The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

Actually, the Project Gutenberg edition on Stanza on my iPhone.

I read Muir's The Yosemite last year and found that book and him utterly amazing. Decided to read some more of his works, and this seemed like the logical place to start.

His origins may not have been that unusual for his time, but where he went from there in his late youth and early manhood seem entirely unexpected.

His early life and his narrative fall into three parts: his early youth in Scotland, his emigration to America and adolescence spent in help his family carve two farms out of the wilderness in Wisconsin, and his remarkable pursuit of an education and cultivation of his inventive genius.

In his early schooling in Scotland, corporal punishment was the chief pedagogical technique. Sort of an early form of standardized testing: no child left unscathed. This, and the savagery of the other boys in school, might have soured one on education forever. Remarkably, in Muir's case, they did not. Even in the narrative of his early youth, he describes his explorations of nature: observing birds and finding their eggs.

Suddenly, in 1849, when Muir was about eleven, his father decided the family would emigrate to America. First, his father and the three eldest children, made the crossing and found some land in Wisconsin. They built a shanty and set about the hard work of making a farm out of the wilderness. By fall, they had cleared the land and built a frame house so that the rest of the family was able to join them. But despite the hard labor that this entailed, his description of this time is one of overwhelming joy as he and his brother Daniel enjoy the freedom of the wilderness and discover the animals of the woods and the farm. This part of his narrative contains vivid descriptions of his discovery of nature around him.

After eight years, having already built a comfortable farm, his father bought another half-section of land four or five miles distant, and again commenced the back-breaking work of clearing it and building it up. Remarkably, for all the strenuous work he was doing and his father's strict religious discouragement, Muir set about trying to educate himself in what little time he had available outside of work. He got his father to buy him a book on arithmetic, and despite not having attended school since the age of 11, he was able to work through it in short order. He then set about trying to read all that he could, borrowing or acquiring books as he could. All this was sternly opposed by his father, who believed that the Bible was the only book he needed. Muir would try to steal five to ten minutes to read by candlelight around 8pm before his father would admonish him to put out the light and go to bed to be ready for work tomorrow.

One night, his father made the tactical mistake of telling him that he shouldn't have to be scolded every night into putting out the light, but that he could get up as early as he liked. Immediately, Muir began going to bed with the rest of the family, but getting up at 1 AM to work on his inventions. He built scientific instruments and whittled clocks of his own design.

Later, when he showed them to a knowledgeable neighbor, he was told he should go exhibit them at the State Fair, and that he could easily secure a job in a machine shop. Eventually, this is just what he did. When he left home for the State Fair, his father assured him that he was on his own and if he should run into a rough spell, he shouldn't look to his father for help.

At the State Fair, he was offered a job in a machine shop. After a few months though, it did really work out. There wasn't enough work or instruction available to satisfy him. So he moved to Madison. After a little while he figured out that he could get into the University of Wisconsin, teaching himself enough to keep up with the rest of the students, and earn enough doing odd jobs to put himself through college.

So that's just what he did, learning a great variety of things befitting his wonderous curiousity: botany, geology, chemistry, sciences, and engineering.

End of youth. He wrote more books about later.