John Muir. Frederick Turner
history: the native forests are long vanished along with the wolf, lynx, bear, beaver, polecat and many other extinct species; the nation’s fish stocks are poised on the brink of ecological disaster with successive crashes in the population of herring, mackerel, salmon and now cod; the intensification of farming under the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy has pushed once-common farmland birds, like the thrush and the skylark, towards comparative rarity throughout the UK and the only economic model which any government or local authority dares to contemplate is growth, growth and yet more growth.
Consequently, the reassessment and reclamation of Muir as a Scottish writer and environmental thinker is a vital process which anyone who cares about Scotland’s environment, its education system and culture should actively support.
In a country whose ecology has been impoverished by the loss of over 99 per cent of its native woodlands, together with many animal and plant species, the repatriation of the world’s greatest advocate of forest conservation is of crucial importance.
In an historic fishing nation, whose marine resources have been pillaged to the extent that cod may soon be declared an endangered species, bringing home the prophet who campaigned for the sustainable use of natural resources as long ago as 1876 is a timely event.
And for a culture where less than a third of one per cent of the children are actively involved in conservation, the reclamation of John Muir as a Scottish writer, conservation hero and educational role-model could mark a turning-point in the historical estrangement of the mass of people from their own landscape and wildlife.
Graham White. Dunbar, April 1997
Prologue: Peru Again
Through the American summer of 1848 Congress thrashed about in the moral wilderness created by the territorial acquisitions from President Polk’s Mexican War. The issue the new lands raised into stark view was slavery—its limits and its future—and over the factional forensics in Washington there now loomed the thunderhead of sectional conflict.
During these months another state came into the steadily expanding union: Wisconsin, a free state, was added to balance the newly acquired slave states of Florida and Texas. The acquisition required the swindling of the tribes native to the new state, but this was so minor a matter, judged in the scale of national controversy, that it was generally ignored.
Eighteen forty-eight was also an election year, and in summer’s heat conventions were held at Baltimore, Rochester, Philadelphia, and Buffalo. Hysterical and self-congratulatory as these gatherings were, the platforms adopted by the Barnburners, Free-Soilers, Liberty Leaguers, and others prophesied the collapse of a national house increasingly divided against itself.
On August 19, the New York Herald ran a lengthy item on that most intriguing of the Union’s new acquisitions, California. Buried some 2,000 words and thirteen paragraphs into this early specimen of California boosterism was mention of the gold discovered the previous winter at Sutter’s Mill on the American River. This rich vein, the writer said, was only three feet below a surface of soft rock and sand and was so extensive it was safe to predict a “Peruvian harvest of the precious metals as soon as a sufficiency of miners &c can be obtained.”
The article with its almost perversely obscure reference to the California strike did not engender a gold rush, nor did it by itself even confirm the first whispered rumors to reach the East. It did, however, add by its language a significant bit to the gathering force of those rumors. The adjectival characterization of the strike as “Peruvian” was a mother lode itself, calling up peculiarly American desires and dreams of riches that waited somewhere beyond the hand-to-mouth realities of the known world: Argonauts, gold of Ophir, Cortés in Mexico, Dalfinger and Aguirre hunting the Gilded Man through South American jungles, the Pizarros looting Peru, where it was said they had captured a golden cable so heavy that 600 natives could barely lift it… .
For more than a century now, emigrating whites filling up the imponderable spaces of this New World had been forced by the persistent nonappearance of further caches of the fabled riches to reformulate their hopes on a more modest scale. By the middle of the nineteenth century the luck of the conquistadores seemed truly a matter of the past. But the old dream lived on in America and in the Western mind, and at the end of the summer of 1848 it was brought to quick life again. America, accidentally discovered on the way to Eastern riches, once more blazed out in the popular imagination as the land of the quick, lustrous strike.
As summer turned into fall, rumor continued to feed hope. On September 20, the Baltimore Sun ran a sensational story about the strike, and a few days thereafter the New York Journal of Commerce wrote that Californians were running over the country and picking gold out of it “just as 1000 hogs, let loose in the forest, would root up ground nuts.” Now there were stirrings all along the eastern seaboard, in the South, and up and down the Mississippi Valley. By November, samples of California gold had found circuitous ways east, people held the palpable stuff in their palms, and the first ships put out for California.
At the end of the month, President Polk had in hand an official firsthand account of the strike, and when he delivered the last of his annual messages to Congress on December 5 he incorporated the glad news in an otherwise sobering discussion of the perils of the large, unretired national debt. Few if any of his listeners cared about the debt. In newspaper accounts of the message, the lead paragraphs dealt with the confirmation of the gold strike. The gold rush was on.
Had Sam Brannan, who announced the gold strike at Sutter’s Mill, bellowed his news in the heart of London or in Edinburgh’s Princes Street, the effect on the Old World could not have been more electrifying than the news contained in Polk’s message. The word “gold” immediately leapt free of its context and flashed along the port cities of Europe, up the watercourses, and into the columns of newspapers and journals already crammed with alluring information on emigration. In the tiny North Sea fishing village of Dunbar, Scotland, even the dour master of the grammar school showed some excitement and allowed his pupils to exhibit some of their own. To ten-year-old Johnnie Muir this latest American news seemed almost too exciting to bear. In their reading book he and his classmates had already been awed by accounts of the vast American forests that contained such marvels as the sugar maple and by descriptions of the wonderful wildlife these forests harbored. Johnnie Muir had been especially taken with the descriptions of the fish hawk and the bald eagle by the Scots naturalist Alexander Wilson, who like so many of his countrymen had gone to the New World after the American Revolutionary War. The boy read Wilson’s words over and over again until he knew them by heart. And now to be told there was also gold in this fabulous country! Visions of hawks, eagles, red Indians, huge trees oozing sweets, and gold glittering in the mighty gloom of the wilderness filled Johnnie Muir’s head.
Such dreams may be the special and perishable blessings of childhood, yet there is good evidence that in varying degrees of vividness they were shared in these years by the adults of Dunbar and a thousand other towns and villages of the Old World and for reasons that had as much to do with European realities as American promises. At midcentury, the Old World seemed faded and chaotic, the New World bright with limitless prospect. The latest news merely made the contrast the more obvious and the impulse for emigration the more compelling.
The three decades since the Congress of Vienna had redrawn the map of Europe had seen an accelerating pace of social and economic disruption amounting to a cultural revolution. Every aspect of life from family relations to international trade was profoundly affected. What is now called the First Industrial Revolution was then a bewildering phenomenon of so many facets that not even the most farsighted social philosopher or statesman could begin to comprehend it all or predict the direction and consequences of the changes taking place. Only the great poets of the Old World could then correctly intuit some of the consequences of all this on the hearts and minds of humankind, and few were listening to them.
Well into the nineteenth century the old certainties of the medieval world, apparently long vanished in the smoke and blood of war and the political rearrangements of the intervening