My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir

Observations among the trees of California

Scottish-American naturalist John Muir’s memoir My First Summer in the Sierra was published in 1911. In chronicling the events of Muir’s life, chronologically, this book comes after The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, but the books were not published in that order. At the end of A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, Muir traveled by ship to California, which is where this memoir begins. Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Muir takes a job as an assistant shepherd with a Mr. Delaney, who owns a flock of about two thousand sheep. Guiding this flock to high-altitude pasture lands gives Muir the opportunity to satisfy his longing to immerse himself in the California wilderness. The events Muir recounts occurred from June to September 1869 and were presumably transcribed from his diaries, as the prose takes the form of dated entries. During this first summer in the Sierra, Muir makes his first trip to Yosemite Valley, a country with which he would forever be identified.

Before arriving in Yosemite, however, Muir spends a lot of time examining and discussing trees. Seeing many of the California species for the first time, Muir describes each species he encounters as if he has stumbled upon a rare treasure. The first half of My First Summer in the Sierra often reads like a field guide, but with Muir’s verbal descriptions of leaves, seeds, cones, and bark in lieu of pictures. (The original edition did feature some landscape photographs and drawings by Muir, but those illustrations aren’t necessarily included in later editions.) Some discussion is also given to the mammals and birds of the region, with Muir providing his impressions of each species he encountered. Bears, in particular, were a constant nuisance to the shepherds. When Muir gets to Yosemite the tone of the book changes to less microcosmic observations of wildlife and more grandiose descriptions of mountain peaks and sweeping vistas.

Personally, I found this book less interesting than other books I’ve read by Muir, including those aforementioned. Though Muir does give some insight into the life of a California shepherd, there’s less of an autobiographical narrative to this book, and it reads more like a sketchbook of impressions. Muir’s writing is similar to that of Henry David Thoreau in that it combines natural observation with philosophical musings, but Thoreau went more heavy on the philosophy while Muir doubles down on the nature. Most of the text of My First Summer in the Sierra is Muir’s empirical observations of plants and animals, interspersed with occasional paeanic comments about the glory of the gods. The contemplative passages in this book feel shallower than those in some of Muir’s other books, and as far as the natural details go, I think I would prefer to just read a field guide to understand the uniqueness of each tree species.

I’m sure any frequent visitor to Yosemite National Park, however, would love this book as a literary record and tribute to a beloved landscape. No doubt many a home in Northern California bears a copy on its shelves. Those who have never been to Yosemite, however, may have a hard time getting the gist of the landscape from the way Muir flits around from topic to topic. Muir is one of our nation’s greatest nature writers, and My First Summer in the Sierra is certainly a fine piece of nature writing; I just think he’s done better.

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A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf by John Muir

Botanizing and philosophizing from Kentucky to Cuba

Shortly before his death in 1914, nature writer John Muir published his autobiography, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. In that book, Muir chronicled his childhood in Scotland, his family’s emigration to America, and his life in Wisconsin up to his departure from the state around the age of 26. Then Muir spent some time in Southern Ontario before briefly settling in Indiana. While working in a wagon wheel factory, he suffered an eye injury that forced him to quit his job and rethink his life. It was this incident that inspired him to devote the rest of his life to his true love, studying nature. After a period of recovery, Muir left Indiana on a botanizing trip to find and collect plant specimens. It is here that the book A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, published in 1916, picks up the story of Muir’s life. Compiled posthumously from Muir’s journals and letters, the book follows the course of his life up until the events covered in his memoir My First Summer in the Sierra.

Muir departed from Indianapolis on September 1, 1867. Taking a train to the Ohio River, he began his epic walk in Kentucky. His ambles would subsequently take him through Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida before boarding a boat to Cuba. Muir had dreams of going all the way to South America and trekking through the jungles of the Orinoco and the Amazon, but illness and poverty drove him to reconsider. Even without reaching that ultimate goal, however, he accomplished an adventure to be proud of. Muir occasionally received packets of money sent by his brother, but for the most part he roughed it and traveled very frugally, often sleeping in the open or relying on the kindness of strangers for a meal or lodging. During his travels through the American South, Muir enjoyed the hospitality of both White and Black families, gaining him a unique perspective on social conditions in the region immediately following the Civil War. This book is also unusual in that in addition to nature writing it also relates Muir’s experiences of urban settings like Havana and New York.

The posthumous assembly of A Thousand-Mile Walk does have its disadvantages. If Muir had deliberately written a book on this period of his life, it would no doubt have proved a more satisfying narrative. Being compiled from journals and letters, the narrative does feel a bit unpolished and piecemeal compared to the eloquence of Muir’s other books. Much of the text is presented as dated entries, giving the impression that the prose is taken verbatim from Muir’s notebooks. This is a relatively short book overall, and only about two-thirds of it actually pertains to Muir’s thousand-mile walk. The last few chapters recount a nautical voyage to New York City and another to California. Like personal journals often do, the book ends at an arbitrary point, presumably having exhausted his writings up to the point at which My First Summer in the Sierra begins.

Despite the cobbled together feeling, however, there are really some fantastic passages in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, particularly when Muir turns away from the natural beauty before his eyes and holds forth on his person environmental ethic, theories of ecology, and philosophy of animal equality over anthropocentrism. Muir’s observations of nature, in this case mostly of plants, are pleasant to read, but it’s when he looks beyond the trees for the forest and expounds on the big picture of man, nature, and the universe that this book really ascends to a profound and inspiring statement. My Boyhood and Youth is a better written book, but A Thousand-Mile Walk is certainly a worthwhile read. Readers with an ardent sense of wanderlust will both envy and enjoy Muir’s cross-continental nature walk.
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The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir

A budding naturalist in frontier Wisconsin

John Muir is best known as the naturalist who explored the Sierras of California and the glaciers of Alaska, but he was born in Scotland and spent his adolescence and early adulthood in Wisconsin. Muir discusses these years of his life, from his birth in 1838 to his departure from college in 1864, in his partial autobiography The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. This memoir was published in 1913, a year before Muir’s death.

The first chapter tells of Muir’s life in Scotland, where he and his brothers developed a love of the outdoors at an early age. His boyhood adventures aren’t remarkably different from those of a child growing up in rural America, but Muir’s exceptional storytelling renders even familiar childhood experiences into captivating anecdotes. At the age of 11, Muir emigrated to America with his father and two of his siblings to establish a farm in Portage, Wisconsin, before sending for his mother and the rest of the family to cross the Atlantic. Unlike many frontier memoirs, this book is not a lovingly nostalgic and picturesque portrait of nineteenth-century farm life. Rather, Muir paints a realistic picture of the hard work and ceaseless toil involved in clearing land and working a farm on the American frontier, especially under the stern supervision of a strict and rigidly pious father who valued hard labor over education.

Nevertheless, Muir and his brother David found time to enjoy the outdoors, whether hunting game or merely exploring and observing nature. Muir spends a large portion of the narrative discussing Wisconsin’s birds. As a birder myself, I enjoyed these portions of the book very much. Muir describes the behavior of birds with the precision of a scientist yet also manages to convey the thrill experienced by a young boy who simply enjoys the beauty of birds. Particularly valuable is Muir’s description of the huge flocks of passenger pigeons that would darken the sky for scores of miles and break trees with their collected weight. He also details some of the barbaric hunting practices that had rendered the bird extinct by the time Muir wrote this memoir. In many instances The Story of My Boyhood and Youth provides a vivid first-person record of Wisconsin’s natural history in the 1850s and ‘60s. Muir also recounts a few encounters with Native Americans and briefly laments the robbing of their lands and rights.

Muir’s narrative takes a surprising turn when he reveals himself to be an inventor. As a teenager he created clocks, thermometers, and other instruments from materials that happened to be lying around the family farm. He fondly relates how his creations caused a big stir when he displayed them at the Wisconsin State Fair. The way Muir describes some of the other mechanical devices he created calls to mind the ingenuity of Thomas Jefferson and the absurdity of Rube Goldberg. Muir originally left home with the intention of working as a machinist, engineer, or physical scientist before attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he enjoyed studying chemistry and botany. The book ends with Muir’s departure from the university and his turning towards what he calls “the University of the Wilderness.”

Those interested in Muir as a naturalist may not be enthralled by the schoolboy anecdotes of his early youth, but this book does contain plenty of passages of scientific discovery and descriptive beauty indicative of his better-known nature writings. Those who enjoy reading the autobiographies of scientists and naturalists will find this a very well-written one. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is a pleasure to read and provides a candid inside look at how Muir became one of America’s great environmental philosophers.
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A Republic of Rivers: Three Centuries of Nature Writing from Alaska and the Yukon, edited by John A. Murray

A well-edited sampler of natural science, travel, literature, and lore
I have traveled to Alaska and the Yukon once, just on a brief vacation, but it was enough to make me fantasize about a longer stay and deeper exploration of the region. Though I may make it back someday, for now I’ll have to admit I am an armchair adventurer who primarily enjoys the idea of the North vicariously through the accounts of others. Whether you’re a long-term resident of the region or just a dabbler like myself, chances are you will find much to appreciate in A Republic of Rivers, an anthology of 48 writings on Alaska and the Yukon. Edited by John A. Murray, a nature writer himself, the book was published by Oxford University Press in 1990.

Murray has done an admirable job of selecting from a wide variety of sources and organizing and presenting them in a manner that truly gives the reader an educational crash course in the literary history of Alaska and the Yukon. The selections are divided into three sections. The Age of Exploration covers the era of Russia’s dominion over Alaska, and contains excerpts from explorer narratives including those of James Cook, George Vancouver, and Alexander Mackenzie. The Age of Exploitation covers Alaska’s period as a U.S. territory and features a wide variety of writers including John Muir, John Burroughs, and Jack London. The Age of Environmentalism covers the time from Alaska’s statehood to the present (1990) and includes many contemporary writers and environmentalists such as Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, and Barry Lopez. These categories are more chronological than thematic, as you will find explorers, exploiters, and environmentalists mixed into all three. The myriad writing styles include exploration diaries, empirical scientific observations, adventure travelogs, personal memoirs, literary nature writing, studies of animal species, poetry, myths and folklore, and more. Murray wisely includes at least a half dozen selections from Native American, First Nations, and Inuit writers, including Koyukon riddles, Eskimo poetry, Haida myths, and a first-person narrative from a Tlingit trapper.

Although this book is 325 pages in length, each selection gets its own title page and author bio page, and it has many intentionally blank pages. As far as the excerpts themselves are concerned, you’re getting at most maybe about 190 pages of text divided among 48 entries. Each selection gets anywhere from one to eight pages. The Age of Exploration excerpts are all very short, which is unfortunate since those are the ones I found the most fascinating. Murray is clearly more interested in the more literary nature writing of the later twentieth century, so he grants those selections a higher page count. At times there’s enough text to leave you feeling content at having read a satisfyingly eloquent piece of natural observation, but often it feels like you’re only getting the barest general idea of what the works from which these excerpts were drawn are actually about. If anything, this collection succeeds as an appetizing variety platter that allows the reader to choose which writers are worthy of further follow-up. To aid the reader in that quest, Murray includes complete citations for each passage and a sizable bibliography in the back matter.

Though the book is attractively designed, a more judicious use of page space would have allowed for the inclusion of more content. The brevity of the selections is really my only major criticism, however. Murray has done a very fine job assembling this collection, and he is both knowledgeable and thoughtful in his selections. Any state or region would be happy to have an anthology of this quality to represent its natural environment and Indigenous culture.
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Travels in Alaska by John Muir

Exploring the Alexander Archipelago and its glaciers

Travels in Alaska, a memoir by naturalist, explorer, and environmental conservationist John Muir, was published in 1915, shortly after his death. The book chronicles three trips Muir made to the Alexander Archipelago in southeastern Alaska during the summers of 1879, 1880, and 1890. (Muir briefly mentions a fourth trip he made to Alaska in 1881, in which he traveled as far as the Aleutian Islands and Barrow. That trip is not covered here but in another book, The Cruise of the Corwin.) Muir didn’t write this account of his trips until much later, using the notes he took during his expeditions to compose the narrative. Muir was writing Travels in Alaska at the time of his death in 1914, so the book is unfinished and stops abruptly midway through the third journey.

Muir had already distinguished himself as a first-class naturalist by exploring and writing on the Sierra Nevada of California. In Yosemite Valley Muir formulated a theory of how glaciation sculpts the geologic landscape. His primary reason for venturing to Alaska was to explore more glaciers in order to investigate this theory. Muir took steamers from California up to Fort Wrangell in Alaska, then explored the islands and inlets in smaller boats and canoes, camping in the wild and engaging in extensive hiking and mountaineering excursions. Muir enjoyed solitude in the wilderness, but he was no recluse. He often made excursions in the company of Native American traveling companions, as well as missionaries from Fort Wrangell including one adventurous Mr. Young. Muir’s account of these trips is an enjoyable mix of a naturalist’s scientific observations, an adventurer’s travel narrative, and a poet’s love letter to mother nature.

The book is at its best when Muir is describing life among the Native inhabitants of Alaska. Muir’s relationship with the Tlingits and Chilcats he met was one of mutual respect, and it’s unlikely you’ll find a more honest and reverential first-hand depiction of the Natives’ way of life coming from a white man’s pen. His descriptions of the natural environment are both beautiful and informative, particularly in his discussions of the region’s plants and animals. Personally, I’m never too enthusiastic about reading descriptions of geological phenomena, topography, and the like, but Muir’s writings on the subject are better than most. Beyond rocks and minerals, Alaskan earth science has the added dimension of glaciology, which is a fascinating subject in its own right and Muir’s true passion. The reader couldn’t ask for a better guide to the wilderness of the region.

Having recently returned from a trip to Southeast Alaska myself, I greatly enjoyed Muir’s vivid and eloquent descriptions of the scenery there, as well as his insightful scientific explanations of the glacial activity taking place. Due to climate change, the number and size of glaciers has greatly decreased since Muir visited, and this book serves as a valuable time capsule of the state of the Alaskan environment at that time. I visited Glacier Bay by cruise ship, a common practice these days, but even Muir encountered significant tourist activity in his 1890 trip. A couple hundred tourists from a sightseeing cruise stopped to visit his campsite, and he greeted them with goodwill, happy to share the wonders of the landscape he loved so much. That same friendly warmth and love of nature shines through in every line of Muir’s writing, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Travels in Alaska is a beautiful document of the land and its people. Those who have been to Alaska will appreciate it all the more. If you haven’t been, Muir’s book will make you want to go.
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