John muir biography facts record

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America's conservation organization the Sierra Club was founded by John Muir. John Muir wrote a book about his time in Yosemite titled First Summer in the Sierra. As power begets the respect of the powerful, Muir's good will and opinion were sought by some of the most powerful figures in his time; men such as railroad baron Edward Henry Harriman and Theodore Roosevelt.

His work influenced the creation of several national parks in the United States, including Yosemite Valley in California.

John Muir

The teachings and musings of Von Humboldt, Emerson, and Thoreau have influenced a great number of historical figures. His family emigrated to Wisconsin in 1849 to work a series of hardscrabble farms under the direction of a religious zealot father, whose fire and brimstone was tempered by a loving and good humored mother.

John Muir built a small cabin in Yosemite along Yosemite Creek. When visitors came to the valley they often met with John Muir as he was a great storyteller, guide, and had a great deal of knowledge about natural history. He lived in the cabin for two years. He studied the natural sciences at the University of Wisconsin, but did not take a degree.

He almost died of malaria three days later. He created a clock with minutes, seconds, and days of the month. This was the present day equivalent of being able to control the content of all three major television networks. Muir’s father was seeking a stricter religious upbringing than was available through the Church of Scotland.

About John Muir

Why John Muir?

An eye for the ecosystem

In his early life, Muir was an inventor and he brought a scientific curiosity to his later explorations.

In 1849, the Muir family immigrated to the United States. Muir ventured to California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains where he was smitten by the high elevations and sweeping valleys.

It was in the Sierra Nevada, especially Yosemite, where he lived in a cabin, that Muir’s genius surfaced. An avid reader of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, he described his first summer in Emersonian terms, “We are in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

After two years of studies, he left for Southern Ontario where his brother had moved to avoid the U.S. Civil War draft. After recovering from blindness caused by an industrial accident in 1868, he began 40 years of intermittent wandering in the wilderness of North America, which produced some of the best nature writing in the English language.

Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it…” Emerson would eventually visit Muir in Yosemite as would many other luminaries including Theodore Roosevelt.

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838 and died in Los Angeles, California, in 1914.