of a new religious enthusiasm; as the years went on and they saw him through an endless succession of these, they apparently learned a sort of ironic tolerance. Now, perhaps they merely accepted his latest involvement as one of the conditions of their lives without understanding how profoundly it was about to change their own destinies.
As for Anne Muir, she was probably simply told, and then Daniel Muir announced his plan to his in-laws. David Gilrye was vastly displeased and even alarmed for the welfare of his daughter and grandchildren. He now redrew his will so as to bar Daniel Muir from any inheritance and forced Muir to leave Anne behind with Margaret and the three younger children until a satisfactory home had been established. The old man knew enough of American realities to sense some of the perils of Daniel Muir’s decision, and this in addition to his view of his son-in-law’s capriciousness and restless spirit produced in him deep forebodings.
On February 1, 1849, Daniel and Anne G. Muir sold their property to Dr. John Lorn, a local physician, the deed of sale being officially recorded on the twelfth. On the evening of the eighteenth John and David were at the grandparents’ hearthside where Grandfather Gilrye put them through their educational paces. Then the father came in from across the high street to announce that they need not learn their lesson this night for in the morning they would be off for America.
Fifty-eight years later John Muir recalled vividly his reaction to this lightning bolt of news: “No more grammar, but boundless woods full of mysterious good things; trees full of sugar, growing in ground full of gold … .” He instantly thought of the naturalist Wilson’s hawks and eagles and of Audubon’s awe-inspiring descriptions of flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the western skies like mighty thunderclouds. Here, suddenly, magnificently, was the prospect of millions of birds’ nests and no gamekeepers in all the “wonderful schoolless, bookless American wilderness.” John and David were delirious with delight, so much so (as Muir recalled in the unpublished version of this episode) that they could not work up a “decent regret” over leaving their grandparents. They promised to send grandfather a box of the fabulous tree sugar packed around with gold. But Gilrye had heard another side to the American story in the tales of terrific hardship and child agricultural servitude as recounted in the letters of immigrants. He knew, looking at these two small boys, wide-eyed in the firelight, that soon enough they too would be enlisted in the breaking of the new lands and that they might themselves be broken in the process. Poor laddies, he called them, and gave each a keepsake gold coin.
Grandfather’s dour forecast was lost on the boys. In the dark street John shouted to some passing schoolmates that he was going to America in the morning. They jeered back their disbelief: the thing was incredible.
And yet in the next morning’s gray light the Muir family with the Gilryes in attendance could be seen bundling down the high street, past the kirkyard (where soon David and Margaret Gilrye would join six of their children beneath a wide heavy marker) and on to the train station. The Glasgow train steamed in, Daniel Muir shepherded Sarah, John, and David aboard it, and they were gone.
In Glasgow there was a new stir to the city to which Daniel Muir had fled in his youth. The stir was the immigration trade, and docksides bristled with the thousands bound outward on errands of necessity and hope. Posters advertised swift passage to limitless opportunity, and the papers were filled with reports of the newest incentive, gold. A newspaper dispatch by electric telegraph told of discussions of a proposed railway across the Panamanian isthmus; another recounted the huge migration to California currently in progress from the eastern United States. There were dozens of items crammed under the heading “Ho! For California” and announcing the availability of passage to Chagres, of California mining boots, of daguerreotypes for those who wished to leave behind likenesses for family and friends, even of specially durable pens for those bound for the gold fields, these last items guaranteed to outlast a “cargo of quills.”
There were other marks of the times that February day as the Muirs stowed their gear aboard with the other emigrants. One item in the day’s news told of a fire in a cheap Glasgow theater that had so far taken the lives of more than fifty people. Another tallied ninety-two recent cases of cholera. In comparison with the brilliant prospects in the offing, the Old World must have indeed seemed old, dreary, and diseased to those—many of them newly married, so Muir remembered—aboard that bluff-prowed ship nudging down the Clyde in the gloom of a winter evening. But perhaps to none was the contrast more dramatic and exciting than to the boy, not quite eleven, who hung onto the rails as the lights of the Old World dropped steadily astern. The sea, woods, and meadows of the Lothians had created a hunger in Johnnie Muir for the wild. He was now bound for a place that promised to satisfy it fully.
As he recalled the passage years later, Muir found it a grand and glorious six-week holiday. There was, of course, no school with its dulling rote routines and cheerless martial tone. And there were probably no thrashings, either, for Daniel Muir (and Sarah as well) was seasick much of the time. John and David were thus much on their own and scampered about the tilting decks, dodging sea chests and sailors, and marveling at the great, rough expanse of water. They made friends with the sailors, learned at first hand the uses of those knots, ropes, and sails they had encountered as seaside boys in Dunbar. Now at last they were aboard a ship instead of merely watching them sail past on their much-conjectured destinies. But Muir also suggests that his delight in the passage was not shared by many of the emigrants, and even had he been silent on this, we know enough about such midnineteenth-century voyages to have drawn the inference.
They were often grim affairs. Ships plying the immigration trade were routinely overcrowded in defiance of the laws, and few health-care provisions were enforced during voyages that averaged about forty days (the Muirs’ was forty-seven). Many captains kept their passengers virtual prisoners below deck, where fetid air, bad water, and tainted food produced “ship’s fever” (typhus), dysentery, and other intestinal ailments. In the 1830s and ’40s the ships brought cholera with them and the mortality was often frightful: passengers told of scores of bodies being dumped overboard. In 1847 seventeen thousand cholera cases were logged at Quebec alone; on the ship bringing Thorstein Veblen’s father from Norway to Wisconsin in that same year, every child died en route.
There was sickness aboard the Muirs’ ship, too, and John Muir remembered the emigrants bravely attempting to keep up their spirits by singing songs and swapping happy dreams of futurity amid the smoky air of the hold. The Scots aboard talked of the settlements made by their countrymen in Nova Scotia, along the St. Lawrence, and in Ontario. They knew also of the sizable Scots and Scots-Irish population of South Carolina and the junction area of Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia. Apparently Daniel Muir, though he too knew of these settlements, and though he had hoped to settle amid a group of coreligionists, had shipped with only the most general knowledge of American geography and with no fixed notion of where he might settle his family. Most of the stories he had heard were of Canada, but now he heard anecdotes of the relentless hardships of the Canadian wilderness, how a man might sweat himself into an early grave grubbing out a meager farm in the shadow of the endless forests. He heard too of the open prairies suitable for farming that lay somewhere below Canada’s southern border. For years, Scots who had originally migrated to Canada had been moving south into the States for this very reason.
In addition, Daniel Muir discovered some Disciples of Christ among the emigrants, and from these he learned of settlements the sect had made in the newly opened region of Wisconsin. In 1849, the Disciples had established centers at Manitowoc, Center, Platteville, and Waupun. Doubtless, it was said, more would be established (they were), for in this year Wisconsin’s population was growing at a faster rate than that of any state in the region. It had succeeded Ohio as the place to settle. Daniel Muir’s view now shifted southward from Canada as the voyage continued, and by the time they raised the port of New York he had determined to try Wisconsin.
On the mild breezes of April 5, the Muirs’ ship came to port. In those days incoming foreign vessels were required to clear a Staten Island quarantine station where the obviously sick were detained, but then the ships
