Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  Muir observes domestic animals, too, talking at length about efforts to understand oxen and his pony, Jack, and he confesses his own complicity in destruction, not only in the story of wounding the loon but also in shooting a woodpecker and hunting muskrats, gophers, and deer. His fifth chapter talks of muskrats, foxes and badgers, raccoons, squirrels and flying squirrels, and gophers and often steps away from reminiscence to admonish the wantonness of some hunting he observed. Here, Muir turns away from celebration and lament toward a more autobiographical recounting of what his life on the farm was like as the son of a demanding, driven father. In doing so he leads us away from the pleasure of imagining a young Johnnie Muir reveling in the feeling of having nature stream into him and leads us toward the changes he and his family and the settlers around him wrought on the land.

  4

  In my boyhood and youth, when I read the biographies of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett in the Landmark series of juvenile history books or, somewhat later, when I read the N. C. Wyeth illustrated volumes of The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, I imagined colonial North America as a narrow band of British American civilization along the Atlantic coast and, to the west, vast tracts of dense forest populated mostly by wolves, bears, and deer, which eventually gave way to vast tracts of rolling grasslands where buffalo roamed and deer and antelope played.

  Occasionally, I knew, a restless frontiersman might run into a primitive village of Indians, but my understanding of the New World was as an immense, open, lush, and fertile natural world, new not only because it had been a surprise to Europeans but also because it was unused, empty of everything the Old World contained. Implicit in our history is the concept of land as something wasted if not put to the service of a community or a government or a commercial enterprise. In the early accounts I’ve read of various state histories, the emphasis is largely on encouraging exploitation of natural resources—trumpeting the ease with which a prairie can be converted into a productive farm, the prospects available for mining or lumbering, the potential inherent in nascent villages and towns. Emigrants from the Old World came to the New as farmers, miners, tradesmen, merchants, laborers, and landowners; they brought their own, assumptions about land and saw no profit in questioning those assumptions. The consequence was virtually the total transformation of the American landscape; the changes began in each locale immediately after settlement and barely took a decade or two to complete.

  Before my own emigration to Wisconsin and the rise of my own need to figure out where I was, if I thought of Wisconsin at all, I saw it as the vast dairy land it promoted itself to be, the result of converting empty prairie into productive pastureland. My obliviousness was unintentional, on par with my ignorance of most of the forty-five other states I’ve never lived in—I’d been as blasé about Colorado until I moved west, though there the mountains insisted I take immediate notice of my terrain—but in the interval since we settled here, I’ve been a little more attentive and a little more observant. I’ve come to appreciate the Wisconsin landscape in ways I hadn’t expected.

  A couple of things are clearer to me now about the landscape to which John Muir was introduced in 1849. One is that the land was being used thoroughly and well by the prairies, marshes, oak savannas, and woodlands that occupied it. The grasses, sedges, flowers, shrubs, and trees, in concert with natural or Indian-set fires, flourished everywhere. The wildlife flourished as well, all those waterfowl and songbirds, reptiles and amphibians, fishes and fauna of the grasslands and forests. The natural world had found a balance here, as it always has, among its various populations—the plants that felt most at home on this particular soil, the animals that felt most at home among those particular plants.

  It is also clear that Wisconsin had been densely populated up until the influx of European American settlement. The Menominee, Ho-Chunk or Winnebago, Ojibwa or Chippewa, Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, and Dakota all lived here. Other tribes had more fleeting residence in the territory; and before all of them there had been mound builders—Wisconsin, until Europeans routinely demolished most of them, had more effigy and burial mounds than any other state, spread all across the region. When Muir tells the story of learning to ride the pony his father bought from a storekeeper “who had obtained it from a Winnebago or Menominee Indian in trade for goods,” his lessons began at “a smooth place near an Indian mound back of the shanty.” Though treaties had relocated the tribes, Muir was aware of Indians passing through the area, occasionally hunting muskrats or harvesting wild rice and ducks in the marshes. It’s evident that for those various tribes, undeveloped Wisconsin had been home ground.

  Muir tells us, in “The Ploughboy,” his sixth chapter, “When we went into the Wisconsin woods there was not a single wheel-track or cattle-track. The only man-made road was an Indian trail along the Fox River between Portage and Packwauckee Lake.” He claims that “in the spring of 1849 there was no other settler within a radius of four miles of our Fountain Lake farm,” yet “in three or four years almost every quarter-section of government land was taken up.” Many of the newcomers were immigrants from Great Britain, in addition to a few “Yankee families from adjacent states.” Muir describes the settlement process:

  All alike striking root and gripping the glacial drift soil as naturally as oak and hickory trees; happy and hopeful, establishing homes and making wider and wider fields in the hospitable wilderness. The axe and plough were kept very busy; cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs multiplied; barns and corncribs were filled up, and man and beast were well fed; a schoolhouse was built, which was also used for a church; and in a very short time the new country began to look like the old one.

  His succinct account of settlement could apply across the country.

  Muir’s “Ploughboy” chapter is particularly rich in chronicling the kind of labor that turned prairie and woodland into farmland. It is in many ways a minor history of transformation in the land, and often Muir makes clear not only the nature of the transformation but also its unforeseen consequences. For example, he notes, “After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake farm, fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses,” his father bought more wild land five miles away and “began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.”

  By then, nearly twenty, Muir was old enough to run the breaking plow, “turning furrows from eighteen inches to two feet wide,” used for “breaking up the wild sod woven into a tough mass, chiefly by the cordlike roots of perennial grasses, reinforced by the taproots of oak and hickory bushes, called ‘grubs,’ some of which were more than a century old and four to five inches in diameter.” This detail may not be one Muir appreciated at the time but his memory of what he was transforming is vivid. He later explains how “the uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree could live on it,” but once “the oak openings in our neighborhood were settled, and the farmers had prevented running grass-fires, the grubs grew up into trees and formed tall thickets so dense that it was difficult to walk through them and every trace of the sunny ‘openings’ vanished.”

  For Fountain Lake Farm, much of the transformation was the result of Daniel Muir’s driven profligacy, attempting to farm as large a plot of land as he could and reap the rewards of its fertility as quickly as possible. John Muir recounts a neighbor’s conversation about the misuse of the land and its consequences, which makes clear that Muir’s father’s approach was commonplace. Having transformed land that had limited value as cropland and then exhausting it, and having no sense of how to renew its fertility, Daniel Muir simply moved on to another plot of ground to repeat the same radical alteration there.

  Looking off from the promontory on Observatory Hill near
ly a century and a half after Muir first stood there, John Warfield Simpson explains that the landscape he sees “differs both from the one John first beheld and from that formed by the extraordinary change he witnessed in the subsequent few years. More forest cover exists now than when he gazed across the rolling hills and broad lowlands.” He notes that two new cultural layers have been added to the original landscape, “layers that nearly erased the prior conditions.” One layer was produced when “pioneers initially cut farms into the indigenous landscape,” and another when those farms were themselves transformed in purpose and in productivity in the succeeding century.

  That second layer is the one I now see from Observatory Hill and as I drive the chip-sealed and paved roads around what was Fountain Lake Farm. Dairy farms dominate. Black-and-white-mottled cows graze the pastures on the drained bottomlands and the rolling hills. I also see black beef cattle, sheep, and swine. Red-painted wooden barns with crisp white trim stand surrounded by fields of wheat, corn, oats, and alfalfa. . . . Some scenery is charming and pastoral, neat and tidy. Other places like wetlands and marshes look disheveled with the scruffy appearance of abandonment and succession.

  That second layer is the one I saw as well from that same promontory, and though I climbed the hill in order to look across the landscape where John Muir spent his adolescence, I have to remember that the country I saw was not the one Muir gazed upon. But I also recall that Muir had hoped one small patch of it would be.

  5

  On November 23, 1895, in an address to the Sierra Club in San Francisco, John Muir spoke of his thwarted dream of preserving some portion of Fountain Lake Farm.

  The preservation of specimen sections of natural flora—bits of pure wildness—was a fond, favorite notion of mine long before I heard of national parks. When my father came from Scotland, he settled in a fine wild region of Wisconsin, beside a small glacier lake bordered with white pond-lilies. . . . And when I was about to wander away on my long rambles I was sorry to leave that precious meadow unprotected; therefore, I said to my brother-in-law, who then owned it, “sell me the forty acres of lake meadow and keep it fenced, and never allow cattle or hogs to break into it, and I will gladly pay you whatever you say. I want to keep it untrampled for the sake of its ferns and flowers; and even if I should never see it again, the beauty of its lilies and orchids are so pressed into my mind I shall always enjoy looking back at them in imagination, even across seas and continents, and perhaps after I am dead.”

  But he regarded my plan as a sentimental dream wholly impracticable. The fence he said would surely be broken down sooner or later, and all the work would be in vain. Eighteen years later I found the deep-water pond lilies in fresh bloom, but the delicate garden-sod of the meadow was broken up and trampled into black mire.

  John Muir eventually left home, at first to try to make a career as an inventor and mechanic—his ingenious and intricate study desk is encased near an entrance to the Wisconsin Historical Society building on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison—and later he enrolled as a student at the university. Eventually, though he doesn’t tell us this in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, he went off to Canada to avoid the draft that would have made him a soldier for the Union cause in the Civil War then raging. In the conclusion of the book he more circumspectly claims, “I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted fifty years and is not yet completed.” He positions himself on a hill overlooking the university, saying farewell “with streaming eyes” and setting off for “the University of the Wilderness.”

  In time, of course, he did take his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico, tramp through the mountains of California and across the glaciers of Alaska, and become a major voice for the preservation of the wilderness. But except for occasional trips to see his family, he seldom visited Wisconsin.

  Fountain Lake Farm, which Daniel Muir had sold to his daughter Sarah and her husband, David Galloway, was sold off in increments in 1865 and 1866, and once John Ennis owned the eighty acres around the lake, it became known as Ennis Lake. John Muir later considered making an offer to Ennis to preserve a portion of the property but decided it wouldn’t work and eventually gave up. Fountain Lake Farm shifted into that second layer of transformation that Simpson talks about, the alteration of the pioneer farm of the mid-nineteenth century into the farm of the twentieth. The abandoned Muir farmhouse eventually burned down and the property passed into the hands of Archie Schmitz, who replaced the house with one of his own and hoped to preserve the site of Muir’s youth.

  On April 14, 1948, Aldo Leopold, then a professor of wildlife management and land conservation at the University of Wisconsin, whose weekend retreat on the Wisconsin River was less than twenty miles southwest of Ennis Lake, wrote to the director of the Wisconsin Conservation Department to propose acquisition of “one of the two boyhood farms of John Muir as a state park.” He recommended that those involved in making such a decision read The Story of My Boyhood and Youth: “It is a necessary background.” Leopold had given the project some careful consideration:

  The reason I have hesitated to recommend this project in the past has been that the Muir farm is undoubtedly badly depleted floristically and otherwise, and hence any possible restoration at this time might be a pretty drab affair compared to the original farm described in Muir’s book. It now occurs to me, however, that this area might fall half way between a state park in the ordinary sense and a “natural area”, the objective being to restore the flora to something approaching the original. To this end the cooperation of the Botany Department would be needed, and the superintendent would have to be a botanist with a general enthusiasm for this restoration job. He should also of course be equipped with the requisite knowledge of history and literature.

  Leopold knew he was advocating an “enlarged function of state parks,” and he insisted that instead of being “a mere stopping place for tourists looking for something to do,” such a park “might be made a public educational institution in the ecological and intellectual history of Wisconsin.”

  April 14, 1948, was also the day that Leopold learned Oxford University Press would publish the book now known as A Sand County Almanac, one of the most significant volumes in environmental literature, the book that placed Leopold in the pantheon that included Thoreau and Muir. One week later, on April 21, Leopold died of a heart attack while fighting a grass fire. Coincidentally, April 21 was also John Muir’s birthday.

  Others began advocating for a Muir Park in the late 1940s, and in 1955 Marquette County established a John Muir Memorial County Park near the site of Fountain Lake Farm but not actually containing any original Muir property. In 1965 the county expanded its holdings to include the lake and the meadow, and in 1972 the State of Wisconsin established the Muir Park State Natural Area, intending to restore and maintain the fen, prairie, and sedge meadow communities around the lake. A portion of the original Muir property is still in private hands, owned by Erik Brynildson, the Muir scholar whose own house stands where the Muir farmhouse once stood and who pursues his own mission of restoration and preservation.

  Brynildson spoke at the dedication ceremony in 1991 that established Fountain Lake Farm as a National Historic Landmark. Speaking of his acquisition of a portion of the farm in 1987, he told of clearcutting a “dense crop of red pine,” planted in 1960 as a replacement for the fallow farmland, having the land rough-disced and fine-tilled, and hand-planting a prairie-savanna seed bed, in hopes of restoring the site to what it was in the spring of 1849. Bobwhite quail were released and nest boxes for various birds installed around the area, and at the time he hoped to reintroduce prairie grouse.

  From Fountain Lake Farm, John Muir went out into the wider world, making his mark as a close observer of, and inspiring presence in, the natural world. Edwin Way Teale has written about the range of Muir’s accomplishments, as a botanist, a glaciologist, and a conservationist. “Today Muir would probably be called an ecologist,�
�� Teale writes. His impact can be felt in the continuing work of the Sierra Club, which he served as its first president and presiding spirit; in the national parks, like Yosemite, Sequoia, and the Grand Canyon, that exist largely because of his efforts; and in the books he wrote, like My First Summer in the Sierra, The Mountains of California, Travels in Alaska, and A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, which are still in print a century after his death and cited frequently by a range of writers who follow in his footsteps. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth he gives us a glimpse of the boy who became that man by showing us the lake, meadows, woods, and hills that prepared him to see the world in his own unique way.

  All that is the landscape I walk when I try walking with John Muir.

  6

  The day before the autumnal equinox I drive again to Muir Park. On a rural county road I pass four sandhill cranes standing in a field, three of them foraging, one of them watching me. I slow the car but don’t want to spook them so keep moving. At once I see a second, larger group of cranes on a higher terrace of the grassy field and then a third still more numerous group even farther up and back, maybe two dozen cranes in all spread out across the fields, the grass a rich green rustling beneath them. An hour and a half into daylight and for me it’s already a good day.

  At the park I step down to the dock where I started my walk last spring. The wind is cold and the sky overcast, low woolly clouds obscuring the sun. Lily pads float on the surface of the lake, their stems curling below the surface. They have no flowers but I remember Muir writing ecstatically of drifting on the lake and admiring “how they grow up in beauty out of gray lime mud and ride gloriously among the breezy sun-spangles.” He thought the white water lily “the most beautiful, sumptuous, and deliciously fragrant of all our Wisconsin flowers.”