|
ONE evening in 1849, when
John and his younger brother David were studying their next day's lessons at
Grandfather Gilrye's fireside, their father brought the information that
they would start together for America the next morning. It was wildly
exciting news, for it not only meant delivery from the tyranny of
schoolmasters, but a life of adventure in a world full of untrodden
wildernesses. Their grammar school reader had already kindled their
imaginations with stories of American animal life, especially such as had
come from the pen of the Scotch ornithologist Alexander Wilson and the
American naturalist John James Audubon. News of the recent discovery of gold
in California had run like wildfire over Europe and was the talk of the hour
also in Dunbar. It is no wonder that the expectations engendered by such
tales, together with the prospect of release from bitter school tasks,
rendered the two lads "utterly, blindly glorious."
The only bitter strain in all
this sweetness was the necessity of parting from Grandfather and Grandmother
Gilrye. And yet they hardly realized what it meant to their grandparents to
be left alone in their darkening old age, never to see their grandchildren
again. The rosy anticipations of childhood left no room for the thought that
their beloved grandparents might be near their own time of departure -in
their case for "the land of the leal." In three years, as it turned out,
both of them were gone. For the time being, however, Grandfather Gilrye
exercised some control over the situation by insisting that his daughter and
the younger children must not be exposed to the hardships of pioneering in a
new country before a comfortable house had been built for their reception.
Hence it was decided that only John, David, and Sarah were to accompany
their father to America.
In those days large numbers
of Scotch emigrants went to the wilds of Upper Canada and Daniel Muir also
set out with the intention of joining some Canadian settlement of his
compatriots. On shipboard, however, the majority opinion favored the States,
especially Wisconsin and Michigan, where according to common report the
forests were less dense and consequently more easily cleared. These
advantages were bound to weigh heavily with a man who feared to delay the
reunion of his family by the choice of a difficult homestead. Before the end
of the voyage he had decided in favor of the western United States,
resolving to be guided in his final choice by what he might learn on his
westward journey. On reaching Buffalo, the reported preeminence of Wisconsin
as a wheat-producing State left no further doubt in his mind. From Milwaukee
his cumbersome luggage was transported by wagon for a hundred miles over
miry roads to the little town of Kingston, where a land-agent helped him to
homestead a quarter-section of land amid sunny open woods beside a small
lake. [The "Fountain Lake" of Muir's memoirs, but now known sometimes as
"Muir's Lake," sometimes as "Ennis Lake."] A shanty was hastily erected and
the household goods stowed away in it until a more permanent frame house
could be built. Before winter came the house was ready for occupancy, and in
November, 1849, Mrs. Muir and the rest of the family arrived from Scotland.
The wild nooks about Fountain
Lake, and especially the lake itself, at once took a unique place in John's
affections. Its beautiful water- lily pads, its bordering meadows full of
showy sedges, orchids, and ferns, the great variety of fish, and the
abundant population of ducks and muskrats which it harbored, excited his
unbounded curiosity and admiration. It was in this lake that he became an
expert swimmer, though on one occasion he nearly lost his life through a
momentary lack of self-possession, and punished himself for it afterwards in
characteristic Scotch fashion by rowing out into the middle of the lake and
diving off into deep water again and again, shouting, "Take that!" each time
as he did it.
The raptures produced in
eleven-year-old i John by this sudden transplanting from the North Sea coast
of Scotland to this lake and the flowery oak-openings of Wisconsin made an
ineffaceable impression and even in retrospect taxed to the utmost his
powers of description when he was past three-score and ten. "This sudden
plash into pure wildness baptism in Nature's warm heart - how utterly happy
it made us!" he writes in his boyhood reminiscences: "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 still were at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but
charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and
pure in the very prime of the spring when Nature's pulses were beating
highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young
leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake,
all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!"
But it was not to be all joy,
this wilderness life. The golden mantle of boyish illusions was soon to be
lifted from stern realities. For when the serious work of subduing this
wilderness into a farm began, John found frequent occasion to remember the
prophecy of Grandfather Gilrye as in boyish exuberance John tried to tell
him about all the wonderful things he and David were going to see and do in
the new world. "Ah, poor laddies, poor lad- dies," he said in a trembling
voice, "you'll find something else ower the sea forbye gold and sugar,
birds' nests and freedom fra lessons and schools. You'll find plenty of
hard, hard work." Fortunately few forms of work are all toil and drudgery to
a gifted lad, and the environment permitted some undesigned good to spring
from the iniquity of child labor.
So it happens that the noble
part which domestic animals play in the development of an impressionable
boy, in this case a future naturalist, is vividly and touchingly reflected
in John's recollections of his four-footed fellow laborers on his father's
farm. Foremost among them were the oxen which in pioneer days did service on
Western farms instead of horses or mules. He shrewdly observes that the
experience of working with them enabled him and his brother to know them far
better than they should had they been "only trained scientific naturalists."
To Muir one ox was not like another - mere animated machines which all
reacted alike to any given stimulus or situation. For.he had seen one ox
learn to smash pumpkins with his head while others awkwardly tried to break
into them with their teeth. "We soon learned," he writes, "that each ox and
cow and calf had individual character."
Later, when the oxen were
displaced by horses, he remarked the same difference of sagacity and
temperament in them. One was intelligent, affectionate, and teachable, the
other balky and dull. Readers of his boyhood memoirs will also recall his
sympathetic description of Jack the Indian pony; of its fearlessness,
playfulness, and gentleness. The farm was evidently the place where he
learned to appreciate what he called the "humanity" of animals and man's
kinship with them. This sympathetic attitude made it easy for Muir to
observe evidence of animal intelligence not only in his humble
companions-in-labor on the farm, but when he came to study animals in their
wild state he was prepared to look there also for differences of
intelligence; and not alone between various types of animals, but between
individuals of the same species. In other words, to him much the most
interesting thing about an animal was its mind and the use to which it put
the same. On this point he differed widely with John Burroughs who seemed to
become a more and more outspoken champion of the mechanistic theory of
animal behavior which explains the actions of animals in terms of "blind
instinct." "Blind" seemed to be coextensive in meaning with "unreasoning,"
thus reducing the actions of all individuals of a given species of animal to
the particular brand of instinct characteristic of the species. On one
occasion when Burroughs and Muir, meeting at the house of a mutual friend in
Berkeley, discussed this issue, Muir in the judgment of those present scored
heavily against his opponent. And this was due not to his superior
conversational and argumentative powers, but to fact-seasoned conclusions
matured amid the observations of a lifetime. It was refreshing and amusing
to hear him go after the so-called animal psychologists and behaviorists
with their "problem boxes," etc., bent on making out, in some cases at
least, that animals are nothing but "machines in fur and feathers." On the
other hand he had no sympathy with the professional observers of wonders who
found it profitable not to distinguish between the imagination of the wild
and their own wild imaginations.
Now that so competent and
well-informed a naturalist as William T. Hornaday has presented the personal
observations of a lifetime in his book "The Minds and Manners of Wild
Animals," and has set forth therein a point of view substantially in accord
with that of John Muir, we may expect the mechanistic interpreters of animal
"behavior" to vacate the stage for a time. It ought to be added that Muir as
early as 1867 confided to his notebook his belief that one of the greatest
hindrances to a fruitful study of the intelligence and individual
characteristics of animals was the average human being's insufferable
self-conceit; that his egotism magnifies his lordship of creation until he
is incapable of seeing that animals "are our earth-born companions and
fellow "mortals." To the fact that the lord-of-creation idea has an abused
Biblical origin he attributed the fact that the "fearfully good, the
orthodox," are the first "to cry 'heresy' on every one whose sympathies
reach out a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own
species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial
country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for whom that
imponderable empire was planned." To this same effect is an eloquent passage
in "My Boyhood and ' where he touchingly describes the death of his favorite
horse Nob, over-driven by his father in going to a church meeting. After
remarking that "of the many advantages of farm life for boys one of the
greatest is the gaining of a real knowledge of animals as fellow mortals,"
worthy of respect and love, he adds: "Thus godlike sympathy grows and
thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where
too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have
neither mind nor soul, have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were
made only for man to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered, or enslaved."
That John Muir survived the
relentless severity with which his father held him to adult labor when he
was a mere boy probably was due less to his physical vitality than to the
buoyancy of his temperament. Called at six in the morning in winter-time, he
had to begin the usual chores of feeding horses and cattle, fetching water
from the spring at the foot of the hill, bringing in wood and sharpening
tools - all before breakfast. Immediately afterwards began the heayiework of
the day, such as wood-chopping, fencing, fanning wheat, and various other
tasks, indoors and out. The only means of warming the house was the kitchen
stove, and even in this he was not allowed to kindle a fire before hastening
to the chores. With Spartan fortitude he had to squeeze his chilblained feet
into wet socks and soggy boots frozen solid. No wonder that in the memoirs
of his boyhood he remembered with regret how great heart-cheering loads of
oak and hickory were hauled with misguided industry into waste places to rot
instead of being laid up for use in a desperately needed large fireplace. It
was a very unusual boy who amid this senseless aggravation of the natural
hardships of pioneer farm life could find it in his heart "to enjoy the
winter beauty —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."
The summer chores and field
labor were different, but not less exacting. The day began earlier and
lasted longer. Among detached jottings under the heading of "Farm Work" in
one of his notebooks I find the following:
We had to work very hard on
the farm in summer, mowing, hoeing, cradling wheat, hauling it to the barns,
etc. No rest in the shade of trees on the side of the fields. When tired we
dared not even go to the spring for water in the terrible thirst of the tnug
dog-days, because the field was in sight of the house and we might be seen.
... We had to make ourselves sick that we might lay up something against a
sick day, as if we could kill time without injuring eternity. The incessant
anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable disease.
A stitch in time saves nine,
so we take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow.
John being the eldest boy,
the greater part of the hard work of the farm naturally fell to him. This
included the splitting of rails for the zigzag fences, mostly from trees so
knotty and cross-grained that the making of a hundred rails a day involved
the expenditure of much energy and not a little skill. It was fatiguing
work, so much so that his father, after trying rail-splitting with him for a
day or two, left it all to John.
A form of labor which he
remembered with special aversion was the hoeing of corn before the days of
cultivators. Under his father's relentless drive the haying and harvest
season bore down hard upon the growing boy. A natural ambition to excel made
him vie with the hired men in mowing and cradling, and at the age of sixteen
John was accustomed to lead the line. He was no doubt right in thinking that
this very severe labor so far exceeded his strength that it checked his
growth.
But there was no one in those
days to warn him of the dangers of overwork, least of all his father. The
latter's unnatural severity toward his children made so indelible an
impression that when John recorded the memories of his boyhood he treated
with great frankness an aspect of family life which ordinarily
autobiographers veil in silence. But since he had, as will appear later, a
humane purpose in exposing to public view this aspect of his early home
experience, it is clearly a biographer's duty not to ignore a situation
already created, though some might question the filial propriety of
introducing it in the first place.
What John describes as "the
old Scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple,
playful forgetfulness" was continued by Daniel Muir in the Wisconsin
wilderness. Most of the whippings fell upon John and were "outrageously
severe, and utterly barren of fun." But in telling about the occasion on
which he was to receive a beating for having lost his father's ox-whip by
tying it to the dog's tail, John makes no concealment of the fact that he
was often a willful and exasperating boy. For when he had escaped a
thrashing because David, commanded to find a switch, had brought an
unmanageable burr- oak sapling, he engaged in the same sort of mischief the
moment his father was out of sight.
But the whippings, however
severe, were less serious in their consequences than the excessive grind of
work demanded. "Even when sick," writes John, "we were held to our tasks as
long as we could stand. Once in harvest- time I had the mumps and was unable
to swallow any food except milk, but this was not allowed to make any
difference, while I staggered with weakness and sometimes fell headlong
among the sheaves. Only once was I allowed to leave the harvest-field - when
I was stricken down with pneumonia. I lay gasping for weeks, but the Scotch
are hard to kill and I pulled through. No physician was called, for father
was an enthusiast and always said and believed that God and hard work were
by far the best doctors."
Though more excessively
industrious than any of his neighbors, Daniel Muir was by no means peculiar
in his addictidness to the vice of over-industry. It was a common failing of
settlers from England and Scotland, and John Muir doubtless was right in
attributing it to their suddenly satisfied land-hunger and the desire to
keep their large farms as neat and well tilled as the little garden patches
which they had left behind them overseas. But, whatever the cause, there was
no doubt about the frenzied manner in which the Muir household was held to
the tasks of the farm. To quote John's memoirs again:
We were all made slaves
through the vice of over- industry. . . . It often seemed to me that our
fierce, over-industrious way of getting the grain from the ground was too
closely connected with grave- digging. The staff of life, naturally
beautiful, oftentimes suggested the grave-digger's spade. Men and boys, and
in those days even women and girls, were cut down while cutting the wheat.
The fat folk grew loan and the lean leaner, while the rosy cheeks brought
from Scotland and other cool countries across the sea faded to yellow like
the wheat.
We were called in the morning
at four o'clock and seldom got to bed before nine, making a broiling,
seething day seventeen hours long loaded with heavy work, while I was only a
small stunted boy; and a few years later my brothers David and Daniel and my
older sisters had to endure about as much as I did. In the harvest dog-days
and dog- nights and dog-mornings; 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.
The losses sustained by John,
both in bodily vigor and in intellectual growth, under the severe farm
régime of his father, were the subject of frequent reflection by him in
after- years. "Pondering on the number who have died and crumbled into
dust," he writes in one of his journals, "the farmer may say that he is
farming the dust of his ancestors and compelling these ancestors to take
refuge in turnips and apples. . . . We might live free, rich, comfortable
lives just as well as not. Yet how hard most people work for mere dust and
ashes and care, taking no thought of growing in knowledge and grace, never
having time to get in sight of their vast ignorance."
This wearing labor of
clearing and setting in order the Fountain Lake farm continued
uninterruptedly for eight years. By that time it had been fully brought
under the plow, fenced and provided with stables for cattle and horses. The
original rude burr-oak shanty had been replaced with a more roomy frame
house. Its former site on the hill overlooking the lake now is marked only
by a depression and by a few stones that may have formed part of the
foundation. In 1856 Sarah Muir was married to David M. Galloway, who bought
the Fountain Lake farm [It has changed ownership several times since then
and been subdivided. David Galloway sold it to James Whitehead and he in
turn to Samuel Ennis. In 1920 the particular tract on which the Muir house
stood was owned by Howard McGwinn.] from his father-in-law. Thus Sarah
succeeded her mother as mistress of the Fountain Lake home, where a warm
welcome always awaited John when he returned from his wanderings.
The elder Muir, after
relinquishing the farm to his son-in-law, bought half a section of uncleared
land about four miles southeast of the original homestead. This new farm was
situated twelve and a half miles northeast of Portage and four miles from
the Fox River. The summit of a gentle slope covered with an open stand of
fine hickory trees was selected as a site for a new house. Its erection in
1857 marked the beginning of another period of hard and exhausting labor.
John at this time was nineteen years old and somewhat stunted in his growth,
but he prided himself on his physical hardihood and his ability to endure
all that was put upon him.
The Hickory Hill house was a
simple two- story frame structure, which is still in existence, though
veneered with brick and shorn of a lean-to shown in Muir's sketch published
in "The Story of My Boyhood and Youth." It is surrounded by wide-spreading
box elders, willows, and apple trees which are said to date from the days of
the Muirs. The local tradition is rendered plausible by the age and size of
the trees. Especially striking among them is a willow near the well around
which by dint of sober necessity the life of the farm revolved. For unlike
the first farm, there was on it "no spring or stream or meadow or lake." Yet
water was indispensable and to John was assigned the task of finding it.
Long before he struck water
by sinking a ninety-foot shaft he had entered into the experience of those
"who passing through the valley of weeping make it a well." After the first
ten feet he struck a stratum of fine-grained sandstone through which he
laboriously chipped his way for eighty feet with mason's chisels. Day after
day for months he chipped away from dawn until dark. His father, apparently
entirely ignorant of the dangers of choke-damp, would lower him by means of
a bucket in the morning and draw him up again with the loosened chips at
noon. Immediately after the noonday meal he was lowered again and left until
night. One morning, as he was putting some left-over chips into the bucket
with which he had just been lowered, he began to sway and sink under the
effect of carbonic-acid gas that had settled at the bottom of the shaft
during the night. His father, alarmed by his silence, and finding that John
was not in the bucket when he heard his feeble-voiced request to be taken
out, roused him from his stupor sufficiently by his shouted commands to make
him get into the bucket. He was unconscious and all but suffocated when he
reached the surface. But after a few days of rest and recovery he was
lowered again, with some precautions against choke-damp, to chip down
another ten feet, when water was struck. That was more than sixty years ago
and ever since then the well has furnished an adequate ,supply of water for
the farm. But one shudders to reflect how much of the imperishable wealth of
the human spirit might have been sunk forever in that Wisconsin well.
In the month of August, 1858,
during the Hickory Hill farm period, there occurred an event which made a
deep impression upon John's memory. It was the death of a poor feeble-minded
man who on account of his physical frailty, and some engaging social
accomplishments, was both pitied and beloved among the neighbors. Many
deemed him an entertaining singer of folk-songs and he had a gift of
impromptu rhyming. It was generally reported and believed in the
neighborhood that his brother, a blacksmith preacher with whom he was making
his home, often beat him and forced him to work beyond his strength, and
that one morning he pitched forward and died on a pile of stovewood which he
was chopping.
When fifty-five years later
Muir was writing the story of his boyhood, the incident was still vivid in
his memory and he gave a peculiarly moving account of it such as he only
could write when his feelings were deeply stirred. Appearing first in the
"Atlantic" it fell under the eye of the blacksmith preacher's son, a boyhood
friend of John's of whom he had lost all trace. While no names were given he
recognized in the person pilloried by Muir none other than his own father,
and wrote John a dignified, friendly letter, pointing out certain mistakes
and the fact that it conveyed an erroneous impression concerning his
father's character. "I desire in conclusion," said the writer, "to emphasize
the respect and admiration I have always entertained for you, beginning with
the day we met where the road from your Father's place intersected with what
was known as the 'River road,' following the holidays of '63 and '64, when
in company we walked twelve miles to Portage and I listened to your
conversation, your life and experience at the University to which you were
returning. The advice and counsel given caused you to enter into and become
a potent factor in my life. Though you did not know it, and have forgotten
the circumstances, with me it remains an abiding memory and in the years
that followed proved a stimulus and incentive to untiring effort. I mention
this to assure you that my esteem and faith in you remain unchanged, and
that you may also know father was not the blot upon the landscape of that
glorious wilderness you believe and have pictured him to be."
Muir's reply is of unusual
interest and biographical value, because it reveals ruling motives of his
life and furnishes the reason why he disregarded customary reserve in
presenting the disciplinary side of his boyhood training.
MARTINEZ, CALIFORNIA
February 13, 1913
DEAR FRIEND:
Your painful letter came to
me in my lonely library writing den while hard at work on an Alaska book
which should have been written a score of years ago. Seldom, if ever, have I
received a letter that has given me so much mingled pleasure and pain -
pleasure in hearing from a friend of my boyhood, and learning from you, the
best and final authority, that the reports on the use of the Solomonic rod
in your father's household, gleaned half a century ago from neighbors,
including my sisters, brothers, and brothers-in-law, were, to say the least,
grossly exaggerated; and pain from having been led to write by my lifelong
hatred of cruelty that which has given you pain.
I never did intentional
injustice to any human being or animal, and I have directed my publishers to
cancel all that has so grievously hurt you. For a full understanding of the
matter I wish to inform you that the four articles that have appeared in the
November, December, January, and February numbers of the "Atlantic" were
taken from the manuscript of a book entitled, "My Boyhood and Youth," being
the first volume of my autobiography, soon to be published. I corrected the
last of the galley proofs several weeks ago and wrote the publishers that
they need not send me the page proofs since their proof-readers were so
careful and able. I have not seen any of them, and am unable to tell how far
the work has progressed. Possibly part or all of this first volume may be
stereotyped, or even printed. If not printed, the unfortunate page will be
cut out of the plate at whatever cost. [His correspondent disclaimed all
desire to have the offending account omitted, so it has been allowed to
stand.] And at the worst, only a comparatively small first edition may have
been printed, and the part that has caused so much trouble will not appear
in the ten or twenty following editions.
I have good reason, as
doubtless you know, to hate the habit of child-beating, having seen and felt
its effects in some of their worst forms in my father's house; and all my
life I have spoken against the habit in season and out of season. But you
make a great mistake in taking what I have written as a judgment or history
of your father's character, as I hope to show in another volume. You
doubtless know that character is made up of many particulars, and that it is
grossly unfair to try the whole general character of any man by one
particular, however striking and influential it may be. I was far from doing
so in sketching the evil of child-beating from which we both have so
bitterly suffered.
When the rod is falling on
the flesh of a child, and, what may oftentimes be worse, heartbreaking
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 conscientious misguided
parent. Compare this Solomonic treatment with Christ's. King Solomon has
much to answer for in this particular, though I suppose he may in some
measure be excused by the trying, irritating size of his family.
Your father, like my own,
was, I devoutly believe, a sincere Christian, abounding in noble qualities,
preaching the Gospel without money or price w hue working hard for a living,
clearing land, blackmithing, able for anything, and from youth to death
never abating one jot his glorious foundational religious enthusiasm. I
revere his memory with that of my father and the New England Puritans -
types of the best American pioneers whose unwavering faith in God's eternal
righteousness forms the basis of our country's greatness.
Come and see me, and let us
become better acquainted after all these eventful years. . You must now be
nearing three score and ten. I will be seventy-five in afew months, and in
the sundown of life we turn fondly back to the friends of the Auld-lang-syne.
So I am now doing, and am wishing that you may be assured that I am,
Faithfully your friend
JOHN MUIR
In accordance with a fairly
common custom among God-fearing pioneers of earlier days morning and evening
family worship was regularly observed in the Muir household. But how easily
morning prayers may become a devastating substitute for a day of real
religion was apparently exemplified glaringly in both these households.
Under such circumstances children often react sharply, not only against the
external forms, but also against the substance of religion. The religious
convictions of a shallower nature than John Muir's would never have survived
the bigotry and rigor of his father's training. The latter, soon after
moving to the Hickory Hill farm, conceived the notion of devoting all his
time to Bible study, leaving to John and his brother David all the heavy
work of the farm. John in the meantime, after much brooding, had evolved the
plan of a clock which, when attached to his bed, would set him on his feet
at any desired time in the morning. Having thought it out clearly he
employed his meagre spare time, and any odd moments he could snatch from
work, to carve and whittle this novel clock in wood. To keep it hid from his
father he concealed it in a spare bedroom upstairs. One day, however, his
father accidentally discovered it and the bad news was promptly conveyed to
John by one of his sisters. He had good reason to fear that his father would
immediately commit his machine to the fire, for the employment of even his
scanty spare time upon such tasks was severely disapproved by his father.
But nothing happened until some days later when his father introduced the
subject at dinner time. "John," he inquired, "what is that thing you are
making upstairs?" Meal-times to Daniel Muir were sacramental occasions when
no light conversation was permitted, and where every one was expected to
cultivate an attitude of mind more befitting the Lord's supper than a family
meal. Neither the time nor the subject boded any good for John, so in
confusion and despair he replied that he did not know what to call it. But
after some heckling John suggested that it might be called "an early-rising
machine."
To appreciate the effect of
this remark upon the elder Muir we must remind the reader that during the
preceding winter John had been getting up at one o'clock to gain time for
reading and for the construction of a miniature self-setting sawmill. His
father had involuntarily given occasion for this extravagantly early rising,
for one evening when ordering John to bed at eight o'clock as usual, as he
was lingering a few minutes in the kitchen to read church history, he added
conciliatingly that if he was set on reading he might get up in the morning
as early as he liked. John rose at one o'clock that very night, feverishly
and pathetically elated over the possession of five hours of time that were
his own. The cold would not let him read, so during the winter lie invested
his new "time-wealth" in contriving and making all kinds of mechanical
inventions. His workshop was in the cellar underneath his father's bedroom
and he must often have disturbed his sleep. But having given his word he
stood to it with Scotch fortitude although he remonstrated against the
unreasonable use which John was making of the permission granted. It does
not seem to have occurred to him that a boy so eager to learn was entitled
to some margin of leisure for self- improvement during normal working hours.
Such in brief was the
background of the occasion on which Daniel Muir broke the sacramental
silence of the noonday meal with an inquiry about the strange contrivance
John was whittling. To learn that it "might be called an early-rising
machine" was almost too much even for his gravity. But he quickly recovered
his usual solemnity of face and voice and asked in a stern tone, "Do you not
think it very wrong to waste your time on such nonsense?" John meekly
replied that he did not think he was doing any wrong. "Well," replied his
father, "I assure you I do; and if you were only half as zealous in the
study of religion as you are in contriving and whittling these useless,
nonsensical things, it would be infinitely better for you. I want you to be
like Paul, who said that he desired to know nothing among men but Christ and
Him crucified."
Such attempts to set religion
at variance with the boy's innocent and commendable desire to develop by his
own efforts his manual skill and mechanical ingenuity would have broken the
spirit of most lads similarly situated. It is a typical instance of how
religiousness, warped out of all semblance to real religion by bigotry and
ignorance, may do grievous harm to its victims. But though he experienced a
sense of injury and rebellion at the time, he lacked the knowledge and
maturity to unravel the complex of fictitious dilemmas which his father
propounded. Fortunately, the difficulties thrown in his way only increased
his tenacity of purpose and in later years he saw the way out clearly
enough. "Strange to say," he wrote in "My Boyhood and Youth," "father
carefully taught us to consider ourselves very poor worms of the dust,
conceived in sin, etc., and devoutly believed that quenching every spark of
pride and self-confidence was a sacred duty, without realizing that in so
doing he might at the same time be quenching everything else."
Luckily, as all his readers
know, he escaped the type of reaction which under like circumstances has
carried other strong characters into lifelong antagonism to religion. It had
no such effect upon John. Indeed, one letter at least, which survives from
this period of his boyhood, shows that he did his best to be an Apostle Paul
to his own youthful generation, writing long, appealing letters to other
boys of the vicinity, urging them to make a "decision for Christ." Their own
letters are laden with phrases about the glories of heaven, the shortness
and uncertainty of life, the appalling length of eternity, and the
importance of being prepared for the fearfully searching inquiries of the
day of judgment. Much of this is no doubt a part of the conventional
religiousness of the time, fanned into flame seasonally by camp meetings and
traveling evangelists. It must, however, be reckoned among the actions and
reactions that went into the making of John Muir.
The invention and
construction of his first wooden clock was, as we have seen, the outgrowth,
in part, of a desire to secure more time for reading. "You say in your
letter," writes a friend in March, 1858, that time to stow wisdom-bins is
precious." So it was for a boy who, by his own testimony, had to consider
himself fortunate if he got five minutes' reading after supper before his
father would notice the light and order him to bed. "Night after night," he
writes, "I tried to steal minutes . . and how keenly precious those minutes
were, few can nowadays know. Father failed perhaps two or three times in a
whole winter to notice my light for nearly ten minutes, magnificent golden
blocks of time, long to be remembered like holidays or geological periods."
In this connection the
following entry, taken from one of his notebooks, tells more between the
lines than in them, being a reflection of the remembered intensity with
which the lad pursued his aims. "Many try to make up time," he writes, "by
wringing the slumber out of their pores. Not so when I was a boy, springing
out of bed at one o'clock in the morning, wide-awake, without the shadow of
a yawn, no sleep left in a single fiber of me, burning and bright as a tiger
springing on its prey."
John mentions his fifteenth
year as the probable time when he began to relish good literature with
enthusiasm. Certain it is that about the time of the family's removal to
Hickory Hill farm this enthusiasm was a steady flame. One can only guess at
the length of the strides he might have made could he have had the
advantages of a first-class school. But such an opportunity was not to fall
to his lot. Between the time of his departure from Scotland and the year in
which he entered the University of Wisconsin he obtained only two months of
additional schooling. Where this was received is uncertain, but it probably
was in the old Fox River School No. 5 which then stood in a patch of dense
forest not far from the first farm. In an undated letter of the fifties,
evidently from a schoolmate, the writer expresses the wish that they might
meet again "at the schoolhouse and speak pieces and sing our old 'Press
Onward' song as we used to last winter." The same correspondent wonders what
has become of the teacher, whether he still occasionally thinks of his
pupils and the merry times they used to have. "I wish we might meet him
again in the old schoolhouse and hear him call us to order and listen to
some of his wonderful speeches."
Among John's papers of this
period is the manuscript of a juvenile poem of some length entitled "The Old
Log Schoolhouse," and a memorandum, apparently of the same date as the poem,
declares that it was "written in 1860." Since that was the year in which he
left home, it is quite possible that it refers to the above-mentioned
school. Of more interest than the local color in these lines of blank verse
is the young author's ability to detach himself from his environment and to
indulge in seriocomic criticism of its defects and crudities. First comes a
word-picture of the school, as follows:
"Old log schoolhouse, warped,
and gnarled, and leaky;
Opening thy crooked ribs and seams and knots
To rain and snow and all the winds of heaven
To keep thee sweet and healthy!
Many a storm Hath played wild music beating on roof and gable,
Loosely boarded, telling all the weather,
As if some wondrous instrument thou wert,
Speaking aloud, through all times and seasons,
Thy parts of speech so strangely varied, mixing
With stranger speech within, called English grammar.
While yet the trunks of which thy walls are built
Stood on the hills with outspread leaves and branches,
A shelter, then, thou wert for gladsome birds,
That made sweet music ring about their nests.
And still a noisy nest thou art and shelter
For callow, birdlike children soft and downy,
Logs woven about them, piled and jointed,
Crossed like sticks and straws, and roughly plastered
With clay and mud like nests of mason robins."
An enumeration of what the
old school has heard within its walls includes some humorous arithmetic and
the hatchet of George Washington that
"Hath hacked small readers
voices and the nerves
Of teachers, in tones strident., rough, and rusty,
In lessons never-ending, never-mending.
With grammar, too, old schoolhouse, thou hast suffered,
While Plato, Milton, Shakespeare, have been murdered,
Torn limb from limb in analytic puzzles,
And wondrous parsing, passing comprehension,
The poetry and meaning blown to atoms -
Sad sacrifices in the glorious cause
Of higher all-embracing education."
"Players, preachers, showmen,
singers, sinners" have all taken their turn in shaking the school's old
oaken ribs, but never have its walls rung with stranger sounds than
"Class-meeting converts'
speeches; low, tearful,
Sobbing promises to walk the narrow way
Henceforward, and prayers for light and strength,
Conscious of weakness and they know not what.
Not so the brawny fighting backwoods brother.
With jaw advanced, and bulging muscles rigid,
He shouts and stamps and makes thy old logs rattle
With rough defiance, calling 'Hither come
Ye men or devils, come all together,
Ye who would bar the narrow way to heaven.
Armed for the fight with Christ, my Captain, leading,
I fear no foe earthborn or from the pit.
Come on! come on!' as though he were addressing
Some foe in sight, yet maybe semi-conscious
The foe was far away, and like to stay far.
Every ism and doxy hath been
sounded
On every key within thy patient walls
Old schoolhouse; blasts of strong revival,
Enough to blow thy dovetailed logs asunder,
While souls were being saved, and pulled, and twisted
All out of shape, till they no longer fitted
The frightened bodies that to each belonged.
Playing at judgment day in lightsome humor,
Calling, 'Ho! all ye saints that love the Lord,
Rise up now quickly and take these benches
On the right side there. And now ye sinners
Cross over to the left, and stand in row,
And be ye separate as sheep and goats
That I may count ye, and get the true statistics
To give the Master and myself some notion
How fare these flocks supernal and infernal
In this section of his backwoods pastures.'
Then halting suddenly to blow his nose
And spit, and bite some fresh tobacco,
He waves his hand and cries, 'Now all be seated,
And mix up as ye will, but pray remember
When all your hardened cases come to trial
In the upper court, I fairly warned ye
To settle here with me as Heaven's agent-
To get a ticket by the gospel route, -
The only route through our denomination."
In conclusion the young poet
foresees the time when the schoolhouse will have fallen under the doom of
"dust to dust . . . perchance to sift and drift in vapor, far and wide o'er
hill and dale and grassy plain, to take new forms of beauty." And on this
passage down the ages "with Nature" he bids it a fond farewell.
To the discerning reader
these excerpts will reveal at once the fact that he was saturated with the
rhythm of Miltonic verse, that he was developing his critical faculty and
his sense of word values, and that he had achieved a considerable degree of
mental independence in a strongly repressive environment.
These gains had obviously not
been accomplished by the only two months of additional schooling which he
received between the ages of eleven and twenty-two, for he had during this
period been wholly dependent upon his own efforts for his further education.
What ways and means did he employ?
In his memoirs Muir has told
how in one summer he worked through a higher arithmetic without assistance
by using the short intervals of time between the noonday meal and the
afternoon start for the fields. Algebra, geometry, and trigonometry were
taken up in the same manner. Even the shorthand of that day excited his
practical interest. But a broad training in literature and science was more
difficult to secure in a backwoods farming community because of the lack of
suitable books. Such raw materials of English literature as the neighborhood
afforded were faithfully used by him. Through acquaintanceship and
correspondence with boys on neighboring farms he arranged for the exchange
of such books as their homes afforded. Reading became a consuming passion
with him, and he seems to have had a marked preference for poetry of which
he was accustomed to learn favorite passages by heart, rolling them like
sweet morsels under his tongue. Nor were the practical aspects of such study
neglected, for in extant correspondence with his young friends they
acknowledge the receipt of rhymed letters and poems. Interestingly enough
one of the poems was an elegy on the death of an enormous tree whose felling
on a neighboring farm had been described to him by one of his correspondents
as a very laborious task.
John has named the age of
fifteen as the time when the realm of poetry began to open to him like the
dawn of a glorious day, and to the same period of his youthful development
he assigns the "great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the Bible,
Shakespeare, and Milton" is a source of "inspiring, exhilarating, uplifting
pleasure." When the book supply of the neighborhood was exhausted he had to
find other ways of meeting his intellectual wants. Farm products in the
backwoods were mostly taken in trade and money was scarce. But by careful
saving of pennies and small sums which John secured in one way or another he
managed to buy such longed-for books as were not ruled out by the rigid
censorship of his all-Bible father. In the course of a few years he was able
to count among his treasures "parts of Shakespeare's, Milton's, Cowper's,
Henry Kirk White's, Campbell's, and Akenside's works, and quite a number of
others seldom read nowadays." Wood's "Natural History," and the once famous
"Ancient History" of the French historian, Charles Rollin, seem also to have
made memorable additions to the furniture of his mind.
Included in the slender stock
of books accessible to him among the neighbors were the novels of Sir Walter
Scott. But these he had to read in secret because his father strictly
forbade the reading of novels as a sinful indulgence. The latter was,
however, induced to buy Josephus' "Wars of the Jews" and d'Aubignó's
"History of the Reformation," and John vainly did his best to get him to buy
Plutarch's "Lives," until he contrived to circumvent paternal prejudices by
suggesting that the old Greek writer might throw valuable light upon the
food question. For Daniel Muir had taken up vegetarianism and was seeking to
convince his family that the Creator never intended man to eat flesh. It
mattered little to John that the old pagan could render no decision on the
subject of man's proper diet. The main point, as he says, was that "so at
last we gained our glorious Plutarch."
John's father, as indicated
in the opening chapter, was a type of the old traditionalist for whom the
Bible's authoritativeness was all of one piece and, like many another
biblical literalist, he became an easy victim of his own theory. Blinded by
his presuppositions, his Bible study plunged him only into deeper mental
confusion. John, possessing a thorough knowledge of the Bible himself, was
quick to take advantage of the weakness of his father's bibliolatry. After
the Plutarch had been secured, he went to the rescue of his mother against
his father's vegetarian fad by pointing out that when the Lord commanded the
ravens to feed Elijah in hiding by the brook Cherith "the ravens," according
to the Scriptures, "brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread
and flesh in the evening." That ended the discussion. Daniel Muir
acknowledged himself mistaken, for the Bible was his final arbiter in
everything, and since the ravens were divinely commanded to bring flesh to
the prophet it could not be otherwise than legitimate food.
A similar argument ensued
when John was caught reading Thomas Dick's "The Christian Philosopher." This
book, by a Scotch contemporary written in a popular and engaging style, was
very influential in its time. The aim of the author, in his own words, was
"to illustrate the harmony which subsists between the system of nature and
the system of revelation, and to show that the manifestations of God in the
material universe ought to be blended with our view of the facts and
doctrines recorded in the volume of inspiration." John, to his great
disappointment, found that the word "Christian" in the title was not
sufficient to overcome in his father's mind the suspicions aroused by the
word "Philosopher." Timothy, he reminded John, had been advised to avoid
"oppositions of science falsely so called," and the Colossians had been
warned, "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit."
John ventured to defend philosophy and science on the ground of their
practical usefulness, but his father insisted that the Bible contained all
the science and philosophy needed for the conduct of life. "But your
spectacles," interposed John, "without which you cannot read the Bible,
cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of optics." "Oh!"
replied his father, "there will always be plenty of worldly people to make
spectacles." Here, again, John found an opportunity to score on his father's
literalism by quoting from Jeremiah a passage referring to the time when
"all shall know the Lord from the least of them to the greatest of them,"
"and then," he asked, "who will make the spectacles?" But this time his
father refused to acknowledge his discomfiture and ordered him to return the
book to its owner. Daniel Muir remained inflexibly hostile to anything that
savored of a "harmony" or compromise between "nature" and "revelation" such
as this book offered. John's mind, however, was beginning to trend in
precisely that direction, and while for the time being he respected his
father's ban of the book, he also records the fact that he "managed to read
it later."
An estimate of the influence
and importance of the farm period upon Muir's future career would not be
complete without considering what he did in his cellar workshop. If the
propriety of linking his love of reading with his love of "whittling" were
not already sufficiently justified by the practical use to which he put his
wooden clock, his own title - "Knowledge and Inventions" - for chapter seven
of "My Boyhood and Youth" would satisfy the need of further warrant for so
doing. By means of the early-rising attachment, which he perfected more and
more, his clocks not only measured but created time and opportunity for him,
so that knowledge and inventions were jointly furthered by the skill of his
hands.
The invention of the
self-setting sawmill and the wooden clock was speedily followed by other
mechanical contrivances. One of these was a hickory clock shaped like a
scythe to symbolize the scythe of Father Time. The handle bore the legend
"All flesh is grass," and the pendulum in the form of a bunch of arrows,
suggested the flight of time. This clock excited much admiration both at
home and among the neighbors. It indicated the days of the week and the
month as well as the diurnal time, and was still capably performing its
functions fifty years later.
The success of this
contrivance encouraged him to invent a still more ambitious clock, one with
four dials, like a town clock, designed to be placed on the peak of the barn
roof so that it could be read from the fields. But before it was finished
his father stopped him, interposing the objection that it would attract too
many people to the barn. Neither would he for the same reason allow him to
put it in the top of an oak tree near the house where the two-second
fourteen-foot pendulum would have had room to swing. He was, therefore,
regretfully compelled to lay away the work uncompleted.
Another invention was a large
thermometer with a dial on which the expansion and contraction of an iron
rod, multiplied about thirty-two thousand times by a series of levers, was
indicated by means of a hand operating against a counter-weight. So
sensitive was it to variations of temperature that in cold weather the dial
hand would move upon the approach of a person. This instrument was regarded
as a great wonder by all the neighbors and extant letters show that a Mr.
Varnel was seriously thinking of acquiring the right to manufacture it
commercially.
While all the world now knows
John Muir as a naturalist, his gifts and capacities in that sphere were as
yet unrevealed and unrecognized. It was his skill and ingenuity as an
inventor that focused the eyes and the interest of his rural friends upon
him. They encouraged him to think that he would have no difficulty in
securing employment in some machine shop, especially if he took some of his
inventions to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair. The suggestion appealed
to him, and when the Fair was convened in Madison, in the autumn of 1860, he
reluctantly prepared to leave the parental roof. The diffident, bashful,
home-loving youth, who now stood hesitatingly at the opening of a fateful
new chapter of his life, bears little resemblance to the dauntless explorer
and world traveler which he was ultimately destined to become. |
