In search of spiritual freedom, Muir’s father takes his family—his wife, five daughters and three sons—to Wisconsin in 1846. Muir is 11 years old. On the family farm, young Muir has a run in with an Indian, almost loses his life digging a ninety-foot deep well, and begins to invent machines, much to the consternation of his father.

A final episode of paternal abuse has Muir abandoning the homestead with an armful of his inventions in search of his own life. The year is 1862. Muir is 24 years old.

Muir is accepted into the University of Wisconsin. His room is soon filled with his inventions, chemistry equipment and plant specimens. He shows several professors some of his inventions, including a bed that sets him on his feet in the morning. It is also at the University where Muir’s infatuation with botany begins.

Fort Randall, where many Northern soldiers are mustering for the Civil War, stands close by the campus. Muir realizes he must leave the United States or be drafted into a war that he feels is both immoral and irrelevent to him. He flees to the Canadian wilderness, where he remains until the war ends.

Muir returns to the United States and gets a job in a workshop in Indianapolis in March of 1867. One day, while at work, he has an accident and temporarily loses his eyesight. When he finally heals, he decides to abandon the world of inventions and machinery and to begin a 1000-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico.

During his walk, Muir witnesses the ravages of the Civil War, meets newly-freed black slaves, encounters a group of bandits, stumbles across a nest of deprived mountain folk, outwits an aggressive blacksmith, foils the lynching of a black man accused of theft, makes a fool of an autocratic postal clerk, is accosted by a hungry ex-slave, and observes that the War has taken its toll not only on the poor but on the wealthy as well.

In Florida, Muir almost dies from malaria. Enfeebled by his illness, he decides to head for California and the Yosemite.

Muir disembarks in San Francisco and sets out for Yosemite on foot. En route, he works briefly as a shepherd and witnesses how destructive sheep are on mountain meadows.

After arriving in Yosemite, Muir gets work repairing a sawmill, builds a cabin, and becomes acquainted with the wife, Elvira, and children of his employer, James Hutchings.

When Hutchings is in Washington, D.C. on personal business, Muir goes on a walk with Elvira and her two daughters. Elvira paints, plays the guitar, and writes poetry. In fact, she reads a poem to Muir she has written about him. She is obviously attracted to Muir.

Muir quickly becomes the go-to guide for the wealthy and famous tourists coming to Yosemite, much to the chagrin of Mr. Hutchings, who considers Yosemite his natural fiefdom. On one occasion, Muir is the guide for showman P.T. Barnum, the advocate for the mentally ill Dorothea Dix, and the notorious English beauty Maria Theresa Longworth, who flirts with Muir.

One day, Elvira is painting at her easel by a stream. She tells Muir that she no longer loves her husband and thinks she is in love with him. She wants to move to Oakland and live with her sister. She invites Muir to come with her. Muir answers that she is a strange and lovely woman but that he would be lost in a city.

Soon after this, Muir and Maria are sitting on a blanket in the forest. She tells Muir that even though she has had many lovers, she never found a man worthy of her love until she met Muir. Muir is terribly attracted to Maria. They kiss. Maria asks him to come with her to Hong Kong. Muir says he would quickly wither and die in a city.

Ralph Waldo Emerson visits Muir in Yosemite. Muir hopes Emerson will camp with him in the woods, but Emerson’s keepers are afraid he will take cold. Muir tells them: “There is not a single sneeze in all the Sierra.” Muir shows Emerson the magnificent redwoods.

One day when Muir is working in the sawmill, Hutchings comes in. He has been drinking, which is uncharacteristic of him, because Elvira has told him she is leaving him and the kids. He blames Muir for this. He also blames Muir for turning the visitors to Yosemite against him. Muir is deeply angered and tells Hutchings that he will be moving on from the valley.

Several mountaineering adventures follow:

In October of 1872, Muir is high up on a cliff face on Mt. Ritter. Suddenly he finds himself unable to move and in great danger of falling to his death. He recalls a similar situation as a child climbing on a castle wall. Almost miraculously he is able to begin climbing again.

Muir is on the summit of Mt. Whitney one year later and must spend the night dancing in place to keep from freezing.

Muir, in 1874, is walking along the Yuba River near Grass Valley when a huge storm blows up. To fully experience the storm, he climbs high into a tree and rides the swaying tree for hours.

That same year, Muir and five companions lead horses up Mt. Shasta. It is late autumn and he has been warned that they could be killed should a storm arise. When the horses can go no further because of the early autumn snow, Muir informs the members of his group that he is going to continue up the mountain on foot. Muir’s companions descend the mountain. A blinding snowstorm ensues. They cannot begin to look for him for four days and are almost certain he will be found dead if found at all. To their amazement, they finally find him burrowed in a snowdrift as snug as a bug in a rug.

In the summer of 1879, Muir travels to Alaska on the steamship Cassiar. Muir talks to a group of missionaries about the glaciers on a snowy mountain they are admiring from the deck of the ship: how they were formed, how old they are, and how they will eventually create meadows and lakes. This does not sit too well with these fundamentalists.

Another missionary, the Reverend Samual (sic) Young, is more open-minded. He strikes up a conversation with Muir. The next morning he asks if he can accompany Muir on a climb up the nearby Glenora Peak. Muir says it would be too dangerous and that he could not keep up with him. The Reverend insists. Muir relents.

The men climb Glenora, and as they approach the summit the tiring Reverend falls and ends up hanging off a cliff 1000 feet above a glacier. Muir rescues him by taking the Reverend, who has lost the use of both arms, in his teeth and climbing a ten foot cliff with him in tow. Muir resets one of the Reverend’s arms but is unable to reset the other. With much difficulty, he finally gets him back to the ship.

Muir has a bizarre dream about Elvira and his mother and father. Maria appears to Muir in the dream naked from the waist up. In the dream it is Muir who falls on Glenora Peak and plunges to his death on the glacier below.

It is the summer of 1880. Muir is again in Alaska. As he sets out from camp to explore a glacier, the camp dog, Stickeen, follows him tenaciously. Stickeen is a dog who never obeys an order, a true child of the wilderness. Muir tries to dissuade the dog from following him. Realizing he cannot, he kneels and gives the dog a piece of bread.

MUIR

Thus began the most memorable

of all my wild days.

As they walk across a field of crusty ice, Muir notices that Stickeen’s paws are bleeding. He tears up a handkerchief and fashions booties for the dog. Stickeen continues on undaunted. They come to crevasses they must leap, Muir with difficulty, the dog effortlessly. A storm comes upon them.

MUIR

You see no danger here, do you,

Stickeen? For you, this glacier is

your playground.

Trying to find their way back to the camp, they come to an enormous crevasse some fifty feet across. There is driving snow and wind. An exceedingly narrow, knife-edged ice bridge curves downward 30 feet into the crevasse, either end lying 10 feet below the glacier’s edge. Stickeen immediately recognizes it as impassable for him and begins to whine.

Muir cuts footholds and makes his way down onto the ice bridge.

MUIR

Hush, my boy. We’ll get across,

though it’s not going to be easy.

No way is easy in this world. At

worst we can only fall, and then

how grand a grave we will have in

this abysmal crevasse.

Muir scoots across the bridge inches at a time.

When he gets to the opposite side, he must cut footholds to get up the 10-foot cliff of ice.

Stickeen is now desperately yelping and running back and forth. He lies down and moans.

Finally, the dog slowly lets himself down into the first foothold Muir dug. He works his way

down the cliff of ice onto the ice bridge. Steadying himself against the wind, he slowly walks across the ice bridge. When he comes to the cliff of ice on the opposite end, he contemplates the footholds Muir has cut and then suddenly bounds up the cliff, flying over Muir’s head.

The dog realizes he has done something miraculous. He runs in loops and circles, turns somersaults in the air and rolls over and over in triumphant, uncontrollable joy.

Muir and the dog make it back to the camp. Thereafter, the dog will never let Muir out of his sight. The dog refuses to eat from the hand of anyone but Muir.

One night as Muir and his companions sit around a campfire, the dog comes to Muir and rests his head on his knee and looks at him devotedly.

MUIR

I know, Stickeen, I know. It was an

awful time we had on that glacier,

wasn’t it?

Muir is walking quickly through forest, then climbing over large boulders, and finally cutting foot holds into a glacier’s edge with his ice axe.

He climbs the glacier’s face and walks out onto its ice field. He begins hiking up the glacier.

Muir is now a dot on a landscape surrounded by gray mountains spiking into blue sky.

THE END

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“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” — from John of the Mountains (1938)

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” — from Our National Parks (1901)

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.” — from John of the Mountains (1938)

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.” — from Travels in Alaska (1915)

 When was the last time Hollywood put a real hero on the screen?

John Muir had a nobility of purpose, a keenness of mind and physical courage unequaled in American history. He fathered the modern conservation movement and explained how glaciation formed the Yosemite valley. He was an inventor of genius who once built, out of the parts of an old wagon, a huge thermometer that was so sensitive it registered your body heat as you approached it. He even saved a man from sliding off a 1000-foot cliff by lifting him up with his teeth.

 Americans yearn for a genuine hero. They need look no further than the young John Muir.