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A thousand-mile walk to the Gulf (1916)

Author: Muir, John, 1838-1914; Badè, William Frederic, 1871-1936
Subject: Botany -- Southern states; Southern States -- Description and travel; California -- Description and travel
Publisher: Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin company
Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
Language: English
Call number: ucb:GLAD-33897485
Digitizing sponsor: MSN
Book contributor: University of California Libraries
Collection: americana; cdl

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Reviewer: stbalbach - - February 21, 2008
Subject: Smelling the roses in the desolation of war
John Muir (naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club) left his home in Indiana at age 29 and "rambled" 1,000 miles through the woods of the southern US ending in Florida in 1867/68. It was just 2 years after the end of the Civil War and he ran into "wild negroes" and long-haired horse-riding ex-guerrillas who would kill a man for $5. He passed through uninhabited stretches of burnt out fields and deserted farms and was often seen as a northern interluder mistrusted by his southern guests. He lived mostly on stale pieces of bread, almost dieing of starvation while camping in a graveyard outside of Savannah, GA. He caught malaria and was bed ridden for 3 months, cared for by a kind family in Florida.

This is a snapshot of the south right after the war and the contrast between Muir's beautiful nature writing and the devastation of war are just as striking today as they must have been for the many people who encountered this unusual walker of the woods. Muir's writing is under-stated - the book was published posthumously and is more a diary than a finished book, which gives it a truthfulness and matter of factness. Fundamentally a Romanticist world-view - the power of nature and mans relation to it - Muir delights in finding, sampling and discussing plants, animals and geography. The genre is best compared with Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes' and Thoreau's 'The Maine Woods'.

--Review by Stephen Balbach (C) cc-by-nd 05-2007 0

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