of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.
Daniel Muir had spied out a tract of land that he thought would prove more fertile than the original homestead, and he had put John to the task of getting it ready for the move, which came in 1857. Meanwhile, the elder Muir had found a buyer for Fountain Lake farm in David Galloway, a twenty-eight-year-old Scot from Fifeshire who had settled in the area, then gone back to Scotland to bring over his parents and relatives. Galloway had fallen in love with Sarah Muir, and they were married in 1856. Galloway released his bride from the servitude of the fields, but the other children remained bound to their tasks.
A major factor that tempted Daniel Muir to the breaking of this new and much larger tract was the endemic immigrant disease called “land hunger.” Most immigrants, even if they had some previous experience with farming as Daniel Muir had, possessed no background as landholders, and in the presence of such an abundance of cheap land as they now found in the New World they grew understandably greedy. Not content with living on small and manageable plots, many bought as much land as they could. A popular Wisconsin saying of the time was that “all the land a man rightly wanted was his own claim and any land that adjoined it.”
In America, the Scots had gained and largely deserved a reputation as even more improvident in this regard, perhaps in part because their native agricultural practices had long been among the most benighted in the Old World. Here they were known not only for buying up more land than they could well manage but also for their wasteful methods of farming. Often they were ignorantly unconcerned with crop rotation and manuring and would exhaust one patch of ground, then another until finally they had worked out their entire claim and had to move on. Rather than cut trees for fuel and lumber and utilize the wood ashes for soap, Scots farmers often seemed content merely to girdle their trees and plant around them while the trees slowly died. In Wisconsin, the contrasts between the thrifty methods of the German immigrants and their Scots neighbors were embarrassing to the latter.
And this was the other factor in Daniel Muir’s decision to move: he had worked out his soil. The light and sandy grounds of Fountain Lake had begun to give out, the wheat yields dwindling steadily from twenty-five to twenty, then to five or six bushels per acre. Daniel Muir had tried corn, but here too the yield gradually proved disappointing. So the answer seemed to be to buy another piece of land and try there. In this fashion much of the state had become exhausted as a wheat-producing region by the time of the Civil War. After the war the locus of production would move into Iowa, Minnesota, and then North Dakota. Hamlin Garland’s story is typical of this general pattern: born on a Wisconsin wheat farm on the eve of the Civil War, Garland had moved with his family to Iowa after the war, and they had ended up raising wheat again on the prairies of North Dakota in the 1880s.
But this ignorant prodigality and disregard for the future was not confined to wheat or to any one national group: all the resources of the region were at the mercy of these mental habits and all groups were to one degree or another implicated. Wood, so plentiful that early settlers positively delighted to see stands of timber consumed by the annual fall grass fires, was everywhere used up in the most wasteful of ways. The land, so it was said, was made for farming, and cutting timber simply and self-evidently opened more land for agriculture while it also produced jobs, capital, and useful products. Hardly anyone out there knew enough to worry about the long-range effects of deforestation, and the few who did, like Professor Increase Lapham of the state college at Madison, were dismissed as cranks. Any settler could tell the professor that there was more wood in Wisconsin than could well be used. But the pineries of the great north woods, hardly known in the year of Muir’s birth, were by now being rapidly sawed to bits. Portable steam-powered saw mills and larger permanent installations sent out an estimated two hundred million board feet in 1853, and a decade after the Civil War the end of the timbering up there was in sight, a thing that would have seemed incredible but a few years previous when the rivers out of the pineries were choked with fabulous log jams.
Daniel Muir was no exception to these wasteful habits of mind and the wasteful practices they engendered. He too ordered the spendthrift cutting of timber on his lands and then refused to use what he had cut to warm his house and so provide for the health and comfort of his family. “The very best oak and hickory fuel,” John Muir recalled of his Wisconsin homesteads, “was embarrassingly abundant and cost nothing but cutting and common sense… .” However, instead of constructing ample fireplaces to accommodate large logs of these slow-burning woods as a household defense against the Wisconsin winters, Daniel Muir ordered the felled timber “hauled with weary heart-breaking industry into fences and waste places to get it out of the way of the plough, and out of the way of doing good.” Meanwhile, the Muir family shivered about what John Muir remembered was a miserable little kitchen stove with a firebox “about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep—scant space for three or four small sticks … .” Yet if Daniel Muir was both niggardly and wasteful with his own timber, there was a persistent rumor in the Muirs’ neighborhood that he ordered his eldest son to poach timber from government land that lay in a swale west of his new claim. If he did so, Daniel Muir at least had the sanction of popular custom, the practice being widespread, the poachers accounting the timber as actually free and the sale money from it a kind of windfall.
Of all this and its consequences for the region—lowered water tables, droughts, proliferation of pests, exhaustion of the soil—Muir at the time knew little, though he could surely lament the wasting of those “heart-cheering” loads of wood. Like the others he was caught up in the seemingly inevitable process of breaking the land for civilization and profit.
Looking around him, he could see other families likewise bound to the soil, other children like himself and his brothers and sisters laboring at kindred tasks through the seasons: planting, plowing, chopping, even poaching wood. Perhaps his father was more severe in his demands and in the way he enforced them, but in truth all the immigrants drove themselves and their families much too hard. Nor did they seem to know any better in this regard than in agricultural matters, where the rule of hard usage also prevailed. As many of them had no previous experience with land-holding or with the principle of usufruct, so many like the elder Muir had had too near and numbing an experience with child labor to recognize how it could surely blunt and blight the new generations. In the Lanark mills of Daniel Muir’s time children regularly worked a thirteen-hour day, six days a week, and spent their Sundays cleaning the machinery. Well into the nineteenth century it was common practice in the British Isles to employ women and small children in the pit collieries where like beasts they hauled carts by iron chains about their middles. To those with such knowledge the labor of the farm seemed neither cruel nor unusual.
To outsiders it might, as it did to Fredrika Bremer. Watching the midwestern farm families, bent and sweating in their chosen servitude, she wondered whether these new Americans, so determined on freedom and prosperity, would ever awaken to the far grander opportunity their new lands and situation offered: the chance to turn toward the sun, to open themselves to the possibility of regeneration as the vanished aboriginal races evidently had.
In the middle 1850s as his father prepared yet another agonizing grid of work for him, John Muir was not quite ready for such thoughts. And yet he could hardly have been oblivious to the human consequences of this furious industry. He could see some of those consequences in the deepening lines of toil and resignation in his own mother’s face, in her hands. He knew that his sisters Sarah and Margaret were now in chronically poor health and that the first and greatest gift David Galloway had bestowed on the former was to take her out of the fields forever. He himself bore the humiliating title of the “runt of the family” since among these tall, angular folk he was somewhat undersized for a teenaged boy; later, he would claim that overwork had stunted his growth.
Like the people, the countryside seemed to be taking on the look of age, seemed to be becoming a facsimile of that Old World the immigrants had so
