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Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness - Hardcover

McNally, Robert Aquinas

 
9781496227263: Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1496227263 ISBN 13: 9781496227263
Verlag: University of Nebraska Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States’ vision of itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. That vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had inhabited and managed those same lands, in many cases for millennia. Muir argued for the preservation of wild sanctuaries that would offer spiritual enlightenment to the conquerors, not to the conquered Indigenous peoples who had once lived there. “Somehow,” he wrote, “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape.”

Cast Out of Eden tells this neglected part of Muir’s story—from Lowland Scotland and the Wisconsin frontier to the Sierra Nevada’s granite heights and Alaska’s glacial fjords—and his take on the tribal nations he encountered and embrace of an ethos that forced those tribes from their homelands. Although Muir questioned and worked against Euro-Americans’ distrust of wild spaces and deep-seated desire to tame and exploit them, his view excluded Native Americans as fallen peoples who stained the wilderness’s pristine sanctity. Fortunately, in a transformation that a resurrected and updated Muir might approve, this long-standing injustice is beginning to be undone, as Indigenous nations and the federal government work together to ensure that quintessentially American lands from Bears Ears to Yosemite serve all Americans equally.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Aquinas McNally is a freelance writer and editor based in Concord, California. He is the author of nine books, including The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Nebraska, 2021).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

From Old World to New

It was an evening seemingly like any other in the deep Scottish winter of
1849. Eleven-year-old John Muir and younger brother David were nestled
with their maternal grandfather beside the fire, catching a few warm minutes
before heading off to study for school the next morning. Daniel Muir, the
boys’ father, entered the room where the fire’s glow lit the far wall. “Bairns,
you needna learn your lessons the nicht,” he announced in a Scots dialect
gone unusually ebullient, “for we’re gan to America the morn!”

When Muir told this story more than sixty years later, he remembered
imagining a door opening to untold wonders. This eleven-year-old was trading
flat grain fields along the windblown North Sea for a country green with
promise. He envisioned a big-leafed canopy of sugar maples and imagined
the sky above it filled with hawks, eagles, and passenger pigeons in sun-darkening
numbers. Propelled westward by hope and social forces he little
understood, the young John Muir was about to become an immigrant bent
on becoming a settler.

His father, Daniel, was a man on a cosmic mission whose energy, if not its
dogma, he would pass on to his eldest son. Years of seeking religious truth
had convinced Daniel that his personal path toward holiness led to North
America. It was time to make the move God willed.

Born in 1804 in Manchester, England, where his soldier father was stationed,
Daniel was orphaned as an infant. His sister, Mary, eleven years his
elder, took him in after she married. Once he grew big enough, Daniel
took on the endless toil of a farm laborer, a harsh existence that likely
played into his soul-deep joylessness. It contributed, too, to his conversion
as a teenager to evangelical religion, the emotional Calvinism that drew in
Scotland’s poor, landless, working-class masses. The newly hooked Daniel
became God-guided. He set out to find the truest of the true while, like his
father, he enlisted in the British Army and rose in the ranks. Stationed as a
recruiter in the port town of Dunbar, east of Edinburgh, Sergeant Muir met
and married Helen Kennedy, who had inherited a grain-and-feed store from
her father. Daniel convinced Helen to buy out his enlistment contract, and
he took on managing the store. Always a hard worker, he turned it into a
small success, and the business became his alone when his wife died suddenly.

Daniel soon married another local young woman, Ann Gilrye, whose
father was a prosperous meat merchant on Dunbar’s High Street. Children
followed quickly. First came Margaret and Sarah, then John, followed by
David, Daniel Jr., and twins Mary and Annie, all born in Scotland. The last
Muir child, Joanna, would arrive in the United States. Expanding the grain-and-
feed business into the first floor of a larger building down the street,
the energetic Daniel turned the floors above into domestic quarters. In his
spare time he grew a garden and was “always trying to make it as much like
Eden as possible,” John recalled. Meanwhile, his family grew, his status rose,
and he won election to the city council.

Daniel’s decision to leave success behind turned on religion. He had for
some time been a member of the Dunbar congregation of the Secessionist
Church, which split from the Church of Scotland over the issue of ministry.
The Church of Scotland held that only landowners could participate in
selecting ministers; the Secessionists argued that the landless, too, should
have a say. Yet, as the years passed, Daniel came to believe that even this
arrangement placed too much human mediation between the individual
believer and God. The faithful should minister to themselves.

In this rebellious frame of mind, Daniel learned of Alexander Campbell,
a Secessionist minister’s son who was embracing radical religious democracy.
A Scot born in Ireland’s Presbyterian north, Campbell studied divinity at the
University of Glasgow and then left to join his father, who had emigrated to
Pennsylvania. The father-son preaching duo created a stir along the settlement
frontier, offering their version of the American religious revival that led
also to the Shakers, the Rappites, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Spiritualists,
and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Calling themselves
the Disciples of Christ, the Campbells and their followers flourished, soon
becoming the fastest-growing denomination in the young republic.

In 1847 Alexander Campbell returned to Scotland on a preaching tour and
held forth in Edinburgh one hot August day. There, it is likely, Daniel Muir
joined the sweaty, adoring audience. Finding in Campbell the charismatic
leader he was seeking, Daniel soon converted to the radically egalitarian,
evangelical Protestantism practiced by the Disciples of Christ. The Disciples
looked beyond Europe and its entrenched hierarchies to democratic North
America as the land promised to the young denomination’s true believers.

Within five months, Daniel resolved to forsake the familiar and embrace
this new world. On the morning of February 19, 1849, Muir headed off with
three of his children, John among them, to make their way to America and
prepare a home to receive the rest of the family. The first leg was a train
trip to Glasgow, where Muir booked passage on the Warren, a three-masted,
modest-sized packet ship built only two years earlier in Maine and registered
in New York. The Warren sailed on a regular schedule between Glasgow and
New York carrying both passengers and cargo. On February 24, five days
after the Muirs left Dunbar, the ship sailed out of Edinburgh’s Broomielaw
Harbor toward the open Atlantic.
 

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Verlag
University of Nebraska Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1496227263
ISBN 13 
9781496227263
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
291
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