by Robert Root
Fen, bog, sedge meadow, wet-mesic prairie. It’s all well and good to sort these terms out on the page. It’s more of a challenge to sort these wetland communities out on the ground. I’ll need to walk in John Muir’s footsteps one more time, without consulting the maps that may already be firmly locked in memory, to identify what I see. Even more challenging, I’ll need to be able to identify them in places other than where I know they already are, especially if they happen to be on my own home ground.
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John Muir thought Fountain Lake was beautiful. He described it as “one of the many small glacier lakes that adorn the Wisconsin landscapes. It is fed by twenty or thirty meadow springs, is about half a mile long, half as wide, and surrounded by low finely-modeled hills dotted with oak and hickory, and meadows full of grasses and sedges and many beautiful orchids and ferns.” He was particularly enthusiastic about the lake itself, with its “zone of green, shining rushes, and just beyond the rushes a zone of white and orange water-lilies fifty or sixty feet wide.” He recalled, “On bright days, when the lake was rippled by a breeze, the lilies and sun-spangles danced together in radiant beauty, and it became difficult to discriminate between them.”
Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, April 21, 1838, and his childhood was spent close to the sea. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, he claimed that as “a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild” and “with red-blooded playmates, wild as myself, I 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.” He and his brothers and his friends often ran off “to hear the birds sing and hunt their nests, glorying in the number we had discovered and called our own.” His memory of the song and flight of the skylark is so vivid he devotes two pages to describing it. He also mentions “a few natural-history sketches that . . . left a deep impression,” one about the fish hawk (the osprey) and the bald eagle by Alexander Wilson, the Scotch ornithologist who wrote the nine-volume American Ornithology, and one about the passenger pigeon by John James Audubon, the artist of Birds of America. With both accounts lodged in his memory, he became an indefatigable observer of the natural world at an early age and one inclined to record his observations.
In Scotland, when his father told him one night that “we’re gan to America the morn,” John Muir was exhilarated by the images that opened up in his imagination: “boundless woods full of mysterious good things; trees full of sugar, growing in ground full of gold; hawks, eagles, pigeons, filling the sky; millions of birds’ nests, and no gamekeepers to stop us in all the wild, happy land. We were utterly, blindly glorious.” Muir’s fascination with the natural world was deep-seated and thorough, and his excitement held throughout a sea voyage of six and a half weeks, followed by weeks more of overland travel from New York to central Wisconsin.
Muir arrived in Wisconsin in 1849, the year after it became a state and at the beginning of decades of settlement and development that essentially changed the nature of the country. His father, Daniel Muir, brought three of his children—John, almost eleven, Sarah, thirteen, and David, nine—to the New World to establish a home to which his wife and the rest of his seven children would later emigrate.
Originally they were bound for Canada, but conversations along the way convinced Daniel Muir that Wisconsin had greater opportunities for profitable farming. In short order, he found property near the Fox River, north of Portage, at a site he described as “fine land for a farm in sunny open woods on the side of a lake.” The children waited at the home of Alexander Gray, another Scots immigrant who had befriended Daniel, while their father, with the help of new neighbors, built a bur oak shanty for immediate shelter. Gray’s team of oxen hauled them and all their possessions to the site. Muir writes of their arrival: “To this charming hut, in the sunny woods, overlooking a flowery glacier meadow and a lake rimmed with white water-lilies, we were hauled by an ox-team across trackless carex swamps and low rolling hills sparsely dotted with round-headed oaks.” Daniel named the lake Fountain Lake, because of the springs that fed it. Fountain Lake Farm would be the center of John Muir’s world for the next decade and more.
Much in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth chronicles the clash between Daniel Muir’s harsh, parsimonious approach to life and his oldest son’s energetic and spirited approach—the boys were often thrashed for misbehavior or the hint of misbehavior or the prospect of misbehavior, meals were small, workdays on the farm were long, joy was discouraged—yet the book is not so much a memoir of a tough childhood and adolescence as it is an exuberant celebration of the natural world that opened up to the boy in Wisconsin. Muir writes of his brother David and himself, at the very moment the ox team approaches the shanty, leaping from the wagon to race to a tree where they had spotted a blue jay’s nest, climbing the tree, and “[feasting] our eyes on the beautiful green eggs and beautiful birds,—our first memorable discovery.” Dropping out of the tree, they “ran along the brow of the hill that the shanty stood on, and down to the meadow, searching the trees and grass tufts and bushes, and soon discovered a bluebird’s and a woodpecker’s nest, and began an acquaintance with the frogs and snakes and turtles in the creeks and springs.”
At this point Muir bursts into an unrestrained paean to the new world opening up to him.
This sudden plash 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, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of spring when Nature’s pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together.
Muir didn’t begin writing his autobiography until roughly sixty years after he arrived at Fountain Lake Farm, and it was published serially in 1912 and 1913 before it appeared in book form. We can’t know how much the intervening decades of ecstatic wandering in the wilderness heightened Muir’s memory of his enthusiasm for “that glorious Wisconsin wilderness.” Nonetheless, it’s remarkable how much of the book celebrates in considerable detail the natural world he witnessed as an eleven-year-old immigrant. Reading his account of observing a kingbird drive a “hen-hawk” away from the vicinity of his nest or of watching flocks of nighthawks hunting above the fields, one is reminded that reading Wilson’s portrait of the osprey and Audubon’s of the passenger pigeon had influenced Muir’s bent toward natural history in Scotland. In his chapter on Scotland, Muir tells how he “stood for hours enjoying [the] singing and soaring” of skylarks. That must have helped prepare his appreciation of the courtship rituals he describes in Wisconsin for the common snipe (or “common jack snipe,” as he calls it) and the partridge (possibly a ruffed grouse). Muir says, “Everything about us was so novel and wonderful that we could hardly believe our senses except when hungry or while father was thrashing us.”
Lessons about the civilized world that he learned in Scottish school and memorization of the Bible that his father insisted on were “taught to the tune of a hickory stick,” as the old song goes, “whipped” or “thrashed” into him. Nature’s lessons, though, were “charmed” into him, “streaming into us,” in large part because he had opened himself up to receiving them.
I try to imagine the natural landscape John Muir first saw when he arrived on the plot of ground his father had chosen to farm. The lake with its water lilies shone at the center of his vision, and beyond it the meadow with its grasses and sedges and, as he later came to discover, its orchids and ferns, and surrounding it the woods of oak and hickory dotting the low hills. It was open, spacious country, punctuated by oak openings but dominated by prairie and savanna, the floodplai
n of the Fox River not far away. The landscape historian John Warfield Simpson, standing on Observatory Hill and imagining the panorama Muir would have witnessed when he stood there over a hundred years earlier, writes, “Here he looked across a savanna-like expanse of rolling hills and prairies covered with widely-scattered trees. Here he saw broad, open marshes and lowlands stretching for miles to the east and south. To the west and north he saw more hills and prairies than in the other directions, with marshes and lowlands and a few forested spots interspersed. Above all, he saw little sign of human disturbance in any direction.”
As the pace of settlement increased, the scene would soon change. The window of time through which John Muir would gaze upon and run merrily through unbroken prairie and unplowed savanna was really limited to that first summer; in the following year his father worked hard to turn over the soil and replace the natural vegetation with commercial crops.
For a period it was possible to understand what had kept the prairies and savannas treeless, since before settlement, fires still ran freely over the prairies. One English immigrant, John Greening, who settled near Mazomanie some fifty miles to the south of Fountain Lake Farm, wrote in his October 24, 1847, journal entry, “The prairie fires are blazing around us day and night for months together. ’Tis a grand sight to see a whole forest burning and millions of feet of fine timber destroyed in a short time.” Four days later he wrote, “Last night we had fires blazing, rushing and crashing in all directions, and very windy indeed all night. This morning all was burned as black as a cinder for 50 miles. The fires run through the country as fast as a horse can trot, and sometimes faster.” His neighbor lost two ricks of wheat, and other neighbors lost their fences; Greening himself had no damage to his property but claims he “stayed up half the night to watch the spectacle.”
The following day Greening went “across the wide marsh to the banks of the Wisconsin river all day, and to view the effects of the fire. . . . Trees 50 feet long in the trunk, and 100 feet to the top, burnt and falling in all directions, with a crash that makes the earth tremble, and sometimes into the river that makes the water boil again, while the deer and other animals plunge headlong into the water as their only protection.” He felt that “it is necessary to be burnt, or else the country would be one mass of forest and does no harm when people are prepared for it” and found the fire advantageous: “The grass on the marsh and the brush in the forest being so thick, it was quite impossible to get across. The marsh grass in some places being more than four feet high, and so thick it was impossible to walk there, but now good traveling.” It was the fires of autumn that had maintained the landscape on which John Muir’s family had settled.
Muir’s memories of his home ground are intermingled with his greater knowledge of the natural world in the years after he began his rambles. It may be that his affection and enthusiasm for the natural world of the farm had been heightened by his appreciation of what was lost to the environment by European American settlement and lost to him by his need to move out on his own. He certainly seems, in the central chapters of the book, to be determined to catalog the flora and fauna he encountered in those early years on Fountain Lake Farm. In the second chapter, which recounts his family’s journey to Wisconsin and arrival on the farm, he tells of finding with his brother the nests of brown thrashers, song sparrows, kingbirds, hen-hawks, night-hawks, whip-poor-wills, and woodpeckers. “Everything about us was so novel and wonderful that we could hardly believe our senses.” He marvels over lightning bugs, partridge drumming, “the love-song of the common jack snipe,” the frogs and the hyla (tree frogs), and thunderstorms at length. In the third chapter he talks about domestic animals, snakes, and insects and itemizes the creatures he observes in the lake: “pickerel, sunfish, black bass, perch, shiners, pumpkin-seeds, ducks, loons, turtles, muskrats, etc.” He admires the water lily, the pasque flower, and lady’s slippers and enjoys strawberries, dewberries, cranberries, huckleberries, hickory nuts and syrup, and hazelnuts. He opens the fourth chapter by declaring, “The Wisconsin oak openings were a summer paradise for song birds, and a fine place to get acquainted with them,” and then catalogs nuthatches, chickadees, owls, prairie chickens, quail, bluebirds, robins, brown thrashers, bobolinks, red-winged blackbirds, meadowlarks, song sparrows, chickadees, wood ducks, Canada geese, bobwhites, loons, and passenger pigeons.
Again and again in his narrative Muir brings alive a moment of wonder and delight in the natural world. He opens his passage on the brown thrasher with general praise and then offers a vivid scene featuring it:
Of all the great singers that sweeten Wisconsin one of the best known and best loved is the brown thrush or thrasher, strong and able without being familiar, and easily seen and heard. Rosy purple evenings after thunder-showers are the favorite song-times, when the winds have died away and the steaming ground and the leaves and flowers fill the air with fragrance. Then the male makes haste to the topmost spray of an oak tree and sings loud and clear with delightful enthusiasm until sundown, mostly I suppose for his mate sitting on the precious eggs in a brush heap.
He goes on to describe the thrasher’s “faithful and watchful and daring” defense of his nest against snakes and squirrels, as admirable an action in his eyes as the kingbird’s assault on hawks. He returns to their song: “Their rich and varied strains make the air fairly quiver. We boys often tried to interpret the wild ringing melody and put it into words.”
In that brief passage Muir celebrates the bird while simultaneously teaching us something distinctive about it, capturing the youthful excitement of discovery his boyhood study of it must have invoked. In most of the passages on individual birds we find not only information on the habits and behavior of the birds—the prairie chickens “strutted about with queer gestures something like turkey gobblers, uttering strange loud, rounded, drumming calls,—boom! boom! boom! interrupted by choking sounds”; “the lonely cry of the loon” sounded as “one of the wildest and most striking of all wilderness sounds, a strange, sad, mournful, unearthly cry, half laughing, half wailing”—but also anecdotes about his own memories of them. He tells of wounding a loon and taking it home where it has a memorable encounter with the housecat, of his brother Daniel catching a prairie chicken as she sat on her nest, of Indians hunting ducks and gathering wild rice in the marshes. In this way he transports himself back into his youthful witnessing of the natural world and, in the process, transports the reader there as well.
Muir, writing his coming-of-age memoir at seventy, is well aware of the changes that had come over the world during the intervening decades. He knows he is writing a history of both personal and environmental losses. His long passage on the passenger pigeon is virtually an elegy for that species. It opens:
It was a great memorable day when the first flock of passenger pigeons came to our farm, calling to mind the story we had read about them when we were at school in Scotland. Of all God’s feathered people that sailed the Wisconsin sky, no other bird seemed to us so wonderful. The beautiful wanderers flew like the winds in flocks of millions from climate to climate in accord with the weather, finding their food—acorns, beechnuts, pine-nuts, cranberries, strawberries, huckleberries, juniper berries, hackberries, buckwheat, rice, wheat, oats, corn—in fields and forests thousands of miles apart. I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, like a mighty river in the sky, widening, contracting, descending like falls and cataracts, and rising suddenly here and there in huge ragged masses like high-plashing spray.
He describes the beauty of the birds and offers an anecdote that confirms how some of those who hunted them and decimated their number were simultaneously admiring of their beauty.
“Oh, what bonnie, bonnie birds!” we exclaimed over the first that fell into our hands. “Oh, what colors! Look at their breasts, bonnie as roses, and at their necks aglow wi’ every color juist like the wonderfu’ wood ducks. Oh, t
he bonnie, bonnie creatures, they beat a’! Where did they a’ come fra, and where are they a’ gan? It’s awfu’ like a sin to kill them!” To which some smug, practical old sinner would remark: “Aye, it’s a peety, as ye say, to kill the bonnie things, but they were made to be killed, and sent for us to eat as the quails were sent to God’s chosen people, the Israelites, when they were starving in the desert ayont the Red Sea. And I must confess that meat was never put up in neater, handsomer-painted packages.”
Muir tells us that he never saw the roosting places of the passenger pigeons “until long after the great flocks were exterminated,” and so he quotes Audubon’s account of them at length, then ends the chapter with the description of the roosts from Pokagon, “an educated Indian writer.”
I saw one nesting-place in Wisconsin one hundred miles long and from three to ten miles wide. Every tree, some of them quite low and scrubby, had from one to fifty nests on each. Some of the nests overflow from the oaks to the hemlock and pine woods. When the pigeon hunters attack the breeding-places they sometimes cut the timber from thousands of acres.
He concludes with a description of millions of birds captured and shipped to New York to be sold for a penny apiece. That Pokagon’s remarks and Audubon’s witnessing of a typically massive pigeon hunt end the chapter suggests that, at least so far as nature is a central focus of the book, lament is a major element.
