Sierra Club Bulletin 



Vol. IX San Francisco, January, 1915 No, 4 



EDWARD TAYLOR PARSONS^^'^" 



By John Muir 



Edward Taylor Parsons, mountaineer and faithful defender 

 of national forests and parks, was born March 15, 1861, near 

 Rochester, New York, the eldest of a family of five. His boy- 

 hood was spent on his father's farm ; in his earliest years help- 

 ing to look after the bees, chickens, and lambs, and at the age 

 of fourteen ploughing, mowing and harvesting. This simple, 

 healthful employment from daylight to dark through all sorts 

 of weather, though rather hard and exacting in the busiest 

 seasons, was not, however, without a few fine compensating 

 holidays spent in fishing and rowing on Black Creek, nutting 

 in the glorious Indian Summer, and in winter skating and 

 sleighing with merry companions, thus forming a bright back- 

 ground for the great club camp-fires in the mountain and forest 

 wildernesses of the west side of the continent that he was soon 

 to know and love so well. 



His parents were poor and the farm was poor, and of course 

 he had to work hard. He was fond of reading, but both time 

 and books were scarce and the wide world of libraries opened 

 later to him than to most boys. Excepting what he learned at 

 a little district school during a few odd months in winter, he 

 had no instruction until at the age of eighteen years he entered 

 the Rochester Academy, going home to help in the farm 

 work during the summer vacations. Three years later he 

 entered Rochester University and worked his way through four 

 lean and hungry years with money earned in harvesting, re- 

 porting on an evening newspaper, copying in a lawyer's office, 

 and was graduated with the class of 1886. 



