The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

Summary

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. By eleven, he says, he could recite the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation. In 1849 his father, Daniel Muir, announces that the family is going to America, and John, his brother David and sister Sarah sail with him, the rest of the family following once a frame house is built. The second chapter describes the journey to Wisconsin and the boys' first spring at Fountain Lake, a plunge into wildness among bluebirds, bobolinks, frogs, flowers and the oak openings. Chapters on the farm, the birds and young hunters describe settlers, Native American neighbors passing through, passenger pigeons in vast flocks, prairie fires, and the animals of the farm, including the pony Jack and the mare Nob, whose death after overwork the boy grieves. The Ploughboy chapter turns to the hard labor of clearing and ploughing, of mowing and cradling grain from dawn to dark, of working through mumps and pneumonia with no physician called, and of digging a ninety-foot well through sandstone at the new Hickory Hill farm, where John is nearly killed by choke-damp. Hungry for knowledge, he teaches himself arithmetic, algebra and geometry, reads borrowed books in snatched minutes, and wins his father's grudging leave to rise early; he begins getting up at one in the morning to read and to invent in the cellar, building a self-setting sawmill, thermometers, a hygrometer, and clocks, one of which tips him out of bed. In 1860 he carries two clocks and a thermometer to the State Fair in Madison, where they draw crowds and a prize. After a stint in a machine shop at Prairie du Chien he enters the University of Wisconsin, works his way by teaching school, rigs his dormitory room with ingenious apparatus, and receives his first lesson in botany from a fellow student, Mr. Griswold, beneath a locust tree. The book ends as he looks back from a hill above Lake Mendota and leaves the university for the wilderness. Muir first dictated the material in 1908 at E. H. Harriman's lodge at Pelican Bay, Oregon; an abridged version ran in The Atlantic Monthly in 1912-13, and Houghton Mifflin published the book, with his own sketches, in March 1913.

Top Lessons

• Wonder as a teacher

  Muir says the first Wisconsin spring taught him more than the grammars beaten into him in Dunbar, because its lessons were charmed rather than whipped into him. The book treats attention to birds, frogs, flowers and storms as a real education, one that lasts a lifetime.

• Using stolen hours well

  Forbidden to read late at night, Muir asks his father whether he may rise early, and is told he may get up as early as he likes. He wakes at one in the morning and spends the five hours on mathematics and inventions. The episode shows how a hungry mind turns a narrow permission into an opportunity.

• Honoring a hard father

  Muir writes frankly of his father's severity: the thrashings, the long harvest days, the illnesses worked through, the well dug by hand. He also records his father's faith, his rescue at the well, and his permission to study and to leave for the fair. The book shows a son telling the truth about a parent while still giving him his due.

• Seeing order in creation

  Under the locust tree Mr. Griswold shows Muir that a tree and a pea vine share a family likeness, and argues that the Creator gave plants unity with variety. For Muir the moment opens botany as a lifelong study of harmony in nature.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book is a useful lay record of frontier health. Muir says he worked the harvest with mumps, able to swallow only milk, and that when pneumonia struck him no physician was called, because his father held that God and hard work were the best doctors; the only medical help sent for, when the mare Nob fell ill with inflamed lungs after overwork, was a Methodist minister who also served as horse-doctor. Chapter VI describes near-asphyxiation by choke-damp, which Muir identifies as carbonic acid gas pooled at the bottom of the well, and the practical remedies a neighboring miner taught: throwing water down the shaft and lowering bundles of brush to stir the air. Chapter I preserves the Scottish children's terror of the Dandy Doctors, a folk memory of the body-snatching for Edinburgh's anatomy schools in the 1820s; Muir's version of the original story is garbled at second hand. His habit of sleeping from bedtime until one in the morning through a whole winter, which he says left him unwearied, is a striking record of self-imposed short sleep, offered as personal testimony rather than as advice.

• Chapter I

  Servant girls' tales of the Dandy Doctors who prowl with sticking-plaster and carry children off to be dissected in Edinburgh.

• Chapter III

  The mare Nob, overdriven to Portage on a hot day, sickens with inflamed lungs and is treated without success by a minister who doubles as horse-doctor.

• Chapter VI

  Harvest work through mumps, pneumonia with no physician called, and the overwork common among the Scottish, English and Irish settlers.

• Chapter VI

  The near-fatal choke-damp at the bottom of the Hickory Hill well and William Duncan's methods for clearing the gas.

• Chapter VII

  Rising at one in the morning all winter to study and invent, and the early-rising machine that tips him out of bed.