The Naturalists

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[Karl Swenson, Voice of John Muir] I will follow my instinct, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot. As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds, and wind sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of floods, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can. [Bob Gladstone, Narrator] John Muir spent more than 10 years living in the wilderness of Yosemite in central California; which became for him a microcosm of all nature. Yosemite was the focus of his scientific discoveries, his conservation efforts, and his personal beliefs about man's kinship to nature, and the value of wildness to man. [Muir] Of all the upness

accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains. All the world's prizes seem nothing. [Narrator] John Muir climbed the mountains of California in work shoes and an old suit. He seldom took a heavier coat, even during the winter. He carried a large flour sack with tea tied in one corner, and sugar on the other and dried pieces of bread in the center. And with these supplies, he walked into the mountains with a long Indian stride, his hair hanging

to his shoulders, and his long untrimmed beard framed a face dominated by intense blue eyes. He was almost six feet tall, very hard, very lean. [Muir] You'll find me rough as rocks and about the same color as granite. [Narrator] Those who saw him were reminded of a biblical prophet returning from the wilderness. [Muir] Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you, the winds will blow their own freshness into you, the storms their energy. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest [birds chirping] wilderness. The life of a mountaineer seems to be particularly favorable to the development of sole life as well as limb life; each receiving abundance of exercise and abundance of food. [Narrator] John Muir was born in Dunbar Scotland in 1838, one of eight

children. His father Daniel Muir was a harsh religious fanatic who worshiped the God of Wrath. John's mother was a tranquil, independent woman who encouraged her children in their delight in nature. [Muir] Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and nature saw to it that besides school lessons and church lessons, some of our own lessons should be learned. Though father certainly forbade it, we stole away to the seashore or the green sunny hills. These were my first excursions, the beginnings of life long wonderings. [Narrator] When John was 11, his father moved the family to America. They settled at Fountain Lake in central Wisconsin. Fountain Lake Farm was in a region of shallow lakes and boggy meadows surrounded by woods. The area was rich in flowers and birds. [Muir] Nature is streaming into us wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons. Every wild

lesson, a love lesson. Not whipped, but charmed into it. Oh that glorious Wisconsin wilderness. [Narrator] But John's father was a forbidding man, a stern taskmaster. He tried to quench every spark of pride and self-confidence in his children. [Muir] We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry. We were cold in the morning at four o'clock, and seldom got to bed before nine making a broiling seizing day 17 hours long, loaded with heavy work. Even when sick, we were held to our tasks as long as we could stand. Only once was I allowed to leave the harvest field when I was stricken down with pneumonia. No physician was called, for father always believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors [wind blowing]. [Narrator] After eight grueling years on Fountain Lake Farm Daniel Muir bought land

six miles from their home, and moved his family to Hickory Hill Farm where they began from scratch once again. [Muir] When I told father I was about to leave home and inquired whether if I should happen to be in need of money he would send me a little. He said [Muir, Daniel] No, depend entirely on yourself. [Muir] So when I left home to try the world I had only 15 dollars in my pocket [music plays]. [Narrator] In Madison, he applied for admission to the University of Wisconsin. [Muir] That glorious university [music continues] Next it seemed to me, to the kingdom of heaven. [Narrator] He had less than fifty cents a week for living expenses and food. He ate mainly graham crackers until his health gave out. His father hearing of his hon's starvation diet, relented and sent him $50. When Muir left the university two and a half years later, his family and friends were urging

him to marry, to settle down. But the desire to wander was pulling him away from a conventional life. [Muir] Civilization has not much to brag about. It drives its victims in flocks for oppressing the growth of individuality. I never tried to abandon creeds or codes of civilizations, they went away of their own accord. I was only leaving one university for another. The Wisconsin University for the university of the wilderness. I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion. Independent alike of roads and people. Without thought of a diploma or making a name. [Narrator] When he needed money, Muir worked in an Indianapolis factory that manufactured carriage parts, inventing machines, and labor saving devices. His work was interrupted when he lost his sight in a factory accident. [Muir] My days were terrible beyond what I can tell. And my nights,

were if possible more terrible. Frightful dreams exhausted and terrified me. The sunshine and winds are working in all the gardens of God. But I... I am lost. [Narrator] He lay in his room in darkness for a month. When he learned that his sight would be restored, he described himself as risen from the grave. [Muir] This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields. God has to nearly kill us sometimes to teach us lessons. I batted you to all my mechanical inventions determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God. As soon as I got out into heaven's light I started on another long excursion. I might have become a millionaire. But I chose to become a tramp.

[Narrator] He was 29 years old when he began his thousand mile walk from Indianapolis to Florida. He moved southward by the least traveled routes, sketching and noting in a journal impressions, which would later form the core of his personal philosophy. [Muir] On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Instead of the friendly sympathy, the union of life and death so apparent in nature; we are taught that death is an accident, a deplorable punishment, the arch enemy of life. The world we are told, was made especially for man. A presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything living or dead in all God's universe which they cannot eat or render in some way, that they call

useful to themselves. In nothing does man with his grand notions of heaven and charity show forth his innate low bred animalism more clearly than in his treatment of his brother creatures. Natures object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them. Not the creation of all for the happiness of one. [Narrator] Muir had planned to continue from Florida to South America, but he went instead to the cooler climate of California. He arrived in San Francisco in April 1868, and set off across the San Joaquin Valley following the Mercedes River toward Yosemite Valley [sound of river flowing]. [Muir] God's glory is in all his works, written upon every field and the sky, but here, it's in larger letters. Magnificent capitals.

[Narrator] Working alone as a shepherd, Muir spent five months of the greatest contentment in the Sierra pastures. [Muir] Just think of the blessedness of my lot. With nearly all of every day to myself to climb, sketch, write, meditate and botanize. I am with nature in the grandest of all her earthly dwelling places. [Narrator] He was not an analyst of nature, but it's worshipper. His God was in everything he saw around him, so that God and nature fused into one. Beauty became synonymous with God. And for Muir the greatest beauty was the never ending change and flux in nature. [Muir] How lavish is nature. Building, pulling down, creating destroying, inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet, when we look into any of our

operations, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty. [Narrator] In the mountains, in nature, Muir found the answer to the pressures and fears suffered by all men who are bound by civilization. [Muir] Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste into the trees and stars. After a whole day in the woods, we are already immortal. [Narrator] Muir understood the natural destruction that was part of nature's rhythm. But he could not accept the unnatural rampant destruction caused by man's greed. He called the sheep in his care hoofed locusts.

He condemned the cattlemen, lumbermen, and miners, as well as the sheep men who used the land for material profit and left it barren. This empty mindless devastation by commercial interests, now clearly became the enemy in Muir's lifelong struggle to protect the forests and mountains of Yosemite. In a cabin he built himself, he spent the nights reading and the days [birds chirping] working and guiding people through Yosemite. Many well-known scientists, writers, artists, and scholars came to the valley expressing a wish to be shown Yosemite only by Muir. To all who came to Yosemite, Muir explained his glacial theory of the formation of the valley. He believed that glaciers had gouged what had once been a narrow canyon into Yosemite Valley, and then had gradually receded as the Ice Age ended. [Muir] One learns that the world though made, is yet being made, that this is

still the morning of creation. That mountains long conceived are now being born. Channels traced for coming rivers. Basins hollowed for lakes to be followed by still others in endless rhythm and beauty. For the last two or three months I have worked incessantly among the most remote and undiscoverable of the deep canyons. Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks lying up on them as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths, which are grave and so lavishly upon them. I know how Yosemite and all the other valleys of these magnificent mountains were made, and the next year or two of my life will be occupied chiefly in writing their history in a human book. [Narrator] He began to gather his findings and put them into publishable form. Aside from his private journals, Muir had never before done any writing. His article "The Death of a Glacier" was published in The New York Tribune in

1871. Encouraged by the success of this article, Muir hoped to support himself by writing and still have time of his own for wandering in the mountains. [Muir] All full. In stern immovable majesty. How softly these rocks are adorned. Their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky. Thousands of joyous streams are born in the snowy range. But not a poet among them can sing like the Merced, a perfect serif among it's fellows. No mountains or mountain range, however divinely clothed with light, has a more enduring charm than those fleeting mountains of the sky. [Narrator] His writing kept him a long time from the mountains. As he struggled to complete a series of articles, the wilderness seemed far away. [Muir] My life these days is like the life of a glacier. One

eternal grind. Soon I'll throw down my pen and take up my heels and go mountaineering once more. If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, my first ramble on spirit wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. And I should go to the very center of our globe, and read the whole splendid page from the beginning. But my first journeys would be into the inner substance of flowers, and among the folds and mazes of Yosemite's Fall. [Narrator] When Muir returned to Yosemite, the great trees captured his imagination. [Muir] It has been said, that trees are imperfect men and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. Well, they never seemed so to me [pipe organ music plays]

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it [pipe-organ music plays]. The giant Redwood, the noblest of the noble race, greatest of living things, their domes belong to the sky, while the great firs and pines about them looked liked mere latter day saplings [pipe organ music continues]. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind. Going and coming like ourselves. Our own journeys are way in back, are only little more than tree wavings, many of them not so much. Trees receive a most beautiful burial.

Nature takes fallen trees gently to her bosom, at rest from storms. I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. I care to live only to entice people to look at nature's loveliness. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread. The weary in soul and limb dying for what these grand old woods can give. Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests and so must we, if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end leaving America barren. Wildness is a necessity. Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. No other tree in the world has looked down on so many centuries as the Sequoia.

Barring accidents they seem to be immortal; being exempt from all the diseases that afflict and kill other trees. Our forest king might live on gloriously in nature's keeping and unless protective measures be speedily invented and applied, in a few decades all that will be left of the great Sequoia will be a few hacked and scarred monuments [sound of a saw in a lumberyard]. When the steel axe of the white man rang out on the startled air, their doom was sealed. Any fool can destroy trees. They can't run away. Through all the wonderful eventful centuries since Christ's time, and long before that, God has cared for these trees, but he can't save them from fools. Only Uncle Sam can do that.

[Narrator] Convinced that only government action could preserve the wilderness, he once again left his beloved mountains to write for an idea he believed in. He thought that the most effective way to convince the United States government that they must act for the preservation of forests, was to convince the people of the urgent need of such action, and urge them to pressure their legislators. [Muir] So far our government is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificent estate in perfect order and then has left his fields, and meadows, forests, and parks to be sold and plundered and wasted at will. [Narrator] He lectured and wrote articles for magazines, popularizing the cause of national parks and reservations of land. He wanted man to recognize himself as a part of the harmonious whole of nature, and to realize that to destroy the wilderness was to destroy part of himself. [Muir] They'll see what I mean in time. There must be places for human beings to

satisfy their souls. The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It's part of the universal warfare between right and wrong. [Muir] To many this gaunt solitary figure seemed uninterested in companionship, love, a family. But Muir always understood this duality in his nature, his need for love as well as solitude, and the wilderness. [Muir] To ask me whether I could endure to live without friends is absurd. It's easy enough to live out of material sight of friends, but to live without human love is impossible. [Narrator] Six years after he met Louie Strentzel at a friends home, they married. His love of wilderness was countered by her love of a cultured civilized life. But they understood each other and were devoted. They lived in Martinez, California north of San Francisco, and Muir took over the management of the Strentzel farm from

his wife's aging father. Muir was a shrewd businessman and successful rancher. But the years of farm work drained him. [Muir] Time partially reconciles us of everything. I gradually became content doggedly content as wild animals in cages. My weariness of this humdrum workaday life is so heavy, it's like to crush me. [Narrator] His wife encouraged him to give up control of the ranch and return to the wilderness. His health and the inspiration for his writing had vanished with a long absence from the mountains. When he returned to Yosemite Valley, he found it the victim of widespread devastation. To save the area from further destruction, he proposed a plan to place it under federal protection. The lumberman, miners, sheepmen, and cattlemen were fiercely opposed to any action that would limit their use of the land. They sent

lobbyists to Washington to demand that California keep custody of Yosemite. Calling Muir and his supporters a few zealots, sentimentalists, and impractical dreamers. And declaring that anyone in favor of placing Yosemite under federal guardianship, must be a traitor. [Muir] Fluffy, frothy, empty, bellowing speeches were made against the measure. Just playing at politics saps the very foundations of righteousness. [Narrator] President Harrison finally supported the bill and Yosemite National Park was created in 1890. But because of the opposition of California commercial interests, Yosemite Valley was not included in the park boundaries, and the sheep men defied the law protecting Yosemite National Park by continuing to pasture over half a million sheep in the area. When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, he made conservation one

of the focal points of his administration. He wanted to visit the West and see for himself what needed to be done. He particularly wished to see Yosemite with Muir. [Roosevelt, Theodore] I do not want anyone with me but you. And I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you. [Narrator] Muir took Roosevelt into Yosemite on horseback where they camped without tents. They cooked over a campfire and slept on a bed of ferns. [Muir] I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves and the destructive work of lumbermen and other spoilers in the forest. [Narrator] One morning they awoke to find themselves covered with four inches of snow. [Roosevelt] Now this is [bully?] I wouldn't miss this for anything! [Muir] Inches of snow on my blankets. Sifted into my hair, glorious storm. [Narrator] Roosevelt was deeply impressed with Muir's concern over the destruction of the forests,

and was convinced of the need for vigorous action. As a result of the Yosemite camping trip, the President created five national parks and 16 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon. The land set aside totaled more than 148 million acres. Muir was still struggling to have Yosemite Valley placed under federal protection. Opponents of recession considered him their most powerful enemy. He had been elected president of the recently formed Sierra Club, whose purpose was to protect wilderness areas. He appeared nine times before California congressional committees to argue for the recession of the valley. After a lengthy battle, the bill passed by only one vote and it was another year before the receipted land-grant was accepted by the United States Congress. Finally, in 1906, after a political struggle of 17 years, the Yosemite Valley became part of the Yosemite National Park.

[Muir] I am now an experienced lobbyist. My political education is complete. And now that the fight is finished, I'm almost finished myself. [Wind howling in background] I've made a tramp of myself I'm 74 and still good at it. I've gone hungry and cold, I've left bloody trails on sharp ice peaks to see the wonders of the world. All these years have been to me one unbroken day in one grand garden. It's always sunrise somewhere that you was never all dried at once. A shower is forever falling, vapor is ever rising, eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and loaming on sea and continents and islands. Each in it's turn as the round Earth rolls [music plays]

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out til sun down. For going out I found, was really going in [music continues as credits roll]. [Announcer 1] Made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. [Announcer] This is PBS.