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      Frederick Turner’s biography of John Muir, published in America in 1985, is the first to appear in Scotland since Muir’s death in 1914, and may prove to be a watershed for environmental awareness in the land of his birth. It certainly represents a milestone for Scottish education and culture and will support the rediscovery and reclamation of Muir as a Scottish figure after a century of fame as an essentially American hero.

      This biography tells the epic story of the pioneer conservationist, whose childhood encounters with wild nature on the beaches of Dunbar and among the oakwoods of the Lammermuir Hills, inspired his role in establishing the nature conservation system of the United States. Turner paints a vivid picture of Muir’s first eleven years in Dunbar, and of Victorian Scotland during the 1840s. During the research for the book he visited and explored East Lothian in considerable depth and discovered the actual deed of sale for the Muir home in Dunbar. He has read extremely widely on Scots history and culture, drawing on sources as disparate as the Border Ballads, Holinshed’s Chronicle of The Wallace and Johnson’s voyage to the Hebrides; he has studied the writings of Scott, Burns and Hogg, as well as Miller’s Victorian History of Dunbar. But this book is no mere academic biography; in Scotland Turner has walked the ground, climbed the castle ruins, read the newspapers of the time and visited the ancestral graves. From these many threads he has woven a rich and colourful tapestry which gives us a convincing impression of Muir’s Dunbar: the boat-thronged harbour, the life of the streets, the religious fervour and factions, the educational “school of hard knocks” and the precarious mortality which made death a common visitor. He has conveyed the magnitude of the adventure in which John Muir’s father, Daniel Muir, risked everything to board an emigrant ship in the freezing winds of February 1849, seeking religious freedom and a better life in America.

      He has used the same research and literary skills to conjure the vast sweep of American history during that crowded and eventful century. He sets John Muir’s odyssey against the background of the greater westward migration and its consequences: the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the California Grizzly; the Indian wars that led via the battles of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee to the virtual extermination of the indigenous Americans, along with the buffalo on which they depended; the California goldrush and the eclipse of the frontier wilderness by the rise of an industrial

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