When was john muir born

We have a vivid picture of Muir at this time thanks to Theresa Yelverton, a. Viscountess Avonmore, a British writer who arrived in Yosemite as a year-old tourist in the spring of Carr had told her to seek out Muir as a guide and the pair became friends.

She recorded her first impressions of him in the novel Zanita: A Tale of the Yo-Semite , a thinly veiled memoir in which Muir is called Kenmuir. He was dressed, she wrote, in "tattered trousers, the waist eked out with a grass band" and held up by "hay-rope suspenders," with "a long flowering sedge rush stuck in the solitary button-hole of his shirt, the sleeves of which were ragged and forlorn.

This is magnificent! Listen to the voice of the Lord; how he speaks in the sublimity of his power and glory! Muir left Yosemite abruptly in late ; some scholars suspect he was fleeing the romantic interest of Lady Yelverton, who had long been separated from a caddish husband.

A short time later, in January , Muir returned to Yosemite, where he would spend the next 22 months—his longest stint. On Sunday excursions away from the sawmill, he made detailed studies of the valley's geology, plants and animals, including the water ouzel, or dipper, a songbird that dives into swift streams in search of insects. He camped out on high ledges where he was doused by freezing waterfalls, lowered himself by ropes into "the womb" of a remote glacier and once "rode" an avalanche down a canyon.

This refreshingly reckless manner, as if he were drunk on nature, is what many fans like to remember about him today. In early , Muir had been obliged to leave his idyllic creek-side cabin, which Hutchings wanted to use for his relatives. With his usual inventiveness, Muir built a small study in the sawmill under a gable reachable only by ladder, which he called his "hang-nest.

Thanks to Jeanne Carr, who had moved to Oakland and hobnobbed with California's literati, Muir was beginning to develop a reputation as a self-taught genius. The noted scientist Joseph LeConte was so impressed with one of his theories—that the Yosemite Valley had been formed by glacial activity rather than a prehistoric cataclysm, as was widely, and incorrectly, thought—that he encouraged Muir to publish his first article, which appeared in the New York Tribune in late Ralph Waldo Emerson, by then elderly, spent days with Muir peppering him with botanical questions.

The pair went to Mariposa Grove, but much to Muir's disappointment, Emerson was too frail to camp overnight. By the end of , Muir was making occasional appearances in the salons of San Francisco and Oakland, where Carr introduced him as "the wild man of the woods.

Part of him wanted to simply return to the park and revel in nature. But by the fall of , having visited the valley after a nine-month absence, he concluded that that option was no longer open to him.

He had a calling, to protect the wilderness, which required his presence in the wider world. By leaving, he was accepting his new responsibility. He had been a guide for individuals. Now he would be a guide for humanity.

As a celebrated elder statesman of American conservation, he continued to visit Yosemite on a regular basis. In , in his early 50s, Muir camped with Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor of Century magazine, in Tuolumne Meadows, where he had worked as a shepherd in Together they devised a plan to create a 1,square-mile Yosemite National Park, a proposal Congress passed the following year. In , the year-old Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt were able to give Secret Service agents the slip and disappear for three days, camping in the wild.

It was during this excursion, historians believe, that Muir persuaded the president to expand the national park system and to combine, under federal authority, both Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove, which had remained under California jurisdiction as authorized by Lincoln decades before.

We invite you to read labels throughout the house to discover more about the mixture of original and period pieces that recreate Muir's home. No he did not, according to Helen Muir in a letter she wrote to friend Hattie in John Muir did cause controversy because he did not lead the same sort of life as most people in the area.

However, from diaries and letters it appears the family had a very loving and understanding relationship. Louie Muir often urged her husband to go to the mountains for his health and was very supportive of his fight for preservation. When his girls were young he took them on nature walks around the ranch, and as they grew older they accompanied him on Sierra Club outings and trips to the southwest. John Muir was 76 years old when he died in a Los Angeles hospital on December 24 th , He had been visiting his daughter Helen and her family in Daggett when his cold developed into pneumonia.

His funeral was held in the Muir House. He is buried beside Mrs. Muir in a small family cemetery about one mile south of the home. Louie Muir died August 9, The Muir family belonged to the Gordon Clan. Since August 31, Although smaller, its beauty was ruggedly spectacular and similar to Yosemite. In the early s, calls were made to dam the valley in order to provide water and hydraulic power for the growing city of San Francisco. John Muir tried to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley by leading the opposition against the dam.

However, the need proved more persuasive than preservation and in , after three political battles, the Northern California politicians won. Explore This Park. Info Alerts Maps Calendar Reserve. Alerts In Effect Dismiss. Dismiss View all alerts. Frequently Asked Questions.

Last updated: September 14, Until the age of eleven he attended the local schools of that small coastal town. Muir's father was a harsh disciplinarian and worked his family from dawn to dusk. Whenever they were allowed a short period away from the plow and hoe, Muir and his younger brother would roam the fields and woods of the rich Wisconsin countryside.

John became more and more the loving observer of the natural world. He also became an inventor, a carver of curious but practical mechanisms in wood. He made clocks that kept accurate time and created a wondrous device that tipped him out of bed before dawn. In , Muir took his inventions to the state fair at Madison, where he won admiration and prizes. Also that year he entered the University of Wisconsin. He made fine grades, but after three years left Madison to travel the northern United States and Canada, odd-jobbing his way through the yet unspoiled land.

In , while working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis, Muir suffered a blinding eye injury that would change his life. When he regained his sight one month later, Muir resolved to turn his eyes to the fields and woods. There began his years of wanderlust. He walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico.