up, and whereas the Muirs once had been virtually solitary, now all the neighboring quarter sections were taken up. There was a graveyard now, too, and Muir watched it entered upon and filled with its own settlers for whom the New World had not opened onto new vistas of life but had led instead to premature death: Graham, McReath, Thompson, Maitland, Whitehead… . “The generations,” wrote another midwestern child of this time who survived into old age, “cannot utter themselves to each other until the strongest need of utterance is past.” William Dean Howells had seen the wasting of the human resources of the region, and he had lived long enough to see in the next generation writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Hamlin Garland give voices to those silent ones beneath the blurring markers of hundreds of rural burying grounds, writers touched nearly enough by the whole breaking process to conceive their mission as the writing of the somber annals of these victims of ignorant industry and innocent rapacity. Now the maturing Muir could only feel the injustice and the pain and vaguely ponder the meaning of it all.
Terms of Challenge
The new homestead lay about five miles southeast of Fountain Lake, and the Muirs christened it Hickory Hill since the house site was atop a hill thickly studded with hickories. Here they raised a stout two-story frame house with a wing running off it in back. Behind the house they built a high, broad barn that backed up on the woods. The views on the other three sides were fine: the land’s gentle rolls lent variety to the eye, and here and there were heavy copses of virgin timber.
John Muir had already cleared the near fields in those months before the family moved, and when they did so the farm was already in production. Western land hunger had plunged the nation into a financial panic in this year of 1857, and the consequences of soil misuse were becoming evident throughout the Midwest. Still the Muirs were hoping to prosper on the new farm as they had not on the old, one family’s version of the national notion that somehow a new situation would inevitably be better than the one left behind.
But the new start began badly for John Muir, began, in fact, almost fatally. Unlike the old homestead, the new one was far from any surface water, and Muir was ordered to dig a well behind the house and a few yards from the barn. He soon tapped into a stratum of close-grained sandstone; the Muirs tried blasting through this, but they were unskilled at it, and so finally Daniel Muir gave his son mason’s tools and told him he must chip his way down to water.
The work went on at a painful, inching pace. Each morning Muir was lowered by bucket and windlass into the slowly deepening shaft and left to work in this cramped, airless place until he was hauled out again for the noon dinner. Then, back down again until supper and chores. One morning as he was lowered into the shaft—at this point about eighty feet deep—he was all but overcome by carbon dioxide that had collected overnight at the bottom. As the fatal fumes invaded his lungs and numbed his brain, he could faintly and confusedly hear his father shouting down to him to get into the bucket, but he was already so weak that it seemed easier to settle against a wall of the shaft and sleep. As his father continued to shout, frantically now, Muir somehow summoned awareness and strength enough to clamber into the bucket and was hauled out, unconscious and gasping for breath.
There was no more work that day or the next, and while he lay in the costly luxury of his sick bed, Muir was visited by William Duncan, who had been a miner and stonemason in Scotland. “Weel, Johnnie,” Muir recalled him saying, “it’s God’s mercy that you’re alive. Many a companion of mine have I seen dead with choke-damp, but none that I ever saw or heard of was so near death in it as you were and escaped without help.” Duncan taught Daniel Muir to air the shaft each morning with a splash of water and frequent stirrings with a bundle of brush and hay. Then the work went on.
Ninety feet down, Muir struck a “fine, hearty gush of water.” They had their well now but at a price Muir would feel all his life; later he claimed that a peculiar rasping feeling in his throat was a lifelong reminder of the incident.
Nor could Muir ever forgive the fact that his father “never spent an hour in that well.” The episode served to deepen his resentments against Daniel Muir’s tyranny. But whereas the boy had few effective defenses against that tyranny, the young man had been developing some in the last years at Fountain Lake, and he continued to do so now at Hickory Hill. Things had slowly been changing in the Muir family, and especially between the father and his eldest son. For one thing, Daniel Muir had now completely retired from active participation in the running of the farm and left things to John. He still gave the orders, of course, and supervised the work, but henceforth he would devote himself to his religious pursuits, attending every revival meeting in the vicinity, and traveling about two counties as a preaching elder of the Disciples of Christ. When at home, he would sit by a strategically located study window where, his Bible in his lap, he could watch his children at their labors in the fields below.
Sarah’s departure for her own household on the old acreage had also made a difference, for she had been a second, mediating mother in the household, and the loss of her counsel and helping hand was felt. Now John began to draw closer to Maggie, four years his senior and a sympathetic listener to whom he commenced to confide both his misgivings and vague ambitions.
The major difference, however, lay in the altered relations between Daniel Muir and John. This was not the boy who had been set to the plow in the spring of 1850. He had been seasoned and toughened by seven hard years in the fields, woods, and barnyard, and he had crossed the invisible divide into young manhood: lean, self-reliant, and increasingly thoughtful. He still deferred to his father and obeyed the orders so peremptorily given, but for some time now he had been freed of a particularly galling part of the paternal tyranny, for even Daniel Muir, so convinced of the spiritual necessity of corporal punishment, had come to feel it was unwise to continue beating John. The master-serf relationship between the two now became an undeclared battle between them. On the surface of it, there was the continuous crackle of verbal skirmishing in which the younger man often enjoyed an advantage, but beneath this lay John Muir’s mortal effort to preserve an essential part of his character as he had come to understand it.
His experiences with the natural world of his Scots childhood had given him a kind of psychic and spiritual base, and in his early years at Fountain Lake he had drawn sustenance from this during the apparently endless days of his servitude until the kinship he felt for nature had deepened into a genuine need. This was the boy—now the young man—who had successfully cheered himself in the frosty fields of midwinter Wisconsin by watching the brave peckings and chirpings of the nuthatches and chickadees. This was the young man who had become intensely interested in some of the very things that had made his life so hard: the thick, gnarled oak and hickory grubs, for instance, that would toss the plowshare out of its furrow when it ran up against them. But rather than cursing their existence (though he may have done this, too, on occasion), Muir made an informal study of the roots and marveled at what he discovered of their life history.
But the farm, and specifically the life he was forced by his father to lead on it, threatened this essential affinity and presented Muir with the first and perhaps the greatest psychic challenge of his life: how in this circumstance to preserve his love of nature. Placed in an adversary, exploitative relationship, an unremitting hand-to-hand combat with the land, he began in his adolescent years to imagine some way of being and thinking that would allow him to continue to love that with which he struggled.
As any farm child knows, it is easy enough to talk of the bucolic splendors of the country when one has never known the round of agricultural labor, and it is quite another to love nature when one has to work with it each day of the year. Hamlin Garland had to learn this lesson and later wrote about it in his story “Up the Coulee.” Here a man who had fled the Wisconsin farm of his youth returned to visit his mother and brother. Riding the train through the countryside toward his old home, he found the land beautiful, a serene and timeless garden of happiness.
