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Discovering the New World

Sometime between the late fall of 1848 and early winter of 1849, Daniel Muir made the decision to emigrate to America. From what is known of his character, it is doubtful that he consulted with any of his family but simply announced the plan after he had made it. The factors, though, that led him to the decision are fairly clear, however obscure they may have been to the rest of the family.

The largest factor was the prevailing climate of opinion that so strongly favored removal to the New World, to which was added the news from California that had so excited schoolboys and adults alike in the waning days of ’48. But in the immediate foreground was Daniel Muir’s perpetually restless spirit that searched through the churches and splinter movements of his time for that perfect combination of zealotry and contentment. Now in his middle age he thought he had found it and was willing to risk all to go where a new sect flourished amid the edenic gardens of America.

He had become a convert to the Disciples of Christ through the exhortations of two brothers named Gray, one of whom had established the sect in Dunbar. The Disciples were still a small movement in Scotland, but they were ardent, and they drew a kind of cultural sustenance from the Scots predilection for “hiving off” into ever smaller splinter groups in religion and politics.

This movement, however, had come to Scotland from abroad, from the New World in fact, where it had its roots in the Great Revival that stirred frontier souls at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Great Revival was in itself the successor to the Great Awakening of the eastern seaboard, and like that earlier outburst it was characterized by an emphatic individualism, by emotional demonstrations of Christian belief, and by a radical anti-institutional bias—convictions close to Daniel Muir’s heart. Mormons, Shakers, Rappites, Adventists, and Spiritualists all came out of it or were greatly strengthened by it, while the established denominations, the Baptists and Methodists, gained large numbers of converts at the expense of their more staid and hierarchical competitors.

What attracted Daniel Muir—and thousands like him—was the promise here of a reversion to the warm and simple ways of the primitive Christian church as it was believed to have been in the days of Christ’s earthly ministry and just after. America, unfeatured, wild, innocently verdant, was clearly the chosen place for this reversion effort, the place where at last Christ’s kingdom on earth could be established. So at least believed the Scots immigrant founders of the Disciples, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, and their American coadjutor, Barton W. Stone.

The Campbells and Stone joined forces in 1832, and thereafter the Disciples became a potent religious force all along the border of an advancing civilization. In Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri, Alexander Campbell was a figure of almost legendary importance until the Civil War, and Mark Twain has recorded in his autobiography the excitement Campbell’s arrival could generate in a sleepy hamlet of middle America. Where such a man as Campbell preached literal adherence to the text of the New Testament without frills or clerical interference and where there seemed such limitless opportunities for the advancement of both the cause and self, there Daniel Muir would go, throwing over as in a moment his prospering grain dealership, ripping up his wife’s family roots and all his associations with his native land.

How much of the background of this decision the Muir children ever knew or understood is questionable. Probably the older four, Margaret, Sarah, John, and David, knew at least that their father was in the strong grip of a new religious enthusiasm; as the years went on and they saw him through an endless succession of these, they apparently learned a sort of ironic tolerance. Now, perhaps they merely accepted his latest involvement as one of the conditions of their lives without understanding how profoundly it was about to change their own destinies.

As for Anne Muir, she was probably simply told, and then Daniel Muir announced his plan to his in-laws. David Gilrye was vastly displeased and even alarmed for the welfare of his daughter and grandchildren. He now redrew his will so as to bar Daniel Muir from any inheritance and forced Muir to leave Anne behind with Margaret and the three younger children until a satisfactory home had been established. The old man knew enough of American realities to sense some of the perils of Daniel Muir’s decision, and this in addition to his view of his son-in-law’s capriciousness and restless spirit produced in him deep forebodings.

On February 1, 1849, Daniel and Anne G. Muir sold their property to Dr. John Lorn, a local physician, the deed of sale being officially recorded on the twelfth. On the evening of the eighteenth John and David were at the grandparents’ hearthside where Grandfather Gilrye put them through their educational paces. Then the father came in from across the high street to announce that they need not learn their lesson this night for in the morning they would be off for America.

Fifty-eight years later John Muir recalled vividly his reaction to this lightning bolt of news: “No more grammar, but boundless woods full of mysterious good things; trees full of sugar, growing in ground full of gold … .” He instantly thought of the naturalist Wilson’s hawks and eagles and of Audubon’s awe-inspiring descriptions of flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the western skies like mighty thunderclouds. Here, suddenly, magnificently, was the prospect of millions of birds’ nests and no gamekeepers in all the “wonderful schoolless, bookless American wilderness.” John and David were delirious with delight, so much so (as Muir recalled in the unpublished version of this episode) that they could not work up a “decent regret” over leaving their grandparents. They promised to send grandfather a box of the fabulous tree sugar packed around with gold. But Gilrye had heard another side to the American story in the tales of terrific hardship and child agricultural servitude as recounted in the letters of immigrants. He knew, looking at these two small boys, wide-eyed in the firelight, that soon enough they too would be enlisted in the breaking of the new lands and that they might themselves be broken in the process. Poor laddies, he called them, and gave each a keepsake gold coin.

Grandfather’s dour forecast was lost on the boys. In the dark street John shouted to some passing schoolmates that he was going to America in the morning. They jeered back their disbelief: the thing was incredible.

And yet in the next morning’s gray light the Muir family with the Gilryes in attendance could be seen bundling down the high street, past the kirkyard (where soon David and Margaret Gilrye would join six of their children beneath a wide heavy marker) and on to the train station. The Glasgow train steamed in, Daniel Muir shepherded Sarah, John, and David aboard it, and they were gone.

In Glasgow there was a new stir to the city to which Daniel Muir had fled in his youth. The stir was the immigration trade, and docksides bristled with the thousands bound outward on errands of necessity and hope. Posters advertised swift passage to limitless opportunity, and the papers were filled with reports of the newest incentive, gold. A newspaper dispatch by electric telegraph told of discussions of a proposed railway across the Panamanian isthmus; another recounted the huge migration to California currently in progress from the eastern United States. There were dozens of items crammed under the heading “Ho! For California” and announcing the availability of passage to Chagres, of California mining boots, of daguerreotypes for those who wished to leave behind likenesses for family and friends, even of specially durable pens for those bound for the gold fields, these last items guaranteed to outlast a “cargo of quills.”

There were other marks of the times that February day as the Muirs stowed their gear aboard with the other emigrants. One item in the day’s news told of a fire in a cheap Glasgow theater that had so far taken the lives of more than fifty people. Another tallied ninety-two recent cases of cholera. In comparison with the brilliant prospects in the offing, the Old World must have indeed seemed old, dreary, and diseased to those—many of them newly married, so Muir remembered—aboard that bluff-prowed ship nudging down the Clyde in the gloom of a winter evening. But perhaps to none was the contrast more dramatic and exciting than to the boy, not quite eleven, who hung onto the rails as the lights of the Old World dropped steadily astern. The sea, woods, and meadows of the Lothians had created a hunger in Johnnie Muir for the wild. He was now bound for a place that promised to satisfy it fully.

As he recalled the passage years later, Muir found it a grand and glorious six-week holiday. There was, of course, no school with its dulling rote routines and cheerless martial tone. And there were probably no thrashings, either, for Daniel Muir (and Sarah as well) was seasick much of the time. John and David were thus much on their own and scampered about the tilting decks, dodging sea chests and sailors, and marveling at the great, rough expanse of water. They made friends with the sailors, learned at first hand the uses of those knots, ropes, and sails they had encountered as seaside boys in Dunbar. Now at last they were aboard a ship instead of merely watching them sail past on their much-conjectured destinies. But Muir also suggests that his delight in the passage was not shared by many of the emigrants, and even had he been silent on this, we know enough about such midnineteenth-century voyages to have drawn the inference.

They were often grim affairs. Ships plying the immigration trade were routinely overcrowded in defiance of the laws, and few health-care provisions were enforced during voyages that averaged about forty days (the Muirs’ was forty-seven). Many captains kept their passengers virtual prisoners below deck, where fetid air, bad water, and tainted food produced “ship’s fever” (typhus), dysentery, and other intestinal ailments. In the 1830s and ’40s the ships brought cholera with them and the mortality was often frightful: passengers told of scores of bodies being dumped overboard. In 1847 seventeen thousand cholera cases were logged at Quebec alone; on the ship bringing Thorstein Veblen’s father from Norway to Wisconsin in that same year, every child died en route.

There was sickness aboard the Muirs’ ship, too, and John Muir remembered the emigrants bravely attempting to keep up their spirits by singing songs and swapping happy dreams of futurity amid the smoky air of the hold. The Scots aboard talked of the settlements made by their countrymen in Nova Scotia, along the St. Lawrence, and in Ontario. They knew also of the sizable Scots and Scots-Irish population of South Carolina and the junction area of Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia. Apparently Daniel Muir, though he too knew of these settlements, and though he had hoped to settle amid a group of coreligionists, had shipped with only the most general knowledge of American geography and with no fixed notion of where he might settle his family. Most of the stories he had heard were of Canada, but now he heard anecdotes of the relentless hardships of the Canadian wilderness, how a man might sweat himself into an early grave grubbing out a meager farm in the shadow of the endless forests. He heard too of the open prairies suitable for farming that lay somewhere below Canada’s southern border. For years, Scots who had originally migrated to Canada had been moving south into the States for this very reason.

In addition, Daniel Muir discovered some Disciples of Christ among the emigrants, and from these he learned of settlements the sect had made in the newly opened region of Wisconsin. In 1849, the Disciples had established centers at Manitowoc, Center, Platteville, and Waupun. Doubtless, it was said, more would be established (they were), for in this year Wisconsin’s population was growing at a faster rate than that of any state in the region. It had succeeded Ohio as the place to settle. Daniel Muir’s view now shifted southward from Canada as the voyage continued, and by the time they raised the port of New York he had determined to try Wisconsin.

On the mild breezes of April 5, the Muirs’ ship came to port. In those days incoming foreign vessels were required to clear a Staten Island quarantine station where the obviously sick were detained, but then the ships proceeded directly to dock to disgorge their passengers without any official reception process whatever. The newcomers simply gathered their belongings and got off.

Waiting for them were the unofficial greeters: crimps and sharks who would tote baggage at extortionate rates and disappear with it if not closely followed; others who sought to waylay the foolish in dockside taverns and spend their money for them; confidence men who for a fee would disclose to these land-hungry Europeans the finest piece of western land available anywhere; others who could arrange inland passage at what were described as rock-bottom terms. In the spring of 1849, business for these types was brisk. There was the uproar of the gold rush, and there were hundreds of thousands of innocent immigrants tumbling in—more than 200,000 this year of ’49 into the port of New York alone. Viewing this unprecedented phenomenon from the vantage point of local journalists, Horace Greeley and Walt Whitman hoped these newcomers would not become trapped in the sprawling port cities and adjacent towns of the eastern seaboard but would get the right advice and head west.

Daniel Muir, with his eye now set on Wisconsin, did so, lingering but a day or two in New York before arranging passage up the Hudson to Albany. There the family saw evidence of the destruction caused by a great fire the previous summer, and there too they saw evidence of that almost ferocious energy of these Americans, who had already rebuilt much of the gutted area. Then along the Erie Canal to Buffalo. The opening of the canal in 1825—the engineering wonder of its time—had proved to be the major factor in attracting settlers like the Muirs into the Midwest, for it had put the ports of Lake Michigan’s western shore on an all-water route to New York City. The canal also had the effect of inflating western New York State land values and so encouraging migrants to hunt farther west in search of cheaper real estate.

Buffalo was the gateway to the new region and in this year it would see more than a quarter of a million migrants pass through on their ways to the prairies. Here Daniel Muir made contact with William Gray, brother of that Philip Gray who led the Edinburgh chapter of the Disciples. Doubtless Gray gave Muir further information of the locations of Disciples centers and good lands in Wisconsin, and John remembered that his father also had a conversation then with a fellow grain dealer who told him that most of the grain received in Buffalo came from Wisconsin.

The Muirs took passage on one of the daily lake steamers out of Buffalo, jammed to its railings with a rough and travel-stained crowd of gold rushers and immigrants, each in his or her national dress, and five days later arrived at Milwaukee, where they joined yet another throng on the wharves and dockside streets and vacant lots. There amid the wheat, pork, and flour from the inland farms they haggled for oxen and wagons to take them still farther.

The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer was in Milwaukee about the same time and found it a beautiful town whose buildings were mostly of pale yellow brick with a populace dominated by thrifty German immigrants. But in 1849 hogs still roamed Milwaukee’s streets, the municipal sewerage system was primitive, and there was (again) cholera. Even had Daniel Muir been disposed to stop here and set up again as a grain dealer, city property was dear, and all the best land on the outskirts had been snapped up by speculators. Those like himself who wanted cheap land were obliged to travel toward Madison and then strike northward through the middle of the state. Muir made a bargain at the port city with a farmer just in from Fort Winnebago with a load of wheat who, for thirty dollars, agreed to transport the Muir family and what John Muir called “our formidable load of stuff” to the town of Kingston some one hundred miles to the northwest.

And so they were off again on the last leg of their long trip, going now over the heavy, mired spring prairies, the oxen and wagon groaning and creaking under the grievous burden of immigrant belongings, many of them purchased in the misguided notion that nowhere in the wilderness beyond Buffalo could the necessities of civilized life be had. Atop the massed stuff—scales, weights, scythes, kettles, stove—sat the severe seeker, Abraham of his little flock, who had set his face toward what he hoped would at last prove his promised land.

The way was rough. Where there were roads these were usually not much better than the unimproved countryside, especially in springtime. Assuming a generally northwestward route to Kingston, they would have passed out of Milwaukee into a region of sugar maples (those treasure trees of which John Muir had heard), basswood, and oaks. Here and there were narrow little valleys with swamps and stands of black spruce and tamarack and hemlock. The junction of present Jefferson County and Dodge County was actually the best farming land the Muirs would have seen on their way to Kingston, but the immigrant father could not have known this, and there were no farms there to give him a clue.

So they kept their way through the oak openings, skirting the streams with their heavy thickets. Until a few years earlier, this portion of the country had been all but unknown to whites, but now a few settlements gave some cheer to anxious travelers—though probably the Muir boys were delighted by the areas they passed through that seemed most untouched. A man named Hyland had recently broken a wagon road from Watertown north to the center of Dodge County and had settled on the prairie there. Others had followed so that houses and barns now dotted the prairie, and all the quarter sections along Hyland’s road had been taken. At Beaver Dam there was another small settlement and a sawmill in operation.

They went on through the sedgy meadows of southeastern Columbia County, then prairie and oak openings with the country beginning to roll now into knolls and hills, until at last they arrived at Kingston, hardly more than a huddle of houses with an inn at the crossroads. Alexander Gray, a bluff, hearty Scots settler near Kingston, readily agreed to help Daniel Muir locate on a suitable piece of land. Gray’s farm was on a section road and he knew the lines of the immediate locale and the qualities of the soil. While their father was off on this business, John and David plunged into their own business of establishing childhood’s intimacy with their new surroundings. Still in the fiction of America as a wild and wonderful playground, they explored the Grays’ whitewashed farmhouse, the barn and outbuildings, the creek that ran behind—smooth and brown-watered with black snags on which snapping turtles sunned and drowsed. They played in the sandy road shaded by bur oaks, white oaks, and shagbark hickories. At the edges of the road ran remnant lines of the big blue stem flower that had once ruled the open lands of the whole Midwest. Meanwhile, Sarah was introduced to reality as Mrs. Gray gave her beginning lessons in the life drudgeries of a farm woman.

Gray and Daniel Muir picked out eighty acres of open woodland about six miles to the northwest on a knoll that sloped westward down through a glacial meadow laced with brooks to a small lake. On the brow of the knoll, Gray, Muir, and some neighbors joined in the quick construction of a bur-oak shanty that would serve as shelter for Daniel and the three children while a more substantial house was framed for the rest of the family.

In the meantime, life was a glorious and innocent exploration for the two immigrant boys from a Scots fishing village. They raced through the meadow, prying into tufts of grass and bushes in search of nests and burrows; climbed trees to inspect the birds’ nests they had spied; poked along the brooks, marveling at the profusion of snakes, frogs, and turtles. Muir recalled, “This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—”

how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!

In that spring of 1849, no white settler lived within a four-mile radius of the Muirs, nor was there a single man-made road in the vicinity other than the old Indian trail that ran through the marshy lands along the Fox River to the town of Portage. To children accustomed to the countryside of the Lammermuirs with its old farms and stone-walled fields, this new landscape must have appeared shaggy indeed, a true wilderness. Strange and wild-seeming birds like nighthawks and partridges bellowed and drummed in the woods. Fireflies spangled the unbroken fields at dusk. And on the far side of the long, narrow lake an occasional drift of wood smoke marked the encampment of some wandering Indian hunter: there were yet some Winnebagoes to be seen passing on their disconsolate ways through what had lately been their homeland. But the Muirs had not settled in the midst of a wilderness but instead on the edge of a rapidly advancing civilization, one that in Wisconsin was tearing into the landscape and transforming it into a recognizable, functioning part of an increasingly industrialized republic. In this year the line of white settlement had moved considerably west of where the Muirs now were, though to be sure north and northwest of their homestead was still Indian territory.

In the two hundred years since Jean Nicolet had met the Winnebagoes in 1634—wearing his Chinese damask to be prepared for oriental potentates—Wisconsin had remained terra incognita to white America. Throughout much of this time the Winnebago, Menominee, Ojibwa, and Sac and Fox tribes had hunted, fished, gathered grain, planted corn, and buried their dead in ancestral lands, largely undisturbed by all but the advance men of civilization: stray white hunters, fur traders, and voyageurs, singing as they flashed their canoe paddles through the waters at forty strokes to the minute.

Nearly two centuries after Nicolet arrived, a census of the territory found little more than 3,000 whites among about 24,000 Indians. All this changed and rapidly so after the Black Hawk War in 1832. The old chiefs people, the Sac and Fox, the Winnebago, and other tribes who were marginally implicated in the doomed resistance effort, were all severely punished. The decisive and bloody conclusion to the war and the subsequent tours on which Black Hawk was taken as a prisoner of war advertised the openness of new lands and the availability of titles to them.

By the following year, the forced land cessions of the tribes had opened all the territory south of a slanting line from Green Bay to Prairie du Chien to survey and settlement, and the Wisconsin land rush was on. Just as “Ohio Fever” had once threatened the depopulation of Connecticut, so now this newest contagion threatened to draw off not only the best of Ohio but even more migrants from the old northeast and western New York State. Organized as a territory in 1836 with a white population of 11,000, Wisconsin had 31,000 by 1840. By 1850 it had 305,000, and by the end of that decade it would have more than doubled this figure—a growth rate unchallenged anywhere except in California.

The transmogrification of the state from the year of John Muir’s birth to his arrival there is an even more striking illustration of the multiform process that was changing the face and character of a continent. Black Hawk had died in the year Muir was born (and had been buried in the alien regalia of his conquerors), and in that same year one William Smith, a Philadelphia gentleman, published an account of his recent travels through the new territory. He mentioned the wild fecundity of the place, the herds of deer, the flocks of prairie hens that would start up under the hooves of the horses, the huge, luscious strawberries of the prairies, and the abundance of agricultural and mineral wealth just waiting to be tapped by enterprising settlers who were unafraid to plant themselves beyond the fringe of settlement.

Sketching the bright prospects of these new lands, Smith said the settler’s land was

purchased at the government price of one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre: land of the richest soil in the world. His prairie ground awaits immediate cultivation. His crops yield him from thirty-five to fifty bushels of fall wheat per acre, and from twenty to thirty bushels of spring wheat is calculated on as a sure crop; barley will yield from forty to sixty bushels, and oats from fifty to seventy-five bushels ….

This utopia lay in the future, however, for when Smith made his tour Wisconsin was indeed beyond the fringe, and only the lead-mining region of its southwestern corner had anything that could be said to be a dense population. Milwaukee was only a small village, the huge pineries of the north woods were all but unknown, and lumber for downstate construction was actually imported. Fort Winnebago (built under the supervision of U.S. Army Lieutenant Jefferson Davis) was the northernmost outpost of white civilization.

By the time Fredrika Bremer arrived in 1849 the changes were astonishing. Milwaukee was now a populous port of 20,000, and Bremer found immigrant groups scattered throughout the lower half of the state. They were thinly scattered, to be sure, and the state’s roads were rough to the point of threatening bodily injury to stagecoach travelers, but Bremer also observed that it was “remarkable that in all directions throughout this young country, along these rough roads, which are no roads at all, run these electric [telegraph] wires from tree to tree, from post to post, along the prairie land, and bring towns and villages into communication.” Milwaukeee was thus connected to Chicago and to the eastern seaboard.

To some the telegraph seemed an expensive toy, but its presence in the new land was a sure indication that American civilization had reached out to include Wisconsin in its fulsome, energetic embrace. Here once again was the national drama of the subjugation and obliteration of the wilderness. As a man, John Muir would see this drama as a tragedy. Now, a youth in the very midst of it, it was only life and necessity to him. Unwittingly, helplessly, he took up his part in it.

That first spring Daniel Muir hired a “Yankee” to help clear enough ground for crops to see them through winter. As the men worked, John and David pestered the Yankee with questions about the flora and fauna. They wanted to know all about the sandhill cranes whose choked cries sounded as if something had been cranked in their throats and to whom they could never get close before the big birds took air with astonishing suddenness, their wings white against the dense growth of woods. They wondered at the sound of partridge drumming, the meaning of the love song of the jack snipe and the song of the whippoorwill. The Yankee supplied only brusque answers to these and other questions, and there was so much to absorb in this new world, so many things for which questions could not even be formulated.

John Muir reveled in it all: the huge, portentous thunderheads, the clamoring chorus of peepers along the lakeshore, the spring flowers that burst forth in the watery meadow, and most especially the songs of the birds. But soon enough his schoolboy’s vision of America as a vast playground where a boy might wander forever free, feasting his eyes and soul on endless beauty—a dream at least as old as settlement here—broke hard against reality: Muir’s father put him to work in the fields clearing away brush for the advent of the plow and heaping it in great piles for burning. Nor did Father lose this opportunity to sermonize as the bonfires threw out blasts of white heat and showers of sparks. Think, he would say to John, just think what an awful thing it would be to be thrown into the midst of such a great, hot fire. Then think of hellfire that’s so much hotter and that’s reserved for all bad boys and for sinners of every sort who disobey God. Think, too, he added (as if this were not enough) of the infinitude of their sufferings, for neither will that hellfire ever die out—ever—nor will the sufferings of the sinners ever cease.

Then too Father once again took up his habit of childbeating. “The old Scotch fashion,” Muir recalled, “of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and of course many of those whippings fell upon me.” He described them as “outrageously severe,” and they left their marks. Many years afterward in a letter to a boyhood friend, Muir offered some uncharacteristically personal reflections on this practice which, if it was indeed a national one, was in this case surely compounded by the father’s cankered religiosity:

When the rod is falling on the flesh of a child, and, what may oftentimes be worse, heart-breaking scolding falling on its tender little heart, it makes the whole family seem far from the Kingdom of Heaven. In all the world I know of nothing more pathetic and deplorable than a broken-hearted child, sobbing itself to sleep after being unjustly punished by a truly pious and conscientiously misguided parent.

“Compare,” he then concluded, “this Solomonic treatment with Christ’s.”

The “Solomonic treatment” continued through spring and into summer, the cleared space in the oak opening gradually widening and the crops planted. When Daniel Muir wasn’t plowing and planting he was hauling lumber from the Kingston lumberyard and supervising the construction of the permanent dwelling. At the end of the day the family would gather in the bur-oak shanty for the evening meal, and as the last bit of daylight lingered within the rough confines, they would kneel on the bare plankings in family worship. Muir evidently took some pleasure in remembering of these moments that he “too often studied the small wild creatures” that played about the devout scene, the field mice and beetles that used the interior of the shanty as if it had been made for them.

By fall when Anne Muir and the rest of the children arrived the house was ready. Of good pine, it stood stout, foursquare, and high with eight rooms; like its owner it was utterly without frills. Behind it was the bur-oak shanty, now converted to a stable for the boys’ Indian pony, Jack. A barn and corral were at the foot of the hill leading down to the lake. John Muir said their wheat field was the first in the vicinity, and on that first evening together the reunited family strolled the borders of the field while Daniel Muir extolled the virtues of his frontier industry.

In his autobiography Muir did not spare readers when it came to descriptions of farm life, but he mentions none of that winter of 1849–50. They must have laid in enough corn, potatoes, and fuel wood to get by, they fed the stock wild hay, and for additional supplies they would have gone along the river road to Portage, a larger town than Kingston and about twelve miles distant. Here Muir had his first good look at American civilization along its cutting edge.

A rough settlement, Portage was strategically positioned between the Wisconsin and Fox rivers. At first it had been a fur-trading center in Astor’s sprawling network, and then in the natural course of such things a military fort. Now, with the furbearing animals hunted out, it was a town supplying the needs of the local farmers and the red-coated lumberjacks bound north to the pineries or south out of them. The fort, as Muir remembered it, still stood within its stockade and was “painted a glistening white, still formidable although the last company of soldiers had departed three or four years ago to take part in War with Mexico.”

There were perhaps 400 permanent residents when the Muirs arrived—Scots, Germans, Yankees from Vermont and Maine, a few blacks—and a shifting population of land speculators, canal boomers, lawyers, whores, theatrical troupers, lumberjacks, and Indians. As a boy from a Scots fishing village, Muir would already have seen his share of pubs and drinking, yet he remembered the freedom with which whiskey flowed in Portage and noted that the “many stores that rejoiced under the name of groceries and genral [sic] merchandise emporiums made their main profits out of whiskey.” The streets were enlivened by Indian ponies at the hitching posts, Indian dogs everywhere, and frequent fistfights. There were cows on the common when the weather permitted. Twice weekly the stage arrived from Madison and pulled up with a grand flourish at the tavern of Uncle Dick Veeder. Here the stage driver, a kind of local hero in red-flannel shirt, high boots, and wide hat, would swing down to mingle with the crowd of lumberjacks and raftsmen who made Veeder’s tavern their clubhouse.

With the coming of spring, 1850, life at what the Muirs called Fountain Lake farm began in earnest. Like so many other settlers, Daniel Muir was going to plant wheat as his cash crop: for a man struggling to get a claim into production, what with clearing, chopping, and fencing, wheat farming was the answer since it could be done in relatively careless fashion and on an extensive basis. So, much more of the Muir land had to be broken open and, as the eldest son, John Muir was drafted for the work.

As soon as the frost was out of the ground, the boy, though not quite twelve, was put to the plow behind the shambling oxen. The big handles of the shafts were about as high as his head so that all day he was obliged to trudge through the shearing furrows with his arms upraised, perhaps as many as eight or nine miles of walking before noon dinner. At the end of each row there was the task of hauling the heavy share loose from the gooey clods and setting it straight again for the return up field. At last the noon dinner and its hour of rest while his young muscles cooled and shrank so that, when called again to the work, he would go bent and hobbling at first like an old man. After another wearying round through the long afternoon, there was supper, the cows to be brought in, horses to be fed, worship, bed.

So it had begun: the patient, inevitable wheeling of the seasons and the years—a decade—and the boy driven relentlessly through them until at last he had emerged on the other side, work-hardened, accustomed to more than ordinary hardship, a man. But a man who had struggled and had managed to retain a youth’s enthusiasm for the natural world that was the scene of his daily toil.

All his life he would remember with that primitive vividness the sights, sounds, and smells of the Wisconsin seasons. Spring announced itself with the shotlike reports of the lake ice cracking and breaking up. As the boy trudged the fields putting in the wheat, the corn, and the potatoes, his mind found refuge and instruction it would lay up for the harvest of maturity as he attended the mysterious emergence of the myriad life forms after the hard sleep of the Wisconsin winter. With the breaking of the ice, the loon, the great northern diver, sounded its utterly wild, wavering cry above the freed waters. Muir marveled at its apparently crazy, wing-dipping routes above the lake, how it would suddenly swoop, splash, and disappear beneath the surface and then emerge hundreds of yards farther on, beating the water from its feathers in flashing beads. Once he shot and wounded one of these magnificent creatures and brought it into the house, where he was able to study its anatomy at close range.

After the loons’ appearance came the bluebirds, bright and tuneful harbingers that told the sure advance of the new season on the thawing land, then the song sparrows, thrushes—those grand singers—the bobolinks, and the handsome red-winged blackbirds. It was a memorable day to Muir when he beheld for the first time the fabulous passenger pigeons of which he had read in Dunbar days. They arrived on a spring day just after the snow had melted, thousands and thousands of them, sweeping the woods clean of acorns in a few minutes. Despite the fact that, as Muir said, every “shotgun was aimed at them and everybody feasted on pigeon pies,” for years they kept coming, spring and summer, and no one could have foretold that this apparently inexhaustible species would be hunted to extinction by the turn of the century.

Far less spectacular but equally awesome in their grace and clearly intelligent behavior were the flocks of Canada geese that broke their northward journeys to alight warily in the Muir wheat fields. After feeding on the young leaves they would mount again into the softening skies and assemble into harrow-shaped formations, leaving the plowboy behind in the fields gazing after them and musing on the mysteries of animal ways, perhaps already beginning to feel that “blind instinct” was not an adequate explanation of the behavior of such wonderful creatures as these.

Through the gradually lengthening days he worked on, kept company by birds busy with nest building and babies, the peepers beginning again to sing in the rushy margins of the lake, and the smaller creatures of the field who had come out into the warming sun—like the gophers who ate so much of the seed corn before it could sprout and whom Muir and his brothers were commanded to kill.

Spring ripened into summer and with it came the hardest labor as the heat intensified. The Muirs had settled far enough south in the state to experience corn-belt summers: hot, hazy days of high humidity punctuated by explosive thundershowers that cooled the air only momentarily before the sun rolled out again from behind the clouds to shine down fiercely on the wet lands. Such days began for them at dawn when gauzy mists hung low over the waiting fields, lake, and woodlands. Muir sharpened tools, fed the stock, chopped stove wood, and struggled up the slope from the spring under the slopping water buckets. Then there was breakfast, and then the fields. In the early years before Daniel Muir bought cultivators, all the cleared land had to be hoed, and the business of corn hoeing was a deadly, heavy one. Daniel Muir insisted that the hoes be kept busy at a machinelike, unvarying pace, that there be no talking or loitering when the children were in the field. Sickness was not allowed. Only once could Muir recall that he had been excused for illness, when he had a case of pneumonia from which he almost died. On another occasion, he had a severe case of the mumps but had to bear a hand anyway, though he often staggered and fell among the wheat sheaves.

In the deeps of the fields the sun streamed down on the boy and his brothers and sisters, the only shade being a solitary shagbark hickory or oak—underneath which they were forbidden to pause—and the occasional big and bossy Wisconsin clouds that drifted lazily across. Grasshoppers droned a steady, reedy accompaniment to the chink-chinking of the hoes. The friable soil was so hot the children scratched for cooler holds with their bare toes. When the breeze rustled the broad leaves of the corn, a heavy, milky smell engulfed the young toilers and seemed to intensify the heat.

If there was still enough light left after the evening chores, Muir and his brothers might have the luxury of fishing in the plank boat their father had made for them. Bullfrogs bellowed from the reeds, mosquitoes sang in their ears, and the placid lake was delicately laced with the zigzagged lines of the water bugs. The boys trailed their blistered, swollen feet in the darkening waters and trolled for pickerel and sunfish, black bass and perch.

Harvest was the hardest part of this hardest season. Wheat shatters quickly on the stalk, and it was watched anxiously as it ripened toward fullness, first the roots turning gold, then the necks, and at last the matured heads. Now there was a furious haste to cut and bind and store it, so Muir and the others were called from their beds at four in the morning and were in the fields at first light. All the long forenoon they relentlessly cut and bound, the oldest boy bent in cruel posture above the crooked snath, pulling the blade toward him through the bright stalks while the August sun crawled to the heaven of the noon dinner, perhaps announced to anxious eyes by the flutter of an apron from an upper window. Coming in to dinner, they would greedily seize upon the watermelons and muskmelons left cooling in the spring since morning. The sweet and juicy meats of these, Muir said, “were a glorious luxury that only weary barefooted farm boys can ever know.”

At such times they worked the fields until dusk and sometimes even after and went to bed utterly drained. “In the harvest dog-days and dog-nights and dog-mornings,” Muir recalled, “when we arose from our clammy beds, our cotton shirts clung to our backs as wet with sweat as the bathing-suits of swimmers, and remained so all the long, sweltering days” that were loaded with as much as seventeen hours of heavy labor.

Sunday afternoons were the only times they could call their own. After the Bible lessons, the Sunday school lessons, and the church services through which they struggled to stay awake, they could fish or swim in the lake or wander the nearby countryside in company with neighboring farm kids. In the early summer they might go strawberry picking or go after the dewberries or huckleberries whose hearts, as Muir remembered them, were colored like little sunsets. They might roam as far as the wild-rice marshes on the Fox to get a shot at the fat mallards that feasted there in flocks of thousands. They might climb Observatory Hill, the highest point around, and gaze off at the blue Baraboo Hills to the west; or climb the loose, glacial slopes of Wolf Hill, up through the oaks and red cedars to the high fields cleared long ago by the Indians, inhabited now only by crows and red-tailed hawks whose sailing cries seemed to add distance and dimension to the increasingly cultivated landscape that unrolled beneath them.

But best of all was the lake on the homestead. Ringed around with marsh grass and jeweled with white water lilies, its brown waters were so clear you could see bottom even at considerable depths, the sun rays filtering down through it in long, angled shafts. They drifted over it in their plank boat, watching the skittering of the water bugs, feeling the sun hot on their backs and luxuriating in the sense that they could cool off at any moment by simply dropping over the side. They fished lazily and learned to swim in a southern cove bordered with purple swamp thistle, cattail rushes, and tamaracks. Wading in here, their feet sank quickly and softly into the lime ooze. Then they pushed off, feeling the reeds trail the lengths of their bodies, tickling at last their toes until they were free of them and into deeper water.

When the wheat had been harvested and the hay as well, the pace of work slackened a bit and the weather too began to mellow toward fall as if in sympathy. John Muir now had to plow for winter wheat, chop wood, and shuck Indian corn. There was also the drudgery of stump grubbing, a task that fell to him as the eldest boy. Some days he spent more on his knees than on his feet, bent in the furrows over the tough old oak and hickory stumps, digging and chopping at the huge, gnarled roots. Splitting rails for fencing was another of his special chores, his father having tried it briefly and failed. Muir said he used to cut and split as many as a hundred logs a day of knotty oak, “swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night.” Meanwhile, the colors came out in the woods, pumpkins turned bright against the slow fading of the grasses, and asters, goldenrod, sunflowers, and daisies put forth their special glows. In the shady portions of the meadows, ferns—to which Muir was especially sensitive all his life—unfurled their lacy banners.

Sometimes, too, more than these autumnal flowers glowed on the land, for in the early years of the Muirs’ settlement great grass fires were a common feature of this season, as predictable as the turning of the leaves and the flowering of the late plants: huge expanses of prairie were swept up and the night skies reddened like an angry sunset. An English immigrant to Wisconsin in 1847 wrote excitedly back to the Old World about the sight of these prairie fires, which he described as burning “day and night for months together.” As more and more of the country came under cultivation, the fires were confined, and the narrowing spaces between the plowed fields grew dense with woody growths that the fires had once checked.

On Sunday afternoons in the fall, John Muir and the others might go nutting in the leaf-showering woods where they especially delighted in hickory nuts. In the trees the birds began to gather on the stripped branches. The bobolink, whose song had been so fine a feature of spring’s glad greening, now departed for southern rice fields. Muir noted that some species might hold convocations in the neighborhood for weeks at a time, and then one morning he would awaken to find them gone.

Few species stayed through the winter, but Muir knew those that did and cheered himself with their examples of fortitude. On winter mornings, many of which might be well below zero, his father’s voice would sound in summons at six, and Muir would awaken to find frost on the coverlets. Hobbling down the cold stairs of the fireless house he would face his first task of the day: getting his aching, chilblained feet into shrunken, half-frozen cowhide boots. No fire was allowed at this hour where it might have lessened this agony. Stumping out on his morning chores, his feet in iron-like prisons, he would have to endure the pain until the temperature of his feet and that of the boots became adjusted and the leather grudgingly thawed and stretched.

In the fields or woods it was often bitter, but Muir warmed to his work of chopping or fencing, though the ax might rebound from the frozen wood as if he had swung it against iron. He remembered of these days not only the hard and “shivery” work but also the stark beauties of the season: “the wonderful radiance of the snow when it was starry with crystals, and the dawns and sunsets and white noons, and the cheery, enlivening company of the brave chickadees and nuthatches.” Sometimes they would see Indian hunters running on the tracks of a deer or spearing muskrats at the edges of the lake. He might also occasionally accompany his father to Portage or Kingston or elsewhere in the immediate vicinity, for winter as a “slack” season was the preferred time for revival meetings, and Daniel Muir was much abroad in the snowy land, preaching his wintry doctrines and being preached at. On stormy days there was always work in the barn—shelling corn, making ax handles or ox yokes, mending harnesses—or they would sort potatoes in the cellar.

At last the ice that had boomed all winter above the surges of the waters beneath would begin to boom in a new and insistent way, then begin to crack, and at last to break up. Skies softened once again, and the voice of the loon was heard. Spring came to the oak openings and the cleared fields, and the old cycle rose again into its ascendant arc. Muir went on with it, captive to his seasonal chores but captivated, too, by the natural life of those seasons.

“After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake Farm,” John Muir recalled with a bitter asperity,

fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses,—after all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to escape with life,—father bought a half-section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.

Daniel Muir had spied out a tract of land that he thought would prove more fertile than the original homestead, and he had put John to the task of getting it ready for the move, which came in 1857. Meanwhile, the elder Muir had found a buyer for Fountain Lake farm in David Galloway, a twenty-eight-year-old Scot from Fifeshire who had settled in the area, then gone back to Scotland to bring over his parents and relatives. Galloway had fallen in love with Sarah Muir, and they were married in 1856. Galloway released his bride from the servitude of the fields, but the other children remained bound to their tasks.

A major factor that tempted Daniel Muir to the breaking of this new and much larger tract was the endemic immigrant disease called “land hunger.” Most immigrants, even if they had some previous experience with farming as Daniel Muir had, possessed no background as landholders, and in the presence of such an abundance of cheap land as they now found in the New World they grew understandably greedy. Not content with living on small and manageable plots, many bought as much land as they could. A popular Wisconsin saying of the time was that “all the land a man rightly wanted was his own claim and any land that adjoined it.”

In America, the Scots had gained and largely deserved a reputation as even more improvident in this regard, perhaps in part because their native agricultural practices had long been among the most benighted in the Old World. Here they were known not only for buying up more land than they could well manage but also for their wasteful methods of farming. Often they were ignorantly unconcerned with crop rotation and manuring and would exhaust one patch of ground, then another until finally they had worked out their entire claim and had to move on. Rather than cut trees for fuel and lumber and utilize the wood ashes for soap, Scots farmers often seemed content merely to girdle their trees and plant around them while the trees slowly died. In Wisconsin, the contrasts between the thrifty methods of the German immigrants and their Scots neighbors were embarrassing to the latter.

And this was the other factor in Daniel Muir’s decision to move: he had worked out his soil. The light and sandy grounds of Fountain Lake had begun to give out, the wheat yields dwindling steadily from twenty-five to twenty, then to five or six bushels per acre. Daniel Muir had tried corn, but here too the yield gradually proved disappointing. So the answer seemed to be to buy another piece of land and try there. In this fashion much of the state had become exhausted as a wheat-producing region by the time of the Civil War. After the war the locus of production would move into Iowa, Minnesota, and then North Dakota. Hamlin Garland’s story is typical of this general pattern: born on a Wisconsin wheat farm on the eve of the Civil War, Garland had moved with his family to Iowa after the war, and they had ended up raising wheat again on the prairies of North Dakota in the 1880s.

But this ignorant prodigality and disregard for the future was not confined to wheat or to any one national group: all the resources of the region were at the mercy of these mental habits and all groups were to one degree or another implicated. Wood, so plentiful that early settlers positively delighted to see stands of timber consumed by the annual fall grass fires, was everywhere used up in the most wasteful of ways. The land, so it was said, was made for farming, and cutting timber simply and self-evidently opened more land for agriculture while it also produced jobs, capital, and useful products. Hardly anyone out there knew enough to worry about the long-range effects of deforestation, and the few who did, like Professor Increase Lapham of the state college at Madison, were dismissed as cranks. Any settler could tell the professor that there was more wood in Wisconsin than could well be used. But the pineries of the great north woods, hardly known in the year of Muir’s birth, were by now being rapidly sawed to bits. Portable steam-powered saw mills and larger permanent installations sent out an estimated two hundred million board feet in 1853, and a decade after the Civil War the end of the timbering up there was in sight, a thing that would have seemed incredible but a few years previous when the rivers out of the pineries were choked with fabulous log jams.

Daniel Muir was no exception to these wasteful habits of mind and the wasteful practices they engendered. He too ordered the spendthrift cutting of timber on his lands and then refused to use what he had cut to warm his house and so provide for the health and comfort of his family. “The very best oak and hickory fuel,” John Muir recalled of his Wisconsin homesteads, “was embarrassingly abundant and cost nothing but cutting and common sense… .” However, instead of constructing ample fireplaces to accommodate large logs of these slow-burning woods as a household defense against the Wisconsin winters, Daniel Muir ordered the felled timber “hauled with weary heart-breaking industry into fences and waste places to get it out of the way of the plough, and out of the way of doing good.” Meanwhile, the Muir family shivered about what John Muir remembered was a miserable little kitchen stove with a firebox “about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep—scant space for three or four small sticks … .” Yet if Daniel Muir was both niggardly and wasteful with his own timber, there was a persistent rumor in the Muirs’ neighborhood that he ordered his eldest son to poach timber from government land that lay in a swale west of his new claim. If he did so, Daniel Muir at least had the sanction of popular custom, the practice being widespread, the poachers accounting the timber as actually free and the sale money from it a kind of windfall.

Of all this and its consequences for the region—lowered water tables, droughts, proliferation of pests, exhaustion of the soil—Muir at the time knew little, though he could surely lament the wasting of those “heart-cheering” loads of wood. Like the others he was caught up in the seemingly inevitable process of breaking the land for civilization and profit.

Looking around him, he could see other families likewise bound to the soil, other children like himself and his brothers and sisters laboring at kindred tasks through the seasons: planting, plowing, chopping, even poaching wood. Perhaps his father was more severe in his demands and in the way he enforced them, but in truth all the immigrants drove themselves and their families much too hard. Nor did they seem to know any better in this regard than in agricultural matters, where the rule of hard usage also prevailed. As many of them had no previous experience with land-holding or with the principle of usufruct, so many like the elder Muir had had too near and numbing an experience with child labor to recognize how it could surely blunt and blight the new generations. In the Lanark mills of Daniel Muir’s time children regularly worked a thirteen-hour day, six days a week, and spent their Sundays cleaning the machinery. Well into the nineteenth century it was common practice in the British Isles to employ women and small children in the pit collieries where like beasts they hauled carts by iron chains about their middles. To those with such knowledge the labor of the farm seemed neither cruel nor unusual.

To outsiders it might, as it did to Fredrika Bremer. Watching the midwestern farm families, bent and sweating in their chosen servitude, she wondered whether these new Americans, so determined on freedom and prosperity, would ever awaken to the far grander opportunity their new lands and situation offered: the chance to turn toward the sun, to open themselves to the possibility of regeneration as the vanished aboriginal races evidently had.

In the middle 1850s as his father prepared yet another agonizing grid of work for him, John Muir was not quite ready for such thoughts. And yet he could hardly have been oblivious to the human consequences of this furious industry. He could see some of those consequences in the deepening lines of toil and resignation in his own mother’s face, in her hands. He knew that his sisters Sarah and Margaret were now in chronically poor health and that the first and greatest gift David Galloway had bestowed on the former was to take her out of the fields forever. He himself bore the humiliating title of the “runt of the family” since among these tall, angular folk he was somewhat undersized for a teenaged boy; later, he would claim that overwork had stunted his growth.

Like the people, the countryside seemed to be taking on the look of age, seemed to be becoming a facsimile of that Old World the immigrants had so willingly left behind for this new one. The land was filling up, and whereas the Muirs once had been virtually solitary, now all the neighboring quarter sections were taken up. There was a graveyard now, too, and Muir watched it entered upon and filled with its own settlers for whom the New World had not opened onto new vistas of life but had led instead to premature death: Graham, McReath, Thompson, Maitland, Whitehead… . “The generations,” wrote another midwestern child of this time who survived into old age, “cannot utter themselves to each other until the strongest need of utterance is past.” William Dean Howells had seen the wasting of the human resources of the region, and he had lived long enough to see in the next generation writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Hamlin Garland give voices to those silent ones beneath the blurring markers of hundreds of rural burying grounds, writers touched nearly enough by the whole breaking process to conceive their mission as the writing of the somber annals of these victims of ignorant industry and innocent rapacity. Now the maturing Muir could only feel the injustice and the pain and vaguely ponder the meaning of it all.