John Muir
A book I discovered on those library shelves changed my life. It was John Muir’s A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf (1916), an account of his traveling mainly by foot from Indiana to Florida, and then to California by ship with a crossing by rail of the Isthmus of Panama. This was in 1866-67 when Muir was turning 30.
I had seen Muir’s last name inscribed below the library’s roof-line along with the names of other famous California writers, but didn’t know much about him. I was attracted to this particular book because it was based on his daily journals and had a lot of detail about places and people so I could experience his trip vicariously.
How could I resist a book that started with Muir taking a ferry from the Indiana side of the Ohio River to Louisville, Kentucky, where he “steered through the big city by compass without speaking a word to anyone. Beyond the city I found a road running southward, and after passing a scatterment of suburban cabins and cottages I reached the green woods and spread out my pocket map to rough-hew a plan for my journey.”
Born in Scotland in 1838 and raised in Wisconsin, John Muir became one of the founders of the American conservation movement. Once in California, Muir explored its mountains and wrote articles for leading magazines and newspapers about his experiences, urging protection for its extraordinary natural places. He visited and wrote about other places in the West and in Alaska. He lectured and lobbied. He co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and served as its President until his passing in 1914. He became friends with influential people and in 1903 famously camped alone with President Theodore Roosevelt in Yosemite for three days and nights. The outing had a lasting effect on T.R., who signed into existence five national parks, 18 national monuments, 55 wildlife refuges, and 150 national forests during his presidency, most of them after his time with Muir. T.R. also signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives presidents broad authority to create national monuments.
On his way to meet Muir in Yosemite Roosevelt visited and gave speeches in South Pasadena and Claremont; see the photos at the bottom of the page.
Muir’s articles were gathered, often with new material, in books published by the prestigious Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin, which also published Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Among his books, most of which are still in print, are The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901), and My First Summer in the Sierra (1912).
Muir is most closely identified with the Sierra Nevada, especially the creation of Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, but he often visited friends in Pasadena and explored and wrote about the San Gabriel Mountains. [2]
Muir's significance
Probably the most important thing Muir gives his readers is an understanding of the interconnectedness of all living things. He summed it up nicely: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’" He wasn’t the first to write about the web of life; that was the German explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, whose works had inspired the young Muir, but Muir’s writings and lectures spoke to a different audience, later generations fascinated with the American West.
The documentary film maker Ken Burns said of Muir, "As we got to know him ... he ascended to the pantheon of the highest individuals in our country; I'm talking about the level of Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, and Thomas Jefferson, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jackie Robinson — people who have had a transformational effect on who we are.” [3]
Lawrence Clark Powell, who I mention above as a kid growing up in South Pasadena, and who wrote extensively on California literature and its writers, including in California Classics (1971), said of Muir: “If I were to choose a single Californian to occupy the Hall of Fame, it would be this tenacious Scot who became a Californian during the final forty-six years of his life." [4]
I said the Muir book I found at the public library, A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf, changed my life. This is no exaggeration. Reading it led to my devouring other books by and about Muir and then reading as much as I could find about nature conservation.
Starting to build a library of my own
I wanted my own copy of A Thousand Mile Walk and it was out of print, so I took a bus downtown and went to Dawson’s, a bookshop then on Figueroa Street known for specializing in rare books about California and the West and mountaineering. It was founded in 1905 by Ernest Dawson, who knew John Muir and named one of his sons after him.
When I visited the store in the mid-1950s the sons, Muir Dawson and Glen Dawson, were running it and took time to talk to me about Muir Dawson’s namesake. Over the years I bought many more items from the Dawsons. In book circles in the 2010s I had the pleasure of meeting Glen again as well as Muir Dawson’s widow Agnes. Glen lived until the age of 103.
Outcomes
Reading John Muir led to my joining the Sierra Club, becoming one of its vice presidents and then chair of its International Committee, going on to leadership roles in IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and in 2018 receiving the Sierra Club’s Raymond J. Sherwin Award “for extraordinary volunteer service toward international conservation.”
Reading books about Africa from the South Pasadena Public Library led to my taking courses about African history and politics at USC and UC Berkeley, serving as a U.S. diplomat in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and returning to the continent many times for my conservation work.
Reading about California at the library eventually led to my producing eight editions of The California Handbook, a standard guide to organizations and publications about the state, and carrying out many other convening, research, and publishing projects on California topics.
Visiting the South Pasadena Public Library almost every day led to a lifelong habit of stopping in at a public or academic library wherever and whenever that has been possible.
For me they are truly "sacred and life-giving" places.
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Notes:
(1) See Elizabeth Pomeroy. John Muir: A Naturalist in Southern California. Pasadena: Many Moons Press, 2001.
(2) Powell is quoted in Ruth Apostol. Centennial: The South Pasadena Public Library: First hundred years 1895-1995. SPPL, 1995, 47.
(3) Ken Burns is quoted in the Sierra Club's online John Muir Exhibit (go to Media/Films): https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/default.aspx.
(4) Powell. California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1971, ch. 12.
Images below (L-R):
(1) President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir standing on Glacier Point, Yosemite, mid-May 1903. [National Park Service]
(2) Gold coin commemorating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service with images of Yosemite's Half Dome, Muir, and T.R. [U.S. Mint]
(3) T.R. stopping for lunch in South Pasadena, May 8, 1903. Above him is a sign made of flowers that reads "Panama Canal"; at this time Panama was still part of Colombia and negotiations over access to the canal route had stalled. [USC Libraries and California Historical Society]
(4) T.R. speaking at Pomona College in Claremont earlier that day. [CC0]
(5) California quarter in the U.S. Mint's 50 States Series showing Muir, a California condor, and Yosemite's Half Dome. [U.S. Mint]
