their disconsolate ways through what had lately been their homeland. But the Muirs had not settled in the midst of a wilderness but instead on the edge of a rapidly advancing civilization, one that in Wisconsin was tearing into the landscape and transforming it into a recognizable, functioning part of an increasingly industrialized republic. In this year the line of white settlement had moved considerably west of where the Muirs now were, though to be sure north and northwest of their homestead was still Indian territory.
In the two hundred years since Jean Nicolet had met the Winnebagoes in 1634—wearing his Chinese damask to be prepared for oriental potentates—Wisconsin had remained terra incognita to white America. Throughout much of this time the Winnebago, Menominee, Ojibwa, and Sac and Fox tribes had hunted, fished, gathered grain, planted corn, and buried their dead in ancestral lands, largely undisturbed by all but the advance men of civilization: stray white hunters, fur traders, and voyageurs, singing as they flashed their canoe paddles through the waters at forty strokes to the minute.
Nearly two centuries after Nicolet arrived, a census of the territory found little more than 3,000 whites among about 24,000 Indians. All this changed and rapidly so after the Black Hawk War in 1832. The old chiefs people, the Sac and Fox, the Winnebago, and other tribes who were marginally implicated in the doomed resistance effort, were all severely punished. The decisive and bloody conclusion to the war and the subsequent tours on which Black Hawk was taken as a prisoner of war advertised the openness of new lands and the availability of titles to them.
By the following year, the forced land cessions of the tribes had opened all the territory south of a slanting line from Green Bay to Prairie du Chien to survey and settlement, and the Wisconsin land rush was on. Just as “Ohio Fever” had once threatened the depopulation of Connecticut, so now this newest contagion threatened to draw off not only the best of Ohio but even more migrants from the old northeast and western New York State. Organized as a territory in 1836 with a white population of 11,000, Wisconsin had 31,000 by 1840. By 1850 it had 305,000, and by the end of that decade it would have more than doubled this figure—a growth rate unchallenged anywhere except in California.
The transmogrification of the state from the year of John Muir’s birth to his arrival there is an even more striking illustration of the multiform process that was changing the face and character of a continent. Black Hawk had died in the year Muir was born (and had been buried in the alien regalia of his conquerors), and in that same year one William Smith, a Philadelphia gentleman, published an account of his recent travels through the new territory. He mentioned the wild fecundity of the place, the herds of deer, the flocks of prairie hens that would start up under the hooves of the horses, the huge, luscious strawberries of the prairies, and the abundance of agricultural and mineral wealth just waiting to be tapped by enterprising settlers who were unafraid to plant themselves beyond the fringe of settlement.
Sketching the bright prospects of these new lands, Smith said the settler’s land was
purchased at the government price of one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre: land of the richest soil in the world. His prairie ground awaits immediate cultivation. His crops yield him from thirty-five to fifty bushels of fall wheat per acre, and from twenty to thirty bushels of spring wheat is calculated on as a sure crop; barley will yield from forty to sixty bushels, and oats from fifty to seventy-five bushels ….
This utopia lay in the future, however, for when Smith made his tour Wisconsin was indeed beyond the fringe, and only the lead-mining region of its southwestern corner had anything that could be said to be a dense population. Milwaukee was only a small village, the huge pineries of the north woods were all but unknown, and lumber for downstate construction was actually imported. Fort Winnebago (built under the supervision of U.S. Army Lieutenant Jefferson Davis) was the northernmost outpost of white civilization.
By the time Fredrika Bremer arrived in 1849 the changes were astonishing. Milwaukee was now a populous port of 20,000, and Bremer found immigrant groups scattered throughout the lower half of the state. They were thinly scattered, to be sure, and the state’s roads were rough to the point of threatening bodily injury to stagecoach travelers, but Bremer also observed that it was “remarkable that in all directions throughout this young country, along these rough roads, which are no roads at all, run these electric [telegraph] wires from tree to tree, from post to post, along the prairie land, and bring towns and villages into communication.” Milwaukeee was thus connected to Chicago and to the eastern seaboard.
To some the telegraph seemed an expensive toy, but its presence in the new land was a sure indication that American civilization had reached out to include Wisconsin in its fulsome, energetic embrace. Here once again was the national drama of the subjugation and obliteration of the wilderness. As a man, John Muir would see this drama as a tragedy. Now, a youth in the very midst of it, it was only life and necessity to him. Unwittingly, helplessly, he took up his part in it.
That first spring Daniel Muir hired a “Yankee” to help clear enough ground for crops to see them through winter. As the men worked, John and David pestered the Yankee with questions about the flora and fauna. They wanted to know all about the sandhill cranes whose choked cries sounded as if something had been cranked in their throats and to whom they could never get close before the big birds took air with astonishing suddenness, their wings white against the dense growth of woods. They wondered at the sound of partridge drumming, the meaning of the love song of the jack snipe and the song of the whippoorwill. The Yankee supplied only brusque answers to these and other questions, and there was so much to absorb in this new world, so many things for which questions could not even be formulated.
John Muir reveled in it all: the huge, portentous thunderheads, the clamoring chorus of peepers along the lakeshore, the spring flowers that burst forth in the watery meadow, and most especially the songs of the birds. But soon enough his schoolboy’s vision of America as a vast playground where a boy might wander forever free, feasting his eyes and soul on endless beauty—a dream at least as old as settlement here—broke hard against reality: Muir’s father put him to work in the fields clearing away brush for the advent of the plow and heaping it in great piles for burning. Nor did Father lose this opportunity to sermonize as the bonfires threw out blasts of white heat and showers of sparks. Think, he would say to John, just think what an awful thing it would be to be thrown into the midst of such a great, hot fire. Then think of hellfire that’s so much hotter and that’s reserved for all bad boys and for sinners of every sort who disobey God. Think, too, he added (as if this were not enough) of the infinitude of their sufferings, for neither will that hellfire ever die out—ever—nor will the sufferings of the sinners ever cease.
Then too Father once again took up his habit of childbeating. “The old Scotch fashion,” Muir recalled, “of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and of course many of those whippings fell upon me.” He described them as “outrageously severe,” and they left their marks. Many years afterward in a letter to a boyhood friend, Muir offered some uncharacteristically personal reflections on this practice which, if it was indeed a national one, was in this case surely compounded by the father’s cankered religiosity:
When the rod is falling on the flesh of a child, and, what may oftentimes be worse, heart-breaking scolding falling on its tender little heart, it makes the whole family seem far from the Kingdom of Heaven. In all the world I know of nothing more pathetic and deplorable than a broken-hearted child, sobbing itself to sleep after being unjustly punished by a truly pious and conscientiously misguided parent.
“Compare,” he then concluded, “this Solomonic treatment with Christ’s.”
The “Solomonic treatment” continued through spring and into summer, the cleared space in the oak opening gradually widening and the crops planted. When Daniel Muir wasn’t plowing and planting he was hauling lumber from the Kingston lumberyard and supervising the construction of the permanent dwelling. At the end of the day the family would gather in the
