John Muir. Frederick Turner
to include Wisconsin in its fulsome, energetic embrace. Here once again was the national drama of the subjugation and obliteration of the wilderness. As a man, John Muir would see this drama as a tragedy. Now, a youth in the very midst of it, it was only life and necessity to him. Unwittingly, helplessly, he took up his part in it.
That first spring Daniel Muir hired a “Yankee” to help clear enough ground for crops to see them through winter. As the men worked, John and David pestered the Yankee with questions about the flora and fauna. They wanted to know all about the sandhill cranes whose choked cries sounded as if something had been cranked in their throats and to whom they could never get close before the big birds took air with astonishing suddenness, their wings white against the dense growth of woods. They wondered at the sound of partridge drumming, the meaning of the love song of the jack snipe and the song of the whippoorwill. The Yankee supplied only brusque answers to these and other questions, and there was so much to absorb in this new world, so many things for which questions could not even be formulated.
John Muir reveled in it all: the huge, portentous thunderheads, the clamoring chorus of peepers along the lakeshore, the spring flowers that burst forth in the watery meadow, and most especially the songs of the birds. But soon enough his schoolboy’s vision of America as a vast playground where a boy might wander forever free, feasting his eyes and soul on endless beauty—a dream at least as old as settlement here—broke hard against reality: Muir’s father put him to work in the fields clearing away brush for the advent of the plow and heaping it in great piles for burning. Nor did Father lose this opportunity to sermonize as the bonfires threw out blasts of white heat and showers of sparks. Think, he would say to John, just think what an awful thing it would be to be thrown into the midst of such a great, hot fire. Then think of hellfire that’s so much hotter and that’s reserved for all bad boys and for sinners of every sort who disobey God. Think, too, he added (as if this were not enough) of the infinitude of their sufferings, for neither will that hellfire ever die out—ever—nor will the sufferings of the sinners ever cease.
Then too Father once again took up his habit of childbeating. “The old Scotch fashion,” Muir recalled, “of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and of course many of those whippings fell upon me.” He described them as “outrageously severe,” and they left their marks. Many years afterward in a letter to a boyhood friend, Muir offered some uncharacteristically personal reflections on this practice which, if it was indeed a national one, was in this case surely compounded by the father’s cankered religiosity:
When the rod is falling on the flesh of a child, and, what may oftentimes be worse, heart-breaking scolding falling on its tender little heart, it makes the whole family seem far from the Kingdom of Heaven. In all the world I know of nothing more pathetic and deplorable than a broken-hearted child, sobbing itself to sleep after being unjustly punished by a truly pious and conscientiously misguided parent.
“Compare,” he then concluded, “this Solomonic treatment with Christ’s.”
The “Solomonic treatment” continued through spring and into summer, the cleared space in the oak opening gradually widening and the crops planted. When Daniel Muir wasn’t plowing and planting he was hauling lumber from the Kingston lumberyard and supervising the construction of the permanent dwelling. At the end of the day the family would gather in the bur-oak shanty for the evening meal, and as the last bit of daylight lingered within the rough confines, they would kneel on the bare plankings in family worship. Muir evidently took some pleasure in remembering of these moments that he “too often studied the small wild creatures” that played about the devout scene, the field mice and beetles that used the interior of the shanty as if it had been made for them.
By fall when Anne Muir and the rest of the children arrived the house was ready. Of good pine, it stood stout, foursquare, and high with eight rooms; like its owner it was utterly without frills. Behind it was the bur-oak shanty, now converted to a stable for the boys’ Indian pony, Jack. A barn and corral were at the foot of the hill leading down to the lake. John Muir said their wheat field was the first in the vicinity, and on that first evening together the reunited family strolled the borders of the field while Daniel Muir extolled the virtues of his frontier industry.
In his autobiography Muir did not spare readers when it came to descriptions of farm life, but he mentions none of that winter of 1849–50. They must have laid in enough corn, potatoes, and fuel wood to get by, they fed the stock wild hay, and for additional supplies they would have gone along the river road to Portage, a larger town than Kingston and about twelve miles distant. Here Muir had his first good look at American civilization along its cutting edge.
A rough settlement, Portage was strategically positioned between the Wisconsin and Fox rivers. At first it had been a fur-trading center in Astor’s sprawling network, and then in the natural course of such things a military fort. Now, with the furbearing animals hunted out, it was a town supplying the needs of the local farmers and the red-coated lumberjacks bound north to the pineries or south out of them. The fort, as Muir remembered it, still stood within its stockade and was “painted a glistening white, still formidable although the last company of soldiers had departed three or four years ago to take part in War with Mexico.”
There were perhaps 400 permanent residents when the Muirs arrived—Scots, Germans, Yankees from Vermont and Maine, a few blacks—and a shifting population of land speculators, canal boomers, lawyers, whores, theatrical troupers, lumberjacks, and Indians. As a boy from a Scots fishing village, Muir would already have seen his share of pubs and drinking, yet he remembered the freedom with which whiskey flowed in Portage and noted that the “many stores that rejoiced under the name of groceries and genral [sic] merchandise emporiums made their main profits out of whiskey.” The streets were enlivened by Indian ponies at the hitching posts, Indian dogs everywhere, and frequent fistfights. There were cows on the common when the weather permitted. Twice weekly the stage arrived from Madison and pulled up with a grand flourish at the tavern of Uncle Dick Veeder. Here the stage driver, a kind of local hero in red-flannel shirt, high boots, and wide hat, would swing down to mingle with the crowd of lumberjacks and raftsmen who made Veeder’s tavern their clubhouse.
With the coming of spring, 1850, life at what the Muirs called Fountain Lake farm began in earnest. Like so many other settlers, Daniel Muir was going to plant wheat as his cash crop: for a man struggling to get a claim into production, what with clearing, chopping, and fencing, wheat farming was the answer since it could be done in relatively careless fashion and on an extensive basis. So, much more of the Muir land had to be broken open and, as the eldest son, John Muir was drafted for the work.
As soon as the frost was out of the ground, the boy, though not quite twelve, was put to the plow behind the shambling oxen. The big handles of the shafts were about as high as his head so that all day he was obliged to trudge through the shearing furrows with his arms upraised, perhaps as many as eight or nine miles of walking before noon dinner. At the end of each row there was the task of hauling the heavy share loose from the gooey clods and setting it straight again for the return up field. At last the noon dinner and its hour of rest while his young muscles cooled and shrank so that, when called again to the work, he would go bent and hobbling at first like an old man. After another wearying round through the long afternoon, there was supper, the cows to be brought in, horses to be fed, worship, bed.
So it had begun: the patient, inevitable wheeling of the seasons and the years—a decade—and the boy driven relentlessly through them until at last he had emerged on the other side, work-hardened, accustomed to more than ordinary hardship, a man. But a man who had struggled and had managed to retain a youth’s enthusiasm for the natural world that was the scene of his daily toil.
All his life he would remember with that primitive vividness the sights, sounds, and smells of the Wisconsin seasons. Spring announced itself with the shotlike reports of the lake ice cracking and breaking up. As the boy trudged the fields putting in the wheat, the corn, and the potatoes, his mind found refuge and instruction it would lay up for the harvest of maturity as he attended the mysterious emergence of the myriad life forms after the hard sleep of the Wisconsin winter. With the breaking of the ice, the loon, the great northern diver, sounded its utterly wild, wavering cry above the freed