A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf: A radical nature-travelogue from the founder of national parks

By John Muir and Terry Gifford

'Many a beautiful plant cultivated to deformity, and arranged in strict geometrical beds, the whole pretty affair a laborious failure side by side with divine beauty.'
A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf is the second book in John Muir's Wilderness-Discovery series. It is within this work that we are really given strong clues toward Muir's future trailblazing movement for environmental conservation, in such comments as 'The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.'
Muir's walk from Indiana to Florida was conceived in order to explore and study further the flora and fauna across states. He undertakes this alone, a dangerous choice perhaps so soon after the civil war, as many characters along the way forewarn. Indeed, Muir is threatened by a robber, and we see a new side to the quiet, lowly gentleman we know as he springs into self-defence mode with lightning initiative and remarkable courage.
This is not the only facet of Muir's personality that is uncovered throughout this journey. He makes reference to feeling 'dreadfully lonesome and poor', which is intriguing as his circumstances are self-sought: 'Stayed with lots of different people but preferred sleeping outside alone where possible'. He spends a substantial period of time struck down with malaria, which does not come as a surprise; he was covering many miles on an unsustainably meagre diet with thirst often quenched with swamp water or not at all.
Join Muir in Kentucky forests, Cumberland mountains, Florida swamps and all the elegantly described trees, plants, creatures and rocks in-between. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf teaches us as much about Muir himself as it does the ecosystems in the wilderness across those 1,000 miles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vertebrate Digital
• Release date: Mar 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911342137

John Muir

John Muir (21 April 1838 – 24 December 1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States.

Book preview

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

A radical nature travelogue from the founder of national parks

John Muir

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www.v-publishing.co.uk

Please note that this is the original text from 1916, and contains language which today may be deemed offensive or inappropriate. However, in order to faithfully reproduce this classic work, the language has not been edited. The views stated by the author are not the views of Vertebrate Publishing.

– Contents –

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Series introduction by Terry Gifford

Foreword by Terry Gifford

Chapter 1 Kentucky Forests and Caves

Chapter 2 Crossing the Cumberland Mountains

Chapter 3 Through the River Country of Georgia

Chapter 4 Camping Among the Tombs

Chapter 5 Through Florida Swamps and Forests

Chapter 6 Cedar Keys

Chapter 7 A Sojourn in Cuba

Chapter 8 By a Crooked Route to California

Chapter 9 Twenty Hill Hollow

Photographs

– Series introduction –

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Terry Gifford

We have never needed nature more than now. At a time when our relationship with our home planet is under stress, the positive words of John Muir (1838–1914) can help us to reconnect, retune, and readjust what it is that we should value for the survival of our species. In 1901 John Muir opened his book Our National Parks with words that might resonate for readers today: ‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find that going to the mountains is going home’. This Scot, transplanted to the USA at the age of eleven by his family to help carve a farm out of the wilds of Wisconsin, came to invent the modern notion of a national park for the ‘recreation’ of future generations. His initial inspiration was Yosemite Valley, deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where he was sought out by the US President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was persuaded on a characteristic Muir camping trip that such an uplifting place and its rich ecology should be preserved in perpetuity for the nation.

Anticipating the modern concept of ‘biophilia’ – our need for regular contact between our inner nature with the outer nature around us – Muir’s opening sentence continued with the idea ‘that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life’. Muir’s suggestion that the fountains of our own lives need to be in contact with the self-renewing cycles of life in wild landscapes led him to be recognised as the founder of the American conservation movement. His establishment of the Sierra Club – still to this day a vigorous local and national conservation organisation in the US – arose because Muir understood the importance of local people holding government to account through membership of a national environmental movement. Muir knew that national policies would be needed if the balance between the economic ‘usefulness’ of timber and rivers was to be controlled. By the end of Our National Parks Muir’s tone had changed. ‘Any fool can destroy trees’, he declared in full preaching mode. ‘God has cared for these trees … but he cannot save them from fools – only Uncle Sam can do that’.

Actually, it was Muir’s ecological knowledge, gained by close observation, by scientific experiment and by always reflecting upon the larger forces at work in nature, that resulted in insights ahead of their time, like the idea that unregulated clear cutting of timber reduced the usefulness of those irrigating rivers as ‘fountains of life’. At a time just before the notion of ‘Oekology’ was being proposed, Muir wrote that, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’. And it is in such unassuming, seductively approachable prose that Muir explored his vision of nature and our relationship with it. It was as a popular writer of newspaper and journal articles that Muir gained his following as a writer. Late in life he began crafting these little lyrical discoveries into the inspirational books that speak so clearly to our heightened environmental awareness today.

– Foreword –

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Terry Gifford

In this book John Muir discovered a voice that changed the world. It is a living, improvised, articulation of a voice that ultimately led to the notion of national parks and the attempt to live the ideal that eluded King Lear – the opposite of Lear’s resignation to ‘unaccommodated man’. It is the voice of a young man in his twenties, free to walk and to think his own thoughts: free from his father’s extreme puritanism; free from a Civil War he felt was not his own; free from his university studies in the new fields of botany, geology and evolutionary theory; free from his draft-dodging apprenticeship of botanising in Canada; and newly free from the blindness that he thought was his life’s fate after an industrial accident. On this walk Muir would see for himself anew and think for himself anew. That many statements in this journal are still regarded as radical, and far from the accepted norm, indicates how this journal, in deceptively effortless lyricism, actually works hard at new insights from this newly freed sensibility.

When Muir identified himself at the start of this journal as ‘John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe’ he was not just connecting himself to the natural world – Humboldt’s Cosmos – but rather liberating himself from all that he had been bound by, learned from, been located in, that he wanted to shake off, but inevitably carried with him to both argue against and at the same time sharpen his new insights. So this is a walk measured in miles to the Gulf, but an inner journey to an unmeasurable new ecological self. It is less a travelogue and more an emergent environmental philosophy forged by walking ‘the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find’. It is a mark of the new orientation that Muir was seeking on this walk that just before he reached the sea he would write, ‘I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilised man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathise with the bears.’

Two examples will demonstrate Muir’s amazing thinking in response to the material environment in front of him on this trip. Outside Savannah, Georgia, Muir botanised in Bonaventure Cemetery, savouring its ‘depth of life’ in ‘the rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flowers, the calm, undisturbed grandeur of the oaks’. The paradox of such life amongst the graves prompted one of Muir’s most striking reflections: ‘On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Instead of the sympathy, the friendly union, of life and death so apparent in nature, we are taught that death is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the archenemy of life, etc. Town children, especially, are steeped in this death orthodoxy, for the natural beauties of death are seldom seen or taught in towns.’ For any era, this would be a challenging idea, but for Muir’s journey it reveals how far he was prepared to push his thinking beyond the extreme puritanism of his father’s beliefs.

Before he had even entered Yosemite Valley and well before he proposed the Sierra Club outings to bring people into a landscape that he hoped they would then want to defend for future generations, Muir expressed his belief that contact with nature would in itself be deeply educative, especially for children struggling to understand the meaning of something as formidable as death: ‘But let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.’ That final sentence is deceptive in terms of the huge cultural shifts that Muir is proposing here. Muir’s sense of harmony is complex and the opposite of a pastoral simple complacency. Conceiving of Muir’s ‘beautiful blendings’ would sometimes be uncomfortable for the future readers of this personal journal, as is vividly demonstrated by his later reconception of the common cultural construction of alligators and snakes, with a little help, in typical Muir fashion, from the behaviour of rocks.

Further south, in the Florida swamps, he reflects upon the dynamics of predation through an image drawn from geology: ‘The antipathies existing in the Lord’s animal family must be wisely planned, like balanced repulsion and attraction in the mineral kingdom.’ Rather than Tennyson’s horror at ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, Muir’s ecological vision is in awe of a ‘wisdom’ that enables him to think of predator and prey in terms of a balanced ‘animal family’. It is the human species – ‘Lord Man’ – he went on to argue, that has developed a narrow hubris that precludes ecocentric sympathies: ‘How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! With what dismal irreverence we speak of our fellow mortals!’ Roderick Nash, in his book The Rights of Nature, says that this is ‘the first association of rights with what a later generation would call environment’. Muir was remembering from his childhood the Scottish biblical image of the serpent as he continued, ‘Though alligators, snakes, etc., naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth.’ The notion that reptiles had rights and might be compared with saints would have been as radical an idea in 1867 as it still is for some in the twenty-first century.

This journal takes Muir into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in which his future fame would be based. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf reveals the forging of the ecological way of seeing and thinking that would eventually make him the founder of the American conservation movement.

– Chapter 1 –

Kentucky Forests and Caves

I had long been looking from the wild woods and gardens of the Northern States to those of the warm south, and at last, all drawbacks overcome, I set forth (from Indianapolis) on the first day of September, 1867, joyful and free, on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. (The trip to Jeffersonville, on the banks of the Ohio, was made by rail.) Crossing the Ohio at Louisville (2 September), I steered through the big city by compass without speaking a word to anyone. Beyond the city I found a road running southward, and after passing a scatterment of suburban cabins and cottages I reached the green woods and spread out my pocket map to rough-hew a plan for my journey.

My plan was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest. Folding my map, I shouldered my little bag and plant press and strode away among the old Kentucky oaks, rejoicing in splendid visions of pines and palms and tropic flowers in glorious array, not, however, without a few cold shadows of loneliness, although the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome.

I have seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur

Reviews for A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

[amerynth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read a bunch of John Muir's books about his travels. While this isn't his best writing (or his most interesting topic,) his travels down south are entertaining enough to make this a worth while read.

[lazysky · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

** Following description by Harry Latimer, Olympia, WashingtonOne of a kind, rare large paper limited edition Verso of Title Page states: "550 copies of this large-paper edition were printed at the Riverside Press at Cambridge, in October, 1916. 500 copies are for sale. This is copy number 320." As shown.INSCRIBED BY MRS. E. H. HARRIMAN (MARY)Both E. H. (Edward Henry) and Mary Williamson (Averell) had a genuinely warm close and productive association with our Homeboy, and it would be difficult for me to state, between the two of them, which one was greater.John Muir's friendship--and partnership with E. H. and Mary was one of the most important in his later life. That later life when Muir was changing the very landscape of The West with words. A new way of seeing. Our National Parks are a new way of seeing.For more clarity in attempting a more truthful understanding of the Harriman's relationship, it is helpful to set aside, for the moment, the patriarchal bias as it has come to us through the usual history (his-story) written in textbooks.In other words, a world run by men. A history becomes a history of what men did. With E. H. and Mary it is more accurate to use the word partnership. Mary was no mere bystander to history, a bit of which can be demonstrated here.Your search engine will take you to a multitude of rare surviving letters between both E.H. and Mary to and from Muir, photos of them together, gorgeous photos and videos of Arden House, Pelican Bay, Southern California, Idaho, Southern Pacific Railroad narratives, studies, and institutional collections, along with PBS, if you like documentary movies on Muir, Harriman and The Harriman Alaska Expedition. The whole Harriman Family were onboard passengers for the Journey.The letters back and forth between Muir and the Harriman children are of particular interest, partly so in demonstrating Muir's own lively childlike sense of wonder and natural affinity for the young, and they for him. These surviving letters online are a special delight to read. The Harriman Alaska Expedition. Klamath Lake. Yosemite. Hetch Hetchy. Arden House. The Ranch in Idaho. National Parks. Their children. for starters...Also, it was the Harriman's talented & persistent private secretary, under explicit orders, who followed Muir around while he was on a visit to Harriman's "country lodge" at Klamath Lake. Muir talked, non-stop as usual, and the verbatim transcript finally became Muir's uniquely worded The Story Of My Boyhood and Youth. A book if otherwise left to Muir alone, late in life, busy and tired, would not likely have been completed for us to read today.E. H. and Mary Harriman are not the usual thing one first associates with John Muir. That would be a mistake if not considered at all, especially in light of Muir's stated singular mission in later life to "do something for the wildness", unprotected and fast disappearing. This is Muir at work, the nuts and bolts of preservation, outside the mountains, important practical matters to him.One does not easily grasp an association between E. H. and Mary and John Muir unless one considers how power moves in the world of money, enormous wealth, and Muir's own practical & political savvy. Political power. Muir needed that, his own powerful writings not enough, and he knew it.At the same time, as evidence shows, Muir maintained a genuine friendship, almost familial, with Mary Harriman ("Mrs. H.") and later often as ("Sister Mary") & family, including the kids, even years after E. H. died.Muir wrote only one book on one person: E. H. E. H. quote: "Cooperation means "Do as I say, and do it damn quick." Muir on E. H. : "I don't think Mr. Harriman is very rich. He has not as much money as I have. I have all I want and he has not." E. H. in response: "I never cared for money except as power for work...getting into partnership with Nature in doing good." This must have been music to Muir's ears, hearing that. Muir had found two partners. (Muir was like that you know, a tactful teaser, in order to find out, for one thing, if a person was too full of themselves. He did it-cautiously-with Harriman as demonstrated above, along with another one on Harriman hunting bears in Alaska. For Theodore Roosevelt, as president, it was his hunting too. John Burroughs got it over his stubborn writing about no glaciers in Yosemite and his general homebodyness. Burroughs was lost in the West, away from home in the Catskills. Muir got away with it with all of them, until Gifford Pinchot, when he let fly with both barrels-publicly-in the lobby of a Seattle Hotel over forests, preservation and sheep. Pinchot deserved it in retrospect, most now agree.)Through the political influence of both E. H. & Mary in considering just one place, (and the still not even now fully understood role of their "associates", particularly in the bowels of the California Legislature, we have today The Yosemite as a fully protected National Park. Yep, the Harrimans helped get us The Park.That was the time when Time moved at the speed of a horse. Then came the Railroads, changing everything. The Harrimans owned or controlled or influenced a great big chunk of all of them across the USA. In California it was the all important Southern Pacific Railroad.Mary inherited-it all-after E.H.'s death in 1909 and began a life of giving a great big chunk of it away. For starters, in 1910 she gave away to the State Of New York 10,000 acres (out of the 40 km2 Arden House estate), designated along with a million bucks maintenance for a State Park, which for generations since has been a wildlife refuge and a nearby vital retreat for the thankful human denizens of New York City.Mary also donated to the welfare of The Yosemite National Park... and fully supported till the end, Muir's noble efforts in the attempt to block the damming of the wild Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park.Around this time, Muir got free passage, and watchful care-mostly unknown to him-as an old guy, aboard the Harriman owned Steamship Lines while he traveled the world. Yep, they owned Steamship Lines too. This was Mary's doing. His last trip to see what Muir called his address one last time: "John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe." as inscribed on his original journal that constitutes this later book.Returned, back in Martinez California he was reinvigorated for his final desperate plunge into the violation, that abyss of lies of others: Hetch Hetchy. Another Yosemite then, now underwater.In one of Muir's last long trips made anywhere, the year before he died, Muir accepted Mary Harriman's invitation to him to join her and the family at their Railroad Ranch in Idaho. Muir arrived August 17, 1913, greeted by Mary, and stayed with the Harriman clan for 10 days. Upon arriving he had what he described as a "second breakfast" with the family. Muir had long talks with Mary, some of it, without any doubt, on Hetch Hetchy, which by this time had practically consumed him, and in time some said, would kill him. He walked, wrote in his journal & sketched...and talked... Also, in one of his last, Muir left us a Journal of those 10 days with the Clan: "Island Park Idaho 1913" available to all for online viewing.***In 1977 Averell Harriman, Mary & E.H's son, deeded to the State Of Idaho for free what would become, as it is today Harriman State Park. The land is part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the most vital wild places of refuge on Planet Earth. Mary taught her children well.I met Averell Harriman by chance, much accomplished in his own right, late in his long life and early in mine. It was around the time he was re-printing his Daddy's Book written by Muir. I don't remember much, except his boyish expressions of sheer delight at retelling of his meeting, as a kid, with Muir on The Harriman Expedition in 1899. He got to hear the story of Stickeen live, in person. Wow. Imagine that. Averell was then the sole living survivor of the Expedition.To me, the Harrimans rank right up there with the Roosevelts, Carnegie and Kennedys for turning private gain into public good. Andrew Carnegie: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." This Nation of Immigrants, most coming ashore dirt poor, like the above person named.Description: E. H. Harriman Arden Bookplate on pastedown. Signed and inscribed on ffep by Mrs. (Mary) Harriman, dated Dec 1917, 1 E. 69th St. (NYC residence). Light green paper boards with green cloth spine, leather label with gilt stamping. Frontispiece is a gorgeous hand colored photogravure. Frontispiece from a watercolor by Amelia M.Watson.Photographs by Herbert W. Gleason, Theodore Eitel, Bradley & Rulofson, Louisville and Nashville Railroad, others, & sketches from Muir's Journal.Condition: Clean & bright & squared & tight. Partially uncut pages. Unusually clean for a Large Paper Edition. Corners not bumped. Lightest soiling to green cover and bottom & top edges. Rubbing wear to leather label. Leather label on spine bumped, with slight loss and professionally repaired. Spine darkening and shelf wear consistent with age, careful use and handling.

[edwin6gleaves · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Refreshing and illuminating autobiography of the intrepid naturalist who managed to walk from Ohio to Florida in the days after the Civil War. His idea was to discover and/or identify new plants without getting killed by suspicious southerners. Nearly dead of the fever, he managed to make it to Florida and eventually to his beloved California, by way of Cuba.