John Muir…

was born on this date in 1838. The Writer’s Almanac has a nice essay.

It’s the birthday of writer and naturalist John Muir, born in Dunbar, Scotland. When he was eleven years old, he immigrated with his family to Fountain Lake Farm in Wisconsin. He went to college, but left after three years to travel through the northern United States and Canada, working at odd jobs to earn a living. In 1867 he was working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis when he almost lost one of his eyes in a freak accident. He later said, “I felt neither pain nor faintness, the thought was so tremendous that my right eye was gone—that I should never look at a flower again.” He was so affected by the incident that he decided to quit his job and walk across the country, living as close to nature as possible.

He walked for a thousand miles, from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, and then he sailed to Cuba, Panama, and finally California, which would become his home for the rest of his life. He fell in love with the Sierra Mountains in California, and spent much of his time hiking and camping there. He also visited Alaska, South America, Australia, Africa, China, Europe, and Japan, studying plants, animals, rocks, and glaciers. He came up with innovative theories of glacial formation that contradicted the theories of earlier scientists and that have proven to be mostly correct.

In 1889, he wrote a series of articles arguing for a national reserve to be created in the Sierra Mountains. The next year, Yosemite National Park was created, and Muir became known as the “Father of our National Parks.” In his final years, he wrote most of the nature books for which he is known—The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901), The Yosemite (1912), and many others.

Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”