biography
pronunciation:
[myoor]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1838–1914)
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| biography:
| Explorer, naturalist, and conservationist, born in Dunbar, East Lothian, E Scotland, UK. Brought by his family to Wisconsin (1849), he grew up on a farm. He studied at the University of Wisconsin (1859–63) but left without a degree as he refused to take the required courses. He was an ingenious inventor of mechanical devices, but he lost an eye (1867) in an industrial accident and so turned to his other interest, natural history. He had already walked through parts of the Midwest and Canada, and in 1867 he walked from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1868 he moved to California, and for the next 12 years he studied the natural world he saw on his extensive travels, going up to Alaska (where in 1879 he discovered Glacier Bay and the glacier later named after him) and to South America, Africa, and Australia, but with a special concern for California's Yosemite Valley. He married Louie Wanda Strentzel (1880), the daughter of an Austrian who established the Californian fruit and wine industries, and he spent the next 11 years successfully engaged in growing fruit trees. Meanwhile, with his friend Robert U Johnson (1853–1937) he campaigned for a national park in California, and in 1890 Congress approved a bill creating the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. In 1891 Congress also passed a bill authorizing the setting aside of forest preserves, but opposition by commercial interests forced Muir to continue campaigning to save the forests through speeches and magazine articles, but it was only when he gained the support of President Theodore Roosevelt that any substantial acreage was set aside. In 1892 Muir had also founded the Sierra Club and was the first president of this leading conservationist organization. In addition to his many articles, he published several books during his lifetime including The Mountains of California (1894) and Our National Parks (1901), while others were published posthumously, such as Travels in Alaska (1915) and A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916). A sequoia forest near San Francisco was named Muir Woods in his honour, and the John Muir Trust to acquire wild land in Britain was established in 1984. |
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