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John Muir, In His Own Words Introduction Introduction If one were to use John Muir's published writings to illuminate his thought and literary development in the usual lineal manner—from youth to old age—the first volume would be The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. But that would be quite misleading, since Muir wrote that book late in life. It has the distinctive tone and content that mark the retrospective, autobiographical view. Muir was saying now what he thought and felt then. He used the vocabulary and style he had developed over several decades of writing for publication. His perceptions of early life inevitably were colored and slanted by the experiences of a lifetime. It was not a false view of his life, but it most certainly was not what he would have written—assuming the ability—at age fifteen or twenty. To the best of my ability I have arranged the quotations in this book chronologically. The chronology is meant to reflect the order in which they were written rather than what period of life they are about or when they were first published. Thus the quotations from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth are well toward the end of the book. Large portions of that volume were published serially in the Atlantic Monthly from November 1912 through February 1913, and the book itself was published in March 1913. Muir's earliest writings—aside from personal letters—were his journals. The first journal, which covered his walk to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867 and up until his arrival in San Francisco in March 1868, was published in 1916—almost two years after his death—as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. The volume My First Summer in the Sierra, published in 1911, was Muir's first use of his journals: the record of his experiences, thoughts, and emotions while he worked as a sheepherder during the spring and summer of 1869. Anyone
who starts at the beginning of this book and reads it straight through will see the
changes in style and content. In his early journals Muir was concerned with the momentous
questions that come to everyone: Who am I? Where am I going? What's it all about? What
will become of me? Those questions were answered by his first summer in the Sierra. Soon
thereafter he established himself in Yosemite Valley, and when he began to write for
publication in the early 1870s he was more focussed on the outer world than on himself. He
wrote in glowing terms about the magnificence of the mountains and the beauty of the flora
and fauna. He insisted that all people would be made well and whole if only they would
come to his glorious mountains—and when the crowds of tourists A great deal of what Muir wrote appeared in more than one publication. A number of his books are collections of articles and essays that originally were published in newspapers and magazines. He often rewrote passages that were to be republished—sometimes improving them and sometimes not. I have tried to locate the first instance of every quotation in this book, and I have used the exact wording and punctuation of that first version. As the reader will discover, upon encountering a quotation in a later publication, the wording and punctuation may well have been altered. In the citation that follows each quotation I have put the date it was written, if that could be determined. In some instances the only date is that of publication, since the date it actually was written could not be established. Following the date is information on when and where the passage was first published. If it later was reprinted in one of the books, that work is cited last. In a reference to any of the books, whether it be a primary or a secondary reference, the page number given is from the first edition; reprint editions may well have different pagination. For the sake of keeping the citations to a reasonable length, I have used three-letter abbreviations for all the books. They are, with the year of publication: BAY
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 1913 Muir died on Christmas Eve of 1914. Only six of these books were published during his lifetime. Five were published during the four years after his death. The contents of Letters to a Friend had been selected by Muir. He was working on Travels in Alaska at the time of his death; the manuscript was completed by Marion Randall Parsons. Dr. William Frederic Badè, Muir's literary executor, edited A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf and The Cruise of the Corwin. The book Steep Trails is a collection of Muir's articles from newspapers and magazines, and also includes three essays he wrote for the book Picturesque California and the Region West of the Rocky Mountains, of which he was the editor. Badè collected and edited the letters for The Life and Letters of John Muir. Linnie Marsh Wolfe edited John of the Mountains, the Unpublished Journals of John Muir. The volume Studies in the Sierra was first published as a book by the Sierra Club in 1950. The essays in that book originally appeared as a series in Overland Monthly in 1874, and were reprinted in the Sierra Club Bulletin between 1915 and 1921. Since I have endeavored to present these quotations in chronological order, quotations from a given book may be widely separated. For those who may wish to locate all the quotations from one book, no matter when or where they first appeared, the following list of quotation numbers should make that possible. [Editor's note: These page number references appear in the book's introduction.] At first I arranged the quotations in quite a different order. I took the path of least resistance, and simply clustered them according to the volume in which they appeared. At the end of the manuscript I had a sizable miscellaneous section, where I put all the quotations from various sources that had not been collected in one of the books. When I became dissatisfied with this arrangement, and decided to organize the quotations chronologically, I faced what might well have been the insuperable problem of trying to trace more than two hundred passages back to their sources. In the event, it was a time-consuming task, but it was made possible by the existence of a superb reference work. My constant companion in this chore was the second edition of John Muir, A Reading Bibliography, by William F. Kimes and Maymie B. Kimes. (Fresno: Panorama West Books, 1986.) The authors have created a detailed and wonderfully cross-referenced work that leads the user forward or backward from any point, naming the antecedents and descendants of every condensed, expanded, and rearranged article, essay, and letter that has been published. Muir's custom of reworking and rearranging his material can easily leave an innocent researcher utterly confused as to the provenance of any given passage. Without the invaluable assistance of William and Maymie Kimes I might still be out in the bush, thrashing around in a Muir-created wilderness. Every book, on whatever subject, had its beginning in someone's head—a "brainstorm" as the vernacular has it. This particular tempest occurred in the mind of Barbara Lekisch some six or seven years ago, when she was the librarian at the Sierra Club. It was also she who introduced me to John Muir, A Reading Bibliography, so I am doubly indebted. |