A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster

Author:Donald Worster [Worster, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-09-20T21:00:00+00:00

Muir gravitated toward idealistic people like the Strentzels, Carrs, and Bidwells who shared his disapproval of the naked pursuit of money. They also shared his passion for the outdoors, loved the beauty of natural things, and found spiritual value in them. As John Strentzel described himself, they were “worshippers of nature.”13 They believed in protecting forests and were thrilled like Muir by mountain vistas.

At the same time these were people who loved to grow plants on an agricultural scale. They had left the city to seek a rural residence where they could produce food in association with like-minded neighbors. Even the San Francisco educator John Swett and his wife Mary, with whom Muir had boarded for many years, eventually moved out to the countryside, buying property adjacent to the Strentzel ranch farther up the Alhambra Valley and going into grape and wine production. All were committed to developing an agricultural economy in California that was cooperative, liberal, and democratic. Muir clearly preferred the company of such people to that of gold miners, city merchants, unrestrained lumbermen or sheepherders, or anyone without conscience or scruple.

Yet he sometimes cast a sardonic eye on his friends’ enthusiasms. He lived within their Grange circle, attended Grange meetings, but did not always support the Grange movement. Compared to the others, he was less inclined to idealize rural life. He was never fully convinced that building a cooperative utopia among farmers could succeed on a practical level. Organizations and institutions never held much attraction, for like his father Daniel he was independent and nonconformist. He was a passionate reformer, but the focus of his reform was more personal, inward looking, and spiritual than outward or social. Farming, like everything else for him, must be first and foremost an individual way of life. One pursued it according to one’s talents constrained by one’s conscience.

When he looked into the eyes of most California farmers Muir did not find much talent or conscience. On the whole they suffered, he wrote in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, from “dry rot.” Farmers were too often poor, shiftless men lacking any enthusiasm for work. One happy exception was a group of “gentle grangers” he discovered trying to create farms in the flat, droughty Mussel Slough area at the southern end of the Central Valley. After years of playing at farming “as at cards, speculating and gambling,” they dug an irrigation ditch from the Kings River to their fields. Now they were able to raise more reliable crops of corn and alfalfa, and an infectious happiness abounded. He had come upon them as he was tracing the lowland effects of glaciations in the mountains and observed that they had found good sediments to work with and had captured a good supply of melt water. The glaciers were producing a bountiful harvest. To one who had often been hungry in his travels, longing for a loaf of bread, the prospect of those healthy crops and prosperous farms was no trivial matter. “Cheerless shanties, sifted

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