ENGLIAH BIOGRAPHY

Writing Biography

A Portrait of Greatness – John Muir

Skilled Mountaineer, Courageous Explorer, Painstaking Geologist,

Astute Businessman, Pioneer Conservationist, Popular Author

From The Wilderness World of John Muir (1955) Edwin Way Teale

All he needed to do to get ready for an expedition, Muir said, was to “throw some tea and bread in an old sack and jump over the back fence.” He preferred bread with a thick crust and always dried it thoroughly to prevent molding. It was his habit occasionally to let his bread sack roll downhill before him, thus producing the fragment which, with a cup of tea, formed his frugal meals… Throughout his life—his childhood in Scotland, with its brutal floggings, his years of labor on the pioneer Wisconsin farm, and his wanderings alone in the wilds of Canada, the South, and among the mountains of the Far West—Muir was stoically indifferent to physical hardship. Across glaciers and on the bleak heights of the Sierra he wandered without so much as an overcoat or blanket. When night overtook him, he burrowed into the needles beneath some mountain evergreen, warmed only by a small fire which he replenished at half-hour intervals till dawn... [His nutritive fare was rough and rustic but not so his intellectual diet. When mountaineering in the Sierras, he read and interacted with the text of The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson].

He never carried a gun. Traveling alone and far from any other human being for weeks at a time, he never was harmed by bear or rattlesnake, never was seriously injured in an accident… He was unafraid of danger, of hardship, of wildness, of being alone, of facing death. He was unafraid of public opinion. He was unafraid of work and poverty and hunger. He knew them all and he remained unafraid…

To understand Muir and the fire that burned in him, it is necessary to realize that for him all outdoors was at once a laboratory for research and a temple for worship. [“Never did he get enough of wildness” p.xi]. Repelled by the harsh fanaticism of his father’s religion, John Muir belonged to no church. He gave freely when solicited by Catholic and Protestant alike. But he affiliated himself with no formal creed. Yet he was intensely religious. The forests and the mountains formed his temple. His approach to all nature was worshipful. He saw everything evolving yet everything the direct handiwork of God. There was a spiritual and religious exaltation in his experiences with nature. And he came down from the mountains like some bearded prophet to preach of the beauty and healing he had found in this natural temple where he worshiped… This religious fervor and spiritual intensity in Muir’s response to nature contributed much to the power of his pleading for the cause of conservation. He never based his arguments on economic considerations alone. He always appealed to men on a high moral plane. I know of no other writer, except Henry Thoreau, who had so pure and lofty a vision of man’s ultimate relationship to nature…

c.1875

Muir was fifty-six when his first book appeared. He had written only two by the time he was seventy. The remarkable thing is not that his books were so slow to appear, so long delayed, but rather that they appeared at all. He was too busy living to stop and write. When urged to set down his observations for publication he always replied that it would take a second lifetime to do his writing and he died leaving notes for a dozen books that he never completed.

All of his early journals were set down with no thought of publication. He shaped his books from his notes more to entice people to look at nature’s loveliness than from the pleasure writing gave him. Muir talked easily, fluently. But he wrote laboriously, rewriting, polishing, complaining that it took him a month to write a chapter that he could read in an hour. While laboring with his pen in San Francisco, he wrote to his sister Sarah: “My life these days is like the life of a glacier, one eternal grind, and the top of my head suffers a weariness at times that you nothing about.” Moreover, he disliked the solitary confinement of authorship. He was always delighted to see a friend arrive, so he could drop writing for a good talk. He never used a typewriter. In his earlier years, he cut his own quill pens, sometimes from eagle feathers he found among the mountains…

Before his first book came from the press, John Muir was already famous as a writer. His sequence of “Sierra Studies” in the old Overland Monthly and his articles in the Century Magazine had wide influence and gave him a national reputation. In the 1880s and early 1890s, the present tidal wave of printed matter was only a ripple and leading periodicals had a permanence and standing unknown today. Subscribers read them carefully from first page to last. It was among such readers that Muir was first recognized as a writer of importance. An exactness and depth of firsthand observation characterizes all his pages. He was by turn a scientist, a poet, a mystic, a philosopher, a humorist. Because he saw everything, mountains and streams and landscapes as evolving, unfinished, in the process of creation, there is a pervading sense of vitality in all he wrote. Even his records of scientific studies read like adventure stories…

Twice Muir had prospects of making a large fortune. Both times he turned aside from the path to wealth to return to … nature. [In 1866 and 1867, he worked in a wagon-wheel factory in Indianapolis]. Had he continued to devote his inventive and administrative abilities to factory work, there is no doubt he would have become an extremely wealthy man. A sharp pointed file that slipped early in March 1867 and pierced the edge of the cornea of his right eye turned him forever away from machines and back to nature. As he lay in a darkened room during convalescence, shut away from all the beauties of the out-of-doors, he resolved to waste no more of his years in indoor work. Almost as soon as his sight was restored, he set out on [a] thousand-mile walk to the Gulf.

Again, after his marriage to Louie Wanda Strenza of Martinez, California, in 1880, Muir rented land from his father-in-law in the alluvial Alhambra valley and concentrated on raising Tokay grapes, Bartlett pears and other fruit. By devising special equipment for setting out orchard trees, by care in packing, by developing new markets for his fruit [he was the first to ship grapes from California to Hawaii], by sharp management and Scottish thrift, he cleared $10,000 a year for ten years… Other ranchers in the region soon discovered they had to get up early in the morning, literally, to keep ahead of Muir. The wooden lug-boxes in which the fruit was shipped to San Francisco were returned empty to a nearby railroad station on a train that arrived around midnight. Muir used to get up in the middle of the night to be first on hand. He took exactly his number of boxes, but he always picked the perfect, undamaged ones… (He) had all the wealth he would ever want (and) turned his back once more on money-making…

During his years in the Yosemite, Muir used to view with sadness the distinguished visitors who were so “time-poor” that they could spend only one day among the glories of the mountains. He chose to be time-rich first of all. “I might have become a millionaire,” he once said, “but I chose to become a tramp.” To his sister, Sarah, he wrote: “I have not yet in all my wanderings found a person so free as myself…”

While visiting friends, Muir sometimes would talk four hours at breakfast. Although he early declared, “I have chosen the lonely way,” he was never misanthropic. He made friends easily. He prized congenial companions. He delighted in conversation. This, however, was often one-sided. Muir’s conversational endurance is legendary. He disliked being interrupted and tended to take the bit in his teeth and keep going. John Burroughs [a popular nature writer] grumbled that whenever he talked about the preacher’s dog, Stickeen, you got “the whole theory of glaciations thrown in.” But if Muir talked at length, he was never pointless or boring or loud…

Each Christmas it was his custom to obtain five-dollar gold pieces from the bank and give one to each of the neighbor children. To his own two daughters, Helen and Wanda, he was a loving, if at times stern, parent…

In talking to those who knew Muir, I found considerable disagreement as to which phase of natural history held first importance in his mind. One thought it was trees. Another believed it was geology. A third suggested it was plants. A fourth, probably the nearest right of all, though it was the whole interrelationships of life, the complete, rounded picture of the mountain world. Today Muir would probably be called an ecologist. This breadth of his interests is reflected in the varied categories in which his name appears on the lists of science… [Named in his honor are plants and insects that he collected on expeditions in California and the Arctic].

Yosemite Valley and the Merced River

He was the first to discover living glaciers in the Sierra. He was the first to explore Glacier Bay in Alaska. He was the first to point out the role glaciers played in forming Yosemite Valley. Unknown and in his early thirties when he advanced his theory, he was opposed by the distinguished and dogmatic California State Geologist, Dr. Josiah Dwight Whitney, formerly of Harvard. Whitney claimed that glaciers had nothing to do with Yosemite, but that the valley had dropped down in some ancient cataclysm. Muir scoffed, “The bottom never fell out of anything God made.” Whitney rejoined that the glacial hypothesis was merely the idea of a sheepherder.” So began three summers of exhausting, lone-handed fieldwork in which Muir traced to their sources all the streams of the Tuolumne Divide. Often returning to the valley only long enough to replenish his bread sack, he followed nameless watercourses through wild canyons in which no white man had ever set foot. Fragment by fragment, glacier-scratch by glacier-scratch, he amassed his evidence. By 1873 he was ready to publish his findings in his series of “Sierra Studies.” Today no scientist doubts the part glaciers played in the formation of the Yosemite Valley.

c.1902

Considerable as was John Muir’s contribution to science, even greater was his stature in the long fight for conservation. During those critical years around the turn of the century, his was the most eloquent and powerful voice raised in defense of nature. He was the spearhead of the western movement to preserve wild beauty, a prime mover in the national park system so valued today. Beside a campfire at Soda Springs on the Tuolumne Meadows in 1889, he and Robert Underwood Johnson mapped the seventeen-year battle that preserved Yosemite as a national park. Beside other campfires under Sequoias, while on a three-day outing with Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, he presented the case for the preservation of numerous wilderness areas with moving effect.

Theodore Roosevelt and Muir, 1906

Major credit for saving the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest in Arizona, is ascribed to John Muir. He was president of the Sierra Club from the formation of that militant conservation organization in 1892 until the time of his death in 1914. His last long battle to save Hetch Hetchy, the beautiful Yosemite Park valley flooded to form a reservoir for San Francisco water—water that could have been obtained elsewhere—ended only the year before he died. It represents one of the great heroic struggles for conservation, no less heroic because the cause was lost.

1907

Near the end of his life, Muir said to a close friend, “I have lived a bully life. I have done what I set out to do.” Rich in time, rich in enjoyment, rich in appreciation, rich in enthusiasm rich in understanding, rich in expression, rich in friends, rich in knowledge, John Muir lived a full and rounded life, a life unique in many ways, valuable in many ways. “A man in his books,” he once wrote, “may be said to walk the Earth long after he has gone.” In his writings and in his conservation achievements, Muir seems especially present in a world that is better because he lived here. His finest monument is the wild beauty he called attention to and helped preserve—beauty, however, that is never entirely safe, beauty that needs as vigilant protection today and tomorrow as it needed yesterday.

Photos, Public Domain

Assignment

Part One

1. Write five or six sentences set out as bullet points that explain how his character was foundational to his achievements. 10

2. In a series of five or six bullet points list his accomplishments. 10

Part Two

For an eminent biologist or conservationist of your choosing, write:

1. A 300-word biography including the formative influences and personal qualities that contributed to that person’s accomplishments. The non-biologists in our midst who are unfamiliar with wildlife scientists, might like to write on Edward Wilson (superb artist and nature writer, and pioneer Antarctic explorer), Rachel Carson, George Schaller (studied Snow Leopards, Mountain Gorillas, African Lions, Snow Leopards, and Pandas), or Jane Goodall (an authority on Chimpanzees). 30

2. An excerpt of about 200 words from one of their writings. 2

3. A 300-word outline of that person’s contributions to science and society 30

4. A series of four bullet points on the value of biographical writing. 8

5. What do you see of Muir’s personality from his essay Wind Storm in the Forest? 10

Total 100

Wind Storm in the Forest

John Muir

Reveling in Nature’s Ferocity – Thrilling, Horrifying, Recreating

In late December 1874, Muir was exploring a tributary valley in the high divide separating the Yuba and Feather Rivers in northern California when a storm rolled in and lashed the mountains, he climbed high into a Douglas Fir, the better to experience the storm. It was he said, “One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever enjoyed in the Sierra,” and Edwin Way Teale says of the essay in his anthology of Muir’s works that apart from his dog story, Stickeen, it brought him more letters from readers than anything else he wrote.

_____________________________

The day was intensely pure, one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm and balmy and full of white sparkling sunshine… Instead of camping out as I usually do, I then chanced to be stopping at the house of a friend. But when the storm began to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience deprecatingly beneath a roof.

The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued…. I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes; some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study. Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and ringing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond…. The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement.

I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees—Spruce, and Fir, and Pine, and leafless Oak—and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way—singing its own song and making its own peculiar gestures—manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen.

Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of Hazel and Ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was a serious matter. One whose instep was very strong seemed in danger of being blown down, or of being struck by others in case they should fall; another was branchless to a considerable height above the ground, and at the same time too large to be grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were not favorably situated for clear views. After cautiously casting about, I made a choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas Spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though comparatively young, they were about 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm, braced, like a bobolink on a reed.

In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen others of the same species still more severely tried—bent almost to the ground indeed, in heavy snows—without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook…. Now my eye roved over the piny hills and dales as over fields of waving grain, and felt the light running in ripples and broad swelling undulations across the valleys from ridge to ridge, as the shining foliage was stirred by corresponding waves of air. Oftentimes these waves of reflected light would break up suddenly into a kind of beaten foam, and again, after chasing one another in regular order, they would seem to bend forward in concentric curves, and disappear on some hillside, like sea-waves on a shelving shore. The quantity of light reflected from the bent needles was so great as to make whole groves appear as if covered with snow, while the black shadows beneath the trees greatly enhanced the effect of the silvery splendor.

Excepting only the shadows there was nothing somber in all this wild sea of Pines.… The shafts of the Pine and Libocedrus were brown and purple, and most of the foliage was well tinged with yellow, the laurel groves, with the pale undersides of their leaves turned upward, made masses of gray; and then there was a many a dash of chocolate color from clumps of Manzanita, and jet of vivid crimson from the bark of the Madroños, while the ground on the hillsides, appearing here and there through openings between the groves, displayed masses of purple and brown.

The sounds of the storm corresponded gloriously with this wild exuberance of light and motion. The profound bass of the naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustle of laurel groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf—all this was heard in easy analysis when the attention was calmly bent….

I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past. The fragrance of the woods was less marked than produced during warm rain, when so many balsamic buds and leaves are steeped like tea; but, from the chafing of resiny branches against each other, and the incessant attrition of myriads of needles, the gale was spiced to a very tonic degree….

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.

When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered down through the calming woods. The storm-tones died away, and, turning toward the east, I beheld the countless hosts of the forests hushed and tranquil, towering above one another on the slopes of the hills like a devout audience. The setting sun filled them with amber light, and seemed to say, while they listened, “My peace I give unto you.”

As I gazed on the impressive scene, all the so-called ruin of the storm was forgotten, and never before did these noble woods appear so fresh, so joyous, so immortal.