John Muir at the University: Where Yosemite Got Its Theory

John Muir arrived at the University of Wisconsin in the early eighteen sixties. He was twenty-two years old, Scottish-born, and had grown up on a Wisconsin farm near Portage, a few dozen miles north of here doing the kind of brutal agricultural labor that had by then given him a permanent distrust of the plow.

He was not a regular student. He paid his own way when he could, left when he could not, and never completed a degree. What he did, under a black locust tree beside North Hall, was encounter botany for the first time in a formal setting. A fellow student showed him a flower of the genus Robinia and demonstrated that, however different two flowers looked, if you understood their structural relationships, you could read the family tree of the living world.

Muir was captivated. He stayed for about two years, studying chemistry, geology, Latin, and botany, and spent his summers traveling across the glaciated terrain of Wisconsin. Those glacial landscapes, the moraines and kettles and drumlins of south-central Wisconsin, gave him the intellectual framework he would later apply to a very different valley.

When Muir arrived in Yosemite in eighteen sixty-eight, the prevailing explanation for how the valley had formed was the catastrophe theory: a sudden geological event had cracked open the mountain. Muir looked at the valley walls and recognized them. He had seen the same striations in Wisconsin. He argued, against the established scientific view of the day, that glaciers had carved Yosemite. He was correct. The University of Wisconsin later claimed him as an alumnus, which is not quite accurate, but it is not entirely wrong either.

He had come here a farm laborer with a gift for building machines. He left beginning to understand the machine the world itself runs on.