What John Muir Beheld

On my shelf at home, I keep a treasured photo album of my great-grandfather’s trip to Yosemite in 1901.

- Rick Hamlin

He was suffering from some undiagnosed ailment when he took his family in their horse-drawn carriage on a rustic tour that culminated in a visit to the recently established national park. Perhaps it will seem ironic if I tell you that my great-grandfather, a former Civil War drummer boy and a mayor of Pasadena, California, had made his living as a lumberman. Still, even he knew that healing could be found amidst the giant sequoias.

Those trees might not have been there had it not been for the rapturous writings of the great American naturalist John Muir. But, then again, my great-grandfather probably wouldn’t have been there either had he not heard about this magical place and seen it through Muir’s eyes. “To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one,” the English writer John Ruskin said. And that’s what Muir did. He saw like that. 

It wasn’t always that way. Muir hadn’t started out as a conservationist. In fact, it wasn’t until an accident left Muir blind in his twenties that he devoted his life to the study of nature. Had it never happened, he would not have become the John Muir we know today.

Muir was born in Scotland in 1838. When he was 11 years old, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in rural Wisconsin, where their backbreaking labor cleared a farm in the native forest. Muir liked to take refuge in the surrounding woods, learning the names of every bird, bush, fern and flower. He also had a knack for inventing things, like a giant thermometer that won a prize at the state fair. Or an alarm clock bed that would lift a sleeper and dump him on the floor, presumably standing. In one of its later iterations, it even included a dish of cold water for an early-morning dousing.