LITMIR.BIZ

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fields grew dense with woody growths that the fires had once checked.

      On Sunday afternoons in the fall, John Muir and the others might go nutting in the leaf-showering woods where they especially delighted in hickory nuts. In the trees the birds began to gather on the stripped branches. The bobolink, whose song had been so fine a feature of spring’s glad greening, now departed for southern rice fields. Muir noted that some species might hold convocations in the neighborhood for weeks at a time, and then one morning he would awaken to find them gone.

      Few species stayed through the winter, but Muir knew those that did and cheered himself with their examples of fortitude. On winter mornings, many of which might be well below zero, his father’s voice would sound in summons at six, and Muir would awaken to find frost on the coverlets. Hobbling down the cold stairs of the fireless house he would face his first task of the day: getting his aching, chilblained feet into shrunken, half-frozen cowhide boots. No fire was allowed at this hour where it might have lessened this agony. Stumping out on his morning chores, his feet in iron-like prisons, he would have to endure the pain until the temperature of his feet and that of the boots became adjusted and the leather grudgingly thawed and stretched.

      In the fields or woods it was often bitter, but Muir warmed to his work of chopping or fencing, though the ax might rebound from the frozen wood as if he had swung it against iron. He remembered of these days not only the hard and “shivery” work but also the stark beauties of the season: “the wonderful radiance of the snow when it was starry with crystals, and the dawns and sunsets and white noons, and the cheery, enlivening company of the brave chickadees and nuthatches.” Sometimes they would see Indian hunters running on the tracks of a deer or spearing muskrats at the edges of the lake. He might also occasionally accompany his father to Portage or Kingston or elsewhere in the immediate vicinity, for winter as a “slack” season was the preferred time for revival meetings, and Daniel Muir was much abroad in the snowy land, preaching his wintry doctrines and being preached at. On stormy days there was always work in the barn—shelling corn, making ax handles or ox yokes, mending harnesses—or they would sort potatoes in the cellar.

      At last the ice that had boomed all winter above the surges of the waters beneath would begin to boom in a new and insistent way, then begin to crack, and at last to break up. Skies softened once again, and the voice of the loon was heard. Spring came to the oak openings and the cleared fields, and the old cycle rose again into its ascendant arc. Muir went on with it, captive to his seasonal chores but captivated, too, by the natural life of those seasons.

      “After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake Farm,” John Muir recalled with a bitter asperity,

      fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses,—after all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to escape with life,—father bought a half-section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.

      Daniel Muir had spied out a tract of land that he thought would prove more fertile than the original homestead, and he had put John to the task of getting it ready for the move, which came in 1857. Meanwhile, the elder Muir had found a buyer for Fountain Lake farm in David Galloway, a twenty-eight-year-old Scot from Fifeshire who had settled in the area, then gone back to Scotland to bring over his parents and relatives. Galloway had fallen in love with Sarah Muir, and they were married in 1856. Galloway released his bride from the servitude of the fields, but the other children remained bound to their tasks.

      A major factor that tempted Daniel Muir to the breaking of this new and much larger tract was the endemic immigrant disease called “land hunger.” Most immigrants, even if they had some previous experience with farming as Daniel Muir had, possessed no background as landholders, and in the presence of such an abundance of cheap land as they now found in the New World they grew understandably greedy. Not content with living on small and manageable plots, many bought as much land as they could. A popular Wisconsin saying of the time was that “all the land a man rightly wanted was his own claim and any land that adjoined it.”

      In America, the Scots had gained and largely deserved a reputation as even more improvident in this regard, perhaps in part because their native agricultural practices had long been among the most benighted in the Old World. Here they were known not only for buying up more land than they could well manage but also for their wasteful methods of farming. Often they were ignorantly unconcerned with crop rotation and manuring and would exhaust one patch of ground, then another until finally they had worked out their entire claim and had to move on. Rather than cut trees for fuel and lumber and utilize the wood ashes for soap, Scots farmers often seemed content merely to girdle their trees and plant around them while the trees slowly died. In Wisconsin, the contrasts between the thrifty methods of the German immigrants and their Scots neighbors were embarrassing to the latter.

      And this was the other factor in Daniel Muir’s decision to move: he had worked out his soil. The light and sandy grounds of Fountain Lake had begun to give out, the wheat yields dwindling steadily from twenty-five to twenty, then to five or six bushels per acre. Daniel Muir had tried corn, but here too the yield gradually proved disappointing. So the answer seemed to be to buy another piece of land and try there. In this fashion much of the state had become exhausted as a wheat-producing region by the time of the Civil War. After the war the locus of production would move into Iowa, Minnesota, and then North Dakota. Hamlin Garland’s story is typical of this general pattern: born on a Wisconsin wheat farm on the eve of the Civil War, Garland had moved with his family to Iowa after the war, and they had ended up raising wheat again on the prairies of North Dakota in the 1880s.

      But this ignorant prodigality and disregard for the future was not confined to wheat or to any one national group: all the resources of the region were at the mercy of these mental habits and all groups were to one degree or another implicated. Wood, so plentiful that early settlers positively delighted to see stands of timber consumed by the annual fall grass fires, was everywhere used up in the most wasteful of ways. The land, so it was said, was made for farming, and cutting timber simply and self-evidently opened more land for agriculture while it also produced jobs, capital, and useful products. Hardly anyone out there knew enough to worry about the long-range effects of deforestation, and the few who did, like Professor Increase Lapham of the state college at Madison, were dismissed as cranks. Any settler could tell the professor that there was more wood in Wisconsin than could well be used. But the pineries of the great north woods, hardly known in the year of Muir’s birth, were by now being rapidly sawed to bits. Portable steam-powered saw mills and larger permanent installations sent out an estimated two hundred million board feet in 1853, and a decade after the Civil War the end of the timbering up there was in sight, a thing that would have seemed incredible but a few years previous when the rivers out of the pineries were choked with fabulous log jams.

      Daniel Muir was no exception to these wasteful habits of mind and the wasteful practices they engendered. He too ordered the spendthrift cutting of timber on his lands and then refused to use what he had cut to warm his house and so provide for the health and comfort of his family. “The very best oak and hickory fuel,” John Muir recalled of his Wisconsin homesteads, “was embarrassingly abundant and cost nothing but cutting and common sense… .” However, instead of constructing ample fireplaces to accommodate large logs of these slow-burning woods as a household defense against the Wisconsin winters, Daniel Muir ordered the felled timber “hauled with weary heart-breaking industry into fences and waste places to get it out of the way of the plough, and out of the way of doing good.” Meanwhile, the Muir family shivered about what John Muir remembered was a miserable little kitchen stove with a firebox “about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep—scant space for three or four small sticks … .” Yet if Daniel Muir was both niggardly and wasteful with his own timber, there was a persistent rumor in the Muirs’ neighborhood that he ordered his eldest son to poach timber from government land that lay in a swale west of his new claim. If he did so, Daniel Muir at least had the sanction of popular custom, the practice being widespread, the poachers accounting the timber as actually free and the sale

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