Naturalist John Muir was, after all, closely associated with Yosemite, having helped outline Yosemite's proposed boundaries in 1889 and writing in 1890 what led to From his creation of magazine articles and co-founding the Sierra Club in 1892 to protect it, you would think he would be famous for his first sanctuary there. But only park historians and some Muir devotees know where the cabin is, just yards off the Yosemite Falls Trail. Maybe that's not a bad thing, since here one can experience the Yosemite that inspired Muir. On the crisp summer morning when I was taken there, the mountain air was filled with the scent of ponderosa and cedar; pines, skylarks, and squirrels were frolicking all around. Every turn offers postcard views of the valley's towering granite cliffs, so majestic that early visitors trimmed them into the walls of a Gothic cathedral. It's no wonder that many 19th-century travelers to Yosemite viewed it as a new Garden of Eden. From this story

[×] Close Carlton Watkins’ 19th-century photos of Yosemite Valley Text by Bruce Hathaway

Video: Yosemite Slideshow Related content About Carlton Watkins Tony Perrott on the Wildness of "John Muir's Yosemite"

Leading me through the woods was Bonnie Giselle, Sierra Club "Yosemite Valley was the ultimate pilgrimage site for Victorian Americans," said Giselle, director of the LeConte Memorial Lodge and author of several Muir books. "This is the absolute embodiment of the sacred, where they God can be celebrated in nature, “We were in a cool, dark cave, filled with ferns and milkweed, as picturesque as America’s most influential conservationist would have wished for a castaway. Although no buildings remain, we know from Muir's journals and letters that he and his friend Harry Randall built a one-room log cabin out of pine and cedar that he built in Yosemite. A diversion near Ti Creek runs beneath its floorboards. "Muir loved the sound of water," Gisel explains, and plants grew out of the floorboards; "He slept on a sheepskin blanket in the cedar branches." Muir wrote that frogs chirped under the floorboards and it was like living in a greenhouse.

Today, Muir has become such an icon that it is difficult to remember that he was once a real person, let alone a wide-eyed, adventurous young man, a gilded flower. child. Even at the Yosemite Visitor Center, he is depicted as a wizened prophet with a Methuselah beard. In a nearby museum, his battered tin cup and the outline of his foot are displayed like religious relics. And his pithy inspirational quote – “Go over the mountains and get their good news. The peace of nature will flow into you like sunlight into the trees” is everywhere. But all this hero worship threatens to obscure the true story of the man and his achievements.

"There are a lot of misconceptions about John Muir," said Park Public Affairs Officer Scott Gediman. People think he discovered Yosemite or A national park system was established. "In fact, Moore lived in Yosemite for a brief and intense period, on and off, from 1868 to 1874, an experience that transformed him into a great figure in both Henry David Thoreau and Lars," Gediman said. The successor to husband Waldo Emerson, Muir would return to Yosemite for shorter trips in his later years, burdened with his own reputation and the responsibilities of his family and work. Muir's ideas were formed during his happy period when he could wander around Yosemite, as Gisel recounted in his book, Yosemite and Our National Parks. Some of his most famous adventures began at this time. "As a young man, Moore felt like a student in what he called the 'wilderness college.' "Yosemite was his graduate program. It was where he decided who he was, what he wanted to say, and how he was going to say it. But he discovered a dazzling new world."

He has made dozens of mountain dives, including the first ascent of the 10,911-foot granite spire atop the Cathedral Mountain, with nothing but a notebook tied to a rope belt and pieces of hard bread in his coat pocket. By the fall of 1869, Muir decided to spend some time in the valley, which he viewed as "nature's landscape garden, both beautiful and sublime." He built and operated a sawmill for James Hutchings, owner of the Hutchings House Hotel, and in November 1869 he built a full house on Yosemite Creek. Fern Cottage. Muir lived there for 11 months, guiding hotel guests on hiking tours and cutting lumber for the walls to replace the linens hanging from the "guest room" partitions. Muir's letters and diaries find him marveling hour after hour at the beauty around him. "He wrote in the letter: "I am eating and drinking in God's mountain house. What pen can I use to write my blessings? "But he misses his family and friends." "I cannot find human sympathy," he wrote in one of his low moments, "and I am hungry."

We now have a vivid picture of Muir The photo is attributed to Theresa Yelverton, the British writer Viscount Avonmore who came to Yosemite as a 33-year-old tourist in the spring of 1870. Carl asked her to find Muir as a guide, and the two became friends. She recorded her first impressions of him in Zanita: A story of the Yo Semite, a slim memoir in which Muir is referred to as Ken Muir. Kenmuir. She wrote that he wore “tattered trousers with a straw belt around his waist” held up by “straw rope slings”, “a long open sedge stuck in the only buttonhole of his shirt, and a long open sedge in his sleeves” Ragged and alone." But Yelverton also noticed his "bright, intelligent face...and his open, questioning blue eyes," and she thought it might be Raphael. Portrait of an angel. ” During their many walks, she also marveled at Muir’s energy and charisma: he was muscular and agile, leaping from one boulder to another like a goat with “a cheerful, ringing laugh.” A huge boulder, Ken Muir said in front of a waterfall: "These are the fountains of God. "This is the reservoir from which he pours his floods, cheering the earth, refreshing man and beast, baptizing every sedge and tiny moss." Kenmuir rejoiced as the storm blew the trees to the earth around them Crazy: "Oh, it's great! It's wonderful! Listen to the voice of the Lord, what He says in power and glory." Other settlers, she wrote, thought he was a little crazy - "a born fool." ", "Wander around this valley collecting stocks and stones. "

Muir left Yosemite suddenly in late 1870; some scholars suspect he was fleeing the romantic interest of Mrs. Leafton, who had long since separated from her caddy husband. Soon after, in January 1871, Muir returned to Yosemite, where he spent his longest Sunday excursions away from the sawmill, studying the geology and flora of the valley. and animals, including the water ouzel, or dipper, a songbird that dives into rapids in search of insects. He camped on a towering rock wall, where he was soaked by icy waterfalls. , roped himself into the "womb" of a remote glacier, and once "rided" an avalanche ("Elijah was flying in a chariot of fire, it was so exciting," he said of it). )

This refreshingly reckless attitude, as if he was immersed in nature, is what many fans today like to remember as "There has never been a wilderness advocate who owned Muir." That kind of personal experience," said Lee Stetson, editor of Muir's anthology of outdoor adventure writing and the actor who has played Muir in one-man shows in Yosemite for the past 25 years. People tend to think of him as a distant philosophizer. The home king, but there is probably not a place in the park that he has not personally visited "tends to be less enthusiastic about him." "I think Moore gets too much credit," said Yosemite Park ranger Ben Cunningham Summerfield, a member of the Maidu tribe of Northern California. "In early 1871, Moore was forced to Leaving his idyllic creekside cabin behind, Hutchins wanted to use it to support his relatives. ".

With his usual ingenuity, Muir built a small study under the gable of the sawmill accessible only by a ladder, which he called his "hanging nest." There, he aimlessly collected many botanical specimens, and he filled his journals, one after another, with his observations of nature and geology, sometimes writing in redwood sap for added effect. Thanks to Jeanne Carr, who moved to Oakland to hang out with California literary men, Muir began to develop a reputation as an autodidact. The famous scientist Joseph LeConte was impressed by one of his theories that Yosemite Valley was formed by glacial activity rather than by a prehistoric catastrophe. This was a widespread and erroneous idea, and he encouraged Mueller. Er published his first article, which was published in the New York Tribune at the end of 1871. Ralph Waldo Emerson, by then an elderly man, spent several days with Muir asking him botanical questions. (The two went to Mariposa Forest, but to Muir's great dismay, Emerson was too weak to camp overnight.)

By the end of 1872, Muir occasionally appeared in Salons in San Francisco and Oakland, where Carl introduced him as "the wild man of the woods." Writing for outdoor magazines, Muir was able to infuse his vision of nature into the vernacular, but he struggled not only with his writing but with the demands of his activism. Part of him just wanted to get back to the park and revel in nature. But by the fall of 1874, nine months after he had left Silicon Valley and visiting the area, he concluded that the option was no longer open to him. He has a mission, which is to protect the wilderness, which requires his presence in the wider world. “This chapter of my life is over,” he wrote to Carl in Yosemite. “I feel like a stranger here. Muir, 36, returned to San Francisco.

"Yosemite had been his refuge," Gisel said. Now the question was how to preserve it. After leaving, he embraced the new Responsibility. He had been a guide to men. Now he would be a guide to mankind.

As America's leading conservation figure, Muir continued to visit Yosemite regularly in 1889. Camping with Century magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson at Tulum Meadows, where he had worked as a shepherd, in 1869 they devised a plan to create a 1,200-square-mile Yosemite. Mitty National Park, a proposal passed by Congress the following year, allowed 65-year-old Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt to give a Secret Service agent a note, camp out in the wilderness, and disappear for three days. History Experts believe it was during this excursion that Muir persuaded the president to expand the national park system and establish Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove parks under federal authority. The park had been under California jurisdiction for ten years before it was unified in 1906.

But just when Muir should have been able to relax, he learned in 1906 that, within the park's boundaries, A dam was planned for the lovely Hetch-Hetch Valley. Despite a hard fight, he was unable to stop construction of the project approved by Congress in 1913. He died of pneumonia in 1914 at the age of 76. But this failure prompted the United States. The conservation movement pushed for the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916 and greater protection for all national parks — a Muir memorial would have been welcome

Tony Perrott, frequent contributor. Tony Perrottet wrote an article introducing European museums for the June 2008 issue of Smithsonian magazine