The Story of my Boyhood and Youth: An early years biography of a pioneering environmentalist

By John Muir and Terry Gifford

The Story of my Boyhood and Youth is the affecting memoir of the now internationally renowned John Muir, a Scottish-American boy subject to a most unusual upbringing, his transition into adulthood, and the path that led him to petition for the concept of protected national parks.
Born in East Lothian, Scotland in 1838, Muir was raised by a fanatically strict, religious father with his numerous brothers and sisters and loving mother. From an early age, a shy Muir showed fascination with the natural world, and at aged eleven, his father announced the family were to move to an American wilderness in Wisconsin – Muir had a new playground.
His adolescence is spent labouring on the family's grassroots farm. Working seventeen-hour days, an exhausted yet inquisitive Muir desperately snatches moments to himself, yearning to explore the environment around him, secretly studying books on topics other than religion, and rising at 1 a.m. to pursue his hobby of inventing intricate time and energy-saving devices – much to his father's disapproval and everyone else's admiration.
At age twenty-two, Muir takes it upon himself to apply to university, and does so without financial or moral support from his father. He makes his way to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study chemistry and botany, and though never graduating with a degree, he is satisfied that he had learned all he wanted to there, before completing the rest of his nature education in 'the university of the wilderness'.
The Story of my Boyhood and Youth includes a new foreword by Terry Gifford, and offers insight into the development of Muir's spiritual connection with the natural world, and suggests an explanation for his passion for freedom in the wilderness, a stark contrast to the forced rigidity of his early years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vertebrate Digital
• Release date: Dec 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911342038

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

– Contents –

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Series Introduction

Foreword

Chapter 1 A Boyhood in Scotland

Chapter 2 A New World

Chapter 3 Life on a Wisconsin Farm

Chapter 4 A Paradise of Birds

Chapter 5 Young Hunters

Chapter 6 The Ploughboy

Chapter 7 Knowledge and Inventions

Chapter 8 The World and the University

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

John Muir did not want to write an autobiography. Persuaded, late in his life, to turn his journals and articles into books, it was the living landscapes that he wanted to celebrate rather than his own life. But by the age of seventy Muir had come to be regarded as a wilderness sage by his American public. The sponsor of Muir’s Alaskan expeditions, the railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman, knew that Muir’s conservation message would be humanised if its author would give a little more of himself to his public. So, in a practical compromise, Muir dictated the first volume of his autobiography to Harriman’s secretary whilst walking where he preferred to be – in the open air of the Ponderosa pine forest at Harriman’s summer log house in a clearing beside a lake in northern California. The stenographer was under orders to follow Muir everywhere to get out of him what became The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1912). Muir wrote to his wife, ‘I’ve never been so task-driven in a literary way before. I don’t know when I’ll get away and get free from this beneficent bondage.’

Muir had originally taken a no-nonsense view of the self-indulgence of autobiography, just like his father’s tone in the pivotal abrupt announcement in this memoir: ‘Bairns, he said, you needna learn your lessons the nicht, for we’re gan to America the morn!’. So this book tells the story of Muir’s first eleven years in Dunbar, forty kilometres east of Edinburgh, and his sudden uprooting to help his father carve a farm out of the grasslands and woods of Wisconsin before going to the local university. But the book is written by a man whose life’s work is largely behind him and who knows what it has been. The first and last sentences bookend its theme and cunningly lead the reader back into Muir’s earlier books. ‘When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures.’ For ‘fondness’ read ‘passion’ and for ‘wild’ read ‘wilderness’, then you sense what has grown from these Dunbar beginnings. When, in the final sentence of this book, Muir bids his university farewell, it is with this same sense of ‘growing fonder’ of what can be learned from wildness: ‘But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness’.

So, looking back, Muir’s emphasis is on the child’s connection, that he and his brother instinctively found, between ‘the natural inherited wildness in our blood’ and the shoreline and fields and woods around Dunbar. Thus was prepared the excited curiosity for not just enjoying the sounds of birds, insects and frogs in the Wisconsin wilds, but the identification of snakes, dragonflies and butterflies, including knowledge of ‘the pinching or stinging species’. Empathy with animals is one of the recurring themes of Muir’s childhood that leads to his being among the first to suggest that animals might have ‘rights that we are bound to respect’. Later, at the university Muir not only studied botany and geology, but also collected his own samples in a lifetime’s scientific habit that was to produce new contributions to knowledge. Rather than follow a degree course, Muir selected subjects that would be useful to him, including chemistry (‘which opened a new world’), physics and mathematics. For Muir, the story of his boyhood and youth was one of establishing curiosities, enthusiasms and practices for lifelong learning.

These include personal characteristics such as daring and fortitude. Even in Dunbar, apparently, mountaineering could be learned, according to the later high Sierra mountaineer: ‘The roof of our house, as well as the crags and walls of the old castle, offered fine mountaineering exercise’. The imagination of the child, when informed by his learning in mathematics, produced in the practical young man an ability to construct amazing inventions of a Heath Robinson nature that not only worked, but drew admiration at the State Fair which led directly to his being encouraged to seek a place at the university, despite having had no schooling since arriving in America. Muir’s self-education and his approach to what the university had to offer expose the limitations of subject boundaries and the drive towards specialisms.

His literary abilities, which are quietly on display in this book, will have been enhanced by ‘a little Greek and Latin’. Indeed, running through this book is evidence of a sustained literary education, from the loaned books of Scottish explorer role models to Shakespeare and Milton via the Scottish ballads that were his heritage. History and philosophy make an appearance and throughout the wanderings of his life he was never without his volume of the poems of Robert Burns. The lightness of all this learning produces some wonderful moments. In Scotland: ‘the grand, simple, all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree’. In Wisconsin: ‘But of all our wild neighbours the mosquitoes were the first with which we became very intimately acquainted’. As usual, what appears so easily achieved was the result of three years’ work on those three weeks of dictation.

In a letter of 1889 Muir introduced himself to his future political co-lobbyist, Robert Underwood Johnson, as a ‘self-styled poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural etc!’ But this typical self-parody belied the fact that the richness of his discoveries and his writings are derived from his early intuitive awareness that the ecology of nature did not recognise human subject boundaries. This little book not only exposes the narrowness of his father’s worldview (candidly revealed in factual detail that actually shocked Muir’s family on publication) that Muir transcended with warmth and openness, but offers a challenge to parents, teachers and young readers today: ‘I was fond of everything that was wild’.

– Chapter 1 –

A Boyhood in Scotland

When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness, though most of the land lay in smooth cultivation. With red-blooded playmates, wild as myself, I loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds were mingled together as one. We never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old I ran away to the seashore or the fields almost every Saturday, and every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly warned that I must play at home in the garden and back yard, lest I should learn to think bad thoughts and say bad words. All in vain. In spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.

My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks with my grandfather when I was perhaps not over three years old. On one of these walks grandfather took me to Lord Lauderdale’s gardens, where I saw figs growing against a sunny wall and tasted some of them, and got as many apples to eat as I wished. On another memorable walk in a hayfield, when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks I heard a sharp, prickly, stinging cry, and, jumping up eagerly, called grandfather’s attention to it. He said he heard only the wind, but I insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over until we discovered the source of the strange exciting sound: a mother field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. This to me was a wonderful discovery. No hunter could have been more excited on discovering a bear and her cubs in a wilderness den.

I was sent to school before I had completed my third year. The first schoolday was doubtless full of wonders, but I am not able to recall any of them. I remember the servant washing my face and getting soap in my eyes, and mother hanging a little green bag with my first book in it around my neck so I would not lose it, and its blowing back in the sea wind like a flag. But before I was sent to school my grandfather, as I was told, had taught me my letters from shop signs across the street. I can remember distinctly how proud I was when I had spelled my way through the little first book into the second, which seemed large and important, and so on to the third. Going from one book to another formed a grand triumphal advancement, the memories of which still stand out in clear relief.

The third book contained interesting stories as well as plain reading and spelling lessons. To me the best story of all was ‘Llewelyn’s Dog’, the first animal that comes to mind after the needle-voiced field mouse. It so deeply interested and touched me and some of my classmates that we read it over and over with aching hearts, both in and out of school, and shed bitter tears over the brave faithful dog, Gellert, slain by his own master, who imagined that he had devoured his son because he came to him all bloody when the boy was lost, though he had saved the child’s life by killing a big wolf. We have to look far back to learn how great may be the capacity of a child’s heart for sorrow and sympathy with animals as well as with human friends and neighbours. This auld lang syne story stands out in the throng of old school-day memories as clearly as if I had myself been one of that Welsh hunting party: heard the bugles blowing, seen Gellert slain, joined in the search for the lost child, discovered it at last happy and smiling among the grass and bushes beside the dead, mangled wolf, and wept with Llewelyn over the sad fate of his noble, faithful dog friend.

Another favourite in this book was Southey’s poem The Inchcape Rock, a story of a priest and a pirate. A good priest in order to warn seamen in dark stormy weather hung a big bell on the dangerous Inchcape Rock. The greater the storm and higher the waves, the louder rang the warning bell, until it was cut off and sunk by wicked Ralph the Rover. One fine day, as the story goes, when the bell was ringing gently, the pirate put out to the rock, saying, ‘I’ll sink that bell and plague the Abbot of Aberbrothok.’ So he cut the rope, and down went the bell ‘with a gurgling sound; the bubbles rose and burst around’, etc. Then ‘Ralph the Rover sailed away; he scoured the seas for many a day; and now, grown rich with plundered store, he steers his course for Scotland’s shore.’ Then came a terrible storm with cloud darkness and night darkness and high roaring waves. ‘Now where we are,’ cried the pirate, ‘I cannot tell, but I wish I could hear the Inchcape bell.’ And the story goes on to tell how the wretched rover ‘tore his hair’, and ‘curst himself in his despair’, when ‘with a shivering shock’, the stout ship struck on the Inchcape Rock, and went down with Ralph and his plunder beside the good priest’s bell. The story appealed to our love of kind deeds and of wildness and fair play.

A lot of terrifying experiences connected with these first schooldays grew out of crimes committed by the keeper of a low lodging-house in Edinburgh, who allowed poor homeless wretches to sleep on benches or the floor for a penny or so a night, and, when kind death came to their relief, sold the bodies for dissection to Dr Hare of the medical school. None of us children ever heard anything like the original story. The servant girls told us that