THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
John Muir
Visited Union County in 1867
Union County
was once visited by one of America’s best-known
naturalists, John Muir. Long before the
terms conservation and environment were heard on a regular basis, Muir
was
leading efforts to study the environment.
As a naturalist, explorer, writer, engineer and geologist, he
left a
major legacy in nature conservancy.
The year John Muir traveled through
Union County, Georgia was 1867. The
nation was recovering from ravages of the Civil War, and life in the
nation was
going through major transitions. Who was
this man, John Muir, and why was he interested in making a thousand
mile walk
to the Gulf, recording what he learned about nature and the environment?
He was born April 21, 1838 at Dunbar
in East Lothian, Scotland. His father
was Daniel Muir and his mother was Ann Gilrye Muir.
John Muir had two brothers and five sisters.
When John Muir was eleven years of
age, his parents migrated to the United States, settling in Wisconsin
where his
father purchased land and farmed. John
was an astute student, especially in the area of earth sciences. He attended the University of Wisconsin, but
decided, rather than graduate from what he called “a man-made school,”
he
wanted to enroll in “the university of the wilderness.”
To get money for the journey he wanted to
make, he worked for parts of 1866 and 1867 as an industrial engineer in
a
factory in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was
there an accident almost cost him his eyesight but fortunately he
recovered so
that he could see the beauties of nature he so much admired. In 1867 he set out from Indiana on his way to
the Gulf Coast of Florida, a thousand mile trip by foot.
We can imagine the angular John Muir,
at age twenty-nine, already with a beard (how would he take time to
shave on
this 1,000 mile trek to the sea?) for which he was still noted in his
later
life. In his knapsack he had a press
where he preserved foliages of various specimens that interested him. He wrote friends and relatives that he would
travel through Murphy, NC, Blairsville, GA and Gainesville, GA, and
advised
them to address letters to him at Gainesville, for he was “terribly
letter-hungry.” Muir averaged traveling
twenty-five miles per day on this journey, a good speed, considering
the
mountains through which much of his trek lay.
Along his route, he talked to
strangers and many befriended him, taking him into their homes for
meals and
lodging. On September 19, 1867, a
“mountaineer” near Murphy, NC, along the Hiawassee River, told him
about the
gap south of Blairsville and the strange tracks on the rocks there. Going by what Muir called “Track Gap,” he saw the indentations in the rocks, and as
his mountaineer host had explained, there were “bird tracks, bar
tracks, hoss
tracks, men tracks, in solid rock, as if it had been mud.”
He continued his journey, admiring the
Blue Ridges that stretched before him in grandeur.
He stopped at a home near Yonah Mountain near
Cleveland, GA in the evening of September 22, 1867.
He wrote in his journal that he “had a long
conversation with an old Methodist (former) slaveholder and mine owner.” He enjoyed homemade cider with his host.
As Muir met people on his travels
throughout the Blue Ridge mountains, he must have felt a kinship with
them. For many of the settlers in the
coves and valleys of the land he traversed had been immigrants from
Scotland as
had he and his family.
He wrote much on this trip to the
Gulf. I have selected two significant
quotations for they seem to give us the heart of John Muir’s philosophy
about
nature:
“There
is not a ‘fragment’ in all nature, for every relative fragment of one
thing is
a full harmonious unit in itself.”
He
must have encountered death on the journey—death of wildlife, death of
people,
death of trees, shrubs, plants. He wrote
introspectively of death:
“On
no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see
the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous
inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains
and
streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is
stingless,
indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory,
for it
never fights. All is divine
harmony.” [Both quotations are in A THOUSAND MILE WALK TO THE GULF
published posthumously in 1916.]
When Muir arrived at the Gulf in
Florida, he had hoped to go on to South America from there and take
another
thousand-mile journey on that continent, studying botany and the
landscape as
he had from Indianapolis to Florida. But
he took malaria, and the illness prevented his going further. He got passage on a ship and arrived at San
Francisco, California in March, 1868.
He was captivated by the Yosemite
Valley, and spent most of the remainder of his life until his death
December
24, 1914, working with President Theodore Roosevelt and others in
getting a
bill passed in Congress to set up Yosemite and other National Parks,
saving the
giant Sequoia trees, and trying to prevent a dam on the Tuolumne River
and
using the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a water reservoir for San Francisco. He organized the Sierra Club and was its
first president. He wrote books and
articles on conservation and preservation.
John Muir and Louisa Wanda Strentzel
were married in 1880. They reared two
daughters, Wanda and Helen. President
Woodrow Wilson succeeded President Theodore Roosevelt and signed the
bill into
law on December 19, 1913 to create the Hetch Hetchy Valley dam. When Muir died a year later, one of his
admirers and fellow conservationists said he “died of a broken heart”
from the
destruction of the valley by the water reservoir.
John Muir did not live to see the
National Forest Preserves in many of the states he traversed in his
trek from
Indianapolis to the Florida Gulf in 1867.
As we in Union County enjoy the Chattahoochee National Forest
and the
wilderness areas of North Georgia, we can be grateful that the early
naturalist
walked through our mountains and saw them as “a full harmonious unit.”
[Ethelene Dyer
Jones is a retired educator,
freelance writer, poet, and historian. She may be reached at
e-mail edj0513@windstream.net;
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
Updated September 8, 2008
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