John Muir. Frederick Turner

      Sometime between the late fall of 1848 and early winter of 1849, Daniel Muir made the decision to emigrate to America. From what is known of his character, it is doubtful that he consulted with any of his family but simply announced the plan after he had made it. The factors, though, that led him to the decision are fairly clear, however obscure they may have been to the rest of the family.

      The largest factor was the prevailing climate of opinion that so strongly favored removal to the New World, to which was added the news from California that had so excited schoolboys and adults alike in the waning days of ’48. But in the immediate foreground was Daniel Muir’s perpetually restless spirit that searched through the churches and splinter movements of his time for that perfect combination of zealotry and contentment. Now in his middle age he thought he had found it and was willing to risk all to go where a new sect flourished amid the edenic gardens of America.

      He had become a convert to the Disciples of Christ through the exhortations of two brothers named Gray, one of whom had established the sect in Dunbar. The Disciples were still a small movement in Scotland, but they were ardent, and they drew a kind of cultural sustenance from the Scots predilection for “hiving off” into ever smaller splinter groups in religion and politics.

      This movement, however, had come to Scotland from abroad, from the New World in fact, where it had its roots in the Great Revival that stirred frontier souls at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Great Revival was in itself the successor to the Great Awakening of the eastern seaboard, and like that earlier outburst it was characterized by an emphatic individualism, by emotional demonstrations of Christian belief, and by a radical anti-institutional bias—convictions close to Daniel Muir’s heart. Mormons, Shakers, Rappites, Adventists, and Spiritualists all came out of it or were greatly strengthened by it, while the established denominations, the Baptists and Methodists, gained large numbers of converts at the expense of their more staid and hierarchical competitors.

      What attracted Daniel Muir—and thousands like him—was the promise here of a reversion to the warm and simple ways of the primitive Christian church as it was believed to have been in the days of Christ’s earthly ministry and just after. America, unfeatured, wild, innocently verdant, was clearly the chosen place for this reversion effort, the place where at last Christ’s kingdom on earth could be established. So at least believed the Scots immigrant founders of the Disciples, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, and their American coadjutor, Barton W. Stone.

      The Campbells and Stone joined forces in 1832, and thereafter the Disciples became a potent religious force all along the border of an advancing civilization. In Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri, Alexander Campbell was a figure of almost legendary importance until the Civil War, and Mark Twain has recorded in his autobiography the excitement Campbell’s arrival could generate in a sleepy hamlet of middle America. Where such a man as Campbell preached literal adherence to the text of the New Testament without frills or clerical interference and where there seemed such limitless opportunities for the advancement of both the cause and self, there Daniel Muir would go, throwing over as in a moment his prospering grain dealership, ripping up his wife’s family roots and all his associations with his native land.

      How much of the background of this decision the Muir children ever knew or understood is questionable. Probably the older four, Margaret, Sarah, John, and David, knew at least that their father was in the strong grip of a new religious enthusiasm; as the years went on and they saw him through an endless succession of these, they apparently learned a sort of ironic tolerance. Now, perhaps they merely accepted his latest involvement as one of the conditions of their lives without understanding how profoundly it was about to change their own destinies.

      As for Anne Muir, she was probably simply told, and then Daniel Muir announced his plan to his in-laws. David Gilrye was vastly displeased and even alarmed for the welfare of his daughter and grandchildren. He now redrew his will so as to bar Daniel Muir from any inheritance and forced Muir to leave Anne behind with Margaret and the three younger children until a satisfactory home had been established. The old man knew enough of American realities to sense some of the perils of Daniel Muir’s decision, and this in addition to his view of his son-in-law’s capriciousness and restless spirit produced in him deep forebodings.

      On February 1, 1849, Daniel and Anne G. Muir sold their property to Dr. John Lorn, a local physician, the deed of sale being officially recorded on the twelfth. On the evening of the eighteenth John and David were at the grandparents’ hearthside where Grandfather Gilrye put them through their educational paces. Then the father came in from across the high street to announce that they need not learn their lesson this night for in the morning they would be off for America.

      Fifty-eight years later John Muir recalled vividly his reaction to this lightning bolt of news: “No more grammar, but boundless woods full of mysterious good things; trees full of sugar, growing in ground full of gold … .” He instantly thought of the naturalist Wilson’s hawks and eagles and of Audubon’s awe-inspiring descriptions of flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the western skies like mighty thunderclouds. Here, suddenly, magnificently, was the prospect of millions of birds’ nests and no gamekeepers in all the “wonderful schoolless, bookless American wilderness.” John and David were delirious with delight, so much so (as Muir recalled in the unpublished version of this episode) that they could not work up a “decent regret” over leaving their grandparents. They promised to send grandfather a box of the fabulous tree sugar packed around with gold. But Gilrye had heard another side to the American story in the tales of terrific hardship and child agricultural servitude as recounted in the letters of immigrants. He knew, looking at these two small boys, wide-eyed in the firelight, that soon enough they too would be enlisted in the breaking of the new lands and that they might themselves be broken in the process. Poor laddies, he called them, and gave each a keepsake gold coin.

      Grandfather’s dour forecast was lost on the boys. In the dark street John shouted to some passing schoolmates that he was going to America in the morning. They jeered back their disbelief: the thing was incredible.

      And yet in the next morning’s gray light the Muir family with the Gilryes in attendance could be seen bundling down the high street, past the kirkyard (where soon David and Margaret Gilrye would join six of their children beneath a wide heavy marker) and on to the train station. The Glasgow train steamed in, Daniel Muir shepherded Sarah, John, and David aboard it, and they were gone.

      In Glasgow there was a new stir to the city to which Daniel Muir had fled in his youth. The stir was the immigration trade, and docksides bristled with the thousands bound outward on errands of necessity and hope. Posters advertised swift passage to limitless opportunity, and the papers were filled with reports of the newest incentive, gold. A newspaper dispatch by electric telegraph told of discussions of a proposed railway across the Panamanian isthmus; another recounted the huge migration to California currently in progress from the eastern United States. There were dozens of items crammed under the heading “Ho! For California” and announcing the availability of passage to Chagres, of California mining boots, of daguerreotypes for those who wished to leave behind likenesses for family and friends, even of specially durable pens for those bound for the gold fields, these last items guaranteed to outlast a “cargo of quills.”

      There were other marks of the times that February day as the Muirs stowed their gear aboard with the other emigrants. One item in the day’s news told of a fire in a cheap Glasgow theater that had