John Muir

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, and emigrated with his family to Wisconsin at age 11. He spent his young adulthood as an inventor and mechanical genius before a factory accident temporarily blinded him and redirected his attention entirely toward the natural world.

In 1867 he walked from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico — a thousand miles, mostly on foot, through the post-Civil War South. He described it in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (published posthumously in 1916). It reads nothing like most Victorian nature writing — Muir was interested in wildness, not the picturesque, and his early writing has a fierceness that conventional nature appreciation lacked.

His Yosemite writing — My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Mountains of California (1894) — gave American readers their first vivid imaginative account of the high Sierra. He climbed peaks in storms, rode avalanches, and slept on ledges to see sunrises, and he wrote about these experiences as spiritual events. His prose mixes scientific observation with something close to religious ecstasy.

His advocacy for national parks was direct and effective. He took President Theodore Roosevelt camping in Yosemite in 1903 — they slept under the stars for three nights — and the federal protection of Yosemite followed.