Muir, John, 1838-1914 > Travel > Southern/States/Muir, John, 1838-1914 > Travel > Cuba/Natural history > Southern States/Natural history > Cuba/Southern States > Description and travel/Southern States > History > 1865-1877/Cuba > Description and travel/Naturalists > United States > Biography/Naturalists > United States > Diaries

John Muir takes a walk through the middle of the civil 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 negros" 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 Savanah, 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. 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" and Thoreau's "The Maine Woods".

Read via Internet Archive, first edition, illustrated:
http://www.archive.org/details/thousa... ( )