David Hickman
UC Davis
John Muir’s Orchard Home
The Divergence of Agriculture and Environmentalism
In the spring on 1903, a writer from Outlook magazine visited John Muir on his fruit
ranch midway up the Alhambra Valley, a couple miles south of the city of Martinez, on the
northern arm of the San Francisco Bay. They walked the orchards together, observed the Chinese
laborers at work, and discussed Muir’s ongoing efforts to ensure federal protection for the
Yosemite Valley. At some point the conversation turned to the ranch, its beauty and evident
prosperity. Ordinarily given to free-flowing talk, Muir demurred on this subject, “This is a good
place to be housed in during stormy weather, to write in, and to raise children in, but it is not my
home.” He gestured eastward, towards the hazy outline of the Sierra Nevada crest, “Up there is
my home.”1
The myth of Muir – Muir as the beatific, bearded prophet of wilderness – developed
around the affirmation contained at the tail end of that quote. It is an idea expressed most
familiarly in the statement endlessly reprinted across Sierra Club products: “Going to the
mountains is going home.”2 Yet, Muir’s life and his thinking were never so simply or onesidedly affirmative. His finding of a spiritual home among the mountains was inextricably paired
with his rejection of a material home in the cultivated lowlands. The two fit together in a linked
1
Ray S. Baker, “John Muir,” Outlook, (June 6, 1903), quote from pages 376-7. This scenario was repeated in two
other publications: French Strother, “John Muir: Naturalist, Geologist, Interpreter of Nature,” World’s Work (April
1907), 8804-08; and George Gerard Clarken, “At Home with John Muir,” Overland Monthly (August 1908), 125-8.
The idea also popped up in one obituary: “John Muir, Noted Interpreter of Nature, Dead,” Sacramento Union,
December 25, 1914.
2
Muir’s relationship with wilderness is the subject of numerous books and articles. Among the best are Michael
Cohen’s enthusiastic The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1984) and Steven Holmes’ The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1999). The latter has been particularly influential on this paper. Donald Worster’s A Passion for
Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) was released as this article was being
completed.
–– 1 —
opposition, the one space defining the other. Even the iconic affirmation, when seen in full,
situated itself in the tension between places and ways of life: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken,
over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home.”3
This paper attempts to take seriously the neglected halves of those quotes, to understand
what is meant as much by the rejection as by the affirmation. A close look at Muir’s career as a
commercial fruit grower reveals that running parallel to the rise of environmentalism was a
decline in the prestige of farming as a way of relating to nature. Productive nature gave way to
recreational nature. Nature as the resource base for a free republic gave way to nature as the
nurturer of physical, mental, and spiritual health. That these two trends should diverge from each
other in Muir’s orchards is surprising, for few groups more exemplified the merger of
environmental stewardship and agrarian development than did the horticulturalists of nineteenthcentury California. Yet California’s foremost environmentalist found in the farm simply another
site for production, more akin to the city than the wilds.4
As a social critic and a wilderness advocate, Muir profoundly affected the thinking of a
generation of Bay Area professionals who joined the Sierra Club or followed his writings in the
press. That Muir could speak meaningfully to this audience owed as much to his career on the
fruit ranch as to the youthful years spent in the Yosemite. Muir knew firsthand the anxieties that
plagued Gilded Age’s professionals and he took to prescribing wilderness as a palliative for
those ills, both for himself and for society at large. He found in the mountains a tool for
critiquing the excesses of a dynamic, ambitious era, and his audience came gradually to forget
that others had once used the farm to make those arguments.5
3
The quote is from the opening paragraph of John Muir’s Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1901).
4
The ideas shaping the environmental commitments of the horticulturalists are well covered in Ian Tyrrell’s True
Gardens of the Gods: California-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (Berkeley: UC Press, 1999).
5
On the early years of the Sierra Club, see Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988). Leo Marx’s classic The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
–– 2 —
The broad outlines of Muir’s career as a commercial fruit grower can be briefly
summarized. After spending the decade of the 1870s living first in Yosemite and then travelling
through the Western states earning a meager living as a writer, in 1880 Muir married into a
prominent and successful fruit growing family, the Strentzels of Contra Costa county. For a
decade Muir devoted himself to the work, acquiring his own land and taking over management
of his father-in-law’s estate. Benefitting from a buoyant market, he quickly earned a small
fortune and funded an early retirement. Physically and mentally, the work had worn Muir down.
He released his responsibilities with obvious relief. He handed off day-to-day management to a
brother-in-law in 1891 and returned with a new sense of purpose to his thinking and writing
about wilderness. A year later, in 1892, Muir helped found the Sierra Club and he devoted the
remainder of his life to advocating on behalf of remote places. However, he continued to live on
the farm and to raise his children there, occasionally taking an active hand in management. When
he died, decades later in 1914, he was buried on the property, in a small family lot surrounded by
the gnarled survivors of the Strentzel’s original pear orchard.6
In reconstructing the experiences of that decade spent on the ranch, Muir himself is of
relatively little assistance. In an autobiography left unfinished at his death, Muir summed up his
ranch life in two dismissive sentences:
For ten years I was engaged in fruit-raising in the Alhambra Valley, near
Martinez, clearing land, planting vineyards and orchards, and selling the
fruit, until I had more money than I thought I would ever need for my
Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) details the long history behind the political use of the
pastoral ideal.
6
Muir’s years on the ranch are sketched in all the major autobiographies: William Frederic Badé, The Life and
Letters of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924); Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The
Life of John Muir (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1945); Thurman Wilkins, John Muir: Apostle Of Nature (Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); Frederick W Turner, John Muir: From Scotland to the Sierra (Edinburgh:
Canongate, 1997). Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1981) pays particular attention to Muir’s emotional and family life during the ranch years. Cohen’s The
Pathless Way offers a close reading of Muir’s writings on agriculture, though these are interpreted in a manner
designed to reinforce the author’s argument for a deep ecology take on Muir’s life and philosophy.
–– 3 —
family or for all expenses of travel and study, however far or however long
continued. But this farm work never seriously interrupted my studies.7
The second sentence is demonstrably false: Muir’s farm work did more than interrupt his studies;
it brought them nearly to a complete halt. Not for nothing did his biographer, Linnie Marsh
Wolfe, refer to these as the “lost years.”8 Between 1882 and 1888, Muir essentially ceased
writing. No articles appeared in the press; no books were in the works.9 He stopped keeping a
journal and his letter writing fell off to a mere trickle. In a telling omission for a man who
defined his relationships to places through the written word, Muir never wrote publicly about the
Alhambra Valley. He buried his memories and denied to himself and to the world that the
horticultural life had ever pulled at his desires.
Piecing together Muir’s emotional and intellectual response to farming, then, requires
relying principally on the writing of those around him, most usefully the diary kept by his
mother-in-law, Louisiana Strentzel. There are large gaps in the periods covered by her surviving
diaries and little exists beyond the summer of 1882, but the entries that are intact cover the
critical period of Muir’s entry into farming, tracing his initial hopes and his developing
disillusionment. From the first years of the decade emerges a richly textured description of life
on the Strentzel property. It is an account that is as striking for Louisiana Strentzel’s success in
making a home for herself as it is for John Muir’s failure to do so.10
“Striking Root”
Muir first came to know the Strentzel family and the Alhambra Valley ranch in the fall of
7
Draft of Autobiography, John Muir Papers, boxes 15-18, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the
Pacific Library. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust [Hereafter, John Muir Papers]. Bill Swaggerty, Director of the
John Muir Center at UOP, helped orient me within this vast collection. Thanks are due to him.
8
Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, 228.
9
For Muir's writings, see William F Kimes and Maymie B Kimes, John Muir: A Reading Bibliography, Rev. and
enl. 2nd ed. (Fresno, Calif: Panorama West Books, 1986).
10
Louisiana Strentzel’s diary is held by the Bancroft Library, at the University of California, Berkeley.
–– 4 —
1877. Mutual friends had long been scheming to unite Muir with Louie Strentzel, the family’s
daughter, and after years of resistance, Muir finally consented to a short stay. He maintained the
pretext that this was a working visit, an opportunity for a budding naturalist and an established,
scientifically-minded horticulturalist to share ideas, but at 39 years of age, Muir also had settling
down in mind. In 1875, Muir father, a fiercely religious man, had abandoned his family in
Wisconsin in order to take up proselytizing in Canada, leaving his wife and children, in the
words of one daughter, to “hard times, hard money, hard work, hard hearts.”11 Prompted by the
family crisis and by his own unfulfilled sense of purpose, Muir turned his attention to starting a
family and earning a living.
He arrived at the ranch to find Dr. John Strentzel at the pinnacle of his career. A Polish
exile, European-trained in horticultural, viticulture, and medicine, Strentzel pioneered
commercial fruit growing in the Alhambra Valley. In 1853, when land was still regularly
measured in leagues, Strentzel paid a premium for twenty acres of fertile, creek-side property.
Selling vegetables, melons, and eggs, Strentzel scraped by until his peaches and grape vines
began to bear, and then he prospered by selling the fruits and wine in the Gold Rush-inflated
markets. Over the decades he built up a substantial estate by purchasing land from neighbors,
buying property at tax sales, and making use of his connections to San Francisco attorneys who
were acquiring large properties in defending their clients’ Mexican land grants. Over his
thousands of acres, Strentzel practiced a mixed agriculture that focused on fruit, grain, and hay
production in the Alhambra Valley and cattle ranching on a extensive property a dozen miles to
the west.12
By the mid-1870s, Strentzel had successfully parlayed his economic prosperity into a
11
Joanna Muir to Mary Muir, February 11, 1878, John Muir Papers.
John Strentzel, “Life of Dr. John T. Strentzel,” Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; “John
Strentzel Account Book, 1848-1860”, Series Vc, Box 6, John Muir Papers; assorted land deeds in “Muir/Strentzel
Legal Documents, 1867-1914” and “Muir/Strentzel Legal Documents, 1853-1913,” Series Vc, Boxes 2 and 7, John
Muir Papers.
12
–– 5 —
position of social leadership. He fit himself comfortably into the role of the gentleman farmer,
encouraging the development of his community through his own benevolent and prosperous
example.13 His authority flowed from the ranch itself. Its productivity and tidiness testified to his
mastery over nature and self, advertising to the community the virtues that Strentzel felt they
should hold dear. He emphasized the skill and learning required for his craft by experimenting
with plant varietals and displaying the results through the agricultural papers or at the state and
county fairs.14 He promoted the horticultural potential of the valley by sending fruit baskets as
gifts to publishers and business leaders and by welcoming visitors to the ranch and sending them
home with fruit tree cuttings.15 In 1876, he capped his achievement by submitting an elaborate
display of fruit to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, confirming his standing among the
leading agricultural practitioners in the state.16
In the same year, Strentzel laid out his intellectual engagement with agriculture in a
lengthy, multi-part article for the Contra Costa Gazette.17 His views fit largely within the
mainstream of horticulturalist thought. He rooted his philosophy in an aesthetic tradition that
dated back to Andrew Jackson Downing’s promotion of the picturesque landscape: rustic
cottages set amid orchards and gardens. As Downing had, Strentzel saw in tasteful rural living
the path to a higher level of civilization.18 He imagined a horticultural landscape densely settled,
13
On the origins of the gentleman farmer on the East Coast see Tamara Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The
Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1786 – 1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
14
On fairs: Louie Strentzel to aunt, October 19, 1859, John Muir Papers; California State Agricultural Society,
Transactions, 1861 and Transactions, 1863; Contra Costa Gazette, September 29, 1860, October 5, 1861, October
4, 1862, October 3, 1863. On articles: Strentzel, “Essay on the Culture of the Vine” in Transactions, 1863, 161-7,
“Observations on the Panting and Pruning of the Vine” and “Notes upon California Products,” Transactions, 187071, 415-7, 490-2.
15
Contra Costa Gazette, July 6, 1861.
16
“Tasteful and Luxuriant,” undated newspaper clipping, paper unknown, Series Vc, Box 3, John Muir Papers.
17
The article, “Agricultural and Horticultural Development and Resources,” appeared as part of the series “Contra
Costa County Centennial Papers” in the Contra Costa Gazette. The article began on August 5, 1876, and continued
on September 23, October 7, and October 14 of the same year.
18
On Downing, the most valuable primary source is Landscape Gardening and Rural Architecture (New York:
Dover Publication, 1991 [Reprint of seventh edition, 1865]). For secondary literature, David Schuyler, Apostle of
Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815 – 1852 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996).
–– 6 —
intensively cultivated, and self-consciously crafted that served both as a statement of Victorian
ideals and as an instrument of instruction for the further refinement of aesthetic and moral
standards. A fruit tree, Strentzel wrote, “is an heirloom for future generations; it is a sign of
expanded culture and civilization.”19
Underlying the cultural aspirations was a commitment to economic development.
Strentzel devoted the bulk of his article to urging his neighbors to awaken from their “Rip Van
Winkle slumber” and to cast themselves into the “race for prosperity and advancement.”20 He led
that development personally, organizing and assuming elected leadership over the Alhambra
Grange in 1874.21 Over the next couple decades, he directed the Grange’s efforts to improving
the valley’s market connections, leading and largely financing the construction of a Grangercontrolled shipping facility.22 He worked as well with a Bay Area circle of agrarian reformers
who advocated for state supported irrigation and reclamation projects, alongside a host of smaller
programs that combined environmental and economic development, from Eucalyptus plantings
to game fish stocking. 23 Like most of the state’s prominent horticulturalists, Strentzel believed
that the market and the land could be co-developed harmoniously and that the improvement of
both would lead to greater social equality and cultural flowerings.
It is, however, a striking feature of California’s pioneering horticulturalists that few had a
background in agriculture. Among their ranks were to be found numerous doctors, lawyers,
bankers, manufactures, and merchants, but only the rare farmer. So, while they idealized the
19
Strentzel, “Agricultural and Horticultural Development.”
Ibid.
21
Ezra S Carr, The Patrons of Husbandry on the Pacific Coast. Being a Complete History of the Origin, Condition
and Progress of Agriculture in Different Parts of the World (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1875), 275.
22
J. P Munro-Fraser, History of Contra Costa County, California, Including Its Geography, Geology, Topography,
Climatography and Description; Together with a Record of the Mexican Grants ... Also, Incidents of Pioneer Life;
and Biographical Sketches of Early and Prominent Settlers and Representative Men (San Francisco: W. A. Slocum
& Co, 1882), 406. The estate of John Strentzel included $10,000 in shares of the Grangers' Warehousing and
Business Association, one-fifth of the associations total value, John Muir Papers, Series Vc.
23
The various programs are well described in Gerald Nash, State Government and Economic Development
(Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1964). They are discussed as environmental reforms in Tyrrell, True
Gardens of the Gods.
20
–– 7 —
agrarian life, few knew at first hand the real labor of farming. 24 Muir was an exception to that
rule and it set him apart from the first. At ten years of age, Muir had immigrated with his family
from small-town Scotland to the thinly settled agricultural frontier of Wisconsin. Out of the
woods and glacially-formed bogs of the region, the family carved, in succession, two wheat and
potato farms, often with little assistance from John’s father, Daniel Muir, who devoted his time
to religious study. Muir wrote about these farms, many decades later, in his partial
autobiography, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. He titled his chapter about farm labor “The
Plowboy,” and he meant it not as an invocation of the romantic clichés of a boyhood spent on the
farm but as an expression of anger over a childhood stolen. At eleven, Muir bore the full weight
of a grown man’s labors, the “dull, hard work” of land clearing and wheat raising. It was a
searing experience that he never forgot. Frontier farming taught Muir that agriculture, poorly
practiced, could impoverish the land and degrade the laborer both. He found nothing ennobling
in the family farm that his father oversaw and never subscribed to the agrarian mythology that
imagined a unique American virtue arising from the back end of a plow.25
Muir knew the hard labor of farming, but he had also learned from his youth in
Wisconsin that the life on the land need not be simply endless grubbing. Remembering those
years, he could still call up a positive vision of farmers content and at ease in nature, “all alike
striking root and gripping the glacial drift soil as naturally as oak and hickory trees, happy and
hopeful, establishing homes and making wider and wider fields in the hospitable wilderness.”26
When he started casting about for an occupation in California, those memories came back to
him. In his travel writing, he increasingly focused his attention on the farms scattered across the
West and he found much to admire. It seemed possible that farming could provide true
24
See Richard Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: The New
Press, 2004), 80.
25
John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin company, 1913), quote from 221.
26
Ibid., 212.
–– 8 —
contentment, a trait that Muir identified as “perhaps the rarest of the virtues in California.”27
Thus, when Muir began to visit regularly with the Strentzels in 1877 and 78, he looked at
the land with a careful eye and with thoughts towards taking on an occupation as much as a wife.
The courtship between John and Louie played out slowly and steadily with long walks through
the orchards and hills. Catching the train home from those visits, Muir travelled laden down with
enormous bouquets of gathered ferns, bay boughs and almond blossoms.28 By 1879 the
engagement was set, and in April of 1880, the two wed. At the ceremony they served fruitcake.29
“Bloom Time”
Muir did not settle into married life gracefully. Virtually from the moment he made his
decision to marry, he showed unmistakable signs of unease. Long trips to Alaska repeatedly
pulled him away over the first couple years, often at the moments when the obligations of family
life seemed to be at their most pressing. He left for the first time within days of engaging himself
to Louie, in June on 1879, and did not return until February of the following year. In the spring
of 1880, Muir lingered long enough to get married and to work for three months in the orchards,
but he left again at the end of July, shortly after learning that Louie was pregnant. When Muir
returned, near Thanksgiving, Louie’s pregnancy was well advanced. He now had little choice but
to settle down, held to the ranch by the impeding birth of his first child. As if to compensate for
the constant desire to leave, he threw himself into work with relentless energy.30
Muir applied himself first to seizing control over the land itself. Two creeks ran through
27
John Muir, “Tulare Levels,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, November 17, 1875. Portions of the travel
writings are collected in Robert Engberg, ed., John Muir Summering in the Sierra (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984) and William Badé, ed., Steep Trails (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1918).
28
Louisiana Strentzel, “Diary,” April 20, 1878.
29
On fruitcake, Annie Bidwell to John Muir, April 1880, John Muir Papers. In an unsurprising example of historical
continuity, fruitcake had as poor a reputation in the late nineteenth century as it does today, though Bidwell
reassured Muir that his cake was superior, “so different from the usual dry unpalatable compound under that name.”
30
This period of Muir’s life is well covered in Fox, American Conservation Movement, 64-71.
–– 9 —
the Strentzel property, both of them thick with vegetation and prone to flooding during the winter
rains. To open up the flow, Muir cut out the trees and larger shrubs along the lower stretches of
the creeks, setting fire to the underbrush to finish the job. He planted buckeyes higher up on the
channels where the banks had been weakened by erosion, and put the ranch’s Chinese laborers to
work digging and improving irrigation ditches. Where the creeks emerged from the foothills,
larger exotic trees, eucalyptuses and cedars, went in to provide firewood and shade for the
animals. The work was difficult and dirty, often requiring wading into poison oak thickets. At
one point, Muir developed a rash severe enough to confine him to bed for several days, his eyes
swollen shut. The work, however, was successful. Opened up, the creeks flowed freely, and
without large oaks or sycamores to shade them, the orchard trees grew more quickly and
uniformly. Clearing the land also expanded the views available from the house, which Louisiana
happily noted “improves the looks of the place very much. … Now the vineyard all seems as one
and much larger and more beautiful.”31
Muir left no record about what this work meant to him, but it plainly ran counter to a
philosophy that he had expressed in years past. In 1875, Muir published in the Overland Monthly
one of his most popular pieces, “Flood-Storm in the Sierra.” Wandering through the pinecovered foothills, Muir marveled at a torrential storm that filled the forests with motions, sounds,
and smells that he captured in some of his most effective prose. However, the storm that
delighted Muir devastated the valley communities below, hitting Marysville particularly hard
when the Yuba breached its levee and flooded through the city streets, drowning one child and
ruining millions of dollars in property. Muir acknowledge the flooding, but dismissed its
importance in language that was shockingly callous, writing that but a “few rats and people”
drowned and expressing delight over “the soft hypocrisies of society” rightly washed away.
31
Louisiana Strentzel, “Diary,” January 16, March 19 and 21, 1881; quote from March 19.
–– 10 —
Without property or a family of his own then, Muir knew where he stood: “Man’s control is
being steadily extended over the forces of nature, but it is well, at least for the present, that
storms can still make themselves heard.”32 When, in 1894, after a dozen years on the ranch, Muir
revised that essay for inclusion in The Mountains of California, he edited out the rats, the corpses
and the flooded farms.33 Slowly and with all too obvious reluctance, Muir was taking root.
Of course, the domestic life was not all renunciation and forsaken pleasures. On March
25, 1881, shortly after Muir wrapped up his labors in the creeks, Louie gave birth to the couple’s
first child, their daughter Wanda. John overflowed with happiness. Having spent months
working on the land, investing himself in it, Muir now drew pleasure from it. He expressed his
joy as though it arose from the land itself. “How beautiful the world is and how beautiful is the
time of the coming of our little love. You remember,” writing to his mother, “that it was bloom
time of the year when we were married, and out little bloom bud baby has arrived in the midst of
the richest bloom of the orchards.”34
Settled at last, Muir began to shape the ranch to fit his desires. He undertook the
renovation of the two-story cottage that he shared with his in-laws, adding additional windows
and two new fireplaces. Large fires in multiple rooms throughout the house became a standard
element at any celebratory moment in the household and Muir made something of a ritual out of
unveiling new sets of fireplace tongs, shovels, and pokers to mark Thanksgiving or the New
Year.35 His unease over being tied to one place did not vanish and his letters to friends showed
that stress. To Annie Bidwell he offered an explanation for his new rootedness that sounded like
an apology: “It is not now so easy a matter to wing hither and thither like a bird, for here is a
wife and a baby and a home.” Yet it is clear too, from the same letter, that he took genuine
32
Muir, “Flood-Storm in the Sierra,” The Overland Monthly, June 1875, 489-496.
Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Century Company, 1894), Chapter 11.
34
JM to Ann Muir, March 27, 1881, John Muir Papers.
35
Louisiana Strentzel, “Diary,” entries from November 25, 1880, December 15 and 30, 1881.
33
–– 11 —
pleasure in the life he was creating: “Dormer windows, open wood-fires and perfectly happy
babies make any home glow with warm sunny brightness and bring out the best there is in us.”36
Muir was creating a home for himself, tying himself through his labor and his emotional
connections to this one particular piece of land where he and his family could find shelter and
sustainment.
“Louie’s Fig”
Louisiana Strentzel, wife to Doctor Strentzel and mother-in-law to John Muir, knew well
how to be at home on the ranch. A frail woman, owing to a traumatic and failed pregnancy in her
earlier years, Louisiana could move about the property only with difficulty. 37 Even short walks,
interrupted with frequent rests, left her exhausted. She did, however, make a point of walking.
By the late 1870s, she had developed the habit of, several times a year, taking a lengthy walk
through the ranch, occasionally even venturing to the peaks of the surrounding hills. Similar
strolls taken by Muir were described by one biographer as “the poor flights of a clipped eagle,”
but for Louisiana those long scrambles represented a significant accomplishment.38 The entire
circumference of her closely-explored natural world never amounted to more than a minor dayhike for her son-in-law, but that small space overflowed with a richness of lived experience in a
way that Muir never managed for the ranch property.
This is her walk from February 21, 1882, as recorded in her diary that evening, in its
entirety:
The weather has been exceedingly cold the past three days, ice near half an
inch thick, but today is very pleasant and at 2 o’clock I took the baby and
walked in the orchard. I first went down to Louie’s fig tree, set the baby in
36
JM to A. Bidwell, December 30, 1881, John Muir Papers.
Suzan Hagstrom, One Man's Journey (Martinez, CA: S. Hagstrom, 1974), 7-10.
38
Turner, John Muir, 271.
37
–– 12 —
the fork, and rested awhile, then by little Johnnies’ row of grapes, to the
flume and then sat down and rested, there over to the big pear tree and
rested awhile on the rocks, the avenue seemed so beautiful that I concluded
to go on to the hedge. I was very tired when I reached there and looked
through to see John and the men planting the grapes in the lower field. John
saw me, and came to meet me and carried the baby along the new road to
where they were planting. They are getting on very well. John has made for
each man a little machine, his own invention, which facilitates the work
very much and greatly aids them in planting the vines perfectly strait. This
will be a grand vineyard when all is planted. I was fearfully tired when I
reached home but the darling baby enjoyed it all so much that I was fully
compensated.39
Dense with memory and alive to the passage of time, this is Louisiana’s characteristic landscape,
experienced in a way particular to her. Her son-in-law sought in the wilderness a boundless
“unmeasured time” – days melting into weeks, the slow rising, arcing, and setting of the sun,
overlaid with the gradual movement of the seasons. For him, at its ideal, the grand expansiveness
of natural cycles absorbed the small, parceled-out time of nineteenth-century American life and
offered an entry into the experience of a mystical wholeness. Louisiana’s experience was not
entirely different. She similarly sought to absorb the particular into the general and to find
consolation for temporary pains in the great passage of time. However, she dipped not into the
endless cycles of the days and seasons, but into a more human time: the succession of
generations. There is a sense of the mystical wholeness, as well, in the idea that the pleasures of
the granddaughter compensate for the exertions of the grandmother.
The process of growth, the taking root of trees and vines, connected her to this landscape
and she realized her part in it by placing her memories and hopes for her family into the heart of
it. “Louie’s fig” had been planted by her daughter, at age seven, in 1853, during the family’s first
39
Louisiana Strentzel, “Diary,” February 21, 1882.
–– 13 —
year on the ranch. “I little thought then of the future of the tree,” Louisiana remembered; “It
grew slowly the first few years.”40 “Little Johnnie’s” grapevines reminded her of her son, who
planted the vines and then, four years later, in 1857, died suddenly and unexpectedly. The vines
linked as well, though, to John Muir, whom she imagined as being in some way compensation
for her own, missing, John.41 John Muir’s planting of vines projected this past growth forward
into the future. Her concern for the absolute straightness of the rows reflected a desire to exert a
positive influence over the future. When the vineyard first started going in, two weeks prior, she
had recorded a conversation between Muir and a field hand: “Charley is helping him, and said to
John that they much mark the rows very strait for the vineyard may last a hundred years.”42 This
process of connecting backwards and projecting forward simultaneously runs throughout the
observations of the land that Louisiana recorded in her diary. Located very specifically in space,
her walks roamed freely through time. The land connected her to family members departed and
to generations yet to come; it made the past present and the future tangible.
The Strentzels also deliberately mimicked past landscapes. They planted in Martinez the
offspring of trees that grew around Honey Grove, Texas, where the couple had been married and
established their first farm, and where Louisiana’s family continued to reside. The hedge that
Louisiana gazed through to observe Muir at work was of Osage orange, a thorny plant
indigenous to the bottom lands of Texas and Oklahoma, and widely planted as a means of
fencing off fields before the invention of barbed wire. In their first year on the ranch, the
Strentzels wrote to their relatives who had remained in Texas in order to request seeds from the
Osage orange. The establishment of the half-mile long hedge served early on to mark both their
increasing prosperity and their intent to fully settle on the land, remaking it in a way familiar to
40
Ibid., July 10, 1878.
The day after John and Louie announced their engagement, Louisiana wrote in her diary, "I felt that my own Son,
my Johnnie had been given back to me," June 17, 1879.
42
Ibid., Feb 6, 1882.
41
–– 14 —
them.43 So, too, they planted pecans sent from Texas by Louisiana’s brother, again establishing
tangible connections between the land, the family, and memories of a home left behind. “What a
grove they will make if they all grow,” Louisiana wrote, revealing a hint of anxiety; “It is rather
late for us to plant trees of such slow growth.”44
Trees did not always grow as expected. The defining feature of the Strentzel property in
its early years was the pear orchard planted in the second summer, eventually featuring more
than sixty varieties of pear, including most of the finest varietals gathered from the European
orchards. This was the orchard that the newspapers and magazines mentioned when they wanted
their readers to grasp the enterprise and ambition of Dr. Strentzel.45 Louisiana had helped to graft
those trees, despite her illness in those early years. She had followed slowly after her husband,
wrapping in cloth each grafted sapling after he had finished emplacing the new cuttings. She
regained her strength as the trees grew and by the mid-1870s was walking daily in the orchard,
down “the rows of pear trees [that] formed a complete arbor, cool and airy.” The trees, though,
grew more vigorously than anticipated. The limbs from neighboring trees began to interweave,
and her walking path grew obstructed. When she revisited the orchard in 1881, a quarter century
after the grafting, she found an orchard grown too thick to continue yielding high quality fruit.
Workers had begun removing every other tree and had heaped in the pathways “great piles of
firewood waiting to be hauled out.”46 Some of their finest orchards reduced to fuel, two of their
three children dead before adulthood, the Strentzel knew the limits of their control, but they
continued to plant in perfectly straight rows, exerting what influence they might, trusting in the
efficacy of their methods.
43
Louisiana Strentzel to parents, February 21, 1854, and Louie Strentzel to aunt, October 19, 1859, John Muir
Papers.
44
Louisiana Strentzel, “Diary,” March 2, 1879.
45
Arno Dosch, “The Mystery of John Muir's Money: A Simple Naturalist's Studies in the Temple of Mammon,”
Sunset, February 1916, 22; “Life of Dr. Strentzel,” Contra Costa Gazette, March 15, 1925.
46
Louisiana Strentzel, “Diary,” March 20, 1881.
–– 15 —
Inhabiting the land, for Louisiana, meant shaping it in order to enhance its capacity to
serve as the seat of memory. The rocks that she rested upon in her walk existed there not
naturally but because they had been hauled into place by a couple of the Chinese laborers, Ah
Kam and Kama, in order to serve as benches. Two had been placed under the big pear, and two
under Louie’s fig. Kama raked the ground beneath the fig and brought up from the creek twenty
buckets of sand to make a floor for the living room. The fig, more than two decades old, reached
out its limbs to form “a very cozy little summer house.” The Strentzels entertained guests within
the bower and told them stories about the ranch, its founding, its pleasures and disappointments.
Because the tree expressed something essential about their place on the land and about the
passage of their family through generations, it meant much more to Louisiana than just a shady
resting place. “This,” she wrote, “will ever be sacred space to us.”47
“A Machine for Making Money”
Muir’s relationship with the ranch turned sour sometime in the early spring of his third
year. In the archival record, this change occurs suddenly on April 18, 1883, in a furious letter
that Muir sent off to the editor of the Overland Monthly, explaining why he would have no new
work to submit:
I am lost and chocked in agricultural needs. Work is coming upon me from
near and far and at present I cannot see how I am to escape its degrading
vicious effects. Get someone to write an article on the vice of over-industry,
it is greatly needed in these times of horticultural storms.48
This was not an isolated complaint. An old friend who called upon Muir during that spring found
him prosperous but discouraged. Muir confessed frankly that he found the ranch work “very
47
Ibid., July 10, 1878. There are intriguing parallels here to Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and
Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
48
JM to Millicent Shinn, April 18, 1883, John Muir Papers.
–– 16 —
distasteful” and that he felt cut off from most everything he had come to value in life. “I am
losing the precious days,” the visitor remembered him declaring; “I am degenerating into a
machine for making money.”49
And truly, during his first years on the ranch, Muir behaved as though making money,
quickly and in abundance, was entirely the point. The Strentzel ranch had always been intensely
cultivated and fundamentally market-oriented, but Muir found ways to push production further.
The grapevines that Muir had been putting in when Louisiana observed him on her walk replaced
a hayfield that Dr. Strentzel reserved for providing feed for the family’s animals. Muir took the
additional money the grapes brought in and used a tiny part of it to buy hay. 50 Where Strentzel
had grown many varieties of fruit, maintaining a personal interest in agricultural
experimentation, Muir narrowed down the ranch’s output, focusing on the most profitable
varietals. Local histories and community lore did not remember Muir as a good neighbor – he
rarely socialized below his social standing and belonged to neither the church nor the Grange –
but they do recall that he was fastidious in his habits and fierce in his business negotiating. He
had an aim and he achieved it. When his fruit was damaged hauling the wagon loads over the
cobbled streets of Martinez, Muir pressured the city to return the roads to dirt and they did so.51
The very geography of the Alhambra Valley was transformed by the quickening pace of
the agricultural markets in which Muir participated. Unexpectedly, the valley found itself at the
crossroads of the booming international wheat trade. The southern shore of the Carquinez Strait
soon bristled with half-mile long piers and immense warehouses standing shoulder-to-shoulder.
Fed by the Central Pacific Railroad, the warehouses shipped nearly all the grain grown in the
49
Samuel Hall Young, Alaska Days with John Muir (New York: Fleming Revell Co., 1915), 203-4.
Dosch, “The Mystery of John Muir's Money,” 61.
51
On negotiating and cobbled streets, Dosch, “The Mystery of John Muir’s Money.” On memories as a poor
neighbor, Transcript, Oral History of Joe Figuerado by John E. Jensen, August 31, 1966; Interview with Earl
Jerkins, May 12, 1975; and Oral Interview with Barbara Schulz, Oct 7, 1994. All the oral histories are housed in the
archives at the John Muir National Historic Site, Martinez, California [Hereafter, JOMU]. Extra thanks to Carola
DeRooy, the archivist for the northern California National Historic Sites, for arranging access to these collections.
50
–– 17 —
Central Valley through the boom years, making its facilities among the largest in the world.
Salmon canneries cropped up alongside them on the waterfront, crowding together Chinese
laborers and Italian and Greek fishermen. The city soon had its first anti-Chinese riot in April of
1882, a bloody affair that drew protest from the Chinese consulate but which received a sort of
official approval two weeks later when President Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. If the
valley had once lain under a Rip Van Winkle slumber, as Strentzel had written, then it awoke in
that spring of 1882, startled from sleep by the cry of train engines and ship whistles. 52
Muir’s responsibilities increased dramatically in the late fall of the year when Strentzel
completed work on the mansion he had been planning as his retirement home. Perched on a
small knoll, a mile down valley from the original homestead, the house allowed Strentzel to look
out over most of the valley, taking in the changes that he had helped to bring about. Ironically,
the economic development that Strentzel had long advocated ended up largely displacing his
social role. The Grange’s wharf, only a half-dozen years old, already felt outdated, vastly
overshadowed by the industrial facilities that had come to dominate the waterfront. Strentzel had
to acknowledge that the influence of even the largest local fruit grower diminished rapidly before
the power of distant capitalists who controlled the railroads, shipping lines, and flour mills that
increasingly dominated the valley’s growth. Retiring when he did, Strentzel managed to exit near
his peak, but he could do so only by adding a heavy burden to his son-in-law’s already
significant load.
As Muir’s activities increased, his health deteriorated. Always thinly framed, Muir’s
weight fell off even further under the stress of management, dipping occasionally below a
hundred pounds. He complained of overwork and exhaustion, and he fretted as his appetite
vanished. Friends and family, seeing a stark contrast to the abundant healthfulness that had
52
Contra Costa Gazette, April 29 and May 6, 1882; Martinez Historical Society, Martinez: A California Town
(Martinez, Calif: RSI Publications, 1986), 25.
–– 18 —
characterized his appearance when fresh from the mountains, decided that Muir was simply out
of place on the ranch.
Neither they nor he used the term neurasthenia in writing, but the symptoms of the illness
fit. Literally meaning a weakness of nerves, the term first appeared in the medical literature in
1869. Never carefully defined, neurasthenia was an expansive illness that corralled an enormous
range of symptoms, from headaches to sexual dysfunction, under a single heading. Its broad
applicability allowed neurasthenia to be deployed as a tool for cultural criticism and the doctors
most associated with the illness earned their acclaim by identifying its underlying causes in the
instability of the American economy. It was an illness, they claimed, that was “most frequently
met with in civilized, intellectual communities,” and that then often perversely took the form of a
crippling inability to write or to perform other high level mental functions. Muir’s own painful
struggles with writing fit the expectations of the illness, and his repeated warnings about the
harm of over-industry made clear that he had absorbed the general cultural anxieties.53
Like most diseases of the nineteenth century, neurasthenia had its own particular
geography, a set of places most associated with its onset or relief.54 East Coast sufferers of hayfever, considered a low-grade version of neurasthenia, learned to avoid the heat and stimulation
of cities during the summer, retreating whenever possible to mountain resorts.55 Climate
53
On neurasthenia, the critical introductory works are those by Charles Rosenberg, particularly “The Place of
George M. Beard in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 36 (1962) and
“Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civilization as Risk,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 72 (1998). Also
Francis Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870 – 1910 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1987). The key primary source is George Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and
Consequences (New York: Arno Press, 1972 [original 1881]), with a forward by Rosenberg. First mention: Beard,
“Neurasthenia, or Nervous Exhaustion,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, (Apr 29, 1869).
54
On medical geography, starting points are James Cassedy, Medicine and American Growth, 1800 – 1860
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), chapter 3, “Medical Geography of a Growing Nation;” and
Conevery Bolton Valencius, “Histories of Medical Geography,” in Rupke, Nicolass, ed., Medical Geography in
Historical Perspective (London: Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine, 2000). An excellent work on
changing perceptions of the Central Valley’s medical geography is Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of
Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
55
Gregg Mitman, “Hay Fever Holiday: Health, Leisure, and Place in Gilded-Age America,” Bulletin of Historical
Medicine, 77 (2003).
–– 19 —
contributed to the over stimulation of the nerves, and the Central Valley of California, with its
hot, dry northern winds, stood out among American locations as particularly hazardous.56 But the
clearest geographical dividing line was one that was as much cultural as physical: the separation
of city and country. Charles Beard, the most prominent of neurasthenia specialists, famously
identified as the five causes of the illness, “steam power, the telegraph, the periodical press, the
sciences, and the mental activity of women.”57 The pace of the city, its unpredictability, its moral
and economic hazards left all urbanites perpetually on a mental edge, greatly increasing their risk
of tumbling over into illness. Conversely, the steadiness and physical substantiality of rural
living was supposed to contribute to recovery, returning the over-stressed to productive health.
Many Californians in the late nineteenth century adopted this mental balance of city and
country. Muir’s neighbor and friend, John Swett, left behind a contentious career as a reforming
principal and state Superintendent of Education to take up wine-making and nursery production.
His autobiography wrapped the farm in rustic prose, finding in country life the perfect salve for
his wounds and nourishment for his soul. 58 Thousands of others shared in this adoration of the
country. On weekends, excursion-rate trains brought out carloads of clerks and mechanics from
Oakland to picnic in the orchards of the Alhambra Valley and to contemplate a change of life.59
Yet the same trains that took tourists to the valley helped to tie the city and country together,
obscuring their differences. Likewise, the heavy expenditure of labor and capital that Swett
invested in realizing his rural estate belied the very notion that this was a retirement to pastoral
slumber.
Louisiana Strentzel caught this tension in an 1865 letter, writing to thank a San Francisco
56
Beard, “Physical Future of the American People,” The Atlantic Monthly, 43 (June 1879).
Beard, American Nervousness, 96.
58
John Swett, Public Education in California; Its Origin and Development, with Personal Reminiscences of Half a
Century (New York: American Book Company, 1911), Chapter 18; plus an undated clipping from an unidentified
newspaper in the folder “Mis. Odds and Ends,” John Swett Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley.
59
Louisiana Strentzel, “Diary,” July 21, 1878.
57
–– 20 —
friend for hosting a visit. In contrasting city and country, she borrowed directly from convention:
The sudden transition from your noisy, blustering city to our calm secluded
home seemed very much to us like entering into another world. We were
very tired of course after five days of continual excitement and confusion,
but a week of quiet life in our pleasant valley has restored our usual
equanimity.
She quickly transitioned, though, to a description of the cherry harvest, a period of frantic labor
as dozens of hired hands brought in the crop and prepared it for shipment, always anxious about
protecting the fruit and securing its best price. “You can have some idea of the work we have to
do,” she concluded. 60 Between 1865 and the mid-1880s, that work grew by leaps and bounds. As
the strains of urban economic life penetrated the valley, the ranch’s ability to offer safe harbor
from the tumult of modern life declined.
For those like Louisiana, whose mental geographies continued to be anchored by San
Francisco at one end and, at the other, by the farming valleys of the Bay Area, the contrast
between city and farm still held enough weight to make overlooking its inconsistencies plausible.
But for Muir, who spent the 1870s alternating between summering in the Sierra and overwintering in Oakland and San Francisco, a different sort of mental geography was at work, one
that divided the city from the wilderness. Where the farm was to fall along that spectrum was the
question that Muir spent the early 1880s answering. He had hoped to find in farming
contentment – the equanimity that Louisiana wrote of. But in an Alhambra Valley that had
outgrown even his father-in-law’s optimistic hopes, Muir found not the organic, simple life, but
one that was mechanical, complex, and fiercely driven.
An accident in the fall of 1882 crystallized that realization. A can of phosphorous, used in
mixing pesticide, burst into flames while being handled by a Chinese worker. In the excitement
60
Louisiana Strentzel to unidentified “Doctor,” May 19, 1865, John Muir Papers.
–– 21 —
to contain the blaze, Muir was splashed with the flaming chemical, setting his clothes on fire. He
burnt his hands extinguishing the flames but felt fortunate to not have been more severely
injured. The paper reported his survival as “near miraculous,” and Muir, tellingly, remembered
the experience as one in which he “came near dying a mean, civilized death. … How different
that would have been from a nice white death in the crevasse of a glacier!” His conclusion to the
morality tale made clear that he had separated the farm from the wilderness, tying it instead to
the compromised realm of the city: “You’re not safe a day in this sordid world of moneygrubbing men.”61
“Going Home”
Muir’s opinion of the ranch never fully recovered after that original realization that the
farm was more of the city than the mountains. The birth of his second daughter, Helen, in 1886,
only reinforced his worries. Helen was small and frail at birth and remained frighteningly fragile
for years. Concern for his daughter’s health tied Muir to the ranch even more firmly and
heightened his anxieties about its winds and vapors. He began to see on the ranch a long series of
hazards that threatened the children at every turn and that required constant vigilance to guard
against. When Muir was away he wrote Louie lengthy prescriptive letters, detailing everything
that needed doing or avoiding in order to keep the girls healthy. In July of 1888, he directed her,
I need not tell you how close and constant should be your care of the
children, especially now with this hot weather. See that their clothing is not
too tight or heavy and be prepared to change as the weather changes. Also
see to it that nothing in the way of bad food and excitement or bad water or
sewer gas reaches them and be sure to make them go regularly to bed at the
61
Event summary and first quote from Contra Costa Gazette, September 10, 1882. Second two quotes from Young,
Alaska Days, 207.
–– 22 —
same hour every night.62
Preserving the children’s health in the Alhambra Valley, Muir argued, required protecting them
from the influences of the land around them.
Muir’s health concerns came to focus on a carp pond that Dr. Strentzel maintained at the
base of the knoll beside his retirement home. The different ways these two men regarded the
pond illustrates the distinction between the progressive horticulturalists’ belief in the improved
and harmonized landscape and Muir’s admiration for wilderness over civilization. For Strentzel,
the pond symbolized his commitment to jointly developing the environmental and economic
resources of the land. In his 1876 article he had imagined the sloughs and streams of the area
teeming with stocked fish, reclaiming what was otherwise a waste-space. He considered the land
of the Alhambra Valley to combine natural health advantages – sheltered from fogs, open to sea
breezes – with the improvements offered by development. Draining the wetlands that bordered
the bay both reduced the risk of fever and made fertile land available to farmers. 63 The
Strentzels’ experiences with the farm emphasized for them its healthfulness: Louisiana recovered
her strength among the orchards and forever after regarded it as particularly suited to invalids.64
By contrast, their two experiences with wilderness – their original desert crossing in coming to
California and the flooding of their first farm in the Sierra foothills – nearly cost them their own
lives and everything they owned.65
Muir never fully rejected the idea of development. Earlier in life, he offered support for
fish hatcheries and small-scale irrigation projects, both of which might suggest a positive attitude
62
JM to Louie Muir, July 1888, John Muir Papers.
John Strentzel, “Agricultural Development.”
64
Louisiana Strentzel, “Diary,” April 28, 1878.
65
John Strentzel, “Life of Dr. John T. Strentzel.”
63
–– 23 —
towards the carp pond. 66 But when his experiences on the ranch produced only ill-health and
discontentment, he started to see the land as a source of trouble. To Louie, he wrote repeatedly
during the summer forbidding the children to go near the pond, as its heated waters could give
off fever-causing vapors.67 To satisfy him, the family drained the pond, covered it with road dust,
and burned over it a quantity of sulfur-treated brush and straw.68 Development introduced
numerous ponds into the valley, for irrigation or recreation, all but the one of them beyond
Muir’s ability to control.69 To exterminate predators, poisons were scattered about the landscape,
a practice that Muir forbid to his own workers but over which otherwise he had no influence.70
And the disruption of predator-prey relationships, he believed, allowed rodents and snakes to
flourish.71 Muir introduced peacocks into his orchards in order to keep rattlesnakes away from
where the children played, but it was a small and defensive measure against a large and diffuse
threat.72 So far as Muir could see, Strentzel’s manipulation of nature produced only imbalance
and disharmony, not the horticultural ideal of which the agrarians dreamed.
Muir’s response to the Alhambra Valley contrasted not only with his in-laws’ beliefs, but
also with his own declarations about the health and safety of wild places. In his public writings,
Muir developed an argument that reversed the audience’s expectations about the wild and the
domestic: “No American wilderness that I know of is so dangerous as a city home ‘with all the
modern improvements.’ One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.”73 Muir’s
argument found its strongest voice in the series of writings promoting government created
66
John Muir, “Salmon Breeding. The Establishment of McCloud River,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin,
October 29, 1874; Muir, “Tulare Levels.”
67
JM to Louise Muir, July 19, 1888, and undated, July 1888, John Muir Papers.
68
Louie Muir to JM, July 31, 1888, John Muir Papers.
69
Frank Tracy to Grandmother Tracy, June 8, 1891, JOMU.
70
Transcript, Oral History, Jose Figueredo, September 1, 1976; and Frank Swett, Mar 9, 1957, JOMU; Jeffery
Killion, Cultural Landscape Report for John Muir National Historic Site (Boston: National Park Service, 2005), 68.
71
Oral History, Swett, JOMU.
72
Transcript, Oral History, Jose Figueredo, no date given, JOMU.
73
John Muir, Our National Parks, 28.
–– 24 —
wilderness parks collected in 1901’s Our National Parks. In it, Muir recalled pleading vainly
with Emerson to spend the night beneath the Sequoias, arguing for the superior healthfulness of
the outdoors: “There was not a single cough or sneeze in all the Sierra. Only in homes and hotels
were colds caught.”74 He downplayed the physical exertion inherent in wilderness travel and
attempted to alleviate fears. In the woods, Muir reassured his audience, “the snake danger is so
slight it is hardly worth mentioning.”75 It is clear, that for Muir, the snake was in the garden, not
the wilderness.
In promoting wilderness, Muir sought to convince his readers not merely that the woods
were safe, but that they were essential for health. He presented his readers to themselves as men
and women enfeebled by modern life, suffering from “the stupefying effects of the vice of overindustry,” living in a landscape of “care and dust and early death.”76 That was a landscape that
Muir knew. In the world he was sketching, it belonged not just to the city but to the farms and
ranches beyond, all the way up into the foothills, before nature again reclaimed the land. Health
and sanity could be found only by escaping the world of labor and profit, dirt and disease. In the
first paragraph of Our National Parks he stated the argument in its by-now familiar form:
“Thousands of tired, never-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to
the mountains is going home.”77
Central to Muir’s philosophy is the story he told about finding that home in the
mountains. Muir intended it as it has been received, as a prescriptive course that others might
follow to bring themselves into relationship with nature. The account is contained in Muir’s
finest work, My First Summer in the Sierra, published in 1911, but based on Muir’s personal
journals from 1869. The decisive moment came on June 6, when Muir’s party crossed from the
74
Ibid., 133.
Ibid.
76
Ibid., 1, 12.
77
Ibid., 1.
75
–– 25 —
grassy foothills into the mountain forests:
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm,
making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-andbone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us…a part of
all nature, neither old nor young, sick or well, but immortal. … How
glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is.78
This testifies that Muir found his home in nature through a spontaneous and ecstatic conversion
experience. His receptivity and openness to the world around him allowed him to discover, in a
flash of insight, that he was fundamentally united with nature and that so long as he remained
spiritually at home in the mountains he, or an essential part of himself, was indestructible. His
body might age and fall ill, but the larger whole to which he had bound himself would remain
fresh and ever-flowing.
The process of homemaking was never quite so simple as he presented it. While My First
Summer in the Sierra is ostensibly the straight publication of the 1869 journals, the text is, in
actuality, far more complicated than that. Historian Steven Holmes has demonstrated that what
survives as the journal from 1869 is actually a much later copy, extensively revised and
expanded in 1887 after years of living on the ranch. Nearly all the material related to the
conversion experience dated from that later time. That is to say that Muir’s fully formed, latelife, intellectual and spiritual conception was inserted backwards into a moment when Muir was
far more tentative in his responses. In 1869, Muir only gradually integrated the new experience
into his existing framework of hopes and memories, relationships and ideas.79 The notion of the
Yosemite Valley as a spiritual home did not come to Muir in a flash but developed incrementally
78
Muir, First Summer, 20-1.
Steven Holmes’ argument is presented in two locations: in his essay “Rethinking Muir’s First Summer in the
Yosemite,” included in Sally Miller, ed., John Muir in Historical Perspective (New York: Peter Lang Publishing,
1999), 153-63, and in his book, The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1999), particularly chapter 5.
79
–– 26 —
over the years. It required leaving Yosemite, finding a home in the city, and then returning as a
visitor to the Valley, to see it again with fresh eyes and new context. It required sorting through
memories; connecting particular locations to developing ideas and personal relationships; writing
about the places; working an amorphous mass of impressions into concrete form. “Put simply,”
Holmes concludes, “Muir did not suddenly find a home in Yosemite; rather he created one.”80
For Muir and the Strentzels homes were more than just houses, they were landscapes
where living nature interacted with the viewers’ aspirations and fears. Coming to know those
places and to be at home in them is a dominant theme that runs through all of their life stories.
Their relationships to places developed in fundamentally idiosyncratic ways, as all human
relationships do, but also fit within larger cultural trends. As part of a generation of agrarian
reformers, John Strentzel attempted to improve the nature of California through careful
cultivation and financial investment. He developed a public role for himself as a gentleman
farmer, and based his authority on the productivity of his land. He imagined the valley
developed, providing homes and health for a body of citizens. Louisiana used the land to
reinforce her role as a mother, walking through a landscape that embodied generations of her
family. She domesticated a space increasingly devoted to economic production, keeping alive the
farm’s ability to offer cultural safe harbor from the anxieties of the Gilded Age markets. Neither
of the Strentzels was wholly original in approach. Both followed broad conventions for their
gender and class. Yet, their actions were sincere and specific, tied to concrete features in the land
and particular past actions. They came to be at home in a lived-in, cultivated valley that they saw
as conducive to health and well-being.
Muir never managed to make such a home for himself in the Alhambra Valley. His initial
aspirations for the ranch sunk beneath the heavy burden of management. A strong market in fruit
80
Holmes, “Rethinking,” 160.
–– 27 —
made Muir wealthy, but it extracted a cost in health and contentment. He adopted a critique of
society that saw in the rush and instability of modern life the source of physical illness and
mental anxiety. He rejected the conviction of his in-laws that economic growth could be
harmonized with nature, and saw in the valley’s intensively altered landscape a harbor for
disease and mishaps. Instead, Muir constructed an intellectual and spiritual home for himself in
the mountains. He imagined wilderness as the world apart from the city, a place to escape from
strains and to recover health. Nature served its function not when it was divided up and made use
of by settlers, but when it was preserved whole for the recreational (literally, re-creational) use of
the nation’s people.
Through his writings and the Sierra Club, Muir sowed these ideas into the broader
culture, directing the thinking of particularly the professional class of Californians. These same
individuals had provided much of the impetus for the growth of the agrarian movement in
California, both intellectually and, through purchasing their own retirement ranches, materially.
As they and their children came to know the mountains of California through Sierra Club
outings, they lost contact with the farms that were increasingly devoted to direct economic
production and stripped of their idealized agrarian associations. In coming to be at home in a
preserved nature, a home that was constructed though intellectual activity, they ceased to closely
examine the process of making a home through physical labor, of investing themselves in a
worked landscape.
–– 28 —