John Muir. Frederick Turner
R. Turner, who has cheerfully borne all the changes attendant to so long a labor.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation assisted me with a handsome grant while I was in the early stages of this work.
Chronology
| 1804 | Daniel Muir born, Manchester, England. |
| 1813 | Anne Gilrye born, Dunbar, Scotland. |
| 1833 | Daniel Muir marries Anne Gilrye, Dunbar. |
| 1838 | John Muir born, Dunbar, April 21. |
| 1845 | Potato crop failures trigger famine in Europe. The Condition of the Working Class by Friedrich Engels. |
| 1849 | Emigration of Muir family to America. California gold rush. |
| 1857 | Muir family moves to Hickory Hill farm, Wisconsin. |
| 1860 | John Muir leaves home for Madison; meets Jeanne Carr; Lincoln nominated by Republican party, elected in November. Extinction of California jaguar. |
| 1862 | Muir in second year at University of Wisconsin; hires out as teacher for part of year. Homestead Act. Morrill Act. Death of Thoreau. |
| 1866 | Civil War over. Muir returns to America from Canadian exile, goes to Indianapolis. |
| 1867 | Muir’s thousand-mile walk to the Gulf. Coal Land Act regulates sale of U.S. coal-bearing lands. |
| 1868 | Muir sees Yosemite for first time; he is thirty. |
| 1871 | Muir deep in glacial studies; publishes “Yosemite Glaciers.” Visit of Emerson to Yosemite. Great slaughter of passenger pigeons in Wisconsin. |
| 1872 | Muir begins to write for Overland Monthly; meets William Keith; visits Oakland. Yellowstone Park established. |
| 1876 | Muir lives with Swetts in San Francisco; “God’s First Temples” heralds his emerging voice in conservation debates. Centennial Exposition. Little Big Horn. |
| 1879 | Muir engaged to Louie Strentzel; leaves on first Alaskan expedition. Edison’s incandescent bulb glows forty consecutive hours. |
| 1880 | Muir marries Louie Strentzel, April 14. |
| 1881 | Muir’s daughter Annie Wanda born; Muir’s health poor due to domestic worries; accepts invitation to go to Alaska aboard Corwin. |
| 1882 | Death of Emerson. |
| 1885 | Death of Daniel Muir. |
| 1886 | Muir’s daughter Helen born. Haymarket Riot. |
| 1888 | In July, Louie writes Muir on trip to Northwest, urging his return to literary and conservation work. |
| 1890 | Muir completes two articles for Robert U. Johnson of Century, signaling his return to public life. Death of Dr. John Strentzel. Wounded Knee. Official Census notes disappearance of American frontier. |
| 1892 | Sierra Club founded. Forest reserves created in three states. |
| 1894 | Mountains of California, Muir’s first book, published. |
| 1896 | Muir with Forestry Commission. Death of Anne G. Muir. McKinley v. Bryan. |
| 1901 | McKinley assassinated; Roosevelt becomes president and Muir writes him about American natural resources. Our National Parks published. |
| 1903 | Roosevelt camps with Muir in Yosemite. Death of F. L. Olmsted. Flight at Kitty Hawk. First federal wildlife reserve established. |
| 1905 | Death of Louie Muir. California recedes Yosemite to U. S. |
| 1908 | Secretary of Interior Garfield grants Hetch Hetchy to San Francisco. Creation of Muir Woods National Monument. Muir is seventy. |
| 1911 | My First Summer in the Sierra published. Death of William Keith. Muir departs on long-deferred South American expedition. |
| 1913 | Story of My Boyhood and Youth published. Death of John Swett. Hetch Hetchy formally granted to San Francisco, thereby ending lengthy dispute. |
| 1914 | World War I begins. Muir dies in Los Angeles, December 24. |
Introduction
Frederick Turner’s biography of John Muir, published in America in 1985, is the first to appear in Scotland since Muir’s death in 1914, and may prove to be a watershed for environmental awareness in the land of his birth. It certainly represents a milestone for Scottish education and culture and will support the rediscovery and reclamation of Muir as a Scottish figure after a century of fame as an essentially American hero.
This biography tells the epic story of the pioneer conservationist, whose childhood encounters with wild nature on the beaches of Dunbar and among the oakwoods of the Lammermuir Hills, inspired his role in establishing the nature conservation system of the United States. Turner paints a vivid picture of Muir’s first eleven years in Dunbar, and of Victorian Scotland during the 1840s. During the research for the book he visited and explored East Lothian in considerable depth and discovered the actual deed of sale for the Muir home in Dunbar. He has read extremely widely on Scots history and culture, drawing on sources as disparate as the Border Ballads, Holinshed’s Chronicle of The Wallace and Johnson’s voyage to the Hebrides; he has studied the writings of Scott, Burns and Hogg, as well as Miller’s Victorian History of Dunbar. But this book is no mere academic biography; in Scotland Turner has walked the ground, climbed the castle ruins, read the newspapers of the time and visited the ancestral graves. From these many threads he has woven a rich and colourful tapestry which gives us a convincing impression of Muir’s Dunbar: the boat-thronged harbour, the life of the streets, the religious fervour and factions, the educational “school of hard knocks” and the precarious mortality which made death a common visitor. He has conveyed the magnitude of the adventure in which John Muir’s father, Daniel Muir, risked everything to board an emigrant ship in the freezing winds of February 1849, seeking religious freedom and a better life in America.
He has used the same research and literary skills to conjure the vast sweep of American history during that crowded and eventful century. He sets John Muir’s odyssey against the background of the greater westward migration and its consequences: the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the California Grizzly; the Indian wars that led via the battles of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee to the virtual extermination of the indigenous Americans, along with the buffalo on which they depended; the California goldrush and the eclipse of the frontier wilderness by the rise of an industrial