John Muir’s reputation is integral to the contemporary mythology about Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, and an account of his life, as well as the literature it inspired, is essential. Muir arrived in San Francisco in 1868 in retreat from a planned walking tour into Mexico that had affected his health. He very quickly departed the city and headed to Yosemite for a brief recuperative visit. Muir’s written reflections on his first experiences in the valley were edited a century later by Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling and published as John Muir: To Yosemite and Beyond. More recently, Muir’s experiences have inspired Peter Thomas and Donna Thomas to hike the same route Muir took, and the result is their Muir Ramble Route. The book includes abundant quotes from Muir’s memoirs, but its truly original contribution is the authors’ leg-by-leg account of their preparations for the 300-mile adventure. Thomas Vale and Geraldine Vale’s Walking with Muir across Yosemite also uses some of Muir’s own words to evoke his first experience of seeing the valley. The authors use these reminiscences to introduce policy proposals and actions intended to return present-day Yosemite to the more pristine conditions that Muir experienced in 1869. Muir’s first visit was enough to convince him to return to the Sierra and Yosemite, where he first worked as a shepherd and then an employee of Hutchings. This stay lasted until 1875. Because of his important role as a spokesperson for nature, Muir has been the subject of more biographies than any other environmentalist. The first biographical account was The Life and Letters of John Muir, edited by William Frederick Badè. Badè was on the faculty at the Pacific School of Religion and played an important role in the battle about damming the Hetch Hetchy. In The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy, Stephen Fox relates Muir to the growth of environmentalism in the US, and in The Young John Muir Steven Holmes relates his growth as a conservationist. The most comprehensive biography is Donald Worster’s excellent A Passion for Nature. Kim Heacox takes a very different approach to Muir’s contributions in John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire, in which Heacox describes Muir’s early studies in Yosemite, followed by a series of trips to Alaska, where he formulated how glaciers work in landscaping the natural environment. Heacox also explores Muir’s relationships with his family, and he delves into the Hetch Hetchy controversy—revealing details about Muir’s health and his relationship with his daughters, who eventually left the farm in Martinez. Another interesting approach to Muir’s life is adopted by Gretel Ehrlich in John Muir: Nature’s Visionary. Ehrlich’s text is interspersed with a number of photos of Muir and his family. Rod Miller’s John Muir: Magnificent Tramp is an appreciation of Muir’s trajectory from an immigrant farming family to a life of environmental activism. Dennis Williams explores Muir’s ideas of nature in two books, God’s Wilds and his earlier John Muir: Apostle of Nature. Another biography is Linnie Wolfe’s Son of the Wilderness. Sally Miller, one of the professionals responsible for preserving all of Muir’s work on microfilm at the University of the Pacific, provides John Muir: Life and Work. In The Wilderness World of John Muir, American naturalist Edwin Way Teale made his own attempt to define Muir by commenting on a selection from Muir’s autobiographical writings. Teale gives Muir top billing as author. Michael Cohen, in addition to writing about the history of the Sierra Club 3, also produced a Muir biography, The Pathless Way. Also contributing to the Muir legend are Ginger Wadsworth’s, John Muir: Wilderness Protector and Tony Perrottet’s John Muir’s Yosemite.
Many famous folks came to visit Muir in Yosemite, Theodore Roosevelt among them.4 Other visitors of note included Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859, Greeley mentions his visits to the Rancho Mariposa (owned by Frémont) and to Yosemite Valley. Emerson, too, spent a short time with Muir in Yosemite, a visit described by Brian Wilson in The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Another celebrated visitor was naturalist George Bird Grinnell. Although Grinnell is more closely associated with Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks and the saving of the bison, John Taliaferro’s Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West describes how he supported Muir and others in their attempt to prevent the Hetch Hetchy Valley from being exploited by the city of San Francisco. Grinnell became the first president of the National Parks Protection Association (NPPA), which today is known as the National Parks and Conservation Association. Under Grinnell’s leadership, the NPPA pushed for national park status for Yosemite. Another notable early visitor to Yosemite was Berkeley faculty member and geologist Joseph LeConte. When Muir was pursuing his studies of glacial behavior and impact, he consulted LeConte about a sample of glacial ice. LeConte, too, published a rousing account of a trip to the Yosemite area, A Journal of Ramblings through the High Sierra of California. LeConte published the three-volume Autobiography of Joseph LeConte in 1903. A more recent biography is Lester Stephens’s Joseph LeConte: Gentle Prophet of Evolution. LeConte had been a student of Louis Agassiz at Harvard and a professor in South Carolina before the Civil War; he ended his academic career at Berkeley. He became a confidant of Muir and, along with Muir, one of the founders of the Sierra Club.
Much of what is written about John Muir focuses on his work as a preservationist. To him, Yosemite Valley could be considered a magnificent cathedral. This conception comes into play particularly in Muir’s efforts to save the nearby Hetch Hetchy Valley when San Francisco wanted to build a dam across the Tuolumne River to provide water for its citizens. Muir’s response was: “Should we flood the Sistine Chapel, just so we could see the ceiling better?” For his part, Gifford Pinchot—often touted as the father of conservation—looked to achieve “the greatest good for the greatest number,” and he supported San Francisco’s proposal. Char Miller examines Pinchot’s response to conservation issues in Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot. Because of his support for San Francisco’s proposal to convert the Hetch Hetchy Valley into a reservoir, some have placed Pinchot and Muir in different camps. Two books on Pinchot can shed further light: Harold Pinkett’s biography, Gifford Pinchot: Private and Public Forester, and Char Miller’s Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism. The latter is more complete. The seeming dichotomy between Muir and Pinchot is dispelled in John Clayton’s Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands. Although this book focuses more on Yellowstone than on Yosemite, it describes the evolution of a public land policy that merges Muir’s idea of the spiritual value of nature with Pinchot’s idea of using nature’s properties for human needs. Many authors have suggested Muir and Pinchot had an adversarial relationship, but Clayton shows that although they had different philosophies concerning nature, their correspondence and their actions toward each other show mutual respect. Still, the Hetch Hetchy controversy revealed the differences between the two men.
Muir is known as a prolific writer, but writing may not have come naturally to him. After his arrival in California, Muir reestablished a friendship with Ezra Carr and Jeanne Carr, who had been his mentors at University of Wisconsin. Jeanne Carr encouraged Muir to channel his thoughts into written form. Their relationship is examined in Kindred & Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr, edited by Bonnie Gisel. Encouraged by the Carrs, Jeanne Carr in particular, Muir wrote many articles for local, regional, and national publications. In later years he reused elements of those writings in his many books, most of which had something to say about the High Sierra and Yosemite.
Following his youthful thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867 5, Muir came down with malaria and realized that his intent to explore the Amazon must be abandoned. He decided to proceed to the West Coast by crossing the Isthmus of Panama. On arrival in San Francisco, his next decision was to get out of the city and head for the High Sierra. His experiences of that summer resulted in the memoir My First Summer in the Sierra, which has been republished and reformatted many times over. Muir’s account of his first view of the Sierras as he crossed Pacheco Pass and saw the mountains across the San Joaquin Valley, which was at that season carpeted in California poppies, is unforgettable. The same outlook is still present today, though the poppies are gone and the view is offset by many farms and the Grand Canal, which carries water from northern California to Los Angeles. This book describes Muir’s first two-week visit and subsequent summers spent as a shepherd, lumber mill operator, guide, and all-around worker.
At the time of Muir’s first visit, the only portion of Yosemite that was protected was the valley floor and the nearby Mariposa redwood grove. Because sheep herding and tourism were already established in areas in and around the valley, Muir (prodded by Robert Underwood Johnson, publisher of Century Magazine) wrote a proposal to expand the protection of the surrounding area. This expansion eventually (in 1892) resulted in creation of a “donut hole” park (the valley still under state protection, but surrounding areas administered as a national park). Muir published The Yosemite as a way of bringing the natural history and scenic values of the area to a larger audience, particularly politicians in Washington, DC. There are many editions of this volume, but the one with a foreword written by David Brower in the “Sierra Club Book” series is of particular interest, in part because Brower himself became such an activist as a Sierra Club member that he was eventually asked to resign from leadership, as detailed in Tom Turner’s David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement.
Readers can get a good feel for what Yosemite was like in the early twentieth century from the writings of Laura White Brunner. In 1915, she and her mother were summer employees of the Curry Corporation, a concessionaire operating in the park. Their experiences in the valley, told in Cliffs and Challenges: A Young Woman Explores Yosemite, 1915–1917, provide a unique view of Yosemite before the modern transformation became entrenched following World War II. Brunner and her coworkers explored and hiked most of the trails in the valley and those leading out of the valley into the High Sierra. She is acknowledged as the second woman to have climbed Half Dome, using clothesline ropes put in place on the steeper sections by earlier Curry employees. In her book Brunner describes what hiking was like for women; for example, she felt restricted by having to wear long dresses, which she had to pin up in order to see her own feet when climbing. Brunner mentions worrying about bears causing problems in Camp Curry. In the 1940s, one could still see bears at the designated feeding location, but park officials later realized the idiocy of this, and the last feeding time occurred in 1943. The popular “fire fall” was also finally discontinued, but not until 1968.
Nevada Barr writes mystery novels, and for the most part these are set in national parks or monuments. Her main character is a park ranger who gets involved with and solves crimes. In Barr’s novel High Country, published in 2004, the park ranger heroine goes to Yosemite as an undercover agent and gets mixed up with crimes having to do with illicit activities in the park. This book reflects the fact that national parks today face the same issues that are troublesome in an urban environment, drugs in particular. Readers may be interested in comparing the Yosemite fiction of Nevada Barr to the fiction of nineteenth-century author Thérèse Yelverton. Following the dissolution of her marriage, Yelverton roamed the globe and in 1870 ended up boarding in the Yosemite hotel owned by James Mason Hutchings. Yelverton began to support herself by writing, and she published her novel Zanita in 1872. The central character in the story is an inhabitant of the Yosemite Valley.
Whether in fact or fiction, Yosemite as a national park cannot escape some of the troublesome aspects of urban society. Michael Ghiglieri and Charles Farabee describe the darker side of modern Yosemite in Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite. Kim Stanley Robinson, too, although known more for his science fiction novels, has recently published The High Sierra: A Love Story, in which the narrator details the many backpacking trips he has taken in the Sierra range with a friend. Most scenes are set south of the park, but some occur within the park and even on the John Muir Trail.
3. The History of the Sierra Club: 1892–1970, published by the Sierra Club in 1988.
4. Barb Rosenstock offers a wonderful experience for young readers in The Camping Trip That Changed America: Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir and Our National Parks (Dial, 2012), a delightful account of Roosevelt’s visit.
5. Recounted in Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, ed. by William Frederic Badè, first published in 1916.
The Life and Letters of John Muir, Vol. 2 (Classic Reprint) by 
Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism by 
