John Muir (1838-1914) was born at Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland, and emigrated with his father and two of his siblings to Wisconsin in 1849, where the family farmed first at Fountain Lake and later at Hickory Hill. After study at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the early 1860s and a walk of a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867, he settled in California, where his explorations and writings on Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada made him the best-known American naturalist of his day. He helped found the Sierra Club in 1892 and served as its first president, and his books include The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901) and My First Summer in the Sierra (1911).
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“When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures.”
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is John Muir's account of his first twenty-five years, from a Scottish seaside town to the edge of what he calls the University of the Wilderness. In the first chapter he remembers Dunbar on the stormy North Sea coast: rambles with his grandfather David Gilrye, who taught him his letters from shop signs, scrambles over the ruins of Dunbar Castle, fights and dares with schoolmates, the servant girls' terrifying tales of the Dandy Doctors who were said to steal children for the Edinburgh dissecting rooms, and a school where Mr. Lyon and his father together drilled grammar and Bible verses into him by memory and the rod.
