John Muir’s Quest to Save the Great Outdoors

Sally Helm (0:00)

The HISTORY Channel Original Podcast.

HISTORY This Week, July 19, 1869 I'm Sally Helm.

In the Sierra Nevada Mountains, naturalist John Muir watches the world wake up. The treetops begin to glow. The sun burns the edges of the mountains. He writes, everything awakening, alert and joyful. The birds begin to stir. Every pulse beeps high. Every life cell rejoices. The very rocks seem to thrill with life. You can feel something in John Muir waking up, too. He's becoming so taken with this landscape that he will decide to stay in the Yosemite Valley, working as a shepherd and living off bread and coffee, mutton and beans. And soon, his published descriptions of the valley will start to change American life by advancing an idea that is taking shape in a lot of people's minds. Maybe nature is more than just a resource for exploiting. Maybe this wildness is something we should protect.

Today John Muir. How did this bard of the wilderness collide with the political forces of his day and help bring about the national parks as we know them? And how did he change the way all of us think about the natural world?

Dean King (1:56)

Oh jeez, dad, not the car again. Oh, happens all the time with old Betsy. Have you checked out Carvana yet? They have thousands of cars for under $20,000.

Sally Helm (2:04)

But do those thousands of cars have personality like old Betsy?

Dean King (2:07)

Betsy is held together by tape, and there are raccoons living in the engine. Psh, it's a family car. Uh, there are flames on the hood.

Sally Helm (2:14)

Ah, custom paint job.

SPEAKER_3 (2:16)

No, dad, the car's on fire.

Sally Helm (2:17)

How many cars did you say Carvana had?

SPEAKER_4 (2:19)

Visit carvana.com to shop thousands of cars for under $20,000. We'll drive you happy at Carvana.

Sally Helm (2:32)

John Muir's first visit to Yosemite, it is not all poetry and bird song and pretty sunrises.

Dean King (2:40)

Muir wanders in the middle of winter, and there are bears there, a lot of snow, nearly stars to death.

Sally Helm (2:47)

Dean King is the author of a new book about Muir called Guardians of the Valley.

Dean King (2:52)

He's got some bread, and he'll take either tea or coffee and sometimes meat juice and go out for four or five days.

Sally Helm (2:59)

Meat juice, what is that?

Dean King (3:00)

It was an extract of meat that was common as a nutrient in elixir back in that time. And I'm sure it did have some nutritional value, but it was not particularly appetizing to others.

Sally Helm (3:14)

Muir was known for this, taking terrible food when he went camping, because he was just so entranced with the natural world that he didn't care. He arrives in Yosemite as a 30-year-old college dropout. He later described it as enrolling instead in the University of Wilderness. And he takes a job as a shepherd, earning $30 a month plus room and board.

Muir starts spending almost all of his time outdoors, taking his sheep up and down the mountain sides.

Dean King (3:47)

But early on, he comes to realize that the sheep, which he calls hooved locusts, are devouring all the greenery up there, and not only what you see, but the roots and all.

Sally Helm (3:59)

And it's not just the hooved locusts. White settlers have begun tramping through the valley, too, and driving the indigenous Miwok tribe from their land.

The Miwok, Muir writes, seem to have learned this wonderful way of walking unseen. These new settlers, they don't get that. Miners are blasting water cannons at the mountains, searching for gold. The year after Muir moves to Yosemite, the transcontinental railroad finally reaches California. In its wake, it's left millions of dead buffalo and felled trees.

Dean King (4:37)

America was really busily devouring its natural resources.

Sally Helm (4:42)

Because, you know, progress. The land can be used to advance human society. A lot of people think that is what it's for.

But not John Muir. He has taken a different view of the natural world ever since he was a kid, growing up in a small town in Scotland.

Dean King (5:04)

His grandfather loved nature and took Muir on walks along the coast. And they would find bird's nests and look at the waves crashing on the shore.

Sally Helm (5:13)

The young Muir starts carrying in his pocket the works of Robert Burns, a romantic poet who wrote about the voice of great nature and about cherishing every living thing.

Dean King (5:25)

Burns early on was lamenting stepping on a flower.

Sally Helm (5:29)