Neil Wilson

John Muir: Champion of the Wilderness

Scottish Field - April 15, 1988

Go and stand on the crags below old Dunbar Castle on a stormy day. Feel the power of the waves crashing against the cliffs, the sting of the salt spray on your face. Hear the howl of the wind and the screams of the sea-birds overhead...

It was to this wild spot that the young John Muir loved to come — to explore, to watch the birds, or "best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins. . ." And experiences such as this kindled within him a passion for nature's wild places that would eventually lead him to become one of the founding fathers of the world conservation movement.

John Muir was born in Dunbar, East Lothian, on April 21st, 1838, the third child but eldest son of Daniel Muir, a shopkeeper, and his wife Ann. Daniel was a stern disciplinarian, pounding the fear of God into his eight children with regular thrashings and hellfire sermons. But John remained a cheerful child, and would escape as often as possible to the sea-shore or the countryside, to hunt for crabs in the rock-pools, or to lie and listen to the skylark's song.

When John was eleven, his father uprooted the family and moved them to Wisconsin in America, there to carve out a farm from the wild, untamed land. The work was hard, and John grew up into a tough, resourceful and intelligent young man. He left home at the age of twenty-two and, over the next eight years, attended the University of Wisconsin, worked for a Canadian woodworking factory, was nearly blinded in an industrial accident, and made a one-thousand-mile walk from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1868, his wanderings brought him to California, where he drifted into the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Here he had his first glimpse of the famed Yosemite Valley.

Yosemite is a place of breathtaking natural beauty. Sheer granite walls plunge three thousand feet down to a wide, flat valley floor, patchworked with woods and wildflower meadows. John immediately fell in love with the valley and its surrounding mountains. He felt as if he had found his spiritual home.

For the next four years John Muir lived in Yosemite Valley, scraping a spartan living from a small sawmill and making long, solitary explorations in the Sierra wilderness. He became well-known to the local people, and often acted as an unofficial guide to the few thousand tourists who came to the valley each year. He was considered a little eccentric, with his long hair, untrimmed beard, and ragged clothes — a "nature-struck tramp" — but intelligence and energy shone from his clear blue eyes. He could talk engagingly and informatively about nature for hours at a time.

Friends often urged him to write; to capture in print the wonderful stories and ideas that came tumbling out during his enthusiastic monologues. When he finally did send a manuscript to an East-coast magazine, he became an instant success. Editors cried out for more.

Further articles and stories preaching his message of love and respect for nature's wild places, made Muir's name well-known and popular with the educated American public. In 1874, with thoughts of making a living from his writing, he moved to San Francisco. Here he began to mix with important and influential people, but still found time for frequent trips to the wilds, including expeditions to study the glaciers of Alaska.

Then in 1880 John married Louie Wanda Strentzel, the daughter of a rich California fruit-grower. She bore him two girls, and the new responsibilities of raising children, in addition to managing his father-in-law's orchards, curtailed any plans for further wilderness wanderings. Freed from the necessity of earning a living from it, his writing stopped too.

But after eight years of domesticity, the old wanderlust returned, and Muir made a trip to the mountains of Washington State. He was shocked by what he found — widespread forest destruction and seedy, ramshackle logging towns. His precious wilderness was under threat.

Early the following year Muir was approached by Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of the influential Century magazine. The two men went together on a camping trip to Yosemite Valley; again Muir was appalled by what he saw.

His beloved valley was afflicted with a rash of shops, stalls, saloons, lumberyards, pig-sties, wheat fields and second-rate hotels. Illegal logging operations scarred the flanks of the hills.

There and then, the two men devised a plan to launch a nationwide campaign to make Yosemite into a National Park. Muir would write impassioned articles for Century’s 200,000 subscribers; Johnson would provide editorial support, and lobby his powerful friends in government. Muir returned to his writing with a mission. The campaign was a success. Public opinion, swayed by Muir's eloquent writing, was behind it.

Yosemite National Park, one of the first in the world, was established in 1890, and fifteen hundred square miles of the Sierra Nevada were saved from the depredations of sheep-farmers, logging companies and other commercial interests.

The American conservation movement had been born, and John Muir was its figurehead.

For the next twenty years, Muir continued to produce books and articles championing the cause of the wilderness. In 1892 he helped to found the Sierra Club, which remains to this day America's principal voice on conservation matters. He lobbied politicians, and in 1903 accompanied President Theodore Roosevelt on a camping trip to Yosemite.

Many more National Parks and Forest Reserves were established, but sadly, Muir was to lose his final battle — to prevent the damming of the lovely Hetch Hetchy Valley so that San Francisco could enjoy a greater water supply. The fight dragged on for many years, until at last, in 1913, the conservationists lost, and the valley was flooded. The next year, John Muir caught pneumonia and died. He was seventy-six years old.

But the conservation movement continued, and today John Muir's achievements are widely known and remembered in America.

His name lives on via a John Muir National Park, Muir College, Muir Peak, Muir Glacier, and even, in California, on each April 21st, the calendar records Muir Day.

Muir, however, did not think of himself as American. He was deeply proud of his Scottish origins.

"Scotland alone will ever be Scotland to me," he wrote. "My love for my own Scottish land seems to grow with every pulse, so that I cannot see the name, or hear it, but a thrill goes to every fibre of my body."

Muir was at last honoured in his native land in 1976, with the opening of the John Muir Country Park, near Dunbar. This 1667-acre stretch of wild coastline reaches from Muir's childhood haunts around Dunbar Castle, northwest to the wide, bird-haunted sweep of Tyninghame Bay. Muir's birthplace, at 126-128 High Street, Dunbar, has been renovated and now houses an exhibition celebrating his life and work. This month sees the 150th anniversary of John Muir's birth. East Lothian District Council, who administer the Park and the John Muir House exhibition, plan to mark the event by initiating a conservation project. Muir would have approved.

John Muir ardently believed that it was not good enough merely to read about nature's wild places; you have to go out and experience them for yourself. He wrote:

"Go climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

Muir's message lives on.

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The John Muir Trust, set up in 1984, is a charity whose aim is to protect Scotland's wilderness areas.

"The Story Of My Boyhood And Youth" by John Muir, first published in America in 1913, is still available as a "Canongate Classic" from Canongate Publishing Ltd., Edinburgh.

© 2025 Neil Wilson - Freelance Scottish Travel Writer and Guidebook Author. All rights reserved.