Often said to be the founder of the modern American environmental movement, John Muir was born in Scotland in 1838. He was one of eight children raised by a strict, religious father, who moved the family moved to America when John was just a boy. The Muirs settled in rural Wisconsin, where life revolved around hard work on the family’s farm. In his spare time, the free-spirited John went tramping through the fields and woods with his younger brother, becoming a careful observer of nature.
Going Wild About Nature
In 1860, Muir started taking classes at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but he never graduated. His wild enthusiasm for what he learned in his botany, geology, and other natural science classes led him to leave school and wander across North America. Odd jobs afforded him the chance to travel, but in 1867 an accident left him blind in one eye for several weeks. It completely changed his life. He later wrote that “God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.”
After recovering his sight, Muir began his first-hand explorations of nature in earnest. He soon embarked on an ambitious “long walk” of 1000 miles from Indiana to Florida’s Gulf of Mexico, where he again fell ill for a short time. But that didn’t stop him from pursuing even more adventures. After sailing to Cuba and eventually California, Muir walked east from San Francisco Bay into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which he came to call “The Range of Light.”
At Home in the Sierra Nevada
In 1869, Muir spent his first summer in the Yosemite Valley, earning money by herding sheep. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair with Yosemite, both its verdant valleys and its mountain peaks. Fellow nature lover and literary icon Ralph Waldo Emerson was among Muir’s visitors in Yosemite. When Muir wrote about his experiences with wilderness in the Sierra Nevada, he launched his own career as a popular writer in 1874.
Muir eventually left the Sierra Nevada to travel the world, first to explore the glaciers of Alaska, as well as to make trips to Asia, Australia, Africa, and Europe. In 1880, he married Louisa Wanda Strentzel, with whom he had two daughters. The family lived on a ranch and farm in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nevertheless, Muir often returned to the Sierra Nevada, which he called his true home, leaving his capable wife to run the family business and raise their children.
Starting The Conservation Movement
As he became an ever more prolific writer, Muir also started working politically to preserve Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada as national park lands. In 1892, he co-founded the Sierra Club to “do something for wildness and make the mountains glad.” Muir’s book Our National Parks was published in 1901, in time to influence President Theodore Roosevelt, a wildlife hunter and outdoorsman, to become a conservationist and national parks supporter.
Although Muir’s political accomplishments were monumental, not all of his efforts were successful. His campaign to save Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley failed when the Tuolumne River was dammed to provide more water to the San Francisco Bay Area, flooding the entire valley (you can learn more about the Hetch Hetchy controversy here).
John Muir’s Legacy
Despite the heartbreaking defeat over Hetch Hetchy, Muir’s legacy as Yosemite’s most important conservationist remains assured. Muir died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital in 1914, at the age of 76. Today, his home in Martinez, CA, has been preserved as John Muir National Historic Site, where you can walk the same hillside and orchard paths that Muir himself once did.
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