The Invention of Nature

Muir lived and breathed nature. One early letter – a love letter to sequoias – was written in ink that Muir had made from their sap, and his scrawl still shines in the red of the sequoia’s sap today. The letterhead stated ‘Squirrelville, Sequoia Co, Nut time’ – and on he goes: ‘The King tree & me have sworn eternal love.’ When it came to nature, Muir was never afraid of letting go. He wanted to preach to the ‘juiceless world’ about the forest, life and nature. Those defrauded by civilization, he wrote, those ‘sick or successful, come suck Sequoia & be saved’.

Muir’s books and articles exuded such a playful joy that he inspired millions of Americans, shaping their relationship with nature. Muir wrote of ‘a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices’ and of trees in a storm that were ‘throbbing with music and life’ – his language was visceral and emotional. He grabbed his readers and took them into the wilderness, up snowy mountains, above and behind stupendous waterfalls and across flowering meadows.⁴

Muir liked to cast himself as the wild man in the mountains. But after his first five years in rural California and the Sierra, he began to spend the winter months in San Francisco and the Bay Area to write his articles. He rented rooms from friends and acquaintances and continued to dislike the city’s ‘barren & beeless’ streets, but here he met the editors who commissioned his first pieces. Throughout these years he remained restless, but as his brothers and sisters wrote letters from Wisconsin, reporting on their marriages and children, Muir began to think about his future.

It was Jeanne Carr who introduced him to Louie Strentzel, in September 1874, when Muir was thirty-six. Louie was twenty-seven and the only surviving child of a wealthy Polish emigrant who owned a large orchard and vineyard in Martinez, thirty miles north-east of San Francisco. For five years Muir wrote her letters, and regularly visited Louie and her family, before he finally made up his mind. They became engaged in 1879, and married in April 1880, a few days before his forty-second birthday. They settled at the Strentzels’ ranch in Martinez – but Muir continued to escape into the wilderness. Louie understood that she had to let her husband go when he felt ‘lost & choked in agricultural needs’. Muir always returned, refreshed and inspired, ready to spend time with his wife and later his two young daughters whom he adored. Only once did Louie accompany him to Yosemite Valley where Muir pushed her up the mountains with a stick pressed to her back – to his mind a helpful gesture, but it was an experiment that was never repeated.

Muir’s sketch of pushing Louie up a mountain in Yosemite (Illustration Credit 23.3)

Muir accepted his role as farm manager but never enjoyed it. Then, when Louie’s father died in 1890, he left her a fortune of almost US $250,000. They decided to sell parts of the land and hired Muir’s sister and her husband to run the remaining estate. Muir, who was now in his early fifties, was glad to be relieved of the daily work on the ranch so that he could concentrate on more important issues.

During the years that he had run the Strentzels’ ranch in Martinez, Muir never lost his passion for Yosemite. Encouraged by Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of the nation’s leading literary monthly magazine, the Century, Muir began to fight for the wilderness. Every time he visited Yosemite Valley he saw more changes. Though the valley was a state park, the enforcement of regulations and control was lax. California was managing Yosemite Valley badly. Sheep had grazed the valley floor barren and tourist accommodation cluttered the landscape. Muir also noted how many wildflowers had disappeared since he had first visited the Sierra two decades earlier. In the mountains, outside the boundaries of the park, many of Muir’s beloved sequoias had been felled for timber. Muir was shocked about the destruction and waste – and would later write that ‘no doubt these trees would make good lumber after passing through a sawmill, as George Washington after passing through the hands of a French cook would have made good food’.⁵