A Wind-storm in the Forests.

• Main Author: Warner, Charles Dudley
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1896
• Subjects: Environmentalist; naturalist; travel; conservation; national parks; John Muir; history; pamphlets; journal articles; speeches; writing; annotation; Dunbar; Glacier Bay; Great Glacier; glacier; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/226; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/context/jmb/article/1225/viewcontent/202.pdf

10405 JOHN MUIR (1836-) !f0HN Muir, an explorer and naturalist, whose field of work has WapM. been particularly the western and northwestern mountain fegfe&M regions of America,— where at least one great glacier now bears his name,—was born at Dunbar, Scotland, in 1836. With his parents and a large flock of brothers and sisters, he came to the United States in 1850, after some good common-schooling in Dunbar. He began his study of nature in the region near Fort Winnebago, Wisconsin, with an ever increasing interest and delight in whatever belongs to the world of creatures, plants, and stones, particularly in the waving solitudes of forests and rock-and-snow tracts of the northwestern Sierras. Muir's freedom to devote himself to a life of observation and record was delayed: and in the story of his years of manual work as a farmer, mechanic, lumberman, sheep-herder, and what not besides, there comes surprise at his power to find time and energy for other pursuits in the nature of an avocation; and with the surprise we have a sense of pleasure that a man of untiring muscles and mind could win free of all that checked his natural preferences. He studied grammar and mathematics while a farm hand, and read through a library of books when in the fields. He earned enough as a young man to give himself four years of special scientific study in the University of Wisconsin, Then began an independent life, in which he alternated seasons of hard work, wholly or much alone; partly through the circumstances of his wanderings, partly by his own choice. It is said that during ten years of mountaineering in the remoter Sierras, he met no men except one band of Mono tribesmen. For some ten summers and winters prior to 1876, Mr. Muir was settled near the Yosemite district, In the year named he became a member of the Geodetic Survey of the Great Basin, and attempted much botanical work. During 1879,and subsequently, after he reached Alaska, he explored and charted its vast mountain ranges, discovered 10406 JOHN MUIR Glacier Bay ...