The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
J >> John Muir >> The Story of My Boyhood and YouthNone of our neighbors were so excessively industrious as father;
though nearly all of the Scotch, English, and Irish worked too hard,
trying to make good homes and to lay up money enough for comfortable
independence. Excepting small garden-patches, few of them had owned
land in the old country. Here their craving land-hunger was satisfied,
and they were naturally proud of their farms and tried to keep them
as neat and clean and well-tilled as gardens. To accomplish this
without the means for hiring help was impossible. Flowers were planted
about the neatly kept log or frame houses; barnyards, granaries, etc.,
were kept in about as neat order as the homes, and the fences and
corn-rows were rigidly straight. But every uncut weed distressed them;
so also did every ungathered ear of grain, and all that was lost by
birds and gophers; and this overcarefulness bred endless work and
worry.
As for money, for many a year there was precious little of it in the
country for anybody. Eggs sold at six cents a dozen in trade, and
five-cent calico was exchanged at twenty-five cents a yard. Wheat
brought fifty cents a bushel in trade. To get cash for it before the
Portage Railway was built, it had to be hauled to Milwaukee, a hundred
miles away. On the other hand, food was abundant,--eggs, chickens,
pigs, cattle, wheat, corn, potatoes, garden vegetables of the best,
and wonderful melons as luxuries. No other wild country I have ever
known extended a kinder welcome to poor immigrants. On the arrival in
the spring, a log house could be built, a few acres ploughed, the
virgin sod planted with corn, potatoes, etc., and enough raised to
keep a family comfortably the very first year; and wild hay for cows
and oxen grew in abundance on the numerous meadows. The American
settlers were wisely content with smaller fields and less of
everything, kept indoors during excessively hot or cold weather,
rested when tired, went off fishing and hunting at the most favorable
times and seasons of the day and year, gathered nuts and berries, and
in general tranquilly accepted all the good things the fertile
wilderness offered.
After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake
farm, 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.
By this time I had learned to run the breaking plough. Most of these
ploughs were very large, turning furrows from eighteen inches to two
feet wide, and were drawn by four or five yoke of oxen. They were used
only for the first ploughing, in breaking up the wild sod woven into a
tough mass, chiefly by the cordlike roots of perennial grasses,
reinforced by the tap-roots of oak and hickory bushes, called "grubs,"
some of which were more than a century old and four or five inches in
diameter. In the hardest ploughing on the most difficult ground, the
grubs were said to be as thick as the hair on a dog's back. If in good
trim, the plough cut through and turned over these grubs as if the
century-old wood were soft like the flesh of carrots and turnips; but
if not in good trim the grubs promptly tossed the plough out of the
ground. A stout Highland Scot, our neighbor, whose plough was in bad
order and who did not know how to trim it, was vainly trying to keep
it in the ground by main strength, while his son, who was driving and
merrily whipping up the cattle, would cry encouragingly, "Haud her in,
fayther! Haud her in!"
"But hoo i' the deil can I haud her in when she'll no _stop_ in?" his
perspiring father would reply, gasping for breath between each word.
On the contrary, with the share and coulter sharp and nicely adjusted,
the plough, instead of shying at every grub and jumping out, ran
straight ahead without need of steering or holding, and gripped the
ground so firmly that it could hardly be thrown out at the end of the
furrow.
Our breaker turned a furrow two feet wide, and on our best land, where
the sod was toughest, held so firm a grip that at the end of the field
my brother, who was driving the oxen, had to come to my assistance in
throwing it over on its side to be drawn around the end of the
landing; and it was all I could do to set it up again. But I learned
to keep that plough in such trim that after I got started on a new
furrow I used to ride on the crossbar between the handles with my feet
resting comfortably on the beam, without having to steady or steer it
in any way on the whole length of the field, unless we had to go round
a stump, for it sawed through the biggest grubs without flinching.
The growth of these grubs was interesting to me. When an acorn or
hickory-nut had sent up its first season's sprout, a few inches long,
it was burned off in the autumn grass fires; but the root continued to
hold on to life, formed a callus over the wound and sent up one or
more shoots the next spring. Next autumn these new shoots were burned
off, but the root and calloused head, about level with the surface of
the ground, continued to grow and send up more new shoots; and so on,
almost every year until very old, probably far more than a century,
while the tops, which would naturally have become tall broad-headed
trees, were only mere sprouts seldom more than two years old. Thus the
ground was kept open like a prairie, with only five or six trees to
the acre, which had escaped the fire by having the good fortune to
grow on a bare spot at the door of a fox or badger den, or between
straggling grass-tufts wide apart on the poorest sandy soil.
The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies
produced so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree
could live on it. Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so
marked a feature of the country, would have been covered by the
heaviest forests. As soon as the oak openings in our neighborhood were
settled, and the farmers had prevented running grass-fires, the grubs
grew up into trees and formed tall thickets so dense that it was
difficult to walk through them and every trace of the sunny "openings"
vanished.
[Illustration: THE HICKORY HILL HOUSE, BUILT IN 1857]
We called our second farm Hickory Hill, from its many fine hickory
trees and the long gentle slope leading up to it. Compared with
Fountain Lake farm it lay high and dry. The land was better, but it
had no living water, no spring or stream or meadow or lake. A well
ninety feet deep had to be dug, all except the first ten feet or so in
fine-grained sandstone. When the sandstone was struck, my father, on
the advice of a man who had worked in mines, tried to blast the rock;
but from lack of skill the blasting went on very slowly, and father
decided to have me do all the work with mason's chisels, a long, hard
job, with a good deal of danger in it. I had to sit cramped in a space
about three feet in diameter, and wearily chip, chip, with heavy
hammer and chisels from early morning until dark, day after day, for
weeks and months. In the morning, father and David lowered me in a
wooden bucket by a windlass, hauled up what chips were left from the
night before, then went away to the farm work and left me until noon,
when they hoisted me out for dinner. After dinner I was promptly
lowered again, the forenoon's accumulation of chips hoisted out of
the way, and I was left until night.
One morning, after the dreary bore was about eighty feet deep, my life
was all but lost in deadly choke-damp,--carbonic acid gas that had
settled at the bottom during the night. Instead of clearing away the
chips as usual when I was lowered to the bottom, I swayed back and
forth and began to sink under the poison. Father, alarmed that I did
not make any noise, shouted, "What's keeping you so still?" to which
he got no reply. Just as I was settling down against the side of the
wall, I happened to catch a glimpse of a branch of a bur-oak tree
which leaned out over the mouth of the shaft. This suddenly awakened
me, and to father's excited shouting I feebly murmured, "Take me out."
But when he began to hoist he found I was not in the bucket and in
wild alarm shouted, "Get in! Get in the bucket and hold on! Hold on!"
Somehow I managed to get into the bucket, and that is all I remembered
until I was dragged out, violently gasping for breath.
One of our near neighbors, a stone mason and miner by the name of
William Duncan, came to see me, and after hearing the particulars of the
accident he solemnly said: "Weel, Johnnie, it's God's mercy that you're
alive. Many a companion of mine have I seen dead with choke-damp, but
none that I ever saw or heard of was so near to death in it as you were
and escaped without help." Mr. Duncan taught father to throw water down
the shaft to absorb the gas, and also to drop a bundle of brush or hay
attached to a light rope, dropping it again and again to carry down pure
air and stir up the poison. When, after a day or two, I had recovered
from the shock, father lowered me again to my work, after taking the
precaution to test the air with a candle and stir it up well with a
brush-and-hay bundle. The weary hammer-and-chisel-chipping went on as
before, only more slowly, until ninety feet down, when at last I struck
a fine, hearty gush of water. Constant dropping wears away stone. So
does constant chipping, while at the same time wearing away the
chipper. Father never spent an hour in that well. He trusted me to sink
it straight and plumb, and I did, and built a fine covered top over it,
and swung two iron-bound buckets in it from which we all drank for many
a day.
The honey-bee arrived in America long before we boys did, but several
years passed ere we noticed any on our farm. The introduction of the
honey-bee into flowery America formed a grand epoch in bee history.
This sweet humming creature, companion and friend of the flowers, is
now distributed over the greater part of the continent, filling
countless hollows in rocks and trees with honey as well as the
millions of hives prepared for them by honey-farmers, who keep and
tend their flocks of sweet winged cattle, as shepherds keep sheep,--a
charming employment, "like directing sunbeams," as Thoreau says. The
Indians call the honey-bee the white man's fly; and though they had
long been acquainted with several species of bumblebees that yielded
more or less honey, how gladly surprised they must have been when
they discovered that, in the hollow trees where before they had found
only coons or squirrels, they found swarms of brown flies with fifty
or even a hundred pounds of honey sealed up in beautiful cells. With
their keen hunting senses they of course were not slow to learn the
habits of the little brown immigrants and the best methods of tracing
them to their sweet homes, however well hidden. During the first few
years none were seen on our farm, though we sometimes heard father's
hired men talking about "lining bees." None of us boys ever found a
bee tree, or tried to find any until about ten years after our arrival
in the woods. On the Hickory Hill farm there is a ridge of moraine
material, rather dry, but flowery with goldenrods and asters of many
species, upon which we saw bees feeding in the late autumn just when
their hives were fullest of honey, and it occurred to me one day after
I was of age and my own master that I must try to find a bee tree. I
made a little box about six inches long and four inches deep and
wide; bought half a pound of honey, went to the goldenrod hill, swept
a bee into the box and closed it. The lid had a pane of glass in it so
I could see when the bee had sucked its fill and was ready to go home.
At first it groped around trying to get out, but, smelling the honey,
it seemed to forget everything else, and while it was feasting I
carried the box and a small sharp-pointed stake to an open spot, where
I could see about me, fixed the stake in the ground, and placed the
box on the flat top of it. When I thought that the little feaster must
be about full, I opened the box, but it was in no hurry to fly. It
slowly crawled up to the edge of the box, lingered a minute or two
cleaning its legs that had become sticky with honey, and when it took
wing, instead of making what is called a bee-line for home, it buzzed
around the box and minutely examined it as if trying to fix a clear
picture of it in its mind so as to be able to recognize it when it
returned for another load, then circled around at a little distance
as if looking for something to locate it by. I was the nearest
object, and the thoughtful worker buzzed in front of my face and took
a good stare at me, and then flew up on to the top of an oak on the
side of the open spot in the centre of which the honey-box was.
Keeping a keen watch, after a minute or two of rest or wing-cleaning,
I saw it fly in wide circles round the tops of the trees nearest the
honey-box, and, after apparently satisfying itself, make a bee-line
for the hive. Looking endwise on the line of flight, I saw that what
is called a bee-line is not an absolutely straight line, but a line in
general straight made of many slight, wavering, lateral curves. After
taking as true a bearing as I could, I waited and watched. In a few
minutes, probably ten, I was surprised to see that bee arrive at the
end of the outleaning limb of the oak mentioned above, as though that
was the first point it had fixed in its memory to be depended on in
retracing the way back to the honey-box. From the tree-top it came
straight to my head, thence straight to the box, entered without the
least hesitation, filled up and started off after the same preparatory
dressing and taking of bearings as before. Then I took particular
pains to lay down the exact course so I would be able to trace it to
the hive. Before doing so, however, I made an experiment to test the
worth of the impression I had that the little insect found the way
back to the box by fixing telling points in its mind. While it was
away, I picked up the honey-box and set it on the stake a few rods
from the position it had thus far occupied, and stood there watching.
In a few minutes I saw the bee arrive at its guide-mark, the
overleaning branch on the tree-top, and thence came bouncing down
right to the spaces in the air which had been occupied by my head and
the honey-box, and when the cunning little honey-gleaner found nothing
there but empty air it whirled round and round as if confused and
lost; and although I was standing with the open honey-box within fifty
or sixty feet of the former feasting-spot, it could not, or at least
did not, find it.
Now that I had learned the general direction of the hive, I pushed on
in search of it. I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile when I caught
another bee, which, after getting loaded, went through the same
performance of circling round and round the honey-box, buzzing in
front of me and staring me in the face to be able to recognize me; but
as if the adjacent trees and bushes were sufficiently well known, it
simply looked around at them and bolted off without much dressing,
indicating, I thought, that the distance to the hive was not great. I
followed on and very soon discovered it in the bottom log of a
corn-field fence, but some lucky fellow had discovered it before me
and robbed it. The robbers had chopped a large hole in the log, taken
out most of the honey, and left the poor bees late in the fall, when
winter was approaching, to make haste to gather all the honey they
could from the latest flowers to avoid starvation in the winter.
VII
KNOWLEDGE AND INVENTIONS
Hungry for Knowledge--Borrowing Books--Paternal
Opposition--Snatched Moments--Early Rising proves a Way out of
Difficulties--The Cellar Workshop--Inventions--An Early-Rising
Machine--Novel Clocks--Hygrometers, etc.--A Neighbor's Advice.
I learned arithmetic in Scotland without understanding any of it,
though I had the rules by heart. But when I was about fifteen or
sixteen years of age, I began to grow hungry for real knowledge, and
persuaded father, who was willing enough to have me study provided my
farm work was kept up, to buy me a higher arithmetic. Beginning at the
beginning, in one summer I easily finished it without assistance, in
the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start
for the harvest-and hay-fields, accomplishing more without a teacher
in a few scraps of time than in years in school before my mind was
ready for such work. Then in succession I took up algebra, geometry,
and trigonometry and made some little progress in each, and reviewed
grammar. I was fond of reading, but father had brought only a few
religious books from Scotland. Fortunately, several of our neighbors
had brought a dozen or two of all sorts of books, which I borrowed and
read, keeping all of them except the religious ones carefully hidden
from father's eye. Among these were Scott's novels, which, like all
other novels, were strictly forbidden, but devoured with glorious
pleasure in secret. Father was easily persuaded to buy Josephus' "Wars
of the Jews," and D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation," and I
tried hard to get him to buy Plutarch's Lives, which, as I told him,
everybody, even religious people, praised as a grand good book; but he
would have nothing to do with the old pagan until the graham bread and
anti-flesh doctrines came suddenly into our backwoods neighborhood,
making a stir something like phrenology and spirit-rappings, which
were as mysterious in their attacks as influenza. He then thought it
possible that Plutarch might be turned to account on the food question
by revealing what those old Greeks and Romans ate to make them strong;
and so at last we gained our glorious Plutarch. Dick's "Christian
Philosopher," which I borrowed from a neighbor, I thought I might
venture to read in the open, trusting that the word "Christian" would
be proof against its cautious condemnation. But father balked at the
word "Philosopher," and quoted from the Bible a verse which spoke of
"philosophy falsely so-called." I then ventured to speak in defense of
the book, arguing that we could not do without at least a little of
the most useful kinds of philosophy.
"Yes, we can," he said with enthusiasm, "the Bible is the only book
human beings can possibly require throughout all the journey from
earth to heaven."
"But how," I contended, "can we find the way to heaven without the
Bible, and how after we grow old can we read the Bible without a
little helpful science? Just think, father, you cannot read your Bible
without spectacles, and millions of others are in the same fix; and
spectacles cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of
optics."
"Oh!" he replied, perceiving the drift of the argument, "there will
always be plenty of worldly people to make spectacles."
To this I stubbornly replied with a quotation from the Bible with
reference to the time coming when "all shall know the Lord from the
least even to the greatest," and then who will make the spectacles?
But he still objected to my reading that book, called me a
contumacious quibbler too fond of disputation, and ordered me to
return it to the accommodating owner. I managed, however, to read it
later.
On the food question father insisted that those who argued for a
vegetable diet were in the right, because our teeth showed plainly
that they were made with reference to fruit and grain and not for
flesh like those of dogs and wolves and tigers. He therefore promptly
adopted a vegetable diet and requested mother to make the bread from
graham flour instead of bolted flour. Mother put both kinds on the
table, and meat also, to let all the family take their choice, and
while father was insisting on the foolishness of eating flesh, I came
to her help by calling father's attention to the passage in the Bible
which told the story of Elijah the prophet who, when he was pursued by
enemies who wanted to take his life, was hidden by the Lord by the
brook Cherith, and fed by ravens; and surely the Lord knew what was
good to eat, whether bread or meat. And on what, I asked, did the Lord
feed Elijah? On vegetables or graham bread? No, he directed the ravens
to feed his prophet on flesh. The Bible being the sole rule, father at
once acknowledged that he was mistaken. The Lord never would have sent
flesh to Elijah by the ravens if graham bread were better.
I remember as a great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the
Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a source of inspiring,
exhilarating, uplifting pleasure; and I became anxious to know all
the poets, and saved up small sums to buy as many of their books as
possible. Within three or four years I was the proud possessor of
parts of Shakespeare's, Milton's, Cowper's, Henry Kirke White's,
Campbell's, and Akenside's works, and quite a number of others seldom
read nowadays. I think it was in my fifteenth year that I began to
relish good literature with enthusiasm, and smack my lips over
favorite lines, but there was desperately little time for reading,
even in the winter evenings,--only a few stolen minutes now and then.
Father's strict rule was, straight to bed immediately after family
worship, which in winter was usually over by eight o'clock. I was in
the habit of lingering in the kitchen with a book and candle after the
rest of the family had retired, and considered myself fortunate if I
got five minutes' reading before father noticed the light and ordered
me to bed; an order that of course I immediately obeyed. But night
after night I tried to steal minutes in the same lingering way, and
how keenly precious those minutes were, few nowadays can know. Father
failed perhaps two or three times in a whole winter to notice my light
for nearly ten minutes, magnificent golden blocks of time, long to be
remembered like holidays or geological periods. One evening when I was
reading Church history father was particularly irritable, and called
out with hope-killing emphasis, "_John go to bed!_ Must I give you a
separate order every night to get you to go to bed? Now, I will have
no irregularity in the family; you _must_ go when the rest go, and
without my having to tell you." Then, as an afterthought, as if
judging that his words and tone of voice were too severe for so
pardonable an offense as reading a religious book he unwarily added:
"If you _will_ read, get up in the morning and read. You may get up in
the morning as early as you like."
That night I went to bed wishing with all my heart and soul that
somebody or something might call me out of sleep to avail myself of
this wonderful indulgence; and next morning to my joyful surprise I
awoke before father called me. A boy sleeps soundly after working all
day in the snowy woods, but that frosty morning I sprang out of bed as
if called by a trumpet blast, rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my
chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won; and when
I held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the
kitchen I found that it was only one o'clock. I had gained five hours,
almost half a day "Five hours to myself!" I said, "five huge, solid
hours!" I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any
discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly
glorious as the possession of these five frosty hours.
In the glad, tumultuous excitement of so much suddenly acquired
time-wealth, I hardly knew what to do with it. I first thought of
going on with my reading, but the zero weather would make a fire
necessary, and it occurred to me that father might object to the cost
of firewood that took time to chop. Therefore, I prudently decided to
go down cellar, and begin work on a model of a self-setting sawmill I
had invented. Next morning I managed to get up at the same gloriously
early hour, and though the temperature of the cellar was a little
below the freezing point, and my light was only a tallow candle the
mill work went joyfully on. There were a few tools in a corner of the
cellar,--a vise, files, a hammer, chisels, etc., that father had
brought from Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse crooked one that
was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine-tooth saw
suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of
an old-fashioned corset, that cut the hardest wood smoothly. I also
made my own bradawls, punches, and a pair of compasses, out of wire
and old files.
My workshop was immediately under father's bed, and the filing and
tapping in making cogwheels, journals, cams, etc., must, no doubt,
have annoyed him, but with the permission he had granted in his mind,
and doubtless hoping that I would soon tire of getting up at one
o'clock, he impatiently waited about two weeks before saying a word. I
did not vary more than five minutes from one o'clock all winter, nor
did I feel any bad effects whatever, nor did I think at all about the
subject as to whether so little sleep might be in any way injurious;
it was a grand triumph of will-power over cold and common comfort and
work-weariness in abruptly cutting down my ten hours' allowance of
sleep to five. I simply felt that I was rich beyond anything I could
have dreamed of or hoped for. I was far more than happy. Like Tam o'
Shanter I was glorious, "O'er a' the ills o' life victorious."