The Invention of Nature

As Muir was falling in love with botany in Madison, the Civil War ripped the country apart, and in March 1863, almost exactly two years after the first shots had been fired at Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln signed the nation’s first conscription law. Wisconsin alone had to raise 40,000 men, and most students in Madison were talking guns, war and cannons. Shocked by his fellow students’ willingness to ‘murder’, Muir had no intention of participating.

A year later, in March 1864, Muir left Madison and avoided conscription by crossing the border into Canada – his new ‘University of the Wilderness’. For the next two years, he rambled through the countryside, taking odd jobs whenever he ran out of money. He had a knack for inventions and built machines and tools for sawmills, but his abiding dream was to follow Humboldt’s footsteps. Whenever he could, Muir went on long excursions – to Lake Ontario and towards the Niagara Falls among others. Fording rivers, wading through bogs and thick forests, he searched for plants, which he collected, pressed and dried for his growing herbarium. He was so obsessed with his specimens that he was nicknamed ‘Botany’ by one family where he lodged and worked for a month on a farm north of Toronto. As Muir scrambled through tangled roots and drooping branches, he thought of Humboldt’s descriptions of the ‘flooded forests of the Orinoco’. And he felt a ‘simple relationship to the Cosmos’ that would accompany him for the rest of his life.

Then, in spring 1866, when a fire destroyed the mill where Muir was working in Meaford on the shore of Lake Huron in Canada, his thoughts turned home. The Civil War had ended the previous summer after five long years of fighting, and Muir was ready to return. He packed his few belongings and studied a map. Where to go? He decided to try his luck in Indianapolis because it was a railway hub and he figured that there would be many manufactories where he would be able to find employment. Most importantly, he said, the city was ‘in the heart of one of the very richest forests of deciduous hard wood trees on the continent’. Here he would be able to combine the necessity of having to make a living with his passion for botany.

Muir found work at a factory in Indianapolis that produced wagon wheels and other carriage parts. The job was only temporary because Muir’s plan was just to save enough money to follow Humboldt on ‘a botanical journey’ through South America. Then, in early March 1867, as Muir tried to shorten the leather belt on a circular saw at the factory, his plans came to an abrupt end. As he undid the stitches that held the belt together with the nail-like end of a metal file, the file slipped and flung against his head, piercing his right eye. When he held his hand under the injured eye, fluid dropped on to the palm and his vision vanished.

At first it was only the right eye but within a few hours Muir’s other eye also became blind. Darkness enveloped him. This moment changed everything. For years Muir had been ‘in a glow with visions of the glories of tropical flora’ but now the colours of South America seemed lost to him for ever. Over the next weeks as he lay in a darkened room to rest, boys from the neighbourhood visited and read books to Muir. To his doctor’s surprise, his eyes slowly recovered. At first Muir was able to make out the silhouettes of the furniture in his room, and then he began to recognize faces. After four weeks of convalescence, he was able to decipher letters and went for his first walk. When his eyesight was fully restored, nothing was going to prevent him from going to South America to see the ‘tropical vegetation in all its palmy glory’. On 1 September, six months after his accident and after a visit to Wisconsin to say goodbye to his parents and siblings, Muir bound his journal to his belt with a piece of string, shouldered his small bag and plant press, and set out to walk the 1,000 miles from Indianapolis to Florida.

Walking south, Muir moved through a devastated country. The Civil War had left the nation’s infrastructure – roads, manufacturers and railways – ruined, while many of the neglected and abandoned farms had fallen into disrepair. The war had destroyed the wealth of the South and the country remained deeply divided. In April 1865, less than a month before the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, struggled to unite the nation. Though slavery had been abolished at the end of the war and the first African-American men had voted in the Tennessee gubernatorial election a month before Muir left Indianapolis, freed slaves were not treated like equals.