Video

A Glorious Journey

John Muir National Historic Site

Transcript

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A sun dappled day in Northern California. Two laughing girls. A doting father.

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This home is the picture of Victorian convention. But life here was never routine. Instead, this loving family lived in the eye of a raging social storm. Stirring the waters was John Muir. The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal warfare between right and wrong. From this home, John Muir changed the way a country viewed its wilderness.

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Not a resource to be harvested, he argued, but a treasure to be preserved. His campaign for preservation bridged a lifetime, carrying John Muir across America on a glorious journey.

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In 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago. Radiant with electric lights. It glows with the triumphs of the Industrial Revolution and the.

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But half a continent away. At his home outside San Francisco, John Muir calls for a counter revolution. Muir is a man at once revered and despised. To those who want to protect America's wilderness. He's a visionary to those who want to exploit it. He's a threat. Muir makes his home amid such contradictions. From 1890 until his death in 1914, the future father of the environmental movement lives not in the woods but in a 10,000 square foot Italianate mansion surrounded not by sequoias but by groves of fruit trees.

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Now nearing the end of his life, Muir reflects in the room of the house. That's his bridge. From the civilized world to the wild one. Muir calls it his scribble den. Here, in the early 1900s, the man known as America's great defender of wild places remembers and writes about the extraordinary journey of his life.

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The Odyssey begins half a century earlier and half a continent away, as the first 40 niners set foot in California. John Muir's family sets foot in the new state of Wisconsin. The 11 year olds family has just emigrated from Dunbar, Scotland. Much of the backbreaking labor of homesteading falls under his young shoulders, shoulders that also bear his father's discipline.

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What John calls the old Scotch fashion of whipping. But instead of the Iron fist, it is the soft caress of nature that shapes John Muir soul.

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Here. Without knowing it, we were still at school. Every wild lesson, a love lesson. Not whipped but charmed into us all that glorious Wisconsin wilderness.

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There is another force fueling John Muir's inner fire, forbidden by his stern father to study by day. He rises in the middle of the night to read. The lessons he learns here will stay with him his entire life. They form John Muir's inner map and will guide him through a lifetime of unexpected twists and turns.

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1867 Muir's journey takes him along an unlikely path the man who would one day rebel against the Industrial Revolution becomes a cog in its massive wheel. Muir, now 29 years old, has a mind for machines. Muir's inventions have some, calling him a genius. He begins putting his ideas to work at a carriage parts factory in Indiana. But in just a blink of an eye, Muir's life would profoundly change.

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A metal file pierces his right cornea. He despairs to his mother. The eye is lost.

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On doctor's orders, Muir sits in a darkened room for four weeks. His mind wandering to places he dreams of seeing, like the mythic Yosemite Valley, which he's read has cascades that batter the earth and trees that stretch to the sky and the eye, Muir thought was lost has, in fact, slowly healed. This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields.

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God has to literally kill us sometimes to teach us lessons.

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The would be Edison turns instead to reinventing himself. He chooses, in his own words, to be a tramp. For months, he drifts across America, a track he will one day memorialize in the book a 1000 mile walk to the Gulf. Seeking the road less traveled, Muir begins a life of wandering that will never really end and will eventually lead him to California to.

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San Francisco, 1868. This is the California that John Muir first sets eyes on when I stopped one day in San Francisco and then inquired about the nearest way out of town. But where do I want to go? Asked the man to whom I had a plate for this important information. I to any place that is wild. I said.

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The mountains are calling. He would later write. And in 1868 the restless Muir eagerly answered the call.

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To the Sierra Nevada.

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They glisten like a towering city of gold. Again John Muir is nearly blinded, this time by nature's glory. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada Snow Range, but the range of light.

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But even this radiant view could not prepare Muir for what he was about to experience in the heart of the Sierra. The place that in many ways, John Muir would come to define would have an even greater effect on him. The.

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In the brilliance of the Yosemite Valley. John Muir is reborn. After years of wandering, he puts down roots, living in this valley for four years.

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His new life plays out against the backdrop of Half Dome and El Capitan, and. Muir fills endless journals with calculations, measurements, and awful descriptions of Yosemite.

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No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life giving welcome to storms and calm alike, seemingly aware yet heedless of everything going on around them. His powers of observation and inventive mind crystallize in Yosemite in a way that would ultimately define him. In 1871, Muir pens the first of many published works on Yosemite, a story for the New York Tribune describing the valley's natural wonders.

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It is a time when great thinkers are celebrities, and, like Emerson and Thoreau, John Muir's eloquence captures imaginations and readers. Then, just as his fame is growing, Muir's journey through life once again takes a surprising turn. The 1880s dawned to find John Muir not studying sequoias, but tending fruit trees, cultivating a new life in the Alhambra Valley near a small town called Martinez.

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Reinventing himself again, this time as a rancher, husband and father. After more than 15 years in the wilderness, the solitude had become too much, even for John Muir.

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His loneliness has led him here to the ranch of Doctor John Strand Song, a well known horticulturalist. He falls in love with struggles daughter Louisa, a classically trained pianist. They marry in 1880. Louis, as Muir fondly called her, would spend the rest of her life being a devoted wife and companion. Understanding the complex, Muir in a way that perhaps no one else ever would.

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John and Louis live a mile from the stressful home. Built in 1882. The Victorian mansion features luxuries that seem to contradict everything. Muir stands for. One day, though, Muir will inherit this mansion and make it his own. For now, he is content to leave a smaller mark. Planting a tiny sequoia seedling gathered from the Sierra. Muir works doggedly in the Strepsils orchard.

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But ten years I was engaged in fruit raising, giving land, planting vineyards and orchards, selling the fruit until I had more money than I thought I would ever need. While the orchards thrive, so too does his family. The Muir's have two daughters, Wanda and Helen, and a devoted dog sticking. Strolling with them through the Alhambra Valley is John Muir's special joy.

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You in? But amid the elderberry and oak, John Muir again feels torn between two worlds. Though he loves his family, he dearly misses the wilderness. He is growing frail and irritable, what Louie calls low altitude sickness. Louie decides to take on management of the ranch. She encourages her husband to return to his true calling and to write about it.

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In 1889, Muir once again returns to the Yosemite Valley. Years earlier, this view left him awestruck.

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Now the same view leaves him devastated.

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Yosemite and much of the Sierra are under siege. Ancient sequoias are harvested for lumber. A businessman even has plans to adjust the flow of Nevada Falls. Muir returns to Martinez and pens his outrage. Tinkering with the Yosemite waterworks would seem about the last branch of industry that even Yankee ingenuity would be likely to undertake. Perhaps we may yet hear of an appropriation to whitewash the face of El Capitan, or correct the curves of the domes.

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Appearing in Century Magazine, a national publication. His words strike a passionate chord with many Americans.

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In 1890, with the death of Doctor Stenzel, the Muir's move into the big house on the Hill, the family's new home becomes the unlikely center of an emerging environmental movement. A movement whose primary voice is that of John Muir. Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away. His writings are eloquent. But Muir struggles with every word. One eternal grind, he calls it.

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But that grind reaps astonishing rewards from the scribbled and come words that begin to change the way Americans look at the wilderness. God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and the thousands streaming, leveling tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools. Only Uncle Sam can do that.

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Muir triumphs. In 1890, Congress set aside more than 1200 square miles of wilderness as Yosemite National Park. But the precious Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Sequoia Grove remain under California jurisdiction. Through Muir's advocacy, the Valley and the Grove are added to the park. In 1906. During the 1890s, while living at his Martinez home, Muir is at the zenith of his influence.

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He is named the first president of the newly formed Sierra Club. Politicians seek his counsel, and in 1903 the president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, asks Muir personally to guide him through Yosemite. For four days, these kindred spirits walked the woods together. Neither suspecting they will soon be on a collision course over the future of this mountain wilderness.

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Within Yosemite National Park. Glaciers sculpted a canyon so marvelous that Muir calls it one of nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples. The Hetch Hetchy Valley.

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Hetch Hetchy represents a nation traveling two paths into the 20th century. One, pursued by John Muir and other like mines, leads to preservation. The other sees the resources of the wilderness as critical to a growing nation. They converge at Hetch Hetchy with dire consequences. In 1901, San Francisco politicians proposed damming this valley for drinking water.

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The Hetch Hetchy is a battle that in many ways, newer will fight alone. Enemies in timber conspire against him. Friends shrink from the political controversy. Even Teddy Roosevelt turns his back.

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At home in Martinez. His loneliness is compounded. Grown children have left the hall silent. And in 1905, his wife Louis passes away.

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By 1913, the fate of Hetch Hetchy is sealed. Muir's precious mountain temple would be drowned under millions of gallons of water.

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The decision to dam Hetch Hetchy slows John Muir spirit and his gate. In the dusky glow of the orchards. The sun is setting on a remarkable lifelong journey. And now that the fight is finished and my education as a politician and lobbyist is finished, I am almost finished myself.

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On Christmas Eve 1914, at the age of 76, John Muir takes his last breath and quietly slips away on a new journey.

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But John Muir's vision did not die. The crowning achievement of his life happened two years after his death. The damming of Hetch Hetchy mobilized many Americans to better protect our national parks.

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In 1916, Congress created the National Park Service to preserve America's treasures for future generations, a mission so profoundly influenced by John Muir that he is called the father of the National Park Service. Building on John Muir's vision, the Park Service has grown to protect more than 83 million acres. These are all John Muir's legacy.

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The John Muir A National Historic Site, stands as a reminder that a single voice can make a difference. That an idea like the sequoias seedling Muir planted over 100 years ago can grow tall with faith and time. Here at journey's end, John Muir changed the world with his words. I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till Sunday.

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For going out, I found wasn't really going in.

 

Description

Official park film for the John Muir National Historic Site.

Duration

22 minutes, 8 seconds

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