An eye injury in a wheel factory turned John Muir toward the wilderness
In March 1867 a file slipped in an Indianapolis wagon-wheel factory and pierced John Muir's eye. He spent six weeks in a darkened room fearing blindness. When his sight returned he walked about 1,000 miles to the Gulf of Mexico, then headed for California, where Yosemite made him the Father of the National Parks.
Muir was born on 21 April 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland, the third of eight children, and roamed the East Lothian coast as a boy. His father held that anything distracting from Bible study deserved punishment; by 11 the boy could recite nearly the whole Bible. In 1849 the family emigrated to a Wisconsin farm, and Muir kept his Scottish accent and a book of Robert Burns's poems for life.
At 22 he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, paying his own way. Under a black locust tree a fellow student explained that the tree belonged to the pea family, and that lesson sent him racing into the woods. He picked courses so eccentrically that he was recorded as an irregular gent and never graduated, yet absorbed enough botany and geology to guide his later travels. He botanised through Ontario from 1864, then became a supervisor in the Indianapolis factory, prized for improving its machines, until the accident.
His 1867 walk from Kentucky to Florida followed, in his words, the wildest and least trodden route he could find. At Cedar Key he nearly died of malaria and credited the Hodgson family with saving him. A ship to Cuba, and later passage to California, brought him to San Francisco, from which he left at once for Yosemite. He whooped at the views, scrambled down cliffs to reach waterfalls, worked a season as a shepherd, and built a cabin on Yosemite Creek with the stream running through one corner.
Muir argued for complete preservation, keeping wild land off-limits to human use, an outlook echoed in the hunting bans at most major national parks. His Century Magazine articles helped persuade Congress to create Yosemite National Park in 1890, and he helped protect Sequoia and co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892. Scotland held its first John Muir Day in 2013. He died on 24 December 1914.
Source: John Muir
