West Virginia Highlands Voice

by Hugh Rogers

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve
the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This
makes it hard to plan the day.-E. B. White

John Muir’s desire to improve the world never equaled his desire to enjoy it-yet somehow, to our benefit, he became a public advocate and presidential adviser. He once wrote that since eight members of his family were “useful” members of society, surely “one may be spared for so fine an experiment.” What experiment was that? “I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot. . . . I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

The internal struggle that E.B. White viewed with wry humor was for Ralph Waldo Emerson a matter of earnest concern. When he met Muir, Emerson was one of America’s most famous men. Muir, then thirty-three, was a part-time employee at a Yosemite sawmill; but he was also a full-time botanist, geologist, and mountain climber, who showed Emerson his plants and sketches and favorite places in the valley. Muir became one of Emerson’s projects. The great essayist invited Muir to stay with him in Cambridge, to meet eminent friends such as Louis Agassiz, who from his post at Harvard had transformed American geology.

Muir turned him down. He did appreciate the gift of Emerson’s essays-the volume, now in Yale’s Beinecke Library, is thoroughly marked-and he brooded on the great man’s appeal for him to take a public role. “Always the seer is the sayer,” Emerson had written (and Muir underlined) in the “Divinity School Address.” Eventually Muir followed the route from seeing to writing to advocacy. But he begrudged every step of the way.

The person who sent Emerson to Muir-as earlier she had sent a professor from the University of California and the president of MIT-had been the first to urge Muir to write up his findings and theories about glaciers in Yosemite. She was the wife of a professor whom Muir had studied with a decade before at the University of Wisconsin.
The professor had influenced how Muir viewed the world, but the wife changed his view of his life. Her name was Jeanne Carr.

Here I should backtrack. In my September column I called Muir “unschooled.” That was an overstatement. He did have three years at his Scottish village’s grammar school, studying Latin, French, and English, along with math and geography. Evenings, he worked on memorizing the Bible to his father’s satisfaction. Learning was enforced by the whip. By the age of eleven, as he later recalled, he had “about three-fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh.”

Emigration changed everything. During his second eleven years, Muir had no school at all. He did not miss it. When the opportunity to learn in a classroom came again, he made sure it would be on his own terms.

At home, Daniel Muir would allow no book but the Bible. But among the nearby Scots in that part of Wisconsin were some who had small libraries, and the young John Muir began a secret reading program. He also developed a practical talent for invention, and that proved to be his means of escape. His first contraption dumped him out of bed at an early hour to pursue his self-education. He went on to build wooden locks, waterwheels, hygrometers, barometers, and an automatic horse feeder; eventually he got into clocks. A neighbor suggested that he show his stuff at the State Fair in Madison. Against his father’s wishes, he set off, and later that fall of 1860 he learned that a student at the university could board for a dollar a week.

Muir attended classes on and off for the next two and a half years; as Jeanne Carr later wrote, he did not follow any usual course of study “but daintily picked such crumbs of literature and science as suited his needs.”

In his subsequent wandering through Canada, Indiana, Florida, and finally, at the age of thirty, to California, Muir earned his bread with his mechanical skill. He applied the academic learning to his solitary time in the woods. He would credit Professor Ezra Carr with opening to him the great book of nature; but he wrote to Mrs. Carr.

Long before he was published, Muir was a prolific journal keeper and letter writer. He might have agreed with the young scribbler who had told Mark Twain, “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” And once he knew what he thought, he must explain himself to those he was close to: his brother, his sisters, and Jeanne Carr. When he finally yielded to her push to go public, he assembled his essays from pieces he had written to that intimate audience.

Late the same year he met Emerson, Muir sent “Yosemite Glaciers” to the New York Tribune. The dam had burst. Soon he was a regular contributor to newspapers and journals, and his opinions were consulted in many corners of civilization, from scientists to sheep ranchers to state representatives. His passion for the preservation of wild places caught the attention of activists. By the time he was forty, Muir’s time was seldom his own. He might escape to the Sierras or Alaska, or take a detour on a trip others had organized-breaks that evoked what he’d given up. Even the writing projects that were closest to his heart had to wait on more urgent issues. My First Summer in the Sierras did not come out until 1911, more than forty years after the event.

When old friends and acquaintances founded the Sierra Club in 1892, Muir was persuaded to become its first president. He advised the U.S. Forestry Commission; conducted a very public debate with Gifford Pinchot, founding head of the Forest Service, over the meaning of “conservation;” and at the peak of his influence, camped alone for three days in the Mariposa Grove with President Theodore Roosevelt and convinced him of the necessity of federal protection for Yosemite.

Now, of course, his name is legend. But when we discover that he had to be dragged, as it were, out of the wilderness in order to defend it, we want to know how that happened. How was the public man made? First, his gift for descriptive and persuasive prose, inspired by the Bible, was recognized by the few who first read him. (Some said he talked even better than he wrote.) Second, he loved the Sierras so much he could not turn down appeals to protect them. And third-well, Cherchez la femme!