THE CONVERSATION OF JOHN MUIR 
By Melville B. Anderson 
Professor of English Literature, Leland Stanford University 
OHN MUIR is beyond care for 
what we do, yet I am a little dis- 
turbed by the feeling that, if he 
knew what I am doing now, he would 
not spare me a shaft of his irony; per- 
haps, with allusion to Burns, his prince 
of poets, he would enquire what he had 
done that I should be discharging my 
musket over his grave! Certainly I 
have no claim to be heard upon hin, 
just as I had no claim to his friendship, 
with which, nevertheless, I was graced 
for nearly a quarter of a century. Yet 
I like to think of “the way that love 
began.” 
When John Muir, then a shy youth, 
best known at the University of Wiscon- 
sin as a mechanical genius, left his Alma 
Mater to start upon his great quest, he 
carried a letter from Professor Butler to 
Miss Catharine Merrill of Indianapolis, 
a lady whose memory is ever blessed 
among the elder generation there. At 
Indianapolis he stopped for awhile to 
earn some money by working in a 
machine-shop, where, however, he met 
with an accident which deprived him of 
sight in the right eye and threatened him 
with total blindness. During this trying 
time Miss Merrill, who was a_ busy 
teacher, showed herself a friend in need. 
In a memorial notice of her, he says: 
“She came to my darkened room an 
angel of light, with hope and cheer and 
sympathy purely divine.” It was from 
the lips of this lady that I first heard of 
Muir, and through my friendship with 
her and her family that it became natural 
and necessary, when coming to Cali- 
fornia, that I should know him. Thus 
one of the most perfect of women is 
beautifully linked in my memory with 
Now that 
they are both gone, it is pleasant to 
think that what I had in him I owed to 
one of the noblest of men. 
her grace. 
Muir had set out for South America, 
and the next stage of his trip was a tramp 
from Indianapolis to the Gulf. There 
he suffered another setback in the shape 
of an attack of some malignant fever. 
Recovering from this, he changed not 
his mind but his goal; the tropics, he 
decided, were not for him — he would go 
to California. He has often told me of 
his landing in San Francisco one April 
morning in I know not what year in the 
Strolling up Market Street and 
peering timidly into the faces of the 
sixties. 
people hurrying to the business of the 
day, he at length singled out a carpenter 
carrying a box of tools on his shoulder, as 
one who might safely be accosted. The 
momentous question was one to which, 
for the rest of us, the speaker’s future 
life was to be a large answer: “ How can 
I get out of town?” — The reply of the 
carpenter was: “Well, sir, you just go 
back the way you came and take the 
Oakland Ferry.’”’ — Oakland was then 
but a straggling village, and the way out 
was not the problem that it now would 
be for a stranger on foot. Instantly 
Muir turned his back upon all that San 
Francisco might have to show, and found 
himself an hour later at home and happy 
in the bills above Oakland. Following 
the line of the hills and mountains, he 
sauntered day after day, botanizing as 
he went, as far as Pacheco Pass, whence 
he had a Pisgah view of his Land of 
Promise, the distant Sierra. Descending 
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