Journeys in the Wilderness E-Book

John Muir

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 1134

Beschreibung

The name of John Muir has come to stand for the protection of wild land and wilderness in both America and Britain. Born in Dunbar in the east of Scotland in 1838, Muir is famed as the father of American conservation, and as the first person to promote the idea of National Parks. Combining acute observation with a sense of inner discovery, Muir's writings of his travels through some of the greatest landscapes on Earth, including the Carolinas, Florida, Alaska and those lands which were to become the great National Parks of Yosemite and the Sierra Valley, raise an awareness of nature to a spiritual dimension. These journals provide a unique marriage of scientific survey of natural history with lyrical and often amusing anecdotes, retaining a freshness, intensity and brutal honesty which will amaze the modern reader. This collection, including the never-before-published "Stickeen", presents the finest of Muir's writings, and imparts a rounded portrait of a man whose generosity, passion, discipline and vision are an inspiration to this day.

Leseprobe

JOURNEYS IN THE WILDERNESS

JOURNEYS IN THE WILDERNESS

A John Muir Reader

Introduced by Graham White

DEDICATION

For William F. Kimes (1907–1986) and Maymie B. Kimes (1909–2002) authors of John Muir – A Reading Bibliography (1986) – who did so much to bring John Muir’s work to a wider audience in America and Scotland

and

Frank Tindall (1919–1998) – East Lothian’s first Planning Officer from 1950–1975, who restored John Muir’s Dunbar birthplace, established John Muir Country Park, organised the first UK exhibition on the life of John Muir and arranged the first publication of Muir’s autobiographical books in Scotland.

This eBook edition published in 2013 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Introductory material copyright © Graham White 2009

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-515-4

Print ISBN: 978-1-84158-697-7

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

CONTENTS

Introduction

THE STORY OF MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH (Complete)

1 A Boyhood in Scotland

2 A New World

3 Life on a Wisconsin Farm

4 A Paradise of Birds

5 Young Hunters

6 The Ploughboy

7 Knowledge and Inventions

8 The World and the University

MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRA (Complete)

1 Through the Foothills with a Flock of Sheep

2 In Camp on the North Fork of the Merced

3 A Bread Famine

4 To the High Mountains

5 The Yosemite

6 Mount Hoffman and Lake Tenaya

7 A Strange Experience

8 The Mono Trail

THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA (Selection)

1 The Sierra Nevada

2 The Glaciers

4 A Near View of the High Sierra

9 The Douglas Squirrel

10 A Wind-Storm in the Forests

13 The Water Ouzel

14 The Wild Sheep

OUR NATIONAL PARKS (Selection)

2 The Yellowstone National Park

3 The Yosemite National Park

9 The Sequoia and General Grant National Parks

THE YOSEMITE (Selection)

1 The Approach to the Valley

4 Snow Banners

7 The Big Trees

10 The South Dome

11 The Ancient Yosemite Glaciers: How the Valley Was Formed

16 Hetch Hetchy Valley

STICKEEN (Complete)

Stickeen

STEEP TRAILS (Selection)

2 A Geologist’s Winter Walk

4 A Perilous Night on Shasta’s Summit

20 An Ascent of Mount Rainier

24 The Grand Canyon of the Colorado

INTRODUCTION

This selection of John Muir’s writings provides a broad introduction to the epic story of his life and achievements as mountaineer, explorer, botanist, glaciologist, conservationist, campaigner and nature-philosopher. It is not intended as a comprehensive reference library but as a collection of seminal books and essays, which will strike a chord with any reader who is interested in mountaineering, wildlife, nature conservation and environmental issues. At a deeper level, these works reveal the ethical fountainhead from which so many streams of the modern conservation movement flow.

I am grateful to Birlinn Press for allowing me to ‘cherry-pick’ some of Muir’s finest story-telling and writing, in the hope of welcoming a new generation of readers into familiarity with John Muir as a great Scottish-American.

The current selection includes two of Muir’s best-loved books in their entirety: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913) and My First Summer in the Sierra (1911); many regard these as Muir’s most ‘complete’ works in terms of style, story-telling and artistic fulfillment. The additional five sections of this volume consist of selected chapters from: The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901), The Yosemite (1912), Stickeen (1909) and Steep Trails (1918).

The sequence in which these are presented does not follow the precise chronology of their publication but rather tracks the narrative arc of Muir’s life, from childhood in Scotland and emigration to the United States; pioneer farming in Wisconsin; arrival in California and his ‘discovery’ of the ‘Range of Light’. They also record Muir’s witness to: the destruction of wilderness areas; his campaigns for the creation of national parks and his eventual emergence as the herald of the American conservation movement.

This book succeeds the Canongate Classics volume John Muir – The Wilderness Journeys (1996) which enjoyed several editions before lapsing from print. It also reprises the earlier editions of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and My First Summer in the Sierra, first published as Canongate Classics in 1987.

WHO WAS JOHN MUIR?

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on 21 April 1838 and, at the age of eleven, he emigrated to the United States with his father, in February 1849. His early schooling at Dunbar Grammar gave him a grounding in English, Latin, Arithmetic and Geography; but from the time he left Scotland, he was entirely self-taught. Before he entered university at the age of twenty-two, he epitomised the pioneer-farmer, carving a home from the wilderness. His teenage years were spent in dawn to dusk labour: clearing the land, felling trees to make room for crops, with season after season of ploughing, planting, weeding and harvesting.

There were few signs during those teenage years that the Scottish farm-boy would go on to blaze the trail for an entirely new field of human endeavour – an ethical attitude to our stewardship of Nature which we now label ‘Conservation’. Indeed, the talents which emerged during Muir’s adolescence were largely mechanical; he seemed destined to become a great inventor and industrial entrepreneur, like his fellow Scot Andrew Carnegie. However, despite his obsession with the invention of water-clocks, barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, lathes and table-saws, Muir’s ruling passion was his communion with the natural world that surrounded him in Dunbar and Wisconsin.

His later role in the birth of the American conservation movement evolved from his explorations of the mountain wildernesses of California, Oregon, Washington and Nevada. He remains the undisputed ‘genius loci’ of much of California, and especially of Yosemite National Park, but his wider influence persists in the dozens of national parks and nature reserves that span the American continent: from the maple forests of Appalachia to the sun-bleached canyons of Arizona; from the glaciers of Alaska to the bayous of the Florida Everglades.

Millions of Americans harbour a deep sense of gratitude to John Muir as the founder of their national conservation movement; the first person to publicly campaign for the preservation and protection of wilderness and wildlife on a national scale. By the time of his death, on Christmas Eve 1914, he had been elevated to near-mythic status in the nation’s environmental Pantheon, where he remains ensconced, along with Emerson, Thoreau and Audubon, as ‘Father of the National Parks’.

Americans have named hundreds of sites in John Muir’s honour, including: Muir Glacier and Mount Muir in Alaska, Muir Woods and Muir Beach near San Francisco, and the John Muir Wilderness and John Muir Trail, which follow the spine of the High Sierra. Moreover, across the length and breadth of America, hundreds of nature reserves, elementary schools, colleges, university departments and even hospitals bear his name. In Scotland, the tally of Muir-honorifics is largely confined to the single county of East Lothian and his birthplace, Dunbar.

In 1964, Congress designated his Martinez home The John Muir National Historic Site, in acknowledgement of the campaigns he fought to preserve the natural heritage of the United States. The Muir mansion is just one of 340 national historic sites and parks, comprising 80 million acres of wild land, cared for by the National Park Service, which Muir himself helped to create. Back East, in Marquette County Wisconsin, the John Muir Memorial Park overlooks the original Muir homestead at Fountain Lake. A granite memorial among the wildflowers, proclaims his epitaph:

JOHN MUIR, Foster son of Wisconsin, born in Scotland April 21st 1838.

He came to America as a lad of eleven, spent his teen years in hard work clearing the farm across this lake, carving out a home in the wilderness.

In the: ‘sunny woods, overlooking a flowery glacial meadow and a lake rimmed with water lilies’, he found an environment that fanned the fire of his zeal and love for all Nature, which as a man, drove him to study, afoot, alone and unafraid, the forests, mountains and glaciers of the West to become the most rugged, fervent naturalist America has produced, and the Father of the National Parks of our country.

Muir was already thirty when he arrived in California in 1868 and found work as a shepherd in Yosemite Valley, as recounted in My First Summer in the Sierra. However, within a few years he witnessed environmental degradation in many parts of the high country: the flower-filled alpine meadows were grazed and trampled by sheep; primeval mountain redwoods were being felled in their thousands, even blasted-down with dynamite; entire mountainsides were scoured away by gold miners using hydraulic water-jets. The erosion that resulted from the destruction of forests, meadows and mountain slopes, buried valleys, rivers and salmon beneath a shroud of rocks and mud. Moreover, the thousands of miners, loggers and herders who invaded the high country had to live-off the land; they fished, trapped, snared and shot every living creature that could be eaten: salmon, deer, bears, beaver, rabbits, birds – in a vast extermination of wildlife. The California population of grizzly bears, once more than 10,000 strong, was reduced to near-extinction during the 1880s; California finally declared the grizzly extinct in 1922; ironically, it only survives today as the iconic symbol of the ‘bear-flag state’.

As a witness to the ‘closing of the Western frontier’, Muir felt such rapacious exploitation would soon destroy the country’s remaining natural heritage, inexhaustible though it had once seemed. However, he was not eager to take on the public role of ‘defender of the wilderness’ and had to be persuaded by his friends that this was indeed the challenge he was made for. In 1889, encouraged by Robert Underwood Johnson, the influential editor of Century Magazine, Muir began to campaign for Yosemite to be rescued from the exploitative care of the State of California, and brought under the aegis of federal protection. This eventually led to a much-expanded Yosemite National Park, whose boundaries were largely proposed by Muir himself. The 1200 square miles of the new Yosemite National Park were established by Congress in 1890; the very first national park, Yellowstone, had been created in 1871.

However, Muir’s seminal victory in Yosemite would not ensure protection of the nation’s wider landscapes and eco-systems; political influence and legislation by Congress seemed the only way forward. In 1893 Muir played a leading role in the creation of the Sierra Club, to lobby for the protection of other wilderness areas as national parks; he served as the Club’s founding president and national figurehead until his death in 1914.

After Muir’s death, Robert Underwood Johnson sounded the paean for his friend:

Muir’s public services were not merely scientific and literary. His countrymen owe him gratitude as the pioneer of our system of national parks. Before 1889 we had but one of any importance, the Yellowstone. Out of the fight which he led for the better care of Yosemite by the state government grew the demand for extension of the system. To this many persons and organisations contributed, but Muir’s writings and enthusiasm were the chief forces that inspired the movement. All the other torches were lighted from his . . . John Muir was not a ‘dreamer’, but a practical man, a faithful citizen, a scientific observer, a writer of enduring power, with vision, poetry, courage in a contest, a heart of gold and a spirit pure and fine . . .

President Theodore Roosevelt also wrote a heartfelt eulogy:

His was a dauntless soul. Not only are his books delightful, not only is he the author to whom all men turn when they think of the Sierras and Northern glaciers, and the giant trees of the California slope, but he was also – what few nature-lovers are – a man able to influence contemporary thought and action on the subjects to which he had devoted his life. He was a great factor in influencing the thought of California and the thought of the entire country so as to secure the preservation of those great natural phenomena – wonderful canyons, giant trees, slopes of flower-spangled hillsides . . . our generation owes much to John Muir.

The scale of the legacy which Muir and the Sierra Club bequeathed to posterity is evident in America’s National Parks, National Monuments and National Historic Sites: 376 protected zones ranging from Hawaii to Florida and Arizona to Alaska. More than 80 million acres of wild land are conserved within the fifty-four national parks; one single area, the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska, extends to 13 million acres. The US Forest Service, whose earliest reserves were surveyed and recommended for protection by Muir, is responsible for 191 million acres, while the Fish and Wildlife Service manages a further 91 million acres of wild ecosystems. Arguably, more than 360 million acres of America are managed and protected, to varying degrees, as a result of the national movement for which John Muir carried the banner. America’s national parks encompass an area four times greater than Scotland’s entire land-area of 19.5 million acres.

Awareness of that historic debt remains undimmed in the national consciousness; on the 150th anniversary of Muir’s birth, 21 April 1988, it was resolved that:

. . . by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America: that April 21, 1988, is designated as ‘John Muir Day’, and the President is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

*

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1912) was written when Muir was over seventy years of age, but he paints a colourful picture of his Dunbar childhood with clarity, insight and a wry Scottish humour. The opening paragraph is one of the most vivid evocations of a childhood experience of Nature:

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. Fortunately, around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness . . . with red blooded playmates, wild as myself, I loved to wander in the fields, to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low.

In this book Muir allows us a glimpse of the childhood Eden, from which most of us are excluded as adults, but to which, somehow, he always found the way back.

It evokes Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality in Recollections of Early Childhood’, Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ and Burns’s poems; all books with which Muir had a deep familiarity.

John was sent to school at three, and at seven he entered Dunbar Grammar School to study English, Latin, French, Maths and Geography. Here he absorbed Scottish culture and history, from Bannockburn and Flodden to Burns and the Border Ballads. Muir’s school-book heroes were William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, and with eager school-mates he often re-enacted the Wars of Independence among the ruins of Dunbar Castle, where Bruce and Wallace had once skirmished. To the end of his days, Muir remained a passionate devotee of all things Scottish; he was a fervent nationalist and supporter of James Bryce’s Home Rule Bill at Westminster, and even after sixty years in America he still spoke with friends and family in vernacular Scots. For many years in California he paid a newspaper clippings service to send him the national press reports of every Burns Night celebration held throughout Scotland.

In the 1840s, letters and newspapers from America filtered back to Dunbar from Scots emigrants, encouraging relatives to join them in the promised land. John Muir’s imagination was sparked by fireside tales of vast prairies and endless forests, filled with grizzly bears, wolves, mountain lions and war-bonneted indians; of maple trees dripping with syrup, and creeks sparkling with gold-dust. America was a country where eagles perched on every branch, and passenger pigeons darkened the sky from horizon to horizon, in uncountable myriads. Emigration offered the boundless possibilities of this young nation to millions of poor Scots and Irish, who had survived the potato famine of 1846.

In February 1849, encouraged by fellow Scottish ‘Disciples of Christ’ already in Wisconsin, Daniel Muir set sail in search of religious freedom, with the promise of cheap land and a better life for his family. Thus, at the age of eleven, with his sister Sarah and brother David, John Muir ‘sailed away from Glasgow, carefree as thistle seeds on the wings of the winds, toward the glorious paradise over the sea’. The family endured a six-week winter voyage across the North Atlantic, on an unpowered, square-rigged vessel, crowded with emigrants; some fleeing the potato famine, others seeking land, or hoping to reach the California goldrush of that year.

On arrival in New York, the Muir family faced a long journey by train and boat to Chicago, thence by steamer Westward across the Great Lakes and onward by train and covered-wagon to Kingston, Wisconsin, where Daniel Muir purchased a section of unploughed prairie and woodland.

Near the end of his life, Muir recalled his first impression of the untouched wilderness at Fountain Lake:

This sudden splash into pure wildness – baptism in Nature’s warm heart – how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here, without knowing it, we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!

But it was endless manual work which dominated Muir’s first decade in Wisconsin, where he slaved as unpaid ‘ploughboy, well-digger and lumberjack’ under his father’s Calvinist discipline. Daniel Muir often beat his sons for the smallest infraction, and refused to call a doctor, or allow time from work when John contracted mumps, and later pneumonia. As the boys grew into young men, their father increasingly left the physical work to them while he pursued his vocation as an evangelical preacher. Somehow, John Muir survived the hardships; he escaped to the solitude of the woods and the pristine lake fringed with water lilies; he immersed himself in books borrowed from Scottish neighbours and devoured Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Burns and Euclid. His literary heroes were Robert Burns and the explorer of South America, Alexander von Humboldt, whose adventures he hoped to emulate. Self-taught from the age of eleven, Muir showed signs of innate genius in his early teens, by the construction of a series of original, hand-made machines. Clocks, barometers, thermometers, semi-automatic table saws, an ‘early-rising machine’ all flowed from his fertile brain, whittled from hickory or with metal scavenged from farm implements. It was the fame of these inventions among the farming community, which eventually gained him admission to the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1861. It was here, aged 23, that he first encountered minds like his own, and set his course for the future.

At Madison he came under the influence of ‘Geology’ Professor Ezra Carr, who was creating a revolution in university education at that time – insisting that students derive their facts from direct observation and testing of Nature in the field, rather than from theological textbooks, classical authorities and metaphysics. Jeanne Carr, the professor’s wife, became Muir’s lifelong friend and literary mentor, opening doors to the higher strata of American society and winning social influence for him through her extensive connections with luminaries such as Emerson.

My First Summer in the Sierra, published in June 1911, was assembled by Muir from his Yosemite journals of the 1870s. Muir’s bibliographers, William and Maymie Kimes wrote of this book:

Muir was seventy-two years old when he began to prepare his journal of his first summer in the Sierra for publication. With the skilful editing of his mature years, he retains the refreshing spontaneity of his youthful experience and observations, interspersed with his lyrical and oft-times mystical reflections. This book, published near the apex of his career, reaps the competence of age while capturing the essence of youth, and becomes, we believe, his finest book.

(John Muir, A Reading Bibliography,

section 299, p85)

*

The First Summer recounts Muir’s arrival in California via the Panama Canal, following his thousand-mile walk from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. Disembarking at San Francisco in March 1868, he was repelled by the noise, poverty and crude materialism which he found in this burgeoning metropolis. Asking for ‘the quickest way out of town’ he hiked across the Central Valley to find work as a shepherd in the Yosemite high country. For the next seven years he based himself in and around Yosemite, exploring the High Sierra, developing his skills in botany, geology, ecology and climbing. Self-taught as always, he declared he would ‘read from the great book of Nature’, trusting only his own observations and measurements, verifying every fact with his own eyes.

The book has been described as ‘the journal of a soul on fire’, and certainly Muir’s first encounters with the glories of the High Sierra peaks, the flower-filled alpine meadows and the dashing waterfalls and streams seem filled with rapture; he experienced this paradaisical landscape as both a scientific revelation and a mystical epiphany. A deeply evangelical Christian, though not a church-goer, Muir was steeped in Scripture from his earliest days. He had been forced to memorise the entire New Testament before the age of eleven, and wrote that he ‘had much of the Old Testament by heart as well’. But standing on the pinnacles of the High Sierra, bathed in the alpen-glow of the ‘Range of Light’, he forsook the gloomy Calvinism of his father’s preaching for a more Romantic, environmental creed, whose prophets were Thoreau, Emerson, Wordsworth, Blake and Burns. A famous epigram which he wrote in the Sierras captures his beliefs in a single line:

My Altars are the Mountains, Oceans, Earth and Sky.

John Muir remained a Christian all his life, but a profound nature-mysticism pervades his writing from this period. After years alone in the mountains, studying the plants, the rocks, the glaciers and the wild creatures, Muir experienced a transcendental vision of Nature in which every rock, stream, plant and animal in the landscape seemed transfigured; each a divine manifestation, a unique thread in the intricately woven tapestry of life, from which no fibre could be teased without unravelling the fabric. Muir sensed a divine presence behind all created things, shining through them, imbuing them with profound meaning and infinite beauty. It is clear from the following passages that Muir was exploring the boundaries of a new area of Science, which today we call Ecology, though that term had only been coined by Haeckel in 1868.

He wrote:

Everything is flowing – going somewhere; animals and so-called lifeless rocks, as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks . . . While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood . . . in Nature’s warm heart.

and

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with all the other stars, all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. 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.

THE REDISCOVERY OF JOHN MUIR IN SCOTLAND

In marked contrast with Muir’s historic status in America, he was almost completely forgotten in Scotland until the late 1960s; none of his books were published in the UK until 1987, when Stephanie Wolfe Murray of Canongate Press published the first British editions of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and My First Summer in the Sierra.

The event which catalysed the ‘rediscovery’ of Muir in Scotland occurred when Bill and Maymie Kimes, eminent Californian bibliographers of Muir, undertook a literary pilgrimage to Dunbar in 1967. They wrote in advance to the town’s Lady Provost asking if some local historian could guide them around Dunbar Castle, Muir’s High Street birthplace and the beaches of Belhaven, where he had first encountered wild nature in the 1840s. On receipt of this letter, the Provost was somewhat non-plussed and began an urgent search for background material on Muir, of whom she knew little. To her chagrin, neither Dunbar library nor the county library in Haddington had a single copy of any book by John Muir; the National Library in Edinburgh drew a similar blank. Eventually, some Muir books were borrowed from a library in Plymouth on the south coast of England, 500 miles to the south, and some information was gleaned.

Bill and Maymie Kimes were fêted with civic hospitality in Dunbar; on their return to California they wrote and suggested the ancient Burgh might acknowledge its most famous son by a plaque on the house in which he was born – at that time a shop. The Provost replied to say that a plaque had been agreed upon by the town council; it was installed on the building in 1969 with the inscription: ‘Birthplace of John Muir, American Naturalist, 1838–1914’.

The 600th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Burgh of Dunbar followed in 1970 and, stimulated by the Kimes’s visit, a modest exhibition of Muir books and photographs was arranged by the East Lothian Planning Department. The exhibition organiser was Frank Tindall, the first County Planning Officer employed in Scotland; but until the Kimes visit, he had heard nothing of John Muir. In 1974 Tindall began negotiations with the Earl of Haddington to lease part of the Tyninghame coastline, now designated as John Muir Country Park and officially opened in 1976. The name was actually proposed by Tindall’s assistant, Ian Fullerton. This 1660-acre nature reserve ranges eight miles from the ruins of Dunbar Castle to Tyninghame sands in the west and overlooks the distant colonies of gannets, kittiwakes and guillemots on the Bass Rock. For many thousands of subsequent visitors, the park at Belhaven has been an introduction to the Scottish origin of Muir’s story.

In 1977, Tindall planned a family holiday to California, determined to track-down the full story of Dunbar’s most famous emigrant. Tindall’s son was then studying architecture at Pennsylvania University and they hiked together in Yosemite National Park and visited Muir Woods and Muir Beach, north of the Golden Gate. To celebrate ‘John Muir Day’ on April 21st, the Tindall family were guests of honour at a Sierra Club barbecue in the grounds of Muir’s Martinez mansion and later they stayed with Bill and Maymie Kimes at their Mariposa ranch. On returning to Scotland, Tindall was convinced that Scots should be made aware of the global stature which their kinsman had achieved, but he discovered that Muir’s Dunbar birthplace was now threatened with redevelopment as a fish and chip shop! Fortunately, Tindall had few difficulties agreeing with Daisy Hawryluk, the owner of the building, that the upper floor should be converted into a Muir-birthplace museum while a photographic studio should be created on the ground floor.

The restoration of the historic house by East Lothian Council went ahead and in 1980 John Muir House was opened to the public; thousands of tourists and school-children visited over the next twenty years, with the Hawryluk family serving as unpaid, honourary curators.

Tindall was surprised to discover that in 1978 the National Library of Scotland still did not hold a single copy of any Muir book, nor any of the various biographies and literary analyses produced since 1924. He met with Professor Denis Roberts, the Director of the National Library and with Alexia Howe, the Assistant Keeper, who gladly agreed to collaborate on the first Scottish exhibition of Muir’s life: ‘A Man of the Wilderness: John Muir (1838–1914)’, which was held at the library in July 1979. The annual report of the library for that year states:

A private view of the exhibition was held at the National Library on 13th July and the exhibition was opened by The Right Hon. The Earl of Haddington. Sequoia seeds procured from the United States by Mr Frank Tindall, from whom came much of the enthusiasm for the Muir exhibition, were successfully germinated in Fochabers, and Sequoia seedlings were distributed to guests attending the private view.

For thousands of Scots this event was the portal to an awareness of the true scale of Muir’s international legacy and status. With advice from the Kimeses in California, Alexia Howe began a comprehensive collection of Muir books and manuscripts from America for the National Library, which culminated in the acquisition of the complete microfilm edition of the entire collected John Muir Papers, in manuscript format. The microfilm edition was created in 1986 by the staff of the John Muir Center, of the Holt Atherton Institute, at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where the John Muir Papers are preserved.

More recently, the Holt Atherton Institute has digitised the entire John Muir Papers and made them freely available online at: http://library.pacific.edu/ha/muir/content.asp.

This digital archive comprises: 7000 original letters; 485 original manuscripts, including book drafts, magazine articles and notebooks; 84 of Muir’s surviving field-journals and the sketchbooks from his expeditions, spanning the period 1867–1913; 3000 photographs collected by Muir; and over 350 items of memorabilia, including his passport, herbarium lists, poems, a lock of his father’s hair etc.

The donation of the earlier microfilm archive to the National Library was arranged by Bill and Maymie Kimes from California in 1986. However, there was still the issue that, for people in the UK, Muir’s books remained difficult to obtain except by import from the USA.

In the light of this, Frank Tindall approached Stephanie Wolfe Murray at Canongate Publishing in Edinburgh with the aim of creating the first Scottish editions of Muir’s works. This led to the publication of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth in 1987, followed a year later by My First Summer in the Sierra, both issued as Canongate Classics with the support of the Scottish Arts Council. These were later re-issued in 1996 as part of a five-volume omnibus, compiled by the present writer, entitled John Muir, The Wilderness Journeys. This compilation included three other books: The Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, Travels in Alaska and Stickeen.

In 1999 I was privileged to serve as the educational curator of a major international exhibition on the life of John Muir, ‘An Infinite Storm of Beauty’, which was created and hosted by the Edinburgh City Art Centre as part of its contribution to the Edinburgh International Festival. The US National Parks Service generously allowed the transatlantic loan of over 200 Muir artefacts from the Muir National Historic Site and other NPS museums; the Muir-Hanna family loaned priceless oil-paintings by William Keith, along with many other personal possessions of John Muir, which were allowed to leave the country for the very first time. The Festival exhibition was a great success, with over 30,000 people attending during its six-week run.

The repatriation of Muir’s ideas and ethos to Scotland has involved action as well as ideas. In 1983, four years after the exhibition at the National Library, the John Muir Trust was founded in Scotland, to purchase and conserve wild land for future generations and to foster Muir’s conservation ethos in Scotland and the UK, see (http://www.jmt.org/home.asp). To date the Trust has raised funds to purchase a number of areas of wild land in the Highlands and Islands, totalling over 50,000 acres: Li and Coire Dhorrcail in Knoydart (1987); Torrin on the Isle of Skye (1991); Sandwood Bay in Sutherland (1993); Strathaird and Bla Bheinn in the Skye Cuillin (1994); part of Shiehallion (1999); and Ben Nevis (2000). None of these areas is untouched ‘wilderness’ in the American sense; they all have crofting communities and people have lived there for hundreds of years, possibly thousands. Whatever the label, these wild landscapes, the haunt of the golden eagle, red deer and otter, are among the most beautiful and unspoiled in Britain. The John Muir Trust aims to demonstrate exemplary management of these areas, sharing responsibility with local communities for the sustainable use of the landscape, wildlife and natural resources. It aims to foster a wider knowledge of Muir’s life and work among the Trust members as well as the general public.

THE JOHN MUIR AWARD

In 1994 I proposed to the John Muir Trust that it should foster an award for environmental endeavour, to be called the John Muir Award. This was intended to address the fact that, at that time, very few young Scots were involved in conservation, from a potential youth membership of over 1.3 million. Initially, the JMT trustees were not enthusiastic and the Award was only created due to the leadership of the Director of the Trust, Terry Isles, and the energetic advocacy of trustee Ben Tindall. The award scheme was launched in February 1997 with support from Scottish Natural Heritage and now has programmes and staff in Scotland, England and Wales. Students from Yosemite Valley Elementary School in California have also completed the Award as a transatlantic venture. The Award is non-competitive, open to all, makes no financial charge, and is offered in partnership with a wide range of schools, universities and youth organisations. It welcomes people of all ages to lifelong involvement with the environmental movement, with the emphasis on direct experience of conservation via personal action and outdoor adventure. At the time of writing, more than 100,000 people have completed the John Muir Award in the UK; it is widely regarded as being the most successful of the John Muir Trust’s educational initiatives.

*

As long ago as 1888, John Muir wrote, in ‘Essay on Mt Shasta’:

The great wilds of our country, once held to be boundless and inexhaustible, are being rapidly invaded, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed. Every landscape, low and high, seems doomed to be trampled and harried. The wedges of development are being driven hard and none of the obstacles or defences of nature can long withstand the onset of this immeasurable industry.

The environmental issues which Muir confronted during the 1880s contained the seeds of the current crisis faced by every nation in the twenty-first century: where do we draw the line in the exploitation of natural resources? How much development should be allowed in the wider countryside? What level of agricultural and industrial development, of roads, housing and power generation is sustainable, and for how large a population should we plan?

Muir’s writings evoke a deep resonance with the issues which have dominated the public agenda in America and Europe throughout 2009. International financial and banking ruin, global warming fears, the collapse of fish-stocks in every ocean, the continued burning of the rain-forests, the extinction of species, the depletion of fossil-fuel reserves, the threat of ‘dangerous climate change’ and uncontrolled sea-rise. Other disturbing issues involve the continuing decline in British wildlife, the deaths of millions of honeybee colonies in America and Europe – all remind us that the issues which Muir confronted persist today; but they have proliferated to a global scale with labyrinthine complexity.

Currently, the UK faces the issue of whether it can support an officially forecast increase of ten million in population by the year 2030, overwhelmingly through economic migration. This would mean an unprecedented 14% increase in UK population within twenty years, and would require the infrastructure equivalent of seven new cities the size of Birmingham. This raises critical questions of where the houses, roads, power stations and schools required to cope with such a huge population increase could possibly be built. Where would the food, water, energy and recreational space be found to give such a populace a decent standard of living? At the time of writing not one environmental NGO in America or the United Kingdom seems willing to question the sustainability of such population increase or migration policies, even though these issues lie at the very heart of any nation’s future social, economic and environmental wellbeing.

The UK government has similarly announced its intention to approve 8,000 new wind turbines to meet its renewable energy targets. If this programme goes ahead, virtually every mountain ridge and moorland in the UK will have a chain of 150 metres high industrial structures imposed upon it, linked by a web of new electricity pylons. It had been widely assumed that the National Parks would escape this industrialisation but at the time of writing, it has just been announced that even these wildest of landscapes must ‘bear their share’ of the march of the wind machines. The argument is, that to preserve the wild and beautiful landscapes of Snowdonia, Dartmoor, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands from ‘dangerous climate change’ we must destroy their very wildness by erecting wind turbines on every mountain, ridge and moor. The logic echoes that of an American general during the Vietnam War who, after bombing and shelling the former Vietnamese imperial capital of Hue into a heap of charred ruins beside the Perfume River, said: ‘in order to save it (from Communism), we had to destroy it’.

The catastrophe triggered by the globalisation of finance, markets, labour and resources which brought the world economy to the brink of total collapse in 2009 was foreseen by Muir in the 1880s. The environmental issues in his time pivoted on the ‘robber barons’ desire to convert every natural asset into a ‘dollarable commodity’ for sale to the highest bidder in distant markets, regardless of the human or environmental cost. Consider this, written in 1889:

If possible, and profitable, every tree, bush and leaf, with the soil they are growing on . . . would be cut, blasted, scraped, shovelled and shipped away, to any market, home or foreign. Everything, without exception, even to Souls and Geography, would be sold for money, could a market be found for such articles.

(San FranciscoDaily Evening Bulletin –

29 June 1889)

In the UK, the corruption and greed of our political and business elites in parliament, the banks and a host of other public agencies has dominated public discourse throughout 2009. Muir had bitter experience of politicians and lawyers who were willing to sacrifice any public asset to feed their own greed. He wrote:

If only one of our grand trees on the Sierra were preserved as an example . . . of all that is most noble and glorious in mountain trees, it would not be long before you would find a lumberman and a lawyer at the foot of it, eagerly proving, by every law terrestrial and celestial, that that tree must come down . . . The battle we have fought, and are still fighting, is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to ever see the end of it.

(Sierra Club Bulletin, January 1896)

There was no end to the environmental struggle:

I often wonder what Man will do with the mountains? Will he cut down all the trees to make ships and houses? If so, what will be the final and far upshot? Will human destructions, like those of Nature – fire, flood and avalanche – work out a higher good, a greater beauty? Will a better civilisation come . . .? What is the human part of the mountain’s destiny?

In bringing this new collection of John Muir’s writings to the public, it is hoped that readers will find inspiration in confronting current environmental and economic issues, from the vision and example of John Muir in the nineteenth century.

AFTERWORD

The Scottish Parliament established its first national parks at Loch Lomond and the Trossachs in 2002, and the Cairngorms in 2003. It is ironic that the land of Muir’s birth waited more than a century after his creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890 before it followed his example. A great opportunity was missed – in that no attempt was made to link the establishment of Scotland’s first national parks to Muir’s historic role in the creation of America’s parks. Indeed, apart from East Lothian Council’s designation of ‘John Muir Country Park’ no other reserve has been named for Muir in Scotland or the entire UK.

Perhaps some future government will eventually name a national park or coastal reserve in honour of John Muir, to acknowledge his seminal influence in global nature conservation. The 2014 centenary of his death gives us a five-year time window to consider such a visionary act. The efforts to repatriate Muir’s conservation ethos and to establish his ideas in Scotland’s education system and institutions have mostly sprung from East Lothian Council, the John Muir Trust, and the enthusiasm of individuals. With few honourable exceptions, Muir’s life and achievements remain unknown and unreflected in the curricula of Scotland’s schools, colleges and universities, and unacknowledged in the work of any department of Scottish and UK government, or their various quangos. It would be timely if this educational and cultural vacuum were to be addressed in time for Muir’s centenary, in honour of this great Scottish-American.

Graham White

Coldstream, July 2009

THE STORY OF MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH (1913)

Chapter 1

A BOYHOOD IN SCOTLAND

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. Fortunately around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness, though most of the land lay in smooth cultivation. With red-blooded playmates, wild as myself, I loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old I ran away to the seashore or the fields most every Saturday, and every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly warned that I must play at home in the garden and back yard, lest I should learn to think bad thoughts and say bad words. All in vain. In spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.

My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks with my grandfather when I was perhaps not over three years old. On one of these walks Grandfather took me to Lord Lauderdale’s gardens, where I saw figs growing against a sunny wall and tasted some of them, and got as many apples to eat as I wished. On another memorable walk in a hayfield, when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks I heard a sharp, prickly, stinging cry, and, jumping up eagerly, called Grandfather’s attention to it. He said he heard only the wind, but I insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over until we discovered the source of the strange exciting sound – a mother field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. This to me was a wonderful discovery. No hunter could have been more excited on discovering a bear and her cubs in a wilderness den.

I was sent to school before I had completed my third year. The first schoolday was doubtless full of wonders, but I am not able to recall any of them. I remember the servant washing my face and getting soap in my eyes, and Mother hanging a little green bag with my first book in it around my neck so I would not lose it, and its blowing back in the sea-wind like a flag. But before I was sent to school my grandfather, as I was told, had taught me my letters from shop signs across the street. I can remember distinctly how proud I was when I had spelled my way through the little first book into the second, which seemed large and important, and so on to the third. Going from one book to another formed a grand triumphal advancement, the memories of which still stand out in clear relief.

The third book contained interesting stories as well as plain reading and spelling lessons. To me the best story of all was ‘Llewellyn’s Dog,’ the first animal that comes to mind after the needle-voiced field mouse. It so deeply interested and touched me and some of my classmates that we read it over and over with aching hearts, both in and out of school, and shed bitter tears over the brave faithful dog, Gelert, slain by his own master, who imagined that he had devoured his son because he came to him all bloody when the boy was lost, though he had saved the child’s life by killing a big wolf. We have to look far back to learn how great may be the capacity of a child’s heart for sorrow and sympathy with animals as well as with human friends and neighbors. This auld-lang-syne story stands out in the throng of old schoolday memories as clearly as if I had myself been one of that Welsh hunting-party – heard the bugles blowing, seen Gelert slain, joined in the search for the lost child, discovered it at last happy and smiling among the grass and bushes beside the dead, angled wolf, and wept with Llewellyn over the sad fate of his noble, faithful dog friend.

Another favorite in this book was Southey’s poem ‘The Inchcape Bell,’ a story of a priest and a pirate. A good priest in order to warn seamen in dark stormy weather hung a big bell on the dangerous Inchcape Rock. The greater the storm and higher the waves, the louder rang the warning bell, until it was cut off and sunk by wicked Ralph the Rover. One fine day, as the story goes, when the bell was raging gently, the pirate put out to the rock, saying, ‘I’ll Sink that bell and plague the Abbot of Aberbrothok.’ So he cut the rope, and down went the bell ‘with a gurgling sound; the bubbles rose and burst around,’ etc. Then ‘Ralph the Rover sailed away; he scoured the seas for many a day; and now, grown rich with plundered store, he steers his course for Scotland’s shore.’ Then came a terrible storm with cloud darkness and night darkness and high roaring waves. ‘Now where we are,’ cried the pirate, ‘I cannot tell, but I wish I could hear the Inchcape bell.’ And the story goes on to tell how the wretched rover ‘tore his hair,’ and curst himself in his despair,’ when ‘with a shivering shock’ the stout ship struck on the Inchcape Rock, and went down with Ralph and his plunder beside the good priest’s bell. The story appealed to our love of kind deeds and of wildness and fair play.

A lot of terrifying experiences connected with these first schooldays grew out of crimes committed by the keeper of a low lodging-house in Edinburgh, who allowed poor homeless wretches to sleep on benches or the floor for a penny or so a night, and, when kind Death came to their relief, sold the bodies for dissection to Dr Hare of the medical school. None of us children ever heard anything like the original story. The servant girls told us that ‘Dandy Doctors,’ clad in long black cloaks and supplied with a store of sticking-plaster of wondrous adhesiveness, prowled at night about the country lanes and even the tow streets, watching for children to choke and sell. The Dandy Doctor’s business method, as the servants explained it, was with lightning quickness to clap a sticking-plaster on the face of a scholar, covering mouth and nose, preventing breathing or crying for help, then pop us under his long black cloak and carry us to Edinburgh to be sold and sliced into small pieces for folk to learn how we were made. We always mentioned the name ‘Dandy Doctor’ in a fearful whisper, and never dared venture out of doors after dark. In the short winter days it got dark before school closed, and in cloudy weather we sometimes had difficulty in finding our way home unless a servant with a lantern was sent for us; but during the Dandy Doctor period the school was closed earlier, for if detained until the usual hour the teacher could not get us to leave the schoolroom. We would rather stay all night supperless than dare the mysterious doctors supposed to be lying in wait for us. We had to go up a hill called the Davel Brae that lay between the schoolhouse and the main street. One evening just before dark, as we were running up the hill, one of the boys shouted, ‘A Dandy Doctor! A Dandy Doctor!’ and we all fled pellmell back into the school-house to the astonishment of Mungo Siddons, the teacher. I can remember to this day the amused look on the good dominie’s face as he stared and tried to guess what had got into us, until one of the older boys breathlessly explained that there was an awful big Dandy Doctor on the Brae and we couldna gang hame. Others corroborated the dreadful news. ‘Yes! We saw him, plain as onything, with his lang black cloak to hide us in, and some of us thought we saw a sticken-plaister ready in his hand.’ We were in such a state of fear and trembling that the teacher saw he wasn’t going to get rid of us without going himself as leader. He went only a short distance, however, and turned us over to the care of the two biggest scholars, who led us to the top of the Brae and then left us to scurry home and dash into the door like pursued squirrels diving into their holes.

Just before school skaled (closed), we all arose and sang the fine hymn ‘Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing.’ In the spring when the swallows were coming back from their winter homes we sang –

Welcome, welcome, little stranger,

Welcome from a foreign shore:

Safe escaped from many a danger . . .

– and while singing we all swayed in rhythm with the music. ‘The Cuckoo,’ that always told his none in the spring of the year, was another favorite song, and when there was nothing in particular to call to mind any special bird or animal, the songs we sang were widely varied, such as –

The whale, the beast for me,

Plunging along through the deep, deep sea.

But the best of all was ‘Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing,’ though at that time the most significant part I fear was the first three words.

With my school lessons Father made me learn hymns and Bible verses. For learning ‘Rock of Ages’ he gave me a penny, and I thus became suddenly rich. Scotch boys are seldom spoiled with money. We thought more of a penny those economical days than the poorest American schoolboy thinks of a dollar. To decide what to do with that first penny was an extravagantly serious affair. I ran in great excitement up and down the street, examining the tempting goodies in the shop windows before venturing on so important an investment. My playmates also became excited when the wonderful news got abroad that Johnnie Muir had a penny, hoping to obtain a taste of the orange, apple, or candy it was likely to bring forth.

At this time infants were baptized and vaccinated a few days after birth. I remember very well a fight with the doctor when my brother David was vaccinated. This happened, I think, before I was sent to school. I couldn’t imagine what the doctor, a tall, severe-looking man in black, was doing to my brother, but as Mother, who was holding him in her arms, offered no objection, I looked on quietly while he scratched the arm until I saw blood. Then, unable to trust even my mother, I managed to spring up high enough to grab and bite the doctor’s arm, yelling that I wasna gan to let him hurt my bonnie brither, while to my utter astonishment Mother and the doctor only laughed at me. So far from complete at times is sympathy between parents and children, and so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting, biting, climbing pagans.

Father was proud of his garden and seemed always to be trying to make it as much like Eden as possible, and in a corner of it he gave each of us a little bit of ground for our very own, in which we planted what we best liked, wondering how the hard dry seeds could change into soft leaves and flowers and find their way out to the light; and, to see how they were coming on, we used to dig up the larger ones, such as peas and beans, every day. My aunt had a corner assigned to her in our garden, which she filled with lilies, and we all looked with the utmost respect and admiration at that precious lily-bed and wondered whether when we grew up we should ever be rich enough to own anything like so grand. We imagined that each lily was worth an enormous sum of money and never dared to touch a single leaf or petal of them. We really stood in awe of them. Far, far was I then from the wild lily gardens of California that I was destined to see in their glory.

When I was a little boy at Mungo Siddons’s school a flower-show was held in Dunbar, and I saw a number of the exhibitors carrying large handfuls of dahlias, the first I had ever seen. I thought them marvelous in size and beauty and, as in the case of my aunt’s lilies, wondered if I should ever be rich enough to own some of them.

Although I never dared to touch my aunt’s sacred lilies, I have good cause to remember stealing some common flowers from an apothecary, Peter Lawson, who also answered the purpose of a regular physician to most of the poor people of the town and adjacent country. He had a pony which was considered very wild and dangerous, and when he was called out of town he mounted this wonderful beast, which, after standing long in the stable, was frisky and boisterous, and often to our delight reared and jumped and danced about from side to side of the street before he could be persuaded to go ahead. We boys gazed in awful admiration and wondered how the druggist could be so brave and able as to get on and stay on that wild beast’s back. This famous Peter loved flowers and had a fine garden surrounded by an iron fence, through the bars of which, when I thought no one saw me, I oftentimes snatched a flower and took to my heels. One day Peter discovered me in this mischief, dashed out into the street and caught me. I screamed that I wouldna steal any more if he would let me go. He didn’t say anything but just dragged me along to the stable where he kept the wild pony, pushed me in right back of its heels, and shut the door. I was screaming, of course, but as soon as I was imprisoned the fear of being kicked quenched all noise. I hardly dared breathe. My only hope was in motionless silence. Imagine the agony I endured! I did not steal any more of his flowers. He was a good hard judge of boy nature.

I was in Peter’s hands some time before this, when I was about two and a half years old. The servant girl bathed us small folk before putting us to bed. The smarting soapy scrubbings of the Saturday nights in preparation for the Sabbath were particularly severe, and we all dreaded them. My sister Sarah, the next older than me, wanted the long-legged stool I was sitting on awaiting my turn, so she just tipped me off. My chin struck on the edge of the bath-tub, and, as I was tallying at the time, my tongue happened to be in the way of my teeth when they were closed by the blow, and a deep gash was cut on the side of it, which bled profusely. Mother came running at the noise I made, wrapped me up, put me in the servant girl’s arms and told her to run with me through the garden and out by a back way to Peter Lawson to have something done to stop the bleeding. He simply rubbed a wad of cotton into my mouth after soaking it in some brown astringent stuff, and told me to be sure to keep my mouth shut and all would soon be well. Mother put me to bed, calmed my fears, and told me to lie still and sleep like a gude bairn. But just as I was dropping of to sleep I swallowed the bulky wad of medicated cotton and with it, as I imagined, my tongue also. My scream over so great a loss brought Mother, and when she anxiously took me in her arms and inquired what was the matter, I told her that I had swallowed my tongue. She only laughed at me, much to my astonishment, when I expected that she would bewail the awful loss her boy had sustained. My sisters, who were older than I, oftentimes said when I happened to be talking too much, ‘It’s a pity you hadn’t swallowed at least half of that long tongue of yours when you were little.’

It appears natural for children to be fond of water, although the Scotch method of making every duty dismal contrived to make necessary bathing for health terrible to us. I well remember among the awful experiences of childhood being taken by the servant to the seashore when I was between two and three years old, stripped at the side of a deep pool in the rocks, plunged into it among crawling crawfish and slippery wriggling snake-like eels, and drawn up gasping and shrieking only to be plunged down again and again. As the time approached for this terrible bathing, I used to hide in the darkest corners of the house, and oftentimes a long search was required to find me. But after we were a few years older, we enjoyed bathing with other boys as we wandered along the shore, careful, however, not to get into a pool that had an invisible boy-devouring monster at the bottom of it. Such pools, miniature maelstroms, were called ‘sookin-in-goats’ and were well known to most of us. Nevertheless we never ventured into any pool on strange parts of the coast before we had thrust a stick into it. If the stick were not pulled out of our hands, we boldly entered and enjoyed plashing and ducking long ere we had learned to swim.

One of our best playgrounds was the famous old Dunbar Castle, to which King Edward fled after his defeat at Bannockburn. It was built more than a thousand years ago, and though we knew little of its history, we had heard many mysterious stories of the battles fought about its walls, and firmly believed that every bone we found in the ruins belonged to an ancient warrior. We tried to see who could climb highest on the crumbling peaks and crags, and took chances that no cautious mountaineer would try. That I did not fall and finish my rock-scrambling in those adventurous boyhood days seems now a reasonable wonder.