Bob Richardson, and others, they would go out into the countryside to hear the singers, run the country roads, snatch turnips from farmers’ fields, whittle wood into whistles, perhaps catch a young lark and bring it home to a cage in defiance of the children’s rhyme that warned against such behavior:
The laverock and the lintie,
The robin and the wren;
If ye harry their nests,
Ye’ll never thrive again.
Perhaps they would go south out of town past the mysterious standing stone set alone in its field, an indecipherable reminder of ancient races who had inhabited this place before the old castle had ever been built; past Doon Hill, where Cromwell had littered the sward with the bodies of Leslie’s Covenanters, and on to Brunt Hill. Then down its far side and on to High Wood and the meadowlands along Elmscleugh Water. Or they might go out Bob Richardson’s way by Belhaven and then westward to Beesknowe and Grangemuir.
Whatever the route, whatever the consequences for a late return home, for John Muir the disobedience was creative and absolutely essential. Considering the ways in which his father’s severity compounded the confining regimen of the Dunbar schools, these long runs and rambles into the heart of that landscape were mental and spiritual escapes as much as they were physical ones. Here the boy developed the intuitive ability to take instruction, comfort, and deep pleasure from the natural world, an ability that did so much to convert his childhood in Dunbar and in Wisconsin from blight to lasting spiritual treasure. The runs began, as he would later recognize, a lifelong pattern of personal salvation. Whenever the deadening or seductive routines of settled life threatened his inmost nature; whenever he felt the shadows of traditional obligations and ways of thought spreading into his mind, then John Muir would contrive some escape as now he did on the days of spring and summer when with brother and friends he raced on out of the old town.
Thus the real locus of his Dunbar memories is not the sea, wild and wonderful as it was in its moods, but the hill country he could see from his back window: the long, broad folds of the Lammermuirs, the deep greens, the copses like shadows, the brown, regular lines traced by the stone walls. And as if in prefiguration of his whole life—emigration, peregrination, and solitary explorings—it was westward he was drawn, like his later hero, Thoreau, who claimed that unconsciously his steps always tended westward.
Outward he and the others would go, first down the sloping street under the kirkyard hill, outward into the Lammermuirs sung by Scott and shepherds and birds. The land rose steadily away from the coast, the roads bending inward, inward to the slopes, following their imperative contours, hedges, stone walls, or just the trees bordering them. On the ridges there were rows of beeches, their massive, smooth and green-iced trunks standing separate while their spreading branches interlaced into a dense braid with their neighbors. Waiting out a shower in the shelter of these beeches, they would listen to a burn gurgling into fullness at the foot of the hill, the grasses deep or cropped close where a flock of sheep browsed, looking like stars amid the greenness. There were the bird calls, too, the larks in the fields and the woodier notes of the copse singers. Then, the rain ended, they would run on again, passing the farm folk with their reddened hands and faces and shapeless dark clothing, hearing their threatening calls fading behind, smelling the hay in the ricks, the dung in the barnyards.
And among his fellows John Muir was perhaps a bit more given to moods. Sitting under the trees or running the roads or walking the meadows, he might have heard something more than they did, something inside the raindrops, inside the leaves upon which they fell: a larger music, even a call … something that urged and compelled. A vision commenced here of life in its fullness, of a way of living that held infinitely more promise of excitement and mystery and enjoyment than that he was learning in town: books, school, prayers, and “content.” There was something out there in the Lammermuirs, and like the name of the hills it was part of him, too.
*Half over.
*In a reference to Scotland’s historic poverty, Dr. Johnson in his famous dictionary defined “oats” as “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”
Discovering the New World
Sometime between the late fall of 1848 and early winter of 1849, Daniel Muir made the decision to emigrate to America. From what is known of his character, it is doubtful that he consulted with any of his family but simply announced the plan after he had made it. The factors, though, that led him to the decision are fairly clear, however obscure they may have been to the rest of the family.
The largest factor was the prevailing climate of opinion that so strongly favored removal to the New World, to which was added the news from California that had so excited schoolboys and adults alike in the waning days of ’48. But in the immediate foreground was Daniel Muir’s perpetually restless spirit that searched through the churches and splinter movements of his time for that perfect combination of zealotry and contentment. Now in his middle age he thought he had found it and was willing to risk all to go where a new sect flourished amid the edenic gardens of America.
He had become a convert to the Disciples of Christ through the exhortations of two brothers named Gray, one of whom had established the sect in Dunbar. The Disciples were still a small movement in Scotland, but they were ardent, and they drew a kind of cultural sustenance from the Scots predilection for “hiving off” into ever smaller splinter groups in religion and politics.
This movement, however, had come to Scotland from abroad, from the New World in fact, where it had its roots in the Great Revival that stirred frontier souls at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Great Revival was in itself the successor to the Great Awakening of the eastern seaboard, and like that earlier outburst it was characterized by an emphatic individualism, by emotional demonstrations of Christian belief, and by a radical anti-institutional bias—convictions close to Daniel Muir’s heart. Mormons, Shakers, Rappites, Adventists, and Spiritualists all came out of it or were greatly strengthened by it, while the established denominations, the Baptists and Methodists, gained large numbers of converts at the expense of their more staid and hierarchical competitors.
What attracted Daniel Muir—and thousands like him—was the promise here of a reversion to the warm and simple ways of the primitive Christian church as it was believed to have been in the days of Christ’s earthly ministry and just after. America, unfeatured, wild, innocently verdant, was clearly the chosen place for this reversion effort, the place where at last Christ’s kingdom on earth could be established. So at least believed the Scots immigrant founders of the Disciples, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, and their American coadjutor, Barton W. Stone.
The Campbells and Stone joined forces in 1832, and thereafter the Disciples became a potent religious force all along the border of an advancing civilization. In Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri, Alexander Campbell was a figure of almost legendary importance until the Civil War, and Mark Twain has recorded in his autobiography the excitement Campbell’s arrival could generate in a sleepy hamlet of middle America. Where such a man as Campbell preached literal adherence to the text of the New Testament without frills or clerical interference and where there seemed such limitless opportunities for the advancement of both the cause and self, there Daniel Muir would go, throwing over as in a moment his prospering grain dealership, ripping up his wife’s family roots and all his associations with his native land.
How much of the background of this decision the Muir children ever knew or understood is questionable. Probably the older four, Margaret, Sarah, John,
