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The
1899
Expedition
Original
Participants
Brief
Chronology
Science
Aboard
the
Elder
Exploration
&
Settlement
Growth Along Alaska's Coast
Alaska
Natives
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John
Muir
1838-1914
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An early
photograph of John Muir, taken in Madison,
Wisconsin around 1875.
Source: Wisconsin Historical Society.
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John Muir was eleven years old when his family emigrated
from Scotland to Wisconsin in 1849. For ten years he worked
on his parents' farm, backbreaking labor made all the worse
by his father's strict Calvinist ways. But John discovered
that he had a gift for invention. He tinkered with wood and
tools, and made clever and playful machines: a
self-regulating study desk, an alarm clock bed, and an
automatic cow feeder. When, in his early twenties, he
exhibited his inventions at the Wisconsin State Fair, he was
recognized as a genius. From that point on, he was able to
get good work in machine shops and factories, and would have
kept on, had he not temporarily lost his sight in a factory
accident. He vowed, when he recovered, to leave the factory,
and to devote his life to "the study of the inventions of
God." He set off on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of
Mexico and eventually made his way to the Yosemite Valley.
In California, he worked as a
naturalist and a writer, and became famous in both the
political and scientific communities for his passionate
essays on nature. He was an absorbing and fascinating
talker, a self-described "poetico-trampo-geologist- botanist
and ornith-natural etc." In 1892, he founded the Sierra
Club, and gave over the labors of his life to the protection
of wilderness.
Muir had traveled to Alaska on
extended expeditions in 1879-1880 and in 1890. He was a
recognized authority on glaciers there; in Glacier Bay, one
of the largest glaciers was already named for him. It was
this expertise in glaciology, along with his broad
background in nature study, that prompted Harriman to invite
him to join the expedition.
As well as being a knowledgeable
naturalist, Muir was a legendary story-teller. He proved
congenial company, although he was known to tease Burroughs
a little too often. He collected botanical samples with the
others, but would not shoot animals. All the specimen
collecting, in fact distressed him. "Alaska's dwindling
resources and wildlife could not afford many more such
attacks in the name of science," he wrote.
After the Harriman Expedition,
Muir devoted his life to saving the Hetch Hetchy Valley in
Yosemite National Park from being flooded to provide for San
Francisco's water supply. Although he failed to save the
valley, he did convince Theodore Roosevelt to expand the
forest reserves and national parks. He continued to write;
in fact, he dictated his memoir, The Story of My Boyhood
and Youth, in 1907 at the Harriman summer retreat in
Oregon. He died on Christmas Eve, 1914.
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