Thomas Jefferson once stated, “That all human beings, respective of the accident of their birth, are entitled to enjoy the aspirations of being fully complete and free beings.”  Of course, he was referring to “freedom” from government suppression.  On the other hand, John Muir felt that to be “free” was to be in the out-of-doors.

 

Some individuals are absolutely extraordinary.  John Muir was such an individual.  One of the endearing mysteries of humanity is how some choose to be capable of such pathetic atrocities with narrowness of mind; while on the other hand are capable of such generosity and kindness.

 

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, and raised in Wisconsin.  His father was an itinerant Presbyterian minister who insisted his son memorize the entire Bible by heart.  If John should mess up, his father would beat him until he got it right.  By age eleven, John Muir was able to recite 3/4 of the Old Testament and the entire New Testament from heart.

 

John Muir was a natural-born scientist, studying geology and botany at the “University of Wisconsin.”  The Civil War had just ended (1865 A. D.) and new industries were beginning to pop up all across America.  It was a perfect time for John Muir and his gifted talents, as he showed great promise as an inventor.  In fact, he increased the productivity of every one of the businesses that wanted and hired his talents.  As an example, he went to work in a carriage factory in Indianapolis, where he conducted a time and motion study, where he determined that the factory is like a machine itself, and human beings, if they will think of themselves as such parts of that machine, will work in harmony with all the other moving parts.

 

He could have been another Andrew Carnegie, or another Thomas Edison.  However, a factory accident temporarily blinded him for several months and when he regained his sight, he set out on a thousand-mile walking adventure of 1,000 miles down to the state of Florida.  While doing so, he pursued his love of the natural sciences, studying plants and flowers along the way.  It was at this point that he began a scientific journal which he named, “Earth-Planet-Universe,” and he would keep adding to it for the rest of his life.

 

When John Muir began this walk south, he was actually intending to walk all the way to South America.  He wanted to find the head-waters of the Amazon River, build himself a raft, and ride it to the Atlantic Ocean.  To our fortunes of his gifts to society, he contacted a fever in Florida, and hearing of the healing nature of the then thought Western United States, he took a boat to San Francisco.

 

After getting off the boat in San Francisco, John Muir was asked, “Where do you want to go?”  His answer was, anywhere that is wild.  Again, to our fortunes, he was directed East to the “Sierra Nevada’s.”  And from Oakland, CA., he walked all the way to them.  To understand the essence of John Muir is to understand that he walks.  For it is this act of “walking” that opens up to John Muir a different version of Christianity; one in which God can be seen in nature.  It’s a Christianity in which God can be worshipped for His creation and not that he just made creation.

 

When he got to the Sierra Nevada’s, he called them, “The Range of Light,” “surely the best all the Lord has built.”  When he descended into “Yosemite Valley” he wrote, “It was by far the grandest of all the special temples of nature I was ever permitted to enter.  The Sanctum Sanctorum of the Sierra.”

 

While in “Yosemite Valley,” a man by the name of James Mason Hutching’s offered him a job as his wood-mill foreman.  The reason is Hutching’s was attempting to cash in on the tourists that he hoped to bring in with his new hotel.  John Muir saw this as an opportunity to live in the Yosemite Valley for the rest of his life.  And if it were not for the talented and gifted John Muir, Hutching’s most likely would have lost his venture to another entrepreneur.

 

John Muir built the “Hunching’s Sawmill,” and began producing lumber for the many projects his new employer had affected him to undertake.  Muir even incorporated what would be known as “The Big Tree Room,” which was built around the trunk of a giant cedar in which two men had to stretch their arms around for the size of it.  It was at this point that tourists began to exceed more than 1,000 a summer in 1869 (John being 32 years of age; 31 when he arrived in the valley).

 

John Muir built a single cabin for himself at the base of Yosemite Falls, with a single window in the cabin; which faced the falls.  The floor of the cabin he made with stones spaced far enough apart that the ferns could still grow.  And he had a small ditch enter into the far corner of the cabin with just enough flow to, as John Muir wrote, “to allow it to sing and warble in low sweet tones at night while I lay in my bed, suspended from the rafters.

 

Every free moment John Muir devoted to exploring the valley and the mountains surrounding him.  He was known to travel for days, with only a few bags of crackers, some oatmeal, and tea for nourishment.  He studded the souls of his shoes with nails in order to climb the steep rocky sloops.  Of course, he had his journal with him and found it hard to pass any new plant without much observation.  However, he would think it nothing to travel fifty miles on a two-day excursion.

 

John Muir was however, known to do some bazar things that most of us wouldn’t dream of.  One time he decided he wanted to see the brink of Yosemite Falls.  He said he just didn’t want to see the falls, but he claimed out onto the edge, alongside the canyon walls, extending out over the crest in which the water overran, such that he could understand what it was like to be a drop lite of water spilling over the edge.  He even went behind the falls, crawling up the slippery moss filled rocks, slowly inching his way as near the top as he could, so he could hear the true song of the waterfall.  Remember, his only gear was his nails he had put in the souls of his shoes (no ropes).

 

One winter he spent all day climbing up one of the mountains, and when he reached the top, he somehow caused an avalanche in which he road down all the way to the valley floor; being swished there in less than a minute.  His interest in the animals did not escape him either.  One day he spotted a brown bear in a meadow, and he decided to run at it to see what it would be like to view running the way a bear does.  However, while he was running at it and making a bunch of noise, the bear raised up as if to defend itself.  He would later call his experience of getting away with this action as, “My interview with a bear.”  He placed Sequoia pinecones in water, which would turn a slight purple in color, which he would then drink exclaiming, “in order to help my own color and to better understand the tree itself.”  Sometimes he would put his head between his knees in order to see the world upside-down, to see what he called, “it’s upness.”

 

One spring season there was an earthquake.  Muir was awakened out of his bed shouting, “Oh noble earthquake,” while a section of the wall of the canyon came tumbling down near his home.  He was known to celebrate the giant trees by scampering up into the top of them during a thunderstorm, in order to understand what a tree felt like while it was getting battered by wind, hale, or lightening.  In essence, he saw the spirituality in nature.  His view as a scientist and a deeply religious man were the same view to him.  He felt he was born anew every single day he was in the raw, untouched, physical landscape.  The reason he wrote, “was because of his unconditional surrender to nature.”  To him, nature had a voice in the winds, waterfalls, and anything else in nature, if only people were willing to listen.

 

Everywhere John Muir turned and looked at nature, he believed he was witnessing the work and presence of a merciful God.  And not that of the stern and wrathful God his father had presented to him.  His father had placed man above nature.  But to John Muir, “God was revealing Himself through nature; and for whom mankind was merely one part of a great, joyously interconnected web of being.”  “By going out into the natural world, I am going in.”  To expose yourself to the natural world is to let it reshape you into something more valuable.  Careful with worshipping the created along with the Creator.

 

In 1875, James Mason Hutching’s attempted to exploit the Yosemite Valley as non-public land, to be used however the owner may see fit.  He took it to congress, where it passed twice in the house, but failed both times in the Senate.  It eventually went to the Supreme Court, where it again failed, and because of this, James Mason Hutching’s did more to help set up the “National Park System” than any other man.  Why?  First, he opened up to the public a land that was not then in the attention of the world with its wonders.  Second, he inadvertently, by challenging the law that made the land inaccessible to commerce, thus set the land aside for public use, and ultimately got him kicked out.  Third, by taking the law to the Supreme Court, this land and all National Parks which fallowed, were now set up to be protected. And fourth, he hired John Muir.

 

Once the “Transcontinental Railroad” was completed, tourists from all over flocked to the now “Yosemite National Park.”  And John Muir was there to guide them to one spectacular viewpoint to another.  However, John Muireventually left Yosemite Valley to live in Oakland, California, where he felt he could better serve the park through writing about it.  He wrote in the “Overland Monthly,” “Scribner’s,” and “Harper’s Magazine,” hoping to spread his gospel of nature.  He once wrote, “Writing is like the life of a glacier, one eternal grind.”

 

After five (5) years of writing, and missing the wilderness he loved so much, John Muir finally wrote: “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a being for making money.  I am learning nothing in this trivial world from men.  I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”  He also stated he wanted to “preach nature as an apostle.”  In the process of writing about Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada’s and their beauty and why they needed to be preserved however, John Muir had become famous.  But his restlessness to travel again drove him to do so.

 

When the opportunity came to visit Alaska, which had only just become a part of the United States for less than a decade (statehood on January 3, 1959; purchased in 1867), he jumped at the chance.  When he reached “Fort Wrangle,” he heard of massive glaciers.  He hired four Tlingit Indians with their long canoe to take him the long 800-mile trek to reach them.  It turned out to be what we now know as “Glacier Bay.”  He then wrote of it, “Alaska is natures own reservation, and every lover of wildness will rejoice with me, that by kindly frost, it is so well preserved.”

 

John Muir developed a deep cough.  But in spite of it, he camps out on the glacier, sleeping upon it, and the next morning he loses his cough.  He then writes, “No lowland microbe can survive on a glacier.”  “Any man that does not believe in God and glaciers is the worst kind of unbeliever.”

 

After his return from Alaska, he married Louisa Wanda Strentzel in 1880.  He settled down upon his wife’s father estate and fruit farm in Martinez, California.  Whereupon they had two children.  He quickly became a family man a took over the management of the family farm and making it very prosperous.  His tenacity and inventiveness he brought to bear as he had as a young man.  Steadily he amassed considerable wealth.

 

However, his health began to deteriorate from the ceaseless work of farming, and his isolation from the wilderness he loved, caused his wife to tell him that he had to go out and engage the wilderness.  Thus, in 1888, he went to Mount Rainer, in the state of Washington, where he camped in what he called, “the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld.”

 

When the young men that accompanied John Muir set out to climb Mount Rainer, the impulsive Muir, age 50, set out to join them on the 8-hour trek to the top.  He later wrote his wife that he “did not mean to climb it, but got excited.”  And soon he was on top of the mountain.  “The Climb,” he said, “had left him with heart and limb exultant and free.”  And when he had come down from the mountain, he understood that his passion, his mission in life, must be devoted to preserving such wilderness places as this.

 

Thus, with the blessing of his wife, in 1889 John Muir went back to giving tours of Yosemite.  But the changes in the park disturbed him terribly.  The valley floor seemed to him to be made into a carnival; “a place of business, instead of a place of prayer.”  He was thus encouraged to help make Yosemite a National Park through his writings about it and the preservation of the high country above it; in order to keep it pristine.

 

In the 19th century, the literary beauty of the Bible was well known, and most citizens used its language.  Thus, with John Muir’s command of the Bible, and his own literary genius with literature, he takes upon the task of saving all National Parks.  He maps the beauties of the parks into literature in a way that makes them transcendent.  He was attacked by the business world with false stories of his past, bringing up questioning ideas against his motives.  But the people, his readers, soon flooded congress with letters and petitions with John Muir’s ideas and concepts for protecting the parks.

 

Finally, on October 1, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed the bill that created Yosemite as a National Park.  At the same time, “Sequoia National Park,” and “General Grant National Park” (later to be named “Kings Canyon National Park”) were also being preserved.  There were now four National Parks.

 

In his then new destiny of now working against and with politics, writing to other Americans with his same values, he attempted to persuade them to “see the necessity in all that is wild.”  Wildness is an essential part of our selves that our ordinary lives tempt us to forget.  And by losing touch with that essential part of ourselves, we risk losing part of our souls.  To John Muir, to go out into nature was to recover ourselves, remember who we truly are, and to reconnect with the core routes of our identity and spirituality.  “Going to the mountains, is going home.”

 

In 1892, Yosemite Valley was still not a part of the National Park (only the northern portion was).  It belonged to the government of California.  And that government was only exploiting its timber and other values for money.  If left on this track, John Muir knew the Park would be forever ruined.  Therefore, he and a small group of prominent Californians with him, formed what they called, “The Sierra Club,” in an effort to place the valley under the control of the National Government.  They quickly elected Muir to be its president.

 

In 1903, John Muir now at the ripe old age of 65, had a visitor to his Martinez, California home, that asked him to show him the Yosemite National Park.  It was the President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt.  John was intending to visit Europe, to gain support for the Park from the people whom had visited it with him as their guide.  But this guided tour request he could not only not turn down, but he felt if he could talk to the President at the evening campfire, this could be the turning point that the Nation needed to protect it.  However, the President had written to him in a letter that stated, “I do not want anyone with me but you.  I want to drop politics absolutely.  And just be out in the open with you.”

 

On May 15th, they set off for the “Mariposa Grove.”  But accompanying them in the Presidents carriage was the Governor of California, the Secretary of the Navy, the Surgeon General, Roosevelt’s personal secretary, two college presidents, 30 buffalo soldiers on horseback, and an entourage of coaches.  It was hard for John to get a word in edge-wise, but get one or two in he would.  Squeezing in when he could, he focused upon the President and the governor of California, the opportunity for them to make all of Yosemite a National Park.

 

A dinner was planned at the “Wawona Hotel” in Yosemite Valley in honor of the President.  As all of the party headed back for that occasion, the President, who had secretly planned this all along, slipped away with John Muir and a few of the Park’s employees.  They set up camp next to one of the largest and oldest Sequoya’s in the Park.  It was at this point that John Muir actually exclaimed, “I fell in love with this man.”

 

However, the President exclaimed to John Muir, “You don’t even know your bird songs,” the President being an Ornithologist, and knew just about everything you could know about certain birds.  But Muir fired back, “Mister President, when are you going to get over this infantile need to kill animals?”  Most likely, Roosevelt would not have taken that from any other human being.  John would later write, “I never before had a more interesting, hearty, and manly companion.  I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves and other spoilers of the forest.”

 

The next morning, after a night under the big trees, the President told the small party to avoid going anywhere near the Wawona Hotel and the people he had abandoned there.  They went to “Glacier Point” and made camp at a spot Charlie Leydig, another Yosemite guide, had picked out.  Here is where John Muir and the President stayed up most of the night, discussing the protection of the forests and the Park itself.  They also included in their discussion other places in the United States that should be set aside for protection.  The only problem with the discussion was that both men wanted to do the talking.

 

The next morning, they awake to a light dusting of snow that had fallen upon them.  When they got back to the crowds who were patiently awaiting them back at the Wawona Hotel, the President shouted to them about how they slept in a snowstorm.  And “This,” he said, “has been the grandest day of my life.”  The President camped out with John Muirone more night, then he went back to his cross-country tour.

 

That next day, speaking from the state capital at Sacramento, California, his speech sounded as though it could have come from the lips of John Muir.  “We are not building this country for a day,” the President said, “We are building it to last for years.”  Within three (3) years, the California legislature and the United States Congress, approved the transfer of “Yosemite National Park” and the “Mariposa Grove” to be under the supervision of the United States Government.

 

In 1905, John Muir’s devoted wife Louisa, died of lung cancer.  He buried her next to her parents on an orchard near their farm.  John then went to Arizona, where it was hoped that his daughter Helen would recover from pneumonia.  He discovered trees there; but not like the ones of the mountains.  It was the “Petrified Forest.”  He began taking total strangers on long walks through the tumbled and broken stone trees.

 

For years, John f. Lacey had been trying to have the place protected.  And now that John Muir was here and took to a loving of the trees, Muir knew a man in Washington D.C. that could save his enchanted forest and have the place protected.  President Roosevelt, using the “Antiquities Act,” passed by Congress earlier, with the stoke of his pen, made the place, “Petrified Forest National Monument.”

 

Before President Roosevelt’s presidency was over, he would create five (5) new National Parks, 51 Federal bird sanctuaries, 4 National game refuges, 18 National Monuments, and over one-hundred-million acres of National Forests.  His last act was to make the “Grand Canyon” as a National Park.  And on January 8, 1908, with too many vested interests against him, he once again invoked the “Antiquities Act,” setting the Canyon aside as a National Monument.  Most congressman and Arizona politicians were opposed, and although it would not enjoy the protection of a National Park, it was a step in the right direction.  History will show that the stubborn President was right.  John Muir would write, “Nothing dollar able is safe.” “There are people good enough, and bad enough, for anything.”

 

On April 21st, 1908, two years after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, John Muir found himself in a fight to keep San Francisco’s false claim that had a dam been built in Yosemite National Park, as San Franciscan politicians had been pushing for before the earthquake and subsequent fires, the water needed could have prevented the fires.  And therefore, a letter was sent on that date to President Roosevelt, pleading his case.

 

Roosevelt couldn’t stop the dam.  But a year later would see a new President, William Howard Taft, who came to California, and to the dismay of San Francisco’s politicians, he choose John Muir as his guide into Yosemite National Park.  Before the visit was over, Taft decided to oppose the dam.  But by 1913 however, another President had taken office.  It was Woodrow Wilson.  And he chose as his Secretary of the Interior, Franklin K. Lane, who was the former city attorney of San Francisco.  And he wasted no time in getting the dam project back on track.

 

John Muir was now 75 years old and the last years of his life devoted to the preservation of Yosemite was now taking its toll.  He wrote to his daughter Helen, “I wonder if leaves feel older when they see their neighbors falling.” “I still think we can win.  Anyhow, I’ll be relieved when it is settled, for it is killing me.”  Three weeks later, the bill passed in congress approving the dam.  President Wilson signed it.  Muir would write, “The battle for conservation will go on, endlessly.  It is part of the universal warfare between right and wrong.  Fortunately, wrong cannot last.  Soon late, it must fall back home to hades.  While some compensating good must surely fallow.  They will see what I meant in time.  There must be places where human beings to satisfy their souls.  Food and drink is not all.  There is the spiritual.  In some, it is only a germ of course.  But the germ will grow.”

 

In December of 1914, John Muir came down with pneumonia.  On Christmas eve, the wilderness prophet succumbed to the natural process of mankind.

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