John Muir

His father made him learn scripture by heart and by sore flesh, so that by 11 he had the New Testament and most of the Old. The family had left Dunbar in 1849 for a Wisconsin farm. He got clear through machines: at the 1860 state fair his handmade clocks took a prize and brought him to Jeanne Carr, the correspondent he learned to write for. At the University of Wisconsin he paid his own way, never rose past first-year standing because his course choices baffled the registrar, and left with no degree. In March 1867 a file slipped in an Indianapolis factory and cut the cornea of his right eye. The other failed in sympathy. He lay six weeks in the dark not knowing if he would see again.

More than 300 articles, two of them in The Century in 1890 that Congress essentially copied into the bill creating Yosemite National Park. The Sierra Club in 1892, with Muir as its president for the next 22 years. The break with Gifford Pinchot in 1897 over sheep in the forest reserves, which split American conservation into two camps still arguing today. Yosemite Valley handed from the state to the federal government in 1906. Hetch Hetchy dammed anyway in 1913. BriefHistory carries that campaign and what it won. This page is about the man running it.

The wilderness he defended was not empty and he wrote as though it were. Muir never acknowledged that the meadows he loved had been kept open for millennia by Native burning, and of the Miwok in Yosemite he wrote that they were most ugly, some of them altogether hideous, and that he was glad to see them fading down the pass. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf carries a passage about Black Southerners that is worse. His views did move. In Travels in Alaska he wrote that all races are essentially alike and that slavery was immoral. On July 22, 2020, the Sierra Club said that its founder had made derogatory comments drawing on deeply harmful racist stereotypes. Aaron Mair, the first Black president of its board, called that framing a misrepresentation and said the club had not consulted him.

He died on Christmas Eve 1914 in a Los Angeles hospital, of pneumonia, a year and five days after Woodrow Wilson signed the Hetch Hetchy bill. The name went everywhere afterward: a national monument north of San Francisco, a glacier in Alaska, a peak a mile south of Mount Whitney, a 1964 postage stamp, the California state quarter, and a state commemorative day, the first California created for anybody. The club he started with a Berkeley philologist and a San Francisco lawyer now has more than 2.4 million members. The largest collection of his papers sits at the University of the Pacific, which was given outright ownership in 2019. The argument about what he wrote is not over.

John Muir's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Treasures of the Yosemite article
  One of two Century pieces Congress followed almost exactly in creating the park 1890
• The Sierra Club company
  Founded with Henry Senger and Warren Olney — now more than 2.4 million members 1892
• The Mountains of California book 1894
• Our National Parks book
  The book Theodore Roosevelt had read before the two of them camped 1901
• My First Summer in the Sierra book
  Drawn from the shepherding season that made him a Yosemite fixture 1911
• A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf book
  Published two years after his death, and the source of his ugliest pages 1916

• 1849 aged ~11 The Muirs leave Dunbar for a farm near Portage, Wisconsin He was 11 and never lost the accent.
• 1860 aged ~22 Wins a prize at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair for handmade clocks and a thermometer The fair assistant who reviewed his entries was Jeanne Carr.
• March 1867 aged 28 A file slips in an Indianapolis factory and takes his sight for six weeks
• September 1867 aged 29 Sets out to walk roughly 1,000 miles from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico He nearly died of malaria at Cedar Key, Florida.
• 1880 aged ~42 Marries Louisa Strentzel and spends ten years running her father's fruit ranch He told a visitor at Martinez that the house was a good place to write in but not his home.
• May 28, 1892 aged 54 The Sierra Club holds its first meeting
• 1903 aged ~65 Camps with Theodore Roosevelt in the Yosemite back country and is naturalized as a US citizen They slept at Glacier Point and woke under fresh snow.
• December 19, 1913 aged 75 Woodrow Wilson signs the bill authorizing the Hetch Hetchy dam Muir called the loss hard to bear.
• December 24, 1914 aged 76 Dies of pneumonia in Los Angeles at 76 He had been in Daggett visiting his daughter Helen.

• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. camped with
• Gifford Pinchot 1865–1946
  First chief of the U.S. Forest Service and leading advocate of scientific conservation and managed public lands. broke with
• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. declined his Harvard offer
• Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862
  Writer and philosopher whose works on nature, individual conscience, and civil disobedience influenced environmentalism and political protest. called himself his disciple
• Woodrow Wilson 1856–1924
  28th President who led the nation through World War I and championed the League of Nations. signed the Hetch Hetchy bill
• Ansel Adams 1902–1984
  Landscape photographer whose Western images and zone system shaped American photographic practice. quoted him constantly