Story of My Boyhood and Youth

In this moving memoir of an unusual childhood, John Muir recalls his younger days in East Lothian with a startling clarity, depicting a wild boy whose quiet individuality and determination were already emerging. Born in mid nineteenth-century Scotland, Muir was eleven when his fanatically religious father took the family to build a new life in America's vast wilderness. Muir charts their pioneering years in Wisconsin, where his battles for survival powerfully anticipate the extraordinary career which was to follow. They reveal a free spirit who perceived bonds between man and nature that were subtle and far reaching for both. Relatively unknown in his native Scotland, John Muir is renowned in the United States as the father of conservation. A friend of presidents and founder of National Parks, Muir was inspired by a love and a vision of nature as remarkable today as it was last century.

John Muir (1838-1914) was born and raised in Dunbar, East Lothian. When his family emigrated to Wisconsin in 1849, young John was brought up to hard labour on his father's homestead. Yet he found time for reading and ingenious inventions which gave him an early reputation for brilliance. After attending the University of Wisconsin, Muir pursued his mechanical skills until an industrial accident nearly blinded him. He set out on an epic walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, keeping a journal as he went, later published in 1916 as A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. In 1868 he went to the Sierra Nevada mountains and spent five years in the Yosemite valley, which influenced the rest of his life. Living rough, Muir studied geology and the plant and animal life around him. His journals from this period, My First Summer in the Sierra, were published in 1911. In subsequent years he produced innumerable articles and lectures from the journals of regular summer trips to the mountains of California, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. Marriage in 1880 took Muir out of the wilderness for a spell, until the need for its preservation involved him in a major campaign for the General Grant, Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, which were finally established in 1890. In the next ten years he overcame opposition from big business to the establishment of still more National Forest parks throughout the country and was a founder member of the Sierra Club which took up the cause of wilderness protection. The Muir Woods National Monument was established in California in 1908, and John Muir has been, honoured ever since as the 'father' of the modern environment movement.