passengers without any official reception process whatever. The newcomers simply gathered their belongings and got off.
Waiting for them were the unofficial greeters: crimps and sharks who would tote baggage at extortionate rates and disappear with it if not closely followed; others who sought to waylay the foolish in dockside taverns and spend their money for them; confidence men who for a fee would disclose to these land-hungry Europeans the finest piece of western land available anywhere; others who could arrange inland passage at what were described as rock-bottom terms. In the spring of 1849, business for these types was brisk. There was the uproar of the gold rush, and there were hundreds of thousands of innocent immigrants tumbling in—more than 200,000 this year of ’49 into the port of New York alone. Viewing this unprecedented phenomenon from the vantage point of local journalists, Horace Greeley and Walt Whitman hoped these newcomers would not become trapped in the sprawling port cities and adjacent towns of the eastern seaboard but would get the right advice and head west.
Daniel Muir, with his eye now set on Wisconsin, did so, lingering but a day or two in New York before arranging passage up the Hudson to Albany. There the family saw evidence of the destruction caused by a great fire the previous summer, and there too they saw evidence of that almost ferocious energy of these Americans, who had already rebuilt much of the gutted area. Then along the Erie Canal to Buffalo. The opening of the canal in 1825—the engineering wonder of its time—had proved to be the major factor in attracting settlers like the Muirs into the Midwest, for it had put the ports of Lake Michigan’s western shore on an all-water route to New York City. The canal also had the effect of inflating western New York State land values and so encouraging migrants to hunt farther west in search of cheaper real estate.
Buffalo was the gateway to the new region and in this year it would see more than a quarter of a million migrants pass through on their ways to the prairies. Here Daniel Muir made contact with William Gray, brother of that Philip Gray who led the Edinburgh chapter of the Disciples. Doubtless Gray gave Muir further information of the locations of Disciples centers and good lands in Wisconsin, and John remembered that his father also had a conversation then with a fellow grain dealer who told him that most of the grain received in Buffalo came from Wisconsin.
The Muirs took passage on one of the daily lake steamers out of Buffalo, jammed to its railings with a rough and travel-stained crowd of gold rushers and immigrants, each in his or her national dress, and five days later arrived at Milwaukee, where they joined yet another throng on the wharves and dockside streets and vacant lots. There amid the wheat, pork, and flour from the inland farms they haggled for oxen and wagons to take them still farther.
The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer was in Milwaukee about the same time and found it a beautiful town whose buildings were mostly of pale yellow brick with a populace dominated by thrifty German immigrants. But in 1849 hogs still roamed Milwaukee’s streets, the municipal sewerage system was primitive, and there was (again) cholera. Even had Daniel Muir been disposed to stop here and set up again as a grain dealer, city property was dear, and all the best land on the outskirts had been snapped up by speculators. Those like himself who wanted cheap land were obliged to travel toward Madison and then strike northward through the middle of the state. Muir made a bargain at the port city with a farmer just in from Fort Winnebago with a load of wheat who, for thirty dollars, agreed to transport the Muir family and what John Muir called “our formidable load of stuff” to the town of Kingston some one hundred miles to the northwest.
And so they were off again on the last leg of their long trip, going now over the heavy, mired spring prairies, the oxen and wagon groaning and creaking under the grievous burden of immigrant belongings, many of them purchased in the misguided notion that nowhere in the wilderness beyond Buffalo could the necessities of civilized life be had. Atop the massed stuff—scales, weights, scythes, kettles, stove—sat the severe seeker, Abraham of his little flock, who had set his face toward what he hoped would at last prove his promised land.
The way was rough. Where there were roads these were usually not much better than the unimproved countryside, especially in springtime. Assuming a generally northwestward route to Kingston, they would have passed out of Milwaukee into a region of sugar maples (those treasure trees of which John Muir had heard), basswood, and oaks. Here and there were narrow little valleys with swamps and stands of black spruce and tamarack and hemlock. The junction of present Jefferson County and Dodge County was actually the best farming land the Muirs would have seen on their way to Kingston, but the immigrant father could not have known this, and there were no farms there to give him a clue.
So they kept their way through the oak openings, skirting the streams with their heavy thickets. Until a few years earlier, this portion of the country had been all but unknown to whites, but now a few settlements gave some cheer to anxious travelers—though probably the Muir boys were delighted by the areas they passed through that seemed most untouched. A man named Hyland had recently broken a wagon road from Watertown north to the center of Dodge County and had settled on the prairie there. Others had followed so that houses and barns now dotted the prairie, and all the quarter sections along Hyland’s road had been taken. At Beaver Dam there was another small settlement and a sawmill in operation.
They went on through the sedgy meadows of southeastern Columbia County, then prairie and oak openings with the country beginning to roll now into knolls and hills, until at last they arrived at Kingston, hardly more than a huddle of houses with an inn at the crossroads. Alexander Gray, a bluff, hearty Scots settler near Kingston, readily agreed to help Daniel Muir locate on a suitable piece of land. Gray’s farm was on a section road and he knew the lines of the immediate locale and the qualities of the soil. While their father was off on this business, John and David plunged into their own business of establishing childhood’s intimacy with their new surroundings. Still in the fiction of America as a wild and wonderful playground, they explored the Grays’ whitewashed farmhouse, the barn and outbuildings, the creek that ran behind—smooth and brown-watered with black snags on which snapping turtles sunned and drowsed. They played in the sandy road shaded by bur oaks, white oaks, and shagbark hickories. At the edges of the road ran remnant lines of the big blue stem flower that had once ruled the open lands of the whole Midwest. Meanwhile, Sarah was introduced to reality as Mrs. Gray gave her beginning lessons in the life drudgeries of a farm woman.
Gray and Daniel Muir picked out eighty acres of open woodland about six miles to the northwest on a knoll that sloped westward down through a glacial meadow laced with brooks to a small lake. On the brow of the knoll, Gray, Muir, and some neighbors joined in the quick construction of a bur-oak shanty that would serve as shelter for Daniel and the three children while a more substantial house was framed for the rest of the family.
In the meantime, life was a glorious and innocent exploration for the two immigrant boys from a Scots fishing village. They raced through the meadow, prying into tufts of grass and bushes in search of nests and burrows; climbed trees to inspect the birds’ nests they had spied; poked along the brooks, marveling at the profusion of snakes, frogs, and turtles. Muir recalled, “This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—”
how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!
In that spring of 1849, no white settler lived within a four-mile radius of the Muirs, nor was there a single man-made road in the vicinity other than the old Indian trail that ran through the marshy lands along the Fox River to the town of Portage. To children accustomed to the countryside of the Lammermuirs with its old farms and stone-walled fields, this new landscape must have appeared shaggy indeed, a true wilderness. Strange and wild-seeming birds like nighthawks and partridges bellowed and drummed in the woods. Fireflies spangled the unbroken fields at dusk. And on the far side of the long, narrow lake an occasional drift of wood smoke marked the encampment of some wandering
