What a Young John Muir Learned In the Wisconsin Wilderness

John Muir harbored a different perspective of the American wilderness than most. Born in 1838 in Dunbar, a small coastal town in southeastern Scotland, Muir wrote in his memoir that he “was fond of everything that was wild” in his native country. His hometown overlooked red sandstone cliffs, sandy beaches, and the dark gray waters of the North Sea.

Called Johnnie by his boyhood friends, Muir “loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one.”

An athletic child, he honed his climbing skills by ascending trees, or the slippery, moss-covered walls of neighboring gardens, or even the roof of his family’s three-story house on the town’s main thoroughfare, High Street. Johnnie and his playmates passed the time by staging races, “running on and on along a public road over the breezy hills like hounds [thinking] nothing of running right ahead ten or a dozen miles before turning back.”

Scotland’s brown skylarks, with their delicate voices, also fascinated Muir. “Oftentimes on a broad meadow near Dunbar,” he remembered, “we stood for hours enjoying their marvelous singing and soaring.” A budding naturalist, he delighted in capturing chicks, observing them, and releasing them. “Wildness was ever sounding in our ears,” Muir recalled, and these “first excursions [were] the beginnings of lifelong wanderings.”

One dark evening in February 1849, when Muir was almost eleven years old, his father made a surprising announcement. When the sun rose the next morning, the family would set off on a one-way journey to North America. This decision came near the beginning of the Gold Rush, just one year after John Marshall found gold in Coloma, California. News of this event rapidly traveled around the world, attracting hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the United States in the months that followed. Some men and women, like the mountain man James Beckwourth, would try their luck in the gold fields of California’s Mother Lode country, while others would seek prosperity elsewhere as farmers, ranchers, or entrepreneurs.

Muir’s father was driven to immigrate not by a desire for earthly riches but for religious freedom. A strict Protestant whose views clashed with those of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, he hoped to join a settlement of the Campbellite Disciples of Christ somewhere in North America. For young John, North America’s reputed natural marvels made the journey seem worthwhile. He recalled his desire to taste the sweet syrup that came from the maple trees growing in New England and the northern Midwest, to see the “hawks, eagles, [and] pigeons, filling the sky,” and to explore the continent’s “boundless woods full of mysterious good things.”

The next morning, John, his father, and two of his six siblings boarded a train bound for Glasgow, from which they would embark upon their transatlantic journey. The rest of the family planned to follow once a homesite was established. As Muir looked back at the shores of his native country, he felt only joy and anticipation for experiencing what he had only read about in his schoolbook: the “American wilderness.” In the naivete of his youth, it was impossible for him to “know what we were leaving, what we were to encounter in the New World, nor what our gains were likely to be.” Like so many other nineteenth- century immigrants, Muir made a bittersweet bargain. He exchanged the familiarity of a home he might never see again for the chance of a better life in an unknown land.

The sea crossing lasted more than six weeks. John kept busy by befriending the captain and crew, peppering them with questions about the marine life teeming in the cold Atlantic waters off the coast of North America. Meanwhile, his father, Daniel, holed up below deck. There, he debated with the other immigrant families as to which region of this new land offered the best prospects. Although Daniel had intended to settle in present-day Ontario, they convinced him that “the States offered superior advantages, especially Wisconsin and Michigan,” Muir recalled.

When the Muirs disembarked in New York City, they immediately headed for the Midwest via the recently completed Erie Canal. Upon reaching Wisconsin, a state admitted to the Union just one year earlier in 1848, Daniel Muir worked with a land agent to quickly obtain 160 acres of land in Marquette County for $200. There, he constructed a sturdy little house made of oak while the children spent their time “wandering in the fields and meadows, looking at the trees and flowers, snakes and birds and squirrels,” Muir remembered.

About half a year after his arrival, Daniel’s wife and the rest of his children joined them, a sign of the family’s commitment to their new life in the United States. It was a heady time for young John, who rejoiced in the new and undeveloped environment so different from that of Dunbar, a bustling port town of thirty-five hundred residents with a new railroad station.

While much of America still contained pristine woodlands, Scottish forests had been decimated over the centuries and would cover only 5 percent of its territory by the end of the nineteenth century. For a budding naturalist like Muir, Wisconsin was paradise. “This sudden splash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons… Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!” he remembered.

The Muirs reached Wisconsin during a decade of explosive growth. Between 1840 and 1850, the state’s population increased by 900 percent to nearly 300,000 people. Immigrants came from the British Isles, Germany, Norway, and Sweden between 1830 and 1860, drawn by the availability of agricultural land and, like the Muirs, the freedom to worship as they pleased. Their arrival contributed to the displacement of Wisconsin’s Meskwaki, Ho-Chunk, Sauk, and Menominee tribes, a pattern that had continued since European missionaries and fur traders first arrived in the seventeenth century.

Between 1804 and 1854, the US government pressured Wisconsin’s tribes to cede millions of acres of land through seventy signed treaties, acquiring most of the state’s territory for settlement and agricultural development. By the 1840s, when the Muirs established their homestead, Wisconsin’s Native population had been decimated, with only tens of thousands of people remaining.

Muir came of age in central Wisconsin without a serious awareness of the consequences of settlement for the local Indigenous population. As a young adult, he helped his father on their farm, which sat one hundred miles northeast of Galena River, where Beckwourth had mined for lead among the Sauk and Meskwaki people twenty-seven years earlier.

The Muirs grew corn and raised livestock on land that was sacred to members of the Ho-Chunk nation who had been driven from their homeland by the federal government in 1840; Muir described riding a pony purchased from the Ho-Chunk or Menominee people atop an Indian mound containing the remains of deceased Native Americans. It rose from the earth just feet from their shanty. His frequent childhood encounters with Indigenous people living in Wisconsin nonetheless remained firmly imprinted on his memory, and he associated the concepts of wilderness and wildness with them.

Muir marveled at the Native Americans’ foraging and hunting abilities; they clearly possessed knowledge about the natural world that far surpassed his own. On one occasion in his youth, he recalled how men from the Menominee or Ho-Chunk nations went “direct to trees on our farm, chop[ped] holes in them with their tomahawks and [took] out coons, of the existence of which we had never noticed the slightest trace.” When the weather turned cold, Muir continued, “we frequently saw three or four Indians hunting deer in company, running like hounds on the fresh, exciting tracks. The escape of the deer from these noiseless, tireless hunters was said to be well-nigh impossible; they were followed to the death.”

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Excerpted from The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions by Amanda Bellows. Copyright © 2024 by Amanda Bellows. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.