Long before the term “climate change”, there was an environmentalist — some say the very first one — who accurately predicted that if the wilderness was not protected, rampant industrial interests would eventually destroy the natural earth. An imperfect man often at odds with the society he grew up in, and with a tendency to live as a hermit, he nonetheless founded the popular movement to save nature from humankind. Even if you don’t know who we’re talking about yet, you’ve seen his photo — a tall man with a long beard, standing next to President Theodore Roosevelt, overlooking El Capitan Mountain in Yosemite National Park. His name is John Muir. He helped found America’s National Park System, and he’s one of the most fascinating and perhaps influential figures in American history. Sadly, while we have plenty of coverage on the tycoons who were his peers, too little is said about the incredible achievements, philosophy and influence of John Muir.
Who Was John Muir?
Born in Dunbar, Scotland in 1838, John Muir would go on to be the farthest-traveled man in history. He earned the nickname “John of the Mountains”. His father, Daniel Muir, was a severe Calvinist Presbyterian minister. He subjected Johnnie and his brother Davie to daily pious lashings. In rural Scotland, Muir began to fall in love with the wild. He was fairly wild himself: fighting other boys, climbing the ruins of the medieval Dunbar Castle, hunting out birds’ nests and stray cats. It didn’t matter how often he was beaten for it, he would record in his memoir, Story of My Boyhood and Youth. Any price was worth paying to be running around out of doors.

Though a hermit by disposition, John Muir became the head of the American Preservation Movement.
Image: Harmony Gerber, Shutterstock
©Harmony Gerber/Shutterstock.com
Immigration to America
In 1849, John Muir’s life changed irrevocably: his family migrated from East Lothian, Scotland, to America in the New World. They settled in the wilderness near Portage, Wisconsin, and established a farm. Yet Daniel, unschooled in how to till the land and unwilling to constant any book but his Bible, selected a homestead absolutely littered with stumps. Young Johnnie Muir came of age wresting these stumps out of the earth — a backbreaking, seemingly endless process. Daniel continued to thrash Johnnie and Davey as thanks for their efforts. Though his father disapproved, John began to sneak books from neighbors until he had learned enough to keep their farm running. Yet on one sub-zero night when John was still a teen, his father directed him to dig a well in frozen earth. The young man contracted an illness known as pitch-damp, which led to a case of pneumonia that almost killed him.
Education and Early Career
When John Muir recovered, he resolved to escape his father. A mechanical prodigy, he had already mastered many farm automations like an automatic horse feeder. He carved a working clock in the likeness of the Angel of Death — its scythe the ticking pendulum — and entered it in a mechanics competition at the Wisconsin State Fair. He won not only the blue ribbon, but a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin.
Though it served as his escape from the tyranny of his father, John Muir did not finish his degree at UW. He learned enough botany and engineering to pursue his goals and dropped out, soon becoming one of the frontier’s first industrial engineers. He oversaw an immense sawmill, and automated a broom-making plant in Indiana.
Here, Muir suffered a freak injury that would once again alter the course of his life: he was temporary blinded in a factory accident.
Though he had escaped the family homestead, Muir had no choice to return to it. His father told him this injury was a punishment from God. Unable to stand it, John Muir set off into the wilderness — still mostly blind, without a map or a weapon. A little like that scene in Forrest Gump, he just started walking away from home.

Muir was awed by the amazing mountains of the Yosemite Valley.
Image: Phitha Tanpairoj, Shutterstock
©Phitha Tanpairoj/Shutterstock.com
A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
The journey he took would be the subject of his second memoir, A 1,000-Mile Walk to the Gulf. The gulf in question was the Gulf of Mexico. Taking a trip no one ever had before, John Muir traveled from Wisconsin through the post-Civil War South. He camped alone on his back most of the way. Without understanding why, he took copious notes of the plants and animals he encountered. “Botanizing”, he called it, though at the time there existed no formal scientific pursuit of unknown species. Little did the young Muir know, he was practicing for a career he would have to invent.
He had intended to explore as much of South America as he could. But John Muir contracted malaria near the Gulf of Mexico and was advised to go no further South. Instead, he sailed to Cuba, then traveled to San Francisco, California.
Having spent so much of his life in the rural wilds, Muir was completely unprepared for the mad crush of civilization he found in this city. His memoirs recount that he asked the first stranger he met the fastest way to get out of town. Before long, his travels led him to the nearby Yosemite. If ever a place has influenced the life of one person, it is Yosemite and John Muir.
Early Explorations in Yosemite
Overawed by the amazing Yosemite mountains — including El Capitan, Half Dome and Mount Gibbs — Muir was willing to undertake any profession that allowed him to stay here in the Yosemite Valley. His first summer in the Sierra he spent as a shepherd. He was happy to undertake the difficult and taxing labor simply to be amidst this incredible landscape. When no shepherding work could be found, he became a handyman for a local hotel. He would earn extra money by leading guided tours of the still-new trails here in Yosemite. And, with his scientific education, he even had some pet theories regarding the topography of the Sierra Nevada and how it was formed.
Proving a Pet Theory
In 2023, you may well have heard the settled science on mountain ranges and how they were formed. Millions of years ago, as an Ice Age came to an end, huge glaciers began to slide about the landscape. And they left incredible mountainscapes in their wake as they receded.
In the mid-1800’s, no one knew this. John Muir advanced and proved this theory, in part by hiking farther into the Yosemite Highlands than anyone had ever gone, discovering high-altitude glaciers that confirmed the hunch. Like Einstein imaginatively leaping to the Theory of Relativity, Muir simply looked into the mountains and made a wild guess. Then, he proved it.
Let’s be honest: until this point in his 30’s, John Muir was essentially a homeless recluse. He had been on the move ever since his blinding, without much idea of how to keep himself alive from one day to the next. He was so ascetic that he nearly starved himself to death on more than one occasion. Let’s face it: after his abusive upbringing, John Muir kind of hated people. Yet after Muir proved his glacier theory, people — we might call them fans today — started coming to Yosemite specifically to meet him. John Muir had inadvertently become an early American scientific celebrity!
Hunting Glaciers
Muir had at last found a profession for himself: as an adventurer and trained natural scientist, he spent all the time he could visiting wild places, not just in America but throughout the world. (He was the most-traveled person in history up to that point, taking a handful of trips around the globe and dozens of shorter excursions to every continent.) And he would finance these epic trips by doing what he had done as a half-blind boy: documenting what he saw through pictures and words. The only difference was that now, Muir had multiple publications clamoring to publish his nature writing.
Creating Parks
And yet, this was not enough. Muir watched as, year by year, more and more people came to Yosemite. Some grazed their sheep, depleting the grasslands. Others visited and left mounds of litter. Still others came to cut down the amazing giant sequoias that grew here. Dismayed, Muir recognized that, hermit though he was, “civilization” would always catch up to him. And it would always bring pollution and unchecked industry with it.
Encouraged by magazine editor Samuel Underwood Johnson, the reclusive Muir resolved to start a club dedicated to preserving the Yosemite wilderness. Gathering a small band of similarly iconoclastic nature lovers, Muir began the Sierra Club in 1892. He was unanimously voted president for life — over his own protest!
There is a photograph of John Muir you have almost definitely seen, even if you don’t know it. He is standing next to President Theodore Roosevelt, with El Capitan Mountain in the background. It’s in most American history textbooks. The significance of this iconic image is that Roosevelt met Muir in Yosemite before the advent of the National Parks System. Roosevelt, often known as our “Outdoorsman President”, was interested in American wildland preservation and, as a hunter and camper, had seen its importance firsthand. On the trip depicted in this photograph, John Muir was tasked with persuading President Roosevelt to throw his political support behind the creation of a system of national parks — and succeeded.

John Muir was tasked with persuading Theodore Roosevelt to create a National Parks System.
John Muir’s Legacy
Tragically, when John Muir died in 1913, he thought his dream of a National Parks System would soon be defeated. A business tycoon and senator named James Phelan, once the Mayor of San Francisco and leader of many anti-Chinese immigration campaigns, persuaded the US Government to allow him to dam the Northern half of the Yosemite Valley, known as the Hetch Hetchy, in order to create a hydroelectric reservoir for San Francisco — one which would enrich Phelan personally. Muir saw this as a travesty of justice, and lobbied with the Sierra Club against the dam. Yet the wildland-loving Roosevelt government was by now a thing of the past. A largely corrupt Congress, led by impassive President Woodrow Wilson, removed Hetch Hetchy’s protections and allowed Phelan to flood it.
Yet an interesting thing happened following Muir’s death amidst this travesty: people became outraged. The Sierra Club had begun with only a few dozen members. Yet the Hetchy dam was national news. Ordinary American citizens couldn’t believe how easily Phelan had taken this wilderness away. Concern over preserving the American environment suddenly swelled on a national level.
Within a year, Congress passed the Organic Act under intense public pressure. It established 35 new parks, as well as the National Park Service. Their protection was entrusted to the US Army’s all-Black regiments, the Buffalo Soldiers. These heroic men are the predecessors of today’s Park Rangers.
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