John Muir. Frederick Turner
Another tallied ninety-two recent cases of cholera. In comparison with the brilliant prospects in the offing, the Old World must have indeed seemed old, dreary, and diseased to those—many of them newly married, so Muir remembered—aboard that bluff-prowed ship nudging down the Clyde in the gloom of a winter evening. But perhaps to none was the contrast more dramatic and exciting than to the boy, not quite eleven, who hung onto the rails as the lights of the Old World dropped steadily astern. The sea, woods, and meadows of the Lothians had created a hunger in Johnnie Muir for the wild. He was now bound for a place that promised to satisfy it fully.
As he recalled the passage years later, Muir found it a grand and glorious six-week holiday. There was, of course, no school with its dulling rote routines and cheerless martial tone. And there were probably no thrashings, either, for Daniel Muir (and Sarah as well) was seasick much of the time. John and David were thus much on their own and scampered about the tilting decks, dodging sea chests and sailors, and marveling at the great, rough expanse of water. They made friends with the sailors, learned at first hand the uses of those knots, ropes, and sails they had encountered as seaside boys in Dunbar. Now at last they were aboard a ship instead of merely watching them sail past on their much-conjectured destinies. But Muir also suggests that his delight in the passage was not shared by many of the emigrants, and even had he been silent on this, we know enough about such midnineteenth-century voyages to have drawn the inference.
They were often grim affairs. Ships plying the immigration trade were routinely overcrowded in defiance of the laws, and few health-care provisions were enforced during voyages that averaged about forty days (the Muirs’ was forty-seven). Many captains kept their passengers virtual prisoners below deck, where fetid air, bad water, and tainted food produced “ship’s fever” (typhus), dysentery, and other intestinal ailments. In the 1830s and ’40s the ships brought cholera with them and the mortality was often frightful: passengers told of scores of bodies being dumped overboard. In 1847 seventeen thousand cholera cases were logged at Quebec alone; on the ship bringing Thorstein Veblen’s father from Norway to Wisconsin in that same year, every child died en route.
There was sickness aboard the Muirs’ ship, too, and John Muir remembered the emigrants bravely attempting to keep up their spirits by singing songs and swapping happy dreams of futurity amid the smoky air of the hold. The Scots aboard talked of the settlements made by their countrymen in Nova Scotia, along the St. Lawrence, and in Ontario. They knew also of the sizable Scots and Scots-Irish population of South Carolina and the junction area of Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia. Apparently Daniel Muir, though he too knew of these settlements, and though he had hoped to settle amid a group of coreligionists, had shipped with only the most general knowledge of American geography and with no fixed notion of where he might settle his family. Most of the stories he had heard were of Canada, but now he heard anecdotes of the relentless hardships of the Canadian wilderness, how a man might sweat himself into an early grave grubbing out a meager farm in the shadow of the endless forests. He heard too of the open prairies suitable for farming that lay somewhere below Canada’s southern border. For years, Scots who had originally migrated to Canada had been moving south into the States for this very reason.
In addition, Daniel Muir discovered some Disciples of Christ among the emigrants, and from these he learned of settlements the sect had made in the newly opened region of Wisconsin. In 1849, the Disciples had established centers at Manitowoc, Center, Platteville, and Waupun. Doubtless, it was said, more would be established (they were), for in this year Wisconsin’s population was growing at a faster rate than that of any state in the region. It had succeeded Ohio as the place to settle. Daniel Muir’s view now shifted southward from Canada as the voyage continued, and by the time they raised the port of New York he had determined to try Wisconsin.
On the mild breezes of April 5, the Muirs’ ship came to port. In those days incoming foreign vessels were required to clear a Staten Island quarantine station where the obviously sick were detained, but then the ships proceeded directly to dock to disgorge their passengers without any official reception process whatever. The newcomers simply gathered their belongings and got off.
Waiting for them were the unofficial greeters: crimps and sharks who would tote baggage at extortionate rates and disappear with it if not closely followed; others who sought to waylay the foolish in dockside taverns and spend their money for them; confidence men who for a fee would disclose to these land-hungry Europeans the finest piece of western land available anywhere; others who could arrange inland passage at what were described as rock-bottom terms. In the spring of 1849, business for these types was brisk. There was the uproar of the gold rush, and there were hundreds of thousands of innocent immigrants tumbling in—more than 200,000 this year of ’49 into the port of New York alone. Viewing this unprecedented phenomenon from the vantage point of local journalists, Horace Greeley and Walt Whitman hoped these newcomers would not become trapped in the sprawling port cities and adjacent towns of the eastern seaboard but would get the right advice and head west.
Daniel Muir, with his eye now set on Wisconsin, did so, lingering but a day or two in New York before arranging passage up the Hudson to Albany. There the family saw evidence of the destruction caused by a great fire the previous summer, and there too they saw evidence of that almost ferocious energy of these Americans, who had already rebuilt much of the gutted area. Then along the Erie Canal to Buffalo. The opening of the canal in 1825—the engineering wonder of its time—had proved to be the major factor in attracting settlers like the Muirs into the Midwest, for it had put the ports of Lake Michigan’s western shore on an all-water route to New York City. The canal also had the effect of inflating western New York State land values and so encouraging migrants to hunt farther west in search of cheaper real estate.
Buffalo was the gateway to the new region and in this year it would see more than a quarter of a million migrants pass through on their ways to the prairies. Here Daniel Muir made contact with William Gray, brother of that Philip Gray who led the Edinburgh chapter of the Disciples. Doubtless Gray gave Muir further information of the locations of Disciples centers and good lands in Wisconsin, and John remembered that his father also had a conversation then with a fellow grain dealer who told him that most of the grain received in Buffalo came from Wisconsin.
The Muirs took passage on one of the daily lake steamers out of Buffalo, jammed to its railings with a rough and travel-stained crowd of gold rushers and immigrants, each in his or her national dress, and five days later arrived at Milwaukee, where they joined yet another throng on the wharves and dockside streets and vacant lots. There amid the wheat, pork, and flour from the inland farms they haggled for oxen and wagons to take them still farther.
The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer was in Milwaukee about the same time and found it a beautiful town whose buildings were mostly of pale yellow brick with a populace dominated by thrifty German immigrants. But in 1849 hogs still roamed Milwaukee’s streets, the municipal sewerage system was primitive, and there was (again) cholera. Even had Daniel Muir been disposed to stop here and set up again as a grain dealer, city property was dear, and all the best land on the outskirts had been snapped up by speculators. Those like himself who wanted cheap land were obliged to travel toward Madison and then strike northward through the middle of the state. Muir made a bargain at the port city with a farmer just in from Fort Winnebago with a load of wheat who, for thirty dollars, agreed to transport the Muir family and what John Muir called “our formidable load of stuff” to the town of Kingston some one hundred miles to the northwest.
And so they were off again on the last leg of their long trip, going now over the heavy, mired spring prairies, the oxen and wagon groaning and creaking under the grievous burden of immigrant belongings, many of them purchased in the misguided notion that nowhere in the wilderness beyond Buffalo could the necessities of civilized life be had. Atop the massed stuff—scales, weights, scythes, kettles, stove—sat the severe seeker, Abraham of his little flock, who had set his face toward what he hoped would at last prove his promised land.
The way was rough. Where there were roads these were usually not much better than the unimproved countryside, especially in springtime. Assuming a generally northwestward route to Kingston, they would have passed out of Milwaukee into a region of sugar maples (those treasure trees of which John Muir had heard), basswood, and oaks. Here and there were narrow little valleys with swamps