last bit of daylight lingered within the rough confines, they would kneel on the bare plankings in family worship. Muir evidently took some pleasure in remembering of these moments that he “too often studied the small wild creatures” that played about the devout scene, the field mice and beetles that used the interior of the shanty as if it had been made for them.
By fall when Anne Muir and the rest of the children arrived the house was ready. Of good pine, it stood stout, foursquare, and high with eight rooms; like its owner it was utterly without frills. Behind it was the bur-oak shanty, now converted to a stable for the boys’ Indian pony, Jack. A barn and corral were at the foot of the hill leading down to the lake. John Muir said their wheat field was the first in the vicinity, and on that first evening together the reunited family strolled the borders of the field while Daniel Muir extolled the virtues of his frontier industry.
In his autobiography Muir did not spare readers when it came to descriptions of farm life, but he mentions none of that winter of 1849–50. They must have laid in enough corn, potatoes, and fuel wood to get by, they fed the stock wild hay, and for additional supplies they would have gone along the river road to Portage, a larger town than Kingston and about twelve miles distant. Here Muir had his first good look at American civilization along its cutting edge.
A rough settlement, Portage was strategically positioned between the Wisconsin and Fox rivers. At first it had been a fur-trading center in Astor’s sprawling network, and then in the natural course of such things a military fort. Now, with the furbearing animals hunted out, it was a town supplying the needs of the local farmers and the red-coated lumberjacks bound north to the pineries or south out of them. The fort, as Muir remembered it, still stood within its stockade and was “painted a glistening white, still formidable although the last company of soldiers had departed three or four years ago to take part in War with Mexico.”
There were perhaps 400 permanent residents when the Muirs arrived—Scots, Germans, Yankees from Vermont and Maine, a few blacks—and a shifting population of land speculators, canal boomers, lawyers, whores, theatrical troupers, lumberjacks, and Indians. As a boy from a Scots fishing village, Muir would already have seen his share of pubs and drinking, yet he remembered the freedom with which whiskey flowed in Portage and noted that the “many stores that rejoiced under the name of groceries and genral [sic] merchandise emporiums made their main profits out of whiskey.” The streets were enlivened by Indian ponies at the hitching posts, Indian dogs everywhere, and frequent fistfights. There were cows on the common when the weather permitted. Twice weekly the stage arrived from Madison and pulled up with a grand flourish at the tavern of Uncle Dick Veeder. Here the stage driver, a kind of local hero in red-flannel shirt, high boots, and wide hat, would swing down to mingle with the crowd of lumberjacks and raftsmen who made Veeder’s tavern their clubhouse.
With the coming of spring, 1850, life at what the Muirs called Fountain Lake farm began in earnest. Like so many other settlers, Daniel Muir was going to plant wheat as his cash crop: for a man struggling to get a claim into production, what with clearing, chopping, and fencing, wheat farming was the answer since it could be done in relatively careless fashion and on an extensive basis. So, much more of the Muir land had to be broken open and, as the eldest son, John Muir was drafted for the work.
As soon as the frost was out of the ground, the boy, though not quite twelve, was put to the plow behind the shambling oxen. The big handles of the shafts were about as high as his head so that all day he was obliged to trudge through the shearing furrows with his arms upraised, perhaps as many as eight or nine miles of walking before noon dinner. At the end of each row there was the task of hauling the heavy share loose from the gooey clods and setting it straight again for the return up field. At last the noon dinner and its hour of rest while his young muscles cooled and shrank so that, when called again to the work, he would go bent and hobbling at first like an old man. After another wearying round through the long afternoon, there was supper, the cows to be brought in, horses to be fed, worship, bed.
So it had begun: the patient, inevitable wheeling of the seasons and the years—a decade—and the boy driven relentlessly through them until at last he had emerged on the other side, work-hardened, accustomed to more than ordinary hardship, a man. But a man who had struggled and had managed to retain a youth’s enthusiasm for the natural world that was the scene of his daily toil.
All his life he would remember with that primitive vividness the sights, sounds, and smells of the Wisconsin seasons. Spring announced itself with the shotlike reports of the lake ice cracking and breaking up. As the boy trudged the fields putting in the wheat, the corn, and the potatoes, his mind found refuge and instruction it would lay up for the harvest of maturity as he attended the mysterious emergence of the myriad life forms after the hard sleep of the Wisconsin winter. With the breaking of the ice, the loon, the great northern diver, sounded its utterly wild, wavering cry above the freed waters. Muir marveled at its apparently crazy, wing-dipping routes above the lake, how it would suddenly swoop, splash, and disappear beneath the surface and then emerge hundreds of yards farther on, beating the water from its feathers in flashing beads. Once he shot and wounded one of these magnificent creatures and brought it into the house, where he was able to study its anatomy at close range.
After the loons’ appearance came the bluebirds, bright and tuneful harbingers that told the sure advance of the new season on the thawing land, then the song sparrows, thrushes—those grand singers—the bobolinks, and the handsome red-winged blackbirds. It was a memorable day to Muir when he beheld for the first time the fabulous passenger pigeons of which he had read in Dunbar days. They arrived on a spring day just after the snow had melted, thousands and thousands of them, sweeping the woods clean of acorns in a few minutes. Despite the fact that, as Muir said, every “shotgun was aimed at them and everybody feasted on pigeon pies,” for years they kept coming, spring and summer, and no one could have foretold that this apparently inexhaustible species would be hunted to extinction by the turn of the century.
Far less spectacular but equally awesome in their grace and clearly intelligent behavior were the flocks of Canada geese that broke their northward journeys to alight warily in the Muir wheat fields. After feeding on the young leaves they would mount again into the softening skies and assemble into harrow-shaped formations, leaving the plowboy behind in the fields gazing after them and musing on the mysteries of animal ways, perhaps already beginning to feel that “blind instinct” was not an adequate explanation of the behavior of such wonderful creatures as these.
Through the gradually lengthening days he worked on, kept company by birds busy with nest building and babies, the peepers beginning again to sing in the rushy margins of the lake, and the smaller creatures of the field who had come out into the warming sun—like the gophers who ate so much of the seed corn before it could sprout and whom Muir and his brothers were commanded to kill.
Spring ripened into summer and with it came the hardest labor as the heat intensified. The Muirs had settled far enough south in the state to experience corn-belt summers: hot, hazy days of high humidity punctuated by explosive thundershowers that cooled the air only momentarily before the sun rolled out again from behind the clouds to shine down fiercely on the wet lands. Such days began for them at dawn when gauzy mists hung low over the waiting fields, lake, and woodlands. Muir sharpened tools, fed the stock, chopped stove wood, and struggled up the slope from the spring under the slopping water buckets. Then there was breakfast, and then the fields. In the early years before Daniel Muir bought cultivators, all the cleared land had to be hoed, and the business of corn hoeing was a deadly, heavy one. Daniel Muir insisted that the hoes be kept busy at a machinelike, unvarying pace, that there be no talking or loitering when the children were in the field. Sickness was not allowed. Only once could Muir recall that he had been excused for illness, when he had a case of pneumonia from which he almost died. On another occasion, he had a severe case of the mumps but had to bear a hand anyway, though he often staggered and fell among the wheat sheaves.
In the deeps of the fields the sun streamed down on the boy and his brothers and sisters, the only shade being
