In 1867 a file slipped in an Indianapolis wagon wheel factory and struck supervisor John Muir in the right eye; his left eye failed in sympathy, and he spent six weeks in a dark room vowing to study nature if his sight returned. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, he was forced by his strict father to memorize most of the Bible under threat of the lash, and in 1849 the family moved to a Wisconsin farm. At the University of Wisconsin a classmate showed him that the black locust tree and the pea belong to the same family, sparking his lifelong botany. He avoided the Civil War draft in Canada, working in a rake factory. After the accident he walked a thousand miles from Kentucky to the Gulf, survived malaria in Florida and reached San Francisco in 1868.
In Yosemite he built a cabin with Yosemite Creek running through a corner and argued, against Harvard’s Josiah Whitney, that glaciers rather than a sudden collapse had carved the valley, citing moraines and striations and later finding a living glacier. Alarmed by sheep grazing, he forced himself to write, encouraged by his mentor Jeanne Carr, and his 1890 articles led Congress to create Yosemite National Park. He co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and led it for over two decades. In 1903 he camped alone with Theodore Roosevelt and woke under snow. He lost his last fight to Gifford Pinchot’s conservationists when the government approved damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley for San Francisco in 1913, and he died of pneumonia in 1914.
- During the 1872 earthquake he ran outside cheering, noting it only piled talus at the cliff bases.
- He called the grazing sheep a plague of hooves.
- He hated writing, rising before dawn to agonize over every sentence.
- His early journals used prejudiced stereotypes of Native Americans and African Americans, but time among Alaska’s coastal tribes changed his views.
- In 2020 the Sierra Club’s leadership split publicly over how to weigh his early racism against his later belief in human equality.
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