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Book Reviews 
THE WILDERNESS WORLD OF JOHN Muir. Edited by Edwin Way Teale. 
Houghton-Mifflin Co., Boston. 332 pages. $4.50. Illustrations by Henry B. 
Kane. 
Here was a man! Every once in awhile there tramps across the pages of 
history a personality whose life will influence thousands. John Muir, the 
Fabulous Scot, was such a creature, wild and untamed; a soul who loved 
to wander alone among the crags and canyons, cross dangerous glaciers 
and sleep under an evergreen, then prepare a breakfast of tea and bread. 
Muir had no equal in his passion for wilderness. He once wrote: “When 
I was a boy in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild. .. With 
red blooded playmates, as wild as myself, I loved to wander in the fields 
to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the 
shells and sea-weeds. .. and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms 
. when the sea and sky, the waves and clouds, were mingled together as 
one.” His earliest recollections were of walking in the country with his 
grandfather when he was but three years old. 
From this beginning came the man who perhaps, more than any other, 
is responsible for our national parks and forests. It was Muir who per- 
suaded Teddy Roosevelt to set aside 148,000,000 acres of forest reserves. 
It was Muir, who for 22 years, as President of the Sierra Club of Califor- 
nia, fought the good fight to preserve the great natural areas of our na- 
tion. Muir was one of the leaders who sought to prevent the Hetch-Hetchy 
Valley in Yosemite National Park from being used as a site for a water 
supply dam. The fight was lost, and in 19183 Congress authorized this project. 
Muir died a year later. 
John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland on April 21, 1838. In the Scot- 
tish tongue, his surname — Muir — means a moor or a wild stretch of 
wasteland. He came to the United States with his father, his brother David, 
and his sister Sarah in 1849. They settled in Wisconsin, and here Muir 
spent his early years. It was in 1867 that Muir began his famous Thousand- 
Mile-Walk-to-the-Gulf. After his marriage in 1880, he rented some land 
in the fruitful Alhambra Valley in California. From this large fruit ranch, 
Muir cleared over $10,000 a year for ten years. At the end of that time, 
he declared he had all the money he would ever need and began to travel 
again. Muir once said that he could have become a millionaire, but he chose 
instead to become a tramp. His travels took him to Florida, Cuba, Califor- 
nia, Alaska, the Arctic, Asia and South America. 
In this collection of writings taken from Muir’s ten volumes, one finds 
this choice item: “This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise some- 
where; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; 
vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and 
gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the earth 
rolls.” Muir’s philosophy is well worth recalling in these days when our 
traditional national park policy is threatened by Wines very officials who 
have sworn to uphold it. 
Raymond Mostek, 3345 N. Harding Ave., Chicago 18, Ill. 
