John Muir. Frederick Turner
all this and its consequences for the region—lowered water tables, droughts, proliferation of pests, exhaustion of the soil—Muir at the time knew little, though he could surely lament the wasting of those “heart-cheering” loads of wood. Like the others he was caught up in the seemingly inevitable process of breaking the land for civilization and profit.
Looking around him, he could see other families likewise bound to the soil, other children like himself and his brothers and sisters laboring at kindred tasks through the seasons: planting, plowing, chopping, even poaching wood. Perhaps his father was more severe in his demands and in the way he enforced them, but in truth all the immigrants drove themselves and their families much too hard. Nor did they seem to know any better in this regard than in agricultural matters, where the rule of hard usage also prevailed. As many of them had no previous experience with land-holding or with the principle of usufruct, so many like the elder Muir had had too near and numbing an experience with child labor to recognize how it could surely blunt and blight the new generations. In the Lanark mills of Daniel Muir’s time children regularly worked a thirteen-hour day, six days a week, and spent their Sundays cleaning the machinery. Well into the nineteenth century it was common practice in the British Isles to employ women and small children in the pit collieries where like beasts they hauled carts by iron chains about their middles. To those with such knowledge the labor of the farm seemed neither cruel nor unusual.
To outsiders it might, as it did to Fredrika Bremer. Watching the midwestern farm families, bent and sweating in their chosen servitude, she wondered whether these new Americans, so determined on freedom and prosperity, would ever awaken to the far grander opportunity their new lands and situation offered: the chance to turn toward the sun, to open themselves to the possibility of regeneration as the vanished aboriginal races evidently had.
In the middle 1850s as his father prepared yet another agonizing grid of work for him, John Muir was not quite ready for such thoughts. And yet he could hardly have been oblivious to the human consequences of this furious industry. He could see some of those consequences in the deepening lines of toil and resignation in his own mother’s face, in her hands. He knew that his sisters Sarah and Margaret were now in chronically poor health and that the first and greatest gift David Galloway had bestowed on the former was to take her out of the fields forever. He himself bore the humiliating title of the “runt of the family” since among these tall, angular folk he was somewhat undersized for a teenaged boy; later, he would claim that overwork had stunted his growth.
Like the people, the countryside seemed to be taking on the look of age, seemed to be becoming a facsimile of that Old World the immigrants had so willingly left behind for this new one. The land was filling up, and whereas the Muirs once had been virtually solitary, now all the neighboring quarter sections were taken up. There was a graveyard now, too, and Muir watched it entered upon and filled with its own settlers for whom the New World had not opened onto new vistas of life but had led instead to premature death: Graham, McReath, Thompson, Maitland, Whitehead… . “The generations,” wrote another midwestern child of this time who survived into old age, “cannot utter themselves to each other until the strongest need of utterance is past.” William Dean Howells had seen the wasting of the human resources of the region, and he had lived long enough to see in the next generation writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Hamlin Garland give voices to those silent ones beneath the blurring markers of hundreds of rural burying grounds, writers touched nearly enough by the whole breaking process to conceive their mission as the writing of the somber annals of these victims of ignorant industry and innocent rapacity. Now the maturing Muir could only feel the injustice and the pain and vaguely ponder the meaning of it all.
Terms of Challenge
The new homestead lay about five miles southeast of Fountain Lake, and the Muirs christened it Hickory Hill since the house site was atop a hill thickly studded with hickories. Here they raised a stout two-story frame house with a wing running off it in back. Behind the house they built a high, broad barn that backed up on the woods. The views on the other three sides were fine: the land’s gentle rolls lent variety to the eye, and here and there were heavy copses of virgin timber.
John Muir had already cleared the near fields in those months before the family moved, and when they did so the farm was already in production. Western land hunger had plunged the nation into a financial panic in this year of 1857, and the consequences of soil misuse were becoming evident throughout the Midwest. Still the Muirs were hoping to prosper on the new farm as they had not on the old, one family’s version of the national notion that somehow a new situation would inevitably be better than the one left behind.
But the new start began badly for John Muir, began, in fact, almost fatally. Unlike the old homestead, the new one was far from any surface water, and Muir was ordered to dig a well behind the house and a few yards from the barn. He soon tapped into a stratum of close-grained sandstone; the Muirs tried blasting through this, but they were unskilled at it, and so finally Daniel Muir gave his son mason’s tools and told him he must chip his way down to water.
The work went on at a painful, inching pace. Each morning Muir was lowered by bucket and windlass into the slowly deepening shaft and left to work in this cramped, airless place until he was hauled out again for the noon dinner. Then, back down again until supper and chores. One morning as he was lowered into the shaft—at this point about eighty feet deep—he was all but overcome by carbon dioxide that had collected overnight at the bottom. As the fatal fumes invaded his lungs and numbed his brain, he could faintly and confusedly hear his father shouting down to him to get into the bucket, but he was already so weak that it seemed easier to settle against a wall of the shaft and sleep. As his father continued to shout, frantically now, Muir somehow summoned awareness and strength enough to clamber into the bucket and was hauled out, unconscious and gasping for breath.
There was no more work that day or the next, and while he lay in the costly luxury of his sick bed, Muir was visited by William Duncan, who had been a miner and stonemason in Scotland. “Weel, Johnnie,” Muir recalled him saying, “it’s God’s mercy that you’re alive. Many a companion of mine have I seen dead with choke-damp, but none that I ever saw or heard of was so near death in it as you were and escaped without help.” Duncan taught Daniel Muir to air the shaft each morning with a splash of water and frequent stirrings with a bundle of brush and hay. Then the work went on.
Ninety feet down, Muir struck a “fine, hearty gush of water.” They had their well now but at a price Muir would feel all his life; later he claimed that a peculiar rasping feeling in his throat was a lifelong reminder of the incident.
Nor could Muir ever forgive the fact that his father “never spent an hour in that well.” The episode served to deepen his resentments against Daniel Muir’s tyranny. But whereas the boy had few effective defenses against that tyranny, the young man had been developing some in the last years at Fountain Lake, and he continued to do so now at Hickory Hill. Things had slowly been changing in the Muir family, and especially between the father and his eldest son. For one thing, Daniel Muir had now completely retired from active participation in the running of the farm and left things to John. He still gave the orders, of course, and supervised the work, but henceforth he would devote himself to his religious pursuits, attending every revival meeting in the vicinity, and traveling about two counties as a preaching elder of the Disciples of Christ. When at home, he would sit by a strategically located study window where, his Bible in his lap, he could watch his children at their labors in the fields below.
Sarah’s departure for her own household on the old acreage had also made a difference, for she had been a second, mediating mother in the household, and the loss of her counsel and helping hand was felt. Now John began to draw closer to Maggie, four years his senior and a sympathetic listener to whom he commenced to confide both his misgivings and vague ambitions.
The major difference, however, lay in the altered relations between Daniel Muir and John. This was not the boy who had been set to the plow in the spring of 1850. He had been seasoned and toughened by seven hard years in the fields, woods, and barnyard, and he had crossed the invisible