Story of My Boyhood and Youth E-Book

John Muir

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In this moving memoir of an unusual childhood, John Muir recalls his younger days in East Lothian with a startling clarity, depicting a wild boy whose quiet individuality and determination were already emerging. Born in mid nineteenth-century Scotland, Muir was eleven when his fanatically religious father took the family to build a new life in America's vast wilderness. Muir charts their pioneering years in Wisconsin, where his battles for survival powerfully anticipate the extraordinary career which was to follow. They reveal a free spirit who perceived bonds between man and nature that were subtle and far reaching for both. Relatively unknown in his native Scotland, John Muir is renowned in the United States as the father of conservation. A friend of presidents and founder of National Parks, Muir was inspired by a love and a vision of nature as remarkable today as it was last century.

Leseprobe

THE STORY OF MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

John Muir (1838–1914) was born and raised in Dunbar, East Lothian. When his family emigrated to Wisconsin in 1849, young John was brought up to hard labour on his father’s homestead. Yet he found time for reading and ingenious inventions which gave him an early reputation for brilliance.

After attending the University of Wisconsin, Muir pursued his mechanical skills until an industrial accident nearly blinded him. He set out on an epic walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, keeping a journal as he went, later published in 1916 as A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. In 1868 he went to the Sierra Nevada mountains and spent five years in the Yosemite valley, which influenced the rest of his life. Living rough, Muir studied geology and the plant and animal life around him. His journals from this period, My First Summer in the Sierra, were published in 1911. In subsequent years he produced innumerable articles and lectures from the journals of regular summer trips to the mountains of California, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. Marriage in 1880 took Muir out of the wilderness for a spell, until the need for its preservation involved him in a major campaign for the General Grant, Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, which were finally established in 1890. In the next ten years he overcame opposition from big business to the establishment of still more National Forest parks throughout the country and was a founder member of the Sierra Club which took up the cause of wilderness protection.

The Muir Woods National Monument was established in California in 1908, and John Muir has been, honoured ever since as the ‘father’ of the modern environment movement.

John Muir

THE STORY OFMY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

Introduction by David M. Anderson

This edition published in 2006 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Reprinted 2013

First published in 1913 by Houghton Miflin Co.

Introduction copyright # David M. Anderson 2006

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 78027 127 9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

Printed and bound by Grafica Veneta

www.graficaveneta.com

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

ONE

A Boyhood in Scotland

TWO

A New World

THREE

Life on a Wisconsin Farm

FOUR

A Paradise of Birds

FIVE

Young Hunters

SIX

The Ploughboy

SEVEN

Knowledge and Inventions

EIGHT

The World and the University

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1   John Muir’s childhood home

  2   View of Victorian Dunbar

  3   The young John Muir

  4   John Muir’s desk clock

  5   Drawing of John Muir’s desk clock

  6   The Fountain Lake Farmhouse

  7   Drawing of a table saw

  8   Drawing of University Hall, University of Wisconsin

  9   Drawing of John Muir’s ‘star clock’

10   Broxburn Smithy

11   Stormy seas at Dunbar

12   Off to the herring

INTRODUCTION

Scotland has sent so many people out into the world. For centuries they have gone, to fight others’ wars, to build empires, to trade, to explore and to settle. They are going still. At one time, those left behind could only wonder at the experiences and fates of those who went overseas. Until comparatively recently communication was difficult and many emigrants never returned or were never heard from again. It has become easier in our technology rich world to keep in contact, to visit, and to experience other lands; but the tales of those who left in the past are often missing pages in Scotland’s story. Sometimes, however, there is rediscovery. And long after he left his native town of Dunbar, more and more Scots are discovering the remarkable tale of John Muir, a man who, quite literally, changed the world.

This is Muir’s first autobiographical work, although his Sierra journals were published before it appeared. Another ‘chapter’ in his life was edited and published posthumously. This book is very different from his campaigning articles and books although it was written with his life’s work in mind. Although all too short it sets the scene for what was a lifetime of exploration and discovery. Writing as a son of Scotland, Muir recalls his beginnings and his family’s transition to the brand new state of Wisconsin in the United States. He celebrates ‘a never-failing source of wonder and delight’ as new experiences piled into his consciousness. None of the hard, hard labour to which he was soon put appears to have inhibited his curiosity. His narrative overflows with examples of the effect the new world had on his senses. The tiredness of bone-aching farm-breaking did nothing to inhibit his determination to discover just how things worked – even if this meant outwitting his formidable father.

It is unfortunate, but typical of Muir, that he never completed more of his autobiography or even the accounts of his explorations. Completing them would indeed have been a daunting task if only because Muir’s explorations and experiences are almost unmatched even in the annals of America. His travels took him to every continent and many times from California to the wilds of Alaska. But he hated the labour of writing for publication. He was only really at home in the woods and wilds; offices, hotels, towns and cities were alien environments to him. He felt that mere words on a sterile page could never do justice to his beloved wilderness: better, by far, he thought, for everyone to experience at least once ‘a trip to the woods’. Once there his philosophy would speak for itself in the voice of the pure ‘wildness’ that would surround them. On the other hand, it is well recorded that in the right circumstances he could enthral audiences with his wilderness tales and inspire them with the necessary task of ensuring that future generations would have a chance of experiencing true wildness. The enthusiasm of his public speaking carried over into his private correspondence. Paradoxically, for a man who hated writing, he was a life-long letter writer. The fullest expression of his philosophy comes in the unfettered liberty he found in corresponding with his large circle of friends. The words would flow as they never did when he shut himself away to worry at the task of producing articles and essays for publication. Indeed, it is through letters that he first found his way into print – friends felt that his words to them were worthy of much wider circulation. Muir puzzled over this conundrum until he was dragooned into a partial solution.

It was only by an intervention by his friends that this work was even begun. During 1908 the railway magnate Edward Harriman cajoled Muir up to his isolated lodge at Klamath Lake. Providing a stenographer to capture Muir’s narration, the poor author ‘was fairly compelled to make a beginning’: ‘being kept so busy, dictating autobiographical stuff, I’m fair dizzy most of the time, and I can’t get out of it, for there’s no withstanding Harriman’s stenographer under orders’. This horrible effort produced more that a thousand pages – still extant in manuscript and now microfilm. The narrated work is a plainer, franker, more revealing account that the published version. Despite this good start, it was all very well getting the words down on paper but then the old Muir took over and the text was worried over, edited, expanded or rejected several times over. Five more years passed before it appeared in book form. The result is, despite its frankness, heavily edited around family matters and childhood experiences. It was a bold step for anyone of Muir’s time to be so revealing about domestic tyranny. Muir found himself on the defensive over some aspects of the work as it first appeared. Nonetheless, in a letter to a childhood friend preserved in the archives of Wisconsin Historical Society his brother Daniel wrote that John felt that ‘he knew the old people were honest, sincere & meant all for the best, but he wanted to put his foot down hard on every thing that was harsh, cruel & unkind’. Many events described in the draft were omitted, wholly or in part, the core of what remained serving to illustrate those aspects of his upbringing and childhood that perhaps emphasised his ‘wildness’ over other considerations.

Thus, this volume sets the scene for a self-proclaimed life as ‘a wandering wilderness lover’ but this was Muir exhibiting Scottish self-effacement in the extreme. He was not by any calling a simple rustic savant. Although by appearance and occasional behaviour extremely eccentric, he was a shrewd businessman when he had to be, an original thinker, and was possessed of a steely determination. Some of these attributes are plain in this volume; others were exhibited later in life. In fact, his life included periods as technologist and tramp, botanist and naturalist, geologist and glaciologist, farmer and trader, family man and loner in the wilderness, mountaineer, writer, campaigner, visionary and philosopher. In many of these facets he shone, sometimes brilliantly, but on top of all these he was first and foremost one of the world’s first practical and effective environmentalists, a champion of ‘preservation’. He did much of his pioneering work on solo trips and could have become just another curious ‘mountain man’ of the Californian uplands. Nevertheless, the links with his many friends, the duty imposed by his Presbyterian upbringing, and the simple need to communicate his discoveries kept him in contact with civilisation. Pressure from his friends led to publication and publication led to reputation and increasing influence.

He was celebrated in his adopted land long before he died, where his hundreds of articles, his books, lectures and campaigning had won him a high profile; but at home, beyond a few family members, there was little awareness of his fame. It is true that a clutch of obituaries appeared following his death in 1914 but they give the impression of acknowledging his passing without understanding his significance. Indeed, even at the present time, close to a century after Muir died, his significance is still generally unappreciated in his home country, although his adopted land seems convinced.

This work does not touch on these later achievements although it is informed by them. It sets the scene for his life and covers the period from Muir’s birth in 1838 and emigration in 1849 to leaving the family farm in 1860 and his four years at the University of Wisconsin.

It begins in Dunbar, then a prosperous Scottish town much like any other. Dunbar had had a long and at times bloody history, as recalled by John and his school friends when they re-enacted the battles of old and played in the ruins of the ancient sea-girt castle beside the brand new Victoria Harbour. The days of battle were long past and Dunbar flourished as the centre of a rich agricultural region. Its principal industries were geared towards its pastoral hinterland although a substantial part of the community earned a living from the sea. In John’s time, the burgh and parish of Dunbar had a population of around 4,500, of whom two thirds lived in the town, then a compact community where most still lived within what had been the medieval boundaries. Burgh life centred on the broad High Street and the closes or pends running off it. Between the High Street and the harbours was an area devoted to workshops and maritime trades and the homes of the workers in these trades. Three nearby villages, a few hamlets and over a dozen large farms accounted for most of the remainder. Most of the farms belonged to one or other of several large landholdings or estates but a few, usually those nearer the burgh, were in the hands of owner-occupiers, mostly merchants who had prospered in Dunbar itself. The community could rank itself from pauper to aristocrat, but the mass were labourers, artisans, shopkeepers and merchants who governed themselves by means of the town and parish councils.

Improvement had made the farms of East Lothian some of the best in Britain. Their peak harvest workforces could run to over 100 hands. Their output was mostly grain and potatoes, which grew well in the rich red soil. In these days most farms also reared livestock – cattle on the plain, sheep in the hills. They generated considerable wealth – many farmers had been shareholders in the East Lothian Bank. When the bank failed during the 1820s it left a six-figure debt (equivalent to a multimillion pound sum today), which was honoured in full by the shareholders.

Dunbar merchants profited from trading on the produce and supplying the needs of the farms and estates. A lot of the equipment they (and the fishing community) needed was made in Dunbar itself. The town still had a robust manufacturing sector, just one substantial component of a mixed economy. As an example, Sked’s foundry, which employed as many hands (22 in 1841) as the three local breweries combined, had a reputation for producing reliable and efficient agricultural steam engines. Advertisements boast that the firm would ‘warrant them to work satisfactorily, with very little more than one-half the fuel and water required for others’. A dozen or more were turned out yearly, mainly to drive threshing machines and other farm equipment. Other family businesses produced ropes and sails, harness and saddlery, and all the millwright and smith-work required; their workshops made and repaired carriages, carts and all manner of farm machinery from sophisticated reapers and binders down to the meanest hoe. Dunbar had a large malt trade, processing vast amounts of local and even imported barley for the brewing and distilling industries. John would have been exposed to much of this industry and it could be envisioned that he would have found employment there, had he stayed in Dunbar. His father and grandfather had many contacts with the farming sector. His playmates were the sons and daughters of the town’s merchants and artisans.

Although doing well during Muir’s boyhood, the town was beginning to face up to changes happening in the wider world. It benefited from two massive construction projects in the 1840s. The first was self initiated and the second was part of a national phenomenon. Dunbar had long felt the need for improved port facilities. Several schemes were floated and the eventual result was in 1842 the New or Victoria Harbour. Its construction was not without loss as a new channel was blasted through the Castle Rock – with the disappearance of much of the old castle ruins. Muir talked about the harbour works in his draft manuscript, but excised all references in this final book. The intention of the harbour development was to bolster the town’s maritime trade, which had been declining due to the poor access and wharfage of the older harbour. The other major project showed that local schemes were now very much dependant upon national events. A station opened at Dunbar serving the new Edinburgh to Berwick railway line. In its first year of operation the herring trade switched almost exclusively to this new and fast network – rendering the recent harbour a near white elephant. Dunbar had lost the greater part of its locally registered merchant fleet by the time the Muirs left in 1849.

Both projects had necessitated an influx of labour, mainly Irish navvies, which caused some local stresses and excitement. Such tensions were dealt with by Dunbar town council, which was responsible for everything locally from policing to piggeries. When Muir was growing up, political reform of the previous decade was beginning to bear fruit.

As well as the major construction projects there was much occurring on a more modest scale. The town’s leading citizens were beginning to invest in new buildings on the town’s ancient High Street by replacing tenements of the eighteenth or earlier centuries or by building on new sites outside the historic boundaries of the town. Although stone from nearby quarries was preferred for much of this work, a large works at nearby West Barns manufactured a wide range of brick, tile and pipe work. Several limekilns just to the east of Dunbar supplied the building trades and agriculture (where lime served as an improver for clay soils). Progress was also underway in the provision of utilities and services – increased water supplies were secured and a local gas production company was floated.

When David Gilrye, John Muir’s grandfather, was in his prime, he served a couple of terms (six years) as a councillor. In these days, a councillor could serve for life if one wished (or, more realistically, was able to keep in with the ruling clique). Election had degenerated to a form of nomination so a dominant faction need never relinquish power. Burgh reform was implemented in the 1830s. The town council opened up to a greater constituency with an extended franchise, the abolition of some restrictions on eligibility and even entitlement to vote. Remarkably, this tempted even Daniel Muir, John Muir’s father, to get involved in secular affairs. Somebody, somehow, convinced him to give politics a go and he was able sufficiently to put aside his religious scruples to stand for office. Muir senior was elected for a three-year term at the end of 1847, standing down when he emigrated. Many positions on the board were still in the hands of the ‘old guard’ represented by Provost Simon Sawers of Newhouse, Bailie David France of Seafield, and former provost Christopher Middlemass of Underedge. Although each of these three was a landed proprietor, appearances were deceptive: Middlemass began as a clerk in a Dunbar merchant’s office, before flourishing in business himself; France was a baker to trade who spotted a niche in cement and brick making; and Sawers came from a family with mercantile roots in nearby Haddington. All could be models for the progress in position and wealth Muir senior was making during his time in Dunbar. Councillors John Kirkwood and James Miller junior were from old Dunbar families, but represented the flourishing shopkeepers of the burgh, and Robert Morton and John Richardson the professionals, being respectively a teacher and a retired naval purser. Most of the rest of the board followed the pattern thus set.

The reformed town council became more attentive to its electors and its duties as new people gained seats. It is possible that John’s father was associated with a few other newcomers united by their active association in a dissenting congregation in the town: Muir’s neighbour, Alex Cunningham, and Matthew Watt, who bought Muir’s first Dunbar home in 1846, are in this category. Although at first sight a trivial association, the Secession church congregation had split from mainstream Presbyterianism over exactly the kind of thing that had corrupted the old civic system, namely restrictive practices, the swearing of burgess oaths and burgh or church patronage – where secular authority interfered with religious prerogatives. It looks like Daniel and his friends were liberated by reform in the 1830s and had the support in the 1840s to gain at least a few council seats.

As he aged, more and more of Daniel Muir’s behaviour and indeed character was dictated to by his literal interpretation of his Bible, as his son makes clear. He had grown up as an orphan farm labourer in his elder sister’s household on farms in Crawfordjohn parish in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire. This old heartland of Covenanters and Cameronians still had a strongly evangelical character and Daniel Muir appears himself to have been converted to evangelical Presbyterianism around the age of 14. Once a promising fiddler and keen attendee of farms kirns, he put frivolity aside for good and all. He left home to seek his fortune, and after joining an unknown regiment of the British Army ended up in Dunbar with a roving commission as a recruiting sergeant. His military career went by the board when he married a Dunbar girl, although his first hopes of settling down were dashed when she died shortly afterwards. She left him in possession of a lease on a tenement and a shop on the High Street. In notices of the time he is recorded as a mealdealer – a seller of oatmeal. He built his business into a flourishing success and is later described as merchant, a sign of greatly improved local status. He was able to buy a large tenement and garden in 1841, a first step to satisfying his ‘land hunger’. The property was one of the largest within the town and its possession was a statement in its own right. In an advertisement 1821 of it was described thus: ‘That large and commodious house . . . with two good gardens, stables, and coachhouse. The house is well calculated for the accommodation of a genteel and numerous family, consisting of parlour, dining room, drawing room, and five excellent bedrooms, with a light bed closet to each of them, besides four garret rooms, kitchen and servant’s room, cellars and other conveniences.’ Daniel Muir must have taken some satisfaction at the progress he had made. Muir senior made also substantial donations to his church, and probably to other causes. It was not economic necessity that drove him to take his family to America.

There were many schools in Dunbar that Muir senior could have selected for his children’s education. Primary (or elementary) education was a private matter in the burgh, although parish schools catered to the youth of the villages of East and West Barns. A charity school had recently been established for the young of the poorer part of the community but several private teachers had schools that catered to the youth of the middling classes. Thus, John’s first schoolmaster was Mungo Suddon (‘Siddons’ in the text), who had rooms close to the Methodist Church on the Dawell Brae (now Victoria Street). Suddon’s school took pupils from infancy to the age of 16 or 17 but it was more usual for children to transfer to the mathematical or grammar schools once they had a grounding in the 3Rs. This is the route that John took. At the grammar school he had to begin again with new classmates, lessons and masters and he vividly remembered these days when he was writing this book towards the end of his life. The grounding his Scottish schooling gave him by the age of eleven was more than sufficient to enable him to hold his own later at university in Madison.

Just across the High Street from the family home was a tenement belonging to Muir’s maternal grandparents. David Gilrye and his wife Margaret Hay were once also incomers to Dunbar. He was from Mindrum in Northumberland and she from Coldstream. They had prospered in Dunbar. Gilrye had been a flesher or butcher and was one of the town’s respected burgesses. As well as his town council stint his commitment to the established church was reflected in long service as an elder. He crops up in the records of the time as witness in civic and legal transactions and was often approached to act as a surety for prospective licensees.

The Gilryes’ lives had been touched by tragedy – eight of their ten children had died young and one of their remaining daughters had lost her husband at an early age as well as two of her three children. There might then been questions over Ann’s choice of a husband: a seeming rootless soldier who was most definitely not in communion with the established church. When Daniel Muir uprooted his family to chase his religious dreams the Gilryes’ remaining solace (their brood of grandchildren) appeared to be vanishing for good. However, it is clear that Gilrye respected Daniel Muir’s business sense, if not his religious convictions. Muir senior was written in as a prospective trustee to Gilrye’s estate and was given his second son David Gilrye Muir’s small inheritance to manage until the boy came of age.

The children were probably shielded from family arguments about religion – Muir makes no reference to them – but they felt the full force of Daniel’s passion at home. Perhaps to compensate, their grandparents’ fireside became a favourite evening refuge for the children. It was probably there that Muir’s lifelong love of Scottish tales, poetry and romance was kindled. And it was at that fireside that the awesome news was broken on one February evening – they were going to America the very next morning.

The children had but a single day’s notice, although Muir senior must have been planning the trip for some time. The house was sold, the tickets were bought, a fearsome amount of goods (‘our formidable load of stuff’) was purchased for the new life, and it had been agreed that an advance party would go first and welcome Muir’s mother and younger siblings once they were set up. The exact destination, however, was rather nebulous.

All his time in Dunbar Muir senior had been chaffing at the restrictions of British life. Secular and religious rules and regulations prevented him from fully following his dream, which by the time of departure had become to follow a fully-fledged life of Biblical literalism. One sect in particular had caught his attention. The Body of the Disciples in Christ (or simply, Disciples of Christ) promised that in the New World a New Jerusalem might be attained. At least one of their itinerant preacher-recruiters had Dunbar links and Muir senior thought he had found his answer; his family appears to have little say in the decision. The Disciples had several colonies in Canada and the States and it was for one of these that the family headed.