Reminiscence of John Muir by Graydon, Katharine Merrill

JOHN MUIR By Katharine Merrill Graydon While the goldseekers of '49 were risking their perilous way by land and by sea to California, there came to our Middle West a Scotchman with his little son of eleven years, this lad, too, was bound for the great Golden State, though years and toil and travel were to intervene. Knowing nothing of the Old World but his own birthplace in the land of brown heather, the little stranger wandered with unspeakable delight over his father's acres in unploughed, untrodden, undesecrated Wisconsin. Such vastness, such color, such glory, he had never dreamed of. Here were tall, widespreading, awful trees; flowers that had been growing through hundreds - through thousands - of springs and summers, unseen by any but the wild eyes of savages and the heavenly eyes of angels, and unmolested by herds or flocks or men. To the amazed, enraptured boy it was Paradise. The top and the bottom of society are alike self-indulgent, if not alike luxurious. It is not from these unfortunate classes that great men usually come, nor did the parents of John Muir belong to either of these classes. Like the parents of Burns and of Carlyle, they were intelligent, upright, pious, duly observant of the laws of earth and heaven, with will and strength for steady toll. John Muir's Bother, Anne Gilrye, was a representative Scotch woman, quiet, conservative, affectionate, fond of poetry and painting. His father, Daniel Muir, was a man of marked character, impetuous, enthusiastic, full of fiery energy, fond of adventure and new enterprise, while his whole life was controlled and kept in a steady glow with the religion of the Old Covenanters. In the Wisconsin wilderness the adventurous father and mother, with their eight children, applied themselves with relentless vigor to the work of creating a farm, - chopping, grubbing, fencing, burning brush, plowing, sowing, even the boy of eleven doing a man's work. While following the plow, John's eager eyes, like those of another plowman, caught glimpses of mouse and daisy, and loved them both; they watched the coming and going and nesting of robins and thrushes and bluejays; they saw the life of insects, frogs and snakes; they rested with everg new delight on the flowers as they arose from the dead at the call of spring, - and the boy learned the habits of all. Unaware he found and unconsciously he accepted his vocation in life. For him there was no school but the prairie and this forest, no discipline but toil and strict obedience to parental authority. After the day's work, the evening weal and worship, the family promptly retired. But one of Farmer Muir's boys had a way of lingering behind by the firelight to catch, perchance, five minutes - or, at most, ten - for a book or for some self-imposed task of invention before the father's not-to-be-disobeyed voice called out, "John, go to bed. Must you get every night a new commandment to go to bed?" One night he chanced to add, "if you will read, read in the morning. You may rise as early as you like," -- of course with no idea of advantage being taken of the permission. But it gave a new thought to the boy; never before had the possibility of waking without the father's call occurred to him, and he mounted to his room so charged with the brave purpose of early rising that he found himself down again at one o'clock. Five hours of time all his own! What a treasure! But it was winter. The thermometer was below zero. A fire would rouse the father and would waste the wood. With shivering body and numb fingers he could not sit down to a book, but to go back to bed and to lose these precious hours was not to be thought of, he could warm himself with the kind of work he loved. At stolen intervals or in the hour of rest at noon, he had been trying to construct a self-acting mill. By the feeble light of a tallow candle, he now set to work in the cellar at this mill. The whole winter, from one or hour as he could waken, until six, he worked at either his books or his mechanical inventions, making for the latter even his own tools. His book hunger was insatiable. Again and again he read the meager home library. To buy a book he saved his pennies for a year, health seemed to come with Wood's Natural History, or Plutarch's Lives, or Josephus, ot Rollin. At the age of fifteen, amid the dreary work of the farm, the reals of poetry began to open to him like the dawn of a glorious day, and he found new joy in Burns, in Aikenside, in Cowper, in Milton, in Shakespeare, and in the language, the imagery, the nobler thoughts of Job, Isaiah, David. In addition to history and poetry, he eagerly studied mathematics without the slightest incitement or assistance from teacher or friend, carrying knotty problems to the field in his mind and solving them as he swung hia axe or scythe, or as he followed the plow. Thus, while the boy was giving time and strength toward reducing the farm to cultivation, his mind pondered the thought of his books, and his soul grew upon the beauty which Mature had scattered about him. The scene has changed. John Muir is again in a strange land. The flowery wilderness of tisoonsin has given way to the mountains of California, to Alaska, and to the dark forests where rolls the Oregon. In these marvelous regions he wanders and wonders and wishes to live forever. The boy has grown to be a man, tall, fair, not very Scotch in appearance. The farm gave health and strength and manly beauty. The University of Wisconsin added to his store of knowledge, gave him mental discipline and discretion, and bestowed on him what perhaps was better still, the abiding friendship of Professor James Davie Butler. While in college, his strongest bent seemed toward mechanical contrivances. To this day, traditions of his inventions linger about the university. He seemed possessed with the desire to make a machine with voluntary powers, not a monster like Mrs. Shelley's, but a thing to be of use; and he very nearly succeeded. Had John Muir lived in the Middle Ages, he might have paid dearly for his ingenuity. In connection with one of his wooden clocks, he contrived a bed that at a certain hour would place its occupant upon his feet, a lamp that would light itself, and a desk that at proper intervals would present a chemistry for study, a volume of mathematics, a Latin work, or whatever else formed the day's routine, allowing time for meals and recreation. After working his way through college, young Muir set out on long botanical and geological rambles in Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Canada, and around the Grest Lakes, moving free as a bird over prairies and bogs, and through wild, majestic forests, supporting himself by any fans work or mill work that came in his way. A year or two in Indianapolis, where he worked in factory or foundry, offered opportunity for acquaintance with the trees and flowers of this vicinity. This was the very tine that Dr. Schliemann found a transient home in our city. Widely different were the two men and their destinies; one learned in the language of men, severely trained in ancient and modern literature; the other unsurpassed in knowledge of the various language and form and dress of Nature; one with pride and circumstance, unearthing cities and investigating enchanting ruins of the childhood of the world, the other wandering alone and unknown in primeval forests, discovering with unutterable joy some frail flower or curious fern or mighty river of ice. It was in a workshop in our town that in on& unhappy dusk the skilled hand of John Muir clipped and that his keen, clear eye was pierced b. a sharp instrument, which, in the same moment, pierced his heart, for all the glory of the world he isight never see again flashed swifter than lightning before his. For weeks the stranger suffered in a dark room, where he was visited by Miss Cathatine Merrill, introduced to him by Professor James D. Butler, who wrote, "Walk into the fields with this young man and you will find him wiser than Solomon." With Miss Merrill were oftentimes children whom he charmed with accounts of the things he had seen and had heard. Through the years which have brought manhood and womanhood to his childish hearers, they have cherished the memory of that dark room, and of those beautiful stories, and they have never ceased to listen to the tales still as wonderful - to the voice still as beloved. The accident, agonising though it was, gave light for darkness, and he now made the decision that his work should no longer lie along the line of mechanics and invention, but he spent in the study of Nature. So, from Indianapolis Mr. Muir set out afoot on a thousand-mile ramble to the Gulf of Mexico, studying the flora of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Yet the plants and the animals and the rocks were not his only companions; very small copies of Burns, of Milton, of the New Testament, he carried, and made them a part of the very fiber and essence of his being. With appetite whetted by the exuberant vegetation of the Southern States, he pushed his way further south, sailing for Cuba, where he enjoyed the glorious plant life and scenery of the tropics. All the while quite unaware whither his path was leading, he was pushing on toward the Lord's garden of California. My own words best tell the story of his arrival: "After leaving the Florida swamps I came here. All the world was before me, and every day was a holiday. I stopped one day in San Francisco, and then asked the nearest way out to the un- trarapled part of the country. 'But where do you want to go?' asked the man to whom I had applied for this important information. 'To any place that is wild,' I said. This reply startled him, and he seemed to fear that I might be crasy, and that, therefore, the sooner I got out of town the better; so he directed me to the Oakland ferry. From East Oakland I started up the Santa Clara Valley on the first of April, after a wet winter. The wars,

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