My First Summer in the Sierra

Summary

My First Summer in the Sierra is the journal John Muir kept from June to September 1869, a year after he reached California, when he signed on to help move a flock of about two thousand sheep from the San Joaquin plains into the high country around Yosemite. The sheep-owner, Mr. Delaney, agrees that Muir need do little herding; his real work is to study plants, rocks, animals and weather, with a hunter's St. Bernard named Carlo as his companion and Billy, a sullen shepherd, in charge of the flock. The entries begin on June 3 as the party climbs through the dusty foothills, and soon settle into a long camp on the North Fork of the Merced. There Muir sketches, botanizes, watches ants, lizards and Douglas squirrels, and describes the thunderclouds that build over the peaks almost every afternoon. When Delaney is late with supplies, the camp lives through a bread famine on mutton and tea, and Muir confesses how weak and sick a lover of wildness becomes without flour. In July the flock moves higher, to Tamarack Flat and the north rim of Yosemite Valley. Muir sketches from North Dome, edges out to the lip of Yosemite Falls on a ledge three inches wide, watches a brown bear in a flower meadow, and feels a sudden certainty that his old Wisconsin professor, J. D. Butler, has entered the valley below; the next day he finds him there. In August Delaney sends him over the range through Bloody Cañon to Mono Lake and its volcanic desert, and the flock grazes the Tuolumne Meadows beneath Mount Dana and Cathedral Peak. In September he climbs Cathedral Peak and the peaks at the head of the Tuolumne and Merced, then follows the sheep down to the lowlands. Throughout, Muir reads polished granite, moraines and meadow basins as the work of vanished glaciers, a theory he would soon defend in print, and he condemns the overgrazing sheep as hoofed locusts. Above all the book records a spiritual awakening: the mountains enter into him, every created thing seems hitched to everything else, and the range appears filled with God's beauty. Revised from his notebooks four decades later, the journal was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1911 and dedicated to the Sierra Club.

Top Lessons

• Everything is connected

  Muir writes that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else. Ants, lilies, clouds, glaciers and sheep all belong to one ordered whole, and he sees in that order the hand of God.

• Gratitude for daily bread

  During the bread famine Muir, who claims to need little, finds he is weak and sick without flour. The episode is funny and honest, and it reminds readers that even the freest wanderer depends on farmers, millers and the gifts of ordinary food.

• Seeing with attention

  Muir sketches, measures cloud cover and records flowers day by day. He contrasts his own wonder with the shepherd who looks at the grandest scenery and sees nothing, and shows that attention is a habit that can be practiced.

• Stewardship and its limits

  Muir calls the sheep hoofed locusts because they strip the meadows. His complaint anticipates his later work for national parks, and it raises the question of how people should use land that God has given.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book offers a vivid lay account of diet and well-being in camp. In the bread famine of Chapter III Muir describes nausea, headache, weakness and difficulty concentrating on a diet of mutton, sugar and tea, and wishes they knew how to cook wild plants as the Indians did. Against this, he repeatedly describes mountain air, exercise and beauty as making the body feel transparent, tireless and whole, an early statement of the idea that wilderness restores body and mind. The final count of the flock records sheep poisoned by azalea, kalmia and alkali. These are personal impressions, not clinical observations.

• Chapter III

  The bread famine: nausea, headache and languor on a mutton-only diet, and chewing ceanothus and monardella leaves for relief.

• Chapter I (June 6)

  Muir writes that his flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent and that he can hardly conceive of bodily needs in the mountains.

• Chapter XI (September 22)

  The flock's losses for the summer, including sheep poisoned by azalea, kalmia and alkali.