John Muir

Muir's family emigrated from Dunbar to a Wisconsin homestead in 1849, where his father's punishing Calvinism shaped him in ways he later resisted. After a factory accident temporarily blinded him in 1867, he set out on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico, then onward to California. The summer of 1869 in the Sierra Nevada gave him the landscape that defined the rest of his life. He campaigned for the protection of Yosemite, founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and corresponded with Theodore Roosevelt, who joined him in Yosemite in 1903 — a camping trip that helped persuade the President to expand the federal park system. Muir's writing, particularly My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), shaped the American idea that wilderness was worth preserving for its own sake.