Highlights Archives
Unpublished Letters of John Muir Go Online
More than 100 pages of original letters by John Muir, America's most celebrated environmentalist, went online this week on the Wisconsin Historical Society's Web site. Muir, whose work led to the first national parks, the preservation of California's redwoods, and the foundation of the Sierra Club, left his native Scotland with his family at age 11, settling on Fountain Lake Farm near Montello in Marquette County, Wisconsin. He spent his youth on the family farm, working for his father before leaving home at 22 for Madison, where he exhibited his inventions and later enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. The 30 letters — believed to be the first important collection of original Muir manuscripts to be made available on the Web — were written between 1861 and 1914 to several friends from his childhood and youth in Wisconsin.
"Because they're intimate personal letters spanning his entire adult life," says Society librarian Michael Edmonds, "they document all the major turning points in his career."
Most remarkable is a series of 24 intimate letters to Emily Pelton and her family. Muir boarded with them in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, the winter of 1860-61, after leaving home but before enrolling in the University of Wisconsin. His letters to Emily span his entire adult life, and were sent from Madison, Canada, the Yosemite Valley, San Francisco, Arizona and his ranch in Martinez, California, over the next 50 years. In them Muir describes his student days in Madison, solitary wanderings in Yosemite, the birth of his first child and the death of his wife, and reflections on his life. Others recount his difficulty writing, publication of his autobiography, and his surprise at becoming a best-selling author.
"They clearly show his transition from fundamentalist Christian to tree-hugging Transcendentalist," Edmonds says, as well as revealing Muir's religious convictions, pacifism, humanitarianism, loneliness, self-doubt and humor.
Two of the 30 letters are published for the first time. Writing near the end of his life to Waukesha judge Milton Griswold, who first introduced Muir to the study of plants when they were fellow students in Madison during the 1860s, Muir recalls a key moment the two shared. He thanks Griswold for "that wonderful botanical lesson you gave me on the steps of our dormitory, which has never been forgotten and which has influenced all my after life."
Although typed transcripts of some of the letters have been quoted by scholars, all but six are published in their entirety for the first time on the Society's Turning Points in Wisconsin History Web site. They can be found in the online collection along with other letters and manuscripts relating to Muir, including his brother David's description of their childhood.
:: Posted April 17, 2005
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