more than a decade John Muir worked his father’s farms. As a diversion he taught himself algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and, using scraps from the wood pile, he concocted all manner of inventions—clocks, door latches, water wheels, an automatic horse-feeder, a barometer, a thermometer, a hygrometer, a self-setting saw mill, and, most important to John, an “early rising machine.” This unique device would, at its appointed time, usually 1 a.m., tip Muir’s bed on end, rousing him to read, to study, to imagine, to invent, to dream. Muir’s inventions attracted the attention of his neighbors, especially William Duncan, who urged him to exhibit them at the Wisconsin State Fair in Madison in l860. Muir won the “Ingenious Whittler’s Award” and met Mrs. Jeanne C. Carr, wife of University of Wisconsin’s Professor Ezra Carr. It was a fortuitous encounter. Taken by Muir’s intelligence and creativity, she urged him to enroll at the university. Jeanne Carr, in a role similar to that of an older sister, was to encourage and guide John Muir for many years, both at the University of Wisconsin and in the wider, outdoor “university of the wilderness” where landscapes, waters, skies, and animals of the waters, lands, and air would teach him all he would need to know about the universe. But before he could enter full-time into the “university of the wilderness,” he had many hurdles to overcome and much to understand before finding his way to become, in his words, “joyful and free.”
The years between 1860 and l867 were turbulent both for the nation and for John Muir personally. The North and the South had taken up arms against each other, and for Muir these were years of moral choices, decisions about which line of work to follow, and how to nourish his independent spirit while supporting himself.
The battle cry was rising. Muir’s companions from neighboring farms were enlisting in the military as were his fellow students at the University of Wisconsin. Muir was not drafted, but had he been, it is hard to say how he would have responded. Aside from some hunting he did as a farm boy, Muir had never carried a gun and he could not conceive of killing another human being. Whether wearing the blue or the gray, the end result would be the same. Killing is killing; death is death. War was an unconscionable loss of life. When Congress passed the Enrollment Act of l863, requiring all male citizens to enlist, Muir felt he couldn’t join. But where would he go and what would he do? He was 25 years old; most of his brothers and sisters had married, and his parents had moved into Portage. He was uncertain about which studies to pursue in Madison. Should he fulfill his parents’ dream and become a preacher? Or his own idea of becoming a doctor? Perhaps he could support himself as a country schoolteacher as he’d done for a few months in l862. He was certain he did not want to spend his life on a farm.
All his life, beginning in early childhood, John Muir was drawn to the wild, natural world. From the seashore of the Firth of Forth and its surrounding hills to Wisconsin’s lakes and forests, the natural world had been a source of wonder and refreshment. Now he needed the clarification of thought that only the wilderness could afford him. By this time he had acquired the skills of a botanist, so nothing pleased him more than the gathering and classification of plants. In l863 he took a long tour through the Wisconsin Dells and along the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi River gathering and identifying all kinds of plant species. Still, the gathering of specimens could not constitute his life’s work, and by this time the clock was ticking. He was balancing on a thin line between desire and duty without any clearly discernable direction to his life.
Though factory work was far from his first choice of employment, in light of his gifts for invention and innovation, Muir saw it as his only way forward. Consequently, he did three stints working in factories—each of them ending in disaster. His first was for an inventor he’d met at the Wisconsin State Fair. The invention was a steam-powered ice-breaking boat, and Muir was hired as the boat’s mechanic at the plant in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. When the boat broke up on its maiden voyage on the ice-filled Mississippi, the job abruptly ended.
In l864, Muir and his younger brother, Daniel, went to work in a Meaford, Ontario, factory making 30,000 broom handles. When a fire burned the factory to the ground, this job ended too. By this time the Civil War was winding down, and it was now safe for Muir to return to the United States. He headed to Indianapolis, at the time a thriving manufacturing city that had doubled its population during the war. He easily found employment in a factory that manufactured wagon wheels, staves, barrels, and plow handles. He was hired to increase the factory’s efficiency. As the plant’s productivity increased, so also did Muir’s sense of ambivalence. In May he wrote to his sister Sarah, “I feel something within, some restless fires urge me on in a way very different from my real wishes, and I suppose that I am doomed to live in some sort of noisy commercial centers. Circumstances over which I have had no control almost compel me to abandon my profession of choice [living in the natural, wild world] and to take up the business of an inventor.… ”3 Ten months later (March 5, 1867) while Muir was working late on the assembly line, a belt snapped, grazing the cornea of his right eye. By the time he’d struggled back to his boarding house he had lost sight in both his eyes. For weeks, condemned to a darkened room, Muir hoped and prayed that his sight would return. If his blindness continued, he feared a life in the shadow-lands, merely a bystander banished to the edge of society, never taking his full part or making his contribution, forever dependent upon the charity of others.
In April, to his immense relief, his sight began returning and he started roaming the fields on the outskirts of Indianapolis. In case he had any setbacks, he wanted to gather enough flowers and sunlight, sylvan landscapes and streams to cherish for the rest of his life. As he gathered flowers and specimens, he gathered himself.
By the first of September, after finally regaining his sight during the summer at home in Wisconsin, Muir set out for his 1,000-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Leaving factory and farm, he was at last walking towards his destiny. His intention was to “make and take one more grand Sabbath three years long,”4 fulfilling a long-cherished dream of going to Cuba and South America and traveling to the sources of the Amazon to see for himself the great araucaria tree, a long-lived coniferous tree of the Southern Hemisphere. He carried only a plant press, a New Testament, a little food, and a new diary inscribed “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.”
Muir tramped through Kentucky, over the Cumberland Mountains, and then into Georgia, sleeping under the stars and accepting the meals and hospitality of the people he met along the way, some of them recently freed slaves.
By the time he reached Savannah, he was low in spirits and in cash. The money he’d asked his brother, David, to send from his bank account back in Wisconsin hadn’t arrived. Exhausted, Muir found a resting place in the Bonaventure cemetery a few miles from town, where he could spend a few days hoping the bank draft would arrive. Nights were hot, humid, and thick with mosquitoes. As soon as his funds from home arrived, Muir set off again on his journey. But he was feeling ill. Sickening more and more as he walked and feeling feverish by the time he reached Cedar Keys on the Gulf coast of Florida, he nonetheless obtained a job at a local saw mill. When a full-blown case of what was later identified as malaria—probably contracted in the cemetery—rendered him delirious, his kindly employers took him into their home and cared for him as his health slowly returned. As he was able, Muir worked a little but again became restless and anxious to continue his travels. When a small schooner docked at the port to pick up a load of lumber for Cuba, Muir talked to the captain and obtained passage.
Muir stayed a month on the boat anchored in Havana harbor, spending every day exploring the outskirts of the city, discovering its tropical plants, grasses, and cacti. But in the aftermath of the malaria he was still weak, and the heat and humidity dampened his desire to go further south. He dreamed of cool forests and clear crystal streams. When he saw a notice advertising $40 fares from New York to California, he boarded an orange boat in Havana for New York. Arriving in February, he had to wait two weeks for a southward-bound ship. He wrote, “I felt completely lost in the vast throngs of people, the noise of the streets, the immense size of the buildings.”5 It was a relief when the steamer left for the Isthmus of Panama.
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