poor due to domestic worries; accepts invitation to go to Alaska aboard Corwin .
1882
Death of Emerson.
1885
Death of Daniel Muir.
1886
Muir’s daughter Helen born. Haymarket Riot.
1888
In July, Louie writes Muir on trip to Northwest, urging his return to literary and conservation work.
1890
Muir completes two articles for Robert U. Johnson of Century , signaling his return to public life. Death of Dr. John Strentzel. Wounded Knee. Official Census notes disappearance of American frontier.
1892
Sierra Club founded. Forest reserves created in three states.
1894
Mountains of California , Muir’s first book, published.
1896
Muir with Forestry Commission. Death of Anne G. Muir. McKinley v. Bryan.
1901
McKinley assassinated; Roosevelt becomes president and Muir writes him about American natural resources. Our National Parks published.
1903
Roosevelt camps with Muir in Yosemite. Death of F. L. Olmsted. Flight at Kitty Hawk. First federal wildlife reserve established.
1905
Death of Louie Muir. California recedes Yosemite to U. S.
1908
Secretary of Interior Garfield grants Hetch Hetchy to San Francisco. Creation of Muir Woods National Monument. Muir is seventy.
1911
My First Summer in the Sierra published. Death of William Keith. Muir departs on long-deferred South American expedition.
1913
Story of My Boyhood and Youth published. Death of John Swett. Hetch Hetchy formally granted to San Francisco, thereby ending lengthy dispute.
1914
World War I begins. Muir dies in Los Angeles, December 24.
Introduction

F rederick Turner’s biography of John Muir, published in America in 1985, is the first to appear in Scotland since Muir’s death in 1914, and may prove to be a watershed for environmental awareness in the land of his birth. It certainly represents a milestone for Scottish education and culture and will support the rediscovery and reclamation of Muir as a Scottish figure after a century of fame as an essentially American hero.
This biography tells the epic story of the pioneer conservationist, whose childhood encounters with wild nature on the beaches of Dunbar and among the oakwoods of the Lammermuir Hills, inspired his role in establishing the nature conservation system of the United States. Turner paints a vivid picture of Muir’s first eleven years in Dunbar, and of Victorian Scotland during the 1840s. During the research for the book he visited and explored East Lothian in considerable depth and discovered the actual deed of sale for the Muir home in Dunbar. He has read extremely widely on Scots history and culture, drawing on sources as disparate as the Border Ballads, Holinshed’s Chronicle of The Wallace and Johnson’s voyage to the Hebrides; he has studied the writings of Scott, Burns and Hogg, as well as Miller’s Victorian History of Dunbar . But this book is no mere academic biography; in Scotland Turner has walked the ground, climbed the castle ruins, read the newspapers of the time and visited the ancestral graves. From these many threads he has woven a rich and colourful tapestry which gives us a convincing impression of Muir’s Dunbar: the boat-thronged harbour, the life of the streets, the religious fervour and factions, the educational “school of hard knocks” and the precarious mortality which made death a common visitor. He has conveyed the magnitude of the adventure in which John Muir’s father, Daniel Muir, risked everything to board an emigrant ship in the freezing winds of February 1849, seeking religious freedom and a better life in America.
He has used the same research and literary skills to conjure the vast sweep of American history during that crowded and eventful century. He sets John Muir’s odyssey against the background of the greater westward migration and its consequences: the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the California Grizzly; the Indian wars that led via the battles of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee to the virtual extermination of the indigenous Americans, along with the buffalo on which they depended; the California goldrush and the eclipse of the frontier wilderness by the rise of an industrial and economic giant. But Turner is more than just a brilliant historian; he is a gifted writer who creates images of enduring power, whether of Scotland, California or Alaska. In his appended “Notes on Sources”, Turner gives us a revealing insight into the biographer’s art and